...a public is a kind of gigantic something, an abstract and deserted void which is everything and nothing.
A public is everything and nothing, the most dangerous of all powers and teh most insignificant: one can speak to a whole nation in the name of the public and still the public will be less than a single real man, however unimportant.
The present age tends toward a mathematical equality in which it takes so and so many to make one individual.
The public is a host, more numerous than all the peoples together, but it is a body which can never be reviewed; it cannot even be represented, because it is an abstraction.
There is no good calling upon a Holger Danske or a Martin Luther; their day is over, and at bottom it is only the individual's laziness which makes a man long to have them back, a worldly impatience which prefers to buy something cheap, second-hand, rather than to buy the highest of all things very dear and first-hand. It is worse than useless to found society after society, because negatively speaking there is something above them, even though the short-sighted member of the society cannot see it. |
