Meanwhile, however, there grew up in his son that new kind of harder and more dangerous skepticism — who knows TO WHAT EXTENT it was encouraged just by his father’s hatred and the icy melancholy of a will condemned to solitude? — the skepticism of daring manliness, which is closely related to the genius for war and conquest, and made its first entrance into Germany in the person of the great Frederick.

This skepticism despises and nevertheless grasps; it undermines and takes possession; it does not believe, but it does not thereby lose itself; it gives the spirit a dangerous liberty, but it keeps strict guard over the heart. It is the GERMAN form of skepticism, which, as a continued Fredericianism, risen to the highest spirituality, has kept Europe for a considerable time under the dominion of the German