without the women? Without those despised and unphilosophical creatures, whom you will not acknowledge as human beings until twenty-five years after the proclamation of the republic, the "freest German," the greatest German poet, would hardly have had any intellectual existence, and would probably have been forgotten long ago. Listen to what he says of us: "Women are the only receptacle which remains to us moderns, to fill with an ideal content. With the men nothing can be done. Homer has anticipated everything in Achilles and Odysseus, the bravest and the wisest." In another place he says: "That he perceived the ideal in a feminine form, or the form of a woman." "What a man was he did not know at all; for it was impossible for him to describe a man otherwise than biographically. There must always be something historical to build on."
What testimony! It is hardly possible that Goethe to-day would be opposed to the emancipation of woman, for he would no more wish to exclude "ideality" from his state than from his writings. Mr. Ruge reproaches naturalists with destroying "ideality;" Goethe, the "freest German," declares that women are the only receptacle of ideality, in the society of to-day, and yet the eulogizer of Goethe, and of ideality, would confine women to the kitchen and the nursery that they may do no harm in a society in which "great men like Hecker, Kinkel," etc., are the most illustrious successors to "Achilles and Odysseus!" Poor men!
