to know about it. To avoid giving the secret away it should be suggested to these members that they found a monthly journal as their main project. And so on. On receiving note of these plans, Herder was, of course, despondent:“ It is not going to amount to anything,” he writes in a letter from February 1788, and he adds:“ I would rather wish that it didn’ t amount to anything than that they destroy everything”. 18
In the end, they didn’ t get the possibility to either create or destroy anything at all. Only a year later the French Revolution broke out, and all of a sudden the ambitions of bringing about a reform of the German principalities through Humanität und Bildung, cultivated and communicated by a society of the best men in each state, seemed almost naive and childish And who were to blame for it? Lo and behold, the Freemasons!
18
Haym, s. 491
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