achieved something unbelievable, something un-understandable. A fundamental denial of the Understanding was therefore the thing hypothecated in advance, both by the wonder-claimer and the wonder-worker: whereas an absolute Faith was the thing demanded by the wonder-doer, and granted by the wonder-getter.
{FEUER} Now, for the operation of its message, the poetising intellect has absolutely no concern with Faith, but only with an understanding through the Feeling. It wants to display a great connexus of natural phenomena in an image swiftly understandable, and this image must [P. 214] therefore be one answering to the phenomena in such a way that the instinctive Feeling may take it up without a struggle, not first be challenged to expound it: whereas the characteristic of the Dogmatic Wonder consists just in this, that, through the obvious impossibility of explaining it, it tyrannously subjugates the Understanding despite the latter’s instinctive search for explanation; and precisely in this subjugation, does it seek for its effect. The Dogmatic Wonder is therefore just as unfitted for Art, as the Poetic Wonder is the highest and most necessary product of the artist’s power of beholding and displaying.” [522W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 213-214]
[523W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 216]
[P. 216] {FEUER} “In virtue of this Wonder, the poet is able to display the most measureless conjunctures (Zusammenhange) in an all-intelligible Unity.” [523W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 216]
[524W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 216-217]
[P. 216] {FEUER} “So long as the phenomena of Nature were merely an ‘objective’ of man’s Phantasy, so long also must the [P. 217] human imagination (Einbildungskraft) be subjected to them: moreover, their semblance governed and determined its view of the human phenomenal-world in such a way, that men derived the inexplicable in that world – that is to say, the unexplained – from the capricious orderings of an extranatural and extrahuman Power, which finally in the Miracle upheaved both Man and Nature. When the reaction against belief in miracles set in, even the Poet had to bow before the prosaic rationalism of the claim, that poetry should also renounce its Wonder; and this happened in the times when natural phenomena, theretofore regarded only with the eye of Phantasy, began to be made the object of scientific operations of the Understanding. [524W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 216-217]
[525W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 217]
[P. 217] {FEUER} The scientific Understanding, however, was so long un-settled about the essence of these phenomena, as it believed that only in an anatomical disclosing of all their inner minutiae could it set them comprehensibly before it. Positive about this essence have we only been, from the time when we learnt to look on Nature as a living Organism, not as an aimfully constructed Mechanism; from the time when we grew clear, that she was not a thing created, but herself the forever becoming; that she includes within herself the begetter and the bearer, the Manly and the Womanly; that Time and Space, by which we earlier had held her circumscribed, were but abstractions from her own reality … .” [525W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 217]
