transcriber's note: this lecture was taken from volume iii of _the complete works of friedrich nietzsche_, dr. oscar levy, ed., j. m. kennedy, translator, 1910] homer and classical philology. (_inaugural address delivered at bâle university, 28th of may 1869._) at the present day no clear and consistent opinion seems to be held regarding classical philology. we are conscious of this in the circles of the learned just as much as among the followers of that science itself. the cause of this lies in its many-sided character, in the lack of an abstract unity, and in the inorganic aggregation of heterogeneous scientific activities which are connected with one another only by the name "philology." it must be freely admitted that philology is to some extent borrowed from several other sciences, and is mixed together like a magic potion from the most outlandish liquors, ores, and bones. it may even be added that it likewise conceals within itself an artistic element, one which, on æsthetic and ethical grounds, may be called imperatival--an element that acts in opposition to its purely scientific behaviour. philology is composed of history just as much as of natural science or æsthetics: history, in so far as it endeavours to comprehend the manifestations of the individualities of peoples in ever new images, and the prevailing law in the disappearance of phenomena; natural science, in so far as it strives to fathom the deepest instinct of man, that of speech; æsthetics, finally, because from various antiquities at our disposal it endeavours to pick out the so-called "classical" antiquity, with the view and pretension of excavating the ideal world buried under it, and to hold up to the present the mirror of the classical and everlasting standards. that these wholly different scientific and æsthetico-ethical impulses have been associated under a common name, a kind of sham monarchy, is shown especially by the fact that philology at every period from its origin onwards was at the same time pedagogical. from the standpoint of the pedagogue, a choice was offered of those elements which were of the greatest educational value; and thus that science, or at least that scientific aim, which we call philology, gradually developed out of the practical calling originated by the exigencies of that science itself. these philological aims were pursued sometimes with greater ardour and sometimes with less, in accordance with the degree of culture and the development of the taste of a particular period; but, on the other hand, the followers of this science are in the habit of regarding the aims which correspond to their several abilities as _the_ aims of philology; whence it comes about that the estimation of philology in public opinion depends upon the weight of the personalities of the philologists! at the present time--that is to say, in a period which has seen men distinguished in almost every department of philology--a general uncertainty of judgment has increased more and more, and likewise a general relaxation of interest and participation in philological problems. such an undecided and imperfect state of public opinion is damaging to a science in that its hidden and open enemies can work with much better prospects of success. and philology has a great many such enemies. where do we not meet with them, these mockers, always ready to aim a blow at the philological "moles," the animals that practise dust-eating _ex professo_, and that grub up and eat for the eleventh time what they have already eaten ten times before. for opponents of this sort, however, philology is merely a useless, harmless, and inoffensive pastime, an object of laughter and not of hate. but, on the other hand, there is a boundless and infuriated hatred of philology wherever an ideal, as such, is feared, where the modern man falls down to worship himself, and where hellenism is looked upon as a superseded and hence very insignificant point of view. against these enemies, we philologists must always count upon the assistance of artists and men of artistic minds; for they alone can judge how the sword of barbarism sweeps over the head of every one who loses sight of the unutterable simplicity and noble dignity of the hellene; and how no progress in commerce or technical industries, however brilliant, no school regulations, no political education of the masses, however widespread and complete, can protect us from the curse of ridiculous and barbaric offences against good taste, or from annihilation by the gorgon head of the classicist. whilst philology as a whole is looked on with jealous eyes by these two classes of opponents, there are numerous and varied hostilities in other directions of philology; philologists themselves are quarrelling with one another; internal dissensions are caused by useless disputes about precedence and mutual jealousies, but especially by the differences--even enmities--comprised in the name of philology, which are not, however, by any means naturally harmonised instincts. science has this in common with art, that the most ordinary, everyday thing appears to it as something entirely new and attractive, as if metamorphosed by witchcraft and now seen for the first time. life is worth living, says art, the beautiful temptress; life is worth knowing, says science. with this contrast the so heartrending and dogmatic tradition follows in a _theory_, and consequently in the practice of classical philology derived from this theory. we may consider antiquity from a scientific point of view; we may try to look at what has happened with the eye of a historian, or to arrange and compare the linguistic forms of ancient masterpieces, to bring them at all events under a morphological law; but we always lose the wonderful creative force, the real fragrance, of the atmosphere of antiquity; we forget that passionate emotion which instinctively drove our meditation and enjoyment back to the greeks. from this point onwards we must take notice of a clearly determined and very surprising antagonism which philology has great cause to regret. from the circles upon whose help we must place the most implicit reliance--the artistic friends of antiquity, the warm supporters of hellenic beauty and noble simplicity--we hear harsh voices crying out that it is precisely the philologists themselves who are the real opponents and destroyers of the ideals of antiquity. schiller upbraided the philologists with having scattered homer's laurel crown to the winds. it was none other than goethe who, in early life a supporter of wolf's theories regarding homer, recanted in the verses- with subtle wit you took away our former adoration: the iliad, you may us say, was mere conglomeration. think it not crime in any way: youth's fervent adoration leads us to know the verity, and feel the poet's unity. the reason of this want of piety and reverence must lie deeper; and many are in doubt as to whether philologists are lacking in artistic capacity and impressions, so that they are unable to do justice to the ideal, or whether the spirit of negation has become a destructive and iconoclastic principle of theirs. when, however, even the friends of antiquity, possessed of such doubts and hesitations, point to our present classical philology as something questionable, what influence may we not ascribe to the outbursts of the "realists" and the claptrap of the heroes of the passing hour? to answer the latter on this occasion, especially when we consider the nature of the present assembly, would be highly injudicious; at any rate, if i do not wish to meet with the fate of that sophist who, when in sparta, publicly undertook to praise and defend herakles, when he was interrupted with the query: "but who then has found fault with him?" i cannot help thinking, however, that some of these scruples are still sounding in the ears of not a few in this gathering; for they may still be frequently heard from the lips of noble and artistically gifted men--as even an upright philologist must feel them, and feel them most painfully, at moments when his spirits are downcast. for the single individual there is no deliverance from the dissensions referred to; but what we contend and inscribe on our banner is the fact that classical philology, as a whole, has nothing whatsoever to do with the quarrels and bickerings of its individual disciples. the entire scientific and artistic movement of this peculiar centaur is bent, though with cyclopic slowness, upon bridging over the gulf between the ideal antiquity--which is perhaps only the magnificent blossoming of the teutonic longing for the south--and the real antiquity; and thus classical philology pursues only the final end of its own being, which is the fusing together of primarily hostile impulses that have only forcibly been brought together. let us talk as we will about the unattainability of this goal, and even designate the goal itself as an illogical pretension--the aspiration for it is very real; and i should like to try to make it clear by an example that the most significant steps of classical philology never lead away from the ideal antiquity, but to it; and that, just when people are speaking unwarrantably of the overthrow of sacred shrines, new and more worthy altars are being erected. let us then examine the so-called _homeric question_ from this standpoint, a question the most important problem of which schiller called a scholastic barbarism. the important problem referred to is _the question of the personality of homer_. we now meet everywhere with the firm opinion that the question of homer's personality is no longer timely, and that it is quite a different thing from the real "homeric question." it may be added that, for a given period--such as our present philological period, for example--the centre of discussion may be removed from the problem of the poet's personality; for even now a painstaking experiment is being made to reconstruct the homeric poems without the aid of personality, treating them as the work of several different persons. but if the centre of a scientific question is rightly seen to be where the swelling tide of new views has risen up, i.e. where individual scientific investigation comes into contact with the whole life of science and culture--if any one, in other words, indicates a historico-cultural valuation as the central point of the question, he must also, in the province of homeric criticism, take his stand upon the question of personality as being the really fruitful oasis in the desert of the whole argument. for in homer the modern world, i will not say has learnt, but has examined, a great historical point of view; and, even without now putting forward my own opinion as to whether this examination has been or can be happily carried out, it was at all events the first example of the application of that productive point of view. by it scholars learnt to recognise condensed beliefs in the apparently firm, immobile figures of the life of ancient peoples; by it they for the first time perceived the wonderful capability of the soul of a people to represent the conditions of its morals and beliefs in the form of a personality. when historical criticism has confidently seized upon this method of evaporating apparently concrete personalities, it is permissible to point to the first experiment as an important event in the history of sciences, without considering whether it was successful in this instance or not. it is a common occurrence for a series of striking signs and wonderful emotions to precede an epoch-making discovery. even the experiment i have just referred to has its own attractive history; but it goes back to a surprisingly ancient era. friedrich august wolf has exactly indicated the spot where greek antiquity dropped the question. the zenith of the historico-literary studies of the greeks, and hence also of their point of greatest importance--the homeric question--was reached in the age of the alexandrian grammarians. up to this time the homeric question had run through the long chain of a uniform process of development, of which the standpoint of those grammarians seemed to be the last link, the last, indeed, which was attainable by antiquity. they conceived the _iliad_ and the _odyssey_ as the creations of _one single_ homer; they declared it to be psychologically possible for two such different works to have sprung from the brain of _one_ genius, in contradiction to the chorizontes, who represented the extreme limit of the scepticism of a few detached individuals of antiquity rather than antiquity itself considered as a whole. to explain the different general impression of the two books on the assumption that _one_ poet composed them both, scholars sought assistance by referring to the seasons of the poet's life, and compared the poet of the _odyssey_ to the setting sun. the eyes of those critics were tirelessly on the lookout for discrepancies in the language and thoughts of the two poems; but at this time also a history of the homeric poem and its tradition was prepared, according to which these discrepancies were not due to homer, but to those who committed his words to writing and those who sang them. it was believed that homer's poem was passed from one generation to another _viva voce_, and faults were attributed to the improvising and at times forgetful bards. at a certain given date, about the time of pisistratus, the poems which had been repeated orally were said to have been collected in manuscript form; but the scribes, it is added, allowed themselves to take some liberties with the text by transposing some lines and adding extraneous matter here and there. this entire hypothesis is the most important in the domain of literary studies that antiquity has exhibited; and the acknowledgment of the dissemination of the homeric poems by word of mouth, as opposed to the habits of a book-learned age, shows in particular a depth of ancient sagacity worthy of our admiration. from those times until the generation that produced friedrich august wolf we must take a jump over a long historical vacuum; but in our own age we find the argument left just as it was at the time when the power of controversy departed from antiquity, and it is a matter of indifference to us that wolf accepted as certain tradition what antiquity itself had set up only as a hypothesis. it may be remarked as most characteristic of this hypothesis that, in the strictest sense, the personality of homer is treated seriously; that a certain standard of inner harmony is everywhere presupposed in the manifestations of the personality; and that, with these two excellent auxiliary hypotheses, whatever is seen to be below this standard and opposed to this inner harmony is at once swept aside as un-homeric. but even this distinguishing characteristic, in place of wishing to recognise the supernatural existence of a tangible personality, ascends likewise through all the stages that lead to that zenith, with ever-increasing energy and clearness. individuality is ever more strongly felt and accentuated; the psychological possibility of a _single_ homer is ever more forcibly demanded. if we descend backwards from this zenith, step by step, we find a guide to the understanding of the homeric problem in the person of aristotle. homer was for him the flawless and untiring artist who knew his end and the means to attain it; but there is still a trace of infantile criticism to be found in aristotle--i.e., in the naive concession he made to the public opinion that considered homer as the author of the original of all comic epics, the _margites_. if we go still further backwards from aristotle, the inability to create a personality is seen to increase; more and more poems are attributed to homer; and every period lets us see its degree of criticism by how much and what it considers as homeric. in this backward examination, we instinctively feel that away beyond herodotus there lies a period in which an immense flood of great epics has been identified with the name of homer. let us imagine ourselves as living in the time of pisistratus: the word "homer" then comprehended an abundance of dissimilarities. what was meant by "homer" at that time? it is evident that that generation found itself unable to grasp a personality and the limits of its manifestations. homer had now become of small consequence. and then we meet with the weighty question: what lies before this period? has homer's personality, because it cannot be grasped, gradually faded away into an empty name? or had all the homeric poems been gathered together in a body, the nation naively representing itself by the figure of homer? _was the person created out of a conception, or the conception out of a person?_ this is the real "homeric question," the central problem of the personality. the difficulty of answering this question, however, is increased when we seek a reply in another direction, from the standpoint of the poems themselves which have come down to us. as it is difficult for us at the present day, and necessitates a serious effort on our part, to understand the law of gravitation clearly--that the earth alters its form of motion when another heavenly body changes its position in space, although no material connection unites one to the other--it likewise costs us some trouble to obtain a clear impression of that wonderful problem which, like a coin long passed from hand to hand, has lost its original and highly conspicuous stamp. poetical works, which cause the hearts of even the greatest geniuses to fail when they endeavour to vie with them, and in which unsurpassable images are held up for the admiration of posterity--and yet the poet who wrote them with only a hollow, shaky name, whenever we do lay hold on him; nowhere the solid kernel of a powerful personality. "for who would wage war with the gods: who, even with the one god?" asks goethe even, who, though a genius, strove in vain to solve that mysterious problem of the homeric inaccessibility. the conception of popular poetry seemed to lead like a bridge over this problem--a deeper and more original power than that of every single creative individual was said to have become active; the happiest people, in the happiest period of its existence, in the highest activity of fantasy and formative power, was said to have created those immeasurable poems. in this universality there is something almost intoxicating in the thought of a popular poem: we feel, with artistic pleasure, the broad, overpowering liberation of a popular gift, and we delight in this natural phenomenon as we do in an uncontrollable cataract. but as soon as we examine this thought at close quarters, we involuntarily put a poetic _mass of people_ in the place of the poetising _soul of the people_: a long row of popular poets in whom individuality has no meaning, and in whom the tumultuous movement of a people's soul, the intuitive strength of a people's eye, and the unabated profusion of a people's fantasy, were once powerful: a row of original geniuses, attached to a time, to a poetic genus, to a subject-matter. such a conception justly made people suspicious. could it be possible that that same nature who so sparingly distributed her rarest and most precious production--genius--should suddenly take the notion of lavishing her gifts in one sole direction? and here the thorny question again made its appearance: could we not get along with one genius only, and explain the present existence of that unattainable excellence? and now eyes were keenly on the lookout for whatever that excellence and singularity might consist of. impossible for it to be in the construction of the complete works, said one party, for this is far from faultless; but doubtless to be found in single songs: in the single pieces above all; not in the whole. a second party, on the other hand, sheltered themselves beneath the authority of aristotle, who especially admired homer's "divine" nature in the choice of his entire subject, and the manner in which he planned and carried it out. if, however, this construction was not clearly seen, this fault was due to the way the poems were handed down to posterity and not to the poet himself--it was the result of retouchings and interpolations, owing to which the original setting of the work gradually became obscured. the more the first school looked for inequalities, contradictions, perplexities, the more energetically did the other school brush aside what in their opinion obscured the original plan, in order, if possible, that nothing might be left remaining but the actual words of the original epic itself. the second school of thought of course held fast by the conception of an epoch-making genius as the composer of the great works. the first school, on the other hand, wavered between the supposition of one genius plus a number of minor poets, and another hypothesis which assumed only a number of superior and even mediocre individual bards, but also postulated a mysterious discharging, a deep, national, artistic impulse, which shows itself in individual minstrels as an almost indifferent medium. it is to this latter school that we must attribute the representation of the homeric poems as the expression of that mysterious impulse. all these schools of thought start from the assumption that the problem of the present form of these epics can be solved from the standpoint of an æsthetic judgment--but we must await the decision as to the authorised line of demarcation between the man of genius and the poetical soul of the people. are there characteristic differences between the utterances of the _man of genius_ and the _poetical soul of the people_? this whole contrast, however, is unjust and misleading. there is no more dangerous assumption in modern æsthetics than that of _popular poetry_ and _individual poetry_, or, as it is usually called, _artistic poetry_. this is the reaction, or, if you will, the superstition, which followed upon the most momentous discovery of historico-philological science, the discovery and appreciation of the _soul of the people_. for this discovery prepared the way for a coming scientific view of history, which was until then, and in many respects is even now, a mere collection of materials, with the prospect that new materials would continue to be added, and that the huge, overflowing pile would never be systematically arranged. the people now understood for the first time that the long-felt power of greater individualities and wills was larger than the pitifully small will of an individual man;[1] they now saw that everything truly great in the kingdom of the will could not have its deepest root in the inefficacious and ephemeral individual will; and, finally, they now discovered the powerful instincts of the masses, and diagnosed those unconscious impulses to be the foundations and supports of the so-called universal history. but the newly-lighted flame also cast its shadow: and this shadow was none other than that superstition already referred to, which popular poetry set up in opposition to individual poetry, and thus enlarged the comprehension of the people's soul to that of the people's mind. by the misapplication of a tempting analogical inference, people had reached the point of applying in the domain of the intellect and artistic ideas that principle of greater individuality which is truly applicable only in the domain of the will. the masses have never experienced more flattering treatment than in thus having the laurel of genius set upon their empty heads. it was imagined that new shells were forming round a small kernel, so to speak, and that those pieces of popular poetry originated like avalanches, in the drift and flow of tradition. they were, however, ready to consider that kernel as being of the smallest possible dimensions, so that they might occasionally get rid of it altogether without losing anything of the mass of the avalanche. according to this view, the text itself and the stories built round it are one and the same thing. [1] of course nietzsche saw afterwards that this was not so.--tr. now, however, such a contrast between popular poetry and individual poetry does not exist at all; on the contrary, all poetry, and of course popular poetry also, requires an intermediary individuality. this much-abused contrast, therefore, is necessary only when the term _individual poem_ is understood to mean a poem which has not grown out of the soil of popular feeling, but which has been composed by a non-popular poet in a non-popular atmosphere--something which has come to maturity in the study of a learned man, for example. with the superstition which presupposes poetising masses is connected another: that popular poetry is limited to one particular period of a people's history and afterwards dies out--which indeed follows as a consequence of the first superstition i have mentioned. according to this school, in the place of the gradually decaying popular poetry we have artistic poetry, the work of individual minds, not of masses of people. but the same powers which were once active are still so; and the form in which they act has remained exactly the same. the great poet of a literary period is still a popular poet in no narrower sense than the popular poet of an illiterate age. the difference between them is not in the way they originate, but it is their diffusion and propagation, in short, _tradition_. this tradition is exposed to eternal danger without the help of handwriting, and runs the risk of including in the poems the remains of those individualities through whose oral tradition they were handed down. if we apply all these principles to the homeric poems, it follows that we gain nothing with our theory of the poetising soul of the people, and that we are always referred back to the poetical individual. we are thus confronted with the task of distinguishing that which can have originated only in a single poetical mind from that which is, so to speak, swept up by the tide of oral tradition, and which is a highly important constituent part of the homeric poems. since literary history first ceased to be a mere collection of names, people have attempted to grasp and formulate the individualities of the poets. a certain mechanism forms part of the method: it must be explained--i.e., it must be deduced from principles--why this or that individuality appears in this way and not in that. people now study biographical details, environment, acquaintances, contemporary events, and believe that by mixing all these ingredients together they will be able to manufacture the wished-for individuality. but they forget that the _punctum saliens_, the indefinable individual characteristics, can never be obtained from a compound of this nature. the less there is known about the life and times of the poet, the less applicable is this mechanism. when, however, we have merely the works and the name of the writer, it is almost impossible to detect the individuality, at all events, for those who put their faith in the mechanism in question; and particularly when the works are perfect, when they are pieces of popular poetry. for the best way for these mechanicians to grasp individual characteristics is by perceiving deviations from the genius of the people; the aberrations and hidden allusions: and the fewer discrepancies to be found in a poem the fainter will be the traces of the individual poet who composed it. all those deviations, everything dull and below the ordinary standard which scholars think they perceive in the homeric poems, were attributed to tradition, which thus became the scapegoat. what was left of homer's own individual work? nothing but a series of beautiful and prominent passages chosen in accordance with subjective taste. the sum total of æsthetic singularity which every individual scholar perceived with his own artistic gifts, he now called homer. this is the central point of the homeric errors. the name of homer, from the very beginning, has no connection either with the conception of æsthetic perfection or yet with the _iliad_ and the _odyssey_. homer as the composer of the _iliad_ and the _odyssey_ is not a historical tradition, but an _æsthetic judgment_. the only path which leads back beyond the time of pisistratus and helps us to elucidate the meaning of the name homer, takes its way on the one hand through the reports which have reached us concerning homer's birthplace: from which we see that, although his name is always associated with heroic epic poems, he is on the other hand no more referred to as the composer of the _iliad_ and the _odyssey_ than as the author of the _thebais_ or any other cyclical epic. on the other hand, again, an old tradition tells of the contest between homer and hesiod, which proves that when these two names were mentioned people instinctively thought of two epic tendencies, the heroic and the didactic; and that the signification of the name "homer" was included in the material category and not in the formal. this imaginary contest with hesiod did not even yet show the faintest presentiment of individuality. from the time of pisistratus onwards, however, with the surprisingly rapid development of the greek feeling for beauty, the differences in the æsthetic value of those epics continued to be felt more and more: the _iliad_ and the _odyssey_ arose from the depths of the flood and have remained on the surface ever since. with this process of æsthetic separation, the conception of homer gradually became narrower: the old material meaning of the name "homer" as the father of the heroic epic poem, was changed into the æsthetic meaning of homer, the father of poetry in general, and likewise its original prototype. this transformation was contemporary with the rationalistic criticism which made homer the magician out to be a possible poet, which vindicated the material and formal traditions of those numerous epics as against the unity of the poet, and gradually removed that heavy load of cyclical epics from homer's shoulders. so homer, the poet of the _iliad_ and the _odyssey_, is an æsthetic judgment. it is, however, by no means affirmed against the poet of these epics that he was merely the imaginary being of an æsthetic impossibility, which can be the opinion of only very few philologists indeed. the majority contend that a single individual was responsible for the general design of a poem such as the _iliad_, and further that this individual was homer. the first part of this contention may be admitted; but, in accordance with what i have said, the latter part must be denied. and i very much doubt whether the majority of those who adopt the first part of the contention have taken the following considerations into account. the design of an epic such as the _iliad_ is not an entire _whole_, not an organism; but a number of pieces strung together, a collection of reflections arranged in accordance with æsthetic rules. it is certainly the standard of an artist's greatness to note what he can take in with a single glance and set out in rhythmical form. the infinite profusion of images and incidents in the homeric epic must force us to admit that such a wide range of vision is next to impossible. where, however, a poet is unable to observe artistically with a single glance, he usually piles conception on conception, and endeavours to adjust his characters according to a comprehensive scheme. he will succeed in this all the better the more he is familiar with the fundamental principles of æsthetics: he will even make some believe that he made himself master of the entire subject by a single powerful glance. the _iliad_ is not a garland, but a bunch of flowers. as many pictures as possible are crowded on one canvas; but the man who placed them there was indifferent as to whether the grouping of the collected pictures was invariably suitable and rhythmically beautiful. he well knew that no one would ever consider the collection as a whole; but would merely look at the individual parts. but that stringing together of some pieces as the manifestations of a grasp of art which was not yet highly developed, still less thoroughly comprehended and generally esteemed, cannot have been the real homeric deed, the real homeric epoch-making event. on the contrary, this design is a later product, far later than homer's celebrity. those, therefore, who look for the "original and perfect design" are looking for a mere phantom; for the dangerous path of oral tradition had reached its end just as the systematic arrangement appeared on the scene; the disfigurements which were caused on the way could not have affected the design, for this did not form part of the material handed down from generation to generation. the relative imperfection of the design must not, however, prevent us from seeing in the designer a different personality from the real poet. it is not only probable that everything which was created in those times with conscious æsthetic insight, was infinitely inferior to the songs that sprang up naturally in the poet's mind and were written down with instinctive power: we can even take a step further. if we include the so-called cyclic poems in this comparison, there remains for the designer of the _iliad_ and the _odyssey_ the indisputable merit of having done something relatively great in this conscious technical composing: a merit which we might have been prepared to recognise from the beginning, and which is in my opinion of the very first order in the domain of instinctive creation. we may even be ready to pronounce this synthetisation of great importance. all those dull passages and discrepancies--deemed of such importance, but really only subjective, which we usually look upon as the petrified remains of the period of tradition--are not these perhaps merely the almost necessary evils which must fall to the lot of the poet of genius who undertakes a composition virtually without a parallel, and, further, one which proves to be of incalculable difficulty? let it be noted that the insight into the most diverse operations of the instinctive and the conscious changes the position of the homeric problem; and in my opinion throws light upon it. we believe in a great poet as the author of the _iliad_ and the _odyssey--but not that homer was this poet_. the decision on this point has already been given. the generation that invented those numerous homeric fables, that poetised the myth of the contest between homer and hesiod, and looked upon all the poems of the epic cycle as homeric, did not feel an æsthetic but a material singularity when it pronounced the name "homer." this period regards homer as belonging to the ranks of artists like orpheus, eumolpus, dædalus, and olympus, the mythical discoverers of a new branch of art, to whom, therefore, all the later fruits which grew from the new branch were thankfully dedicated. and that wonderful genius to whom we owe the _iliad_ and the _odyssey_ belongs to this thankful posterity: he, too, sacrificed his name on the altar of the primeval father of the homeric epic, homeros. up to this point, gentlemen, i think i have been able to put before you the fundamental philosophical and æsthetic characteristics of the problem of the personality of homer, keeping all minor details rigorously at a distance, on the supposition that the primary form of this widespread and honeycombed mountain known as the homeric question can be most clearly observed by looking down at it from a far-off height. but i have also, i imagine, recalled two facts to those friends of antiquity who take such delight in accusing us philologists of lack of piety for great conceptions and an unproductive zeal for destruction. in the first place, those "great" conceptions--such, for example, as that of the indivisible and inviolable poetic genius, homer--were during the pre-wolfian period only too great, and hence inwardly altogether empty and elusive when we now try to grasp them. if classical philology goes back again to the same conceptions, and once more tries to pour new wine into old bottles, it is only on the surface that the conceptions are the same: everything has really become new; bottle and mind, wine and word. we everywhere find traces of the fact that philology has lived in company with poets, thinkers, and artists for the last hundred years: whence it has now come about that the heap of ashes formerly pointed to as classical philology is now turned into fruitful and even rich soil.[2] [2] nietzsche perceived later on that this statement was, unfortunately, not justified.--tr. and there is a second fact which i should like to recall to the memory of those friends of antiquity who turn their dissatisfied backs on classical philology. you honour the immortal masterpieces of the hellenic mind in poetry and sculpture, and think yourselves so much more fortunate than preceding generations, which had to do without them; but you must not forget that this whole fairyland once lay buried under mountains of prejudice, and that the blood and sweat and arduous labour of innumerable followers of our science were all necessary to lift up that world from the chasm into which it had sunk. we grant that philology is not the creator of this world, not the composer of that immortal music; but is it not a merit, and a great merit, to be a mere virtuoso, and let the world for the first time hear that music which lay so long in obscurity, despised and undecipherable? who was homer previously to wolf's brilliant investigations? a good old man, known at best as a "natural genius," at all events the child of a barbaric age, replete with faults against good taste and good morals. let us hear how a learned man of the first rank writes about homer even so late as 1783: "where does the good man live? why did he remain so long incognito? apropos, can't you get me a silhouette of him?" we demand _thanks_--not in our own name, for we are but atoms--but in the name of philology itself, which is indeed neither a muse nor a grace, but a messenger of the gods: and just as the muses descended upon the dull and tormented boeotian peasants, so philology comes into a world full of gloomy colours and pictures, full of the deepest, most incurable woes; and speaks to men comfortingly of the beautiful and godlike figure of a distant, rosy, and happy fairyland. it is time to close; yet before i do so a few words of a personal character must be added, justified, i hope, by the occasion of this lecture. it is but right that a philologist should describe his end and the means to it in the short formula of a confession of faith; and let this be done in the saying of seneca which i thus reverse- "philosophia facta est quæ philologia fuit." by this i wish to signify that all philological activities should be enclosed and surrounded by a philosophical view of things, in which everything individual and isolated is evaporated as something detestable, and in which great homogeneous views alone remain. now, therefore, that i have enunciated my philological creed, i trust you will give me cause to hope that i shall no longer be a stranger among you: give me the assurance that in working with you towards this end i am worthily fulfilling the confidence with which the highest authorities of this community have honoured me. the antichrist borzoi pocket books a complete list to date of this series of popular reprints, bound uniformly with a design and endpapers by claude bragdon, may be found at the back of this volume. one book will appear each month, numbered for convenience in ordering. the antichrist _by_ f. w. nietzsche _translated from the german with an introduction by_ h. l. mencken _new york_ alfred a. knopf copyright, 1918, by alfred a. knopf, inc. _pocket book edition, published september, 1923 second printing, november, 1924_ _set up, electrotyped, and printed by the vail-ballou press, binghamton, n. y._ _paper manufactured by w. c. hamilton & sons, miquon, pa., and furnished by w. f. etherington & co., new york._ manufactured in the united states of america. contents page introduction by h. l. mencken 7 author's preface 37 the antichrist 41 introduction save for his raucous, rhapsodical autobiography, "ecce homo," "the antichrist" is the last thing that nietzsche ever wrote, and so it may be accepted as a statement of some of his most salient ideas in their final form. notes for it had been accumulating for years and it was to have constituted the first volume of his long-projected _magnum opus_, "the will to power." his full plan for this work, as originally drawn up, was as follows: vol. i. the antichrist: an attempt at a criticism of christianity. vol. ii. the free spirit: a criticism of philosophy as a nihilistic movement. vol. iii. the immoralist: a criticism of morality, the most fatal form of ignorance. vol. iv. dionysus: the philosophy of eternal recurrence. the first sketches for "the will to power" were made in 1884, soon after the publication of the first three parts of "thus spake zarathustra," and thereafter, for four years, nietzsche piled up notes. they were written at all the places he visited on his endless travels in search of health--at nice, at venice, at sils-maria in the engadine (for long his favourite resort), at cannobio, at zürich, at genoa, at chur, at leipzig. several times his work was interrupted by other books, first by "beyond good and evil," then by "the genealogy of morals" (written in twenty days), then by his wagner pamphlets. almost as often he changed his plan. once he decided to expand "the will to power" to ten volumes, with "an attempt at a new interpretation of the world" as a general sub-title. again he adopted the sub-title of "an interpretation of all that happens." finally, he hit upon "an attempt at a transvaluation of all values," and went back to four volumes, though with a number of changes in their arrangement. in september, 1888, he began actual work upon the first volume, and before the end of the month it was completed. the summer had been one of almost hysterical creative activity. since the middle of june he had written two other small books, "the case of wagner" and "the twilight of the idols," and before the end of the year he was destined to write "ecce homo." some time during december his health began to fail rapidly, and soon after the new year he was helpless. thereafter he wrote no more. the wagner diatribe and "the twilight of the idols" were published immediately, but "the antichrist" did not get into type until 1895. i suspect that the delay was due to the influence of the philosopher's sister, elisabeth förster-nietzsche, an intelligent and ardent but by no means uniformly judicious propagandist of his ideas. during his dark days of neglect and misunderstanding, when even family and friends kept aloof, frau förster-nietzsche went with him farther than any other, but there were bounds beyond which she, also, hesitated to go, and those bounds were marked by crosses. one notes, in her biography of him--a useful but not always accurate work--an evident desire to purge him of the accusation of mocking at sacred things. he had, she says, great admiration for "the elevating effect of christianity ... upon the weak and ailing," and "a real liking for sincere, pious christians," and "a tender love for the founder of christianity." all his wrath, she continues, was reserved for "st. paul and his like," who perverted the beatitudes, which christ intended for the lowly only, into a universal religion which made war upon aristocratic values. here, obviously, one is addressed by an interpreter who cannot forget that she is the daughter of a lutheran pastor and the grand-daughter of two others; a touch of conscience gets into her reading of "the antichrist." she even hints that the text may have been garbled, after the author's collapse, by some more sinister heretic. there is not the slightest reason to believe that any such garbling ever took place, nor is there any evidence that their common heritage of piety rested upon the brother as heavily as it rested upon the sister. on the contrary, it must be manifest that nietzsche, in this book, intended to attack christianity headlong and with all arms, that for all his rapid writing he put the utmost care into it, and that he wanted it to be printed exactly as it stands. the ideas in it were anything but new to him when he set them down. he had been developing them since the days of his beginning. you will find some of them, clearly recognizable, in the first book he ever wrote, "the birth of tragedy." you will find the most important of all of them--the conception of christianity as _ressentiment_--set forth at length in the first part of "the genealogy of morals," published under his own supervision in 1887. and the rest are scattered through the whole vast mass of his notes, sometimes as mere questionings but often worked out very carefully. moreover, let it not be forgotten that it was wagner's yielding to christian sentimentality in "parsifal" that transformed nietzsche from the first among his literary advocates into the most bitter of his opponents. he could forgive every other sort of mountebankery, but not that. "in me," he once said, "the christianity of my forbears reaches its logical conclusion. in me the stern intellectual conscience that christianity fosters and makes paramount turns _against_ christianity. in me christianity ... devours itself." in truth, the present philippic is as necessary to the completeness of the whole of nietzsche's system as the keystone is to the arch. all the curves of his speculation lead up to it. what he flung himself against, from beginning to end of his days of writing, was always, in the last analysis, christianity in some form or other--christianity as a system of practical ethics, christianity as a political code, christianity as metaphysics, christianity as a gauge of the truth. it would be difficult to think of any intellectual enterprise on his long list that did not, more or less directly and clearly, relate itself to this master enterprise of them all. it was as if his apostasy from the faith of his fathers, filling him with the fiery zeal of the convert, and particularly of the convert to heresy, had blinded him to every other element in the gigantic self-delusion of civilized man. the will to power was his answer to christianity's affectation of humility and self-sacrifice; eternal recurrence was his mocking criticism of christian optimism and millennialism; the superman was his candidate for the place of the christian ideal of the "good" man, prudently abased before the throne of god. the things he chiefly argued for were anti-christian things--the abandonment of the purely moral view of life, the rehabilitation of instinct, the dethronement of weakness and timidity as ideals, the renunciation of the whole hocus-pocus of dogmatic religion, the extermination of false aristocracies (of the priest, of the politician, of the plutocrat), the revival of the healthy, lordly "innocence" that was greek. if he was anything in a word, nietzsche was a greek born two thousand years too late. his dreams were thoroughly hellenic; his whole manner of thinking was hellenic; his peculiar errors were hellenic no less. but his hellenism, i need not add, was anything but the pale neo-platonism that has run like a thread through the thinking of the western world since the days of the christian fathers. from plato, to be sure, he got what all of us must get, but his real forefather was heraclitus. it is in heraclitus that one finds the germ of his primary view of the universe--a view, to wit, that sees it, not as moral phenomenon, but as mere aesthetic representation. the god that nietzsche imagined, in the end, was not far from the god that such an artist as joseph conrad imagines--a supreme craftsman, ever experimenting, ever coming closer to an ideal balancing of lines and forces, and yet always failing to work out the final harmony. the late war, awakening all the primitive racial fury of the western nations, and therewith all their ancient enthusiasm for religious taboos and sanctions, naturally focused attention upon nietzsche, as upon the most daring and provocative of recent amateur theologians. the germans, with their characteristic tendency to explain their every act in terms as realistic and unpleasant as possible, appear to have mauled him in a belated and unexpected embrace, to the horror, i daresay, of the kaiser, and perhaps to the even greater horror of nietzsche's own ghost. the folks of anglo-saxondom, with their equally characteristic tendency to explain all their enterprises romantically, simultaneously set him up as the antichrist he no doubt secretly longed to be. the result was a great deal of misrepresentation and misunderstanding of him. from the pulpits of the allied countries, and particularly from those of england and the united states, a horde of patriotic ecclesiastics denounced him in extravagant terms as the author of all the horrors of the time, and in the newspapers, until the kaiser was elected sole bugaboo, he shared the honors of that office with von hindenburg, the crown prince, capt. boy-ed, von bernstorff and von tirpitz. most of this denunciation, of course, was frankly idiotic--the naïve pishposh of suburban methodists, notoriety-seeking college professors, almost illiterate editorial writers, and other such numskulls. in much of it, including not a few official hymns of hate, nietzsche was gravely discovered to be the teacher of such spokesmen of the extremest sort of german nationalism as von bernhardi and von treitschke--which was just as intelligent as making george bernard shaw the mentor of lloyd-george. in other solemn pronunciamentoes he was credited with being philosophically responsible for various imaginary crimes of the enemy--the wholesale slaughter or mutilation of prisoners of war, the deliberate burning down of red cross hospitals, the utilization of the corpses of the slain for soap-making. i amused myself, in those gaudy days, by collecting newspaper clippings to this general effect, and later on i shall probably publish a digest of them, as a contribution to the study of war hysteria. the thing went to unbelievable lengths. on the strength of the fact that i had published a book on nietzsche in 1906, six years after his death, i was called upon by agents of the department of justice, elaborately outfitted with badges, to meet the charge that i was an intimate associate and agent of "the german monster, nietzsky." i quote the official _procès verbal_, an indignant but often misspelled document. alas, poor nietzsche! after all his laborious efforts to prove that he was not a german, but a pole--even after his heroic readiness, via anti-anti-semitism, to meet the deduction that, if a pole, then probably also a jew! but under all this alarmed and preposterous tosh there was at least a sound instinct, and that was the instinct which recognized nietzsche as the most eloquent, pertinacious and effective of all the critics of the philosophy to which the allies against germany stood committed, and on the strength of which, at all events in theory, the united states had engaged itself in the war. he was not, in point of fact, involved with the visible enemy, save in remote and transient ways; the german, officially, remained the most ardent of christians during the war and became a democrat at its close. but he was plainly a foe of democracy in all its forms, political, religious and epistemological, and what is worse, his opposition was set forth in terms that were not only extraordinarily penetrating and devastating, but also uncommonly offensive. it was thus quite natural that he should have aroused a degree of indignation verging upon the pathological in the two countries that had planted themselves upon the democratic platform most boldly, and that felt it most shaky, one may add, under their feet. i daresay that nietzsche, had he been alive, would have got a lot of satisfaction out of the execration thus heaped upon him, not only because, being a vain fellow, he enjoyed execration as a tribute to his general singularity, and hence to his superiority, but also and more importantly because, being no mean psychologist, he would have recognized the disconcerting doubts underlying it. if nietzsche's criticism of democracy were as ignorant and empty, say, as the average evangelical clergyman's criticism of darwin's hypothesis of natural selection, then the advocates of democracy could afford to dismiss it as loftily as the darwinians dismiss the blather of the holy clerks. and if his attack upon christianity were mere sound and fury, signifying nothing, then there would be no call for anathemas from the sacred desk. but these onslaughts, in point of fact, have behind them a tremendous learning and a great deal of point and plausibility--there are, in brief, bullets in the gun, teeth in the tiger,--and so it is no wonder that they excite the ire of men who hold, as a primary article of belief, that their acceptance would destroy civilization, darken the sun, and bring jahveh to sobs upon his throne. but in all this justifiable fear, of course, there remains a false assumption, and that is the assumption that nietzsche proposed to destroy christianity altogether, and so rob the plain people of the world of their virtue, their spiritual consolations, and their hope of heaven. nothing could be more untrue. the fact is that nietzsche had no interest whatever in the delusions of the plain people--that is, intrinsically. it seemed to him of small moment _what_ they believed, so long as it was safely imbecile. what he stood against was not their beliefs, but the elevation of those beliefs, by any sort of democratic process, to the dignity of a state philosophy--what he feared most was the pollution and crippling of the superior minority by intellectual disease from below. his plain aim in "the antichrist" was to combat that menace by completing the work begun, on the one hand, by darwin and the other evolutionist philosophers, and, on the other hand, by german historians and philologians. the net effect of this earlier attack, in the eighties, had been the collapse of christian theology as a serious concern of educated men. the mob, it must be obvious, was very little shaken; even to this day it has not put off its belief in the essential christian doctrines. but the _intelligentsia_, by 1885, had been pretty well convinced. no man of sound information, at the time nietzsche planned "the antichrist," actually believed that the world was created in seven days, or that its fauna was once overwhelmed by a flood as a penalty for the sins of man, or that noah saved the boa constrictor, the prairie dog and the _pediculus capitis_ by taking a pair of each into the ark, or that lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt, or that a fragment of the true cross could cure hydrophobia. such notions, still almost universally prevalent in christendom a century before, were now confined to the great body of ignorant and credulous men--that is, to ninety-five or ninety-six percent. of the race. for a man of the superior minority to subscribe to one of them publicly was already sufficient to set him off as one in imminent need of psychiatrical attention. belief in them had become a mark of inferiority, like the allied belief in madstones, magic and apparitions. but though the theology of christianity had thus sunk to the lowly estate of a mere delusion of the rabble, propagated on that level by the ancient caste of sacerdotal parasites, the ethics of christianity continued to enjoy the utmost acceptance, and perhaps even more acceptance than ever before. it seemed to be generally felt, in fact, that they simply _must_ be saved from the wreck--that the world would vanish into chaos if they went the way of the revelations supporting them. in this fear a great many judicious men joined, and so there arose what was, in essence, an absolutely new christian cult--a cult, to wit, purged of all the supernaturalism superimposed upon the older cult by generations of theologians, and harking back to what was conceived to be the pure ethical doctrine of jesus. this cult still flourishes; protestantism tends to become identical with it; it invades catholicism as modernism; it is supported by great numbers of men whose intelligence is manifest and whose sincerity is not open to question. even nietzsche himself yielded to it in weak moments, as you will discover on examining his somewhat laborious effort to make paul the villain of christian theology, and jesus no more than an innocent bystander. but this sentimental yielding never went far enough to distract his attention for long from his main idea, which was this: that christian ethics were quite as dubious, at bottom, as christian theology--that they were founded, just as surely as such childish fables as the story of jonah and the whale, upon the peculiar prejudices and credulities, the special desires and appetites, of inferior men--that they warred upon the best interests of men of a better sort quite as unmistakably as the most extravagant of objective superstitions. in brief, what he saw in christian ethics, under all the poetry and all the fine show of altruism and all the theoretical benefits therein, was a democratic effort to curb the egoism of the strong--a conspiracy of the _chandala_ against the free functioning of their superiors, nay, against the free progress of mankind. this theory is the thing he exposes in "the antichrist," bringing to the business his amazingly chromatic and exigent eloquence at its finest flower. this is the "conspiracy" he sets forth in all the panoply of his characteristic italics, dashes, _sforzando_ interjections and exclamation points. well, an idea is an idea. the present one may be right and it may be wrong. one thing is quite certain: that no progress will be made against it by denouncing it as merely immoral. if it is ever laid at all, it must be laid evidentially, logically. the notion to the contrary is thoroughly democratic; the mob is the most ruthless of tyrants; it is always in a democratic society that heresy and felony tend to be most constantly confused. one hears without surprise of a bismarck philosophizing placidly (at least in his old age) upon the delusion of socialism and of a frederick the great playing the hose of his cynicism upon the absolutism that was almost identical with his own person, but men in the mass never brook the destructive discussion of their fundamental beliefs, and that impatience is naturally most evident in those societies in which men in the mass are most influential. democracy and free speech are not facets of one gem; democracy and free speech are eternal enemies. but in any battle between an institution and an idea, the idea, in the long run, has the better of it. here i do not venture into the absurdity of arguing that, as the world wags on, the truth always survives. i believe nothing of the sort. as a matter of fact, it seems to me that an idea that happens to be true--or, more exactly, as near to truth as any human idea can be, and yet remain generally intelligible--it seems to me that such an idea carries a special and often fatal handicap. the majority of men prefer delusion to truth. it soothes. it is easy to grasp. above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances--of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped. but though an idea that is true is thus not likely to prevail, an idea that is _attacked_ enjoys a great advantage. the evidence behind it is now supported by sympathy, the sporting instinct, sentimentality--and sentimentality is as powerful as an army with banners. one never hears of a martyr in history whose notions are seriously disputed today. the forgotten ideas are those of the men who put them forward soberly and quietly, hoping fatuously that they would conquer by the force of their truth; these are the ideas that we now struggle to rediscover. had nietzsche lived to be burned at the stake by outraged mississippi methodists, it would have been a glorious day for his doctrines. as it is, they are helped on their way every time they are denounced as immoral and against god. the war brought down upon them the maledictions of vast herds of right-thinking men. and now "the antichrist," after fifteen years of neglect, is being reprinted.... one imagines the author, a sardonic wraith, snickering somewhat sadly over the fact. his shade, wherever it suffers, is favoured in these days by many such consolations, some of them of much greater horsepower. think of the facts and arguments, even the underlying theories and attitudes, that have been borrowed from him, consciously and unconsciously, by the foes of bolshevism during these last thrilling years! the face of democracy, suddenly seen hideously close, has scared the guardians of the reigning plutocracy half to death, and they have gone to the devil himself for aid. southern senators, almost illiterate men, have mixed his acids with well water and spouted them like affrighted geysers, not knowing what they did. nor are they the first to borrow from him. years ago i called attention to the debt incurred with characteristic forgetfulness of obligation by the late theodore roosevelt, in "the strenuous life" and elsewhere. roosevelt, a typical apologist for the existing order, adeptly dragging a herring across the trail whenever it was menaced, yet managed to delude the native boobery, at least until toward the end, into accepting him as a fiery exponent of pure democracy. perhaps he even fooled himself; charlatans usually do so soon or late. a study of nietzsche reveals the sources of much that was honest in him, and exposes the hollowness of much that was sham. nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact. what is called bolshevism today he saw clearly a generation ago and described for what it was and is--democracy in another aspect, the old _ressentiment_ of the lower orders in free function once more. socialism, puritanism, philistinism, christianity--he saw them all as allotropic forms of democracy, as variations upon the endless struggle of quantity against quality, of the weak and timorous against the strong and enterprising, of the botched against the fit. the world needed a staggering exaggeration to make it see even half of the truth. it trembles today as it trembled during the french revolution. perhaps it would tremble less if it could combat the monster with a clearer conscience and less burden of compromising theory--if it could launch its forces frankly at the fundamental doctrine, and not merely employ them to police the transient orgy. nietzsche, in the long run, may help it toward that greater honesty. his notions, propagated by cuttings from cuttings from cuttings, may conceivably prepare the way for a sounder, more healthful theory of society and of the state, and so free human progress from the stupidities which now hamper it, and men of true vision from the despairs which now sicken them. i say it is conceivable, but i doubt that it is probable. the soul and the belly of mankind are too evenly balanced; it is not likely that the belly will ever put away its hunger or forget its power. here, perhaps, there is an example of the eternal recurrence that nietzsche was fond of mulling over in his blacker moods. we are in the midst of one of the perennial risings of the lower orders. it got under way long before any of the current bolshevist demons was born; it was given its long, secure start by the intolerable tyranny of the plutocracy--the end product of the eighteenth century revolt against the old aristocracy. it found resistance suddenly slackened by civil war within the plutocracy itself--one gang of traders falling upon another gang, to the tune of vast hymn-singing and yells to god. perhaps it has already passed its apogee; the plutocracy, chastened, shows signs of a new solidarity; the wheel continues to swing 'round. but this combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world. what actual difference does it make to a civilized man, when there is a steel strike, whether the workmen win or the mill-owners win? the conflict can interest him only as spectacle, as the conflict between bonaparte and the old order in europe interested goethe and beethoven. the victory, whichever way it goes, will simply bring chaos nearer, and so set the stage for a genuine revolution later on, with (let us hope) a new feudalism or something better coming out of it, and a new thirteenth century at dawn. this seems to be the slow, costly way of the worst of habitable worlds. in the present case my money is laid upon the plutocracy. it will win because it will be able, in the long run, to enlist the finer intelligences. the mob and its maudlin causes attract only sentimentalists and scoundrels, chiefly the latter. politics, under a democracy, reduces itself to a mere struggle for office by flatterers of the proletariat; even when a superior man prevails at that disgusting game he must prevail at the cost of his self-respect. not many superior men make the attempt. the average great captain of the rabble, when he is not simply a weeper over irremediable wrongs, is a hypocrite so far gone that he is unconscious of his own hypocrisy--a slimy fellow, offensive to the nose. the plutocracy can recruit measurably more respectable janissaries, if only because it can make self-interest less obviously costly to _amour propre_. its defect and its weakness lie in the fact that it is still too young to have acquired dignity. but lately sprung from the mob it now preys upon, it yet shows some of the habits of mind of that mob: it is blatant, stupid, ignorant, lacking in all delicate instinct and governmental finesse. above all, it remains somewhat heavily moral. one seldom finds it undertaking one of its characteristic imbecilities without offering a sonorous moral reason; it spends almost as much to support the y. m. c. a., vice-crusading, prohibition and other such puerilities as it spends upon congressmen, strike-breakers, gun-men, kept patriots and newspapers. in england the case is even worse. it is almost impossible to find a wealthy industrial over there who is not also an eminent non-conformist layman, and even among financiers there are praying brothers. on the continent, the day is saved by the fact that the plutocracy tends to become more and more jewish. here the intellectual cynicism of the jew almost counterbalances his social unpleasantness. if he is destined to lead the plutocracy of the world out of little bethel he will fail, of course, to turn it into an aristocracy--_i. e._, a caste of gentlemen--, but he will at least make it clever, and hence worthy of consideration. the case against the jews is long and damning; it would justify ten thousand times as many pogroms as now go on in the world. but whenever you find a davidsbündlerschaft making practise against the philistines, there you will find a jew laying on. maybe it was this fact that caused nietzsche to speak up for the children of israel quite as often as he spoke against them. he was not blind to their faults, but when he set them beside christians he could not deny their general superiority. perhaps in america and england, as on the continent, the increasing jewishness of the plutocracy, while cutting it off from all chance of ever developing into an aristocracy, will yet lift it to such a dignity that it will at least deserve a certain grudging respect. but even so, it will remain in a sort of half-world, midway between the gutter and the stars. above it will still stand the small group of men that constitutes the permanent aristocracy of the race--the men of imagination and high purpose, the makers of genuine progress, the brave and ardent spirits, above all petty fears and discontents and above all petty hopes and ideals no less. there were heroes before agamemnon; there will be bachs after johann sebastian. and beneath the judaized plutocracy, the sublimated _bourgeoisie_, there the immemorial proletariat, i venture to guess, will roar on, endlessly tortured by its vain hatreds and envies, stampeded and made to tremble by its ancient superstitions, prodded and made miserable by its sordid and degrading hopes. it seems to me very likely that, in this proletariat, christianity will continue to survive. it is nonsense, true enough, but it is sweet. nietzsche, denouncing its dangers as a poison, almost falls into the error of denying it its undoubtedly sugary smack. of all the religions ever devised by the great practical jokers of the race, this is the one that offers most for the least money, so to speak, to the inferior man. it starts out by denying his inferiority in plain terms: _all_ men are equal in the sight of god. it ends by erecting that inferiority into a sort of actual superiority: it is a merit to be stupid, and miserable, and sorely put upon--of such are the celestial elect. not all the eloquence of a million nietzsches, nor all the painful marshalling of evidence of a million darwins and harnacks, will ever empty that great consolation of its allure. the most they can ever accomplish is to make the superior orders of men acutely conscious of the exact nature of it, and so give them armament against the contagion. this is going on; this is being done. i think that "the antichrist" has a useful place in that enterprise. it is strident, it is often extravagant, it is, to many sensitive men, in the worst of possible taste, but at bottom it is enormously apt and effective--and on the surface it is undoubtedly a good show. one somehow enjoys, with the malice that is native to man, the spectacle of anathemas batted back; it is refreshing to see the pitchfork employed against gentlemen who have doomed such innumerable caravans to hell. in nietzsche they found, after many long years, a foeman worthy of them--not a mere fancy swordsman like voltaire, or a mob orator like tom paine, or a pedant like the heretics of exegesis, but a gladiator armed with steel and armoured with steel, and showing all the ferocious gusto of a mediaeval bishop. it is a pity that holy church has no process for the elevation of demons, like its process for the canonization of saints. there must be a long roll of black miracles to the discredit of the accursed friedrich--sinners purged of conscience and made happy in their sinning, clerics shaken in their theology by visions of a new and better holy city, the strong made to exult, the weak robbed of their old sad romance. it would be a pleasure to see the _advocatus diaboli_ turn from the table of the prosecution to the table of the defence, and move in solemn form for the damnation of the naumburg hobgoblin.... of all nietzsche's books, "the antichrist" comes nearest to conventionality in form. it presents a connected argument with very few interludes, and has a beginning, a middle and an end. most of his works are in the form of collections of apothegms, and sometimes the subject changes on every second page. this fact constitutes one of the counts in the orthodox indictment of him: it is cited as proof that his capacity for consecutive thought was limited, and that he was thus deficient mentally, and perhaps a downright moron. the argument, it must be obvious, is fundamentally nonsensical. what deceives the professors is the traditional prolixity of philosophers. because the average philosophical writer, when he essays to expose his ideas, makes such inordinate drafts upon the parts of speech that the dictionary is almost emptied these defective observers jump to the conclusion that his intrinsic notions are of corresponding weight. this is not unseldom quite untrue. what makes philosophy so garrulous is not the profundity of philosophers, but their lack of art; they are like physicians who sought to cure a slight hyperacidity by giving the patient a carload of burned oyster-shells to eat. there is, too, the endless poll-parrotting that goes on: each new philosopher must prove his learning by laboriously rehearsing the ideas of all previous philosophers.... nietzsche avoided both faults. he always assumed that his readers knew the books, and that it was thus unnecessary to rewrite them. and, having an idea that seemed to him to be novel and original, he stated it in as few words as possible, and then shut down. sometimes he got it into a hundred words; sometimes it took a thousand; now and then, as in the present case, he developed a series of related ideas into a connected book. but he never wrote a word too many. he never pumped up an idea to make it appear bigger than it actually was. the pedagogues, alas, are not accustomed to that sort of writing in serious fields. they resent it, and sometimes they even try to improve it. there exists, in fact, a huge and solemn tome on nietzsche by a learned man of america in which all of his brilliancy is painfully translated into the windy phrases of the seminaries. the tome is satisfactorily ponderous, but the meat of the cocoanut is left out: there is actually no discussion of the nietzschean view of christianity!... always nietzsche daunts the pedants. he employed too few words for them--and he had too many ideas. * * * * * the present translation of "the antichrist" is published by agreement with dr. oscar levy, editor of the english edition of nietzsche. there are two earlier translations, one by thomas common and the other by anthony m. ludovici. that of mr. common follows the text very closely, and thus occasionally shows some essentially german turns of phrase; that of mr. ludovici is more fluent but rather less exact. i do not offer my own version on the plea that either of these is useless; on the contrary, i cheerfully acknowledge that they have much merit, and that they helped me at almost every line. i began this new englishing of the book, not in any hope of supplanting them, and surely not with any notion of meeting a great public need, but simply as a private amusement in troubled days. but as i got on with it i began to see ways of putting some flavour of nietzsche's peculiar style into the english, and so amusement turned into a more or less serious labour. the result, of course, is far from satisfactory, but it at least represents a very diligent attempt. nietzsche, always under the influence of french models, wrote a german that differs materially from any other german that i know. it is more nervous, more varied, more rapid in tempo; it runs to more effective climaxes; it is never stodgy. his marks begin to show upon the writing of the younger germans of today. they are getting away from the old thunderous manner, with its long sentences and its tedious grammatical complexities. in the course of time, i daresay, they will develop a german almost as clear as french and almost as colourful and resilient as english. i owe thanks to dr. levy for his _imprimatur_, to mr. theodor hemberger for criticism, and to messrs. common and ludovici for showing me the way around many a difficulty. h. l. mencken. preface this book belongs to the most rare of men. perhaps not one of them is yet alive. it is possible that they may be among those who understand my "zarathustra": how _could_ i confound myself with those who are now sprouting ears?--first the day after tomorrow must come for me. some men are born posthumously. the conditions under which any one understands me, and _necessarily_ understands me--i know them only too well. even to endure my seriousness, my passion, he must carry intellectual integrity to the verge of hardness. he must be accustomed to living on mountain tops--and to looking upon the wretched gabble of politics and nationalism as _beneath_ him. he must have become indifferent; he must never ask of the truth whether it brings profit to him or a fatality to him.... he must have an inclination, born of strength, for questions that no one has the courage for; the courage for the _forbidden_; predestination for the labyrinth. the experience of seven solitudes. new ears for new music. new eyes for what is most distant. a new conscience for truths that have hitherto remained unheard. _and_ the will to economize in the grand manner--to hold together his strength, his enthusiasm.... reverence for self; love of self; absolute freedom of self.... very well, then! of that sort only are my readers, my true readers, my readers foreordained: of what account are the _rest_?--the rest are merely humanity.--one must make one's self superior to humanity, in power, in _loftiness_ of soul,--in contempt. friedrich w. nietzsche. the antichrist 1. --let us look each other in the face. we are hyperboreans--we know well enough how remote our place is. "neither by land nor by water will you find the road to the hyperboreans": even pindar,[1] in his day, knew _that_ much about us. beyond the north, beyond the ice, beyond _death_--_our_ life, _our_ happiness.... we have discovered that happiness; we know the way; we got our knowledge of it from thousands of years in the labyrinth. who _else_ has found it?--the man of today?--"i don't know either the way out or the way in; i am whatever doesn't know either the way out or the way in"--so sighs the man of today.... _this_ is the sort of modernity that made us ill,--we sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous dirtiness of the modern yea and nay. this tolerance and _largeur_ of the heart that "forgives" everything because it "understands" everything is a sirocco to us. rather live amid the ice than among modern virtues and other such south-winds!... we were brave enough; we spared neither ourselves nor others; but we were a long time finding out _where_ to direct our courage. we grew dismal; they called us fatalists. _our_ fate--it was the fulness, the tension, the _storing up_ of powers. we thirsted for the lightnings and great deeds; we kept as far as possible from the happiness of the weakling, from "resignation"... there was thunder in our air; nature, as we embodied it, became overcast--_for we had not yet found the way_. the formula of our happiness: a yea, a nay, a straight line, a _goal_.... [1] _cf._ the tenth pythian ode. see also the fourth book of herodotus. the hyperboreans were a mythical people beyond the rhipaean mountains, in the far north. they enjoyed unbroken happiness and perpetual youth. 2. what is good?--whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man. what is evil?--whatever springs from weakness. what is happiness?--the feeling that power _increases_--that resistance is overcome. not contentment, but more power; _not_ peace at any price, but war; _not_ virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the renaissance sense, _virtu_, virtue free of moral acid). the weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of _our_ charity. and one should help them to it. what is more harmful than any vice?--practical sympathy for the botched and the weak--christianity.... 3. the problem that i set here is not what shall replace mankind in the order of living creatures (--man is an end--): but what type of man must be _bred_, must be _willed_, as being the most valuable, the most worthy of life, the most secure guarantee of the future. this more valuable type has appeared often enough in the past: but always as a happy accident, as an exception, never as deliberately _willed_. very often it has been precisely the most feared; hitherto it has been almost _the_ terror of terrors;--and out of that terror the contrary type has been willed, cultivated and _attained_: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick brute-man--the christian.... 4. mankind surely does _not_ represent an evolution toward a better or stronger or higher level, as progress is now understood. this "progress" is merely a modern idea, which is to say, a false idea. the european of today, in his essential worth, falls far below the european of the renaissance; the process of evolution does _not_ necessarily mean elevation, enhancement, strengthening. true enough, it succeeds in isolated and individual cases in various parts of the earth and under the most widely different cultures, and in these cases a _higher_ type certainly manifests itself; something which, compared to mankind in the mass, appears as a sort of superman. such happy strokes of high success have always been possible, and will remain possible, perhaps, for all time to come. even whole races, tribes and nations may occasionally represent such lucky accidents. 5. we should not deck out and embellish christianity: it has waged a war to the death against this _higher_ type of man, it has put all the deepest instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of evil, of the evil one himself, out of these instincts--the strong man as the typical reprobate, the "outcast among men." christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of _antagonism_ to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation. the most lamentable example: the corruption of pascal, who believed that his intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually destroyed by christianity!-6. it is a painful and tragic spectacle that rises before me: i have drawn back the curtain from the _rottenness_ of man. this word, in my mouth, is at least free from one suspicion: that it involves a moral accusation against humanity. it is used--and i wish to emphasize the fact again--without any moral significance: and this is so far true that the rottenness i speak of is most apparent to me precisely in those quarters where there has been most aspiration, hitherto, toward "virtue" and "godliness." as you probably surmise, i understand rottenness in the sense of _décadence_: my argument is that all the values on which mankind now fixes its highest aspirations are _décadence_-values. i call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it _prefers_, what is injurious to it. a history of the "higher feelings," the "ideals of humanity"--and it is possible that i'll have to write it--would almost explain why man is so degenerate. life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for _power_: whenever the will to power fails there is disaster. my contention is that all the highest values of humanity have been emptied of this will--that the values of _décadence_, of _nihilism_, now prevail under the holiest names. 7. christianity is called the religion of _pity_.--pity stands in opposition to all the tonic passions that augment the energy of the feeling of aliveness: it is a depressant. a man loses power when he pities. through pity that drain upon strength which suffering works is multiplied a thousandfold. suffering is made contagious by pity; under certain circumstances it may lead to a total sacrifice of life and living energy--a loss out of all proportion to the magnitude of the cause (--the case of the death of the nazarene). this is the first view of it; there is, however, a still more important one. if one measures the effects of pity by the gravity of the reactions it sets up, its character as a menace to life appears in a much clearer light. pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural selection. it preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on the side of those disinherited and condemned by life; by maintaining life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life itself a gloomy and dubious aspect. mankind has ventured to call pity a virtue (--in every _superior_ moral system it appears as a weakness--); going still further, it has been called _the_ virtue, the source and foundation of all other virtues--but let us always bear in mind that this was from the standpoint of a philosophy that was nihilistic, and upon whose shield _the denial of life_ was inscribed. schopenhauer was right in this: that by means of pity life is denied, and made _worthy of denial_--pity is the technic of nihilism. let me repeat: this depressing and contagious instinct stands against all those instincts which work for the preservation and enhancement of life: in the rôle of _protector_ of the miserable, it is a prime agent in the promotion of _décadence_--pity persuades to extinction.... of course, one doesn't say "extinction": one says "the other world," or "god," or "the _true_ life," or nirvana, salvation, blessedness.... this innocent rhetoric, from the realm of religious-ethical balderdash, appears _a good deal less innocent_ when one reflects upon the tendency that it conceals beneath sublime words: the tendency to _destroy life_. schopenhauer was hostile to life: that is why pity appeared to him as a virtue.... aristotle, as every one knows, saw in pity a sickly and dangerous state of mind, the remedy for which was an occasional purgative: he regarded tragedy as that purgative. the instinct of life should prompt us to seek some means of puncturing any such pathological and dangerous accumulation of pity as that appearing in schopenhauer's case (and also, alack, in that of our whole literary _décadence_, from st. petersburg to paris, from tolstoi to wagner), that it may burst and be discharged.... nothing is more unhealthy, amid all our unhealthy modernism, than christian pity. to be the doctors _here_, to be unmerciful _here_, to wield the knife _here_--all this is _our_ business, all this is _our_ sort of humanity, by this sign we are philosophers, we hyperboreans!-8. it is necessary to say just _whom_ we regard as our antagonists: theologians and all who have any theological blood in their veins--this is our whole philosophy.... one must have faced that menace at close hand, better still, one must have had experience of it directly and almost succumbed to it, to realize that it is not to be taken lightly (--the alleged free-thinking of our naturalists and physiologists seems to me to be a joke--they have no passion about such things; they have not suffered--). this poisoning goes a great deal further than most people think: i find the arrogant habit of the theologian among all who regard themselves as "idealists"--among all who, by virtue of a higher point of departure, claim a right to rise above reality, and to look upon it with suspicion.... the idealist, like the ecclesiastic, carries all sorts of lofty concepts in his hand (--and not only in his hand!); he launches them with benevolent contempt against "understanding," "the senses," "honor," "good living," "science"; he sees such things as _beneath_ him, as pernicious and seductive forces, on which "the soul" soars as a pure thing-in-itself--as if humility, chastity, poverty, in a word, _holiness_, had not already done much more damage to life than all imaginable horrors and vices.... the pure soul is a pure lie.... so long as the priest, that _professional_ denier, calumniator and poisoner of life, is accepted as a _higher_ variety of man, there can be no answer to the question, what _is_ truth? truth has already been stood on its head when the obvious attorney of mere emptiness is mistaken for its representative.... 9. upon this theological instinct i make war: i find the tracks of it everywhere. whoever has theological blood in his veins is shifty and dishonourable in all things. the pathetic thing that grows out of this condition is called _faith_: in other words, closing one's eyes upon one's self once for all, to avoid suffering the sight of incurable falsehood. people erect a concept of morality, of virtue, of holiness upon this false view of all things; they ground good conscience upon faulty vision; they argue that no _other_ sort of vision has value any more, once they have made theirs sacrosanct with the names of "god," "salvation" and "eternity." i unearth this theological instinct in all directions: it is the most widespread and the most _subterranean_ form of falsehood to be found on earth. whatever a theologian regards as true _must_ be false: there you have almost a criterion of truth. his profound instinct of self-preservation stands against truth ever coming into honour in any way, or even getting stated. wherever the influence of theologians is felt there is a transvaluation of values, and the concepts "true" and "false" are forced to change places: whatever is most damaging to life is there called "true," and whatever exalts it, intensifies it, approves it, justifies it and makes it triumphant is there called "false."... when theologians, working through the "consciences" of princes (or of peoples--), stretch out their hands for _power_, there is never any doubt as to the fundamental issue: the will to make an end, the _nihilistic_ will exerts that power.... 10. among germans i am immediately understood when i say that theological blood is the ruin of philosophy. the protestant pastor is the grandfather of german philosophy; protestantism itself is its _peccatum originale_. definition of protestantism: hemiplegic paralysis of christianity--_and_ of reason.... one need only utter the words "tübingen school" to get an understanding of what german philosophy is at bottom--a very artful form of theology.... the suabians are the best liars in germany; they lie innocently.... why all the rejoicing over the appearance of kant that went through the learned world of germany, three-fourths of which is made up of the sons of preachers and teachers--why the german conviction still echoing, that with kant came a change for the _better_? the theological instinct of german scholars made them see clearly just _what_ had become possible again.... a backstairs leading to the old ideal stood open; the concept of the "true world," the concept of morality as the _essence_ of the world (--the two most vicious errors that ever existed!), were once more, thanks to a subtle and wily scepticism, if not actually demonstrable, then _at least_ no longer _refutable_.... _reason_, the _prerogative_ of reason, does not go so far.... out of reality there had been made "appearance"; an absolutely false world, that of being, had been turned into reality.... the success of kant is merely a theological success; he was, like luther and leibnitz, but one more impediment to german integrity, already far from steady.-11. a word now against kant as a moralist. a virtue must be _our_ invention; it must spring out of _our_ personal need and defence. in every other case it is a source of danger. that which does not belong to our life _menaces_ it; a virtue which has its roots in mere respect for the concept of "virtue," as kant would have it, is pernicious. "virtue," "duty," "good for its own sake," goodness grounded upon impersonality or a notion of universal validity--these are all chimeras, and in them one finds only an expression of the decay, the last collapse of life, the chinese spirit of königsberg. quite the contrary is demanded by the most profound laws of self-preservation and of growth: to wit, that every man find his _own_ virtue, his _own_ categorical imperative. a nation goes to pieces when it confounds _its_ duty with the general concept of duty. nothing works a more complete and penetrating disaster than every "impersonal" duty, every sacrifice before the moloch of abstraction.--to think that no one has thought of kant's categorical imperative as _dangerous to life_!... the theological instinct alone took it under protection!--an action prompted by the life-instinct proves that it is a _right_ action by the amount of pleasure that goes with it: and yet that nihilist, with his bowels of christian dogmatism, regarded pleasure as an _objection_.... what destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure--as a mere automaton of duty? that is the recipe for _décadence_, and no less for idiocy.... kant became an idiot.--and such a man was the contemporary of goethe! this calamitous spinner of cobwebs passed for _the_ german philosopher--still passes today!... i forbid myself to say what i think of the germans.... didn't kant see in the french revolution the transformation of the state from the inorganic form to the _organic_? didn't he ask himself if there was a single event that could be explained save on the assumption of a moral faculty in man, so that on the basis of it, "the tendency of mankind toward the good" could be _explained_, once and for all time? kant's answer: "that is revolution." instinct at fault in everything and anything, instinct as a revolt against nature, german _décadence_ as a philosophy--_that is kant_!-12. i put aside a few sceptics, the types of decency in the history of philosophy: the rest haven't the slightest conception of intellectual integrity. they behave like women, all these great enthusiasts and prodigies--they regard "beautiful feelings" as arguments, the "heaving breast" as the bellows of divine inspiration, conviction as the _criterion_ of truth. in the end, with "german" innocence, kant tried to give a scientific flavour to this form of corruption, this dearth of intellectual conscience, by calling it "practical reason." he deliberately invented a variety of reasons for use on occasions when it was desirable not to trouble with reason--that is, when morality, when the sublime command "thou shalt," was heard. when one recalls the fact that, among all peoples, the philosopher is no more than a development from the old type of priest, this inheritance from the priest, this _fraud upon self_, ceases to be remarkable. when a man feels that he has a divine mission, say to lift up, to save or to liberate mankind--when a man feels the divine spark in his heart and believes that he is the mouthpiece of supernatural imperatives--when such a mission inflames him, it is only natural that he should stand beyond all merely reasonable standards of judgment. he feels that he is _himself_ sanctified by this mission, that he is himself a type of a higher order!... what has a priest to do with philosophy! he stands far above it!--and hitherto the priest has _ruled_!--he has determined the meaning of "true" and "not true"!... 13. let us not underestimate this fact: that _we ourselves_, we free spirits, are already a "transvaluation of all values," a _visualized_ declaration of war and victory against all the old concepts of "true" and "not true." the most valuable intuitions are the last to be attained; the most valuable of all are those which determine _methods_. all the methods, all the principles of the scientific spirit of today, were the targets for thousands of years of the most profound contempt; if a man inclined to them he was excluded from the society of "decent" people--he passed as "an enemy of god," as a scoffer at the truth, as one "possessed." as a man of science, he belonged to the chandala[2].... we have had the whole pathetic stupidity of mankind against us--their every notion of what the truth _ought_ to be, of what the service of the truth _ought_ to be--their every "thou shalt" was launched against us.... our objectives, our methods, our quiet, cautious, distrustful manner--all appeared to them as absolutely discreditable and contemptible.--looking back, one may almost ask one's self with reason if it was not actually an _aesthetic_ sense that kept men blind so long: what they demanded of the truth was picturesque effectiveness, and of the learned a strong appeal to their senses. it was our _modesty_ that stood out longest against their taste.... how well they guessed that, these turkey-cocks of god! [2] the lowest of the hindu castes. 14. we have unlearned something. we have become more modest in every way. we no longer derive man from the "spirit," from the "godhead"; we have dropped him back among the beasts. we regard him as the strongest of the beasts because he is the craftiest; one of the results thereof is his intellectuality. on the other hand, we guard ourselves against a conceit which would assert itself even here: that man is the great second thought in the process of organic evolution. he is, in truth, anything but the crown of creation: beside him stand many other animals, all at similar stages of development.... and even when we say that we say a bit too much, for man, relatively speaking, is the most botched of all the animals and the sickliest, and he has wandered the most dangerously from his instincts--though for all that, to be sure, he remains the most _interesting_!--as regards the lower animals, it was descartes who first had the really admirable daring to describe them as _machina_; the whole of our physiology is directed toward proving the truth of this doctrine. moreover, it is illogical to set man apart, as descartes did: what we know of man today is limited precisely by the extent to which we have regarded him, too, as a machine. formerly we accorded to man, as his inheritance from some higher order of beings, what was called "free will"; now we have taken even this will from him, for the term no longer describes anything that we can understand. the old word "will" now connotes only a sort of result, an individual reaction, that follows inevitably upon a series of partly discordant and partly harmonious stimuli--the will no longer "acts," or "moves."... formerly it was thought that man's consciousness, his "spirit," offered evidence of his high origin, his divinity. that he might be _perfected_, he was advised, tortoise-like, to draw his senses in, to have no traffic with earthly things, to shuffle off his mortal coil--then only the important part of him, the "pure spirit," would remain. here again we have thought out the thing better: to us consciousness, or "the spirit," appears as a symptom of a relative imperfection of the organism, as an experiment, a groping, a misunderstanding, as an affliction which uses up nervous force unnecessarily--we deny that anything can be done perfectly so long as it is done consciously. the "pure spirit" is a piece of pure stupidity: take away the nervous system and the senses, the so-called "mortal shell," and _the rest is miscalculation_--that is all!... 15. under christianity neither morality nor religion has any point of contact with actuality. it offers purely imaginary _causes_ ("god," "soul," "ego," "spirit," "free will"--or even "unfree"), and purely imaginary _effects_ ("sin," "salvation," "grace," "punishment," "forgiveness of sins"). intercourse between imaginary _beings_ ("god," "spirits," "souls"); an imaginary _natural history_ (anthropocentric; a total denial of the concept of natural causes); an imaginary _psychology_ (misunderstandings of self, misinterpretations of agreeable or disagreeable general feelings--for example, of the states of the _nervus sympathicus_ with the help of the sign-language of religio-ethical balderdash--, "repentance," "pangs of conscience," "temptation by the devil," "the presence of god"); an imaginary _teleology_ (the "kingdom of god," "the last judgment," "eternal life").--this purely _fictitious world_, greatly to its disadvantage, is to be differentiated from the world of dreams; the latter at least reflects reality, whereas the former falsifies it, cheapens it and denies it. once the concept of "nature" had been opposed to the concept of "god," the word "natural" necessarily took on the meaning of "abominable"--the whole of that fictitious world has its sources in hatred of the natural (--the real!--), and is no more than evidence of a profound uneasiness in the presence of reality.... _this explains everything._ who alone has any reason for living his way out of reality? the man who suffers under it. but to suffer from reality one must be a _botched_ reality.... the preponderance of pains over pleasures is the cause of this fictitious morality and religion: but such a preponderance also supplies the formula for _décadence_.... 16. a criticism of the _christian concept of god_ leads inevitably to the same conclusion.--a nation that still believes in itself holds fast to its own god. in him it does honour to the conditions which enable it to survive, to its virtues--it projects its joy in itself, its feeling of power, into a being to whom one may offer thanks. he who is rich will give of his riches; a proud people need a god to whom they can make _sacrifices_.... religion, within these limits, is a form of gratitude. a man is grateful for his own existence: to that end he needs a god.--such a god must be able to work both benefits and injuries; he must be able to play either friend or foe--he is wondered at for the good he does as well as for the evil he does. but the castration, against all nature, of such a god, making him a god of goodness alone, would be contrary to human inclination. mankind has just as much need for an evil god as for a good god; it doesn't have to thank mere tolerance and humanitarianism for its own existence.... what would be the value of a god who knew nothing of anger, revenge, envy, scorn, cunning, violence? who had perhaps never experienced the rapturous _ardeurs_ of victory and of destruction? no one would understand such a god: why should any one want him?--true enough, when a nation is on the downward path, when it feels its belief in its own future, its hope of freedom slipping from it, when it begins to see submission as a first necessity and the virtues of submission as measures of self-preservation, then it _must_ overhaul its god. he then becomes a hypocrite, timorous and demure; he counsels "peace of soul," hate-no-more, leniency, "love" of friend and foe. he moralizes endlessly; he creeps into every private virtue; he becomes the god of every man; he becomes a private citizen, a cosmopolitan.... formerly he represented a people, the strength of a people, everything aggressive and thirsty for power in the soul of a people; now he is simply _the good god_.... the truth is that there is no other alternative for gods: _either_ they are the will to power--in which case they are national gods--_or_ incapacity for power--in which case they have to be good.... 17. wherever the will to power begins to decline, in whatever form, there is always an accompanying decline physiologically, a _décadence_. the divinity of this _décadence_, shorn of its masculine virtues and passions, is converted perforce into a god of the physiologically degraded, of the weak. of course, they do not _call_ themselves the weak; they call themselves "the good."... no hint is needed to indicate the moments in history at which the dualistic fiction of a good and an evil god first became possible. the same instinct which prompts the inferior to reduce their own god to "goodness-in-itself" also prompts them to eliminate all good qualities from the god of their superiors; they make revenge on their masters by making a _devil_ of the latter's god.--the _good_ god, and the devil like him--both are abortions of _décadence_.--how can we be so tolerant of the naïveté of christian theologians as to join in their doctrine that the evolution of the concept of god from "the god of israel," the god of a people, to the christian god, the essence of all goodness, is to be described as _progress_?--but even renan does this. as if renan had a right to be naïve! the contrary actually stares one in the face. when everything necessary to _ascending_ life; when all that is strong, courageous, masterful and proud has been eliminated from the concept of a god; when he has sunk step by step to the level of a staff for the weary, a sheet-anchor for the drowning; when he becomes the poor man's god, the sinner's god, the invalid's god _par excellence_, and the attribute of "saviour" or "redeemer" remains as the one essential attribute of divinity--just _what_ is the significance of such a metamorphosis? what does such a _reduction_ of the godhead imply?--to be sure, the "kingdom of god" has thus grown larger. formerly he had only his own people, his "chosen" people. but since then he has gone wandering, like his people themselves, into foreign parts; he has given up settling down quietly anywhere; finally he has come to feel at home everywhere, and is the great cosmopolitan--until now he has the "great majority" on his side, and half the earth. but this god of the "great majority," this democrat among gods, has not become a proud heathen god: on the contrary, he remains a jew, he remains a god in a corner, a god of all the dark nooks and crevices, of all the noisesome quarters of the world!... his earthly kingdom, now as always, is a kingdom of the underworld, a _souterrain_ kingdom, a ghetto kingdom.... and he himself is so pale, so weak, so _décadent_.... even the palest of the pale are able to master him--messieurs the metaphysicians, those albinos of the intellect. they spun their webs around him for so long that finally he was hypnotized, and began to spin himself, and became another metaphysician. thereafter he resumed once more his old business of spinning the world out of his inmost being _sub specie spinozae_; thereafter he became ever thinner and paler--became the "ideal," became "pure spirit," became "the absolute," became "the thing-in-itself."... _the collapse of a god_: he became a "thing-in-itself." 18. the christian concept of a god--the god as the patron of the sick, the god as a spinner of cobwebs, the god as a spirit--is one of the most corrupt concepts that has ever been set up in the world: it probably touches low-water mark in the ebbing evolution of the god-type. god degenerated into the _contradiction of life_. instead of being its transfiguration and eternal yea! in him war is declared on life, on nature, on the will to live! god becomes the formula for every slander upon the "here and now," and for every lie about the "beyond"! in him nothingness is deified, and the will to nothingness is made holy!... 19. the fact that the strong races of northern europe did not repudiate this christian god does little credit to their gift for religion--and not much more to their taste. they ought to have been able to make an end of such a moribund and worn-out product of the _décadence_. a curse lies upon them because they were not equal to it; they made illness, decrepitude and contradiction a part of their instincts--and since then they have not managed to _create_ any more gods. two thousand years have come and gone--and not a single new god! instead, there still exists, and as if by some intrinsic right,--as if he were the _ultimatum_ and _maximum_ of the power to create gods, of the _creator spiritus_ in mankind--this pitiful god of christian monotono-theism! this hybrid image of decay, conjured up out of emptiness, contradiction and vain imagining, in which all the instincts of _décadence_, all the cowardices and wearinesses of the soul find their sanction!-20. in my condemnation of christianity i surely hope i do no injustice to a related religion with an even larger number of believers: i allude to _buddhism_. both are to be reckoned among the nihilistic religions--they are both _décadence_ religions--but they are separated from each other in a very remarkable way. for the fact that he is able to _compare_ them at all the critic of christianity is indebted to the scholars of india.--buddhism is a hundred times as realistic as christianity--it is part of its living heritage that it is able to face problems objectively and coolly; it is the product of long centuries of philosophical speculation. the concept, "god," was already disposed of before it appeared. buddhism is the only genuinely _positive_ religion to be encountered in history, and this applies even to its epistemology (which is a strict phenomenalism). it does not speak of a "struggle with sin," but, yielding to reality, of the "struggle with suffering." sharply differentiating itself from christianity, it puts the self-deception that lies in moral concepts behind it; it is, in my phrase, _beyond_ good and evil.--the two physiological facts upon which it grounds itself and upon which it bestows its chief attention are: first, an excessive sensitiveness to sensation, which manifests itself as a refined susceptibility to pain, and _secondly_, an extraordinary spirituality, a too protracted concern with concepts and logical procedures, under the influence of which the instinct of personality has yielded to a notion of the "impersonal." (--both of these states will be familiar to a few of my readers, the objectivists, by experience, as they are to me). these physiological states produced a _depression_, and buddha tried to combat it by hygienic measures. against it he prescribed a life in the open, a life of travel; moderation in eating and a careful selection of foods; caution in the use of intoxicants; the same caution in arousing any of the passions that foster a bilious habit and heat the blood; finally, no _worry_, either on one's own account or on account of others. he encourages ideas that make for either quiet contentment or good cheer--he finds means to combat ideas of other sorts. he understands good, the state of goodness, as something which promotes health. _prayer_ is not included, and neither is _asceticism_. there is no categorical imperative nor any disciplines, even within the walls of a monastery (--it is always possible to leave--). these things would have been simply means of increasing the excessive sensitiveness above mentioned. for the same reason he does not advocate any conflict with unbelievers; his teaching is antagonistic to nothing so much as to revenge, aversion, _ressentiment_ (--"enmity never brings an end to enmity": the moving refrain of all buddhism....) and in all this he was right, for it is precisely these passions which, in view of his main regiminal purpose, are _unhealthful_. the mental fatigue that he observes, already plainly displayed in too much "objectivity" (that is, in the individual's loss of interest in himself, in loss of balance and of "egoism"), he combats by strong efforts to lead even the spiritual interests back to the _ego_. in buddha's teaching egoism is a duty. the "one thing needful," the question "how can you be delivered from suffering," regulates and determines the whole spiritual diet. (--perhaps one will here recall that athenian who also declared war upon pure "scientificality," to wit, socrates, who also elevated egoism to the estate of a morality). 21. the things necessary to buddhism are a very mild climate, customs of great gentleness and liberality, and _no_ militarism; moreover, it must get its start among the higher and better educated classes. cheerfulness, quiet and the absence of desire are the chief desiderata, and they are _attained_. buddhism is not a religion in which perfection is merely an object of aspiration: perfection is actually normal.-under christianity the instincts of the subjugated and the oppressed come to the fore: it is only those who are at the bottom who seek their salvation in it. here the prevailing pastime, the favourite remedy for boredom is the discussion of sin, self-criticism, the inquisition of conscience; here the emotion produced by _power_ (called "god") is pumped up (by prayer); here the highest good is regarded as unattainable, as a gift, as "grace." here, too, open dealing is lacking; concealment and the darkened room are christian. here body is despised and hygiene is denounced as sensual; the church even ranges itself against cleanliness (--the first christian order after the banishment of the moors closed the public baths, of which there were 270 in cordova alone). christian, too, is a certain cruelty toward one's self and toward others; hatred of unbelievers; the will to persecute. sombre and disquieting ideas are in the foreground; the most esteemed states of mind, bearing the most respectable names, are epileptoid; the diet is so regulated as to engender morbid symptoms and over-stimulate the nerves. christian, again, is all deadly enmity to the rulers of the earth, to the "aristocratic"--along with a sort of secret rivalry with them (--one resigns one's "body" to them; one wants _only_ one's "soul"...). and christian is all hatred of the intellect, of pride, of courage, of freedom, of intellectual _libertinage_; christian is all hatred of the senses, of joy in the senses, of joy in general.... 22. when christianity departed from its native soil, that of the lowest orders, the _underworld_ of the ancient world, and began seeking power among barbarian peoples, it no longer had to deal with _exhausted_ men, but with men still inwardly savage and capable of self-torture--in brief, strong men, but bungled men. here, unlike in the case of the buddhists, the cause of discontent with self, suffering through self, is _not_ merely a general sensitiveness and susceptibility to pain, but, on the contrary, an inordinate thirst for inflicting pain on others, a tendency to obtain subjective satisfaction in hostile deeds and ideas. christianity had to embrace _barbaric_ concepts and valuations in order to obtain mastery over barbarians: of such sort, for example, are the sacrifices of the first-born, the drinking of blood as a sacrament, the disdain of the intellect and of culture; torture in all its forms, whether bodily or not; the whole pomp of the cult. buddhism is a religion for peoples in a further state of development, for races that have become kind, gentle and over-spiritualized (--europe is not yet ripe for it--): it is a summons that takes them back to peace and cheerfulness, to a careful rationing of the spirit, to a certain hardening of the body. christianity aims at mastering _beasts of prey_; its modus operandi is to make them _ill_--to make feeble is the christian recipe for taming, for "_civilizing_." buddhism is a religion for the closing, over-wearied stages of civilization. christianity appears before civilization has so much as begun--under certain circumstances it lays the very foundations thereof. 23. buddhism, i repeat, is a hundred times more austere, more honest, more objective. it no longer has to _justify_ its pains, its susceptibility to suffering, by interpreting these things in terms of sin--it simply says, as it simply thinks, "i suffer." to the barbarian, however, suffering in itself is scarcely understandable: what he needs, first of all, is an explanation as to _why_ he suffers. (his mere instinct prompts him to deny his suffering altogether, or to endure it in silence.) here the word "devil" was a blessing: man had to have an omnipotent and terrible enemy--there was no need to be ashamed of suffering at the hands of such an enemy.-at the bottom of christianity there are several subtleties that belong to the orient. in the first place, it knows that it is of very little consequence whether a thing be true or not, so long as it is _believed_ to be true. truth and _faith_: here we have two wholly distinct worlds of ideas, almost two diametrically _opposite_ worlds--the road to the one and the road to the other lie miles apart. to understand that fact thoroughly--this is almost enough, in the orient, to _make_ one a sage. the brahmins knew it, plato knew it, every student of the esoteric knows it. when, for example, a man gets any _pleasure_ out of the notion that he has been saved from sin, it is _not_ necessary for him to be actually sinful, but merely to _feel_ sinful. but when _faith_ is thus exalted above everything else, it necessarily follows that reason, knowledge and patient inquiry have to be discredited: the road to the truth becomes a forbidden road.--hope, in its stronger forms, is a great deal more powerful _stimulans_ to life than any sort of realized joy can ever be. man must be sustained in suffering by a hope so high that no conflict with actuality can dash it--so high, indeed, that no fulfilment can _satisfy_ it: a hope reaching out beyond this world. (precisely because of this power that hope has of making the suffering hold out, the greeks regarded it as the evil of evils, as the most _malign_ of evils; it remained behind at the source of all evil.)[3]--in order that _love_ may be possible, god must become a person; in order that the lower instincts may take a hand in the matter god must be young. to satisfy the ardor of the woman a beautiful saint must appear on the scene, and to satisfy that of the men there must be a virgin. these things are necessary if christianity is to assume lordship over a soil on which some aphrodisiacal or adonis cult has already established a notion as to what a cult ought to be. to insist upon _chastity_ greatly strengthens the vehemence and subjectivity of the religious instinct--it makes the cult warmer, more enthusiastic, more soulful.--love is the state in which man sees things most decidedly as they are _not_. the force of illusion reaches its highest here, and so does the capacity for sweetening, for _transfiguring_. when a man is in love he endures more than at any other time; he submits to anything. the problem was to devise a religion which would allow one to love: by this means the worst that life has to offer is overcome--it is scarcely even noticed.--so much for the three christian virtues: faith, hope and charity: i call them the three christian _ingenuities_.--buddhism is in too late a stage of development, too full of positivism, to be shrewd in any such way.-[3] that is, in pandora's box. 24. here i barely touch upon the problem of the _origin_ of christianity. the _first_ thing necessary to its solution is this: that christianity is to be understood only by examining the soil from which it sprung--it is _not_ a reaction against jewish instincts; it is their inevitable product; it is simply one more step in the awe-inspiring logic of the jews. in the words of the saviour, "salvation is of the jews."[4]--the _second_ thing to remember is this: that the psychological type of the galilean is still to be recognized, but it was only in its most degenerate form (which is at once maimed and overladen with foreign features) that it could serve in the manner in which it has been used: as a type of the _saviour_ of mankind.-[4] john iv, 22. the jews are the most remarkable people in the history of the world, for when they were confronted with the question, to be or not to be, they chose, with perfectly unearthly deliberation, to be _at any price_: this price involved a radical _falsification_ of all nature, of all naturalness, of all reality, of the whole inner world, as well as of the outer. they put themselves _against_ all those conditions under which, hitherto, a people had been able to live, or had even been _permitted_ to live; out of themselves they evolved an idea which stood in direct opposition to _natural_ conditions--one by one they distorted religion, civilization, morality, history and psychology until each became a _contradiction_ of its _natural significance_. we meet with the same phenomenon later on, in an incalculably exaggerated form, but only as a copy: the christian church, put beside the "people of god," shows a complete lack of any claim to originality. precisely for this reason the jews are the most _fateful_ people in the history of the world: their influence has so falsified the reasoning of mankind in this matter that today the christian can cherish anti-semitism without realizing that it is no more than the _final consequence of judaism_. in my "genealogy of morals" i give the first psychological explanation of the concepts underlying those two antithetical things, a _noble_ morality and a _ressentiment_ morality, the second of which is a mere product of the denial of the former. the judaeo-christian moral system belongs to the second division, and in every detail. in order to be able to say nay to everything representing an _ascending_ evolution of life--that is, to well-being, to power, to beauty, to self-approval--the instincts of _ressentiment_, here become downright genius, had to invent an _other_ world in which the _acceptance of life_ appeared as the most evil and abominable thing imaginable. psychologically, the jews are a people gifted with the very strongest vitality, so much so that when they found themselves facing impossible conditions of life they chose voluntarily, and with a profound talent for self-preservation, the side of all those instincts which make for _décadence_--_not_ as if mastered by them, but as if detecting in them a power by which "the world" could be _defied_. the jews are the very opposite of _décadents_: they have simply been forced into _appearing_ in that guise, and with a degree of skill approaching the _non plus ultra_ of histrionic genius they have managed to put themselves at the head of all _décadent_ movements (--for example, the christianity of paul--), and so make of them something stronger than any party frankly saying _yes_ to life. to the sort of men who reach out for power under judaism and christianity,--that is to say, to the _priestly_ class--_décadence_ is no more than a means to an end. men of this sort have a vital interest in making mankind sick, and in confusing the values of "good" and "bad," "true" and "false" in a manner that is not only dangerous to life, but also slanders it. 25. the history of israel is invaluable as a typical history of an attempt to _denaturize_ all natural values: i point to five facts which bear this out. originally, and above all in the time of the monarchy, israel maintained the _right_ attitude of things, which is to say, the natural attitude. its jahveh was an expression of its consciousness of power, its joy in itself, its hopes for itself: to him the jews looked for victory and salvation and through him they expected nature to give them whatever was necessary to their existence--above all, rain. jahveh is the god of israel, and _consequently_ the god of justice: this is the logic of every race that has power in its hands and a good conscience in the use of it. in the religious ceremonial of the jews both aspects of this self-approval stand revealed. the nation is grateful for the high destiny that has enabled it to obtain dominion; it is grateful for the benign procession of the seasons, and for the good fortune attending its herds and its crops.--this view of things remained an ideal for a long while, even after it had been robbed of validity by tragic blows: anarchy within and the assyrian without. but the people still retained, as a projection of their highest yearnings, that vision of a king who was at once a gallant warrior and an upright judge--a vision best visualized in the typical prophet (_i. e._, critic and satirist of the moment), isaiah.--but every hope remained unfulfilled. the old god no longer _could_ do what he used to do. he ought to have been abandoned. but what actually happened? simply this: the conception of him was _changed_--the conception of him was _denaturized_; this was the price that had to be paid for keeping him.--jahveh, the god of "justice"--he is in accord with israel _no more_, he no longer vizualizes the national egoism; he is now a god only conditionally.... the public notion of this god now becomes merely a weapon in the hands of clerical agitators, who interpret all happiness as a reward and all unhappiness as a punishment for obedience or disobedience to him, for "sin": that most fraudulent of all imaginable interpretations, whereby a "moral order of the world" is set up, and the fundamental concepts, "cause" and "effect," are stood on their heads. once natural causation has been swept out of the world by doctrines of reward and punishment some sort of _un_-natural causation becomes necessary: and all other varieties of the denial of nature follow it. a god who _demands_--in place of a god who helps, who gives counsel, who is at bottom merely a name for every happy inspiration of courage and self-reliance.... _morality_ is no longer a reflection of the conditions which make for the sound life and development of the people; it is no longer the primary life-instinct; instead it has become abstract and in opposition to life--a fundamental perversion of the fancy, an "evil eye" on all things. _what_ is jewish, _what_ is christian morality? chance robbed of its innocence; unhappiness polluted with the idea of "sin"; well-being represented as a danger, as a "temptation"; a physiological disorder produced by the canker worm of conscience.... 26. the concept of god falsified; the concept of morality falsified;--but even here jewish priest-craft did not stop. the whole history of israel ceased to be of any value: out with it!--these priests accomplished that miracle of falsification of which a great part of the bible is the documentary evidence; with a degree of contempt unparalleled, and in the face of all tradition and all historical reality, they translated the past of their people into _religious_ terms, which is to say, they converted it into an idiotic mechanism of salvation, whereby all offences against jahveh were punished and all devotion to him was rewarded. we would regard this act of historical falsification as something far more shameful if familiarity with the _ecclesiastical_ interpretation of history for thousands of years had not blunted our inclinations for uprightness _in historicis_. and the philosophers support the church: the _lie_ about a "moral order of the world" runs through the whole of philosophy, even the newest. what is the meaning of a "moral order of the world"? that there is a thing called the will of god which, once and for all time, determines what man ought to do and what he ought not to do; that the worth of a people, or of an individual thereof, is to be measured by the extent to which they or he obey this will of god; that the destinies of a people or of an individual are _controlled_ by this will of god, which rewards or punishes according to the degree of obedience manifested.--in place of all that pitiable lie _reality_ has this to say: the _priest_, a parasitical variety of man who can exist only at the cost of every sound view of life, takes the name of god in vain: he calls that state of human society in which he himself determines the value of all things "the kingdom of god"; he calls the means whereby that state of affairs is attained "the will of god"; with cold-blooded cynicism he estimates all peoples, all ages and all individuals by the extent of their subservience or opposition to the power of the priestly order. one observes him at work: under the hand of the jewish priesthood the _great_ age of israel became an age of decline; the exile, with its long series of misfortunes, was transformed into a _punishment_ for that great age--during which priests had not yet come into existence. out of the powerful and _wholly free_ heroes of israel's history they fashioned, according to their changing needs, either wretched bigots and hypocrites or men entirely "godless." they reduced every great event to the idiotic formula: "obedient _or_ disobedient to god."--they went a step further: the "will of god" (in other words some means necessary for preserving the power of the priests) had to be _determined_--and to this end they had to have a "revelation." in plain english, a gigantic literary fraud had to be perpetrated, and "holy scriptures" had to be concocted--and so, with the utmost hierarchical pomp, and days of penance and much lamentation over the long days of "sin" now ended, they were duly published. the "will of god," it appears, had long stood like a rock; the trouble was that mankind had neglected the "holy scriptures".... but the "will of god" had already been revealed to moses.... what happened? simply this: the priest had formulated, once and for all time and with the strictest meticulousness, what tithes were to be paid to him, from the largest to the smallest (--not forgetting the most appetizing cuts of meat, for the priest is a great consumer of beefsteaks); in brief, he let it be known just _what he wanted_, what "the will of god" was.... from this time forward things were so arranged that the priest became _indispensable everywhere_; at all the great natural events of life, at birth, at marriage, in sickness, at death, not to say at the "_sacrifice_" (that is, at meal-times), the holy parasite put in his appearance, and proceeded to _denaturize_ it--in his own phrase, to "sanctify" it.... for this should be noted: that every natural habit, every natural institution (the state, the administration of justice, marriage, the care of the sick and of the poor), everything demanded by the life-instinct, in short, everything that has any value _in itself_, is reduced to absolute worthlessness and even made the _reverse_ of valuable by the parasitism of priests (or, if you chose, by the "moral order of the world"). the fact requires a sanction--a power to _grant values_ becomes necessary, and the only way it can create such values is by denying nature.... the priest depreciates and desecrates nature: it is only at this price that he can exist at all.--disobedience to god, which actually means to the priest, to "the law," now gets the name of "sin"; the means prescribed for "reconciliation with god" are, of course, precisely the means which bring one most effectively under the thumb of the priest; he alone can "save".... psychologically considered, "sins" are indispensable to every society organized on an ecclesiastical basis; they are the only reliable weapons of power; the priest _lives_ upon sins; it is necessary to him that there be "sinning".... prime axiom: "god forgiveth him that repenteth"--in plain english, _him that submitteth to the priest_. 27. christianity sprang from a soil so corrupt that on it everything natural, every natural value, every _reality_ was opposed by the deepest instincts of the ruling class--it grew up as a sort of war to the death upon reality, and as such it has never been surpassed. the "holy people," who had adopted priestly values and priestly names for all things, and who, with a terrible logical consistency, had rejected everything of the earth as "unholy," "worldly," "sinful"--this people put its instinct into a final formula that was logical to the point of self-annihilation: as _christianity_ it actually denied even the last form of reality, the "holy people," the "chosen people," _jewish_ reality itself. the phenomenon is of the first order of importance: the small insurrectionary movement which took the name of jesus of nazareth is simply the jewish instinct _redivivus_--in other words, it is the priestly instinct come to such a pass that it can no longer endure the priest as a fact; it is the discovery of a state of existence even more fantastic than any before it, of a vision of life even more _unreal_ than that necessary to an ecclesiastical organization. christianity actually _denies_ the church.... i am unable to determine what was the target of the insurrection said to have been led (whether rightly or _wrongly_) by jesus, if it was not the jewish church--"church" being here used in exactly the same sense that the word has today. it was an insurrection against the "good and just," against the "prophets of israel," against the whole hierarchy of society--_not_ against corruption, but against caste, privilege, order, formalism. it was _unbelief_ in "superior men," a nay flung at everything that priests and theologians stood for. but the hierarchy that was called into question, if only for an instant, by this movement was the structure of piles which, above everything, was necessary to the safety of the jewish people in the midst of the "waters"--it represented their _last_ possibility of survival; it was the final _residuum_ of their independent political existence; an attack upon it was an attack upon the most profound national instinct, the most powerful national will to live, that has ever appeared on earth. this saintly anarchist, who aroused the people of the abyss, the outcasts and "sinners," the chandala of judaism, to rise in revolt against the established order of things--and in language which, if the gospels are to be credited, would get him sent to siberia today--this man was certainly a political criminal, at least in so far as it was possible to be one in so _absurdly unpolitical_ a community. this is what brought him to the cross: the proof thereof is to be found in the inscription that was put upon the cross. he died for his _own_ sins--there is not the slightest ground for believing, no matter how often it is asserted, that he died for the sins of others.-28. as to whether he himself was conscious of this contradiction--whether, in fact, this was the only contradiction he was cognizant of--that is quite another question. here, for the first time, i touch upon the problem of the _psychology of the saviour_.--i confess, to begin with, that there are very few books which offer me harder reading than the gospels. my difficulties are quite different from those which enabled the learned curiosity of the german mind to achieve one of its most unforgettable triumphs. it is a long while since i, like all other young scholars, enjoyed with all the sapient laboriousness of a fastidious philologist the work of the incomparable strauss.[5] at that time i was twenty years old: now i am too serious for that sort of thing. what do i care for the contradictions of "tradition"? how can any one call pious legends "traditions"? the histories of saints present the most dubious variety of literature in existence; to examine them by the scientific method, _in the entire absence of corroborative documents_, seems to me to condemn the whole inquiry from the start--it is simply learned idling.... [5] david friedrich strauss (1808-74), author of "das leben jesu" (1835-6), a very famous work in its day. nietzsche here refers to it. 29. what concerns _me_ is the psychological type of the saviour. this type might be depicted in the gospels, in however mutilated a form and however much overladen with extraneous characters--that is, in _spite_ of the gospels; just as the figure of francis of assisi shows itself in his legends in spite of his legends. it is _not_ a question of mere truthful evidence as to what he did, what he said and how he actually died; the question is, whether his type is still conceivable, whether it has been handed down to us.--all the attempts that i know of to read the _history_ of a "soul" in the gospels seem to me to reveal only a lamentable psychological levity. m. renan, that mountebank _in psychologicus_, has contributed the two most _unseemly_ notions to this business of explaining the type of jesus: the notion of the _genius_ and that of the _hero_ ("_héros_"). but if there is anything essentially unevangelical, it is surely the concept of the hero. what the gospels make instinctive is precisely the reverse of all heroic struggle, of all taste for conflict: the very incapacity for resistance is here converted into something moral: ("resist not evil!"--the most profound sentence in the gospels, perhaps the true key to them), to wit, the blessedness of peace, of gentleness, the _inability_ to be an enemy. what is the meaning of "glad tidings"?--the true life, the life eternal has been found--it is not merely promised, it is here, it is in _you_; it is the life that lies in love free from all retreats and exclusions, from all keeping of distances. every one is the child of god--jesus claims nothing for himself alone--as the child of god each man is the equal of every other man.... imagine making jesus a _hero_!--and what a tremendous misunderstanding appears in the word "genius"! our whole conception of the "spiritual," the whole conception of our civilization, could have had no meaning in the world that jesus lived in. in the strict sense of the physiologist, a quite different word ought to be used here.... we all know that there is a morbid sensibility of the tactile nerves which causes those suffering from it to recoil from every touch, and from every effort to grasp a solid object. brought to its logical conclusion, such a physiological _habitus_ becomes an instinctive hatred of all reality, a flight into the "intangible," into the "incomprehensible"; a distaste for all formulae, for all conceptions of time and space, for everything established--customs, institutions, the church--; a feeling of being at home in a world in which no sort of reality survives, a merely "inner" world, a "true" world, an "eternal" world.... "the kingdom of god is within _you_".... 30. _the instinctive hatred of reality_: the consequence of an extreme susceptibility to pain and irritation--so great that merely to be "touched" becomes unendurable, for every sensation is too profound. _the instinctive exclusion of all aversion, all hostility, all bounds and distances in feeling_: the consequence of an extreme susceptibility to pain and irritation--so great that it senses all resistance, all compulsion to resistance, as unbearable _anguish_ (--that is to say, as _harmful_, as _prohibited_ by the instinct of self-preservation), and regards blessedness (joy) as possible only when it is no longer necessary to offer resistance to anybody or anything, however evil or dangerous--love, as the only, as the _ultimate_ possibility of life.... these are the two _physiological realities_ upon and out of which the doctrine of salvation has sprung. i call them a sublime super-development of hedonism upon a thoroughly unsalubrious soil. what stands most closely related to them, though with a large admixture of greek vitality and nerve-force, is epicureanism, the theory of salvation of paganism. epicurus was a _typical décadent_: i was the first to recognize him.--the fear of pain, even of infinitely slight pain--the end of this _can_ be nothing save a _religion of love_.... 31. i have already given my answer to the problem. the prerequisite to it is the assumption that the type of the saviour has reached us only in a greatly distorted form. this distortion is very probable: there are many reasons why a type of that sort should not be handed down in a pure form, complete and free of additions. the milieu in which this strange figure moved must have left marks upon him, and more must have been imprinted by the history, the _destiny_, of the early christian communities; the latter indeed, must have embellished the type retrospectively with characters which can be understood only as serving the purposes of war and of propaganda. that strange and sickly world into which the gospels lead us--a world apparently out of a russian novel, in which the scum of society, nervous maladies and "childish" idiocy keep a tryst--must, in any case, have _coarsened_ the type: the first disciples, in particular, must have been forced to translate an existence visible only in symbols and incomprehensibilities into their own crudity, in order to understand it at all--in their sight the type could take on reality only after it had been recast in a familiar mould.... the prophet, the messiah, the future judge, the teacher of morals, the worker of wonders, john the baptist--all these merely presented chances to misunderstand it.... finally, let us not underrate the _proprium_ of all great, and especially all sectarian veneration: it tends to erase from the venerated objects all its original traits and idiosyncrasies, often so painfully strange--_it does not even see them_. it is greatly to be regretted that no dostoyevsky lived in the neighbourhood of this most interesting _décadent_--i mean some one who would have felt the poignant charm of such a compound of the sublime, the morbid and the childish. in the last analysis, the type, as a type of the _décadence_, may actually have been peculiarly complex and contradictory: such a possibility is not to be lost sight of. nevertheless, the probabilities seem to be against it, for in that case tradition would have been particularly accurate and objective, whereas we have reasons for assuming the contrary. meanwhile, there is a contradiction between the peaceful preacher of the mount, the sea-shore and the fields, who appears like a new buddha on a soil very unlike india's, and the aggressive fanatic, the mortal enemy of theologians and ecclesiastics, who stands glorified by renan's malice as "_le grand maître en ironie_." i myself haven't any doubt that the greater part of this venom (and no less of _esprit_) got itself into the concept of the master only as a result of the excited nature of christian propaganda: we all know the unscrupulousness of sectarians when they set out to turn their leader into an _apologia_ for themselves. when the early christians had need of an adroit, contentious, pugnacious and maliciously subtle theologian to tackle other theologians, they _created_ a "god" that met that need, just as they put into his mouth without hesitation certain ideas that were necessary to them but that were utterly at odds with the gospels--"the second coming," "the last judgment," all sorts of expectations and promises, current at the time.-32. i can only repeat that i set myself against all efforts to intrude the fanatic into the figure of the saviour: the very word _impérieux_, used by renan, is alone enough to _annul_ the type. what the "glad tidings" tell us is simply that there are no more contradictions; the kingdom of heaven belongs to _children_; the faith that is voiced here is no more an embattled faith--it is at hand, it has been from the beginning, it is a sort of recrudescent childishness of the spirit. the physiologists, at all events, are familiar with such a delayed and incomplete puberty in the living organism, the result of degeneration. a faith of this sort is not furious, it does not denounce, it does not defend itself: it does not come with "the sword"--it does not realize how it will one day set man against man. it does not manifest itself either by miracles, or by rewards and promises, or by "scriptures": it is itself, first and last, its own miracle, its own reward, its own promise, its own "kingdom of god." this faith does not formulate itself--it simply _lives_, and so guards itself against formulae. to be sure, the accident of environment, of educational background gives prominence to concepts of a certain sort: in primitive christianity one finds _only_ concepts of a judaeo-semitic character (--that of eating and drinking at the last supper belongs to this category--an idea which, like everything else jewish, has been badly mauled by the church). but let us be careful not to see in all this anything more than symbolical language, semantics[6] an opportunity to speak in parables. it is only on the theory that no work is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. set down among hindus he would have made use of the concepts of sankhya,[7] and among chinese he would have employed those of lao-tse[8]--and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.--with a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call jesus a "free spirit"[9]--he cares nothing for what is established: the word _killeth_,[10] whatever is established _killeth_. the idea of "life" as an _experience_, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. he speaks only of inner things: "life" or "truth" or "light" is his word for the innermost--in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory.--here it is of paramount importance to be led into no error by the temptations lying in christian, or rather _ecclesiastical_ prejudices: such a symbolism _par excellence_ stands outside all religion, all notions of worship, all history, all natural science, all worldly experience, all knowledge, all politics, all psychology, all books, all art--his "wisdom" is precisely a _pure ignorance_[11] of all such things. he has never heard of _culture_; he doesn't have to make war on it--he doesn't even deny it.... the same thing may be said of the _state_, of the whole bourgeoise social order, of labour, of war--he has no ground for denying "the world," for he knows nothing of the ecclesiastical concept of "the world".... _denial_ is precisely the thing that is impossible to him.--in the same way he lacks argumentative capacity, and has no belief that an article of faith, a "truth," may be established by proofs (--_his_ proofs are inner "lights," subjective sensations of happiness and self-approval, simple "proofs of power"--). such a doctrine _cannot_ contradict: it doesn't know that other doctrines exist, or _can_ exist, and is wholly incapable of imagining anything opposed to it.... if anything of the sort is ever encountered, it laments the "blindness" with sincere sympathy--for it alone has "light"--but it does not offer objections.... [6] the word _semiotik_ is in the text, but it is probable that _semantik_ is what nietzsche had in mind. [7] one of the six great systems of hindu philosophy. [8] the reputed founder of taoism. [9] nietzsche's name for one accepting his own philosophy. [10] that is, the strict letter of the law--the chief target of jesus's early preaching. [11] a reference to the "pure ignorance" (_reine thorheit_) of parsifal. 33. in the whole psychology of the "gospels" the concepts of guilt and punishment are lacking, and so is that of reward. "sin," which means anything that puts a distance between god and man, is abolished--_this is precisely the "glad tidings."_ eternal bliss is not merely promised, nor is it bound up with conditions: it is conceived as the _only_ reality--what remains consists merely of signs useful in speaking of it. the _results_ of such a point of view project themselves into a new _way of life_, the special evangelical way of life. it is not a "belief" that marks off the christian; he is distinguished by a different mode of action; he acts _differently_. he offers no resistance, either by word or in his heart, to those who stand against him. he draws no distinction between strangers and countrymen, jews and gentiles ("neighbour," of course, means fellow-believer, jew). he is angry with no one, and he despises no one. he neither appeals to the courts of justice nor heeds their mandates ("swear not at all").[12] he never under any circumstances divorces his wife, even when he has proofs of her infidelity.--and under all of this is one principle; all of it arises from one instinct.-[12] matthew v, 34. the life of the saviour was simply a carrying out of this way of life--and so was his death.... he no longer needed any formula or ritual in his relations with god--not even prayer. he had rejected the whole of the jewish doctrine of repentance and atonement; he _knew_ that it was only by a _way_ of life that one could feel one's self "divine," "blessed," "evangelical," a "child of god." _not_ by "repentance," _not_ by "prayer and forgiveness" is the way to god: _only the gospel way_ leads to god--it is _itself_ "god!"--what the gospels _abolished_ was the judaism in the concepts of "sin," "forgiveness of sin," "faith," "salvation through faith"--the whole _ecclesiastical_ dogma of the jews was denied by the "glad tidings." the deep instinct which prompts the christian how to _live_ so that he will feel that he is "in heaven" and is "immortal," despite many reasons for feeling that he is _not_ "in heaven": this is the only psychological reality in "salvation."--a new way of life, _not_ a new faith.... 34. if i understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this: that he regarded only _subjective_ realities as realities, as "truths"--that he saw everything else, everything natural, temporal, spatial and historical, merely as signs, as materials for parables. the concept of "the son of god" does not connote a concrete person in history, an isolated and definite individual, but an "eternal" fact, a psychological symbol set free from the concept of time. the same thing is true, and in the highest sense, of the _god_ of this typical symbolist, of the "kingdom of god," and of the "sonship of god." nothing could be more un-christian than the _crude ecclesiastical_ notions of god as a _person_, of a "kingdom of god" that is to come, of a "kingdom of heaven" beyond, and of a "son of god" as the _second person_ of the trinity. all this--if i may be forgiven the phrase--is like thrusting one's fist into the eye (and what an eye!) of the gospels: a disrespect for symbols amounting to _world-historical cynicism_.... but it is nevertheless obvious enough what is meant by the symbols "father" and "son"--not, of course, to every one--: the word "son" expresses _entrance_ into the feeling that there is a general transformation of all things (beatitude), and "father" expresses _that feeling itself_--the sensation of eternity and of perfection.--i am ashamed to remind you of what the church has made of this symbolism: has it not set an amphitryon story[13] at the threshold of the christian "faith"? and a dogma of "immaculate conception" for good measure?... _and thereby it has robbed conception of its immaculateness_-[13] amphitryon was the son of alcaeus, king of tiryns. his wife was alcmene. during his absence she was visited by zeus, and bore heracles. the "kingdom of heaven" is a state of the heart--not something to come "beyond the world" or "after death." the whole idea of natural death is _absent_ from the gospels: death is not a bridge, not a passing; it is absent because it belongs to a quite different, a merely apparent world, useful only as a symbol. the "hour of death" is _not_ a christian idea--"hours," time, the physical life and its crises have no existence for the bearer of "glad tidings."... the "kingdom of god" is not something that men wait for: it had no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it is not going to come at a "millennium"--it is an experience of the heart, it is everywhere and it is nowhere.... 35. this "bearer of glad tidings" died as he lived and _taught_--_not_ to "save mankind," but to show mankind how to live. it was a _way of life_ that he bequeathed to man: his demeanour before the judges, before the officers, before his accusers--his demeanour on the _cross_. he does not resist; he does not defend his rights; he makes no effort to ward off the most extreme penalty--more, _he invites it_.... and he prays, suffers and loves _with_ those, _in_ those, who do him evil.... _not_ to defend one's self, _not_ to show anger, _not_ to lay blames.... on the contrary, to submit even to the evil one--to _love_ him.... 36. --we free spirits--we are the first to have the necessary prerequisite to understanding what nineteen centuries have misunderstood--that instinct and passion for integrity which makes war upon the "holy lie" even more than upon all other lies.... mankind was unspeakably far from our benevolent and cautious neutrality, from that discipline of the spirit which alone makes possible the solution of such strange and subtle things: what men always sought, with shameless egoism, was their _own_ advantage therein; they created the _church_ out of denial of the gospels.... whoever sought for signs of an ironical divinity's hand in the great drama of existence would find no small indication thereof in the _stupendous question-mark_ that is called christianity. that mankind should be on its knees before the very antithesis of what was the origin, the meaning and the _law_ of the gospels--that in the concept of the "church" the very things should be pronounced holy that the "bearer of glad tidings" regards as _beneath_ him and _behind_ him--it would be impossible to surpass this as a grand example of _world-historical irony_-37. --our age is proud of its historical sense: how, then, could it delude itself into believing that the _crude fable of the wonder-worker and saviour_ constituted the beginnings of christianity--and that everything spiritual and symbolical in it only came later? quite to the contrary, the whole history of christianity--from the death on the cross onward--is the history of a progressively clumsier misunderstanding of an _original_ symbolism. with every extension of christianity among larger and ruder masses, even less capable of grasping the principles that gave birth to it, the need arose to make it more and more _vulgar_ and _barbarous_--it absorbed the teachings and rites of all the _subterranean_ cults of the _imperium romanum_, and the absurdities engendered by all sorts of sickly reasoning. it was the fate of christianity that its faith had to become as sickly, as low and as vulgar as the needs were sickly, low and vulgar to which it had to administer. a _sickly barbarism_ finally lifts itself to power as the church--the church, that incarnation of deadly hostility to all honesty, to all loftiness of soul, to all discipline of the spirit, to all spontaneous and kindly humanity.--_christian_ values--_noble_ values: it is only we, we _free_ spirits, who have re-established this greatest of all antitheses in values!... 38. --i cannot, at this place, avoid a sigh. there are days when i am visited by a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy--_contempt of man_. let me leave no doubt as to _what_ i despise, _whom_ i despise: it is the man of today, the man with whom i am unhappily contemporaneous. the man of today--i am suffocated by his foul breath!... toward the past, like all who understand, i am full of tolerance, which is to say, _generous_ self-control: with gloomy caution i pass through whole millenniums of this madhouse of a world, call it "christianity," "christian faith" or the "christian church," as you will--i take care not to hold mankind responsible for its lunacies. but my feeling changes and breaks out irresistibly the moment i enter modern times, _our_ times. our age _knows better_.... what was formerly merely sickly now becomes indecent--it is indecent to be a christian today. _and here my disgust begins._--i look about me: not a word survives of what was once called "truth"; we can no longer bear to hear a priest pronounce the word. even a man who makes the most modest pretensions to integrity _must_ know that a theologian, a priest, a pope of today not only errs when he speaks, but actually _lies_--and that he no longer escapes blame for his lie through "innocence" or "ignorance." the priest knows, as every one knows, that there is no longer any "god," or any "sinner," or any "saviour"--that "free will" and the "moral order of the world" are lies--: serious reflection, the profound self-conquest of the spirit, _allow_ no man to pretend that he does _not_ know it.... _all_ the ideas of the church are now recognized for what they are--as the worst counterfeits in existence, invented to debase nature and all natural values; the priest himself is seen as he actually is--as the most dangerous form of parasite, as the venomous spider of creation.... we know, our _conscience_ now knows--just _what_ the real value of all those sinister inventions of priest and church has been and _what ends they have served_, with their debasement of humanity to a state of self-pollution, the very sight of which excites loathing,--the concepts "the other world," "the last judgment," "the immortality of the soul," the "soul" itself: they are all merely so many instruments of torture, systems of cruelty, whereby the priest becomes master and remains master.... every one knows this, _but nevertheless things remain as before_. what has become of the last trace of decent feeling, of self-respect, when our statesmen, otherwise an unconventional class of men and thoroughly anti-christian in their acts, now call themselves christians and go to the communion-table?... a prince at the head of his armies, magnificent as the expression of the egoism and arrogance of his people--and yet acknowledging, _without_ any shame, that he is a christian!... whom, then, does christianity deny? _what_ does it call "the world"? to be a _soldier_, to be a judge, to be a patriot; to defend one's self; to be careful of one's honour; to desire one's own advantage; to be _proud_ ... every act of everyday, every instinct, every valuation that shows itself in a _deed_, is now anti-christian: what a _monster of falsehood_ the modern man must be to call himself nevertheless, and _without_ shame, a christian!-39. --i shall go back a bit, and tell you the _authentic_ history of christianity.--the very word "christianity" is a misunderstanding--at bottom there was only one christian, and he died on the cross. the "gospels" _died_ on the cross. what, from that moment onward, was called the "gospels" was the very reverse of what _he_ had lived: "bad tidings," a _dysangelium_.[14] it is an error amounting to nonsensicality to see in "faith," and particularly in faith in salvation through christ, the distinguishing mark of the christian: only the christian _way of life_, the life _lived_ by him who died on the cross, is christian.... to this day _such_ a life is still possible, and for _certain_ men even necessary: genuine, primitive christianity will remain possible in all ages.... _not_ faith, but acts; above all, an _avoidance_ of acts, a different _state of being_.... states of consciousness, faith of a sort, the acceptance, for example, of anything as true--as every psychologist knows, the value of these things is perfectly indifferent and fifth-rate compared to that of the instincts: strictly speaking, the whole concept of intellectual causality is false. to reduce being a christian, the state of christianity, to an acceptance of truth, to a mere phenomenon of consciousness, is to formulate the negation of christianity. _in fact, there are no christians._ the "christian"--he who for two thousand years has passed as a christian--is simply a psychological self-delusion. closely examined, it appears that, _despite_ all his "faith," he has been ruled _only_ by his instincts--and _what instincts_!--in all ages--for example, in the case of luther--"faith" has been no more than a cloak, a pretense, a _curtain_ behind which the instincts have played their game--a shrewd _blindness_ to the domination of _certain_ of the instincts.... i have already called "faith" the specially christian form of _shrewdness_--people always _talk_ of their "faith" and _act_ according to their instincts.... in the world of ideas of the christian there is nothing that so much as touches reality: on the contrary, one recognizes an instinctive _hatred_ of reality as the motive power, the only motive power at the bottom of christianity. what follows therefrom? that even here, in _psychologicis_, there is a radical error, which is to say one conditioning fundamentals, which is to say, one in _substance_. take away one idea and put a genuine reality in its place--and the whole of christianity crumbles to nothingness!--viewed calmly, this strangest of all phenomena, a religion not only depending on errors, but inventive and ingenious _only_ in devising injurious errors, poisonous to life and to the heart--this remains a _spectacle for the gods_--for those gods who are also philosophers, and whom i have encountered, for example, in the celebrated dialogues at naxos. at the moment when their _disgust_ leaves them (--and us!) they will be thankful for the spectacle afforded by the christians: perhaps because of _this_ curious exhibition alone the wretched little planet called the earth deserves a glance from omnipotence, a show of divine interest.... therefore, let us not underestimate the christians: the christian, false _to the point of innocence_, is far above the ape--in its application to the christians a well-known theory of descent becomes a mere piece of politeness.... [14] so in the text. one of nietzsche's numerous coinages, obviously suggested by _evangelium_, the german for _gospel_. 40. --the fate of the gospels was decided by death--it hung on the "cross."... it was only death, that unexpected and shameful death; it was only the cross, which was usually reserved for the canaille only--it was only this appalling paradox which brought the disciples face to face with the real riddle: "_who was it? what was it_?"--the feeling of dismay, of profound affront and injury; the suspicion that such a death might involve a _refutation_ of their cause; the terrible question, "why just in this way?"--this state of mind is only too easy to understand. here everything _must_ be accounted for as necessary; everything must have a meaning, a reason, the highest sort of reason; the love of a disciple excludes all chance. only then did the chasm of doubt yawn: "_who_ put him to death? who was his natural enemy?"--this question flashed like a lightning-stroke. answer: dominant judaism, its ruling class. from that moment, one found one's self in revolt _against_ the established order, and began to understand jesus as _in revolt against the established order_. until then this militant, this nay-saying, nay-doing element in his character had been lacking; what is more, he had appeared to present its opposite. obviously, the little community had _not_ understood what was precisely the most important thing of all: the example offered by this way of dying, the freedom from and superiority to every feeling of _ressentiment_--a plain indication of how little he was understood at all! all that jesus could hope to accomplish by his death, in itself, was to offer the strongest possible proof, or _example_, of his teachings in the most public manner.... but his disciples were very far from _forgiving_ his death--though to have done so would have accorded with the gospels in the highest degree; and neither were they prepared to _offer_ themselves, with gentle and serene calmness of heart, for a similar death.... on the contrary, it was precisely the most unevangelical of feelings, _revenge_, that now possessed them. it seemed impossible that the cause should perish with his death: "recompense" and "judgment" became necessary (--yet what could be less evangelical than "recompense," "punishment," and "sitting in judgment"!). once more the popular belief in the coming of a messiah appeared in the foreground; attention was rivetted upon an historical moment: the "kingdom of god" is to come, with judgment upon his enemies.... but in all this there was a wholesale misunderstanding: imagine the "kingdom of god" as a last act, as a mere promise! the gospels had been, in fact, the incarnation, the fulfilment, the _realization_ of this "kingdom of god." it was only now that all the familiar contempt for and bitterness against pharisees and theologians began to appear in the character of the master--he was thereby _turned_ into a pharisee and theologian himself! on the other hand, the savage veneration of these completely unbalanced souls could no longer endure the gospel doctrine, taught by jesus, of the equal right of all men to be children of god: their revenge took the form of _elevating_ jesus in an extravagant fashion, and thus separating him from themselves: just as, in earlier times, the jews, to revenge themselves upon their enemies, separated themselves from their god, and placed him on a great height. the one god and the only son of god: both were products of _ressentiment_.... 41. --and from that time onward an absurd problem offered itself: "how _could_ god allow it!" to which the deranged reason of the little community formulated an answer that was terrifying in its absurdity: god gave his son as a _sacrifice_ for the forgiveness of sins. at once there was an end of the gospels! sacrifice for sin, and in its most obnoxious and barbarous form: sacrifice of the _innocent_ for the sins of the guilty! what appalling paganism!--jesus himself had done away with the very concept of "guilt," he denied that there was any gulf fixed between god and man; he _lived_ this unity between god and man, and that was precisely _his_ "glad tidings".... and _not_ as a mere privilege!--from this time forward the type of the saviour was corrupted, bit by bit, by the doctrine of judgment and of the second coming, the doctrine of death as a sacrifice, the doctrine of the _resurrection_, by means of which the entire concept of "blessedness," the whole and only reality of the gospels, is juggled away--in favour of a state of existence _after_ death!... st. paul, with that rabbinical impudence which shows itself in all his doings, gave a logical quality to that conception, that _indecent_ conception, in this way: "_if_ christ did not rise from the dead, then all our faith is in vain!"--and at once there sprang from the gospels the most contemptible of all unfulfillable promises, the _shameless_ doctrine of personal immortality.... paul even preached it as a _reward_.... 42. one now begins to see just _what_ it was that came to an end with the death on the cross: a new and thoroughly original effort to found a buddhistic peace movement, and so establish _happiness on earth_--real, _not_ merely promised. for this remains--as i have already pointed out--the essential difference between the two religions of _décadence_: buddhism promises nothing, but actually fulfils; christianity promises everything, but _fulfils nothing_.--hard upon the heels of the "glad tidings" came the worst imaginable: those of paul. in paul is incarnated the very opposite of the "bearer of glad tidings"; he represents the genius for hatred, the vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred. _what_, indeed, has not this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred! above all, the saviour: he nailed him to _his own_ cross. the life, the example, the teaching, the death of christ, the meaning and the law of the whole gospels--nothing was left of all this after that counterfeiter in hatred had reduced it to his uses. surely _not_ reality; surely _not_ historical truth!... once more the priestly instinct of the jew perpetrated the same old master crime against history--he simply struck out the yesterday and the day before yesterday of christianity, and _invented his own history of christian beginnings_. going further, he treated the history of israel to another falsification, so that it became a mere prologue to _his_ achievement: all the prophets, it now appeared, had referred to _his_ "saviour."... later on the church even falsified the history of man in order to make it a prologue to christianity.... the figure of the saviour, his teaching, his way of life, his death, the meaning of his death, even the consequences of his death--nothing remained untouched, nothing remained in even remote contact with reality. paul simply shifted the centre of gravity of that whole life to a place _behind_ this existence--in the _lie_ of the "risen" jesus. at bottom, he had no use for the life of the saviour--what he needed was the death on the cross, _and_ something more. to see anything honest in such a man as paul, whose home was at the centre of the stoical enlightenment, when he converts an hallucination into a _proof_ of the resurrection of the saviour, or even to believe his tale that he suffered from this hallucination himself--this would be a genuine _niaiserie_ in a psychologist. paul willed the end; _therefore_ he also willed the means.... what he himself didn't believe was swallowed readily enough by the idiots among whom he spread _his_ teaching.--what _he_ wanted was power; in paul the priest once more reached out for power--he had use only for such concepts, teachings and symbols as served the purpose of tyrannizing over the masses and organizing mobs. _what_ was the only part of christianity that mohammed borrowed later on? paul's invention, his device for establishing priestly tyranny and organizing the mob: the belief in the immortality of the soul--_that is to say, the doctrine of "judgment"_.... 43. when the centre of gravity of life is placed, _not_ in life itself, but in "the beyond"--in _nothingness_--then one has taken away its centre of gravity altogether. the vast lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all natural instinct--henceforth, everything in the instincts that is beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards the future is a cause of suspicion. so to live that life no longer has any meaning: _this_ is now the "meaning" of life.... why be public-spirited? why take any pride in descent and forefathers? why labour together, trust one another, or concern one's self about the common welfare, and try to serve it?... merely so many "temptations," so many strayings from the "straight path."--"_one_ thing only is necessary".... that every man, because he has an "immortal soul," is as good as every other man; that in an infinite universe of things the "salvation" of _every_ individual may lay claim to eternal importance; that insignificant bigots and the three-fourths insane may assume that the laws of nature are constantly _suspended_ in their behalf--it is impossible to lavish too much contempt upon such a magnification of every sort of selfishness to infinity, to _insolence_. and yet christianity has to thank precisely _this_ miserable flattery of personal vanity for its _triumph_--it was thus that it lured all the botched, the dissatisfied, the fallen upon evil days, the whole refuse and off-scouring of humanity to its side. the "salvation of the soul"--in plain english: "the world revolves around _me_."... the poisonous doctrine, "_equal_ rights for all," has been propagated as a christian principle: out of the secret nooks and crannies of bad instinct christianity has waged a deadly war upon all feelings of reverence and distance between man and man, which is to say, upon the first _prerequisite_ to every step upward, to every development of civilization--out of the _ressentiment_ of the masses it has forged its chief weapons against _us_, against everything noble, joyous and high-spirited on earth, against our happiness on earth.... to allow "immortality" to every peter and paul was the greatest, the most vicious outrage upon _noble_ humanity ever perpetrated.--_and_ let us not underestimate the fatal influence that christianity has had, even upon politics! nowadays no one has courage any more for special rights, for the right of dominion, for feelings of honourable pride in himself and his equals--for the _pathos of distance_.... our politics is sick with this lack of courage!--the aristocratic attitude of mind has been undermined by the lie of the equality of souls; and if belief in the "privileges of the majority" makes and _will continue to make_ revolutions--it is christianity, let us not doubt, and _christian_ valuations, which convert every revolution into a carnival of blood and crime! christianity is a revolt of all creatures that creep on the ground against everything that is _lofty_: the gospel of the "lowly" _lowers_.... 44. --the gospels are invaluable as evidence of the corruption that was already persistent _within_ the primitive community. that which paul, with the cynical logic of a rabbi, later developed to a conclusion was at bottom merely a process of decay that had begun with the death of the saviour.--these gospels cannot be read too carefully; difficulties lurk behind every word. i confess--i hope it will not be held against me--that it is precisely for this reason that they offer first-rate joy to a psychologist--as the _opposite_ of all merely naïve corruption, as refinement _par excellence_, as an artistic triumph in psychological corruption. the gospels, in fact, stand alone. the bible as a whole is not to be compared to them. here we are among jews: this is the _first_ thing to be borne in mind if we are not to lose the thread of the matter. this positive genius for conjuring up a delusion of personal "holiness" unmatched anywhere else, either in books or by men; this elevation of fraud in word and attitude to the level of an _art_--all this is not an accident due to the chance talents of an individual, or to any violation of nature. the thing responsible is _race_. the whole of judaism appears in christianity as the art of concocting holy lies, and there, after many centuries of earnest jewish training and hard practice of jewish technic, the business comes to the stage of mastery. the christian, that _ultima ratio_ of lying, is the jew all over again--he is _threefold_ the jew.... the underlying will to make use only of such concepts, symbols and attitudes as fit into priestly practice, the instinctive repudiation of every _other_ mode of thought, and every other method of estimating values and utilities--this is not only tradition, it is _inheritance_: only as an inheritance is it able to operate with the force of nature. the whole of mankind, even the best minds of the best ages (with one exception, perhaps hardly human--), have permitted themselves to be deceived. the gospels have been read as a _book of innocence_ ... surely no small indication of the high skill with which the trick has been done.--of course, if we could actually _see_ these astounding bigots and bogus saints, even if only for an instant, the farce would come to an end,--and it is precisely because _i_ cannot read a word of theirs without seeing their attitudinizing that _i have made an end of them_.... i simply cannot endure the way they have of rolling up their eyes.--for the majority, happily enough, books are mere _literature_.--let us not be led astray: they say "judge not," and yet they condemn to hell whoever stands in their way. in letting god sit in judgment they judge themselves; in glorifying god they glorify themselves; in _demanding_ that every one show the virtues which they themselves happen to be capable of--still more, which they _must_ have in order to remain on top--they assume the grand air of men struggling for virtue, of men engaging in a war that virtue may prevail. "we live, we die, we sacrifice ourselves _for the good_" (--"the truth," "the light," "the kingdom of god"): in point of fact, they simply do what they cannot help doing. forced, like hypocrites, to be sneaky, to hide in corners, to slink along in the shadows, they convert their necessity into a _duty_: it is on grounds of duty that they account for their lives of humility, and that humility becomes merely one more proof of their piety.... ah, that humble, chaste, charitable brand of fraud! "virtue itself shall bear witness for us."... one may read the gospels as books of _moral_ seduction: these petty folks fasten themselves to morality--they know the uses of morality! morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind _by the nose_!--the fact is that the conscious conceit of the chosen here disguises itself as modesty: it is in this way that _they_, the "community," the "good and just," range themselves, once and for always, on one side, the side of "the truth"--and the rest of mankind, "the world," on the other.... in _that_ we observe the most fatal sort of megalomania that the earth has ever seen: little abortions of bigots and liars began to claim exclusive rights in the concepts of "god," "the truth," "the light," "the spirit," "love," "wisdom" and "life," as if these things were synonyms of themselves and thereby they sought to fence themselves off from the "world"; little super-jews, ripe for some sort of madhouse, turned values upside down in order to meet _their_ notions, just as if the christian were the meaning, the salt, the standard and even the _last judgment_ of all the rest.... the whole disaster was only made possible by the fact that there already existed in the world a similar megalomania, allied to this one in race, to wit, the _jewish_: once a chasm began to yawn between jews and judaeo-christians, the latter had no choice but to employ the self-preservative measures that the jewish instinct had devised, even _against_ the jews themselves, whereas the jews had employed them only against non-jews. the christian is simply a jew of the "reformed" confession.-45. --i offer a few examples of the sort of thing these petty people have got into their heads--what they have _put into the mouth_ of the master: the unalloyed creed of "beautiful souls."-"and whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear you, when ye depart thence, shake off the dust under your feet for a testimony against them. verily i say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for sodom and gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city" (mark vi, 11)--how _evangelical_!... "and whosoever shall offend one of _these_ little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea" (mark ix, 42).--how _evangelical_!... "and if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of god with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire; where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched." (mark ix, 47.[15])--it is not exactly the eye that is meant.... [15] to which, without mentioning it, nietzsche adds verse 48. "verily i say unto you, that there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of god come with power." (mark ix, 1.)--well _lied_, lion![16]... [16] a paraphrase of demetrius' "well roar'd, lion!" in act v, scene 1 of "a midsummer night's dream." the lion, of course, is the familiar christian symbol for mark. "whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. _for_..." (_note of a psychologist._ christian morality is refuted by its _fors_: its reasons are against it,--this makes it christian.) mark viii, 34.-"judge not, that ye be not judged. with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again." (matthew vii, 1.[17])--what a notion of justice, of a "just" judge!... [17] nietzsche also quotes part of verse 2. "for if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? and if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more _than others_? do not even the publicans so?" (matthew v, 46.[18])--principle of "christian love": it insists upon being well _paid_ in the end.... [18] the quotation also includes verse 47. "but if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your father forgive your trespasses." (matthew vi, 15.)--very compromising for the said "father."... "but seek ye first the kingdom of god, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you." (matthew vi, 33.)--all these things: namely, food, clothing, all the necessities of life. an _error_, to put it mildly.... a bit before this god appears as a tailor, at least in certain cases.... "rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward _is_ great in heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers unto the prophets." (luke vi, 23.)--_impudent_ rabble! it compares itself to the prophets.... "know ye not that ye are the temple of god, and _that_ the spirit of god dwelleth in you? if any man defile the temple of god, _him shall god destroy_; for the temple of god is holy, _which temple ye are_." (paul, 1 corinthians iii, 16.[19])--for that sort of thing one cannot have enough contempt.... [19] and 17. "do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world? and if the world shall be judged by you, are ye unworthy to judge the smallest matters?" (paul, 1 corinthians vi, 2.)--unfortunately, not merely the speech of a lunatic.... this _frightful impostor_ then proceeds: "know ye not that we shall judge angels? how much more things that pertain to this life?"... "hath not god made foolish the wisdom of this world? for after that in the wisdom of god the world by wisdom knew not god, it pleased god by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.... not many wise men after the flesh, not men mighty, not many noble _are called_: but god hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and god hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath god chosen, _yea_, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: that no flesh should glory in his presence." (paul, 1 corinthians i, 20ff.[20])--in order to _understand_ this passage, a first-rate example of the psychology underlying every chandala-morality, one should read the first part of my "genealogy of morals": there, for the first time, the antagonism between a _noble_ morality and a morality born of _ressentiment_ and impotent vengefulness is exhibited. paul was the greatest of all apostles of revenge.... [20] verses 20, 21, 26, 27, 28, 29. 46. --_what follows, then?_ that one had better put on gloves before reading the new testament. the presence of so much filth makes it very advisable. one would as little choose "early christians" for companions as polish jews: not that one need seek out an objection to them.... neither has a pleasant smell.--i have searched the new testament in vain for a single sympathetic touch; nothing is there that is free, kindly, open-hearted or upright. in it humanity does not even make the first step upward--the instinct for _cleanliness_ is lacking.... only _evil_ instincts are there, and there is not even the courage of these evil instincts. it is all cowardice; it is all a shutting of the eyes, a self-deception. every other book becomes clean, once one has read the new testament: for example, immediately after reading paul i took up with delight that most charming and wanton of scoffers, petronius, of whom one may say what domenico boccaccio wrote of cæsar borgia to the duke of parma: "_è tutto festo_"--immortally healthy, immortally cheerful and sound.... these petty bigots make a capital miscalculation. they attack, but everything they attack is thereby _distinguished_. whoever is attacked by an "early christian" is surely _not_ befouled.... on the contrary, it is an honour to have an "early christian" as an opponent. one cannot read the new testament without acquired admiration for whatever it abuses--not to speak of the "wisdom of this world," which an impudent wind-bag tries to dispose of "by the foolishness of preaching."... even the scribes and pharisees are benefitted by such opposition: they must certainly have been worth something to have been hated in such an indecent manner. hypocrisy--as if this were a charge that the "early christians" _dared_ to make!--after all, they were the _privileged_, and that was enough: the hatred of the chandala needed no other excuse. the "early christian"--and also, i fear, the "last christian," _whom i may perhaps live to see_--is a rebel against all privilege by profound instinct--he lives and makes war for ever for "equal rights."... strictly speaking, he has no alternative. when a man proposes to represent, in his own person, the "chosen of god"--or to be a "temple of god," or a "judge of the angels"--then every _other_ criterion, whether based upon honesty, upon intellect, upon manliness and pride, or upon beauty and freedom of the heart, becomes simply "worldly"--_evil in itself_.... moral: every word that comes from the lips of an "early christian" is a lie, and his every act is instinctively dishonest--all his values, all his aims are noxious, but _whoever_ he hates, _whatever_ he hates, has real _value_.... the christian, and particularly the christian priest, is thus a _criterion of values_. --must i add that, in the whole new testament, there appears but a _solitary_ figure worthy of honour? pilate, the roman viceroy. to regard a jewish imbroglio _seriously_--that was quite beyond him. one jew more or less--what did it matter?... the noble scorn of a roman, before whom the word "truth" was shamelessly mishandled, enriched the new testament with the only saying _that has any value_--and that is at once its criticism and its _destruction_: "what is truth?..." 47. --the thing that sets us apart is not that we are unable to find god, either in history, or in nature, or behind nature--but that we regard what has been honoured as god, not as "divine," but as pitiable, as absurd, as injurious; not as a mere error, but as a _crime against life_.... we deny that god is god.... if any one were to _show_ us this christian god, we'd be still less inclined to believe in him.--in a formula: _deus, qualem paulus creavit, dei negatio_.--such a religion as christianity, which does not touch reality at a single point and which goes to pieces the moment reality asserts its rights at any point, must be inevitably the deadly enemy of the "wisdom of this world," which is to say, of _science_--and it will give the name of good to whatever means serve to poison, calumniate and _cry down_ all intellectual discipline, all lucidity and strictness in matters of intellectual conscience, and all noble coolness and freedom of the mind. "faith," as an imperative, vetoes science--_in praxi_, lying at any price.... paul _well knew_ that lying--that "faith"--was necessary; later on the church borrowed the fact from paul.--the god that paul invented for himself, a god who "reduced to absurdity" "the wisdom of this world" (especially the two great enemies of superstition, philology and medicine), is in truth only an indication of paul's resolute _determination_ to accomplish that very thing himself: to give one's own will the name of god, _thora_--that is essentially jewish. paul _wants_ to dispose of the "wisdom of this world": his enemies are the _good_ philologians and physicians of the alexandrine school--on them he makes his war. as a matter of fact no man can be a _philologian_ or a physician without being also _antichrist_. that is to say, as a philologian a man sees _behind_ the "holy books," and as a physician he sees _behind_ the physiological degeneration of the typical christian. the physician says "incurable"; the philologian says "fraud."... 48. --has any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at the beginning of the bible--of god's mortal terror of _science_?... no one, in fact, has understood it. this priest-book _par excellence_ opens, as is fitting, with the great inner difficulty of the priest: _he_ faces only one great danger; _ergo_, "god" faces only one great danger.-the old god, wholly "spirit," wholly the high-priest, wholly perfect, is promenading his garden: he is bored and trying to kill time. against boredom even gods struggle in vain.[21] what does he do? he creates man--man is entertaining.... but then he notices that man is also bored. god's pity for the only form of distress that invades all paradises knows no bounds: so he forthwith creates other animals. god's first mistake: to man these other animals were not entertaining--he sought dominion over them; he did not want to be an "animal" himself.--so god created woman. in the act he brought boredom to an end--and also many other things! woman was the _second_ mistake of god.--"woman, at bottom, is a serpent, heva"--every priest knows that; "from woman comes every evil in the world"--every priest knows that, too. _ergo_, she is also to blame for _science_.... it was through woman that man learned to taste of the tree of knowledge.--what happened? the old god was seized by mortal terror. man himself had been his _greatest_ blunder; he had created a rival to himself; science makes men _godlike_--it is all up with priests and gods when man becomes scientific!--_moral_: science is the forbidden _per se_; it alone is forbidden. science is the _first_ of sins, the germ of all sins, the _original_ sin. _this is all there is of morality._--"thou shall _not_ know":--the rest follows from that.--god's mortal terror, however, did not hinder him from being shrewd. how is one to _protect_ one's self against science? for a long while this was the capital problem. answer: out of paradise with man! happiness, leisure, foster thought--and all thoughts are bad thoughts!--man _must_ not think.--and so the priest invents distress, death, the mortal dangers of childbirth, all sorts of misery, old age, decrepitude, above all, _sickness_--nothing but devices for making war on science! the troubles of man don't _allow_ him to think.... nevertheless--how terrible!--, the edifice of knowledge begins to tower aloft, invading heaven, shadowing the gods--what is to be done?--the old god invents _war_; he separates the peoples; he makes men destroy one another (--the priests have always had need of war....). war--among other things, a great disturber of science!--incredible! knowledge, _deliverance from the priests_, prospers in spite of war.--so the old god comes to his final resolution: "man has become scientific--_there is no help for it: he must be drowned!_"... [21] a paraphrase of schiller's "against stupidity even gods struggle in vain." 49. --i have been understood. at the opening of the bible there is the _whole_ psychology of the priest.--the priest knows of only one great danger: that is science--the sound comprehension of cause and effect. but science flourishes, on the whole, only under favourable conditions--a man must have time, he must have an _overflowing_ intellect, in order to "know."... "_therefore_, man must be made unhappy,"--this has been, in all ages, the logic of the priest.--it is easy to see just _what_, by this logic, was the first thing to come into the world:--"_sin_."... the concept of guilt and punishment, the whole "moral order of the world," was set up _against_ science--_against_ the deliverance of man from priests.... man must _not_ look outward; he must look inward. he must _not_ look at things shrewdly and cautiously, to learn about them; he must not look at all; he must _suffer_.... and he must suffer so much that he is always in need of the priest.--away with physicians! _what is needed is a saviour._--the concept of guilt and punishment, including the doctrines of "grace," of "salvation," of "forgiveness"--_lies_ through and through, and absolutely without psychological reality--were devised to destroy man's _sense of causality_: they are an attack upon the concept of cause and effect!--and _not_ an attack with the fist, with the knife, with honesty in hate and love! on the contrary, one inspired by the most cowardly, the most crafty, the most ignoble of instincts! an attack of _priests_! an attack of _parasites_! the vampirism of pale, subterranean leeches!... when the natural consequences of an act are no longer "natural," but are regarded as produced by the ghostly creations of superstition--by "god," by "spirits," by "souls"--and reckoned as merely "moral" consequences, as rewards, as punishments, as hints, as lessons, then the whole ground-work of knowledge is destroyed--_then the greatest of crimes against humanity has been perpetrated_.--i repeat that sin, man's self-desecration _par excellence_, was invented in order to make science, culture, and every elevation and ennobling of man impossible; the priest _rules_ through the invention of sin.-50. --in this place i can't permit myself to omit a psychology of "belief," of the "believer," for the special benefit of "believers." if there remain any today who do not yet know how _indecent_ it is to be "believing"--_or_ how much a sign of _décadence_, of a broken will to live--then they will know it well enough tomorrow. my voice reaches even the deaf.--it appears, unless i have been incorrectly informed, that there prevails among christians a sort of criterion of truth that is called "proof by power." "faith makes blessed: _therefore_ it is true."--it might be objected right here that blessedness is not demonstrated, it is merely _promised_: it hangs upon "faith" as a condition--one _shall_ be blessed _because_ one believes.... but what of the thing that the priest promises to the believer, the wholly transcendental "beyond"--how is _that_ to be demonstrated?--the "proof by power," thus assumed, is actually no more at bottom than a belief that the effects which faith promises will not fail to appear. in a formula: "i believe that faith makes for blessedness--_therefore_, it is true."... but this is as far as we may go. this "therefore" would be _absurdum_ itself as a criterion of truth.--but let us admit, for the sake of politeness, that blessedness by faith may be demonstrated (--_not_ merely hoped for, and _not_ merely promised by the suspicious lips of a priest): even so, _could_ blessedness--in a technical term, _pleasure_--ever be a proof of truth? so little is this true that it is almost a proof against truth when sensations of pleasure influence the answer to the question "what is true?" or, at all events, it is enough to make that "truth" highly suspicious. the proof by "pleasure" is a proof _of_ "pleasure"--nothing more; why in the world should it be assumed that _true_ judgments give more pleasure than false ones, and that, in conformity to some pre-established harmony, they necessarily bring agreeable feelings in their train?--the experience of all disciplined and profound minds teaches _the contrary_. man has had to fight for every atom of the truth, and has had to pay for it almost everything that the heart, that human love, that human trust cling to. greatness of soul is needed for this business: the service of truth is the hardest of all services.--what, then, is the meaning of _integrity_ in things intellectual? it means that a man must be severe with his own heart, that he must scorn "beautiful feelings," and that he makes every yea and nay a matter of conscience!--faith makes blessed: _therefore_, it lies.... 51. the fact that faith, under certain circumstances, may work for blessedness, but that this blessedness produced by an _idée fixe_ by no means makes the idea itself true, and the fact that faith actually moves no mountains, but instead _raises them up_ where there were none before: all this is made sufficiently clear by a walk through a _lunatic asylum_. _not_, of course, to a priest: for his instincts prompt him to the lie that sickness is not sickness and lunatic asylums not lunatic asylums. christianity finds sickness _necessary_, just as the greek spirit had need of a superabundance of health--the actual ulterior purpose of the whole system of salvation of the church is to _make_ people ill. and the church itself--doesn't it set up a catholic lunatic asylum as the ultimate ideal?--the whole earth as a madhouse?--the sort of religious man that the church _wants_ is a typical _décadent_; the moment at which a religious crisis dominates a people is always marked by epidemics of nervous disorder; the "inner world" of the religious man is so much like the "inner world" of the overstrung and exhausted that it is difficult to distinguish between them; the "highest" states of mind, held up before mankind by christianity as of supreme worth, are actually epileptoid in form--the church has granted the name of holy only to lunatics or to gigantic frauds _in majorem dei honorem_.... once i ventured to designate the whole christian system of _training_[22] in penance and salvation (now best studied in england) as a method of producing a _folie circulaire_ upon a soil already prepared for it, which is to say, a soil thoroughly unhealthy. not every one may be a christian: one is not "converted" to christianity--one must first be sick enough for it.... we others, who have the _courage_ for health _and_ likewise for contempt,--we may well despise a religion that teaches misunderstanding of the body! that refuses to rid itself of the superstition about the soul! that makes a "virtue" of insufficient nourishment! that combats health as a sort of enemy, devil, temptation! that persuades itself that it is possible to carry about a "perfect soul" in a cadaver of a body, and that, to this end, had to devise for itself a new concept of "perfection," a pale, sickly, idiotically ecstatic state of existence, so-called "holiness"--a holiness that is itself merely a series of symptoms of an impoverished, enervated and incurably disordered body!... the christian movement, as a european movement, was from the start no more than a general uprising of all sorts of outcast and refuse elements (--who now, under cover of christianity, aspire to power). it does _not_ represent the decay of a race; it represents, on the contrary, a conglomeration of _décadence_ products from all directions, crowding together and seeking one another out. it was _not_, as has been thought, the corruption of antiquity, of _noble_ antiquity, which made christianity possible; one cannot too sharply challenge the learned imbecility which today maintains that theory. at the time when the sick and rotten chandala classes in the whole _imperium_ were christianized, the _contrary type_, the nobility, reached its finest and ripest development. the majority became master; democracy, with its christian instincts, _triumphed_.... christianity was not "national," it was not based on race--it appealed to all the varieties of men disinherited by life, it had its allies everywhere. christianity has the rancour of the sick at its very core--the instinct against the _healthy_, against _health_. everything that is well-constituted, proud, gallant and, above all, beautiful gives offence to its ears and eyes. again i remind you of paul's priceless saying: "and god hath chosen the _weak_ things of the world, the _foolish_ things of the world, the _base_ things of the world, and things which are _despised_":[23] _this_ was the formula; _in hoc signo_ the _décadence_ triumphed.--_god on the cross_--is man always to miss the frightful inner significance of this symbol?--everything that suffers, everything that hangs on the cross, is _divine_.... we all hang on the cross, consequently _we_ are divine.... we alone are divine.... christianity was thus a victory: a nobler attitude of mind was destroyed by it--christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.-[22] the word _training_ is in english in the text. [23] 1 corinthians i, 27, 28. 52. christianity also stands in opposition to all _intellectual_ well-being,--sick reasoning is the only sort that it _can_ use as christian reasoning; it takes the side of everything that is idiotic; it pronounces a curse upon "intellect," upon the _superbia_ of the healthy intellect. since sickness is inherent in christianity, it follows that the typically christian state of "faith" _must_ be a form of sickness too, and that all straight, straightforward and scientific paths to knowledge _must_ be banned by the church as _forbidden_ ways. doubt is thus a sin from the start.... the complete lack of psychological cleanliness in the priest--revealed by a glance at him--is a phenomenon _resulting_ from _décadence_,--one may observe in hysterical women and in rachitic children how regularly the falsification of instincts, delight in lying for the mere sake of lying, and incapacity for looking straight and walking straight are symptoms of _décadence_. "faith" means the will to avoid knowing what is true. the pietist, the priest of either sex, is a fraud _because_ he is sick: his instinct _demands_ that the truth shall never be allowed its rights on any point. "whatever makes for illness is _good_; whatever issues from abundance, from superabundance, from power, is _evil_": so argues the believer. the _impulse to lie_--it is by this that i recognize every foreordained theologian.--another characteristic of the theologian is his _unfitness for philology_. what i here mean by philology is, in a general sense, the art of reading with profit--the capacity for absorbing facts _without_ interpreting them falsely, and _without_ losing caution, patience and subtlety in the effort to understand them. philology as _ephexis_[24] in interpretation: whether one be dealing with books, with newspaper reports, with the most fateful events or with weather statistics--not to mention the "salvation of the soul."... the way in which a theologian, whether in berlin or in rome, is ready to explain, say, a "passage of scripture," or an experience, or a victory by the national army, by turning upon it the high illumination of the psalms of david, is always so _daring_ that it is enough to make a philologian run up a wall. but what shall he do when pietists and other such cows from suabia[25] use the "finger of god" to convert their miserably commonplace and huggermugger existence into a miracle of "grace," a "providence" and an "experience of salvation"? the most modest exercise of the intellect, not to say of decency, should certainly be enough to convince these interpreters of the perfect childishness and unworthiness of such a misuse of the divine digital dexterity. however small our piety, if we ever encountered a god who always cured us of a cold in the head at just the right time, or got us into our carriage at the very instant heavy rain began to fall, he would seem so absurd a god that he'd have to be abolished even if he existed. god as a domestic servant, as a letter carrier, as an almanac-man--at bottom, he is a mere name for the stupidest sort of chance.... "divine providence," which every third man in "educated germany" still believes in, is so strong an argument against god that it would be impossible to think of a stronger. and in any case it is an argument against germans!... [24] that is, to say, scepticism. among the greeks scepticism was also occasionally called ephecticism. [25] a reference to the university of tübingen and its famous school of biblical criticism. the leader of this school was f. c. baur, and one of the men greatly influenced by it was nietzsche's pet abomination, david f. strauss, himself a suabian. _vide_ § 10 and § 28. 53. --it is so little true that _martyrs_ offer any support to the truth of a cause that i am inclined to deny that any martyr has ever had anything to do with the truth at all. in the very tone in which a martyr flings what he fancies to be true at the head of the world there appears so low a grade of intellectual honesty and such _insensibility_ to the problem of "truth," that it is never necessary to refute him. truth is not something that one man has and another man has not: at best, only peasants, or peasant-apostles like luther, can think of truth in any such way. one may rest assured that the greater the degree of a man's intellectual conscience the greater will be his modesty, his _discretion_, on this point. to _know_ in five cases, and to refuse, with delicacy, to know anything _further_.... "truth," as the word is understood by every prophet, every sectarian, every free-thinker, every socialist and every churchman, is simply a complete proof that not even a beginning has been made in the intellectual discipline and self-control that are necessary to the unearthing of even the smallest truth.--the deaths of the martyrs, it may be said in passing, have been misfortunes of history: they have _misled_.... the conclusion that all idiots, women and plebeians come to, that there must be something in a cause for which any one goes to his death (or which, as under primitive christianity, sets off epidemics of death-seeking)--this conclusion has been an unspeakable drag upon the testing of facts, upon the whole spirit of inquiry and investigation. the martyrs have _damaged_ the truth.... even to this day the crude fact of persecution is enough to give an honourable name to the most empty sort of sectarianism.--but why? is the worth of a cause altered by the fact that some one had laid down his life for it?--an error that becomes honourable is simply an error that has acquired one seductive charm the more: do you suppose, messrs. theologians, that we shall give you the chance to be martyred for your lies?--one best disposes of a cause by respectfully putting it on ice--that is also the best way to dispose of theologians.... this was precisely the world-historical stupidity of all the persecutors: that they gave the appearance of honour to the cause they opposed--that they made it a present of the fascination of martyrdom.... women are still on their knees before an error because they have been told that some one died on the cross for it. _is the cross, then, an argument?_--but about all these things there is one, and one only, who has said what has been needed for thousands of years--_zarathustra_. they made signs in blood along the way that they went, and their folly taught them that the truth is proved by blood. but blood is the worst of all testimonies to the truth; blood poisoneth even the purest teaching and turneth it into madness and hatred in the heart. and when one goeth through fire for his teaching--what doth that prove? verily, it is more when one's teaching cometh out of one's own burning![26] [26] the quotations are from "also sprach zarathustra" ii, 24: "of priests." 54. do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects are sceptical. zarathustra is a sceptic. the strength, the _freedom_ which proceed from intellectual power, from a superabundance of intellectual power, _manifest_ themselves as scepticism. men of fixed convictions do not count when it comes to determining what is fundamental in values and lack of values. men of convictions are prisoners. they do not see far enough, they do not see what is _below_ them: whereas a man who would talk to any purpose about value and non-value must be able to see five hundred convictions _beneath_ him--and _behind_ him.... a mind that aspires to great things, and that wills the means thereto, is necessarily sceptical. freedom from any sort of conviction _belongs_ to strength, and to an independent point of view.... that grand passion which is at once the foundation and the power of a sceptic's existence, and is both more enlightened and more despotic than he is himself, drafts the whole of his intellect into its service; it makes him unscrupulous; it gives him courage to employ unholy means; under certain circumstances it does not _begrudge_ him even convictions. conviction as a means: one may achieve a good deal by means of a conviction. a grand passion makes use of and uses up convictions; it does not yield to them--it knows itself to be sovereign.--on the contrary, the need of faith, of something unconditioned by yea or nay, of carlylism, if i may be allowed the word, is a need of _weakness_. the man of faith, the "believer" of any sort, is necessarily a dependent man--such a man cannot posit _himself_ as a goal, nor can he find goals within himself. the "believer" does not belong to himself; he can only be a means to an end; he must be _used up_; he needs some one to use him up. his instinct gives the highest honours to an ethic of self-effacement; he is prompted to embrace it by everything: his prudence, his experience, his vanity. every sort of faith is in itself an evidence of self-effacement, of self-estrangement.... when one reflects how necessary it is to the great majority that there be regulations to restrain them from without and hold them fast, and to what extent control, or, in a higher sense, _slavery_, is the one and only condition which makes for the well-being of the weak-willed man, and especially woman, then one at once understands conviction and "faith." to the man with convictions they are his backbone. to _avoid_ seeing many things, to be impartial about nothing, to be a party man through and through, to estimate all values strictly and infallibly--these are conditions necessary to the existence of such a man. but by the same token they are _antagonists_ of the truthful man--of the truth.... the believer is not free to answer the question, "true" or "not true," according to the dictates of his own conscience: integrity on _this_ point would work his instant downfall. the pathological limitations of his vision turn the man of convictions into a fanatic--savonarola, luther, rousseau, robespierre, saint-simon--these types stand in opposition to the strong, _emancipated_ spirit. but the grandiose attitudes of these _sick_ intellects, these intellectual epileptics, are of influence upon the great masses--fanatics are picturesque, and mankind prefers observing poses to listening to _reasons_.... 55. --one step further in the psychology of conviction, of "faith." it is now a good while since i first proposed for consideration the question whether convictions are not even more dangerous enemies to truth than lies. ("human, all-too-human," i, aphorism 483.)[27] this time i desire to put the question definitely: is there any actual difference between a lie and a conviction?--all the world believes that there is; but what is not believed by all the world!--every conviction has its history, its primitive forms, its stage of tentativeness and error: it _becomes_ a conviction only after having been, for a long time, _not_ one, and then, for an even longer time, _hardly_ one. what if falsehood be also one of these embryonic forms of conviction?--sometimes all that is needed is a change in persons: what was a lie in the father becomes a conviction in the son.--i call it lying to refuse to see what one sees, or to refuse to see it _as_ it is: whether the lie be uttered before witnesses or not before witnesses is of no consequence. the most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offence.--now, this will _not_ to see what one sees, this will _not_ to see it as it is, is almost the first requisite for all who belong to a party of whatever sort: the party man becomes inevitably a liar. for example, the german historians are convinced that rome was synonymous with despotism and that the germanic peoples brought the spirit of liberty into the world: what is the difference between this conviction and a lie? is it to be wondered at that all partisans, including the german historians, instinctively roll the fine phrases of morality upon their tongues--that morality almost owes its very _survival_ to the fact that the party man of every sort has need of it every moment?--"this is _our_ conviction: we publish it to the whole world; we live and die for it--let us respect all who have convictions!"--i have actually heard such sentiments from the mouths of anti-semites. on the contrary, gentlemen! an anti-semite surely does not become more respectable because he lies on principle.... the priests, who have more finesse in such matters, and who well understand the objection that lies against the notion of a conviction, which is to say, of a falsehood that becomes a matter of principle _because_ it serves a purpose, have borrowed from the jews the shrewd device of sneaking in the concepts, "god," "the will of god" and "the revelation of god" at this place. kant, too, with his categorical imperative, was on the same road: this was his _practical_ reason.[28] there are questions regarding the truth or untruth of which it is _not_ for man to decide; all the capital questions, all the capital problems of valuation, are beyond human reason.... to know the limits of reason--_that_ alone is genuine philosophy.... why did god make a revelation to man? would god have done anything superfluous? man _could_ not find out for himself what was good and what was evil, so god taught him his will.... moral: the priest does _not_ lie--the question, "true" or "untrue," has nothing to do with such things as the priest discusses; it is impossible to lie about these things. in order to lie here it would be necessary to know _what_ is true. but this is more than man _can_ know; therefore, the priest is simply the mouthpiece of god.--such a priestly syllogism is by no means merely jewish and christian; the right to lie and the _shrewd dodge_ of "revelation" belong to the general priestly type--to the priest of the _décadence_ as well as to the priest of pagan times (--pagans are all those who say yes to life, and to whom "god" is a word signifying acquiescence in all things).--the "law," the "will of god," the "holy book," and "inspiration"--all these things are merely words for the conditions _under_ which the priest comes to power and _with_ which he maintains his power,--these concepts are to be found at the bottom of all priestly organizations, and of all priestly or priestly-philosophical schemes of governments. the "holy lie"--common alike to confucius, to the code of manu, to mohammed and to the christian church--is not even wanting in plato. "truth is here": this means, no matter where it is heard, _the priest lies_.... [27] the aphorism, which is headed "the enemies of truth," makes the direct statement: "convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies." [28] a reference, of course, to kant's "kritik der praktischen vernunft" (critique of practical reason). 56. --in the last analysis it comes to this: what is the _end_ of lying? the fact that, in christianity, "holy" ends are not visible is _my_ objection to the means it employs. only _bad_ ends appear: the poisoning, the calumniation, the denial of life, the despising of the body, the degradation and self-contamination of man by the concept of sin--_therefore_, its means are also bad.--i have a contrary feeling when i read the code of manu, an incomparably more intellectual and superior work, which it would be a sin against the _intelligence_ to so much as _name_ in the same breath with the bible. it is easy to see why: there is a genuine philosophy behind it, _in_ it, not merely an evil-smelling mess of jewish rabbinism and superstition,--it gives even the most fastidious psychologist something to sink his teeth into. and, _not_ to forget what is most important, it differs fundamentally from every kind of bible: by means of it the _nobles_, the philosophers and the warriors keep the whip-hand over the majority; it is full of noble valuations, it shows a feeling of perfection, an acceptance of life, and triumphant feeling toward self and life--the _sun_ shines upon the whole book.--all the things on which christianity vents its fathomless vulgarity--for example, procreation, women and marriage--are here handled earnestly, with reverence and with love and confidence. how can any one really put into the hands of children and ladies a book which contains such vile things as this: "to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband; ... it is better to marry than to burn"?[29] and is it _possible_ to be a christian so long as the origin of man is christianized, which is to say, _befouled_, by the doctrine of the _immaculata conceptio_?... i know of no book in which so many delicate and kindly things are said of women as in the code of manu; these old grey-beards and saints have a way of being gallant to women that it would be impossible, perhaps, to surpass. "the mouth of a woman," it says in one place, "the breasts of a maiden, the prayer of a child and the smoke of sacrifice are always pure." in another place: "there is nothing purer than the light of the sun, the shadow cast by a cow, air, water, fire and the breath of a maiden." finally, in still another place--perhaps this is also a holy lie--: "all the orifices of the body above the navel are pure, and all below are impure. only in the maiden is the whole body pure." [29] 1 corinthians vii, 2, 9. 57. one catches the _unholiness_ of christian means _in flagranti_ by the simple process of putting the ends sought by christianity beside the ends sought by the code of manu--by putting these enormously antithetical ends under a strong light. the critic of christianity cannot evade the necessity of making christianity _contemptible_.--a book of laws such as the code of manu has the same origin as every other good law-book: it epitomizes the experience, the sagacity and the ethical experimentation of long centuries; it brings things to a conclusion; it no longer creates. the prerequisite to a codification of this sort is recognition of the fact that the means which establish the authority of a slowly and painfully attained _truth_ are fundamentally different from those which one would make use of to prove it. a law-book never recites the utility, the grounds, the casuistical antecedents of a law: for if it did so it would lose the imperative tone, the "thou shall," on which obedience is based. the problem lies exactly here.--at a certain point in the evolution of a people, the class within it of the greatest insight, which is to say, the greatest hindsight and foresight, declares that the series of experiences determining how all shall live--or _can_ live--has come to an end. the object now is to reap as rich and as complete a harvest as possible from the days of experiment and _hard_ experience. in consequence, the thing that is to be avoided above everything is further experimentation--the continuation of the state in which values are fluent, and are tested, chosen and criticized _ad infinitum_. against this a double wall is set up: on the one hand, _revelation_, which is the assumption that the reasons lying behind the laws are _not_ of human origin, that they were _not_ sought out and found by a slow process and after many errors, but that they are of divine ancestry, and came into being complete, perfect, without a history, as a free gift, a miracle...; and on the other hand, _tradition_, which is the assumption that the law has stood unchanged from time immemorial, and that it is impious and a crime against one's forefathers to bring it into question. the authority of the law is thus grounded on the thesis: god gave it, and the fathers _lived_ it.--the higher motive of such procedure lies in the design to distract consciousness, step by step, from its concern with notions of right living (that is to say, those that have been _proved_ to be right by wide and carefully considered experience), so that instinct attains to a perfect automatism--a primary necessity to every sort of mastery, to every sort of perfection in the art of life. to draw up such a law-book as manu's means to lay before a people the possibility of future mastery, of attainable perfection--it permits them to aspire to the highest reaches of the art of life. _to that end the thing must be made unconscious_: that is the aim of every holy lie.--the _order of castes_, the highest, the dominating law, is merely the ratification of an _order of nature_, of a natural law of the first rank, over which no arbitrary fiat, no "modern idea," can exert any influence. in every healthy society there are three physiological types, gravitating toward differentiation but mutually conditioning one another, and each of these has its own hygiene, its own sphere of work, its own special mastery and feeling of perfection. it is _not_ manu but nature that sets off in one class those who are chiefly intellectual, in another those who are marked by muscular strength and temperament, and in a third those who are distinguished in neither one way or the other, but show only mediocrity--the last-named represents the great majority, and the first two the select. the superior caste--i call it the _fewest_--has, as the most perfect, the privileges of the few: it stands for happiness, for beauty, for everything good upon earth. only the most intellectual of men have any right to beauty, to the beautiful; only in them can goodness escape being weakness. _pulchrum est paucorum hominum_:[30] goodness is a privilege. nothing could be more unbecoming to them than uncouth manners or a pessimistic look, or an eye that sees _ugliness_--or indignation against the general aspect of things. indignation is the privilege of the chandala; so is pessimism. "_the world is perfect_"--so prompts the instinct of the intellectual, the instinct of the man who says yes to life. "imperfection, whatever is _inferior_ to us, distance, the pathos of distance, even the chandala themselves are parts of this perfection." the most intelligent men, like the _strongest_, find their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is in self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct. they regard a difficult task as a privilege; it is to them a _recreation_ to play with burdens that would crush all others.... knowledge--a form of asceticism.--they are the most honourable kind of men: but that does not prevent them being the most cheerful and most amiable. they rule, not because they want to, but because they _are_; they are not at liberty to play second.--the _second caste_: to this belong the guardians of the law, the keepers of order and security, the more noble warriors, above all, the king as the highest form of warrior, judge and preserver of the law. the second in rank constitute the executive arm of the intellectuals, the next to them in rank, taking from them all that is _rough_ in the business of ruling--their followers, their right hand, their most apt disciples.--in all this, i repeat, there is nothing arbitrary, nothing "made up"; whatever is to the _contrary_ is made up--by it nature is brought to shame.... the order of castes, the _order of rank_, simply formulates the supreme law of life itself; the separation of the three types is necessary to the maintenance of society, and to the evolution of higher types, and the highest types--the _inequality_ of rights is essential to the existence of any rights at all.--a right is a privilege. every one enjoys the privileges that accord with his state of existence. let us not underestimate the privileges of the _mediocre_. life is always harder as one mounts the _heights_--the cold increases, responsibility increases. a high civilization is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity. the handicrafts, commerce, agriculture, _science_, the greater part of art, in brief, the whole range of _occupational_ activities, are compatible only with mediocre ability and aspiration; such callings would be out of place for exceptional men; the instincts which belong to them stand as much opposed to aristocracy as to anarchism. the fact that a man is publicly useful, that he is a wheel, a function, is evidence of a natural predisposition; it is not _society_, but the only sort of happiness that the majority are capable of, that makes them intelligent machines. to the mediocre mediocrity is a form of happiness; they have a natural instinct for mastering one thing, for specialization. it would be altogether unworthy of a profound intellect to see anything objectionable in mediocrity in itself. it is, in fact, the _first_ prerequisite to the appearance of the exceptional: it is a necessary condition to a high degree of civilization. when the exceptional man handles the mediocre man with more delicate fingers than he applies to himself or to his equals, this is not merely kindness of heart--it is simply his _duty_.... whom do i hate most heartily among the rabbles of today? the rabble of socialists, the apostles to the chandala, who undermine the workingman's instincts, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his petty existence--who make him envious and teach him revenge.... wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in the assertion of "equal" rights.... what is _bad_? but i have already answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from _revenge_.--the anarchist and the christian have the same ancestry.... [30] few men are noble. 58. in point of fact, the end for which one lies makes a great difference: whether one preserves thereby or destroys. there is a perfect likeness between christian and anarchist: their object, their instinct, points only toward destruction. one need only turn to history for a proof of this: there it appears with appalling distinctness. we have just studied a code of religious legislation whose object it was to convert the conditions which cause life to _flourish_ into an "eternal" social organization,--christianity found its mission in putting an end to such an organization, _because life flourished under it_. there the benefits that reason had produced during long ages of experiment and insecurity were applied to the most remote uses, and an effort was made to bring in a harvest that should be as large, as rich and as complete as possible; here, on the contrary, the harvest is _blighted_ overnight.... that which stood there _aere perennis_, the _imperium romanum_, the most magnificent form of organization under difficult conditions that has ever been achieved, and compared to which everything before it and after it appears as patchwork, bungling, _dilletantism_--those holy anarchists made it a matter of "piety" to destroy "the world," _which is to say_, the _imperium romanum_, so that in the end not a stone stood upon another--and even germans and other such louts were able to become its masters.... the christian and the anarchist: both are _décadents_; both are incapable of any act that is not disintegrating, poisonous, degenerating, _blood-sucking_; both have an instinct of _mortal hatred_ of everything that stands up, and is great, and has durability, and promises life a future.... christianity was the vampire of the _imperium romanum_,--overnight it destroyed the vast achievement of the romans: the conquest of the soil for a great culture _that could await its time_. can it be that this fact is not yet understood? the _imperium romanum_ that we know, and that the history of the roman provinces teaches us to know better and better,--this most admirable of all works of art in the grand manner was merely the beginning, and the structure to follow was not to _prove_ its worth for thousands of years. to this day, nothing on a like scale _sub specie aeterni_ has been brought into being, or even dreamed of!--this organization was strong enough to withstand bad emperors: the accident of personality has nothing to do with such things--the _first_ principle of all genuinely great architecture. but it was not strong enough to stand up against the _corruptest_ of all forms of corruption--against christians.... these stealthy worms, which under the cover of night, mist and duplicity, crept upon every individual, sucking him dry of all earnest interest in _real_ things, of all instinct for _reality_--this cowardly, effeminate and sugar-coated gang gradually alienated all "souls," step by step, from that colossal edifice, turning against it all the meritorious, manly and noble natures that had found in the cause of rome their own cause, their own serious purpose, their own _pride_. the sneakishness of hypocrisy, the secrecy of the conventicle, concepts as black as hell, such as the sacrifice of the innocent, the _unio mystica_ in the drinking of blood, above all, the slowly rekindled fire of revenge, of chandala revenge--all _that_ sort of thing became master of rome: the same kind of religion which, in a pre-existent form, epicurus had combatted. one has but to read lucretius to know _what_ epicurus made war upon--_not_ paganism, but "christianity," which is to say, the corruption of souls by means of the concepts of guilt, punishment and immortality.--he combatted the _subterranean_ cults, the whole of latent christianity--to deny immortality was already a form of genuine _salvation_.--epicurus had triumphed, and every respectable intellect in rome was epicurean--_when paul appeared_ ... paul, the chandala hatred of rome, of "the world," in the flesh and inspired by genius--the jew, the _eternal_ jew _par excellence_.... what he saw was how, with the aid of the small sectarian christian movement that stood apart from judaism, a "world conflagration" might be kindled; how, with the symbol of "god on the cross," all secret seditions, all the fruits of anarchistic intrigues in the empire, might be amalgamated into one immense power. "salvation is of the jews."--christianity is the formula for exceeding _and_ summing up the subterranean cults of all varieties, that of osiris, that of the great mother, that of mithras, for instance: in his discernment of this fact the genius of paul showed itself. his instinct was here so sure that, with reckless violence to the truth, he put the ideas which lent fascination to every sort of chandala religion into the mouth of the "saviour" as his own inventions, and not only into the mouth--he _made_ out of him something that even a priest of mithras could understand.... this was his revelation at damascus: he grasped the fact that he _needed_ the belief in immortality in order to rob "the world" of its value, that the concept of "hell" would master rome--that the notion of a "beyond" is the _death of life_.... nihilist and christian: they rhyme in german, and they do more than rhyme.... 59. the whole labour of the ancient world gone for _naught_: i have no word to describe the feelings that such an enormity arouses in me.--and, considering the fact that its labour was merely preparatory, that with adamantine self-consciousness it laid only the foundations for a work to go on for thousands of years, the whole _meaning_ of antiquity disappears!... to what end the greeks? to what end the romans?--all the prerequisites to a learned culture, all the _methods_ of science, were already there; man had already perfected the great and incomparable art of reading profitably--that first necessity to the tradition of culture, the unity of the sciences; the natural sciences, in alliance with mathematics and mechanics, were on the right road,--_the sense of fact_, the last and more valuable of all the senses, had its schools, and its traditions were already centuries old! is all this properly understood? every _essential_ to the beginning of the work was ready:--and the _most_ essential, it cannot be said too often, are methods, and also the most difficult to develop, and the longest opposed by habit and laziness. what we have today reconquered, with unspeakable self-discipline, for ourselves--for certain bad instincts, certain christian instincts, still lurk in our bodies--that is to say, the keen eye for reality, the cautious hand, patience and seriousness in the smallest things, the whole _integrity_ of knowledge--all these things were already there, and had been there for two thousand years! _more_, there was also a refined and excellent tact and taste! _not_ as mere brain-drilling! _not_ as "german" culture, with its loutish manners! but as body, as bearing, as instinct--in short, as reality.... _all gone for naught!_ overnight it became merely a memory!--the greeks! the romans! instinctive nobility, taste, methodical inquiry, genius for organization and administration, faith in and the _will_ to secure the future of man, a great yes to everything entering into the _imperium romanum_ and palpable to all the senses, a grand style that was beyond mere art, but had become reality, truth, _life_....--all overwhelmed in a night, but not by a convulsion of nature! not trampled to death by teutons and others of heavy hoof! but brought to shame by crafty, sneaking, invisible, anæmic vampires! not conquered,--only sucked dry!... hidden vengefulness, petty envy, became _master_! everything wretched, intrinsically ailing, and invaded by bad feelings, the whole _ghetto-world_ of the soul, was at once _on top_!--one needs but read any of the christian agitators, for example, st. augustine, in order to realize, in order to smell, what filthy fellows came to the top. it would be an error, however, to assume that there was any lack of understanding in the leaders of the christian movement:--ah, but they were clever, clever to the point of holiness, these fathers of the church! what they lacked was something quite different. nature neglected--perhaps forgot--to give them even the most modest endowment of respectable, of upright, of _cleanly_ instincts.... between ourselves, they are not even men.... if islam despises christianity, it has a thousandfold right to do so: islam at least assumes that it is dealing with _men_.... 60. christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilization, and later it also destroyed for us the whole harvest of _mohammedan_ civilization. the wonderful culture of the moors in spain, which was fundamentally nearer to _us_ and appealed more to our senses and tastes than that of rome and greece, was _trampled down_ (--i do not say by what sort of feet--) why? because it had to thank noble and manly instincts for its origin--because it said yes to life, even to the rare and refined luxuriousness of moorish life!... the crusaders later made war on something before which it would have been more fitting for them to have grovelled in the dust--a civilization beside which even that of our nineteenth century seems very poor and very "senile."--what they wanted, of course, was booty: the orient was rich.... let us put aside our prejudices! the crusades were a higher form of piracy, nothing more! the german nobility, which is fundamentally a viking nobility, was in its element there: the church knew only too well how the german nobility was to be _won_.... the german noble, always the "swiss guard" of the church, always in the service of every bad instinct of the church--_but well paid_.... consider the fact that it is precisely the aid of german swords and german blood and valour that has enabled the church to carry through its war to the death upon everything noble on earth! at this point a host of painful questions suggest themselves. the german nobility stands _outside_ the history of the higher civilization: the reason is obvious.... christianity, alcohol--the two _great_ means of corruption.... intrinsically there should be no more choice between islam and christianity than there is between an arab and a jew. the decision is already reached; nobody remains at liberty to choose here. either a man is a chandala or he is not.... "war to the knife with rome! peace and friendship with islam!": this was the feeling, this was the _act_, of that great free spirit, that genius among german emperors, frederick ii. what! must a german first be a genius, a free spirit, before he can feel _decently_? i can't make out how a german could ever feel _christian_.... 61. here it becomes necessary to call up a memory that must be a hundred times more painful to germans. the germans have destroyed for europe the last great harvest of civilization that europe was ever to reap--the _renaissance_. is it understood at last, _will_ it ever be understood, _what_ the renaissance was? _the transvaluation of christian values_,--an attempt with all available means, all instincts and all the resources of genius to bring about a triumph of the _opposite_ values, the more _noble_ values.... this has been the one great war of the past; there has never been a more critical question than that of the renaissance--it is _my_ question too--; there has never been a form of _attack_ more fundamental, more direct, or more violently delivered by a whole front upon the center of the enemy! to attack at the critical place, at the very seat of christianity, and there enthrone the more noble values--that is to say, to _insinuate_ them into the instincts, into the most fundamental needs and appetites of those sitting there ... i see before me the _possibility_ of a perfectly heavenly enchantment and spectacle:--it seems to me to scintillate with all the vibrations of a fine and delicate beauty, and within it there is an art so divine, so infernally divine, that one might search in vain for thousands of years for another such possibility; i see a spectacle so rich in significance and at the same time so wonderfully full of paradox that it should arouse all the gods on olympus to immortal laughter--_cæsar borgia as pope!_... am i understood?... well then, _that_ would have been the sort of triumph that _i_ alone am longing for today--: by it christianity would have been _swept away_!--what happened? a german monk, luther, came to rome. this monk, with all the vengeful instincts of an unsuccessful priest in him, raised a rebellion _against_ the renaissance in rome.... instead of grasping, with profound thanksgiving, the miracle that had taken place: the conquest of christianity at its _capital_--instead of this, his hatred was stimulated by the spectacle. a religious man thinks only of himself.--luther saw only the _depravity_ of the papacy at the very moment when the opposite was becoming apparent: the old corruption, the _peccatum originale_, christianity itself, no longer occupied the papal chair! instead there was life! instead there was the triumph of life! instead there was a great yea to all lofty, beautiful and daring things!... and luther _restored the church_: he attacked it.... the renaissance--an event without meaning, a great futility!--ah, these germans, what they have not cost us! _futility_--that has always been the work of the germans.--the reformation; leibnitz; kant and so-called german philosophy; the war of "liberation"; the empire--every time a futile substitute for something that once existed, for something _irrecoverable_.... these germans, i confess, are my enemies: i despise all their uncleanliness in concept and valuation, their cowardice before every honest yea and nay. for nearly a thousand years they have tangled and confused everything their fingers have touched; they have on their conscience all the half-way measures, all the three-eighths-way measures, that europe is sick of,--they also have on their conscience the uncleanest variety of christianity that exists, and the most incurable and indestructible--protestantism.... if mankind never manages to get rid of christianity the _germans_ will be to blame.... 62. --with this i come to a conclusion and pronounce my judgment. i _condemn_ christianity; i bring against the christian church the most terrible of all the accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. it is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the worst possible corruption. the christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul. let any one dare to speak to me of its "humanitarian" blessings! its deepest necessities range it against any effort to abolish distress; it lives by distress; it _creates_ distress to make _itself_ immortal.... for example, the worm of sin: it was the church that first enriched mankind with this misery!--the "equality of souls before god"--this fraud, this _pretext_ for the _rancunes_ of all the base-minded--this explosive concept, ending in revolution, the modern idea, and the notion of overthrowing the whole social order--this is _christian_ dynamite.... the "humanitarian" blessings of christianity forsooth! to breed out of _humanitas_ a self-contradiction, an art of self-pollution, a will to lie at any price, an aversion and contempt for all good and honest instincts! all this, to me, is the "humanitarianism" of christianity!--parasitism as the _only_ practice of the church; with its anæmic and "holy" ideals, sucking all the blood, all the love, all the hope out of life; the beyond as the will to deny all reality; the cross as the distinguishing mark of the most subterranean conspiracy ever heard of,--against health, beauty, well-being, intellect, _kindness_ of soul--_against life itself_.... this eternal accusation against christianity i shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to be found--i have letters that even the blind will be able to see.... i call christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and _small_ enough,--i call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race.... and mankind reckons _time_ from the _dies nefastus_ when this fatality befell--from the _first_ day of christianity!--_why not rather from its last?_--_from today?_--the transvaluation of all values!... the end human, all too human a book for free spirits by friedrich nietzsche translated by alexander harvey chicago charles h. kerr & company 1908 copyright 1908 by charles h. kerr & company contents author's preface of the first and last things history of the moral feelings the religious life preface. 1 it is often enough, and always with great surprise, intimated to me that there is something both ordinary and unusual in all my writings, from the "birth of tragedy" to the recently published "prelude to a philosophy of the future": they all contain, i have been told, snares and nets for short sighted birds, and something that is almost a constant, subtle, incitement to an overturning of habitual opinions and of approved customs. what!? everything is merely--human--all too human? with this exclamation my writings are gone through, not without a certain dread and mistrust of ethic itself and not without a disposition to ask the exponent of evil things if those things be not simply misrepresented. my writings have been termed a school of distrust, still more of disdain: also, and more happily, of courage, audacity even. and in fact, i myself do not believe that anybody ever looked into the world with a distrust as deep as mine, seeming, as i do, not simply the timely advocate of the devil, but, to employ theological terms, an enemy and challenger of god; and whosoever has experienced any of the consequences of such deep distrust, anything of the chills and the agonies of isolation to which such an unqualified difference of standpoint condemns him endowed with it, will also understand how often i must have sought relief and self-forgetfulness from any source--through any object of veneration or enmity, of scientific seriousness or wanton lightness; also why i, when i could not find what i was in need of, had to fashion it for myself, counterfeiting it or imagining it (and what poet or writer has ever done anything else, and what other purpose can all the art in the world possibly have?) that which i always stood most in need of in order to effect my cure and self-recovery was faith, faith enough not to be thus isolated, not to look at life from so singular a point of view--a magic apprehension (in eye and mind) of relationship and equality, a calm confidence in friendship, a blindness, free from suspicion and questioning, to two sidedness; a pleasure in externals, superficialities, the near, the accessible, in all things possessed of color, skin and seeming. perhaps i could be fairly reproached with much "art" in this regard, many fine counterfeitings; for example, that, wisely or wilfully, i had shut my eyes to schopenhauer's blind will towards ethic, at a time when i was already clear sighted enough on the subject of ethic; likewise that i had deceived myself concerning richard wagner's incurable romanticism, as if it were a beginning and not an end; likewise concerning the greeks, likewise concerning the germans and their future--and there may be, perhaps, a long list of such likewises. granted, however, that all this were true, and with justice urged against me, what does it signify, what can it signify in regard to how much of the self-sustaining capacity, how much of reason and higher protection are embraced in such self-deception?--and how much more falsity is still necessary to me that i may therewith always reassure myself regarding the luxury of my truth. enough, i still live; and life is not considered now apart from ethic; it _will_ [have] deception; it thrives (lebt) on deception ... but am i not beginning to do all over again what i have always done, i, the old immoralist, and bird snarer--talk unmorally, ultramorally, "beyond good and evil"? 2 thus, then, have i evolved for myself the "free spirits" to whom this discouraging-encouraging work, under the general title "human, all too human," is dedicated. such "free spirits" do not really exist and never did exist. but i stood in need of them, as i have pointed out, in order that some good might be mixed with my evils (illness, loneliness, strangeness, _acedia_, incapacity): to serve as gay spirits and comrades, with whom one may talk and laugh when one is disposed to talk and laugh, and whom one may send to the devil when they grow wearisome. they are some compensation for the lack of friends. that such free spirits can possibly exist, that our europe will yet number among her sons of to-morrow or of the day after to-morrow, such a brilliant and enthusiastic company, alive and palpable and not merely, as in my case, fantasms and imaginary shades, i, myself, can by no means doubt. i see them already coming, slowly, slowly. may it not be that i am doing a little something to expedite their coming when i describe in advance the influences under which i see them evolving and the ways along which they travel? 3 it may be conjectured that a soul in which the type of "free spirit" can attain maturity and completeness had its decisive and deciding event in the form of a great emancipation or unbinding, and that prior to that event it seemed only the more firmly and forever chained to its place and pillar. what binds strongest? what cords seem almost unbreakable? in the case of mortals of a choice and lofty nature they will be those of duty: that reverence, which in youth is most typical, that timidity and tenderness in the presence of the traditionally honored and the worthy, that gratitude to the soil from which we sprung, for the hand that guided us, for the relic before which we were taught to pray--their sublimest moments will themselves bind these souls most strongly. the great liberation comes suddenly to such prisoners, like an earthquake: the young soul is all at once shaken, torn apart, cast forth--it comprehends not itself what is taking place. an involuntary onward impulse rules them with the mastery of command; a will, a wish are developed to go forward, anywhere, at any price; a strong, dangerous curiosity regarding an undiscovered world flames and flashes in all their being. "better to die than live _here_"--so sounds the tempting voice: and this "here," this "at home" constitutes all they have hitherto loved. a sudden dread and distrust of that which they loved, a flash of contempt for that which is called their "duty," a mutinous, wilful, volcanic-like longing for a far away journey, strange scenes and people, annihilation, petrifaction, a hatred surmounting love, perhaps a sacrilegious impulse and look backwards, to where they so long prayed and loved, perhaps a flush of shame for what they did and at the same time an exultation at having done it, an inner, intoxicating, delightful tremor in which is betrayed the sense of victory--a victory? over what? over whom? a riddle-like victory, fruitful in questioning and well worth questioning, but the _first_ victory, for all--such things of pain and ill belong to the history of the great liberation. and it is at the same time a malady that can destroy a man, this first outbreak of strength and will for self-destination, self-valuation, this will for free will: and how much illness is forced to the surface in the frantic strivings and singularities with which the freedman, the liberated seeks henceforth to attest his mastery over things! he roves fiercely around, with an unsatisfied longing and whatever objects he may encounter must suffer from the perilous expectancy of his pride; he tears to pieces whatever attracts him. with a sardonic laugh he overturns whatever he finds veiled or protected by any reverential awe: he would see what these things look like when they are overturned. it is wilfulness and delight in the wilfulness of it, if he now, perhaps, gives his approval to that which has heretofore been in ill repute--if, in curiosity and experiment, he penetrates stealthily to the most forbidden things. in the background during all his plunging and roaming--for he is as restless and aimless in his course as if lost in a wilderness--is the interrogation mark of a curiosity growing ever more dangerous. "can we not upset every standard? and is good perhaps evil? and god only an invention and a subtlety of the devil? is everything, in the last resort, false? and if we are dupes are we not on that very account dupers also? _must_ we not be dupers also?" such reflections lead and mislead him, ever further on, ever further away. solitude, that dread goddess and mater saeva cupidinum, encircles and besets him, ever more threatening, more violent, more heart breaking--but who to-day knows what solitude is? 4 from this morbid solitude, from the deserts of such trial years, the way is yet far to that great, overflowing certainty and healthiness which cannot dispense even with sickness as a means and a grappling hook of knowledge; to that matured freedom of the spirit which is, in an equal degree, self mastery and discipline of the heart, and gives access to the path of much and various reflection--to that inner comprehensiveness and self satisfaction of over-richness which precludes all danger that the spirit has gone astray even in its own path and is sitting intoxicated in some corner or other; to that overplus of plastic, healing, imitative and restorative power which is the very sign of vigorous health, that overplus which confers upon the free spirit the perilous prerogative of spending a life in experiment and of running adventurous risks: the past-master-privilege of the free spirit. in the interval there may be long years of convalescence, years filled with many hued painfully-bewitching transformations, dominated and led to the goal by a tenacious will for health that is often emboldened to assume the guise and the disguise of health. there is a middle ground to this, which a man of such destiny can not subsequently recall without emotion; he basks in a special fine sun of his own, with a feeling of birdlike freedom, birdlike visual power, birdlike irrepressibleness, a something extraneous (drittes) in which curiosity and delicate disdain have united. a "free spirit"--this refreshing term is grateful in any mood, it almost sets one aglow. one lives--no longer in the bonds of love and hate, without a yes or no, here or there indifferently, best pleased to evade, to avoid, to beat about, neither advancing nor retreating. one is habituated to the bad, like a person who all at once sees a fearful hurly-burly _beneath_ him--and one was the counterpart of him who bothers himself with things that do not concern him. as a matter of fact the free spirit is bothered with mere things--and how many things--which no longer _concern_ him. 5 a step further in recovery: and the free spirit draws near to life again, slowly indeed, almost refractorily, almost distrustfully. there is again warmth and mellowness: feeling and fellow feeling acquire depth, lambent airs stir all about him. he almost feels: it seems as if now for the first time his eyes are open to things _near_. he is in amaze and sits hushed: for where had he been? these near and immediate things: how changed they seem to him! he looks gratefully back--grateful for his wandering, his self exile and severity, his lookings afar and his bird flights in the cold heights. how fortunate that he has not, like a sensitive, dull home body, remained always "in the house" and "at home!" he had been beside himself, beyond a doubt. now for the first time he really sees himself--and what surprises in the process. what hitherto unfelt tremors! yet what joy in the exhaustion, the old sickness, the relapses of the convalescent! how it delights him, suffering, to sit still, to exercise patience, to lie in the sun! who so well as he appreciates the fact that there comes balmy weather even in winter, who delights more in the sunshine athwart the wall? they are the most appreciative creatures in the world, and also the most humble, these convalescents and lizards, crawling back towards life: there are some among them who can let no day slip past them without addressing some song of praise to its retreating light. and speaking seriously, it is a fundamental cure for all pessimism (the cankerous vice, as is well known, of all idealists and humbugs), to become ill in the manner of these free spirits, to remain ill quite a while and then bit by bit grow healthy--i mean healthier. it is wisdom, worldly wisdom, to administer even health to oneself for a long time in small doses. 6 about this time it becomes at last possible, amid the flash lights of a still unestablished, still precarious health, for the free, the ever freer spirit to begin to read the riddle of that great liberation, a riddle which has hitherto lingered, obscure, well worth questioning, almost impalpable, in his memory. if once he hardly dared to ask "why so apart? so alone? renouncing all i loved? renouncing respect itself? why this coldness, this suspicion, this hate for one's very virtues?"--now he dares, and asks it loudly, already hearing the answer, "you had to become master over yourself, master of your own good qualities. formerly they were your masters: but they should be merely your tools along with other tools. you had to acquire power over your aye and no and learn to hold and withhold them in accordance with your higher aims. you had to grasp the perspective of every representation (werthschätzung)--the dislocation, distortion and the apparent end or teleology of the horizon, besides whatever else appertains to the perspective: also the element of demerit in its relation to opposing merit, and the whole intellectual cost of every affirmative, every negative. you had to find out the _inevitable_ error[1] in every yes and in every no, error as inseparable from life, life itself as conditioned by the perspective and its inaccuracy.[1] above all, you had to see with your own eyes where the error[1] is always greatest: there, namely, where life is littlest, narrowest, meanest, least developed and yet cannot help looking upon itself as the goal and standard of things, and smugly and ignobly and incessantly tearing to tatters all that is highest and greatest and richest, and putting the shreds into the form of questions from the standpoint of its own well being. you had to see with your own eyes the problem of classification, (rangordnung, regulation concerning rank and station) and how strength and sweep and reach of perspective wax upward together: you had"--enough, the free spirit knows henceforward which "you had" it has obeyed and also what it now can do and what it now, for the first time, _dare_. [1] ungerechtigkeit, literally wrongfulness, injustice, unrighteousness. 7 accordingly, the free spirit works out for itself an answer to that riddle of its liberation and concludes by generalizing upon its experience in the following fashion: "what i went through everyone must go through" in whom any problem is germinated and strives to body itself forth. the inner power and inevitability of this problem will assert themselves in due course, as in the case of any unsuspected pregnancy--long before the spirit has seen this problem in its true aspect and learned to call it by its right name. our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law to our to-day. granted, that it is the problem of classification[2] of which we free spirits may say, this is _our_ problem, yet it is only now, in the midday of our life, that we fully appreciate what preparations, shifts, trials, ordeals, stages, were essential to that problem before it could emerge to our view, and why we had to go through the various and contradictory longings and satisfactions of body and soul, as circumnavigators and adventurers of that inner world called "man"; as surveyors of that "higher" and of that "progression"[3] that is also called "man"--crowding in everywhere, almost without fear, disdaining nothing, missing nothing, testing everything, sifting everything and eliminating the chance impurities--until at last we could say, we free spirits: "here--a _new_ problem! here, a long ladder on the rungs of which we ourselves have rested and risen, which we have actually been at times. here is a something higher, a something deeper, a something below us, a vastly extensive order, (ordnung) a comparative classification (rangordnung), that we perceive: here--_our_ problem!" [2] rangordnung: the meaning is "the problem of grasping the relative importance of things." [3] uebereinander: one over another. 8 to what stage in the development just outlined the present book belongs (or is assigned) is something that will be hidden from no augur or psychologist for an instant. but where are there psychologists to-day? in france, certainly; in russia, perhaps; certainly not in germany. grounds are not wanting, to be sure, upon which the germans of to-day may adduce this fact to their credit: unhappily for one who in this matter is fashioned and mentored in an un-german school! this _german_ book, which has found its readers in a wide circle of lands and peoples--it has been some ten years on its rounds--and which must make its way by means of any musical art and tune that will captivate the foreign ear as well as the native--this book has been read most indifferently in germany itself and little heeded there: to what is that due? "it requires too much," i have been told, "it addresses itself to men free from the press of petty obligations, it demands fine and trained perceptions, it requires a surplus, a surplus of time, of the lightness of heaven and of the heart, of otium in the most unrestricted sense: mere good things that we germans of to-day have not got and therefore cannot give." after so graceful a retort, my philosophy bids me be silent and ask no more questions: at times, as the proverb says, one remains a philosopher only because one says--nothing! nice, spring, 1886. of the first and last things. 1 =chemistry of the notions and the feelings.=--philosophical problems, in almost all their aspects, present themselves in the same interrogative formula now that they did two thousand years ago: how can a thing develop out of its antithesis? for example, the reasonable from the non-reasonable, the animate from the inanimate, the logical from the illogical, altruism from egoism, disinterestedness from greed, truth from error? the metaphysical philosophy formerly steered itself clear of this difficulty to such extent as to repudiate the evolution of one thing from another and to assign a miraculous origin to what it deemed highest and best, due to the very nature and being of the "thing-in-itself." the historical philosophy, on the other hand, which can no longer be viewed apart from physical science, the youngest of all philosophical methods, discovered experimentally (and its results will probably always be the same) that there is no antithesis whatever, except in the usual exaggerations of popular or metaphysical comprehension, and that an error of the reason is at the bottom of such contradiction. according to its explanation, there is, strictly speaking, neither unselfish conduct, nor a wholly disinterested point of view. both are simply sublimations in which the basic element seems almost evaporated and betrays its presence only to the keenest observation. all that we need and that could possibly be given us in the present state of development of the sciences, is a chemistry of the moral, religious, aesthetic conceptions and feeling, as well as of those emotions which we experience in the affairs, great and small, of society and civilization, and which we are sensible of even in solitude. but what if this chemistry established the fact that, even in _its_ domain, the most magnificent results were attained with the basest and most despised ingredients? would many feel disposed to continue such investigations? mankind loves to put by the questions of its origin and beginning: must one not be almost inhuman in order to follow the opposite course? 2 =the traditional error of philosophers.=--all philosophers make the common mistake of taking contemporary man as their starting point and of trying, through an analysis of him, to reach a conclusion. "man" involuntarily presents himself to them as an aeterna veritas as a passive element in every hurly-burly, as a fixed standard of things. yet everything uttered by the philosopher on the subject of man is, in the last resort, nothing more than a piece of testimony concerning man during a very limited period of time. lack of the historical sense is the traditional defect in all philosophers. many innocently take man in his most childish state as fashioned through the influence of certain religious and even of certain political developments, as the permanent form under which man must be viewed. they will not learn that man has evolved,[4] that the intellectual faculty itself is an evolution, whereas some philosophers make the whole cosmos out of this intellectual faculty. but everything essential in human evolution took place aeons ago, long before the four thousand years or so of which we know anything: during these man may not have changed very much. however, the philosopher ascribes "instinct" to contemporary man and assumes that this is one of the unalterable facts regarding man himself, and hence affords a clue to the understanding of the universe in general. the whole teleology is so planned that man during the last four thousand years shall be spoken of as a being existing from all eternity, and with reference to whom everything in the cosmos from its very inception is naturally ordered. yet everything evolved: there are no eternal facts as there are no absolute truths. accordingly, historical philosophising is henceforth indispensable, and with it honesty of judgment. [4] geworden. 3 =appreciation of simple truths.=--it is the characteristic of an advanced civilization to set a higher value upon little, simple truths, ascertained by scientific method, than upon the pleasing and magnificent errors originating in metaphysical and æsthetical epochs and peoples. to begin with, the former are spoken of with contempt as if there could be no question of comparison respecting them, so rigid, homely, prosaic and even discouraging is the aspect of the first, while so beautiful, decorative, intoxicating and perhaps beatific appear the last named. nevertheless, the hardwon, the certain, the lasting and, therefore, the fertile in new knowledge, is the higher; to hold fast to it is manly and evinces courage, directness, endurance. and not only individual men but all mankind will by degrees be uplifted to this manliness when they are finally habituated to the proper appreciation of tenable, enduring knowledge and have lost all faith in inspiration and in the miraculous revelation of truth. the reverers of forms, indeed, with their standards of beauty and taste, may have good reason to laugh when the appreciation of little truths and the scientific spirit begin to prevail, but that will be only because their eyes are not yet opened to the charm of the utmost simplicity of form or because men though reared in the rightly appreciative spirit, will still not be fully permeated by it, so that they continue unwittingly imitating ancient forms (and that ill enough, as anybody does who no longer feels any interest in a thing). formerly the mind was not brought into play through the medium of exact thought. its serious business lay in the working out of forms and symbols. that has now changed. any seriousness in symbolism is at present the indication of a deficient education. as our very acts become more intellectual, our tendencies more rational, and our judgment, for example, as to what seems reasonable, is very different from what it was a hundred years ago: so the forms of our lives grow ever more intellectual and, to the old fashioned eye, perhaps, uglier, but only because it cannot see that the richness of inner, rational beauty always spreads and deepens, and that the inner, rational aspect of all things should now be of more consequence to us than the most beautiful externality and the most exquisite limning. 4 =astrology and the like.=--it is presumable that the objects of the religious, moral, aesthetic and logical notions pertain simply to the superficialities of things, although man flatters himself with the thought that here at least he is getting to the heart of the cosmos. he deceives himself because these things have power to make him so happy and so wretched, and so he evinces, in this respect, the same conceit that characterises astrology. astrology presupposes that the heavenly bodies are regulated in their movements in harmony with the destiny of mortals: the moral man presupposes that that which concerns himself most nearly must also be the heart and soul of things. 5 =misconception of dreams.=--in the dream, mankind, in epochs of crude primitive civilization, thought they were introduced to a second, substantial world: here we have the source of all metaphysic. without the dream, men would never have been incited to an analysis of the world. even the distinction between soul and body is wholly due to the primitive conception of the dream, as also the hypothesis of the embodied soul, whence the development of all superstition, and also, probably, the belief in god. "the dead still live: for they appear to the living in dreams." so reasoned mankind at one time, and through many thousands of years. 6 =the scientific spirit prevails only partially, not wholly.=--the specialized, minutest departments of science are dealt with purely objectively. but the general universal sciences, considered as a great, basic unity, posit the question--truly a very living question--: to what purpose? what is the use? because of this reference to utility they are, as a whole, less impersonal than when looked at in their specialized aspects. now in the case of philosophy, as forming the apex of the scientific pyramid, this question of the utility of knowledge is necessarily brought very conspicuously forward, so that every philosophy has, unconsciously, the air of ascribing the highest utility to itself. it is for this reason that all philosophies contain such a great amount of high flying metaphysic, and such a shrinking from the seeming insignificance of the deliverances of physical science: for the significance of knowledge in relation to life must be made to appear as great as possible. this constitutes the antagonism between the specialties of science and philosophy. the latter aims, as art aims, at imparting to life and conduct the utmost depth and significance: in the former mere knowledge is sought and nothing else--whatever else be incidentally obtained. heretofore there has never been a philosophical system in which philosophy itself was not made the apologist of knowledge [in the abstract]. on this point, at least, each is optimistic and insists that to knowledge the highest utility must be ascribed. they are all under the tyranny of logic, which is, from its very nature, optimism. 7 =the discordant element in science.=--philosophy severed itself from science when it put the question: what is that knowledge of the world and of life through which mankind may be made happiest? this happened when the socratic school arose: with the standpoint of _happiness_ the arteries of investigating science were compressed too tightly to permit of any circulation of the blood--and are so compressed to-day. 8 =pneumatic explanation of nature.=[5]--metaphysic reads the message of nature as if it were written purely pneumatically, as the church and its learned ones formerly did where the bible was concerned. it requires a great deal of expertness to apply to nature the same strict science of interpretation that the philologists have devised for all literature, and to apply it for the purpose of a simple, direct interpretation of the message, and at the same time, not bring out a double meaning. but, as in the case of books and literature, errors of exposition are far from being completely eliminated, and vestiges of allegorical and mystical interpretations are still to be met with in the most cultivated circles, so where nature is concerned the case is--actually much worse. [5] pneumatic is here used in the sense of spiritual. pneuma being the greek word in the new testament for the holy spirit.--ed. 9 =metaphysical world.=--it is true, there may be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it can scarcely be disputed. we see all things through the medium of the human head and we cannot well cut off this head: although there remains the question what part of the world would be left after it had been cut off. but that is a purely abstract scientific problem and one not much calculated to give men uneasiness: yet everything that has heretofore made metaphysical assumptions valuable, fearful or delightful to men, all that gave rise to them is passion, error and self deception: the worst systems of knowledge, not the best, pin their tenets of belief thereto. when such methods are once brought to view as the basis of all existing religions and metaphysics, they are already discredited. there always remains, however, the possibility already conceded: but nothing at all can be made out of that, to say not a word about letting happiness, salvation and life hang upon the threads spun from such a possibility. accordingly, nothing could be predicated of the metaphysical world beyond the fact that it is an elsewhere,[6] another sphere, inaccessible and incomprehensible to us: it would become a thing of negative properties. even were the existence of such a world absolutely established, it would nevertheless remain incontrovertible that of all kinds of knowledge, knowledge of such a world would be of least consequence--of even less consequence than knowledge of the chemical analysis of water would be to a storm tossed mariner. [6] anderssein. 10 =the harmlessness of metaphysic in the future.=--as soon as religion, art and ethics are so understood that a full comprehension of them can be gained without taking refuge in the postulates of metaphysical claptrap at any point in the line of reasoning, there will be a complete cessation of interest in the purely theoretical problem of the "thing in itself" and the "phenomenon." for here, too, the same truth applies: in religion, art and ethics we are not concerned with the "essence of the cosmos".[7] we are in the sphere of pure conception. no presentiment [or intuition] can carry us any further. with perfect tranquility the question of how our conception of the world could differ so sharply from the actual world as it is manifest to us, will be relegated to the physiological sciences and to the history of the evolution of ideas and organisms. [7] "wesen der welt an sich." 11 =language as a presumptive science.=--the importance of language in the development of civilization consists in the fact that by means of it man placed one world, his own, alongside another, a place of leverage that he thought so firm as to admit of his turning the rest of the cosmos on a pivot that he might master it. in so far as man for ages looked upon mere ideas and names of things as upon aeternae veritates, he evinced the very pride with which he raised himself above the brute. he really supposed that in language he possessed a knowledge of the cosmos. the language builder was not so modest as to believe that he was only giving names to things. on the contrary he thought he embodied the highest wisdom concerning things in [mere] words; and, in truth, language is the first movement in all strivings for wisdom. here, too, it is _faith in ascertained truth_[8] from which the mightiest fountains of strength have flowed. very tardily--only now--it dawns upon men that they have propagated a monstrous error in their belief in language. fortunately, it is too late now to arrest and turn back the evolutionary process of the reason, which had its inception in this belief. logic itself rests upon assumptions to which nothing in the world of reality corresponds. for example, the correspondence of certain things to one another and the identity of those things at different periods of time are assumptions pure and simple, but the science of logic originated in the positive belief that they were not assumptions at all but established facts. it is the same with the science of mathematics which certainly would never have come into existence if mankind had known from the beginning that in all nature there is no perfectly straight line, no true circle, no standard of measurement. [8] glaube an die gefundene wahrheit, as distinguished from faith in what is taken on trust as truth. 12 =dream and civilization.=--the function of the brain which is most encroached upon in slumber is the memory; not that it is wholly suspended, but it is reduced to a state of imperfection as, in primitive ages of mankind, was probably the case with everyone, whether waking or sleeping. uncontrolled and entangled as it is, it perpetually confuses things as a result of the most trifling similarities, yet in the same mental confusion and lack of control the nations invented their mythologies, while nowadays travelers habitually observe how prone the savage is to forgetfulness, how his mind, after the least exertion of memory, begins to wander and lose itself until finally he utters falsehood and nonsense from sheer exhaustion. yet, in dreams, we all resemble this savage. inadequacy of distinction and error of comparison are the basis of the preposterous things we do and say in dreams, so that when we clearly recall a dream we are startled that so much idiocy lurks within us. the absolute distinctness of all dream-images, due to implicit faith in their substantial reality, recalls the conditions in which earlier mankind were placed, for whom hallucinations had extraordinary vividness, entire communities and even entire nations laboring simultaneously under them. therefore: in sleep and in dream we make the pilgrimage of early mankind over again. 13 =logic of the dream.=--during sleep the nervous system, through various inner provocatives, is in constant agitation. almost all the organs act independently and vigorously. the blood circulates rapidly. the posture of the sleeper compresses some portions of the body. the coverlets influence the sensations in different ways. the stomach carries on the digestive process and acts upon other organs thereby. the intestines are in motion. the position of the head induces unaccustomed action. the feet, shoeless, no longer pressing the ground, are the occasion of other sensations of novelty, as is, indeed, the changed garb of the entire body. all these things, following the bustle and change of the day, result, through their novelty, in a movement throughout the entire system that extends even to the brain functions. thus there are a hundred circumstances to induce perplexity in the mind, a questioning as to the cause of this excitation. now, the dream is a _seeking and presenting of reasons_ for these excitations of feeling, of the supposed reasons, that is to say. thus, for example, whoever has his feet bound with two threads will probably dream that a pair of serpents are coiled about his feet. this is at first a hypothesis, then a belief with an accompanying imaginative picture and the argument: "these snakes must be the _causa_ of those sensations which i, the sleeper, now have." so reasons the mind of the sleeper. the conditions precedent, as thus conjectured, become, owing to the excitation of the fancy, present realities. everyone knows from experience how a dreamer will transform one piercing sound, for example, that of a bell, into another of quite a different nature, say, the report of cannon. in his dream he becomes aware first of the effects, which he explains by a subsequent hypothesis and becomes persuaded of the purely conjectural nature of the sound. but how comes it that the mind of the dreamer goes so far astray when the same mind, awake, is habitually cautious, careful, and so conservative in its dealings with hypotheses? why does the first plausible hypothesis of the cause of a sensation gain credit in the dreaming state? (for in a dream we look upon that dream as reality, that is, we accept our hypotheses as fully established). i have no doubt that as men argue in their dreams to-day, mankind argued, even in their waking moments, for thousands of years: the first _causa_, that occurred to the mind with reference to anything that stood in need of explanation, was accepted as the true explanation and served as such. (savages show the same tendency in operation, as the reports of travelers agree). in the dream this atavistic relic of humanity manifests its existence within us, for it is the foundation upon which the higher rational faculty developed itself and still develops itself in every individual. dreams carry us back to the earlier stages of human culture and afford us a means of understanding it more clearly. dream thought comes so easily to us now because we are so thoroughly trained to it through the interminable stages of evolution during which this fanciful and facile form of theorising has prevailed. to a certain extent the dream is a restorative for the brain, which, during the day, is called upon to meet the many demands for trained thought made upon it by the conditions of a higher civilization.--we may, if we please, become sensible, even in our waking moments, of a condition that is as a door and vestibule to dreaming. if we close our eyes the brain immediately conjures up a medley of impressions of light and color, apparently a sort of imitation and echo of the impressions forced in upon the brain during its waking moments. and now the mind, in co-operation with the imagination, transforms this formless play of light and color into definite figures, moving groups, landscapes. what really takes place is a sort of reasoning from effect back to cause. as the brain inquires: whence these impressions of light and color? it posits as the inducing causes of such lights and colors, those shapes and figures. they serve the brain as the occasions of those lights and colors because the brain, when the eyes are open and the senses awake, is accustomed to perceiving the cause of every impression of light and color made upon it. here again the imagination is continually interposing its images inasmuch as it participates in the production of the impressions made through the senses day by day: and the dream-fancy does exactly the same thing--that is, the presumed cause is determined from the effect and _after_ the effect: all this, too, with extraordinary rapidity, so that in this matter, as in a matter of jugglery or sleight-of-hand, a confusion of the mind is produced and an after effect is made to appear a simultaneous action, an inverted succession of events, even.--from these considerations we can see how _late_ strict, logical thought, the true notion of cause and effect must have been in developing, since our intellectual and rational faculties to this very day revert to these primitive processes of deduction, while practically half our lifetime is spent in the super-inducing conditions.--even the poet, the artist, ascribes to his sentimental and emotional states causes which are not the true ones. to that extent he is a reminder of early mankind and can aid us in its comprehension. 14 =association.=[9]--all strong feelings are associated with a variety of allied sentiments and emotions. they stir up the memory at the same time. when we are under their influence we are reminded of similar states and we feel a renewal of them within us. thus are formed habitual successions of feelings and notions, which, at last, when they follow one another with lightning rapidity are no longer felt as complexities but as unities. in this sense we hear of moral feelings, of religious feelings, as if they were absolute unities. in reality they are streams with a hundred sources and tributaries. here again, the unity of the word speaks nothing for the unity of the thing. [9] miterklingen: to sound simultaneously with. 15 =no within and without in the world.=[10]--as democritus transferred the notions above and below to limitless space, where they are destitute of meaning, so the philosophers do generally with the idea "within and without," as regards the form and substance (wesen und erscheinung) of the world. what they claim is that through the medium of profound feelings one can penetrate deep into the soul of things (innre), draw close to the heart of nature. but these feelings are deep only in so far as with them are simultaneously aroused, although almost imperceptibly, certain complicated groups of thoughts (gedankengruppen) which we call deep: a feeling is deep because we deem the thoughts accompanying it deep. but deep thought can nevertheless be very widely sundered from truth, as for instance every metaphysical thought. take from deep feeling the element of thought blended with it and all that remains is _strength_ of feeling which is no voucher for the validity of knowledge, as intense faith is evidence only of its own intensity and not of the truth of that in which the faith is felt. [10] kein innen und aussen in der welt: the above translation may seem too literal but some dispute has arisen concerning the precise idea the author means to convey. 16 =phenomenon and thing-in-itself.=--the philosophers are in the habit of placing themselves in front of life and experience--that which they call the world of phenomena--as if they were standing before a picture that is unrolled before them in its final completeness. this panorama, they think, must be studied in every detail in order to reach some conclusion regarding the object represented by the picture. from effect, accordingly is deduced cause and from cause is deduced the unconditioned. this process is generally looked upon as affording the all sufficient explanation of the world of phenomena. on the other hand one must, (while putting the conception of the metaphysical distinctly forward as that of the unconditioned, and consequently of the unconditioning) absolutely deny any connection between the unconditioned (of the metaphysical world) and the world known to us: so that throughout phenomena there is no manifestation of the thing-in-itself, and getting from one to the other is out of the question. thus is left quite ignored the circumstance that the picture--that which we now call life and experience--is a gradual evolution, is, indeed, still in process of evolution and for that reason should not be regarded as an enduring whole from which any conclusion as to its author (the all-sufficient reason) could be arrived at, or even pronounced out of the question. it is because we have for thousands of years looked into the world with moral, aesthetic, religious predispositions, with blind prejudice, passion or fear, and surfeited ourselves with indulgence in the follies of illogical thought, that the world has gradually become so wondrously motley, frightful, significant, soulful: it has taken on tints, but we have been the colorists: the human intellect, upon the foundation of human needs, of human passions, has reared all these "phenomena" and injected its own erroneous fundamental conceptions into things. late, very late, the human intellect checks itself: and now the world of experience and the thing-in-itself seem to it so severed and so antithetical that it denies the possibility of one's hinging upon the other--or else summons us to surrender our intellect, our personal will, to the secret and the awe-inspiring in order that thereby we may attain certainty of certainty hereafter. again, there are those who have combined all the characteristic features of our world of phenomena--that is, the conception of the world which has been formed and inherited through a series of intellectual vagaries--and instead of holding the intellect responsible for it all, have pronounced the very nature of things accountable for the present very sinister aspect of the world, and preached annihilation of existence. through all these views and opinions the toilsome, steady process of science (which now for the first time begins to celebrate its greatest triumph in the genesis of thought) will definitely work itself out, the result, being, perhaps, to the following effect: that which we now call the world is the result of a crowd of errors and fancies which gradually developed in the general evolution of organic nature, have grown together and been transmitted to us as the accumulated treasure of all the past--as the _treasure_, for whatever is worth anything in our humanity rests upon it. from this world of conception it is in the power of science to release us only to a slight extent--and this is all that could be wished--inasmuch as it cannot eradicate the influence of hereditary habits of feeling, but it can light up by degrees the stages of the development of that world of conception, and lift us, at least for a time, above the whole spectacle. perhaps we may then perceive that the thing-in-itself is a meet subject for homeric laughter: that it seemed so much, everything, indeed, and is really a void--void, that is to say, of meaning. 17 =metaphysical explanation.=--man, when he is young, prizes metaphysical explanations, because they make him see matters of the highest import in things he found disagreeable or contemptible: and if he is not satisfied with himself, this feeling of dissatisfaction is soothed when he sees the most hidden world-problem or world-pain in that which he finds so displeasing in himself. to feel himself more unresponsible and at the same time to find things (dinge) more interesting--that is to him the double benefit he owes to metaphysics. later, indeed, he acquires distrust of the whole metaphysical method of explaining things: he then perceives, perhaps, that those effects could have been attained just as well and more scientifically by another method: that physical and historical explanations would, at least, have given that feeling of freedom from personal responsibility just as well, while interest in life and its problems would be stimulated, perhaps, even more. 18 =the fundamental problems of metaphysics.=--if a history of the development of thought is ever written, the following proposition, advanced by a distinguished logician, will be illuminated with a new light: "the universal, primordial law of the apprehending subject consists in the inner necessity of cognizing every object by itself, as in its essence a thing unto itself, therefore as self-existing and unchanging, in short, as a substance." even this law, which is here called "primordial," is an evolution: it has yet to be shown how gradually this evolution takes place in lower organizations: how the dim, mole eyes of such organizations see, at first, nothing but a blank sameness: how later, when the various excitations of desire and aversion manifest themselves, various substances are gradually distinguished, but each with an attribute, that is, a special relationship to such an organization. the first step towards the logical is judgment, the essence of which, according to the best logicians, is belief. at the foundation of all beliefs lie sensations of pleasure or pain in relation to the apprehending subject. a third feeling, as the result of two prior, single, separate feelings, is judgment in its crudest form. we organic beings are primordially interested by nothing whatever in any thing (ding) except its relation to ourselves with reference to pleasure and pain. between the moments in which we are conscious of this relation, (the states of feeling) lie the moments of rest, of not-feeling: then the world and every thing (ding) have no interest for us: we observe no change in them (as at present a person absorbed in something does not notice anyone passing by). to plants all things are, as a rule, at rest, eternal, every object like itself. from the period of lower organisms has been handed down to man the belief that there are like things (gleiche dinge): only the trained experience attained through the most advanced science contradicts this postulate. the primordial belief of all organisms is, perhaps, that all the rest of the world is one thing and motionless.--furthest away from this first step towards the logical is the notion of causation: even to-day we think that all our feelings and doings are, at bottom, acts of the free will; when the sentient individual contemplates himself he deems every feeling, every change, a something isolated, disconnected, that is to say, unqualified by any thing; it comes suddenly to the surface, independent of anything that went before or came after. we are hungry, but originally we do not know that the organism must be nourished: on the contrary that feeling seems to manifest itself without reason or purpose; it stands out by itself and seems quite independent. therefore: the belief in the freedom of the will is a primordial error of everything organic as old as the very earliest inward prompting of the logical faculty; belief in unconditioned substances and in like things (gleiche dinge) is also a primordial and equally ancient error of everything organic. inasmuch as all metaphysic has concerned itself particularly with substance and with freedom of the will, it should be designated as the science that deals with the fundamental errors of mankind as if they were fundamental truths. 19 =number.=--the invention of the laws of number has as its basis the primordial and prior-prevailing delusion that many like things exist (although in point of fact there is no such thing is a duplicate), or that, at least, there are things (but there is no "thing"). the assumption of plurality always presupposes that _something_ exists which manifests itself repeatedly, but just here is where the delusion prevails; in this very matter we feign realities, unities, that have no existence. our feelings, notions, of space and time are false for they lead, when duly tested, to logical contradictions. in all scientific demonstrations we always unavoidably base our calculation upon some false standards [of duration or measurement] but as these standards are at least _constant_, as, for example, our notions of time and space, the results arrived at by science possess absolute accuracy and certainty in their relationship to one another: one can keep on building upon them--until is reached that final limit at which the erroneous fundamental conceptions, (the invariable breakdown) come into conflict with the results established--as, for example, in the case of the atomic theory. here we always find ourselves obliged to give credence to a "thing" or material "substratum" that is set in motion, although, at the same time, the whole scientific programme has had as its aim the resolving of everything material into motions [themselves]: here again we distinguish with our feeling [that which does the] moving and [that which is] moved,[11] and we never get out of this circle, because the belief in things[12] has been from time immemorial rooted in our nature.--when kant says "the intellect does not derive its laws from nature, but dictates them to her" he states the full truth as regards the _idea of nature_ which we form (nature = world, as notion, that is, as error) but which is merely the synthesis of a host of errors of the intellect. to a world not [the outcome of] our conception, the laws of number are wholly inapplicable: such laws are valid only in the world of mankind. [11] wir scheiden auch hier noch mit unserer empfindung bewegendes und bewegtes. [12] glaube an dinge. 20 =some backward steps.=--one very forward step in education is taken when man emerges from his superstitious and religious ideas and fears and, for instance, no longer believes in the dear little angels or in original sin, and has stopped talking about the salvation of the soul: when he has taken this step to freedom he has, nevertheless, through the utmost exertion of his mental power, to overcome metaphysics. then a backward movement is necessary: he must appreciate the historical justification, and to an equal extent the psychological considerations, in such a movement. he must understand that the greatest advances made by mankind have resulted from such a course and that without this very backward movement the highest achievements of man hitherto would have been impossible.--with regard to philosophical metaphysics i see ever more and more who have arrived at the negative goal (that all positive metaphysic is a delusion) but as yet very few who go a few steps backward: one should look out over the last rungs of the ladder, but not try to stand on them, that is to say. the most advanced as yet go only far enough to free themselves from metaphysic and look back at it with an air of superiority: whereas here, no less than in the hippodrome, it is necessary to turn around in order to reach the end of the course. 21 =presumable [nature of the] victory of doubt.=--let us assume for a moment the validity of the skeptical standpoint: granted that there is no metaphysical world, and that all the metaphysical explanations of the only world we know are useless to us, how would we then contemplate men and things? [menschen und dinge]. this can be thought out and it is worth while doing so, even if the question whether anything metaphysical has ever been demonstrated by or through kant and schopenhauer, be put altogether aside. for it is, to all appearances, highly probable that men, on this point, will be, in the mass, skeptical. the question thus becomes: what sort of a notion will human society, under the influence of such a state of mind, form of itself? perhaps the _scientific demonstration_ of any metaphysical world is now so difficult that mankind will never be free from a distrust of it. and when there is formed a feeling of distrust of metaphysics, the results are, in the mass, the same as if metaphysics were refuted altogether and _could_ no longer be believed. in both cases the historical question, with regard to an unmetaphysical disposition in mankind, remains the same. 22 =disbelief in the "monumentum aere perennius".=[13]--a decided disadvantage, attending the termination of metaphysical modes of thought, is that the individual fixes his mind too attentively upon his own brief lifetime and feels no strong inducement to aid in the foundation of institutions capable of enduring for centuries: he wishes himself to gather the fruit from the tree that he plants and consequently he no longer plants those trees which require centuries of constant cultivation and are destined to afford shade to generation after generation in the future. for metaphysical views inspire the belief that in them is afforded the final sure foundation upon which henceforth the whole future of mankind may rest and be built up: the individual promotes his own salvation; when, for example, he builds a church or a monastery he is of opinion that he is doing something for the salvation of his immortal soul:--can science, as well, inspire such faith in the efficacy of her results? in actual fact, science requires doubt and distrust as her surest auxiliaries; nevertheless, the sum of the irresistible (that is all the onslaughts of skepticism, all the disintegrating effects of surviving truths) can easily become so great (as, for instance, in the case of hygienic science) as to inspire the determination to build "eternal" works upon it. at present the contrast between our excitated ephemeral existence and the tranquil repose of metaphysical epochs is too great because both are as yet in too close juxtaposition. the individual man himself now goes through too many stages of inner and outer evolution for him to venture to make a plan even for his life time alone. a perfectly modern man, indeed, who wants to build himself a house feels as if he were walling himself up alive in a mausoleum. [13] monument more enduring than brass: horace, odes iii:xxx. 23 =age of comparison.=--the less men are bound by tradition, the greater is the inner activity of motives, the greater, correspondingly, the outer restlessness, the promiscuous flow of humanity, the polyphony of strivings. who now feels any great impulse to establish himself and his posterity in a particular place? for whom, moreover, does there exist, at present, any strong tie? as all the methods of the arts were copied from one another, so were all the methods and advancements of moral codes, of manners, of civilizations.--such an age derives its significance from the fact that in it the various ideas, codes, manners and civilizations can be compared and experienced side by side; which was impossible at an earlier period in view of the localised nature of the rule of every civilization, corresponding to the limitation of all artistic effects by time and place. to-day the growth of the aesthetic feeling is decided, owing to the great number of [artistic] forms which offer themselves for comparison. the majority--those that are condemned by the method of comparison--will be allowed to die out. in the same way there is to-day taking place a selection of the forms and customs of the higher morality which can result only in the extinction of the vulgar moralities. this is the age of comparison! that is its glory--but also its pain. let us not, however shrink from this pain. rather would we comprehend the nature of the task imposed upon us by our age as adequately as we can: posterity will bless us for doing so--a posterity that knows itself to be [developed] through and above the narrow, early race-civilizations as well as the culture-civilization of comparison, but yet looks gratefully back upon both as venerable monuments of antiquity. 24 =possibility of progress.=--when a master of the old civilization (den alten cultur) vows to hold no more discussion with men who believe in progress, he is quite right. for the old civilization[14] has its greatness and its advantages behind it, and historic training forces one to acknowledge that it can never again acquire vigor: only intolerable stupidity or equally intolerable fanaticism could fail to perceive this fact. but men may consciously determine to evolve to a new civilization where formerly they evolved unconsciously and accidentally. they can now devise better conditions for the advancement of mankind, for their nourishment, training and education, they can administer the earth as an economic power, and, particularly, compare the capacities of men and select them accordingly. this new, conscious civilization is killing the other which, on the whole, has led but an unreflective animal and plant life: it is also destroying the doubt of progress itself--progress is possible. i mean: it is hasty and almost unreflective to assume that progress must _necessarily_ take place: but how can it be doubted that progress is possible? on the other hand, progress in the sense and along the lines of the old civilization is not even conceivable. if romantic fantasy employs the word progress in connection with certain aims and ends identical with those of the circumscribed primitive national civilizations, the picture presented of progress is always borrowed from the past. the idea and the image of progress thus formed are quite without originality. [14] cultur, culture, civilisation etc., but there is no exact english equivalent. 25 =private ethics and world ethics.=--since the extinction of the belief that a god guides the general destiny of the world and, notwithstanding all the contortions and windings of the path of mankind, leads it gloriously forward, men must shape oecumenical, world-embracing ends for themselves. the older ethics, namely kant's, required of the individual such a course of conduct as he wishes all men to follow. this evinces much simplicity--as if any individual could determine off hand what course of conduct would conduce to the welfare of humanity, and what course of conduct is preëminently desirable! this is a theory like that of freedom of competition, which takes it for granted that the general harmony [of things] _must_ prevail of itself in accordance with some inherent law of betterment or amelioration. it may be that a later contemplation of the needs of mankind will reveal that it is by no means desirable that all men should regulate their conduct according to the same principle; it may be best, from the standpoint of certain ends yet to be attained, that men, during long periods should regulate their conduct with reference to special, and even, in certain circumstances, evil, objects. at any rate, if mankind is not to be led astray by such a universal rule of conduct, it behooves it to attain a _knowledge of the condition of culture_ that will serve as a scientific standard of comparison in connection with cosmical ends. herein is comprised the tremendous mission of the great spirits of the next century. 26 =reaction as progress.=--occasionally harsh, powerful, impetuous, yet nevertheless backward spirits, appear, who try to conjure back some past era in the history of mankind: they serve as evidence that the new tendencies which they oppose, are not yet potent enough, that there is something lacking in them: otherwise they [the tendencies] would better withstand the effects of this conjuring back process. thus luther's reformation shows that in his century all the impulses to freedom of the spirit were still uncertain, lacking in vigor, and immature. science could not yet rear her head. indeed the whole renaissance appears but as an early spring smothered in snow. but even in the present century schopenhauer's metaphysic shows that the scientific spirit is not yet powerful enough: for the whole mediaeval christian world-standpoint (weltbetrachtung) and conception of man (mensch-empfindung)[15] once again, notwithstanding the slowly wrought destruction of all christian dogma, celebrated a resurrection in schopenhauer's doctrine. there is much science in his teaching although the science does not dominate, but, instead of it, the old, trite "metaphysical necessity." it is one of the greatest and most priceless advantages of schopenhauer's teaching that by it our feelings are temporarily forced back to those old human and cosmical standpoints to which no other path could conduct us so easily. the gain for history and justice is very great. i believe that without schopenhauer's aid it would be no easy matter for anyone now to do justice to christianity and its asiatic relatives--a thing impossible as regards the christianity that still survives. after according this great triumph to justice, after we have corrected in so essential a respect the historical point of view which the age of learning brought with it, we may begin to bear still farther onward the banner of enlightenment--a banner bearing the three names: petrarch, erasmus, voltaire. we have taken a forward step out of reaction. [15] literally man-feeling or human outlook. 27 =a substitute for religion.=--it is supposed to be a recommendation for philosophy to say of it that it provides the people with a substitute for religion. and in fact, the training of the intellect does necessitate the convenient laying out of the track of thought, since the transition from religion by way of science entails a powerful, perilous leap,--something that should be advised against. with this qualification, the recommendation referred to is a just one. at the same time, it should be further explained that the needs which religion satisfies and which science must now satisfy, are not immutable. even they can be diminished and uprooted. think, for instance, of the christian soul-need, the sighs over one's inner corruption, the anxiety regarding salvation--all notions that arise simply out of errors of the reason and require no satisfaction at all, but annihilation. a philosophy can either so affect these needs as to appease them or else put them aside altogether, for they are acquired, circumscribed needs, based upon hypotheses which those of science explode. here, for the purpose of affording the means of transition, for the sake of lightening the spirit overburdened with feeling, art can be employed to far better purpose, as these hypotheses receive far less support from art than from a metaphysical philosophy. then from art it is easier to go over to a really emancipating philosophical science. 28 =discredited words.=--away with the disgustingly over-used words optimism and pessimism! for the occasion for using them grows daily less; only drivelers now find them indispensably necessary. what earthly reason could anyone have for being an optimist unless he had a god to defend who _must_ have created the best of all possible worlds, since he is himself all goodness and perfection?--but what thinking man has now any need for the hypothesis that there is a god?--there is also no occasion whatever for a pessimistic confession of faith, unless one has a personal interest in denouncing the advocate of god, the theologian or the theological philosopher, and maintaining the counter proposition that evil reigns, that wretchedness is more potent than joy, that the world is a piece of botch work, that phenomenon (erscheinung) is but the manifestation of some evil spirit. but who bothers his head about the theologians any more--except the theologians themselves? apart from all theology and its antagonism, it is manifest that the world is neither good nor bad, (to say nothing about its being the best or the worst) and that these ideas of "good" and "bad" have significance only in relation to men, indeed, are without significance at all, in view of the sense in which they are usually employed. the contemptuous and the eulogistic point of view must, in every case, be repudiated. 29 =intoxicated by the perfume of flowers.=--the ship of humanity, it is thought, acquires an ever deeper draught the more it is laden. it is believed that the more profoundly man thinks, the more exquisitely he feels, the higher the standard he sets for himself, the greater his distance from the other animals--the more he appears as a genius (genie) among animals--the nearer he gets to the true nature of the world and to comprehension thereof: this, indeed, he really does through science, but he thinks he does it far more adequately through his religions and arts. these are, certainly, a blossoming of the world, but not, therefore, _nearer the roots of the world_ than is the stalk. one cannot learn best from it the nature of the world, although nearly everyone thinks so. _error_ has made men so deep, sensitive and imaginative in order to bring forth such flowers as religions and arts. pure apprehension would be unable to do that. whoever should disclose to us the essence of the world would be undeceiving us most cruelly. not the world as thing-in-itself but the world as idea[16] (as error) is rich in portent, deep, wonderful, carrying happiness and unhappiness in its womb. this result leads to a philosophy of world negation: which, at any rate, can be as well combined with a practical world affirmation as with its opposite. [16] vorstellung: this word sometimes corresponds to the english word "idea", at others to "conception" or "notion." 30 =evil habits in reaching conclusions.=--the most usual erroneous conclusions of men are these: a thing[17] exists, therefore it is right: here from capacity to live is deduced fitness, from fitness, is deduced justification. so also: an opinion gives happiness, therefore it is the true one, its effect is good, therefore it is itself good and true. here is predicated of the effect that it gives happiness, that it is good in the sense of utility, and there is likewise predicated of the cause that it is good, but good in the sense of logical validity. conversely, the proposition would run: a thing[17] cannot attain success, cannot maintain itself, therefore it is evil: a belief troubles [the believer], occasions pain, therefore it is false. the free spirit, who is sensible of the defect in this method of reaching conclusions and has had to suffer its consequences, often succumbs to the temptation to come to the very opposite conclusions (which, in general, are, of course, equally erroneous): a thing cannot maintain itself: therefore it is good; a belief is troublesome, therefore it is true. [17] sache, thing but not in the sense of ding. sache is of very indefinite application (res). 31 =the illogical is necessary.=--among the things which can bring a thinker to distraction is the knowledge that the illogical is necessary to mankind and that from the illogical springs much that is good. the illogical is so imbedded in the passions, in language, in art, in religion and, above all, in everything that imparts value to life that it cannot be taken away without irreparably injuring those beautiful things. only men of the utmost simplicity can believe that the nature man knows can be changed into a purely logical nature. yet were there steps affording approach to this goal, how utterly everything would be lost on the way! even the most rational man needs nature again, from time to time, that is, his illogical fundamental relation (grundstellung) to all things. 32 =being unjust is essential.=--all judgments of the value of life are illogically developed and therefore unjust. the vice of the judgment consists, first, in the way in which the subject matter comes under observation, that is, very incompletely; secondly in the way in which the total is summed up; and, thirdly, in the fact that each single item in the totality of the subject matter is itself the result of defective perception, and this from absolute necessity. no practical knowledge of a man, for example, stood he never so near to us, can be complete--so that we could have a logical right to form a total estimate of him; all estimates are summary and must be so. then the standard by which we measure, (our being) is not an immutable quantity; we have moods and variations, and yet we should know ourselves as an invariable standard before we undertake to establish the nature of the relation of any thing (sache) to ourselves. perhaps it will follow from all this that one should form no judgments whatever; if one could but merely _live_ without having to form estimates, without aversion and without partiality!--for everything most abhorred is closely connected with an estimate, as well as every strongest partiality. an inclination towards a thing, or from a thing, without an accompanying feeling that the beneficial is desired and the pernicious contemned, an inclination without a sort of experiential estimation of the desirability of an end, does not exist in man. we are primordially illogical and hence unjust beings _and can recognise this fact_: this is one of the greatest and most baffling discords of existence. 33 =error respecting living for the sake of living essential.=--every belief in the value and worthiness of life rests upon defective thinking; it is for this reason alone possible that sympathy with the general life and suffering of mankind is so imperfectly developed in the individual. even exceptional men, who can think beyond their own personalities, do not have this general life in view, but isolated portions of it. if one is capable of fixing his observation upon exceptional cases, i mean upon highly endowed individuals and pure souled beings, if their development is taken as the true end of world-evolution and if joy be felt in their existence, then it is possible to believe in the value of life, because in that case the rest of humanity is overlooked: hence we have here defective thinking. so, too, it is even if all mankind be taken into consideration, and one species only of impulses (the less egoistic) brought under review and those, in consideration of the other impulses, exalted: then something could still be hoped of mankind in the mass and to that extent there could exist belief in the value of life: here, again, as a result of defective thinking. whatever attitude, thus, one may assume, one is, as a result of this attitude, an exception among mankind. now, the great majority of mankind endure life without any great protest, and believe, to this extent, in the value of existence, but that is because each individual decides and determines alone, and never comes out of his own personality like these exceptions: everything outside of the personal has no existence for them or at the utmost is observed as but a faint shadow. consequently the value of life for the generality of mankind consists simply in the fact that the individual attaches more importance to himself than he does to the world. the great lack of imagination from which he suffers is responsible for his inability to enter into the feelings of beings other than himself, and hence his sympathy with their fate and suffering is of the slightest possible description. on the other hand, whosoever really _could_ sympathise, necessarily doubts the value of life; were it possible for him to sum up and to feel in himself the total consciousness of mankind, he would collapse with a malediction against existence,--for mankind is, in the mass, without a goal, and hence man cannot find, in the contemplation of his whole course, anything to serve him as a mainstay and a comfort, but rather a reason to despair. if he looks beyond the things that immediately engage him to the final aimlessness of humanity, his own conduct assumes in his eyes the character of a frittering away. to feel oneself, however, as humanity (not alone as an individual) frittered away exactly as we see the stray leaves frittered away by nature, is a feeling transcending all feeling. but who is capable of it? only a poet, certainly: and poets always know how to console themselves. 34 =for tranquility.=--but will not our philosophy become thus a tragedy? will not truth prove the enemy of life, of betterment? a question seems to weigh upon our tongue and yet will not put itself into words: whether one _can_ knowingly remain in the domain of the untruthful? or, if one _must_, whether, then, death would not be preferable? for there is no longer any ought (sollen), morality; so far as it is involved "ought," is, through our point of view, as utterly annihilated as religion. our knowledge can permit only pleasure and pain, benefit and injury, to subsist as motives. but how can these motives be distinguished from the desire for truth? even they rest upon error (in so far, as already stated, partiality and dislike and their very inaccurate estimates palpably modify our pleasure and our pain). the whole of human life is deeply involved in _untruth_. the individual cannot extricate it from this pit without thereby fundamentally clashing with his whole past, without finding his present motives of conduct, (as that of honor) illegitimate, and without opposing scorn and contempt to the ambitions which prompt one to have regard for the future and for one's happiness in the future. is it true, does there, then, remain but one way of thinking, which, as a personal consequence brings in its train despair, and as a theoretical [consequence brings in its train] a philosophy of decay, disintegration, self annihilation? i believe the deciding influence, as regards the after-effect of knowledge, will be the _temperament_ of a man; i can, in addition to this after-effect just mentioned, suppose another, by means of which a much simpler life, and one freer from disturbances than the present, could be lived; so that at first the old motives of vehement passion might still have strength, owing to hereditary habit, but they would gradually grow weaker under the influence of purifying knowledge. a man would live, at last, both among men and unto himself, as in the natural state, without praise, reproach, competition, feasting one's eyes, as if it were a play, upon much that formerly inspired dread. one would be rid of the strenuous element, and would no longer feel the goad of the reflection that man is not even [as much as] nature, nor more than nature. to be sure, this requires, as already stated, a good temperament, a fortified, gentle and naturally cheerful soul, a disposition that has no need to be on its guard against its own eccentricities and sudden outbreaks and that in its utterances manifests neither sullenness nor a snarling tone--those familiar, disagreeable characteristics of old dogs and old men that have been a long time chained up. rather must a man, from whom the ordinary bondages of life have fallen away to so great an extent, so do that he only lives on in order to grow continually in knowledge, and to learn to resign, without envy and without disappointment, much, yes nearly everything, that has value in the eyes of men. he must be content with such a free, fearless soaring above men, manners, laws and traditional estimates of things, as the most desirable of all situations. he will freely share the joy of being in such a situation, and he has, perhaps, nothing else to share--in which renunciation and self-denial really most consist. but if more is asked of him, he will, with a benevolent shake of the head, refer to his brother, the free man of fact, and will, perhaps, not dissemble a little contempt: for, as regards his "freedom," thereby hangs a tale.[18] [18] den mit dessen "freiheit" hat es eine eigene bewandtniss. history of the moral feelings. 35 =advantages of psychological observation.=--that reflection regarding the human, all-too-human--or as the learned jargon is: psychological observation--is among the means whereby the burden of life can be made lighter, that practice in this art affords presence of mind in difficult situations and entertainment amid a wearisome environment, aye, that maxims may be culled in the thorniest and least pleasing paths of life and invigoration thereby obtained: this much was believed, was known--in former centuries. why was this forgotten in our own century, during which, at least in germany, yes in europe, poverty as regards psychological observation would have been manifest in many ways had there been anyone to whom this poverty could have manifested itself. not only in the novel, in the romance, in philosophical standpoints--these are the works of exceptional men; still more in the state of opinion regarding public events and personages; above all in general society, which says much about men but nothing whatever about man, there is totally lacking the art of psychological analysis and synthesis. but why is the richest and most harmless source of entertainment thus allowed to run to waste? why is the greatest master of the psychological maxim no longer read?--for, with no exaggeration whatever be it said: the educated person in europe who has read la rochefoucauld and his intellectual and artistic affinities is very hard to find; still harder, the person who knows them and does not disparage them. apparently, too, this unusual reader takes far less pleasure in them than the form adopted by these artists should afford him: for the subtlest mind cannot adequately appreciate the art of maxim-making unless it has had training in it, unless it has competed in it. without such practical acquaintance, one is apt to look upon this making and forming as a much easier thing than it really is; one is not keenly enough alive to the felicity and the charm of success. hence present day readers of maxims have but a moderate, tempered pleasure in them, scarcely, indeed, a true perception of their merit, so that their experiences are about the same as those of the average beholder of cameos: people who praise because they cannot appreciate, and are very ready to admire and still readier to turn away. 36 =objection.=--or is there a counter-proposition to the dictum that psychological observation is one of the means of consoling, lightening, charming existence? have enough of the unpleasant effects of this art been experienced to justify the person striving for culture in turning his regard away from it? in all truth, a certain blind faith in the goodness of human nature, an implanted distaste for any disparagement of human concerns, a sort of shamefacedness at the nakedness of the soul, may be far more desirable things in the general happiness of a man, than this only occasionally advantageous quality of psychological sharpsightedness; and perhaps belief in the good, in virtuous men and actions, in a plenitude of disinterested benevolence has been more productive of good in the world of men in so far as it has made men less distrustful. if plutarch's heroes are enthusiastically imitated and a reluctance is experienced to looking too critically into the motives of their actions, not the knowledge but the welfare of human society is promoted thereby: psychological error and above all obtuseness in regard to it, help human nature forward, whereas knowledge of the truth is more promoted by means of the stimulating strength of a hypothesis; as la rochefoucauld in the first edition of his "sentences and moral maxims" has expressed it: "what the world calls virtue is ordinarily but a phantom created by the passions, and to which we give a good name in order to do whatever we please with impunity." la rochefoucauld and those other french masters of soul-searching (to the number of whom has lately been added a german, the author of "psychological observations") are like expert marksmen who again and again hit the black spot--but it is the black spot in human nature. their art inspires amazement, but finally some spectator, inspired, not by the scientific spirit but by a humanitarian feeling, execrates an art that seems to implant in the soul a taste for belittling and impeaching mankind. 37 =nevertheless.=--the matter therefore, as regards pro and con, stands thus: in the present state of philosophy an awakening of the moral observation is essential. the repulsive aspect of psychological dissection, with the knife and tweezers entailed by the process, can no longer be spared humanity. such is the imperative duty of any science that investigates the origin and history of the so-called moral feelings and which, in its progress, is called upon to posit and to solve advanced social problems:--the older philosophy does not recognize the newer at all and, through paltry evasions, has always gone astray in the investigation of the origin and history of human estimates (werthschätzungen). with what results may now be very clearly perceived, since it has been shown by many examples, how the errors of the greatest philosophers have their origin in a false explanation of certain human actions and feelings; how upon the foundation of an erroneous analysis (for example, of the so called disinterested actions), a false ethic is reared, to support which religion and like mythological monstrosities are called in, until finally the shades of these troubled spirits collapse in physics and in the comprehensive world point of view. but if it be established that superficiality of psychological observation has heretofore set the most dangerous snares for human judgment and deduction, and will continue to do so, all the greater need is there of that steady continuance of labor that never wearies putting stone upon stone, little stone upon little stone; all the greater need is there of a courage that is not ashamed of such humble labor and that will oppose persistence, to all contempt. it is, finally, also true that countless single observations concerning the human, all-too-human, have been first made and uttered in circles accustomed, not to furnish matter for scientific knowledge, but for intellectual pleasure-seeking; and the original home atmosphere--a very seductive atmosphere--of the moral maxim has almost inextricably interpenetrated the entire species, so that the scientific man involuntarily manifests a sort of mistrust of this species and of its seriousness. but it is sufficient to point to the consequences: for already it is becoming evident that events of the most portentous nature are developing in the domain of psychological observation. what is the leading conclusion arrived at by one of the subtlest and calmest of thinkers, the author of the work "concerning the origin of the moral feelings", as a result of his thorough and incisive analysis of human conduct? "the moral man," he says, "stands no nearer the knowable (metaphysical) world than the physical man."[19] this dictum, grown hard and cutting beneath the hammer-blow of historical knowledge, can some day, perhaps, in some future or other, serve as the axe that will be laid to the root of the "metaphysical necessities" of men--whether more to the blessing than to the banning of universal well being who can say?--but in any event a dictum fraught with the most momentous consequences, fruitful and fearful at once, and confronting the world in the two faced way characteristic of all great facts. [19] "der moralische mensch, sagt er, steht der intelligiblen (metaphysischen) welt nicht näher, als der physische mensch." 38 =to what extent useful.=--therefore, whether psychological observation is more an advantage than a disadvantage to mankind may always remain undetermined: but there is no doubt that it is necessary, because science can no longer dispense with it. science, however, recognizes no considerations of ultimate goals or ends any more than nature does; but as the latter duly matures things of the highest fitness for certain ends without any intention of doing it, so will true science, doing with ideas what nature does with matter,[20] promote the purposes and the welfare of humanity, (as occasion may afford, and in many ways) and attain fitness [to ends]--but likewise without having intended it. [20] als die nachahmung der natur in begriffen, literally: "as the counterfeit of nature in (regard to) ideas." he to whom the atmospheric conditions of such a prospect are too wintry, has too little fire in him: let him look about him, and he will become sensible of maladies requiring an icy air, and of people who are so "kneaded together" out of ardor and intellect that they can scarcely find anywhere an atmosphere too cold and cutting for them. moreover: as too serious individuals and nations stand in need of trivial relaxations; as others, too volatile and excitable require onerous, weighty ordeals to render them entirely healthy: should not we, the more intellectual men of this age, which is swept more and more by conflagrations, catch up every cooling and extinguishing appliance we can find that we may always remain as self contained, steady and calm as we are now, and thereby perhaps serve this age as its mirror and self reflector, when the occasion arises? 39 =the fable of discretionary freedom.=--the history of the feelings, on the basis of which we make everyone responsible, hence, the so-called moral feelings, is traceable in the following leading phases. at first single actions are termed good or bad without any reference to their motive, but solely because of the utilitarian or prejudicial consequences they have for the community. in time, however, the origin of these designations is forgotten [but] it is imagined that action in itself, without reference to its consequences, contains the property "good" or "bad": with the same error according to which language designates the stone itself as hard[ness] the tree itself as green[ness]--for the reason, therefore, that what is a consequence is comprehended as a cause. accordingly, the good[ness] or bad[ness] is incorporated into the motive and [any] deed by itself is regarded as morally ambiguous. a step further is taken, and the predication good or bad is no longer made of the particular motives but of the entire nature of a man, out of which motive grows as grow the plants out of the soil. thus man is successively made responsible for his [particular] acts, then for his [course of] conduct, then for his motives and finally for his nature. now, at last, is it discovered that this nature, even, cannot be responsible, inasmuch as it is only and wholly a necessary consequence and is synthesised out of the elements and influence of past and present things: therefore, that man is to be made responsible for nothing, neither for his nature, nor his motives, nor his [course of] conduct nor his [particular] acts. by this [process] is gained the knowledge that the history of moral estimates is the history of error, of the error of responsibility: as is whatever rests upon the error of the freedom of the will. schopenhauer concluded just the other way, thus: since certain actions bring depression ("consciousness of guilt") in their train, there must, then, exist responsibility, for there would be no basis for this depression at hand if all man's affairs did not follow their course of necessity--as they do, indeed, according to the opinion of this philosopher, follow their course--but man himself, subject to the same necessity, would be just the man that he is--which schopenhauer denies. from the fact of such depression schopenhauer believes himself able to prove a freedom which man in some way must have had, not indeed in regard to his actions but in regard to his nature: freedom, therefore, to be thus and so, not to act thus and so. out of the _esse_, the sphere of freedom and responsibility, follows, according to his opinion, the _operari_, the spheres of invariable causation, necessity and irresponsibility. this depression, indeed, is due apparently to the _operari_--in so far as it be delusive--but in truth to whatever _esse_ be the deed of a free will, the basic cause of the existence of an individual: [in order to] let man become whatever he wills to become, his [to] will (wollen) must precede his existence.--here, apart from the absurdity of the statement just made, there is drawn the wrong inference that the fact of the depression explains its character, the rational admissibility of it: from such a wrong inference does schopenhauer first come to his fantastic consequent of the so called discretionary freedom (intelligibeln freiheit). (for the origin of this fabulous entity plato and kant are equally responsible). but depression after the act does not need to be rational: indeed, it is certainly not so at all, for it rests upon the erroneous assumption that the act need not necessarily have come to pass. therefore: only because man deems himself free, but not because he is free, does he experience remorse and the stings of conscience.--moreover, this depression is something that can be grown out of; in many men it is not present at all as a consequence of acts which inspire it in many other men. it is a very varying thing and one closely connected with the development of custom and civilization, and perhaps manifest only during a relatively brief period of the world's history.--no one is responsible for his acts, no one for his nature; to judge is tantamount to being unjust. this applies as well when the individual judges himself. the proposition is as clear as sunlight, and yet here everyone prefers to go back to darkness and untruth: for fear of the consequences. 40 =above animal.=--the beast in us must be wheedled: ethic is necessary, that we may not be torn to pieces. without the errors involved in the assumptions of ethics, man would have remained an animal. thus has he taken himself as something higher and imposed rigid laws upon himself. he feels hatred, consequently, for states approximating the animal: whence the former contempt for the slave as a not-yet-man, as a thing, is to be explained. 41 =unalterable character.=--that character is unalterable is not, in the strict sense, true; rather is this favorite proposition valid only to the extent that during the brief life period of a man the potent new motives can not, usually, press down hard enough to obliterate the lines imprinted by ages. could we conceive of a man eighty thousand years old, we should have in him an absolutely alterable character; so that the maturities of successive, varying individuals would develop in him. the shortness of human life leads to many erroneous assertions concerning the qualities of man. 42 =classification of enjoyments and ethic.=--the once accepted comparative classification of enjoyments, according to which an inferior, higher, highest egoism may crave one or another enjoyment, now decides as to ethical status or unethical status. a lower enjoyment (for example, sensual pleasure) preferred to a more highly esteemed one (for example, health) rates as unethical, as does welfare preferred to freedom. the comparative classification of enjoyments is not, however, alike or the same at all periods; when anyone demands satisfaction of the law, he is, from the point of view of an earlier civilization, moral, from that of the present, non-moral. "unethical" indicates, therefore, that a man is not sufficiently sensible to the higher, finer impulses which the present civilization has brought with it, or is not sensible to them at all; it indicates backwardness, but only from the point of view of the contemporary degree of distinction.--the comparative classification of enjoyments itself is not determined according to absolute ethics; but after each new ethical adjustment, it is then decided whether conduct be ethical or the reverse. 43 =inhuman men as survivals.=--men who are now inhuman must serve us as surviving specimens of earlier civilizations. the mountain height of humanity here reveals its lower formations, which might otherwise remain hidden from view. there are surviving specimens of humanity whose brains through the vicissitudes of heredity, have escaped proper development. they show us what we all were and thus appal us; but they are as little responsible on this account as is a piece of granite for being granite. in our own brains there must be courses and windings corresponding to such characters, just as in the forms of some human organs there survive traces of fishhood. but these courses and windings are no longer the bed in which flows the stream of our feeling. 44 =gratitude and revenge.=--the reason the powerful man is grateful is this. his benefactor has, through his benefaction, invaded the domain of the powerful man and established himself on an equal footing: the powerful man in turn invades the domain of the benefactor and gets satisfaction through the act of gratitude. it is a mild form of revenge. by not obtaining the satisfaction of gratitude the powerful would have shown himself powerless and have ranked as such thenceforward. hence every society of the good, that is to say, of the powerful originally, places gratitude among the first of duties.--swift has added the dictum that man is grateful in the same degree that he is revengeful. 45 =two-fold historical origin of good and evil.=--the notion of good and bad has a two-fold historical origin: namely, first, in the spirit of ruling races and castes. whoever has power to requite good with good and evil with evil and actually brings requital, (that is, is grateful and revengeful) acquires the name of being good; whoever is powerless and cannot requite is called bad. a man belongs, as a good individual, to the "good" of a community, who have a feeling in common, because all the individuals are allied with one another through the requiting sentiment. a man belongs, as a bad individual, to the "bad," to a mass of subjugated, powerless men who have no feeling in common. the good are a caste, the bad are a quantity, like dust. good and bad is, for a considerable period, tantamount to noble and servile, master and slave. on the other hand an enemy is not looked upon as bad: he can requite. the trojan and the greek are in homer both good. not he, who does no harm, but he who is despised, is deemed bad. in the community of the good individuals [the quality of] good[ness] is inherited; it is impossible for a bad individual to grow from such a rich soil. if, notwithstanding, one of the good individuals does something unworthy of his goodness, recourse is had to exorcism; thus the guilt is ascribed to a deity, the while it is declared that this deity bewitched the good man into madness and blindness.--second, in the spirit of the subjugated, the powerless. here every other man is, to the individual, hostile, inconsiderate, greedy, inhuman, avaricious, be he noble or servile; bad is the characteristic term for man, for every living being, indeed, that is recognized at all, even for a god: human, divine, these notions are tantamount to devilish, bad. manifestations of goodness, sympathy, helpfulness, are regarded with anxiety as trickiness, preludes to an evil end, deception, subtlety, in short, as refined badness. with such a predisposition in individuals, a feeling in common can scarcely arise at all, at most only the rudest form of it: so that everywhere that this conception of good and evil prevails, the destruction of the individuals, their race and nation, is imminent.--our existing morality has developed upon the foundation laid by ruling races and castes. 46 =sympathy greater than suffering.=--there are circumstances in which sympathy is stronger than the suffering itself. we feel more pain, for instance, when one of our friends becomes guilty of a reprehensible action than if we had done the deed ourselves. we once, that is, had more faith in the purity of his character than he had himself. hence our love for him, (apparently because of this very faith) is stronger than is his own love for himself. if, indeed, his egoism really suffers more, as a result, than our egoism, inasmuch as he must take the consequences of his fault to a greater extent than ourselves, nevertheless, the unegoistic--this word is not to be taken too strictly, but simply as a modified form of expression--in us is more affected by his guilt than the unegoistic in him. 47 =hypochondria.=--there are people who, from sympathy and anxiety for others become hypochondriacal. the resulting form of compassion is nothing else than sickness. so, also, is there a christian hypochondria, from which those singular, religiously agitated people suffer who place always before their eyes the suffering and death of christ. 48 =economy of blessings.=--the advantageous and the pleasing, as the healthiest growths and powers in the intercourse of men, are such precious treasures that it is much to be wished the use made of these balsamic means were as economical as possible: but this is impossible. economy in the use of blessings is the dream of the craziest of utopians. 49 =well-wishing.=--among the small, but infinitely plentiful and therefore very potent things to which science must pay more attention than to the great, uncommon things, well-wishing[21] must be reckoned; i mean those manifestations of friendly disposition in intercourse, that laughter of the eye, every hand pressure, every courtesy from which, in general, every human act gets its quality. every teacher, every functionary adds this element as a gratuity to whatever he does as a duty; it is the perpetual well spring of humanity, like the waves of light in which everything grows; thus, in the narrowest circles, within the family, life blooms and flowers only through this kind feeling. the cheerfulness, friendliness and kindness of a heart are unfailing sources of unegoistic impulse and have made far more for civilization than those other more noised manifestations of it that are styled sympathy, benevolence and sacrifice. but it is customary to depreciate these little tokens of kindly feeling, and, indeed, there is not much of the unegoistic in them. the sum of these little doses is very great, nevertheless; their combined strength is of the greatest of strengths.--thus, too, much more happiness is to be found in the world than gloomy eyes discover: that is, if the calculation be just, and all these pleasing moments in which every day, even the meanest human life, is rich, be not forgotten. [21] wohl-wollen, kind feeling. it stands here for benevolence but not benevolence in the restricted sense of the word now prevailing. 50 =the desire to inspire compassion.=--la rochefoucauld, in the most notable part of his self portraiture (first printed 1658) reaches the vital spot of truth when he warns all those endowed with reason to be on their guard against compassion, when he advises that this sentiment be left to men of the masses who stand in need of the promptings of the emotions (since they are not guided by reason) to induce them to give aid to the suffering and to be of service in misfortune: whereas compassion, in his (and plato's) view, deprives the heart of strength. to be sure, sympathy should be manifested but men should take care not to feel it; for the unfortunate are rendered so dull that the manifestation of sympathy affords them the greatest happiness in the world.--perhaps a more effectual warning against this compassion can be given if this need of the unfortunate be considered not simply as stupidity and intellectual weakness, not as a sort of distraction of the spirit entailed by misfortune itself (and thus, indeed, does la rochefoucauld seem to view it) but as something quite different and more momentous. let note be taken of children who cry and scream in order to be compassionated and who, therefore, await the moment when their condition will be observed; come into contact with the sick and the oppressed in spirit and try to ascertain if the wailing and sighing, the posturing and posing of misfortune do not have as end and aim the causing of pain to the beholder: the sympathy which each beholder manifests is a consolation to the weak and suffering only in as much as they are made to perceive that at least they have the power, notwithstanding all their weakness, to inflict pain. the unfortunate experiences a species of joy in the sense of superiority which the manifestation of sympathy entails; his imagination is exalted; he is always strong enough, then, to cause the world pain. thus is the thirst for sympathy a thirst for self enjoyment and at the expense of one's fellow creatures: it shows man in the whole ruthlessness of his own dear self: not in his mere "dullness" as la rochefoucauld thinks.--in social conversation three fourths of all the questions are asked, and three fourths of all the replies are made in order to inflict some little pain; that is why so many people crave social intercourse: it gives them a sense of their power. in these countless but very small doses in which the quality of badness is administered it proves a potent stimulant of life: to the same extent that well wishing--(wohl-wollen) distributed through the world in like manner, is one of the ever ready restoratives.--but will many honorable people be found to admit that there is any pleasure in administering pain? that entertainment--and rare entertainment--is not seldom found in causing others, at least in thought, some pain, and in raking them with the small shot of wickedness? the majority are too ignoble and a few are too good to know anything of this pudendum: the latter may, consequently, be prompt to deny that prosper mérimée is right when he says: "know, also, that nothing is more common than to do wrong for the pleasure of doing it." 51 =how appearance becomes reality.=--the actor cannot, at last, refrain, even in moments of the deepest pain, from thinking of the effect produced by his deportment and by his surroundings--for example, even at the funeral of his own child: he will weep at his own sorrow and its manifestations as though he were his own audience. the hypocrite who always plays one and the same part, finally ceases to be a hypocrite; as in the case of priests who, when young men, are always, either consciously or unconsciously, hypocrites, and finally become naturally and then really, without affectation, mere priests: or if the father does not carry it to this extent, the son, who inherits his father's calling and gets the advantage of the paternal progress, does. when anyone, during a long period, and persistently, wishes to appear something, it will at last prove difficult for him to be anything else. the calling of almost every man, even of the artist, begins with hypocrisy, with an imitation of deportment, with a copying of the effective in manner. he who always wears the mask of a friendly man must at last gain a power over friendliness of disposition, without which the expression itself of friendliness is not to be gained--and finally friendliness of disposition gains the ascendancy over him--he _is_ benevolent. 52 =the point of honor in deception.=--in all great deceivers one characteristic is prominent, to which they owe their power. in the very act of deception, amid all the accompaniments, the agitation in the voice, the expression, the bearing, in the crisis of the scene, there comes over them a belief in themselves; this it is that acts so effectively and irresistibly upon the beholders. founders of religions differ from such great deceivers in that they never come out of this state of self deception, or else they have, very rarely, a few moments of enlightenment in which they are overcome by doubt; generally, however, they soothe themselves by ascribing such moments of enlightenment to the evil adversary. self deception must exist that both classes of deceivers may attain far reaching results. for men believe in the truth of all that is manifestly believed with due implicitness by others. 53 =presumed degrees of truth.=--one of the most usual errors of deduction is: because someone truly and openly is against us, therefore he speaks the truth. hence the child has faith in the judgments of its elders, the christian in the assertions of the founder of the church. so, too, it will not be admitted that all for which men sacrificed life and happiness in former centuries was nothing but delusion: perhaps it is alleged these things were degrees of truth. but what is really meant is that, if a person sincerely believes a thing and has fought and died for his faith, it would be too _unjust_ if only delusion had inspired him. such a state of affairs seems to contradict eternal justice. for that reason the heart of a sensitive man pronounces against his head the judgment: between moral conduct and intellectual insight there must always exist an inherent connection. it is, unfortunately, otherwise: for there is no eternal justice. 54 =falsehood.=--why do men, as a rule, speak the truth in the ordinary affairs of life? certainly not for the reason that a god has forbidden lying. but because first: it is more convenient, as falsehood entails invention, make-believe and recollection (wherefore swift says that whoever invents a lie seldom realises the heavy burden he takes up: he must, namely, for every lie that he tells, insert twenty more). therefore, because in plain ordinary relations of life it is expedient to say without circumlocution: i want this, i have done this, and the like; therefore, because the way of freedom and certainty is surer than that of ruse.--but if it happens that a child is brought up in sinister domestic circumstances, it will then indulge in falsehood as matter of course, and involuntarily say anything its own interests may prompt: an inclination for truth, an aversion to falsehood, is quite foreign and uncongenial to it, and hence it lies in all innocence. 55 =ethic discredited for faith's sake.=--no power can sustain itself when it is represented by mere humbugs: the catholic church may possess ever so many "worldly" sources of strength, but its true might is comprised in those still numberless priestly natures who make their lives stern and strenuous and whose looks and emaciated bodies are eloquent of night vigils, fasts, ardent prayer, perhaps even of whip lashes: these things make men tremble and cause them anxiety: what, if it be really imperative to live thus? this is the dreadful question which their aspect occasions. as they spread this doubt, they lay anew the prop of their power: even the free thinkers dare not oppose such disinterestedness with severe truth and cry: "thou deceived one, deceive not!"--only the difference of standpoint separates them from him: no difference in goodness or badness. but things we cannot accomplish ourselves, we are apt to criticise unfairly. thus we are told of the cunning and perverted acts of the jesuits, but we overlook the self mastery that each jesuit imposes upon himself and also the fact that the easy life which the jesuit manuals advocate is for the benefit, not of the jesuits but the laity. indeed, it may be questioned whether we enlightened ones would become equally competent workers as the result of similar tactics and organization, and equally worthy of admiration as the result of self mastery, indefatigable industry and devotion. 56 =victory of knowledge over radical evil.=--it proves a material gain to him who would attain knowledge to have had during a considerable period the idea that mankind is a radically bad and perverted thing: it is a false idea, as is its opposite, but it long held sway and its roots have reached down even to ourselves and our present world. in order to understand _ourselves_ we must understand _it_; but in order to attain a loftier height we must step above it. we then perceive that there is no such thing as sin in the metaphysical sense: but also, in the same sense, no such thing as virtue; that this whole domain of ethical notions is one of constant variation; that there are higher and deeper conceptions of good and evil, moral and immoral. whoever desires no more of things than knowledge of them attains speedily to peace of mind and will at most err through lack of knowledge, but scarcely through eagerness for knowledge (or through sin, as the world calls it). he will not ask that eagerness for knowledge be interdicted and rooted out; but his single, all powerful ambition to _know_ as thoroughly and as fully as possible, will soothe him and moderate all that is strenuous in his circumstances. moreover, he is now rid of a number of disturbing notions; he is no longer beguiled by such words as hell-pain, sinfulness, unworthiness: he sees in them merely the flitting shadow pictures of false views of life and of the world. 57 =ethic as man's self-analysis.=--a good author, whose heart is really in his work, wishes that someone would arise and wholly refute him if only thereby his subject be wholly clarified and made plain. the maid in love wishes that she could attest the fidelity of her own passion through the faithlessness of her beloved. the soldier wishes to sacrifice his life on the field of his fatherland's victory: for in the victory of his fatherland his highest end is attained. the mother gives her child what she deprives herself of--sleep, the best nourishment and, in certain circumstances, her health, her self.--but are all these acts unegoistic? are these moral deeds miracles because they are, in schopenhauer's phrase "impossible and yet accomplished"? is it not evident that in all four cases man loves one part of himself, (a thought, a longing, an experience) more than he loves another part of himself? that he thus analyses his being and sacrifices one part of it to another part? is this essentially different from the behavior of the obstinate man who says "i would rather be shot than go a step out of my way for this fellow"?--preference for something (wish, impulse, longing) is present in all four instances: to yield to it, with all its consequences, is not "unegoistic."--in the domain of the ethical man conducts himself not as individuum but as dividuum. 58 =what can be promised.=--actions can be promised, but not feelings, for these are involuntary. whoever promises somebody to love him always, or to hate him always, or to be ever true to him, promises something that it is out of his power to bestow. but he really can promise such courses of conduct as are the ordinary accompaniments of love, of hate, of fidelity, but which may also have their source in motives quite different: for various ways and motives lead to the same conduct. the promise to love someone always, means, consequently: as long as i love you, i will manifest the deportment of love; but if i cease to love you my deportment, although from some other motive, will be just the same, so that to the people about us it will seem as if my love remained unchanged.--hence it is the continuance of the deportment of love that is promised in every instance in which eternal love (provided no element of self deception be involved) is sworn. 59 =intellect and ethic.=--one must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one makes. one must have a strong imagination in order to feel sympathy. so closely is ethics connected with intellectual capacity. 60 =desire for vengeance and vengeance itself.=--to meditate revenge and attain it is tantamount to an attack of fever, that passes away: but to meditate revenge without possessing the strength or courage to attain it is tantamount to suffering from a chronic malady, or poisoning of body and soul. ethics, which takes only the motive into account, rates both cases alike: people generally estimate the first case as the worst (because of the consequences which the deed of vengeance may entail). both views are short sighted. 61 =ability to wait.=--ability to wait is so hard to acquire that great poets have not disdained to make inability to wait the central motive of their poems. so shakespeare in othello, sophocles in ajax, whose suicide would not have seemed to him so imperative had he only been able to cool his ardor for a day, as the oracle foreboded: apparently he would then have repulsed somewhat the fearful whispers of distracted thought and have said to himself: who has not already, in my situation, mistaken a sheep for a hero? is it so extraordinary a thing? on the contrary it is something universally human: ajax should thus have soothed himself. passion will not wait: the tragic element in the lives of great men does not generally consist in their conflict with time and the inferiority of their fellowmen but in their inability to put off their work a year or two: they cannot wait.--in all duels, the friends who advise have but to ascertain if the principals can wait: if this be not possible, a duel is rational inasmuch as each of the combatants may say: "either i continue to live and the other dies instantly, or vice versa." to wait in such circumstances would be equivalent to the frightful martyrdom of enduring dishonor in the presence of him responsible for the dishonor: and this can easily cost more anguish than life is worth. 62 =glutting revenge.=--coarse men, who feel a sense of injury, are in the habit of rating the extent of their injury as high as possible and of stating the occasion of it in greatly exaggerated language, in order to be able to feast themselves on the sentiments of hatred and revenge thus aroused. 63 =value of disparagement.=--not a few, perhaps the majority of men, find it necessary, in order to retain their self esteem and a certain uprightness in conduct, to mentally disparage and belittle all the people they know. but as the inferior natures are in the majority and as a great deal depends upon whether they retain or lose this uprightness, so-64 =the man in a rage.=--we should be on our guard against the man who is enraged against us, as against one who has attempted our life, for the fact that we still live consists solely in the inability to kill: were looks sufficient, it would have been all up with us long since. to reduce anyone to silence by physical manifestations of savagery or by a terrorizing process is a relic of under civilization. so, too, that cold look which great personages cast upon their servitors is a remnant of the caste distinction between man and man; a specimen of rude antiquity: women, the conservers of the old, have maintained this survival, too, more perfectly than men. 65 =whither honesty may lead.=--someone once had the bad habit of expressing himself upon occasion, and with perfect honesty, on the subject of the motives of his conduct, which were as good or as bad as the motives of all men. he aroused first disfavor, then suspicion, became gradually of ill repute and was pronounced a person of whom society should beware, until at last the law took note of such a perverted being for reasons which usually have no weight with it or to which it closes its eyes. lack of taciturnity concerning what is universally held secret, and an irresponsible predisposition to see what no one wants to see--oneself--brought him to prison and to early death. 66 =punishable, not punished.=--our crime against criminals consists in the fact that we treat them as rascals. 67 =sancta simplicitas of virtue.=--every virtue has its privilege: for example, that of contributing its own little bundle of wood to the funeral pyre of one condemned. 68 =morality and consequence.=--not alone the beholders of an act generally estimate the ethical or unethical element in it by the result: no, the one who performed the act does the same. for the motives and the intentions are seldom sufficiently apparent, and amid them the memory itself seems to become clouded by the results of the act, so that a man often ascribes the wrong motives to his acts or regards the remote motives as the direct ones. success often imparts to an action all the brilliance and honor of good intention, while failure throws the shadow of conscience over the most estimable deeds. hence arises the familiar maxim of the politician: "give me only success: with it i can win all the noble souls over to my side--and make myself noble even in my own eyes."--in like manner will success prove an excellent substitute for a better argument. to this very day many well educated men think the triumph of christianity over greek philosophy is a proof of the superior truth of the former--although in this case it was simply the coarser and more powerful that triumphed over the more delicate and intellectual. as regards superiority of truth, it is evident that because of it the reviving sciences have connected themselves, point for point, with the philosophy of epicurus, while christianity has, point for point, recoiled from it. 69 =love and justice.=--why is love so highly prized at the expense of justice and why are such beautiful things spoken of the former as if it were a far higher entity than the latter? is the former not palpably a far more stupid thing than the latter?--certainly, and on that very account so much the more agreeable to everybody: it is blind and has a rich horn of plenty out of which it distributes its gifts to everyone, even when they are unmerited, even when no thanks are returned. it is impartial like the rain, which according to the bible and experience, wets not alone the unjust but, in certain circumstances, the just as well, and to their skins at that. 70 =execution.=--how comes it that every execution causes us more pain than a murder? it is the coolness of the executioner, the painful preparation, the perception that here a man is being used as an instrument for the intimidation of others. for the guilt is not punished even if there be any: this is ascribable to the teachers, the parents, the environment, in ourselves, not in the murderer--i mean the predisposing circumstances. 71 =hope.=--pandora brought the box containing evils and opened it. it was the gift of the gods to men, a gift of most enticing appearance externally and called the "box of happiness." thereupon all the evils, (living, moving things) flew out: from that time to the present they fly about and do ill to men by day and night. one evil only did not fly out of the box: pandora shut the lid at the behest of zeus and it remained inside. now man has this box of happiness perpetually in the house and congratulates himself upon the treasure inside of it; it is at his service: he grasps it whenever he is so disposed, for he knows not that the box which pandora brought was a box of evils. hence he looks upon the one evil still remaining as the greatest source of happiness--it is hope.--zeus intended that man, notwithstanding the evils oppressing him, should continue to live and not rid himself of life, but keep on making himself miserable. for this purpose he bestowed hope upon man: it is, in truth, the greatest of evils for it lengthens the ordeal of man. 72 =degree of moral susceptibility unknown.=--the fact that one has or has not had certain profoundly moving impressions and insights into things--for example, an unjustly executed, slain or martyred father, a faithless wife, a shattering, serious accident,--is the factor upon which the excitation of our passions to white heat principally depends, as well as the course of our whole lives. no one knows to what lengths circumstances (sympathy, emotion) may lead him. he does not know the full extent of his own susceptibility. wretched environment makes him wretched. it is as a rule not the quality of our experience but its quantity upon which depends the development of our superiority or inferiority, from the point of view of good and evil. 73 =the martyr against his will.=--in a certain movement there was a man who was too cowardly and vacillating ever to contradict his comrades. he was made use of in each emergency, every sacrifice was demanded of him because he feared the disfavor of his comrades more than he feared death: he was a petty, abject spirit. they perceived this and upon the foundation of the qualities just mentioned they elevated him to the altitude of a hero, and finally even of a martyr. although the cowardly creature always inwardly said no, he always said yes with his lips, even upon the scaffold, where he died for the tenets of his party: for beside him stood one of his old associates who so domineered him with look and word that he actually went to his death with the utmost fortitude and has ever since been celebrated as a martyr and exalted character. 74 =general standard.=--one will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit and mean actions to fear. 75 =misunderstanding of virtue.=--whoever has obtained his experience of vice in connection with pleasure as in the case of one with a youth of wild oats behind him, comes to the conclusion that virtue must be connected with self denial. whoever, on the other hand, has been very much plagued by his passions and vices, longs to find in virtue the rest and peace of the soul. that is why it is possible for two virtuous people to misunderstand one another wholly. 76 =the ascetic.=--the ascetic makes out of virtue a slavery. 77 =honor transferred from persons to things.=--actions prompted by love or by the spirit of self sacrifice for others are universally honored wherever they are manifest. hence is magnified the value set upon whatever things may be loved or whatever things conduce to self sacrifice: although in themselves they may be worth nothing much. a valiant army is evidence of the value of the thing it fights for. 78 =ambition a substitute for moral feeling.=--moral feeling should never become extinct in natures that are destitute of ambition. the ambitious can get along without moral feeling just as well as with it.--hence the sons of retired, ambitionless families, generally become by a series of rapid gradations, when they lose moral feeling, the most absolute lunkheads. 79 =vanity enriches.=--how poor the human mind would be without vanity! as it is, it resembles a well stacked and ever renewed ware-emporium that attracts buyers of every class: they can find almost everything, have almost everything, provided they bring with them the right kind of money--admiration. 80 =senility and death.=--apart from the demands made by religion, it may well be asked why it is more honorable in an aged man, who feels the decline of his powers, to await slow extinction than to fix a term to his existence himself? suicide in such a case is a quite natural and due proceeding that ought to command respect as a triumph of reason: and did in fact command respect during the times of the masters of greek philosophy and the bravest roman patriots, who usually died by their own hand. eagerness, on the other hand, to keep alive from day to day with the anxious counsel of physicians, without capacity to attain any nearer to one's ideal of life, is far less worthy of respect.--religions are very rich in refuges from the mandate of suicide: hence they ingratiate themselves with those who cling to life. 81 =delusions regarding victim and regarding evil doer.=--when the rich man takes a possession away from the poor man (for example, a prince who deprives a plebeian of his beloved) there arises in the mind of the poor man a delusion: he thinks the rich man must be wholly perverted to take from him the little that he has. but the rich man appreciates the value of a single possession much less because he is accustomed to many possessions, so that he cannot put himself in the place of the poor man and does not act by any means as ill as the latter supposes. both have a totally false idea of each other. the iniquities of the mighty which bulk most largely in history are not nearly so monstrous as they seem. the hereditary consciousness of being a superior being with superior environment renders one very callous and lulls the conscience to rest. we all feel, when the difference between ourselves and some other being is exceedingly great, that no element of injustice can be involved, and we kill a fly with no qualms of conscience whatever. so, too, it is no indication of wickedness in xerxes (whom even the greeks represent as exceptionally noble) that he deprived a father of his son and had him drawn and quartered because the latter had manifested a troublesome, ominous distrust of an entire expedition: the individual was in this case brushed aside as a pestiferous insect. he was too low and mean to justify continued sentiments of compunction in the ruler of the world. indeed no cruel man is ever as cruel, in the main, as his victim thinks. the idea of pain is never the same as the sensation. the rule is precisely analogous in the case of the unjust judge, and of the journalist who by means of devious rhetorical methods, leads public opinion astray. cause and effect are in all these instances entwined with totally different series of feeling and thoughts, whereas it is unconsciously assumed that principal and victim feel and think exactly alike, and because of this assumption the guilt of the one is based upon the pain of the other. 82 =the soul's skin.=--as the bones, flesh, entrails and blood vessels are enclosed by a skin that renders the aspect of men endurable, so the impulses and passions of the soul are enclosed by vanity: it is the skin of the soul. 83 =sleep of virtue.=--if virtue goes to sleep, it will be more vigorous when it awakes. 84 =subtlety of shame.=--men are not ashamed of obscene thoughts, but they are ashamed when they suspect that obscene thoughts are attributed to them. 85 =naughtiness is rare.=--most people are too much absorbed in themselves to be bad. 86 =the mite in the balance.=--we are praised or blamed, as the one or the other may be expedient, for displaying to advantage our power of discernment. 87 =luke 18:14 improved.=--he that humbleth himself wisheth to be exalted. 88 =prevention of suicide.=--there is a justice according to which we may deprive a man of life, but none that permits us to deprive him of death: this is merely cruelty. 89 =vanity.=--we set store by the good opinion of men, first because it is of use to us and next because we wish to give them pleasure (children their parents, pupils their teacher, and well disposed persons all others generally). only when the good opinion of men is important to somebody, apart from personal advantage or the desire to give pleasure, do we speak of vanity. in this last case, a man wants to give himself pleasure, but at the expense of his fellow creatures, inasmuch as he inspires them with a false opinion of himself or else inspires "good opinion" in such a way that it is a source of pain to others (by arousing envy). the individual generally seeks, through the opinion of others, to attest and fortify the opinion he has of himself; but the potent influence of authority--an influence as old as man himself--leads many, also, to strengthen their own opinion of themselves by means of authority, that is, to borrow from others the expedient of relying more upon the judgment of their fellow men than upon their own.--interest in oneself, the wish to please oneself attains, with the vain man, such proportions that he first misleads others into a false, unduly exalted estimate of himself and then relies upon the authority of others for his self estimate; he thus creates the delusion that he pins his faith to.--it must, however, be admitted that the vain man does not desire to please others so much as himself and he will often go so far, on this account, as to overlook his own interests: for he often inspires his fellow creatures with malicious envy and renders them ill disposed in order that he may thus increase his own delight in himself. 90 =limits of the love of mankind.=--every man who has declared that some other man is an ass or a scoundrel, gets angry when the other man conclusively shows that the assertion was erroneous. 91 =weeping morality.=--how much delight morality occasions! think of the ocean of pleasing tears that has flowed from the narration of noble, great-hearted deeds!--this charm of life would disappear if the belief in complete irresponsibility gained the upper hand. 92 =origin of justice.=--justice (reasonableness) has its origin among approximate equals in power, as thucydides (in the dreadful conferences of the athenian and melian envoys) has rightly conceived. thus, where there exists no demonstrable supremacy and a struggle leads but to mutual, useless damage, the reflection arises that an understanding would best be arrived at and some compromise entered into. the reciprocal nature is hence the first nature of justice. each party makes the other content inasmuch as each receives what it prizes more highly than the other. each surrenders to the other what the other wants and receives in return its own desire. justice is therefore reprisal and exchange upon the basis of an approximate equality of power. thus revenge pertains originally to the domain of justice as it is a sort of reciprocity. equally so, gratitude.--justice reverts naturally to the standpoint of self preservation, therefore to the egoism of this consideration: "why should i injure myself to no purpose and perhaps never attain my end?"--so much for the origin of justice. only because men, through mental habits, have forgotten the original motive of so called just and rational acts, and also because for thousands of years children have been brought to admire and imitate such acts, have they gradually assumed the appearance of being unegotistical. upon this appearance is founded the high estimate of them, which, moreover, like all estimates, is continually developing, for whatever is highly esteemed is striven for, imitated, made the object of self sacrifice, while the merit of the pain and emulation thus expended is, by each individual, ascribed to the thing esteemed.--how slightly moral would the world appear without forgetfulness! a poet could say that god had posted forgetfulness as a sentinel at the portal of the temple of human merit! 93 =concerning the law of the weaker.=--whenever any party, for instance, a besieged city, yields to a stronger party, under stipulated conditions, the counter stipulation is that there be a reduction to insignificance, a burning and destruction of the city and thus a great damage inflicted upon the stronger party. thus arises a sort of equalization principle upon the basis of which a law can be established. the enemy has an advantage to gain by its maintenance.--to this extent there is also a law between slaves and masters, limited only by the extent to which the slave may be useful to his master. the law goes originally only so far as the one party may appear to the other potent, invincible, stable, and the like. to such an extent, then, the weaker has rights, but very limited ones. hence the famous dictum that each has as much law on his side as his power extends (or more accurately, as his power is believed to extend). 94 =the three phases of morality hitherto.=--it is the first evidence that the animal has become human when his conduct ceases to be based upon the immediately expedient, but upon the permanently useful; when he has, therefore, grown utilitarian, capable of purpose. thus is manifested the first rule of reason. a still higher stage is attained when he regulates his conduct upon the basis of honor, by means of which he gains mastery of himself and surrenders his desires to principles; this lifts him far above the phase in which he was actuated only by considerations of personal advantage as he understood it. he respects and wishes to be respected. this means that he comprehends utility as a thing dependent upon what his opinion of others is and their opinion of him. finally he regulates his conduct (the highest phase of morality hitherto attained) by his own standard of men and things. he himself decides, for himself and for others, what is honorable and what is useful. he has become a law giver to opinion, upon the basis of his ever higher developing conception of the utilitarian and the honorable. knowledge makes him capable of placing the highest utility, (that is, the universal, enduring utility) before merely personal utility,--of placing ennobling recognition of the enduring and universal before the merely temporary: he lives and acts as a collective individuality. 95 =ethic of the developed individual.=--hitherto the altruistic has been looked upon as the distinctive characteristic of moral conduct, and it is manifest that it was the consideration of universal utility that prompted praise and recognition of altruistic conduct. must not a radical departure from this point of view be imminent, now that it is being ever more clearly perceived that in the most personal considerations the most general welfare is attained: so that conduct inspired by the most personal considerations of advantage is just the sort which has its origin in the present conception of morality (as a universal utilitarianism)? to contemplate oneself as a complete personality and bear the welfare of that personality in mind in all that one does--this is productive of better results than any sympathetic susceptibility and conduct in behalf of others. indeed we all suffer from such disparagement of our own personalities, which are at present made to deteriorate from neglect. capacity is, in fact, divorced from our personality in most cases, and sacrificed to the state, to science, to the needy, as if it were the bad which deserved to be made a sacrifice. now, we are willing to labor for our fellowmen but only to the extent that we find our own highest advantage in so doing, no more, no less. the whole matter depends upon what may be understood as one's advantage: the crude, undeveloped, rough individualities will be the very ones to estimate it most inadequately. 96 =usage and ethic.=--to be moral, virtuous, praiseworthy means to yield obedience to ancient law and hereditary usage. whether this obedience be rendered readily or with difficulty is long immaterial. enough that it be rendered. "good" finally comes to mean him who acts in the traditional manner, as a result of heredity or natural disposition, that is to say does what is customary with scarcely an effort, whatever that may be (for example revenges injuries when revenge, as with the ancient greeks, was part of good morals). he is called good because he is good "to some purpose," and as benevolence, sympathy, considerateness, moderation and the like come, in the general course of conduct, to be finally recognized as "good to some purpose" (as utilitarian) the benevolent man, the helpful man, is duly styled "good". (at first other and more important kinds of utilitarian qualities stand in the foreground.) bad is "not habitual" (unusual), to do things not in accordance with usage, to oppose the traditional, however rational or the reverse the traditional may be. to do injury to one's social group or community (and to one's neighbor as thus understood) is looked upon, through all the variations of moral laws, in different ages, as the peculiarly "immoral" act, so that to-day we associate the word "bad" with deliberate injury to one's neighbor or community. "egoistic" and "non-egoistic" do not constitute the fundamental opposites that have brought mankind to make a distinction between moral and immoral, good and bad; but adherence to traditional custom, and emancipation from it. how the traditional had its origin is quite immaterial; in any event it had no reference to good and bad or any categorical imperative but to the all important end of maintaining and sustaining the community, the race, the confederation, the nation. every superstitious custom that originated in a misinterpreted event or casualty entailed some tradition, to adhere to which is moral. to break loose from it is dangerous, more prejudicial to the community than to the individual (because divinity visits the consequences of impiety and sacrilege upon the community rather than upon the individual). now every tradition grows ever more venerable--the more remote is its origin, the more confused that origin is. the reverence due to it increases from generation to generation. the tradition finally becomes holy and inspires awe. thus it is that the precept of piety is a far loftier morality than that inculcated by altruistic conduct. 97 =delight in the moral.=--a potent species of joy (and thereby the source of morality) is custom. the customary is done more easily, better, therefore preferably. a pleasure is felt in it and experience thus shows that since this practice has held its own it must be good. a manner or moral that lives and lets live is thus demonstrated advantageous, necessary, in contradistinction to all new and not yet adopted practices. the custom is therefore the blending of the agreeable and the useful. moreover it does not require deliberation. as soon as man can exercise compulsion, he exercises it to enforce and establish his customs, for they are to him attested lifewisdom. so, too, a community of individuals constrains each one of their number to adopt the same moral or custom. the error herein is this: because a certain custom has been agreeable to the feelings or at least because it proves a means of maintenance, this custom must be imperative, for it is regarded as the only thing that can possibly be consistent with well being. the well being of life seems to spring from it alone. this conception of the customary as a condition of existence is carried into the slightest detail of morality. inasmuch as insight into true causation is quite restricted in all inferior peoples, a superstitious anxiety is felt that everything be done in due routine. even when a custom is exceedingly burdensome it is preserved because of its supposed vital utility. it is not known that the same degree of satisfaction can be experienced through some other custom and even higher degrees of satisfaction, too. but it is fully appreciated that all customs do become more agreeable with the lapse of time, no matter how difficult they may have been found in the beginning, and that even the severest way of life may be rendered a matter of habit and therefore a pleasure. 98 =pleasure and social instinct.=--through his relations with other men, man derives a new species of delight in those pleasurable emotions which his own personality affords him; whereby the domain of pleasurable emotions is made infinitely more comprehensive. no doubt he has inherited many of these feelings from the brutes, which palpably feel delight when they sport with one another, as mothers with their young. so, too, the sexual relations must be taken into account: they make every young woman interesting to every young man from the standpoint of pleasure, and conversely. the feeling of pleasure originating in human relationships makes men in general better. the delight in common, the pleasures enjoyed together heighten one another. the individual feels a sense of security. he becomes better natured. distrust and malice dissolve. for the man feels the sense of benefit and observes the same feeling in others. mutual manifestations of pleasure inspire mutual sympathy, the sentiment of homogeneity. the same effect is felt also at mutual sufferings, in a common danger, in stormy weather. upon such a foundation are built the earliest alliances: the object of which is the mutual protection and safety from threatening misfortunes, and the welfare of each individual. and thus the social instinct develops from pleasure. 99 =the guiltless nature of so-called bad acts.=--all "bad" acts are inspired by the impulse to self preservation or, more accurately, by the desire for pleasure and for the avoidance of pain in the individual. thus are they occasioned, but they are not, therefore, bad. "pain self prepared" does not exist, except in the brains of the philosophers, any more than "pleasure self prepared" (sympathy in the schopenhauer sense). in the condition anterior to the state we kill the creature, be it man or ape, that attempts to pluck the fruit of a tree before we pluck it ourselves should we happen to be hungry at the time and making for that tree: as we would do to-day, so far as the brute is concerned, if we were wandering in savage regions.--the bad acts which most disturb us at present do so because of the erroneous supposition that the one who is guilty of them towards us has a free will in the matter and that it was within his discretion not to have done these evil things. this belief in discretionary power inspires hate, thirst for revenge, malice, the entire perversion of the mental processes, whereas we would feel in no way incensed against the brute, as we hold it irresponsible. to inflict pain not from the instinct of self preservation but in requital--this is the consequence of false judgment and is equally a guiltless course of conduct. the individual can, in that condition which is anterior to the state, act with fierceness and violence for the intimidation of another creature, in order to render his own power more secure as a result of such acts of intimidation. thus acts the powerful, the superior, the original state founder, who subjugates the weaker. he has the right to do so, as the state nowadays assumes the same right, or, to be more accurate, there is no right that can conflict with this. a foundation for all morality can first be laid only when a stronger individuality or a collective individuality, for example society, the state, subjects the single personalities, hence builds upon their unification and establishes a bond of union. morality results from compulsion, it is indeed itself one long compulsion to which obedience is rendered in order that pain may be avoided. at first it is but custom, later free obedience and finally almost instinct. at last it is (like everything habitual and natural) associated with pleasure--and is then called virtue. 100 =shame.=--shame exists wherever a "mystery" exists: but this is a religious notion which in the earlier period of human civilization had great vogue. everywhere there were circumscribed spots to which access was denied on account of some divine law, except in special circumstances. at first these spots were quite extensive, inasmuch as stipulated areas could not be trod by the uninitiated, who, when near them, felt tremors and anxieties. this sentiment was frequently transferred to other relationships, for example to sexual relations, which, as the privilege and gateway of mature age, must be withdrawn from the contemplation of youth for its own advantage: relations which many divinities were busy in preserving and sanctifying, images of which divinities were duly placed in marital chambers as guardians. (in turkish such an apartment is termed a harem or holy thing, the same word also designating the vestibule of a mosque). so, too, kingship is regarded as a centre from which power and brilliance stream forth, as a mystery to the subjects, impregnated with secrecy and shame, sentiments still quite operative among peoples who in other respects are without any shame at all. so, too, is the whole world of inward states, the so-called "soul," even now, for all non-philosophical persons, a "mystery," and during countless ages it was looked upon as a something of divine origin, in direct communion with deity. it is, therefore, an adytum and occasions shame. 101 =judge not.=--care must be taken, in the contemplation of earlier ages, that there be no falling into unjust scornfulness. the injustice in slavery, the cruelty in the subjugation of persons and peoples must not be estimated by our standard. for in that period the instinct of justice was not so highly developed. who dare reproach the genoese calvin for burning the physician servetus at the stake? it was a proceeding growing out of his convictions. and the inquisition, too, had its justification. the only thing is that the prevailing views were false and led to those proceedings which seem so cruel to us, simply because such views have become foreign to us. besides, what is the burning alive of one individual compared with eternal hell pains for everybody else? and yet this idea then had hold of all the world without in the least vitiating, with its frightfulness, the other idea of a god. even we nowadays are hard and merciless to political revolutionists, but that is because we are in the habit of believing the state a necessity, and hence the cruelty of the proceeding is not so much understood as in the other cases where the points of view are repudiated. the cruelty to animals shown by children and italians is due to the same misunderstanding. the animal, owing to the exigencies of the church catechism, is placed too far below the level of mankind.--much, too, that is frightful and inhuman in history, and which is almost incredible, is rendered less atrocious by the reflection that the one who commands and the one who executes are different persons. the former does not witness the performance and hence it makes no strong impression on him. the latter obeys a superior and hence feels no responsibility. most princes and military chieftains appear, through lack of true perception, cruel and hard without really being so.--egoism is not bad because the idea of the "neighbor"--the word is of christian origin and does not correspond to truth--is very weak in us, and we feel ourselves, in regard to him, as free from responsibility as if plants and stones were involved. that another is in suffering must be learned and it can never be wholly learned. 102 "=man always does right.="--we do not blame nature when she sends a thunder storm and makes us wet: why then do we term the man who inflicts injury immoral? because in the latter case we assume a voluntary, ruling, free will, and in the former necessity. but this distinction is a delusion. moreover, even the intentional infliction of injury is not, in all circumstances termed immoral. thus, we kill a fly intentionally without thinking very much about it, simply because its buzzing about is disagreeable; and we punish a criminal and inflict pain upon him in order to protect ourselves and society. in the first case it is the individual who, for the sake of preserving himself or in order to spare himself pain, does injury with design: in the second case, it is the state. all ethic deems intentional infliction of injury justified by necessity; that is when it is a matter of self preservation. but these two points of view are sufficient to explain all bad acts done by man to men. it is desired to obtain pleasure or avoid pain. in any sense, it is a question, always, of self preservation. socrates and plato are right: whatever man does he always does right: that is, does what seems to him good (advantageous) according to the degree of advancement his intellect has attained, which is always the measure of his rational capacity. 103 =the inoffensive in badness.=--badness has not for its object the infliction of pain upon others but simply our own satisfaction as, for instance, in the case of thirst for vengeance or of nerve excitation. every act of teasing shows what pleasure is caused by the display of our power over others and what feelings of delight are experienced in the sense of domination. is there, then, anything immoral in feeling pleasure in the pain of others? is malicious joy devilish, as schopenhauer says? in the realm of nature we feel joy in breaking boughs, shattering rocks, fighting with wild beasts, simply to attest our strength thereby. should not the knowledge that another suffers on our account here, in this case, make the same kind of act, (which, by the way, arouses no qualms of conscience in us) immoral also? but if we had not this knowledge there would be no pleasure in one's own superiority or power, for this pleasure is experienced only in the suffering of another, as in the case of teasing. all pleasure is, in itself, neither good nor bad. whence comes the conviction that one should not cause pain in others in order to feel pleasure oneself? simply from the standpoint of utility, that is, in consideration of the consequences, of ultimate pain, since the injured party or state will demand satisfaction and revenge. this consideration alone can have led to the determination to renounce such pleasure.--sympathy has the satisfaction of others in view no more than, as already stated, badness has the pain of others in view. for there are at least two (perhaps many more) elementary ingredients in personal gratification which enter largely into our self satisfaction: one of them being the pleasure of the emotion, of which species is sympathy with tragedy, and another, when the impulse is to action, being the pleasure of exercising one's power. should a sufferer be very dear to us, we divest ourselves of pain by the performance of acts of sympathy.--with the exception of some few philosophers, men have placed sympathy very low in the rank of moral feelings: and rightly. 104 =self defence.=--if self defence is in general held a valid justification, then nearly every manifestation of so called immoral egoism must be justified, too. pain is inflicted, robbery or killing done in order to maintain life or to protect oneself and ward off harm. a man lies when cunning and delusion are valid means of self preservation. to injure intentionally when our safety and our existence are involved, or the continuance of our well being, is conceded to be moral. the state itself injures from this motive when it hangs criminals. in unintentional injury the immoral, of course, can not be present, as accident alone is involved. but is there any sort of intentional injury in which our existence and the maintenance of our well being be not involved? is there such a thing as injuring from absolute badness, for example, in the case of cruelty? if a man does not know what pain an act occasions, that act is not one of wickedness. thus the child is not bad to the animal, not evil. it disturbs and rends it as if it were one of its playthings. does a man ever fully know how much pain an act may cause another? as far as our nervous system extends, we shield ourselves from pain. if it extended further, that is, to our fellow men, we would never cause anyone else any pain (except in such cases as we cause it to ourselves, when we cut ourselves, surgically, to heal our ills, or strive and trouble ourselves to gain health). we conclude from analogy that something pains somebody and can in consequence, through recollection and the power of imagination, feel pain also. but what a difference there always is between the tooth ache and the pain (sympathy) that the spectacle of tooth ache occasions! therefore when injury is inflicted from so called badness the degree of pain thereby experienced is always unknown to us: in so far, however, as pleasure is felt in the act (a sense of one's own power, of one's own excitation) the act is committed to maintain the well being of the individual and hence comes under the purview of self defence and lying for self preservation. without pleasure, there is no life; the struggle for pleasure is the struggle for life. whether the individual shall carry on this struggle in such a way that he be called good or in such a way that he be called bad is something that the standard and the capacity of his own intellect must determine for him. 105 =justice that rewards.=--whoever has fully understood the doctrine of absolute irresponsibility can no longer include the so called rewarding and punishing justice in the idea of justice, if the latter be taken to mean that to each be given his due. for he who is punished does not deserve the punishment. he is used simply as a means to intimidate others from certain acts. equally, he who is rewarded does not merit the reward. he could not act any differently than he did act. hence the reward has only the significance of an encouragement to him and others as a motive for subsequent acts. the praise is called out only to him who is running in the race and not to him who has arrived at the goal. something that comes to someone as his own is neither a punishment nor a reward. it is given to him from utiliarian considerations, without his having any claim to it in justice. hence one must say "the wise man praises not because a good act has been done" precisely as was once said: "the wise man punishes not because a bad act has been done but in order that a bad act may not be done." if punishment and reward ceased, there would cease with them the most powerful incentives to certain acts and away from other acts. the purposes of men demand their continuance [of punishment and reward] and inasmuch as punishment and reward, blame and praise operate most potently upon vanity, these same purposes of men imperatively require the continuance of vanity. 106 =the water fall.=--at the sight of a water fall we may opine that in the countless curves, spirations and dashes of the waves we behold freedom of the will and of the impulses. but everything is compulsory, everything can be mathematically calculated. thus it is, too, with human acts. we would be able to calculate in advance every single action if we were all knowing, as well as every advance in knowledge, every delusion, every bad deed. the acting individual himself is held fast in the illusion of volition. if, on a sudden, the entire movement of the world stopped short, and an all knowing and reasoning intelligence were there to take advantage of this pause, he could foretell the future of every being to the remotest ages and indicate the path that would be taken in the world's further course. the deception of the acting individual as regards himself, the assumption of the freedom of the will, is a part of this computable mechanism. 107 =non-responsibility and non-guilt.=--the absolute irresponsibility of man for his acts and his nature is the bitterest drop in the cup of him who has knowledge, if he be accustomed to behold in responsibility and duty the patent of nobility of his human nature. all his estimates, preferences, dislikes are thus made worthless and false. his deepest sentiment, with which he honored the sufferer, the hero, sprang from an error. he may no longer praise, no longer blame, for it is irrational to blame and praise nature and necessity. just as he cherishes the beautiful work of art, but does not praise it (as it is incapable of doing anything for itself), just as he stands in the presence of plants, he must stand in the presence of human conduct, his own included. he may admire strength, beauty, capacity, therein, but he can discern no merit. the chemical process and the conflict of the elements, the ordeal of the invalid who strives for convalescence, are no more merits than the soul-struggles and extremities in which one is torn this way and that by contending motives until one finally decides in favor of the strongest--as the phrase has it, although, in fact, it is the strongest motive that decides for us. all these motives, however, whatever fine names we may give them, have grown from the same roots in which we believe the baneful poisons lurk. between good and bad actions there is no difference in kind but, at most, in degree. good acts are sublimated evil. bad acts are degraded, imbruted good. the very longing of the individual for self gratification (together with the fear of being deprived of it) obtains satisfaction in all circumstances, let the individual act as he may, that is, as he must: be it in deeds of vanity, revenge, pleasure, utility, badness, cunning, be it in deeds of self sacrifice, sympathy or knowledge. the degrees of rational capacity determine the direction in which this longing impels: every society, every individual has constantly present a comparative classification of benefits in accordance with which conduct is determined and others are judged. but this standard perpetually changes. many acts are called bad that are only stupid, because the degree of intelligence that decided for them was low. indeed, in a certain sense, all acts now are stupid, for the highest degree of human intelligence that has yet been attained will in time most certainly be surpassed and then, in retrospection, all our present conduct and opinion will appear as narrow and petty as we now deem the conduct and opinion of savage peoples and ages.--to perceive all these things may occasion profound pain but there is, nevertheless, a consolation. such pains are birth pains. the butterfly insists upon breaking through the cocoon, he presses through it, tears it to pieces, only to be blinded and confused by the strange light, by the realm of liberty. by such men as are capable of this sadness--how few there are!--will the first attempt be made to see if humanity may convert itself from a thing of morality to a thing of wisdom. the sun of a new gospel sheds its first ray upon the loftiest height in the souls of those few: but the clouds are massed there, too, thicker than ever, and not far apart are the brightest sunlight and the deepest gloom. everything is necessity--so says the new knowledge: and this knowledge is itself necessity. all is guiltlessness, and knowledge is the way to insight into this guiltlessness. if pleasure, egoism, vanity be necessary to attest the moral phenomena and their richest blooms, the instinct for truth and accuracy of knowledge; if delusion and confusion of the imagination were the only means whereby mankind could gradually lift itself up to this degree of self enlightenment and self emancipation--who would venture to disparage the means? who would have the right to feel sad if made aware of the goal to which those paths lead? everything in the domain of ethic is evolved, changeable, tottering; all things flow, it is true--but all things are also in the stream: to their goal. though within us the hereditary habit of erroneous judgment, love, hate, may be ever dominant, yet under the influence of awaking knowledge it will ever become weaker: a new habit, that of understanding, not-loving, not-hating, looking from above, grows up within us gradually and in the same soil, and may, perhaps, in thousands of years be powerful enough to endow mankind with capacity to develop the wise, guiltless man (conscious of guiltlessness) as unfailingly as it now developes the unwise, irrational, guilt-conscious man--that is to say, the necessary higher step, not the opposite of it. the religious life. 108 =the double contest against evil.=--if an evil afflicts us we can either so deal with it as to remove its cause or else so deal with it that its effect upon our feeling is changed: hence look upon the evil as a benefit of which the uses will perhaps first become evident in some subsequent period. religion and art (and also the metaphysical philosophy) strive to effect an alteration of the feeling, partly by an alteration of our judgment respecting the experience (for example, with the aid of the dictum "whom god loves, he chastizes") partly by the awakening of a joy in pain, in emotion especially (whence the art of tragedy had its origin). the more one is disposed to interpret away and justify, the less likely he is to look directly at the causes of evil and eliminate them. an instant alleviation and narcotizing of pain, as is usual in the case of tooth ache, is sufficient for him even in the severest suffering. the more the domination of religions and of all narcotic arts declines, the more searchingly do men look to the elimination of evil itself, which is a rather bad thing for the tragic poets--for there is ever less and less material for tragedy, since the domain of unsparing, immutable destiny grows constantly more circumscribed--and a still worse thing for the priests, for these last have lived heretofore upon the narcoticizing of human ill. 109 =sorrow is knowledge.=--how willingly would not one exchange the false assertions of the homines religiosi that there is a god who commands us to be good, who is the sentinel and witness of every act, every moment, every thought, who loves us, who plans our welfare in every misfortune--how willingly would not one exchange these for truths as healing, beneficial and grateful as those delusions! but there are no such truths. philosophy can at most set up in opposition to them other metaphysical plausibilities (fundamental untruths as well). the tragedy of it all is that, although one cannot believe these dogmas of religion and metaphysics if one adopts in heart and head the potent methods of truth, one has yet become, through human evolution, so tender, susceptible, sensitive, as to stand in need of the most effective means of rest and consolation. from this state of things arises the danger that, through the perception of truth or, more accurately, seeing through delusion, one may bleed to death. byron has put this into deathless verse: "sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth, the tree of knowledge is not that of life." against such cares there is no better protective than the light fancy of horace, (at any rate during the darkest hours and sun eclipses of the soul) expressed in the words "quid aeternis minorem consiliis animum fatigas? cur non sub alta vel platano vel hac pinu jacentes."[22] [22] then wherefore should you, who are mortal, outwear your soul with a profitless burden of care say, why should we not, flung at ease neath this pine, or a plane-tree's broad umbrage, quaff gaily our wine? (translation of sir theodore martin.) at any rate, light fancy or heavy heartedness of any degree must be better than a romantic retrogression and desertion of one's flag, an approach to christianity in any form: for with it, in the present state of knowledge, one can have nothing to do without hopelessly defiling one's intellectual integrity and surrendering it unconditionally. these woes may be painful enough, but without pain one cannot become a leader and guide of humanity: and woe to him who would be such and lacks this pure integrity of the intellect! 110 =the truth in religion.=--in the ages of enlightenment justice was not done to the importance of religion, of this there can be no doubt. it is also equally certain that in the ensuing reaction of enlightenment, the demands of justice were far exceeded inasmuch as religion was treated with love, even with infatuation and proclaimed as a profound, indeed the most profound knowledge of the world, which science had but to divest of its dogmatic garb in order to possess "truth" in its unmythical form. religions must therefore--this was the contention of all foes of enlightenment--sensu allegorico, with regard for the comprehension of the masses, give expression to that ancient truth which is wisdom in itself, inasmuch as all science of modern times has led up to it instead of away from it. so that between the most ancient wisdom of man and all later wisdom there prevails harmony, even similarity of viewpoint; and the advancement of knowledge--if one be disposed to concede such a thing--has to do not with its nature but with its propagation. this whole conception of religion and science is through and through erroneous, and none would to-day be hardy enough to countenance it had not schopenhauer's rhetoric taken it under protection, this high sounding rhetoric which now gains auditors after the lapse of a generation. much as may be gained from schopenhauer's religio-ethical human and cosmical oracle as regards the comprehension of christianity and other religions, it is nevertheless certain that he erred regarding the value of religion to knowledge. he himself was in this but a servile pupil of the scientific teachers of his time who had all taken romanticism under their protection and renounced the spirit of enlightenment. had he been born in our own time it would have been impossible for him to have spoken of the sensus allegoricus of religion. he would instead have done truth the justice to say: never has a religion, directly or indirectly, either as dogma or as allegory, contained a truth. for all religions grew out of dread or necessity, and came into existence through an error of the reason. they have, perhaps, in times of danger from science, incorporated some philosophical doctrine or other into their systems in order to make it possible to continue one's existence within them. but this is but a theological work of art dating from the time in which a religion began to doubt of itself. these theological feats of art, which are most common in christianity as the religion of a learned age, impregnated with philosophy, have led to this superstition of the sensus allegoricus, as has, even more, the habit of the philosophers (namely those half-natures, the poetical philosophers and the philosophising artists) of dealing with their own feelings as if they constituted the fundamental nature of humanity and hence of giving their own religious feelings a predominant influence over the structure of their systems. as the philosophers mostly philosophised under the influence of hereditary religious habits, or at least under the traditional influence of this "metaphysical necessity," they naturally arrived at conclusions closely resembling the judaic or christian or indian religious tenets--resembling, in the way that children are apt to look like their mothers: only in this case the fathers were not certain as to the maternity, as easily happens--but in the innocence of their admiration, they fabled regarding the family likeness of all religion and science. in reality, there exists between religion and true science neither relationship nor friendship, not even enmity: they dwell in different spheres. every philosophy that lets the religious comet gleam through the darkness of its last outposts renders everything within it that purports to be science, suspicious. it is all probably religion, although it may assume the guise of science.--moreover, though all the peoples agree concerning certain religious things, for example, the existence of a god (which, by the way, as regards this point, is not the case) this fact would constitute an argument against the thing agreed upon, for example the very existence of a god. the consensus gentium and especially hominum can probably amount only to an absurdity. against it there is no consensus omnium sapientium whatever, on any point, with the exception of which goethe's verse speaks: "all greatest sages to all latest ages will smile, wink and slily agree 'tis folly to wait till a fool's empty pate has learned to be knowing and free. so children of wisdom must look upon fools as creatures who're never the better for schools." stated without rhyme or metre and adapted to our case: the consensus sapientium is to the effect that the consensus gentium amounts to an absurdity. 111 =origin of religious worship.=--let us transport ourselves back to the times in which religious life flourished most vigorously and we will find a fundamental conviction prevalent which we no longer share and which has resulted in the closing of the door to religious life once for all so far as we are concerned: this conviction has to do with nature and intercourse with her. in those times nothing is yet known of nature's laws. neither for earth nor for heaven is there a must. a season, sunshine, rain can come or stay away as it pleases. there is wanting, in particular, all idea of natural causation. if a man rows, it is not the oar that moves the boat, but rowing is a magical ceremony whereby a demon is constrained to move the boat. all illness, death itself, is a consequence of magical influences. in sickness and death nothing natural is conceived. the whole idea of "natural course" is wanting. the idea dawns first upon the ancient greeks, that is to say in a very late period of humanity, in the conception of a moira [fate] ruling over the gods. if any person shoots off a bow, there is always an irrational strength and agency in the act. if the wells suddenly run dry, the first thought is of subterranean demons and their pranks. it must have been the dart of a god beneath whose invisible influence a human being suddenly collapses. in india, the carpenter (according to lubbock) is in the habit of making devout offerings to his hammer and hatchet. a brahmin treats the plume with which he writes, a soldier the weapon that he takes into the field, a mason his trowel, a laborer his plow, in the same way. all nature is, in the opinion of religious people, a sum total of the doings of conscious and willing beings, an immense mass of complex volitions. in regard to all that takes place outside of us no conclusion is permissible that anything will result thus and so, must result thus and so, that we are comparatively calculable and certain in our experiences, that man is the rule, nature the ruleless. this view forms the fundamental conviction that dominates crude, religion-producing, early civilizations. we contemporary men feel exactly the opposite: the richer man now feels himself inwardly, the more polyphone the music and the sounding of his soul, the more powerfully does the uniformity of nature impress him. we all, with goethe, recognize in nature the great means of repose for the soul. we listen to the pendulum stroke of this great clock with longing for rest, for absolute calm and quiescence, as if we could drink in the uniformity of nature and thereby arrive first at an enjoyment of oneself. formerly it was the reverse: if we carry ourselves back to the periods of crude civilization, or if we contemplate contemporary savages, we will find them most strongly influenced by rule, by tradition. the individual is almost automatically bound to rule and tradition and moves with the uniformity of a pendulum. to him nature--the uncomprehended, fearful, mysterious nature--must seem the domain of freedom, of volition, of higher power, indeed as an ultra-human degree of destiny, as god. every individual in such periods and circumstances feels that his existence, his happiness, the existence and happiness of the family, the state, the success or failure of every undertaking, must depend upon these dispositions of nature. certain natural events must occur at the proper time and certain others must not occur. how can influence be exercised over this fearful unknown, how can this domain of freedom be brought under subjection? thus he asks himself, thus he worries: is there no means to render these powers of nature as subject to rule and tradition as you are yourself?--the cogitation of the superstitious and magic-deluded man is upon the theme of imposing a law upon nature: and to put it briefly, religious worship is the result of such cogitation. the problem which is present to every man is closely connected with this one: how can the weaker party dictate laws to the stronger, control its acts in reference to the weaker? at first the most harmless form of influence is recollected, that influence which is acquired when the partiality of anyone has been won. through beseeching and prayer, through abject humiliation, through obligations to regular gifts and propitiations, through flattering homages, it is possible, therefore, to impose some guidance upon the forces of nature, to the extent that their partiality be won: love binds and is bound. then agreements can be entered into by means of which certain courses of conduct are mutually concluded, vows are made and authorities prescribed. but far more potent is that species of power exercised by means of magic and incantation. as a man is able to injure a powerful enemy by means of the magician and render him helpless with fear, as the love potion operates at a distance, so can the mighty forces of nature, in the opinion of weaker mankind, be controlled by similar means. the principal means of effecting incantations is to acquire control of something belonging to the party to be influenced, hair, finger nails, food from his table, even his picture or his name. with such apparatus it is possible to act by means of magic, for the basic principle is that to everything spiritual corresponds something corporeal. with the aid of this corporeal element the spirit may be bound, injured or destroyed. the corporeal affords the handle by which the spiritual can be laid hold of. in the same way that man influences mankind does he influences some spirit of nature, for this latter has also its corporeal element that can be grasped. the tree, and on the same basis, the seed from which it grew: this puzzling sequence seems to demonstrate that in both forms the same spirit is embodied, now large, now small. a stone that suddenly rolls, is the body in which the spirit works. does a huge boulder lie in a lonely moor? it is impossible to think of mortal power having placed it there. the stone must have moved itself there. that is to say some spirit must dominate it. everything that has a body is subject to magic, including, therefore, the spirits of nature. if a god is directly connected with his portrait, a direct influence (by refraining from devout offerings, by whippings, chainings and the like) can be brought to bear upon him. the lower classes in china tie cords around the picture of their god in order to defy his departing favor, when he has left them in the lurch, and tear the picture to pieces, drag it through the streets into dung heaps and gutters, crying: "you dog of a spirit, we housed you in a beautiful temple, we gilded you prettily, we fed you well, we brought you offerings, and yet how ungrateful you are!" similar displays of resentment have been made against pictures of the mother of god and pictures of saints in catholic countries during the present century when such pictures would not do their duty during times of pestilence and drought. through all these magical relationships to nature countless ceremonies are occasioned, and finally, when their complexity and confusion grow too great, pains are taken to systematize them, to arrange them so that the favorable course of nature's progress, namely the great yearly circle of the seasons, may be brought about by a corresponding course of the ceremonial progress. the aim of religious worship is to influence nature to human advantage, and hence to instil a subjection to law into her that originally she has not, whereas at present man desires to find out the subjection to law of nature in order to guide himself thereby. in brief, the system of religious worship rests upon the idea of magic between man and man, and the magician is older than the priest. but it rests equally upon other and higher ideas. it brings into prominence the sympathetic relation of man to man, the existence of benevolence, gratitude, prayer, of truces between enemies, of loans upon security, of arrangements for the protection of property. man, even in very inferior degrees of civilization, does not stand in the presence of nature as a helpless slave, he is not willy-nilly the absolute servant of nature. in the greek development of religion, especially in the relationship to the olympian gods, it becomes possible to entertain the idea of an existence side by side of two castes, a higher, more powerful, and a lower, less powerful: but both are bound together in some way, on account of their origin and are one species. they need not be ashamed of one another. this is the element of distinction in greek religion. 112 =at the contemplation of certain ancient sacrificial proceedings.=--how many sentiments are lost to us is manifest in the union of the farcical, even of the obscene, with the religious feeling. the feeling that this mixture is possible is becoming extinct. we realize the mixture only historically, in the mysteries of demeter and dionysos and in the christian easter festivals and religious mysteries. but we still perceive the sublime in connection with the ridiculous, and the like, the emotional with the absurd. perhaps a later age will be unable to understand even these combinations. 113 =christianity as antiquity.=--when on a sunday morning we hear the old bells ringing, we ask ourselves: is it possible? all this for a jew crucified two thousand years ago who said he was god's son? the proof of such an assertion is lacking.--certainly, the christian religion constitutes in our time a protruding bit of antiquity from very remote ages and that its assertions are still generally believed--although men have become so keen in the scrutiny of claims--constitutes the oldest relic of this inheritance. a god who begets children by a mortal woman; a sage who demands that no more work be done, that no more justice be administered but that the signs of the approaching end of the world be heeded; a system of justice that accepts an innocent as a vicarious sacrifice in the place of the guilty; a person who bids his disciples drink his blood; prayers for miracles; sins against a god expiated upon a god; fear of a hereafter to which death is the portal; the figure of the cross as a symbol in an age that no longer knows the purpose and the ignominy of the cross--how ghostly all these things flit before us out of the grave of their primitive antiquity! is one to believe that such things can still be believed? 114 =the un-greek in christianity.=--the greeks did not look upon the homeric gods above them as lords nor upon themselves beneath as servants, after the fashion of the jews. they saw but the counterpart as in a mirror of the most perfect specimens of their own caste, hence an ideal, but no contradiction of their own nature. there was a feeling of mutual relationship, resulting in a mutual interest, a sort of alliance. man thinks well of himself when he gives himself such gods and places himself in a relationship akin to that of the lower nobility with the higher; whereas the italian races have a decidedly vulgar religion, involving perpetual anxiety because of bad and mischievous powers and soul disturbers. wherever the olympian gods receded into the background, there even greek life became gloomier and more perturbed.--christianity, on the other hand, oppressed and degraded humanity completely and sank it into deepest mire: into the feeling of utter abasement it suddenly flashed the gleam of divine compassion, so that the amazed and grace-dazzled stupefied one gave a cry of delight and for a moment believed that the whole of heaven was within him. upon this unhealthy excess of feeling, upon the accompanying corruption of heart and head, christianity attains all its psychological effects. it wants to annihilate, debase, stupefy, amaze, bedazzle. there is but one thing that it does not want: measure, standard (das maas) and therefore is it in the worst sense barbarous, asiatic, vulgar, un-greek. 115 =being religious to some purpose.=--there are certain insipid, traffic-virtuous people to whom religion is pinned like the hem of some garb of a higher humanity. these people do well to remain religious: it adorns them. all who are not versed in some professional weapon--including tongue and pen as weapons--are servile: to all such the christian religion is very useful, for then their servility assumes the aspect of christian virtue and is amazingly adorned.--people whose daily lives are empty and colorless are readily religious. this is comprehensible and pardonable, but they have no right to demand that others, whose daily lives are not empty and colorless, should be religious also. 116 =the everyday christian.=--if christianity, with its allegations of an avenging god, universal sinfulness, choice of grace, and the danger of eternal damnation, were true, it would be an indication of weakness of mind and character not to be a priest or an apostle or a hermit, and toil for one's own salvation. it would be irrational to lose sight of one's eternal well being in comparison with temporary advantage: assuming these dogmas to be generally believed, the every day christian is a pitiable figure, a man who really cannot count as far as three, and who, for the rest, just because of his intellectual incapacity, does not deserve to be as hard punished as christianity promises he shall be. 117 =concerning the cleverness of christianity.=--it is a master stroke of christianity to so emphasize the unworthiness, sinfulness and degradation of men in general that contempt of one's fellow creatures becomes impossible. "he may sin as much as he pleases, he is not by nature different from me. it is i who in every way am unworthy and contemptible." so says the christian to himself. but even this feeling has lost its keenest sting for the christian does not believe in his individual degradation. he is bad in his general human capacity and he soothes himself a little with the assertion that we are all alike. 118 =personal change.=--as soon as a religion rules, it has for its opponents those who were its first disciples. 119 =fate of christianity.=--christianity arose to lighten the heart, but now it must first make the heart heavy in order to be able to lighten it afterwards. christianity will consequently go down. 120 =the testimony of pleasure.=--the agreeable opinion is accepted as true. this is the testimony of pleasure (or as the church says, the evidence of strength) of which all religions are so proud, although they should all be ashamed of it. if a belief did not make blessed it would not be believed. how little it would be worth, then! 121 =dangerous play.=--whoever gives religious feeling room, must then also let it grow. he can do nothing else. then his being gradually changes. the religious element brings with it affinities and kinships. the whole circle of his judgment and feeling is clouded and draped in religious shadows. feeling cannot stand still. one should be on one's guard. 122 =the blind pupil.=--as long as one knows very well the strength and the weakness of one's dogma, one's art, one's religion, its strength is still low. the pupil and apostle who has no eye for the weaknesses of a dogma, a religion and so on, dazzled by the aspect of the master and by his own reverence for him, has, on that very account, generally more power than the master. without blind pupils the influence of a man and his work has never become great. to give victory to knowledge, often amounts to no more than so allying it with stupidity that the brute force of the latter forces triumph for the former. 123 =the breaking off of churches.=--there is not sufficient religion in the world merely to put an end to the number of religions. 124 =sinlessness of men.=--if one have understood how "sin came into the world," namely through errors of the reason, through which men in their intercourse with one another and even individual men looked upon themselves as much blacker and wickeder than was really the case, one's whole feeling is much lightened and man and the world appear together in such a halo of harmlessness that a sentiment of well being is instilled into one's whole nature. man in the midst of nature is as a child left to its own devices. this child indeed dreams a heavy, anxious dream. but when it opens its eyes it finds itself always in paradise. 125 =irreligiousness of artists.=--homer is so much at home among his gods and is as a poet so good natured to them that he must have been profoundly irreligious. that which was brought to him by the popular faith--a mean, crude and partially repulsive superstition--he dealt with as freely as the sculptor with his clay, therefore with the same freedom that æschylus and aristophanes evinced and with which in later times the great artists of the renaissance, and also shakespeare and goethe, drew their pictures. 126 =art and strength of false interpretation.=--all the visions, fears, exhaustions and delights of the saint are well known symptoms of sickness, which in him, owing to deep rooted religious and psychological delusions, are explained quite differently, that is not as symptoms of sickness.--so, too, perhaps, the demon of socrates was nothing but a malady of the ear that he explained, in view of his predominant moral theory, in a manner different from what would be thought rational to-day. nor is the case different with the frenzy and the frenzied speeches of the prophets and of the priests of the oracles. it is always the degree of wisdom, imagination, capacity and morality in the heart and mind of the interpreters that got so much out of them. it is among the greatest feats of the men who are called geniuses and saints that they made interpreters for themselves who, fortunately for mankind, did not understand them. 127 =reverence for madness.=--because it was perceived that an excitement of some kind often made the head clearer and occasioned fortunate inspirations, it was concluded that the utmost excitement would occasion the most fortunate inspirations. hence the frenzied being was revered as a sage and an oracle giver. a false conclusion lies at the bottom of all this. 128 =promises of wisdom.=--modern science has as its object as little pain as possible, as long a life as possible--hence a sort of eternal blessedness, but of a very limited kind in comparison with the promises of religion. 129 =forbidden generosity.=--there is not enough of love and goodness in the world to throw any of it away on conceited people. 130 =survival of religious training in the disposition.=--the catholic church, and before it all ancient education, controlled the whole domain of means through which man was put into certain unordinary moods and withdrawn from the cold calculation of personal advantage and from calm, rational reflection. a church vibrating with deep tones; gloomy, regular, restraining exhortations from a priestly band, who involuntarily communicate their own tension to their congregation and lead them to listen almost with anxiety as if some miracle were in course of preparation; the awesome pile of architecture which, as the house of a god, rears itself vastly into the vague and in all its shadowy nooks inspires fear of its nerve-exciting power--who would care to reduce men to the level of these things if the ideas upon which they rest became extinct? but the results of all these things are nevertheless not thrown away: the inner world of exalted, emotional, prophetic, profoundly repentant, hope-blessed moods has become inborn in man largely through cultivation. what still exists in his soul was formerly, as he germinated, grew and bloomed, thoroughly disciplined. 131 =religious after-pains.=--though one believe oneself absolutely weaned away from religion, the process has yet not been so thorough as to make impossible a feeling of joy at the presence of religious feelings and dispositions without intelligible content, as, for example, in music; and if a philosophy alleges to us the validity of metaphysical hopes, through the peace of soul therein attainable, and also speaks of "the whole true gospel in the look of raphael's madonna," we greet such declarations and innuendoes with a welcome smile. the philosopher has here a matter easy of demonstration. he responds with that which he is glad to give, namely a heart that is glad to accept. hence it is observable how the less reflective free spirits collide only with dogmas but yield readily to the magic of religious feelings; it is a source of pain to them to let the latter go simply on account of the former.--scientific philosophy must be very much on its guard lest on account of this necessity--an evolved and hence, also, a transitory necessity--delusions are smuggled in. even logicians speak of "presentiments" of truth in ethics and in art (for example of the presentiment that the essence of things is unity) a thing which, nevertheless, ought to be prohibited. between carefully deduced truths and such "foreboded" things there lies the abysmal distinction that the former are products of the intellect and the latter of the necessity. hunger is no evidence that there is food at hand to appease it. hunger merely craves food. "presentiment" does not denote that the existence of a thing is known in any way whatever. it denotes merely that it is deemed possible to the extent that it is desired or feared. the "presentiment" is not one step forward in the domain of certainty.--it is involuntarily believed that the religious tinted sections of a philosophy are better attested than the others, but the case is at bottom just the opposite: there is simply the inner wish that it may be so, that the thing which beautifies may also be true. this wish leads us to accept bad grounds as good. 132 =of the christian need of salvation.=--careful consideration must render it possible to propound some explanation of that process in the soul of a christian which is termed need of salvation, and to propound an explanation, too, free from mythology: hence one purely psychological. heretofore psychological explanations of religious conditions and processes have really been in disrepute, inasmuch as a theology calling itself free gave vent to its unprofitable nature in this domain; for its principal aim, so far as may be judged from the spirit of its creator, schleier-macher, was the preservation of the christian religion and the maintenance of the christian theology. it appeared that in the psychological analysis of religious "facts" a new anchorage and above all a new calling were to be gained. undisturbed by such predecessors, we venture the following exposition of the phenomena alluded to. man is conscious of certain acts which are very firmly implanted in the general course of conduct: indeed he discovers in himself a predisposition to such acts that seems to him to be as unalterable as his very being. how gladly he would essay some other kind of acts which in the general estimate of conduct are rated the best and highest, how gladly he would welcome the consciousness of well doing which ought to follow unselfish motive! unfortunately, however, it goes no further than this longing: the discontent consequent upon being unable to satisfy it is added to all other kinds of discontent which result from his life destiny in particular or which may be due to so called bad acts; so that a deep depression ensues accompanied by a desire for some physician to remove it and all its causes.--this condition would not be found so bitter if the individual but compared himself freely with other men: for then he would have no reason to be discontented with himself in particular as he is merely bearing his share of the general burden of human discontent and incompleteness. but he compares himself with a being who alone must be capable of the conduct that is called unegoistic and of an enduring consciousness of unselfish motive, with god. it is because he gazes into this clear mirror, that his own self seems so extraordinarily distracted and so troubled. thereupon the thought of that being, in so far as it flits before his fancy as retributive justice, occasions him anxiety. in every conceivable small and great experience he believes he sees the anger of the being, his threats, the very implements and manacles of his judge and prison. what succors him in this danger, which, in the prospect of an eternal duration of punishment, transcends in hideousness all the horrors that can be presented to the imagination? 133 before we consider this condition in its further effects, we would admit to ourselves that man is betrayed into this condition not through his "fault" and "sin" but through a series of delusions of the reason; that it was the fault of the mirror if his own self appeared to him in the highest degree dark and hateful, and that that mirror was his own work, the very imperfect work of human imagination and judgment. in the first place a being capable of absolutely unegoistic conduct is as fabulous as the phoenix. such a being is not even thinkable for the very reason that the whole notion of "unegoistic conduct," when closely examined, vanishes into air. never yet has a man done anything solely for others and entirely without reference to a personal motive; indeed how could he possibly do anything that had no reference to himself, that is without inward compulsion (which must always have its basis in a personal need)? how could the ego act without ego?--a god, who, on the other hand, is all love, as he is usually represented, would not be capable of a solitary unegoistic act: whence one is reminded of a reflection of lichtenberg's which is, in truth, taken from a lower sphere: "we cannot possibly feel for others, as the expression goes; we feel only for ourselves. the assertion sounds hard, but it is not, if rightly understood. a man loves neither his father nor his mother nor his wife nor his child, but simply the feelings which they inspire." or, as la rochefoucauld says: "if you think you love your mistress for the mere love of her, you are very much mistaken." why acts of love are more highly prized than others, namely not on account of their nature, but on account of their utility, has already been explained in the section on the origin of moral feelings. but if a man should wish to be all love like the god aforesaid, and want to do all things for others and nothing for himself, the procedure would be fundamentally impossible because he _must_ do a great deal for himself before there would be any possibility of doing anything for the love of others. it is also essential that others be sufficiently egoistic to accept always and at all times this self sacrifice and living for others, so that the men of love and self sacrifice have an interest in the survival of unloving and selfish egoists, while the highest morality, in order to maintain itself must formally enforce the existence of immorality (wherein it would be really destroying itself.)--further: the idea of a god perturbs and discourages as long as it is accepted but as to how it originated can no longer, in the present state of comparative ethnological science, be a matter of doubt, and with the insight into the origin of this belief all faith collapses. what happens to the christian who compares his nature with that of god is exactly what happened to don quixote, who depreciated his own prowess because his head was filled with the wondrous deeds of the heroes of chivalrous romance. the standard of measurement which both employ belongs to the domain of fable.--but if the idea of god collapses, so too, does the feeling of "sin" as a violation of divine rescript, as a stain upon a god-like creation. there still apparently remains that discouragement which is closely allied with fear of the punishment of worldly justice or of the contempt of one's fellow men. the keenest thorn in the sentiment of sin is dulled when it is perceived that one's acts have contravened human tradition, human rules and human laws without having thereby endangered the "eternal salvation of the soul" and its relations with deity. if finally men attain to the conviction of the absolute necessity of all acts and of their utter irresponsibility and then absorb it into their flesh and blood, every relic of conscience pangs will disappear. 134 if now, as stated, the christian, through certain delusive feelings, is betrayed into self contempt, that is by a false and unscientific view of his acts and feelings, he must, nevertheless, perceive with the utmost amazement that this state of self contempt, of conscience pangs, of despair in particular, does not last, that there are hours during which all these things are wafted away from the soul and he feels himself once more free and courageous. the truth is that joy in his own being, the fulness of his own powers in connection with the inevitable decline of his profound excitation with the lapse of time, bore off the palm of victory. the man loves himself once more, he feels it--but this very new love, this new self esteem seems to him incredible. he can see in it only the wholly unmerited stream of the light of grace shed down upon him. if he formerly saw in every event merely warnings, threats, punishments and every kind of indication of divine anger, he now reads into his experiences the grace of god. the latter circumstance seems to him full of love, the former as a helpful pointing of the way, and his entirely joyful frame of mind now seems to him to be an absolute proof of the goodness of god. as formerly in his states of discouragement he interpreted his conduct falsely so now he does the same with his experiences. his state of consolation is now regarded as the effect produced by some external power. the love with which, at bottom, he loves himself, seems to be the divine love. that which he calls grace and the preliminary of salvation is in reality self-grace, self-salvation. 135 therefore a certain false psychology, a certain kind of imaginativeness in the interpretation of motives and experiences is the essential preliminary to being a christian and to experiencing the need of salvation. upon gaining an insight into this wandering of the reason and the imagination, one ceases to be a christian. 136 =of christian asceticism and sanctity.=--much as some thinkers have exerted themselves to impart an air of the miraculous to those singular phenomena known as asceticism and sanctity, to question which or to account for which upon a rational basis would be wickedness and sacrilege, the temptation to this wickedness is none the less great. a powerful impulse of nature has in every age led to protest against such phenomena. at any rate science, inasmuch as it is the imitation of nature, permits the casting of doubts upon the inexplicable character and the supernal degree of such phenomena. it is true that heretofore science has not succeeded in its attempts at explanation. the phenomena remain unexplained still, to the great satisfaction of those who revere moral miracles. for, speaking generally, the unexplained must rank as the inexplicable, the inexplicable as the non-natural, supernatural, miraculous--so runs the demand in the souls of all the religious and all the metaphysicians (even the artists if they happen to be thinkers), whereas the scientific man sees in this demand the "evil principle."--the universal, first, apparent truth that is encountered in the contemplation of sanctity and asceticism is that their nature is complicated; for nearly always, within the physical world as well as in the moral, the apparently miraculous may be traced successfully to the complex, the obscure, the multi-conditioned. let us venture then to isolate a few impulses in the soul of the saint and the ascetic, to consider them separately and then view them as a synthetic development. 137 there is an obstinacy against oneself, certain sublimated forms of which are included in asceticism. certain kinds of men are under such a strong necessity of exercising their power and dominating impulses that, if other objects are lacking or if they have not succeeded with other objects they will actually tyrannize over some portions of their own nature or over sections and stages of their own personality. thus do many thinkers bring themselves to views which are far from likely to increase or improve their fame. many deliberately bring down the contempt of others upon themselves although they could easily have retained consideration by silence. others contradict earlier opinions and do not shrink from the ordeal of being deemed inconsistent. on the contrary they strive for this and act like eager riders who enjoy horseback exercise most when the horse is skittish. thus will men in dangerous paths ascend to the highest steeps in order to laugh to scorn their own fear and their own trembling limbs. thus will the philosopher embrace the dogmas of asceticism, humility, sanctity, in the light of which his own image appears in its most hideous aspect. this crushing of self, this mockery of one's own nature, this spernere se sperni out of which religions have made so much is in reality but a very high development of vanity. the whole ethic of the sermon on the mount belongs in this category: man has a true delight in mastering himself through exaggerated pretensions or excessive expedients and later deifying this tyrannically exacting something within him. in every scheme of ascetic ethics, man prays to one part of himself as if it were god and hence it is necessary for him to treat the rest of himself as devil. 138 =man is not at all hours equally moral=; this is established. if one's morality be judged according to one's capacity for great, self sacrificing resolutions and abnegations (which when continual, and made a habit are known as sanctity) one is, in affection, or disposition, the most moral: while higher excitement supplies wholly new impulses which, were one calm and cool as ordinarily, one would not deem oneself even capable of. how comes this? apparently from the propinquity of all great and lofty emotional states. if a man is brought to an extraordinary pitch of feeling he can resolve upon a fearful revenge or upon a fearful renunciation of his thirst for vengeance indifferently. he craves, under the influences of powerful emotion, the great, the powerful, the immense, and if he chances to perceive that the sacrifice of himself will afford him as much satisfaction as the sacrifice of another, or will afford him more, he will choose self sacrifice. what concerns him particularly is simply the unloading of his emotion. hence he readily, to relieve his tension, grasps the darts of the enemy and buries them in his own breast. that in self abnegation and not in revenge the element of greatness consisted must have been brought home to mankind only after long habituation. a god who sacrifices himself would be the most powerful and most effective symbol of this sort of greatness. as the conquest of the most hardly conquered enemy, the sudden mastering of a passion--thus does such abnegation _appear_: hence it passes for the summit of morality. in reality all that is involved is the exchange of one idea for another whilst the temperament remained at a like altitude, a like tidal state. men when coming out of the spell, or resting from such passionate excitation, no longer understand the morality of such instants, but the admiration of all who participated in the occasion sustains them. pride is their support if the passion and the comprehension of their act weaken. therefore, at bottom even such acts of self-abnegation are not moral inasmuch as they are not done with a strict regard for others. rather do others afford the high strung temperament an opportunity to lighten itself through such abnegation. 139 =even the ascetic seeks to make life easier=, and generally by means of absolute subjection to another will or to an all inclusive rule and ritual, pretty much as the brahmin leaves absolutely nothing to his own volition but is guided in every moment of his life by some holy injunction or other. this subjection is a potent means of acquiring dominion over oneself. one is occupied, hence time does not bang heavy and there is no incitement of the personal will and of the individual passion. the deed once done there is no feeling of responsibility nor the sting of regret. one has given up one's own will once for all and this is easier than to give it up occasionally, as it is also easier wholly to renounce a desire than to yield to it in measured degree. when we consider the present relation of man to the state we perceive unconditional obedience is easier than conditional. the holy person also makes his lot easier through the complete surrender of his life personality and it is all delusion to admire such a phenomenon as the loftiest heroism of morality. it is always more difficult to assert one's personality without shrinking and without hesitation than to give it up altogether in the manner indicated, and it requires moreover more intellect and thought. 140 after having discovered in many of the less comprehensible actions mere manifestations of pleasure in emotion for its own sake, i fancy i can detect in the self contempt which characterises holy persons, and also in their acts of self torture (through hunger and scourgings, distortions and chaining of the limbs, acts of madness) simply a means whereby such natures may resist the general exhaustion of their will to live (their nerves). they employ the most painful expedients to escape if only for a time from the heaviness and weariness in which they are steeped by their great mental indolence and their subjection to a will other than their own. 141 =the most usual means= by which the ascetic and the sanctified individual seeks to make life more endurable comprises certain combats of an inner nature involving alternations of victory and prostration. for this purpose an enemy is necessary and he is found in the so called "inner enemy." that is, the holy individual makes use of his tendency to vanity, domineering and pride, and of his mental longings in order to contemplate his life as a sort of continuous battle and himself as a battlefield, in which good and evil spirits wage war with varying fortune. it is an established fact that the imagination is restrained through the regularity and adequacy of sexual intercourse while on the other hand abstention from or great irregularity in sexual intercourse will cause the imagination to run riot. the imaginations of many of the christian saints were obscene to a degree; and because of the theory that sexual desires were in reality demons that raged within them, the saints did not feel wholly responsible for them. it is to this conviction that we are indebted for the highly instructive sincerity of their evidence against themselves. it was to their interest that this contest should always be kept up in some fashion because by means of this contest, as already stated, their empty lives gained distraction. in order that the contest might seem sufficiently great to inspire sympathy and admiration in the unsanctified, it was essential that sexual capacity be ever more and more damned and denounced. indeed the danger of eternal damnation was so closely allied to this capacity that for whole generations christians showed their children with actual conscience pangs. what evil may not have been done to humanity through this! and yet here the truth is just upside down: an exceedingly unseemly attitude for the truth. christianity, it is true, had said that every man is conceived and born in sin, and in the intolerable and excessive christianity of calderon this thought is again perverted and entangled into the most distorted paradox extant in the well known lines the greatest sin of man is the sin of being born. in all pessimistic religions the act of procreation is looked upon as evil in itself. this is far from being the general human opinion. it is not even the opinion of all pessimists. empedocles, for example, knows nothing of anything shameful, devilish and sinful in it. he sees rather in the great field of bliss of unholiness simply a healthful and hopeful phenomenon, aphrodite. she is to him an evidence that strife does not always rage but that some time a gentle demon is to wield the sceptre. the christian pessimists of practice, had, as stated, a direct interest in the prevalence of an opposite belief. they needed in the loneliness and the spiritual wilderness of their lives an ever living enemy, and a universally known enemy through whose conquest they might appear to the unsanctified as utterly incomprehensible and half unnatural beings. when this enemy at last, as a result of their mode of life and their shattered health, took flight forever, they were able immediately to people their inner selves with new demons. the rise and fall of the balance of cheerfulness and despair maintained their addled brains in a totally new fluctuation of longing and peace of soul. and in that period psychology served not only to cast suspicion on everything human but to wound and scourge it, to crucify it. man wanted to find himself as base and evil as possible. man sought to become anxious about the state of his soul, he wished to be doubtful of his own capacity. everything natural with which man connects the idea of badness and sinfulness (as, for instance, is still customary in regard to the erotic) injures and degrades the imagination, occasions a shamed aspect, leads man to war upon himself and makes him uncertain, distrustful of himself. even his dreams acquire a tincture of the unclean conscience. and yet this suffering because of the natural element in certain things is wholly superfluous. it is simply the result of opinions regarding the things. it is easy to understand why men become worse than they are if they are brought to look upon the unavoidably natural as bad and later to feel it as of evil origin. it is the master stroke of religions and metaphysics that wish to make man out bad and sinful by nature, to render nature suspicious in his eyes and to so make himself evil, for he learns to feel himself evil when he cannot divest himself of nature. he gradually comes to look upon himself, after a long life lived naturally, so oppressed by a weight of sin that supernatural powers become necessary to relieve him of the burden; and with this notion comes the so called need of salvation, which is the result not of a real but of an imaginary sinfulness. go through the separate moral expositions in the vouchers of christianity and it will always be found that the demands are excessive in order that it may be impossible for man to satisfy them. the object is not that he may become moral but that he may feel as sinful as possible. if this feeling had not been rendered agreeable to man--why should he have improvised such an ideal and clung to it so long? as in the ancient world an incalculable strength of intellect and capacity for feeling was squandered in order to increase the joy of living through feastful systems of worship, so in the era of christianity an equally incalculable quantity of intellectual capacity has been sacrificed in another endeavor: that man should in every way feel himself sinful and thereby be moved, inspired, inspirited. to move, to inspire, to inspirit at any cost--is not this the freedom cry of an exhausted, over-ripe, over cultivated age? the circle of all the natural sensations had been gone through a hundred times: the soul had grown weary. then the saints and the ascetics found a new order of ecstacies. they set themselves before the eyes of all not alone as models for imitation to many, but as fearful and yet delightful spectacles on the boundary line between this world and the next world, where in that period everyone thought he saw at one time rays of heavenly light, at another fearful, threatening tongues of flame. the eye of the saint, directed upon the fearful significance of the shortness of earthly life, upon the imminence of the last judgment, upon eternal life hereafter; this glowering eye in an emaciated body caused men, in the old time world, to tremble to the depths of their being. to look, to look away and shudder, to feel anew the fascination of the spectacle, to yield to it, sate oneself upon it until the soul trembled with ardor and fever--that was the last pleasure left to classical antiquity when its sensibilities had been blunted by the arena and the gladiatorial show. 142 =to sum up all that has been said=: that condition of soul at which the saint or expectant saint is rejoiced is a combination of elements which we are all familiar with, except that under other influences than those of mere religious ideation they customarily arouse the censure of men in the same way that when combined with religion itself and regarded as the supreme attainment of sanctity, they are object of admiration and even of prayer--at least in more simple times. very soon the saint turns upon himself that severity that is so closely allied to the instinct of domination at any price and which inspire even in the most solitary individual the sense of power. soon his swollen sensitiveness of feeling breaks forth from the longing to restrain his passions within it and is transformed into a longing to master them as if they were wild steeds, the master impulse being ever that of a proud spirit; next he craves a complete cessation of all perturbing, fascinating feelings, a waking sleep, an enduring repose in the lap of a dull, animal, plant-like indolence. next he seeks the battle and extinguishes it within himself because weariness and boredom confront him. he binds his self-deification with self-contempt. he delights in the wild tumult of his desires and the sharp pain of sin, in the very idea of being lost. he is able to play his very passions, for instance the desire to domineer, a trick so that he goes to the other extreme of abject humiliation and subjection, so that his overwrought soul is without any restraint through this antithesis. and, finally, when indulgence in visions, in talks with the dead or with divine beings overcomes him, this is really but a form of gratification that he craves, perhaps a form of gratification in which all other gratifications are blended. novalis, one of the authorities in matters of sanctity, because of his experience and instinct, betrays the whole secret with the utmost simplicity when he says: "it is remarkable that the close connection of gratification, religion and cruelty has not long ago made men aware of their inner relationship and common tendency." 143 =not what the saint is but what he was in= the eyes of the non-sanctified gives him his historical importance. because there existed a delusion respecting the saint, his soul states being falsely viewed and his personality being sundered as much as possible from humanity as a something incomparable and supernatural, because of these things he attained the extraordinary with which he swayed the imaginations of whole nations and whole ages. even he knew himself not for even he regarded his dispositions, passions and actions in accordance with a system of interpretation as artificial and exaggerated as the pneumatic interpretation of the bible. the distorted and diseased in his own nature with its blending of spiritual poverty, defective knowledge, ruined health, overwrought nerves, remained as hidden from his view as from the view of his beholders. he was neither a particularly good man nor a particularly bad man but he stood for something that was far above the human standard in wisdom and goodness. faith in him sustained faith in the divine and miraculous, in a religious significance of all existence, in an impending day of judgment. in the last rays of the setting sun of the ancient world, which fell upon the christian peoples, the shadowy form of the saint attained enormous proportions--to such enormous proportions, indeed, that down even to our own age, which no longer believes in god, there are thinkers who believe in the saints. 144 it stands to reason that this sketch of the saint, made upon the model of the whole species, can be confronted with many opposing sketches that would create a more agreeable impression. there are certain exceptions among the species who distinguish themselves either by especial gentleness or especial humanity, and perhaps by the strength of their own personality. others are in the highest degree fascinating because certain of their delusions shed a particular glow over their whole being, as is the case with the founder of christianity who took himself for the only begotten son of god and hence felt himself sinless; so that through his imagination--that should not be too harshly judged since the whole of antiquity swarmed with sons of god--he attained the same goal, the sense of complete sinlessness, complete irresponsibility, that can now be attained by every individual through science.--in the same manner i have viewed the saints of india who occupy an intermediate station between the christian saints and the greek philosophers and hence are not to be regarded as a pure type. knowledge and science--as far as they existed--and superiority to the rest of mankind by logical discipline and training of the intellectual powers were insisted upon by the buddhists as essential to sanctity, just as they were denounced by the christian world as the indications of sinfulness. thoughts out of season part ii the use and abuse of history_ schopenhauer as educator_ by friedrich nietzsche translated by adrian collins, m.a. [illustration] the complete works of friedrich nietzsche the first complete and authorised english translation edited by dr oscar levy volume five t.n. foulis 13 & 15 frederick street edinburgh: and london 1910 to l. p. from the translator. en reconnaissance. contents. introduction the use and abuse of history schopenhauer as educator introduction. the two essays translated in this volume form the second and third parts of the _unzeitgemässe betrachtungen_. the essay on history was completed in january, that on schopenhauer in august, 1874. both were written in the few months of feverish activity that nietzsche could spare from his duties as professor of classical philology in bâle. nietzsche, who served in an ambulance corps in '71, had seen something of the franco-german war, and to him it was the "honest german bravery" that had won the day. but to the rest of his countrymen it was a victory for german culture as well; though there were still a few elegancies, a few refinements of manners, that might veneer the new culture, and in this regard the conquered might be allowed the traditional privilege of conquering the conquerors. nietzsche answered roundly, "the german does not yet know the meaning of the word culture," and in the essay on history set himself to show that the so-called culture was a morass into which the german had been led by a sixth sense he had developed during the nineteenth century--the "historical sense": he had been brought by his spiritual teachers to believe that he was the "crown of the world-process" and that his highest duty lay in surrendering himself to it. with nietzsche, the historical sense became a "malady from which men suffer," the world-process an illusion, evolutionary theories a subtle excuse for inactivity. history is for the few not the many, for the man not the youth, for the great not the small--who are broken and bewildered by it. it is the lesson of remembrance, and few are strong enough to bear that lesson. history has no meaning except as the servant of life and action: and most of us can only act if we forget. this is the burden of the first essay; and turning from history to the historian he condemns the "noisy little fellows" who measure the motives of the great men of the past by their own, and use the past to justify their present. but who are the men that can use history rightly, and for whom it is a help and not a hindrance to life? they are the great men of action and thought, the "lonely giants amid the pigmies." to them alone can the record of their great forebears be a consolation as well as a lesson. in the realm of thought, they are of the type of the ideal philosopher sketched in the second essay. to nietzsche the only hope of the race lies in the "production of the genius," of the man who can bear the burden of the future and not be swamped by the past: he found the personal expression of such a man, for the time being, in schopenhauer. schopenhauer here stands, as a personality, for all that makes for life in philosophy, against the stagnation of the professional philosopher. the last part of the essay is a fierce polemic against state-aided philosophy and the official position of the professors, who formed, and still form, the intellectual aristocracy of germany, with a cathedral authority on all their pronouncements. but "there has never been a eulogy on a philosopher," says dr. kögel, "that has had so little to say about his philosophy." the essay on schopenhauer is of value precisely because it has nothing to do with schopenhauer. we need not be disturbed by the thought that nietzsche afterwards turned from him. he truly recognised that schopenhauer was here merely a name for himself, that "not schopenhauer as educator is in question, but his opposite, nietzsche as educator" (_ecce homo_). he could regard schopenhauer, later, as a siren that called to death; he put him among the great artists that lead down--who are worse than the bad artists that lead nowhere. "we must go further in the pessimistic logic than the denial of the will," he says in the _götzendämmerung_; "we must deny schopenhauer." the pessimism and denial of the will, the blank despair before suffering, were the shoals on which nietzsche's reverence finally broke. they could not stand before the dionysian outlook, whose pessimism sprang not from weakness but strength, and in which the joy of willing and being can even welcome suffering. in this essay we hear little of the pessimism, save as the imperfect and "all-too-human" side of schopenhauer, that actually brings us nearer to him. later, he could part the man and his work, and speak of schopenhauer's view as the "evil eye." but as yet he is a young man who has kept his illusions, and, like ogniben, he judges men by what they might be. afterwards, he judged himself too in these essays by "what he might be." "to me," he said in _ecce homo_, "they are promises: i know not what they mean to others." it is also in the belief they are promises that they are here translated "for others." the _thoughts out of season_ are the first announcement of the complex theme of the _zarathustra_. they form the best possible introduction to nietzschean thought. nietzsche is already the knight-errant of philosophy: but his adventure is just beginning. a. c. the use and abuse of history. preface. "i hate everything that merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity." these words of goethe, like a sincere _ceterum censeo_, may well stand at the head of my thoughts on the worth and the worthlessness of history. i will show in them why instruction that does not "quicken," knowledge that slackens the rein of activity, why in fact history, in goethe's phrase, must be seriously "hated," as a costly and superfluous luxury of the understanding: for we are still in want of the necessaries of life, and the superfluous is an enemy to the necessary. we do need history, but quite differently from the jaded idlers in the garden of knowledge, however grandly they may look down on our rude and unpicturesque requirements. in other words, we need it for life and action, not as a convenient way to avoid life and action, or to excuse a selfish life and a cowardly or base action. we would serve history only so far as it serves life; but to value its study beyond a certain point mutilates and degrades life: and this is a fact that certain marked symptoms of our time make it as necessary as it may be painful to bring to the test of experience. i have tried to describe a feeling that has often troubled me: i revenge myself on it by giving it publicity. this may lead some one to explain to me that he has also had the feeling, but that i do not feel it purely and elementally enough, and cannot express it with the ripe certainty of experience. a few may say so; but most people will tell me that it is a perverted, unnatural, horrible, and altogether unlawful feeling to have, and that i show myself unworthy of the great historical movement which is especially strong among the german people for the last two generations. i am at all costs going to venture on a description of my feelings; which will be decidedly in the interests of propriety, as i shall give plenty of opportunity for paying compliments to such a "movement." and i gain an advantage for myself that is more valuable to me than propriety--the attainment of a correct point of view, through my critics, with regard to our age. these thoughts are "out of season," because i am trying to represent something of which the age is rightly proud--its historical culture--as a fault and a defect in our time, believing as i do that we are all suffering from a malignant historical fever and should at least recognise the fact. but even if it be a virtue, goethe may be right in asserting that we cannot help developing our faults at the same time as our virtues; and an excess of virtue can obviously bring a nation to ruin, as well as an excess of vice. in any case i may be allowed my say. but i will first relieve my mind by the confession that the experiences which produced those disturbing feelings were mostly drawn from myself,--and from other sources only for the sake of comparison; and that i have only reached such "unseasonable" experience, so far as i am the nursling of older ages like the greek, and less a child of this age. i must admit so much in virtue of my profession as a classical scholar: for i do not know what meaning classical scholarship may have for our time except in its being "unseasonable,"--that is, contrary to our time, and yet with an influence on it for the benefit, it may be hoped, of a future time. i. consider the herds that are feeding yonder: they know not the meaning of yesterday or to-day, they graze and ruminate, move or rest, from morning to night, from day to day, taken up with their little loves and hates, at the mercy of the moment, feeling neither melancholy nor satiety. man cannot see them without regret, for even in the pride of his humanity he looks enviously on the beast's happiness. he wishes simply to live without satiety or pain, like the beast; yet it is all in vain, for he will not change places with it. he may ask the beast--"why do you look at me and not speak to me of your happiness?" the beast wants to answer--"because i always forget what i wished to say": but he forgets this answer too, and is silent; and the man is left to wonder. he wonders also about himself, that he cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he run, that chain runs with him. it is matter for wonder: the moment, that is here and gone, that was nothing before and nothing after, returns like a spectre to trouble the quiet of a later moment. a leaf is continually dropping out of the volume of time and fluttering away--and suddenly it flutters back into the man's lap. then he says, "i remember...," and envies the beast, that forgets at once, and sees every moment really die, sink into night and mist, extinguished for ever. the beast lives _unhistorically_; for it "goes into" the present, like a number, without leaving any curious remainder. it cannot dissimulate, it conceals nothing; at every moment it seems what it actually is, and thus can be nothing that is not honest. but man is always resisting the great and continually increasing weight of the past; it presses him down, and bows his shoulders; he travels with a dark invisible burden that he can plausibly disown, and is only too glad to disown in converse with his fellows--in order to excite their envy. and so it hurts him, like the thought of a lost paradise, to see a herd grazing, or, nearer still, a child, that has nothing yet of the past to disown, and plays in a happy blindness between the walls of the past and the future. and yet its play must be disturbed, and only too soon will it be summoned from its little kingdom of oblivion. then it learns to understand the words "once upon a time," the "open sesame" that lets in battle, suffering and weariness on mankind, and reminds them what their existence really is, an imperfect tense that never becomes a present. and when death brings at last the desired forgetfulness, it abolishes life and being together, and sets the seal on the knowledge that "being" is merely a continual "has been," a thing that lives by denying and destroying and contradicting itself. if happiness and the chase for new happiness keep alive in any sense the will to live, no philosophy has perhaps more truth than the cynic's: for the beast's happiness, like that of the perfect cynic, is the visible proof of the truth of cynicism. the smallest pleasure, if it be only continuous and make one happy, is incomparably a greater happiness than the more intense pleasure that comes as an episode, a wild freak, a mad interval between ennui, desire, and privation. but in the smallest and greatest happiness there is always one thing that makes it happiness: the power of forgetting, or, in more learned phrase, the capacity of feeling "unhistorically" throughout its duration. one who cannot leave himself behind on the threshold of the moment and forget the past, who cannot stand on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without fear or giddiness, will never know what happiness is; and, worse still, will never do anything to make others happy. the extreme case would be the man without any power to forget, who is condemned to see "becoming" everywhere. such a man believes no more in himself or his own existence, he sees everything fly past in an eternal succession, and loses himself in the stream of becoming. at last, like the logical disciple of heraclitus, he will hardly dare to raise his finger. forgetfulness is a property of all action; just as not only light but darkness is bound up with the life of every organism. one who wished to feel everything historically, would be like a man forcing himself to refrain from sleep, or a beast who had to live by chewing a continual cud. thus even a happy life is possible without remembrance, as the beast shows: but life in any true sense is absolutely impossible without forgetfulness. or, to put my conclusion better, there is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of "historical sense," that injures and finally destroys the living thing, be it a man or a people or a system of culture. to fix this degree and the limits to the memory of the past, if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present, we must see clearly how great is the "plastic power" of a man or a community or a culture; i mean the power of specifically growing out of one's self, of making the past and the strange one body with the near and the present, of healing wounds, replacing what is lost, repairing broken moulds. there are men who have this power so slightly that a single sharp experience, a single pain, often a little injustice, will lacerate their souls like the scratch of a poisoned knife. there are others, who are so little injured by the worst misfortunes, and even by their own spiteful actions, as to feel tolerably comfortable, with a fairly quiet conscience, in the midst of them,--or at any rate shortly afterwards. the deeper the roots of a man's inner nature, the better will he take the past into himself; and the greatest and most powerful nature would be known by the absence of limits for the historical sense to overgrow and work harm. it would assimilate and digest the past, however foreign, and turn it to sap. such a nature can forget what it cannot subdue; there is no break in the horizon, and nothing to remind it that there are still men, passions, theories and aims on the other side. this is a universal law; a living thing can only be healthy, strong and productive within a certain horizon: if it be incapable of drawing one round itself, or too selfish to lose its own view in another's, it will come to an untimely end. cheerfulness, a good conscience, belief in the future, the joyful deed, all depend, in the individual as well as the nation, on there being a line that divides the visible and clear from the vague and shadowy: we must know the right time to forget as well as the right time to remember; and instinctively see when it is necessary to feel historically, and when unhistorically. this is the point that the reader is asked to consider; that the unhistorical and the historical are equally necessary to the health of an individual, a community, and a system of culture. every one has noticed that a man's historical knowledge and range of feeling may be very limited, his horizon as narrow as that of an alpine valley, his judgments incorrect and his experience falsely supposed original, and yet in spite of all the incorrectness and falsity he may stand forth in unconquerable health and vigour, to the joy of all who see him; whereas another man with far more judgment and learning will fail in comparison, because the lines of his horizon are continually changing and shifting, and he cannot shake himself free from the delicate network of his truth and righteousness for a downright act of will or desire. we saw that the beast, absolutely "unhistorical," with the narrowest of horizons, has yet a certain happiness, and lives at least without hypocrisy or ennui; and so we may hold the capacity of feeling (to a certain extent) unhistorically, to be the more important and elemental, as providing the foundation of every sound and real growth, everything that is truly great and human. the unhistorical is like the surrounding atmosphere that can alone create life, and in whose annihilation life itself disappears. it is true that man can only become man by first suppressing this unhistorical element in his thoughts, comparisons, distinctions, and conclusions, letting a clear sudden light break through these misty clouds by his power of turning the past to the uses of the present. but an excess of history makes him flag again, while without the veil of the unhistorical he would never have the courage to begin. what deeds could man ever have done if he had not been enveloped in the dust-cloud of the unhistorical? or, to leave metaphors and take a concrete example, imagine a man swayed and driven by a strong passion, whether for a woman or a theory. his world is quite altered. he is blind to everything behind him, new sounds are muffled and meaningless; though his perceptions were never so intimately felt in all their colour, light and music, and he seems to grasp them with his five senses together. all his judgments of value are changed for the worse; there is much he can no longer value, as he can scarcely feel it: he wonders that he has so long been the sport of strange words and opinions, that his recollections have run around in one unwearying circle and are yet too weak and weary to make a single step away from it. his whole case is most indefensible; it is narrow, ungrateful to the past, blind to danger, deaf to warnings, a small living eddy in a dead sea of night and forgetfulness. and yet this condition, unhistorical and antihistorical throughout, is the cradle not only of unjust action, but of every just and justifiable action in the world. no artist will paint his picture, no general win his victory, no nation gain its freedom, without having striven and yearned for it under those very "unhistorical" conditions. if the man of action, in goethe's phrase, is without conscience, he is also without knowledge: he forgets most things in order to do one, he is unjust to what is behind him, and only recognises one law, the law of that which is to be. so he loves his work infinitely more than it deserves to be loved; and the best works are produced in such an ecstasy of love that they must always be unworthy of it, however great their worth otherwise. should any one be able to dissolve the unhistorical atmosphere in which every great event happens, and breathe afterwards, he might be capable of rising to the "super-historical" standpoint of consciousness, that niebuhr has described as the possible result of historical research. "history," he says, "is useful for one purpose, if studied in detail: that men may know, as the greatest and best spirits of our generation do not know, the accidental nature of the forms in which they see and insist on others seeing,--insist, i say, because their consciousness of them is exceptionally intense. any one who has not grasped this idea in its different applications will fall under the spell of a more powerful spirit who reads a deeper emotion into the given form." such a standpoint might be called "super-historical," as one who took it could feel no impulse from history to any further life or work, for he would have recognised the blindness and injustice in the soul of the doer as a condition of every deed: he would be cured henceforth of taking history too seriously, and have learnt to answer the question how and why life should be lived,--for all men and all circumstances, greeks or turks, the first century or the nineteenth. whoever asks his friends whether they would live the last ten or twenty years over again, will easily see which of them is born for the "super-historical standpoint": they will all answer no, but will give different reasons for their answer. some will say they have the consolation that the next twenty will be better: they are the men referred to satirically by david hume:- "and from the dregs of life hope to receive, what the first sprightly running could not give." we will call them the "historical men." their vision of the past turns them towards the future, encourages them to persevere with life, and kindles the hope that justice will yet come and happiness is behind the mountain they are climbing. they believe that the meaning of existence will become ever clearer in the course of its evolution, they only look backward at the process to understand the present and stimulate their longing for the future. they do not know how unhistorical their thoughts and actions are in spite of all their history, and how their preoccupation with it is for the sake of life rather than mere science. but that question to which we have heard the first answer, is capable of another; also a "no," but on different grounds. it is the "no" of the "super-historical" man who sees no salvation in evolution, for whom the world is complete and fulfils its aim in every single moment. how could the next ten years teach what the past ten were not able to teach? whether the aim of the teaching be happiness or resignation, virtue or penance, these super-historical men are not agreed; but as against all merely historical ways of viewing the past, they are unanimous in the theory that the past and the present are one and the same, typically alike in all their diversity, and forming together a picture of eternally present imperishable types of unchangeable value and significance. just as the hundreds of different languages correspond to the same constant and elemental needs of mankind, and one who understood the needs could learn nothing new from the languages; so the "super-historical" philosopher sees all the history of nations and individuals from within. he has a divine insight into the original meaning of the hieroglyphs, and comes even to be weary of the letters that are continually unrolled before him. how should the endless rush of events not bring satiety, surfeit, loathing? so the boldest of us is ready perhaps at last to say from his heart with giacomo leopardi: "nothing lives that were worth thy pains, and the earth deserves not a sigh. our being is pain and weariness, and the world is mud--nothing else. be calm." but we will leave the super-historical men to their loathings and their wisdom: we wish rather to-day to be joyful in our unwisdom and have a pleasant life as active men who go forward, and respect the course of the world. the value we put on the historical may be merely a western prejudice: let us at least go forward within this prejudice and not stand still. if we could only learn better to study history as a means to life! we would gladly grant the super-historical people their superior wisdom, so long as we are sure of having more life than they: for in that case our unwisdom would have a greater future before it than their wisdom. to make my opposition between life and wisdom clear, i will take the usual road of the short summary. a historical phenomenon, completely understood and reduced to an item of knowledge, is, in relation to the man who knows it, dead: for he has found out its madness, its injustice, its blind passion, and especially the earthly and darkened horizon that was the source of its power for history. this power has now become, for him who has recognised it, powerless; not yet, perhaps, for him who is alive. history regarded as pure knowledge and allowed to sway the intellect would mean for men the final balancing of the ledger of life. historical study is only fruitful for the future if it follow a powerful life-giving influence, for example, a new system of culture; only, therefore, if it be guided and dominated by a higher force, and do not itself guide and dominate. history, so far as it serves life, serves an unhistorical power, and thus will never become a pure science like mathematics. the question how far life needs such a service is one of the most serious questions affecting the well-being of a man, a people and a culture. for by excess of history life becomes maimed and degenerate, and is followed by the degeneration of history as well. ii. the fact that life does need the service of history must be as clearly grasped as that an excess of history hurts it; this will be proved later. history is necessary to the living man in three ways: in relation to his action and struggle, his conservatism and reverence, his suffering and his desire for deliverance. these three relations answer to the three kinds of history--so far as they can be distinguished--the _monumental_, the _antiquarian_, and the _critical_. history is necessary above all to the man of action and power who fights a great fight and needs examples, teachers and comforters; he cannot find them among his contemporaries. it was necessary in this sense to schiller; for our time is so evil, goethe says, that the poet meets no nature that will profit him, among living men. polybius is thinking of the active man when he calls political history the true preparation for governing a state; it is the great teacher, that shows us how to bear steadfastly the reverses of fortune, by reminding us of what others have suffered. whoever has learned to recognise this meaning in history must hate to see curious tourists and laborious beetle-hunters climbing up the great pyramids of antiquity. he does not wish to meet the idler who is rushing through the picture-galleries of the past for a new distraction or sensation, where he himself is looking for example and encouragement. to avoid being troubled by the weak and hopeless idlers, and those whose apparent activity is merely neurotic, he looks behind him and stays his course towards the goal in order to breathe. his goal is happiness, not perhaps his own, but often the nation's, or humanity's at large: he avoids quietism, and uses history as a weapon against it. for the most part he has no hope of reward except fame, which means the expectation of a niche in the temple of history, where he in his turn may be the consoler and counsellor of posterity. for his orders are that what has once been able to extend the conception "man" and give it a fairer content, must ever exist for the same office. the great moments in the individual battle form a chain, a high road for humanity through the ages, and the highest points of those vanished moments are yet great and living for men; and this is the fundamental idea of the belief in humanity, that finds a voice in the demand for a "monumental" history. but the fiercest battle is fought round the demand for greatness to be eternal. every other living thing cries no. "away with the monuments," is the watch-word. dull custom fills all the chambers of the world with its meanness, and rises in thick vapour round anything that is great, barring its way to immortality, blinding and stifling it. and the way passes through mortal brains! through the brains of sick and short-lived beasts that ever rise to the surface to breathe, and painfully keep off annihilation for a little space. for they wish but one thing: to live at any cost. who would ever dream of any "monumental history" among them, the hard torch-race that alone gives life to greatness? and yet there are always men awakening, who are strengthened and made happy by gazing on past greatness, as though man's life were a lordly thing, and the fairest fruit of this bitter tree were the knowledge that there was once a man who walked sternly and proudly through this world, another who had pity and loving-kindness, another who lived in contemplation,--but all leaving one truth behind them, that his life is the fairest who thinks least about life. the common man snatches greedily at this little span, with tragic earnestness, but they, on their way to monumental history and immortality, knew how to greet it with olympic laughter, or at least with a lofty scorn; and they went down to their graves in irony--for what had they to bury? only what they had always treated as dross, refuse, and vanity, and which now falls into its true home of oblivion, after being so long the sport of their contempt. one thing will live, the sign-manual of their inmost being, the rare flash of light, the deed, the creation; because posterity cannot do without it. in this spiritualised form fame is something more than the sweetest morsel for our egoism, in schopenhauer's phrase: it is the belief in the oneness and continuity of the great in every age, and a protest against the change and decay of generations. what is the use to the modern man of this "monumental" contemplation of the past, this preoccupation with the rare and classic? it is the knowledge that the great thing existed and was therefore possible, and so may be possible again. he is heartened on his way; for his doubt in weaker moments, whether his desire be not for the impossible, is struck aside. suppose one believe that no more than a hundred men, brought up in the new spirit, efficient and productive, were needed to give the deathblow to the present fashion of education in germany; he will gather strength from the remembrance that the culture of the renaissance was raised on the shoulders of such another band of a hundred men. and yet if we really wish to learn something from an example, how vague and elusive do we find the comparison! if it is to give us strength, many of the differences must be neglected, the individuality of the past forced into a general formula and all the sharp angles broken off for the sake of correspondence. ultimately, of course, what was once possible can only become possible a second time on the pythagorean theory, that when the heavenly bodies are in the same position again, the events on earth are reproduced to the smallest detail; so when the stars have a certain relation, a stoic and an epicurean will form a conspiracy to murder cæsar, and a different conjunction will show another columbus discovering america. only if the earth always began its drama again after the fifth act, and it were certain that the same interaction of motives, the same _deus ex machina_, the same catastrophe would occur at particular intervals, could the man of action venture to look for the whole archetypic truth in monumental history, to see each fact fully set out in its uniqueness: it would not probably be before the astronomers became astrologers again. till then monumental history will never be able to have complete truth; it will always bring together things that are incompatible and generalise them into compatibility, will always weaken the differences of motive and occasion. its object is to depict effects at the expense of the causes--"monumentally," that is, as examples for imitation: it turns aside, as far as it may, from reasons, and might be called with far less exaggeration a collection of "effects in themselves," than of events that will have an effect on all ages. the events of war or religion cherished in our popular celebrations are such "effects in themselves"; it is these that will not let ambition sleep, and lie like amulets on the bolder hearts--not the real historical nexus of cause and effect, which, rightly understood, would only prove that nothing quite similar could ever be cast again from the dice-boxes of fate and the future. as long as the soul of history is found in the great impulse that it gives to a powerful spirit, as long as the past is principally used as a model for imitation, it is always in danger of being a little altered and touched up, and brought nearer to fiction. sometimes there is no possible distinction between a "monumental" past and a mythical romance, as the same motives for action can be gathered from the one world as the other. if this monumental method of surveying the past dominate the others,--the antiquarian and the critical,--the past itself suffers wrong. whole tracts of it are forgotten and despised; they flow away like a dark unbroken river, with only a few gaily coloured islands of fact rising above it. there is something beyond nature in the rare figures that become visible, like the golden hips that his disciples attributed to pythagoras. monumental history lives by false analogy; it entices the brave to rashness, and the enthusiastic to fanaticism by its tempting comparisons. imagine this history in the hands--and the head--of a gifted egoist or an inspired scoundrel; kingdoms will be overthrown, princes murdered, war and revolution let loose, and the number of "effects in themselves"--in other words, effects without sufficient cause--increased. so much for the harm done by monumental history to the powerful men of action, be they good or bad; but what if the weak and the inactive take it as their servant--or their master! consider the simplest and commonest example, the inartistic or half artistic natures whom a monumental history provides with sword and buckler. they will use the weapons against their hereditary enemies, the great artistic spirits, who alone can learn from that history the one real lesson, how to live, and embody what they have learnt in noble action. their way is obstructed, their free air darkened by the idolatrous--and conscientious--dance round the half understood monument of a great past. "see, that is the true and real art," we seem to hear: "of what use are these aspiring little people of to-day?" the dancing crowd has apparently the monopoly of "good taste": for the creator is always at a disadvantage compared with the mere looker-on, who never put a hand to the work; just as the arm-chair politician has ever had more wisdom and foresight than the actual statesman. but if the custom of democratic suffrage and numerical majorities be transferred to the realm of art, and the artist put on his defence before the court of æsthetic dilettanti, you may take your oath on his condemnation; although, or rather because, his judges had proclaimed solemnly the canon of "monumental art," the art that has "had an effect on all ages," according to the official definition. in their eyes no need nor inclination nor historical authority is in favour of the art which is not yet "monumental" because it is contemporary. their instinct tells them that art can be slain by art: the monumental will never be reproduced, and the weight of its authority is invoked from the past to make it sure. they are connoisseurs of art, primarily because they wish to kill art; they pretend to be physicians, when their real idea is to dabble in poisons. they develop their tastes to a point of perversion, that they may be able to show a reason for continually rejecting all the nourishing artistic fare that is offered them. for they do not want greatness, to arise: their method is to say, "see, the great thing is already here!" in reality they care as little about the great thing that is already here, as that which is about to arise: their lives are evidence of that. monumental history is the cloak under which their hatred of present power and greatness masquerades as an extreme admiration of the past: the real meaning of this way of viewing history is disguised as its opposite; whether they wish it or no, they are acting as though their motto were, "let the dead bury the--living." each of the three kinds of history will only flourish in one ground and climate: otherwise it grows to a noxious weed. if the man who will produce something great, have need of the past, he makes himself its master by means of monumental history: the man who can rest content with the traditional and venerable, uses the past as an "antiquarian historian": and only he whose heart is oppressed by an instant need, and who will cast the burden off at any price, feels the want of "critical history," the history that judges and condemns. there is much harm wrought by wrong and thoughtless planting: the critic without the need, the antiquary without piety, the knower of the great deed who cannot be the doer of it, are plants that have grown to weeds, they are torn from their native soil and therefore degenerate. iii. secondly, history is necessary to the man of conservative and reverent nature, who looks back to the origins of his existence with love and trust; through it, he gives thanks for life. he is careful to preserve what survives from ancient days, and will reproduce the conditions of his own upbringing for those who come after him; thus he does life a service. the possession of his ancestors' furniture changes its meaning in his soul: for his soul is rather possessed by it. all that is small and limited, mouldy and obsolete, gains a worth and inviolability of its own from the conservative and reverent soul of the antiquary migrating into it, and building a secret nest there. the history of his town becomes the history of himself; he looks on the walls, the turreted gate, the town council, the fair, as an illustrated diary of his youth, and sees himself in it all--his strength, industry, desire, reason, faults and follies. "here one could live," he says, "as one can live here now--and will go on living; for we are tough folk, and will not be uprooted in the night." and so, with his "we," he surveys the marvellous individual life of the past and identifies himself with the spirit of the house, the family and the city. he greets the soul of his people from afar as his own, across the dim and troubled centuries: his gifts and his virtues lie in such power of feeling and divination, his scent of a half-vanished trail, his instinctive correctness in reading the scribbled past, and understanding at once its palimpsests--nay, its polypsests. goethe stood with such thoughts before the monument of erwin von steinbach: the storm of his feeling rent the historical cloud-veil that hung between them, and he saw the german work for the first time "coming from the stern, rough, german soul." this was the road that the italians of the renaissance travelled, the spirit that reawakened the ancient italic genius in their poets to "a wondrous echo of the immemorial lyre," as jacob burckhardt says. but the greatest value of this antiquarian spirit of reverence lies in the simple emotions of pleasure and content that it lends to the drab, rough, even painful circumstances of a nation's or individual's life: niebuhr confesses that he could live happily on a moor among free peasants with a history, and would never feel the want of art. how could history serve life better than by anchoring the less gifted races and peoples to the homes and customs of their ancestors, and keeping them from ranging far afield in search of better, to find only struggle and competition? the influence that ties men down to the same companions and circumstances, to the daily round of toil, to their bare mountain-side,--seems to be selfish and unreasonable: but it is a healthy unreason and of profit to the community; as every one knows who has clearly realised the terrible consequences of mere desire for migration and adventure,--perhaps in whole peoples,--or who watches the destiny of a nation that has lost confidence in its earlier days, and is given up to a restless cosmopolitanism and an unceasing desire for novelty. the feeling of the tree that clings to its roots, the happiness of knowing one's growth to be one not merely arbitrary and fortuitous, but the inheritance, the fruit and blossom of a past, that does not merely justify but crown the present--this is what we nowadays prefer to call the real historical sense. these are not the conditions most favourable to reducing the past to pure science: and we see here too, as we saw in the case of monumental history, that the past itself suffers when history serves life and is directed by its end. to vary the metaphor, the tree feels its roots better than it can see them: the greatness of the feeling is measured by the greatness and strength of the visible branches. the tree may be wrong here; how far more wrong will it be in regard to the whole forest, which it only knows and feels so far as it is hindered or helped by it, and not otherwise! the antiquarian sense of a man, a city or a nation has always a very limited field. many things are not noticed at all; the others are seen in isolation, as through a microscope. there is no measure: equal importance is given to everything, and therefore too much to anything. for the things of the past are never viewed in their true perspective or receive their just value; but value and perspective change with the individual or the nation that is looking back on its past. there is always the danger here, that everything ancient will be regarded as equally venerable, and everything without this respect for antiquity, like a new spirit, rejected as an enemy. the greeks themselves admitted the archaic style of plastic art by the side of the freer and greater style; and later, did not merely tolerate the pointed nose and the cold mouth, but made them even a canon of taste. if the judgment of a people harden in this way, and history's service to the past life be to undermine a further and higher life; if the historical sense no longer preserve life, but mummify it: then the tree dies, unnaturally, from the top downwards, and at last the roots themselves wither. antiquarian history degenerates from the moment that it no longer gives a soul and inspiration to the fresh life of the present. the spring of piety is dried up, but the learned habit persists without it and revolves complaisantly round its own centre. the horrid spectacle is seen of the mad collector raking over all the dust-heaps of the past. he breathes a mouldy air; the antiquarian habit may degrade a considerable talent, a real spiritual need in him, to a mere insatiable curiosity for everything old: he often sinks so low as to be satisfied with any food, and greedily devour all the scraps that fall from the bibliographical table. even if this degeneration do not take place, and the foundation be not withered on which antiquarian history can alone take root with profit to life: yet there are dangers enough, if it become too powerful and invade the territories of the other methods. it only understands how to preserve life, not to create it; and thus always undervalues the present growth, having, unlike monumental history, no certain instinct for it. thus it hinders the mighty impulse to a new deed and paralyses the doer, who must always, as doer, be grazing some piety or other. the fact that has grown old carries with it a demand for its own immortality. for when one considers the life-history of such an ancient fact, the amount of reverence paid to it for generations--whether it be a custom, a religious creed, or a political principle,--it seems presumptuous, even impious, to replace it by a new fact, and the ancient congregation of pieties by a new piety. here we see clearly how necessary a third way of looking at the past is to man, beside the other two. this is the "critical" way; which is also in the service of life. man must have the strength to break up the past; and apply it too, in order to live. he must bring the past to the bar of judgment, interrogate it remorselessly, and finally condemn it. every past is worth condemning: this is the rule in mortal affairs, which always contain a large measure of human power and human weakness. it is not justice that sits in judgment here; nor mercy that proclaims the verdict; but only life, the dim, driving force that insatiably desires--itself. its sentence is always unmerciful, always unjust, as it never flows from a pure fountain of knowledge: though it would generally turn out the same, if justice herself delivered it. "for everything that is born is _worthy_ of being destroyed: better were it then that nothing should be born." it requires great strength to be able to live and forget how far life and injustice are one. luther himself once said that the world only arose by an oversight of god; if he had ever dreamed of heavy ordnance, he would never have created it. the same life that needs forgetfulness, needs sometimes its destruction; for should the injustice of something ever become obvious--a monopoly, a caste, a dynasty for example--the thing deserves to fall. its past is critically examined, the knife put to its roots, and all the "pieties" are grimly trodden under foot. the process is always dangerous, even for life; and the men or the times that serve life in this way, by judging and annihilating the past, are always dangerous to themselves and others. for as we are merely the resultant of previous generations, we are also the resultant of their errors, passions, and crimes: it is impossible to shake off this chain. though we condemn the errors and think we have escaped them, we cannot escape the fact that we spring from them. at best, it comes to a conflict between our innate, inherited nature and our knowledge, between a stern, new discipline and an ancient tradition; and we plant a new way of life, a new instinct, a second nature, that withers the first. it is an attempt to gain a past _a posteriori_ from which we might spring, as against that from which we do spring; always a dangerous attempt, as it is difficult to find a limit to the denial of the past, and the second natures are generally weaker than the first. we stop too often at knowing the good without doing it, because we also know the better but cannot do it. here and there the victory is won, which gives a strange consolation to the fighters, to those who use critical history for the sake of life. the consolation is the knowledge that this "first nature" was once a second, and that every conquering "second nature" becomes a first. iv. this is how history can serve life. every man and nation needs a certain knowledge of the past, whether it be through monumental, antiquarian, or critical history, according to his objects, powers, and necessities. the need is not that of the mere thinkers who only look on at life, or the few who desire knowledge and can only be satisfied with knowledge; but it has always a reference to the end of life, and is under its absolute rule and direction. this is the natural relation of an age, a culture and a people to history; hunger is its source, necessity its norm, the inner plastic power assigns its limits. the knowledge of the past is only desired for the service of the future and the present, not to weaken the present or undermine a living future. all this is as simple as truth itself, and quite convincing to any one who is not in the toils of "historical deduction." and now to take a quick glance at our time! we fly back in astonishment. the clearness, naturalness, and purity of the connection between life and history has vanished; and in what a maze of exaggeration and contradiction do we now see the problem! is the guilt ours who see it, or have life and history really altered their conjunction and an inauspicious star risen between them? others may prove we have seen falsely; i am merely saying what we believe we see. there is such a star, a bright and lordly star, and the conjunction is really altered--by science, and the demand for history to be a science. life is no more dominant, and knowledge of the past no longer its thrall: boundary marks are overthrown everything bursts its limits. the perspective of events is blurred, and the blur extends through their whole immeasurable course. no generation has seen such a panoramic comedy as is shown by the "science of universal evolution," history; that shows it with the dangerous audacity of its motto--"fiat veritas, pereat vita." let me give a picture of the spiritual events in the soul of the modern man. historical knowledge streams on him from sources that are inexhaustible, strange incoherencies come together, memory opens all its gates and yet is never open wide enough, nature busies herself to receive all the foreign guests, to honour them and put them in their places. but they are at war with each other: violent measures seem necessary, in order to escape destruction one's self. it becomes second nature to grow gradually accustomed to this irregular and stormy home-life, though this second nature is unquestionably weaker, more restless, more radically unsound than the first. the modern man carries inside him an enormous heap of indigestible knowledge-stones that occasionally rattle together in his body, as the fairy-tale has it. and the rattle reveals the most striking characteristic of these modern men, the opposition of something inside them to which nothing external corresponds; and the reverse. the ancient nations knew nothing of this. knowledge, taken in excess without hunger, even contrary to desire, has no more the effect of transforming the external life; and remains hidden in a chaotic inner world that the modern man has a curious pride in calling his "real personality." he has the substance, he says, and only wants the form; but this is quite an unreal opposition in a living thing. our modern culture is for that reason not a living one, because it cannot be understood without that opposition. in other words, it is not a real culture but a kind of knowledge about culture, a complex of various thoughts and feelings about it, from which no decision as to its direction can come. its real motive force that issues in visible action is often no more than a mere convention, a wretched imitation, or even a shameless caricature. the man probably feels like the snake that has swallowed a rabbit whole and lies still in the sun, avoiding all movement not absolutely necessary. the "inner life" is now the only thing that matters to education, and all who see it hope that the education may not fail by being too indigestible. imagine a greek meeting it; he would observe that for modern men "education" and "historical education" seem to mean the same thing, with the difference that the one phrase is longer. and if he spoke of his own theory, that a man can be very well educated without any history at all, people would shake their heads and think they had not heard aright. the greeks, the famous people of a past still near to us, had the "unhistorical sense" strongly developed in the period of the greatest power. if a typical child of this age were transported to that world by some enchantment, he would probably find the greeks very "uneducated." and that discovery would betray the closely guarded secret of modern culture to the laughter of the world. for we moderns have nothing of our own. we only become worth notice by filling ourselves to overflowing with foreign customs, arts, philosophies, religions and sciences: we are wandering encyclopædias, as an ancient greek who had strayed into our time would probably call us. but the only value of an encyclopædia lies in the inside, in the contents, not in what is written outside, in the binding or the wrapper. and so the whole of modern culture is essentially internal; the bookbinder prints something like this on the cover: "manual of internal culture for external barbarians." the opposition of inner and outer makes the outer side still more barbarous, as it would naturally be, when the outward growth of a rude people merely developed its primitive inner needs. for what means has nature of repressing too great a luxuriance from without? only one,--to be affected by it as little as possible, to set it aside and stamp it out at the first opportunity. and so we have the custom of no longer taking real things seriously, we get the feeble personality on which the real and the permanent make so little impression. men become at last more careless and accommodating in external matters, and the considerable cleft between substance and form is widened; until they have no longer any feeling for barbarism, if only their memories be kept continually titillated, and there flow a constant stream of new things to be known, that can be neatly packed up in the cupboards of their memory. the culture of a people as against this barbarism, can be, i think, described with justice as the "unity of artistic style in every outward expression of the people's life." this must not be misunderstood, as though it were merely a question of the opposition between barbarism and "fine style." the people that can be called cultured, must be in a real sense a living unity, and not be miserably cleft asunder into form and substance. if one wish to promote a people's culture, let him try to promote this higher unity first, and work for the destruction of the modern educative system for the sake of a true education. let him dare to consider how the health of a people that has been destroyed by history may be restored, and how it may recover its instincts with its honour. i am only speaking, directly, about the germans of the present day, who have had to suffer more than other people from the feebleness of personality and the opposition of substance and form. "form" generally implies for us some convention, disguise or hypocrisy, and if not hated, is at any rate not loved. we have an extraordinary fear of both the word convention and the thing. this fear drove the german from the french school; for he wished to become more natural, and therefore more german. but he seems to have come to a false conclusion with his "therefore." first he ran away from his school of convention, and went by any road he liked: he has come ultimately to imitate voluntarily in a slovenly fashion, what he imitated painfully and often successfully before. so now the lazy fellow lives under french conventions that are actually incorrect: his manner of walking shows it, his conversation and dress, his general way of life. in the belief that he was returning to nature, he merely followed caprice and comfort, with the smallest possible amount of self-control. go through any german town; you will see conventions that are nothing but the negative aspect of the national characteristics of foreign states. everything is colourless, worn out, shoddy and ill-copied. every one acts at his own sweet will--which is not a strong or serious will--on laws dictated by the universal rush and the general desire for comfort. a dress that made no head ache in its inventing and wasted no time in the making, borrowed from foreign models and imperfectly copied, is regarded as an important contribution to german fashion. the sense of form is ironically disclaimed by the people--for they have the "sense of substance": they are famous for their cult of "inwardness." but there is also a famous danger in their "inwardness": the internal substance cannot be seen from the outside, and so may one day take the opportunity of vanishing, and no one notice its absence, any more than its presence before. one may think the german people to be very far from this danger: yet the foreigner will have some warrant for his reproach that our inward life is too weak and ill-organised to provide a form and external expression for itself. it may in rare cases show itself finely receptive, earnest and powerful, richer perhaps than the inward life of other peoples; but, taken as a whole, it remains weak, as all its fine threads are not tied together in one strong knot. the visible action is not the self-manifestation of the inward life, but only a weak and crude attempt of a single thread to make a show of representing the whole. and thus the german is not to be judged on any one action, for the individual may be as completely obscure after it as before. he must obviously be measured by his thoughts and feelings, which are now expressed in his books; if only the books did not, more than ever, raise the doubt whether the famous inward life is still really sitting in its inaccessible shrine. it might one day vanish and leave behind it only the external life,--with its vulgar pride and vain servility,--to mark the german. fearful thought!--as fearful as if the inward life still sat there, painted and rouged and disguised, become a play-actress or something worse; as his theatrical experience seems to have taught the quiet observer grillparzer, standing aside as he did from the main press. "we feel by theory," he says. "we hardly know any more how our contemporaries give expression to their feelings: we make them use gestures that are impossible nowadays. shakespeare has spoilt us moderns." this is a single example, its general application perhaps too hastily assumed. but how terrible it would be were that generalisation justified before our eyes! there would be then a note of despair in the phrase, "we germans feel by theory, we are all spoilt by history;"--a phrase that would cut at the roots of any hope for a future national culture. for every hope of that kind grows from the belief in the genuineness and immediacy of german feeling, from the belief in an untarnished inward life. where is our hope or belief, when its spring is muddied, and the inward quality has learned gestures and dances and the use of cosmetics, has learned to express itself "with due reflection in abstract terms," and gradually lose itself? and how should a great productive spirit exist among a nation that is not sure of its inward unity and is divided into educated men whose inner life has been drawn from the true path of education, and uneducated men whose inner life cannot be approached at all? how should it exist, i say, when the people has lost its own unity of feeling, and knows that the feeling of the part calling itself the educated part and claiming the right of controlling the artistic spirit of the nation, is false and hypocritical? here and there the judgment and taste of individuals may be higher and finer than the rest, but that is no compensation: it tortures a man to have to speak only to one section and be no longer in sympathy with his people. he would rather bury his treasure now, in disgust at the vulgar patronage of a class, though his heart be filled with tenderness for all. the instinct of the people can no longer meet him half-way; it is useless for them to stretch their arms out to him in yearning. what remains but to turn his quickened hatred against the ban, strike at the barrier raised by the so-called culture, and condemn as judge what blasted and degraded him as a living man and a source of life? he takes a profound insight into fate in exchange for the godlike desire of creation and help, and ends his days as a lonely philosopher, with the wisdom of disillusion. it is the painfullest comedy: he who sees it will feel a sacred obligation on him, and say to himself,--"help must come: the higher unity in the nature and soul of a people must be brought back, the cleft between inner and outer must again disappear under the hammer of necessity." but to what means can he look? what remains to him now but his knowledge? he hopes to plant the feeling of a need, by speaking from the breadth of that knowledge, giving it freely with both hands. from the strong need the strong action may one day arise. and to leave no doubt of the instance i am taking of the need and the knowledge, my testimony shall stand, that it is german unity in its highest sense which is the goal of our endeavour, far more than political union: it is the unity of the german spirit and life after the annihilation of the antagonism between form and substance, inward life and convention. v. an excess of history seems to be an enemy to the life of a time, and dangerous in five ways. firstly, the contrast of inner and outer is emphasised and personality weakened. secondly, the time comes to imagine that it possesses the rarest of virtues, justice, to a higher degree than any other time. thirdly, the instincts of a nation are thwarted, the maturity of the individual arrested no less than that of the whole. fourthly, we get the belief in the old age of mankind, the belief, at all times harmful, that we are late survivals, mere epigoni. lastly, an age reaches a dangerous condition of irony with regard to itself, and the still more dangerous state of cynicism, when a cunning egoistic theory of action is matured that maims and at last destroys the vital strength. to return to the first point: the modern man suffers from a weakened personality. the roman of the empire ceased to be a roman through the contemplation of the world that lay at his feet; he lost himself in the crowd of foreigners that streamed into rome, and degenerated amid the cosmopolitan carnival of arts, worships and moralities. it is the same with the modern man, who is continually having a world-panorama unrolled before his eyes by his historical artists. he is turned into a restless, dilettante spectator, and arrives at a condition when even great wars and revolutions cannot affect him beyond the moment. the war is hardly at an end, and it is already converted into thousands of copies of printed matter, and will be soon served up as the latest means of tickling the jaded palates of the historical gourmets. it seems impossible for a strong full chord to be prolonged, however powerfully the strings are swept: it dies away again the next moment in the soft and strengthless echo of history. in ethical language, one never succeeds in staying on a height; your deeds are sudden crashes, and not a long roll of thunder. one may bring the greatest and most marvellous thing to perfection; it must yet go down to orcus unhonoured and unsung. for art flies away when you are roofing your deeds with the historical awning. the man who wishes to understand everything in a moment, when he ought to grasp the unintelligible as the sublime by a long struggle, can be called intelligent only in the sense of schiller's epigram on the "reason of reasonable men." there is something the child sees that he does not see; something the child hears that he does not hear; and this something is the most important thing of all. because he does not understand it, his understanding is more childish than the child's and more simple than simplicity itself; in spite of the many clever wrinkles on his parchment face, and the masterly play of his fingers in unravelling the knots. he has lost or destroyed his instinct; he can no longer trust the "divine animal" and let the reins hang loose, when his understanding fails him and his way lies through the desert. his individuality is shaken, and left without any sure belief in itself; it sinks into its own inner being, which only means here the disordered chaos of what it has learned, which will never express itself externally, being mere dogma that cannot turn to life. looking further, we see how the banishment of instinct by history has turned men to shades and abstractions: no one ventures to show a personality, but masks himself as a man of culture, a savant, poet or politician. if one take hold of these masks, believing he has to do with a serious thing and not a mere puppet-show--for they all have an appearance of seriousness--he will find nothing but rags and coloured streamers in his hands. he must deceive himself no more, but cry aloud, "off with your jackets, or be what you seem!" a man of the royal stock of seriousness must no longer be don quixote, for he has better things to do than to tilt at such pretended realities. but he must always keep a sharp look about him, call his "halt! who goes there?" to all the shrouded figures, and tear the masks from their faces. and see the result! one might have thought that history encouraged men above all to be honest, even if it were only to be honest fools: this used to be its effect, but is so no longer. historical education and the uniform frock-coat of the citizen are both dominant at the same time. while there has never been such a full-throated chatter about "free personality," personalities can be seen no more (to say nothing of free ones); but merely men in uniform, with their coats anxiously pulled over their ears. individuality has withdrawn itself to its recesses; it is seen no more from the outside, which makes one doubt if it be possible to have causes without effects. or will a race of eunuchs prove to be necessary to guard the historical harem of the world? we can understand the reason for their aloofness very well. does it not seem as if their task were to watch over history to see that nothing comes out except other histories, but no deed that might be historical; to prevent personalities becoming "free," that is, sincere towards themselves and others, both in word and deed? only through this sincerity will the inner need and misery of the modern man be brought to the light, and art and religion come as true helpers in the place of that sad hypocrisy of convention and masquerade, to plant a common culture which will answer to real necessities, and not teach, as the present "liberal education" teaches, to tell lies about these needs, and thus become a walking lie one's self. in such an age, that suffers from its "liberal education," how unnatural, artificial and unworthy will be the conditions under which the sincerest of all sciences, the holy naked goddess philosophy, must exist! she remains, in such a world of compulsion and outward conformity, the subject of the deep monologue of the lonely wanderer or the chance prey of any hunter, the dark secret of the chamber or the daily talk of the old men and children at the university. no one dare fulfil the law of philosophy in himself; no one lives philosophically, with that single-hearted virile faith that forced one of the olden time to bear himself as a stoic, wherever he was and whatever he did, if he had once sworn allegiance to the stoa. all modern philosophising is political or official, bound down to be a mere phantasmagoria of learning by our modern governments, churches, universities, moralities and cowardices: it lives by sighing "if only...." and by knowing that "it happened once upon a time...." philosophy has no place in historical education, if it will be more than the knowledge that lives indoors, and can have no expression in action. were the modern man once courageous and determined, and not merely such an indoor being even in his hatreds, he would banish philosophy. at present he is satisfied with modestly covering her nakedness. yes, men think, write, print, speak and teach philosophically: so much is permitted them. it is only otherwise in action, in "life." only one thing is permitted there, and everything else quite impossible: such are the orders of historical education. "are these human beings," one might ask, "or only machines for thinking, writing and speaking?" goethe says of shakespeare: "no one has more despised correctness of costume than he: he knows too well the inner costume that all men wear alike. you hear that he describes romans wonderfully; i do not think so: they are flesh-and-blood englishmen; but at any rate they are men from top to toe, and the roman toga sits well on them." would it be possible, i wonder, to represent our present literary and national heroes, officials and politicians as romans? i am sure it would not, as they are no men, but incarnate compendia, abstractions made concrete. if they have a character of their own, it is so deeply sunk that it can never rise to the light of day: if they are men, they are only men to a physiologist. to all others they are something else, not men, not "beasts or gods," but historical pictures of the march of civilisation, and nothing but pictures and civilisation, form without any ascertainable substance, bad form unfortunately, and uniform at that. and in this way my thesis is to be understood and considered: "only strong personalities can endure history, the weak are extinguished by it." history unsettles the feelings when they are not powerful enough to measure the past by themselves. the man who dare no longer trust himself, but asks history against his will for advice "how he ought to feel now," is insensibly turned by his timidity into a play-actor, and plays a part, or generally many parts,--very badly therefore and superficially. gradually all connection ceases between the man and his historical subjects. we see noisy little fellows measuring themselves with the romans as though they were like them: they burrow in the remains of the greek poets, as if these were _corpora_ for their dissection--and as _vilia_ as their own well-educated _corpora_ might be. suppose a man is working at democritus. the question is always on my tongue, why precisely democritus? why not heraclitus, or philo, or bacon, or descartes? and then, why a philosopher? why not a poet or orator? and why especially a greek? why not an englishman or a turk? is not the past large enough to let you find some place where you may disport yourself without becoming ridiculous? but, as i said, they are a race of eunuchs: and to the eunuch one woman is the same as another, merely a woman, "woman in herself," the ever-unapproachable. and it is indifferent what they study, if history itself always remain beautifully "objective" to them, as men, in fact, who could never make history themselves. and since the eternal feminine could never "draw you upward," you draw it down to you, and being neuter yourselves, regard history as neuter also. but in order that no one may take any comparison of history and the eternal feminine too seriously, i will say at once that i hold it, on the contrary, to be the eternal masculine: i only add that for those who are "historically trained" throughout, it must be quite indifferent which it is; for they are themselves neither man nor woman, nor even hermaphrodite, but mere neuters, or, in more philosophic language, the eternal objective. if the personality be once emptied of its subjectivity, and come to what men call an "objective" condition, nothing can have any more effect on it. something good and true may be done, in action, poetry or music: but the hollow culture of the day will look beyond the work and ask the history of the author. if the author have already created something, our historian will set out clearly the past and the probable future course of his development, he will put him with others and compare them, and separate by analysis the choice of his material and his treatment; he will wisely sum the author up and give him general advice for his future path. the most astonishing works may be created; the swarm of historical neuters will always be in their place, ready to consider the authors through their long telescopes. the echo is heard at once: but always in the form of "criticism," though the critic never dreamed of the work's possibility a moment before. it never comes to have an influence, but only a criticism: and the criticism itself has no influence, but only breeds another criticism. and so we come to consider the fact of many critics as a mark of influence, that of few or none as a mark of failure. actually everything remains in the old condition, even in the presence of such "influence": men talk a little while of a new thing, and then of some other new thing, and in the meantime they do what they have always done. the historical training of our critics prevents their having an influence in the true sense, an influence on life and action. they put their blotting paper on the blackest writing, and their thick brushes over the gracefullest designs; these they call "corrections";--and that is all. their critical pens never cease to fly, for they have lost power over them; they are driven by their pens instead of driving them. the weakness of modern personality comes out well in the measureless overflow of criticism, in the want of self-mastery, and in what the romans called _impotentia_. vi. but leaving these weaklings, let us turn rather to a point of strength for which the modern man is famous. let us ask the painful question whether he has the right in virtue of his historical "objectivity" to call himself strong and just in a higher degree than the man of another age. is it true that this objectivity has its source in a heightened sense of the need for justice? or, being really an effect of quite other causes, does it only have the appearance of coming from justice, and really lead to an unhealthy prejudice in favour of the modern man? socrates thought it near madness to imagine one possessed a virtue without really possessing it. such imagination has certainly more danger in it than the contrary madness of a positive vice. for of this there is still a cure; but the other makes a man or a time daily worse, and therefore more unjust. no one has a higher claim to our reverence than the man with the feeling and the strength for justice. for the highest and rarest virtues unite and are lost in it, as an unfathomable sea absorbs the streams that flow from every side. the hand of the just man, who is called to sit in judgment, trembles no more when it holds the scales: he piles the weights inexorably against his own side, his eyes are not dimmed as the balance rises and falls, and his voice is neither hard nor broken when he pronounces the sentence. were he a cold demon of knowledge, he would cast round him the icy atmosphere of an awful, superhuman majesty, that we should fear, not reverence. but he is a man, and has tried to rise from a careless doubt to a strong certainty, from gentle tolerance to the imperative "thou must"; from the rare virtue of magnanimity to the rarest, of justice. he has come to be like that demon without being more than a poor mortal at the outset; above all, he has to atone to himself for his humanity and tragically shatter his own nature on the rock of an impossible virtue.--all this places him on a lonely height as the most reverend example of the human race. for truth is his aim, not in the form of cold intellectual knowledge, but the truth of the judge who punishes according to law; not as the selfish possession of an individual, but the sacred authority that removes the boundary stones from all selfish possessions; truth, in a word, as the tribunal of the world, and not as the chance prey of a single hunter. the search for truth is often thoughtlessly praised: but it only has anything great in it if the seeker have the sincere unconditional will for justice. its roots are in justice alone: but a whole crowd of different motives may combine in the search for it, that have nothing to do with truth at all; curiosity, for example, or dread of ennui, envy, vanity, or amusement. thus the world seems to be full of men who "serve truth": and yet the virtue of justice is seldom present, more seldom known, and almost always mortally hated. on the other hand a throng of sham virtues has entered in at all times with pomp and honour. few in truth serve truth, as only few have the pure will for justice; and very few even of these have the strength to be just. the will alone is not enough: the impulse to justice without the power of judgment has been the cause of the greatest suffering to men. and thus the common good could require nothing better than for the seed of this power to be strewn as widely as possible, that the fanatic may be distinguished from the true judge, and the blind desire from the conscious power. but there are no means of planting a power of judgment: and so when one speaks to men of truth and justice, they will be ever troubled by the doubt whether it be the fanatic or the judge who is speaking to them. and they must be pardoned for always treating the "servants of truth" with special kindness, who possess neither the will nor the power to judge and have set before them the task of finding "pure knowledge without reference to consequences," knowledge, in plain terms, that comes to nothing. there are very many truths which are unimportant; problems that require no struggle to solve, to say nothing of sacrifice. and in this safe realm of indifference a man may very successfully become a "cold demon of knowledge." and yet--if we find whole regiments of learned inquirers being turned to such demons in some age specially favourable to them, it is always unfortunately possible that the age is lacking in a great and strong sense of justice, the noblest spring of the so-called impulse to truth. consider the historical virtuoso of the present time: is he the justest man of his age? true, he has developed in himself such a delicacy and sensitiveness that "nothing human is alien to him." times and persons most widely separated come together in the concords of his lyre. he has become a passive instrument, whose tones find an echo in similar instruments: until the whole atmosphere of a time is filled with such echoes, all buzzing in one soft chord. yet i think one only hears the overtones of the original historical note: its rough powerful quality can be no longer guessed from these thin and shrill vibrations. the original note sang of action, need, and terror; the overtone lulls us into a soft dilettante sleep. it is as though the heroic symphony had been arranged for two flutes for the use of dreaming opium-smokers. we can now judge how these virtuosi stand towards the claim of the modern man to a higher and purer conception of justice. this virtue has never a pleasing quality; it never charms; it is harsh and strident. generosity stands very low on the ladder of the virtues in comparison; and generosity is the mark of a few rare historians! most of them only get as far as tolerance, in other words they leave what cannot be explained away, they correct it and touch it up condescendingly, on the tacit assumption that the novice will count it as justice if the past be narrated without harshness or open expressions of hatred. but only superior strength can really judge; weakness must tolerate, if it do not pretend to be strength and turn justice to a play-actress. there is still a dreadful class of historians remaining--clever, stern and honest, but narrow-minded: who have the "good will" to be just with a pathetic belief in their actual judgments, which are all false; for the same reason, almost, as the verdicts of the usual juries are false. how difficult it is to find a real historical talent, if we exclude all the disguised egoists, and the partisans who pretend to take up an impartial attitude for the sake of their own unholy game! and we also exclude the thoughtless folk who write history in the naïve faith that justice resides in the popular view of their time, and that to write in the spirit of the time is to be just; a faith that is found in all religions, and which, in religion, serves very well. the measurement of the opinions and deeds of the past by the universal opinions of the present is called "objectivity" by these simple people: they find the canon of all truth here: their work is to adapt the past to the present triviality. and they call all historical writing "subjective" that does not regard these popular opinions as canonical. might not an illusion lurk in the highest interpretation of the word objectivity? we understand by it a certain standpoint in the historian, who sees the procession of motive and consequence too clearly for it to have an effect on his own personality. we think of the æsthetic phenomenon of the detachment from all personal concern with which the painter sees the picture and forgets himself, in a stormy landscape, amid thunder and lightning, or on a rough sea: and we require the same artistic vision and absorption in his object from the historian. but it is only a superstition to say that the picture given to such a man by the object really shows the truth of things. unless it be that objects are expected in such moments to paint or photograph themselves by their own activity on a purely passive medium! but this would be a myth, and a bad one at that. one forgets that this moment is actually the powerful and spontaneous moment of creation in the artist, of "composition" in its highest form, of which the result will be an artistically, but not an historically, true picture. to think objectively, in this sense, of history is the work of the dramatist: to think one thing with another, and weave the elements into a single whole; with the presumption that the unity of plan must be put into the objects if it be not already there. so man veils and subdues the past, and expresses his impulse to art--but not his impulse to truth or justice. objectivity and justice have nothing to do with each other. there could be a kind of historical writing that had no drop of common fact in it and yet could claim to be called in the highest degree objective. grillparzer goes so far as to say that "history is nothing but the manner in which the spirit of man apprehends facts that are obscure to him, links things together whose connection heaven only knows, replaces the unintelligible by something intelligible, puts his own ideas of causation into the external world, which can perhaps be explained only from within: and assumes the existence of chance, where thousands of small causes may be really at work. each man has his own individual needs, and so millions of tendencies are running together, straight or crooked, parallel or across, forward or backward, helping or hindering each other. they have all the appearance of chance, and make it impossible, quite apart from all natural influences, to establish any universal lines on which past events must have run." but as a result of this so-called "objective" way of looking at things, such a "must" ought to be made clear. it is a presumption that takes a curious form if adopted by the historian as a dogma. schiller is quite clear about its truly subjective nature when he says of the historian, "one event after the other begins to draw away from blind chance and lawless freedom, and take its place as the member of an harmonious whole--_which is of course only apparent in its presentation_." but what is one to think of the innocent statement, wavering between tautology and nonsense, of a famous historical virtuoso? "it seems that all human actions and impulses are subordinate to the process of the material world, that works unnoticed, powerfully and irresistibly." in such a sentence one no longer finds obscure wisdom in the form of obvious folly; as in the saying of goethe's gardener, "nature may be forced but not compelled," or in the notice on the side-show at a fair, in swift: "the largest elephant in the world, except himself, to be seen here." for what opposition is there between human action and the process of the world? it seems to me that such historians cease to be instructive as soon as they begin to generalise; their weakness is shown by their obscurity. in other sciences the generalisations are the most important things, as they contain the laws. but if such generalisations as these are to stand as laws, the historian's labour is lost; for the residue of truth, after the obscure and insoluble part is removed, is nothing but the commonest knowledge. the smallest range of experience will teach it. but to worry whole peoples for the purpose, and spend many hard years of work on it, is like crowding one scientific experiment on another long after the law can be deduced from the results already obtained: and this absurd excess of experiment has been the bane of all natural science since zollner. if the value of a drama lay merely in its final scene, the drama itself would be a very long, crooked and laborious road to the goal: and i hope history will not find its whole significance in general propositions, and regard them as its blossom and fruit. on the contrary, its real value lies in inventing ingenious variations on a probably commonplace theme, in raising the popular melody to a universal symbol and showing what a world of depth, power and beauty exists in it. but this requires above all a great artistic faculty, a creative vision from a height, the loving study of the data of experience, the free elaborating of a given type,--objectivity in fact, though this time as a positive quality. objectivity is so often merely a phrase. instead of the quiet gaze of the artist that is lit by an inward flame, we have an affectation of tranquillity; just as a cold detachment may mask a lack of moral feeling. in some cases a triviality of thought, the everyday wisdom that is too dull not to seem calm and disinterested, comes to represent the artistic condition in which the subjective side has quite sunk out of sight. everything is favoured that does not rouse emotion, and the driest phrase is the correct one. they go so far as to accept a man who is _not affected at all_ by some particular moment in the past as the right man to describe it. this is the usual relation of the greeks and the classical scholars. they have nothing to do with each other--and this is called "objectivity"! the intentional air of detachment that is assumed for effect, the sober art of the superficial motive-hunter is most exasperating when the highest and rarest things are in question; and it is the _vanity_ of the historian that drives him to this attitude of indifference. he goes to justify the axiom that a man's vanity corresponds to his lack of wit. no, be honest at any rate! do not pretend to the artist's strength, that is the real objectivity; do not try to be just, if you are not born to that dread vocation. as if it were the task of every time to be just to everything before it! ages and generations have never the right to be the judges of all previous ages and generations: only to the rarest men in them can that difficult mission fall. who compels you to judge? if it is your wish--you must prove first that you are capable of justice. as judges, you must stand higher than that which is to be judged: as it is, you have only come later. the guests that come last to the table should rightly take the last places: and will you take the first? then do some great and mighty deed: the place may be prepared for you then, even though you do come last. _you can only explain the past by what is highest in the present._ only by straining the noblest qualities you have to their highest power will you find out what is greatest in the past, most worth knowing and preserving. like by like! otherwise you will draw the past to your own level. do not believe any history that does not spring from the mind of a rare spirit. you will know the quality of the spirit, by its being forced to say something universal, or to repeat something that is known already; the fine historian must have the power of coining the known into a thing never heard before and proclaiming the universal so simply and profoundly that the simple is lost in the profound, and the profound in the simple. no one can be a great historian and artist, and a shallowpate at the same time. but one must not despise the workers who sift and cast together the material because they can never become great historians. they must, still less, be confounded with them, for they are the necessary bricklayers and apprentices in the service of the master: just as the french used to speak, more naïvely than a german would, of the "historiens de m. thiers." these workmen should gradually become extremely learned, but never, for that reason, turn to be masters. great learning and great shallowness go together very well under one hat. thus, history is to be written by the man of experience and character. he who has not lived through something greater and nobler than others, will not be able to explain anything great and noble in the past. the language of the past is always oracular: you will only understand it as builders of the future who know the present. we can only explain the extraordinarily wide influence of delphi by the fact that the delphic priests had an exact knowledge of the past: and, similarly, only he who is building up the future has a right to judge the past. if you set a great aim before your eyes, you control at the same time the itch for analysis that makes the present into a desert for you, and all rest, all peaceful growth and ripening, impossible. hedge yourselves with a great, all-embracing hope, and strive on. make of yourselves a mirror where the future may see itself, and forget the superstition that you are epigoni. you have enough to ponder and find out, in pondering the life of the future: but do not ask history to show you the means and the instrument to it. if you live yourselves back into the history of great men, you will find in it the high command to come to maturity and leave that blighting system of cultivation offered by your time: which sees its own profit in not allowing you to become ripe, that it may use and dominate you while you are yet unripe. and if you want biographies, do not look for those with the legend "mr. so-and-so and his times," but for one whose title-page might be inscribed "a fighter against his time." feast your souls on plutarch, and dare to believe in yourselves when you believe in his heroes. a hundred such men--educated against the fashion of to-day, made familiar with the heroic, and come to maturity--are enough to give an eternal quietus to the noisy sham education of this time. vii. the unrestrained historical sense, pushed to its logical extreme, uproots the future, because it destroys illusions and robs existing things of the only atmosphere in which they can live. historical justice, even if practised conscientiously, with a pure heart, is therefore a dreadful virtue, because it always undermines and ruins the living thing: its judgment always means annihilation. if there be no constructive impulse behind the historical one, if the clearance of rubbish be not merely to leave the ground free for the hopeful living future to build its house, if justice alone be supreme, the creative instinct is sapped and discouraged. a religion, for example, that has to be turned into a matter of historical knowledge by the power of pure justice, and to be scientifically studied throughout, is destroyed at the end of it all. for the historical audit brings so much to light which is false and absurd, violent and inhuman, that the condition of pious illusion falls to pieces. and a thing can only live through a pious illusion. for man is creative only through love and in the shadow of love's illusions, only through the unconditional belief in perfection and righteousness. everything that forces a man to be no longer unconditioned in his love, cuts at the root of his strength: he must wither, and be dishonoured. art has the opposite effect to history: and only perhaps if history suffer transformation into a pure work of art, can it preserve instincts or arouse them. such history would be quite against the analytical and inartistic tendencies of our time, and even be considered false. but the history that merely destroys without any impulse to construct, will in the long-run make its instruments tired of life; for such men destroy illusions, and "he who destroys illusions in himself and others is punished by the ultimate tyrant, nature." for a time a man can take up history like any other study, and it will be perfectly harmless. recent theology seems to have entered quite innocently into partnership with history, and scarcely sees even now that it has unwittingly bound itself to the voltairean _écrasez_! no one need expect from that any new and powerful constructive impulse: they might as well have let the so-called protestant union serve as the cradle of a new religion, and the jurist holtzendorf, the editor of the far more dubiously named protestant bible, be its john the baptist. this state of innocence may be continued for some time by the hegelian philosophy,--still seething in some of the older heads,--by which men can distinguish the "idea of christianity" from its various imperfect "manifestations"; and persuade themselves that it is the "self-movement of the idea" that is ever particularising itself in purer and purer forms, and at last becomes the purest, most transparent, in fact scarcely visible form in the brain of the present _theologus liberalis vulgaris_. but to listen to this pure christianity speaking its mind about the earlier impure christianity, the uninitiated hearer would often get the impression that the talk was not of christianity at all but of ...--what are we to think? if we find christianity described by the "greatest theologians of the century" as the religion that claims to "find itself in all real religions and some other barely possible religions," and if the "true church" is to be a thing "which may become a liquid mass with no fixed outline, with no fixed place for its different parts, but everything to be peacefully welded together"--what, i ask again, are we to think? christianity has been denaturalised by historical treatment--which in its most complete form means "just" treatment--until it has been resolved into pure knowledge and destroyed in the process. this can be studied in everything that has life. for it ceases to have life if it be perfectly dissected, and lives in pain and anguish as soon as the historical dissection begins. there are some who believe in the saving power of german music to revolutionise the german nature. they angrily exclaim against the special injustice done to our culture, when such men as mozart and beethoven are beginning to be spattered with the learned mud of the biographers and forced to answer a thousand searching questions on the rack of historical criticism. is it not premature death, or at least mutilation, for anything whose living influence is not yet exhausted, when men turn their curious eyes to the little minutiæ of life and art, and look for problems of knowledge where one ought to learn to live, and forget problems? set a couple of these modern biographers to consider the origins of christianity or the lutheran reformation: their sober, practical investigations would be quite sufficient to make all spiritual "action at a distance" impossible: just as the smallest animal can prevent the growth of the mightiest oak by simply eating up the acorn. all living things need an atmosphere, a mysterious mist, around them. if that veil be taken away and a religion, an art, or a genius condemned to revolve like a star without an atmosphere, we must not be surprised if it becomes hard and unfruitful, and soon withers. it is so with all great things "that never prosper without some illusion," as hans sachs says in the meistersinger. every people, every man even, who would become ripe, needs such a veil of illusion, such a protecting cloud. but now men hate to become ripe, for they honour history above life. they cry in triumph that "science is now beginning to rule life." possibly it might; but a life thus ruled is not of much value. it is not such true _life_, and promises much less for the future than the life that used to be guided not by science, but by instincts and powerful illusions. but this is not to be the age of ripe, alert and harmonious personalities, but of work that may be of most use to the commonwealth. men are to be fashioned to the needs of the time, that they may soon take their place in the machine. they must work in the factory of the "common good" before they are ripe, or rather to prevent them becoming ripe; for this would be a luxury that would draw away a deal of power from the "labour market." some birds are blinded that they may sing better; i do not think men sing to-day better than their grandfathers, though i am sure they are blinded early. but light, too clear, too sudden and dazzling, is the infamous means used to blind them. the young man is kicked through all the centuries: boys who know nothing of war, diplomacy, or commerce are considered fit to be introduced to political history. we moderns also run through art galleries and hear concerts in the same way as the young man runs through history. we can feel that one thing sounds differently from another, and pronounce on the different "effects." and the power of gradually losing all feelings of strangeness or astonishment, and finally being pleased at anything, is called the historical sense, or historical culture. the crowd of influences streaming on the young soul is so great, the clods of barbarism and violence flung at him so strange and overwhelming, that an assumed stupidity is his only refuge. where there is a subtler and stronger self-consciousness we find another emotion too--disgust. the young man has become homeless: he doubts all ideas, all moralities. he knows "it was different in every age, and what you are does not matter." in a heavy apathy he lets opinion on opinion pass by him, and understands the meaning of hölderlin's words when he read the work of diogenes laertius on the lives and doctrines of the greek philosophers: "i have seen here too what has often occurred to me, that the change and waste in men's thoughts and systems is far more tragic than the fates that overtake what men are accustomed to call the only realities." no, such study of history bewilders and overwhelms. it is not necessary for youth, as the ancients show, but even in the highest degree dangerous, as the moderns show. consider the historical student, the heir of ennui, that appears even in his boyhood. he has the "methods" for original work, the "correct ideas" and the airs of the master at his fingers' ends. a little isolated period of the past is marked out for sacrifice. he cleverly applies his method, and produces something, or rather, in prouder phrase, "creates" something. he becomes a "servant of truth" and a ruler in the great domain of history. if he was what they call ripe as a boy, he is now over-ripe. you only need shake him and wisdom will rattle down into your lap; but the wisdom is rotten, and every apple has its worm. believe me, if men work in the factory of science and have to make themselves useful before they are really ripe, science is ruined as much as the slaves who have been employed too soon. i am sorry to use the common jargon about slave-owners and taskmasters in respect of such conditions, that might be thought free from any economic taint: but the words "factory, labour-market, auction-sale, practical use," and all the auxiliaries of egoism, come involuntarily to the lips in describing the younger generation of savants. successful mediocrity tends to become still more mediocre, science still more "useful." our modern savants are only wise on one subject, in all the rest they are, to say the least, different from those of the old stamp. in spite of that they demand honour and profit for themselves, as if the state and public opinion were bound to take the new coinage for the same value as the old. the carters have made a trade-compact among themselves, and settled that genius is superfluous, for every carrier is being re-stamped as one. and probably a later age will see that their edifices are only carted together and not built. to those who have ever on their lips the modern cry of battle and sacrifice--"division of labour! fall into line!" we may say roundly: "if you try to further the progress of science as quickly as possible, you will end by destroying it as quickly as possible; just as the hen is worn out which you force to lay too many eggs." the progress of science has been amazingly rapid in the last decade; but consider the savants, those exhausted hens. they are certainly not "harmonious" natures: they can merely cackle more than before, because they lay eggs oftener: but the eggs are always smaller, though their books are bigger. the natural result of it all is the favourite "popularising" of science (or rather its feminising and infantising), the villainous habit of cutting the cloth of science to fit the figure of the "general public." goethe saw the abuse in this, and demanded that science should only influence the outer world by way of _a nobler ideal of action_. the older generation of savants had good reason for thinking this abuse an oppressive burden: the modern savants have an equally good reason for welcoming it, because, leaving their little corner of knowledge out of account, they are part of the "general public" themselves, and its needs are theirs. they only require to take themselves less seriously to be able to open their little kingdom successfully to popular curiosity. this easy-going behaviour is called "the modest condescension of the savant to the people"; whereas in reality he has only "descended" to himself, so far as he is not a savant but a plebeian. rise to the conception of a people, you learned men; you can never have one noble or high enough. if you thought much of the people, you would have compassion towards them, and shrink from offering your historical aquafortis as a refreshing drink. but you really think very little of them, for you dare not take any reasonable pains for their future; and you act like practical pessimists, men who feel the coming catastrophe and become indifferent and careless of their own and others' existence. "if only the earth last for us: and if it do not last, it is no matter." thus they come to live an _ironical_ existence. viii. it may seem a paradox, though it is none, that i should attribute a kind of "ironical self-consciousness" to an age that is generally so honestly, and clamorously, vain of its historical training; and should see a suspicion hovering near it that there is really nothing to be proud of, and a fear lest the time for rejoicing at historical knowledge may soon have gone by. goethe has shown a similar riddle in man's nature, in his remarkable study of newton: he finds a "troubled feeling of his own error" at the base--or rather on the height--of his being, just as if he was conscious at times of having a deeper insight into things, that vanished the moment after. this gave him a certain ironical view of his own nature. and one finds that the greater and more developed "historical men" are conscious of all the superstition and absurdity in the belief that a people's education need be so extremely historical as it is; the mightiest nations, mightiest in action and influence, have lived otherwise, and their youth has been trained otherwise. the knowledge gives a sceptical turn to their minds. "the absurdity and superstition," these sceptics say, "suit men like ourselves, who come as the latest withered shoots of a gladder and mightier stock, and fulfil hesiod's prophecy, that men will one day be born gray-headed, and that zeus will destroy that generation as soon as the sign be visible." historical culture is really a kind of inherited grayness, and those who have borne its mark from childhood must believe instinctively in _the old age of mankind_. to old age belongs the old man's business of looking back and casting up his accounts, of seeking consolation in the memories of the past,--in historical culture. but the human race is tough and persistent, and will not admit that the lapse of a thousand years, or a hundred thousand, entitles any one to sum up its progress from the past to the future; that is, it will not be observed as a whole at all by that infinitesimal atom, the individual man. what is there in a couple of thousand years--the period of thirty-four consecutive human lives of sixty years each--to make us speak of youth at the beginning, and "the old age of mankind" at the end of them? does not this paralysing belief in a fast-fading humanity cover the misunderstanding of a theological idea, inherited from the middle ages, that the end of the world is approaching and we are waiting anxiously for the judgment? does not the increasing demand for historical judgment give us that idea in a new dress? as if our time were the latest possible time, and commanded to hold that universal judgment of the past, which the christian never expected from a man, but from "the son of man." the _memento mori_, spoken to humanity as well as the individual, was a sting that never ceased to pain, the crown of mediæval knowledge and consciousness. the opposite message of a later time, _memento vivere_, is spoken rather timidly, without the full power of the lungs; and there is something almost dishonest about it. for mankind still keeps to its _memento mori_, and shows it by the universal need for history; science may flap its wings as it will, it has never been able to gain the free air. a deep feeling of hopelessness has remained, and taken the historical colouring that has now darkened and depressed all higher education. a religion that, of all the hours of man's life, thinks the last the most important, that has prophesied the end of earthly life and condemned all creatures to live in the fifth act of a tragedy, may call forth the subtlest and noblest powers of man, but it is an enemy to all new planting, to all bold attempts or free aspirations. it opposes all flight into the unknown, because it has no life or hope there itself. it only lets the new bud press forth on sufferance, to blight it in its own good time: "it might lead life astray and give it a false value." what the florentines did under the influence of savonarola's exhortations, when they made the famous holocaust of pictures, manuscripts, masks and mirrors, christianity would like to do with every culture that allured to further effort and bore that _memento vivere_ on its standard. and if it cannot take the direct way--the way of main force--it gains its end all the same by allying itself with historical culture, though generally without its connivance; and speaking through its mouth, turns away every fresh birth with a shrug of its shoulders, and makes us feel all the more that we are late-comers and epigoni, that we are, in a word, born with gray hair. the deep and serious contemplation of the unworthiness of all past action, of the world ripe for judgment, has been whittled down to the sceptical consciousness that it is anyhow a good thing to know all that has happened, as it is too late to do anything better. the historical sense makes its servants passive and retrospective. only in moments of forgetfulness, when that sense is dormant, does the man who is sick of the historical fever ever act; though he only analyses his deed again after it is over (which prevents it from having any further consequences), and finally puts it on the dissecting table for the purposes of history. in this sense we are still living in the middle ages, and history is still a disguised theology; just as the reverence with which the unlearned layman looks on the learned class is inherited through the clergy. what men gave formerly to the church they give now, though in smaller measure, to science. but the fact of giving at all is the work of the church, not of the modern spirit, which among its other good qualities has something of the miser in it, and is a bad hand at the excellent virtue of liberality. these words may not be very acceptable, any more than my derivation of the excess of history from the mediæval _memento mori_ and the hopelessness that christianity bears in its heart towards all future ages of earthly existence. but you should always try to replace my hesitating explanations by a better one. for the origin of historical culture, and of its absolutely radical antagonism to the spirit of a new time and a "modern consciousness," must itself be known by a historical process. history must solve the problem of history, science must turn its sting against itself. this threefold "must" is the imperative of the "new spirit," if it is really to contain something new, powerful, vital and original. or is it true that we germans--to leave the romance nations out of account--must always be mere "followers" in all the higher reaches of culture, because that is all we _can_ be? the words of wilhelm wackernagel are well worth pondering: "we germans are a nation of 'followers,' and with all our higher science and even our faith, are merely the successors of the ancient world. even those who are opposed to it are continually breathing the immortal spirit of classical culture with that of christianity: and if any one could separate these two elements from the living air surrounding the soul of man, there would not be much remaining for a spiritual life to exist on." even if we would rest content with our vocation to follow antiquity, even if we decided to take it in an earnest and strenuous spirit and to show our high prerogative in our earnestness,--we should yet be compelled to ask whether it were our eternal destiny to be pupils of a fading antiquity. we might be allowed at some time to put our aim higher and further above us. and after congratulating ourselves on having brought that secondary spirit of alexandrian culture in us to such marvellous productiveness--through our "universal history"--we might go on to place before us, as our noblest prize, the still higher task of striving beyond and above this alexandrian world; and bravely find our prototypes in the ancient greek world, where all was great, natural and human. but it is just _there_ that we find the reality of a true unhistorical culture--and in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, an unspeakably rich and vital culture. were we germans nothing but followers, we could not be anything greater or prouder than the lineal inheritors and followers of such a culture. this however must be added. the thought of being epigoni, that is often a torture, can yet create a spring of hope for the future, to the individual as well as the people: so far, that is, as we can regard ourselves as the heirs and followers of the marvellous classical power, and see therein both our honour and our spur. but not as the late and bitter fruit of a powerful stock, giving that stock a further spell of cold life, as antiquaries and grave-diggers. such late-comers live truly an ironical existence. annihilation follows their halting walk on tiptoe through life. they shudder before it in the midst of their rejoicing over the past. they are living memories, and their own memories have no meaning; for there are none to inherit them. and thus they are wrapped in the melancholy thought that their life is an injustice, which no future life can set right again. suppose that these antiquaries, these late arrivals, were to change their painful ironic modesty for a certain shamelessness. suppose we heard them saying, aloud, "the race is at its zenith, for it has manifested itself consciously for the first time." we should have a comedy, in which the dark meaning of a certain very celebrated philosophy would unroll itself for the benefit of german culture. i believe there has been no dangerous turning-point in the progress of german culture in this century that has not been made more dangerous by the enormous and still living influence of this hegelian philosophy. the belief that one is a late-comer in the world is, anyhow, harmful and degrading: but it must appear frightful and devastating when it raises our late-comer to godhead, by a neat turn of the wheel, as the true meaning and object of all past creation, and his conscious misery is set up as the perfection of the world's history. such a point of view has accustomed the germans to talk of a "world-process," and justify their own time as its necessary result. and it has put history in the place of the other spiritual powers, art and religion, as the one sovereign; inasmuch as it is the "idea realising itself," the "dialectic of the spirit of the nations," and the "tribunal of the world." history understood in this hegelian way has been contemptuously called god's sojourn upon earth,--though the god was first created by the history. he, at any rate, became transparent and intelligible inside hegelian skulls, and has risen through all the dialectically possible steps in his being up to the manifestation of the self: so that for hegel the highest and final stage of the world-process came together in his own berlin existence. he ought to have said that everything after him was merely to be regarded as the musical coda of the great historical rondo,--or rather, as simply superfluous. he has not said it; and thus he has implanted in a generation leavened throughout by him the worship of the "power of history," that practically turns every moment into a sheer gaping at success, into an idolatry of the actual: for which we have now discovered the characteristic phrase "to adapt ourselves to circumstances." but the man who has once learnt to crook the knee and bow the head before the power of history, nods "yes" at last, like a chinese doll, to every power, whether it be a government or a public opinion or a numerical majority; and his limbs move correctly as the power pulls the string. if each success have come by a "rational necessity," and every event show the victory of logic or the "idea," then--down on your knees quickly, and let every step in the ladder of success have its reverence! there are no more living mythologies, you say? religions are at their last gasp? look at the religion of the power of history, and the priests of the mythology of ideas, with their scarred knees! do not all the virtues follow in the train of the new faith? and shall we not call it unselfishness, when the historical man lets himself be turned into an "objective" mirror of all that is? is it not magnanimity to renounce all power in heaven and earth in order to adore the mere fact of power? is it not justice, always to hold the balance of forces in your hands and observe which is the stronger and heavier? and what a school of politeness is such a contemplation of the past! to take everything objectively, to be angry at nothing, to love nothing, to understand everything--makes one gentle and pliable. even if a man brought up in this school will show himself openly offended, one is just as pleased, knowing it is only meant in the artistic sense of _ira et studium_, though it is really _sine ira et studio_. what old-fashioned thoughts i have on such a combination of virtue and mythology! but they must out, however one may laugh at them. i would even say that history always teaches--"it was once," and morality--"it ought not to be, or have been." so history becomes a compendium of actual immorality. but how wrong would one be to regard history as the judge of this actual immorality! morality is offended by the fact that a raphael had to die at thirty-six; such a being ought not to die. if you came to the help of history, as the apologists of the actual, you would say: "he had spoken everything that was in him to speak, a longer life would only have enabled him to create a similar beauty, and not a new beauty," and so on. thus you become an _advocatus diaboli_ by setting up the success, the fact, as your idol: whereas the fact is always dull, at all times more like calf than a god. your apologies for history are helped by ignorance: for it is only because you do not know what a _natura naturans_ like raphael is, that you are not on fire when you think it existed once and can never exist again. some one has lately tried to tell us that goethe had out-lived himself with his eighty-two years: and yet i would gladly take two of goethe's "out-lived" years in exchange for whole cartloads of fresh modern lifetimes, to have another set of such conversations as those with eckermann, and be preserved from all the "modern" talk of these esquires of the moment. how few living men have a right to live, as against those mighty dead! that the many live and those few live no longer, is simply a brutal truth, that is, a piece of unalterable folly, a blank wall of "it was once so" against the moral judgment "it ought not to have been." yes, against the moral judgment! for you may speak of what virtue you will, of justice, courage, magnanimity, of wisdom and human compassion,--you will find the virtuous man will always rise against the blind force of facts, the tyranny of the actual, and submit himself to laws that are not the fickle laws of history. he ever swims against the waves of history, either by fighting his passions, as the nearest brute facts of his existence, or by training himself to honesty amid the glittering nets spun round him by falsehood. were history nothing more than the "all-embracing system of passion and error," man would have to read it as goethe wished werther to be read;--just as if it called to him, "be a man and follow me not!" but fortunately history also keeps alive for us the memory of the great "fighters against history," that is, against the blind power of the actual; it puts itself in the pillory just by glorifying the true historical nature in men who troubled themselves very little about the "thus it is," in order that they might follow a "thus it must be" with greater joy and greater pride. not to drag their generation to the grave, but to found a new one--that is the motive that ever drives them onward; and even if they are born late, there is a way of living by which they can forget it--and future generations will know them only as the first-comers. ix. is perhaps our time such a "first-comer"? its historical sense is so strong, and has such universal and boundless expression, that future times will commend it, if only for this, as a first-comer--if there be any future time, in the sense of future culture. but here comes a grave doubt. close to the modern man's pride there stands his irony about himself, his consciousness that he must live in a historical, or twilit, atmosphere, the fear that he can retain none of his youthful hopes and powers. here and there one goes further into cynicism, and justifies the course of history, nay, the whole evolution of the world, as simply leading up to the modern man, according to the cynical canon:--"what you see now had to come, man had to be thus and not otherwise, no one can stand against this necessity." he who cannot rest in a state of irony flies for refuge to the cynicism. the last decade makes him a present of one of its most beautiful inventions, a full and well-rounded phrase for this cynicism: he calls his way of living thoughtlessly and after the fashion of his time, "the full surrender of his personality to the world-process." the personality and the world-process! the world-process and the personality of the earthworm! if only one did not eternally hear the word "world, world, world," that hyperbole of all hyperboles; when we should only speak, in a decent manner, of "man, man, man"! heirs of the greeks and romans, of christianity? all that seems nothing to the cynics. but "heirs of the world-process"; the final target of the world-process; the meaning and solution of all riddles of the universe, the ripest fruit on the tree of knowledge!--that is what i call a right noble thought: by this token are the firstlings of every time to be known, although they may have arrived last. the historical imagination has never flown so far, even in a dream; for now the history of man is merely the continuation of that of animals and plants: the universal historian finds traces of himself even in the utter depths of the sea, in the living slime. he stands astounded in face of the enormous way that man has run, and his gaze quivers before the mightier wonder, the modern man who can see all this way! he stands proudly on the pyramid of the world-process: and while he lays the final stone of his knowledge, he seems to cry aloud to listening nature: "we are at the top, we are the top, we are the completion of nature!" o thou too proud european of the nineteenth century, art thou not mad? thy knowledge does not complete nature, it only kills thine own nature! measure the height of what thou knowest by the depths of thy power to _do_. thou climbest the sunbeams of knowledge up towards heaven--but also down to chaos. thy manner of going is fatal to thee; the ground slips from under thy feet into the unknown; thy life has no other stay, but only spider's webs that every new stroke of thy knowledge tears asunder.--but not another serious word about this, for there is a lighter side to it all. the moralist, the artist, the saint and the statesman may well be troubled, when they see that all foundations are breaking up in mad unconscious ruin, and resolving themselves into the ever flowing stream of becoming; that all creation is being tirelessly spun into webs of history by the modern man, the great spider in the mesh of the world-net. we ourselves may be glad for once in a way that we see it all in the shining magic mirror of a philosophical parodist, in whose brain the time has come to an ironical consciousness of itself, to a point even of wickedness, in goethe's phrase. hegel once said, "when the spirit makes a fresh start, we philosophers are at hand." our time did make a fresh start--into irony, and lo! edward von hartmann was at hand, with his famous philosophy of the unconscious--or, more plainly, his philosophy of unconscious irony. we have seldom read a more jovial production, a greater philosophical joke than hartmann's book. any one whom it does not fully enlighten about "becoming," who is not swept and garnished throughout by it, is ready to become a monument of the past himself. the beginning and end of the world-process, from the first throb of consciousness to its final leap into nothingness, with the task of our generation settled for it;--all drawn from that clever fount of inspiration, the unconscious, and glittering in apocalyptic light, imitating an honest seriousness to the life, as if it were a serious philosophy and not a huge joke,--such a system shows its creator to be one of the first philosophical parodists of all time. let us then sacrifice on his altar, and offer the inventor of a true universal medicine a lock of hair, in schleiermacher's phrase. for what medicine would be more salutary to combat the excess of historical culture than hartmann's parody of the world's history? if we wished to express in the fewest words what hartmann really has to tell us from his mephitic tripod of unconscious irony, it would be something like this: our time could only remain as it is, if men should become thoroughly sick of this existence. and i fervently believe he is right. the frightful petrifaction of the time, the restless rattle of the ghostly bones, held naïvely up to us by david strauss as the most beautiful fact of all--is justified by hartmann not only from the past, _ex causis efficientibus_, but also from the future, _ex causa finali_. the rogue let light stream over our time from the last day, and saw that it was very good,--for him, that is, who wishes to feel the indigestibility of life at its full strength, and for whom the last day cannot come quickly enough. true, hartmann calls the old age of life that mankind is approaching the "old age of man": but that is the blessed state, according to him, where there is only a successful mediocrity; where art is the "evening's amusement of the berlin financier," and "the time has no more need for geniuses, either because it would be casting pearls before swine, or because the time has advanced beyond the stage where the geniuses are found, to one more important," to that stage of social evolution, in fact, in which every worker "leads a comfortable existence, with hours of work that leave him sufficient leisure to cultivate his intellect." rogue of rogues, you say well what is the aspiration of present-day mankind: but you know too what a spectre of disgust will arise at the end of this old age of mankind, as the result of the intellectual culture of stolid mediocrity. it is very pitiful to see, but it will be still more pitiful yet. "antichrist is visibly extending his arms:" yet it _must be so_, for after all we are on the right road--of disgust at all existence. "forward then, boldly, with the world-process, as workers in the vineyard of the lord, for it is the process alone that can lead to redemption!" the vineyard of the lord! the process! to redemption! who does not see and hear in this how historical culture, that only knows the word "becoming," parodies itself on purpose and says the most irresponsible things about itself through its grotesque mask? for what does the rogue mean by this cry to the workers in the vineyard? by what "work" are they to strive boldly forward? or, to ask another question:--what further has the historically educated fanatic of the world-process to do,--swimming and drowning as he is in the sea of becoming,--that he may at last gather in that vintage of disgust, the precious grape of the vineyard? he has nothing to do but to live on as he has lived, love what he has loved, hate what he has hated, and read the newspapers he has always read. the only sin is for him to live otherwise than he has lived. we are told how he has lived, with monumental clearness, by that famous page with its large typed sentences, on which the whole rabble of our modern cultured folk have thrown themselves in blind ecstasy, because they believe they read their own justification there, haloed with an apocalyptic light. for the unconscious parodist has demanded of every one of them, "the full surrender of his personality to the world-process, for the sake of his end, the redemption of the world": or still more clearly,--"the assertion of the will to live is proclaimed to be the first step on the right road: for it is only in the full surrender to life and its sorrow, and not in the cowardice of personal renunciation and retreat, that anything can be done for the world-process.... the striving for the denial of the individual will is as foolish as it is useless, more foolish even than suicide.... the thoughtful reader will understand without further explanation how a practical philosophy can be erected on these principles, and that such a philosophy cannot endure any disunion, but only the fullest reconciliation with life." the thoughtful reader will understand! then one really could misunderstand hartmann! and what a splendid joke it is, that he should be misunderstood! why should the germans of to-day be particularly subtle? a valiant englishman looks in vain for "delicacy of perception" and dares to say that "in the german mind there does seem to be something splay, something blunt-edged, unhandy and infelicitous." could the great german parodist contradict this? according to him, we are approaching "that ideal condition in which the human race makes its history with full consciousness": but we are obviously far from the perhaps more ideal condition, in which mankind can read hartmann's book with full consciousness. if we once reach it, the word "world-process" will never pass any man's lips again without a smile. for he will remember the time when people listened to the mock gospel of hartmann, sucked it in, attacked it, reverenced it, extended it and canonised it with all the honesty of that "german mind," with "the uncanny seriousness of an owl," as goethe has it. but the world must go forward, the ideal condition cannot be won by dreaming, it must be fought and wrestled for, and the way to redemption lies only through joyousness, the way to redemption from that dull, owlish seriousness. the time will come when we shall wisely keep away from all constructions of the world-process, or even of the history of man; a time when we shall no more look at masses but at individuals, who form a sort of bridge over the wan stream of becoming. they may not perhaps continue a process, but they live out of time, as contemporaries: and thanks to history that permits such a company, they live as the republic of geniuses of which schopenhauer speaks. one giant calls to the other across the waste spaces of time, and the high spirit-talk goes on, undisturbed by the wanton noisy dwarfs who creep among them. the task of history is to be the mediator between these, and even to give the motive and power to produce the great man. the aim of mankind can lie ultimately only in its highest examples. our low comedian has his word on this too, with his wonderful dialectic, which is just as genuine as its admirers are admirable. "the idea of evolution cannot stand with our giving the world-process an endless duration in the past, for thus every conceivable evolution must have taken place, which is not the case (o rogue!); and so we cannot allow the process an endless duration in the future. both would raise the conception of evolution to a mere ideal (and again rogue!), and would make the world-process like the sieve of the danaides. the complete victory of the logical over the illogical (o thou complete rogue!) must coincide with the last day, the end in time of the world-process." no, thou clear, scornful spirit, so long as the illogical rules as it does to-day,--so long, for example, as the world-process can be spoken of as thou speakest of it, amid such deep-throated assent,--the last day is yet far off. for it is still too joyful on this earth, many an illusion still blooms here--like the illusion of thy contemporaries about thee. we are not yet ripe to be hurled into thy nothingness: for we believe that we shall have a still more splendid time, when men once begin to understand thee, thou misunderstood, unconscious one! but if, in spite of that, disgust shall come throned in power, as thou hast prophesied to thy readers; if thy portrayal of the present and the future shall prove to be right,--and no one has despised them with such loathing as thou,--i am ready then to cry with the majority in the form prescribed by thee, that next saturday evening, punctually at twelve o'clock, thy world shall fall to pieces. and our decree shall conclude thus--from to-morrow time shall not exist, and the _times_ shall no more be published. perhaps it will be in vain, and our decree of no avail: at any rate we have still time for a fine experiment. take a balance and put hartmann's "unconscious" in one of the scales, and his "world-process" in the other. there are some who believe they weigh equally; for in each scale there is an evil word--and a good joke. when they are once understood, no one will take hartmann's words on the world-process as anything but a joke. it is, as a fact, high time to move forward with the whole battalion of satire and malice against the excesses of the "historical sense," the wanton love of the world-process at the expense of life and existence, the blind confusion of all perspective. and it will be to the credit of the philosopher of the unconscious that he has been the first to see the humour of the world-process, and to succeed in making others see it still more strongly by the extraordinary seriousness of his presentation. the existence of the "world" and "humanity" need not trouble us for some time, except to provide us with a good joke: for the presumption of the small earthworm is the most uproariously comic thing on the face of the earth. ask thyself to what end thou art here, as an individual; and if no one can tell thee, try then to justify the meaning of thy existence _a posteriori_, by putting before thyself a high and noble end. perish on that rock! i know no better aim for life than to be broken on something great and impossible, _animæ magnæ prodigus_. but if we have the doctrines of the finality of "becoming," of the flux of all ideas, types, and species, of the lack of all radical difference between man and beast (a true but fatal idea as i think),--if we have these thrust on the people in the usual mad way for another generation, no one need be surprised if that people drown on its little miserable shoals of egoism, and petrify in its self-seeking. at first it will fall asunder and cease to be a people. in its place perhaps individualist systems, secret societies for the extermination of non-members, and similar utilitarian creations, will appear on the theatre of the future. are we to continue to work for these creations and write history from the standpoint of the _masses_; to look for laws in it, to be deduced from the needs of the masses, the laws of motion of the lowest loam and clay strata of society? the masses seem to be worth notice in three aspects only: first as the copies of great men, printed on bad paper from worn-out plates, next as a contrast to the great men, and lastly as their tools: for the rest, let the devil and statistics fly away with them! how could statistics prove that there are laws in history? laws? yes, they may prove how common and abominably uniform the masses are: and should we call the effects of leaden folly, imitation, love and hunger--laws? we may admit it: but we are sure of this too--that so far as there are laws in history, the laws are of no value and the history of no value either. and least valuable of all is that kind of history which takes the great popular movements as the most important events of the past, and regards the great men only as their clearest expression, the visible bubbles on the stream. thus the masses have to produce the great man, chaos to bring forth order; and finally all the hymns are naturally sung to the teeming chaos. everything is called "great" that has moved the masses for some long time, and becomes, as they say, a "historical power." but is not this really an intentional confusion of quantity and quality? when the brutish mob have found some idea, a religious idea for example, which satisfies them, when they have defended it through thick and thin for centuries then, and then only, will they discover its inventor to have been a great man. the highest and noblest does not affect the masses at all. the historical consequences of christianity, its "historical power," toughness and persistence prove nothing, fortunately, as to its founder's greatness, they would have been a witness against him. for between him and the historical success of christianity lies a dark heavy weight of passion and error, lust of power and honour, and the crushing force of the roman empire. from this, christianity had its earthly taste, and its earthly foundations too, that made its continuance in this world possible. greatness should not depend on success; demosthenes is great without it. the purest and noblest adherents of christianity have always doubted and hindered, rather than helped, its effect in the world, its so-called "historical power"; for they were accustomed to stand outside the "world," and cared little for the "process of the christian idea." hence they have generally remained unknown to history, and their very names are lost. in christian terms the devil is the prince of the world, and the lord of progress and consequence: he is the power behind all "historical power," and so will it remain, however ill it may sound to-day in ears that are accustomed to canonise such power and consequence. the world has become skilled at giving new names to things and even baptizing the devil. it is truly an hour of great danger. men seem to be near the discovery that the egoism of individuals, groups or masses has been at all times the lever of the "historical movements": and yet they are in no way disturbed by the discovery, but proclaim that "egoism shall be our god." with this new faith in their hearts, they begin quite intentionally to build future history on egoism: though it must be a clever egoism, one that allows of some limitation, that it may stand firmer; one that studies history for the purpose of recognising the foolish kind of egoism. their study has taught them that the state has a special mission in all future egoistic systems: it will be the patron of all the clever egoisms, to protect them with all the power of its military and police against the dangerous outbreaks of the other kind. there is the same idea in introducing history--natural as well as human history--among the labouring classes, whose folly makes them dangerous. for men know well that a grain of historical culture is able to break down the rough, blind instincts and desires, or to turn them to the service of a clever egoism. in fact they are beginning to think, with edward von hartmann, of "fixing themselves with an eye to the future in their earthly home, and making themselves comfortable there." hartmann calls this life the "manhood of humanity" with an ironical reference to what is now called "manhood";--as if only our sober models of selfishness were embraced by it; just as he prophesies an age of graybeards following on this stage,--obviously another ironical glance at our ancient time-servers. for he speaks of the ripe discretion with which "they view all the stormy passions of their past life and understand the vanity of the ends they seem to have striven for." no, a manhood of crafty and historically cultured egoism corresponds to an old age that hangs to life with no dignity but a horrible tenacity, where the "last scene of all that ends this strange eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." whether the dangers of our life and culture come from these dreary, toothless old men, or from the so-called "men" of hartmann, we have the right to defend our youth with tooth and claw against both of them, and never tire of saving the future from these false prophets. but in this battle we shall discover an unpleasant truth--that men intentionally help, and encourage, and use, the worst aberrations of the historical sense from which the present time suffers. they use it, however, against youth, in order to transform it into that ripe "egoism of manhood" they so long for: they use it to overcome the natural reluctance of the young by its magical splendour, which unmans while it enlightens them. yes, we know only too well the kind of ascendency history can gain; how it can uproot the strongest instincts of youth, passion, courage, unselfishness and love; can cool its feeling for justice, can crush or repress its desire for a slow ripening by the contrary desire to be soon productive, ready and useful; and cast a sick doubt over all honesty and downrightness of feeling. it can even cozen youth of its fairest privilege, the power of planting a great thought with the fullest confidence, and letting it grow of itself to a still greater thought. an excess of history can do all that, as we have seen, by no longer allowing a man to feel and act _unhistorically_: for history is continually shifting his horizon and removing the atmosphere surrounding him. from an infinite horizon he withdraws into himself, back into the small egoistic circle, where he must become dry and withered: he may possibly attain to cleverness, but never to wisdom. he lets himself be talked over, is always calculating and parleying with facts. he is never enthusiastic, but blinks his eyes, and understands how to look for his own profit or his party's in the profit or loss of somebody else. he unlearns all his useless modesty, and turns little by little into the "man" or the "graybeard" of hartmann. and that is what they _want_ him to be: that is the meaning of the present cynical demand for the "full surrender of the personality to the world-process"--for the sake of his end, the redemption of the world, as the rogue e. von hartmann tells us. though redemption can scarcely be the conscious aim of these people: the world were better redeemed by being redeemed from these "men" and "graybeards." for then would come the reign of youth. x. and in this kingdom of youth i can cry land! land! enough, and more than enough, of the wild voyage over dark strange seas, of eternal search and eternal disappointment! the coast is at last in sight. whatever it be, we must land there, and the worst haven is better than tossing again in the hopeless waves of an infinite scepticism. let us hold fast by the land: we shall find the good harbours later and make the voyage easier for those who come after us. the voyage was dangerous and exciting. how far are we even now from that quiet state of contemplation with which we first saw our ship launched! in tracking out the dangers of history, we have found ourselves especially exposed to them. we carry on us the marks of that sorrow which an excess of history brings in its train to the men of the modern time. and this present treatise, as i will not attempt to deny, shows the modern note of a weak personality in the intemperateness of its criticism, the unripeness of its humanity, in the too frequent transitions from irony to cynicism, from arrogance to scepticism. and yet i trust in the inspiring power that directs my vessel instead of genius; i trust in _youth_, that has brought me on the right road in forcing from me a protest against the modern historical education, and a demand that the man must learn to live, above all, and only use history in the service of the life that he has learned to live. he must be young to understand this protest; and considering the premature grayness of our present youth, he can scarcely be young enough if he would understand its reason as well. an example will help me. in germany, not more than a century ago, a natural instinct for what is called "poetry" was awakened in some young men. are we to think that the generations who had lived before that time had not spoken of the art, however really strange and unnatural it may have been to them? we know the contrary; that they had thought, written, and quarrelled about it with all their might--in "words, words, words." giving life to such words did not prove the death of the word-makers; in a certain sense they are living still. for if, as gibbon says, nothing but time--though a long time--is needed for a world to perish, so nothing but time--though still more time--is needed for a false idea to be destroyed in germany, the "land of little-by-little." in any event, there are perhaps a hundred men more now than there were a century ago who know what poetry is: perhaps in another century there will be a hundred more who have learned in the meantime what culture is, and that the germans have had as yet no culture, however proudly they may talk about it. the general satisfaction of the germans at their culture will seem as foolish and incredible to such men as the once lauded classicism of gottsched, or the reputation of ramler as the german pindar, seemed to us. they will perhaps think this "culture" to be merely a kind of knowledge about culture, and a false and superficial knowledge at that. false and superficial, because the germans endured the contradiction between life and knowledge, and did not see what was characteristic in the culture of really educated peoples, that it can only rise and bloom from life. but by the germans it is worn like a paper flower, or spread over like the icing on a cake; and so must remain a useless lie for ever. the education of youth in germany starts from this false and unfruitful idea of culture. its aim, when faced squarely, is not to form the liberally educated man, but the professor, the man of science, who wants to be able to make use of his science as soon as possible, and stands on one side in order to see life clearly. the result, even from a ruthlessly practical point of view, is the historically and æsthetically trained philistine, the babbler of old saws and new wisdom on church, state and art, the sensorium that receives a thousand impressions, the insatiable belly that yet knows not what true hunger and thirst is. an education with such an aim and result is against nature. but only he who is not quite drowned in it can feel that; only youth can feel it, because it still has the instinct of nature, that is the first to be broken by that education. but he who will break through that education in his turn, must come to the help of youth when called upon; must let the clear light of understanding shine on its unconscious striving, and bring it to a full, vocal consciousness. how is he to attain such a strange end? principally by destroying the superstition that this kind of education is _necessary_. people think nothing but this troublesome reality of ours is possible. look through the literature of higher education in school and college for the last ten years, and you will be astonished--and pained--to find how much alike all the proposals of reform have been; in spite of all the hesitations and violent controversies surrounding them. you will see how blindly they have all adopted the old idea of the "educated man" (in our sense) being the necessary and reasonable basis of the system. the monotonous canon runs thus: the young man must begin with a knowledge of culture, not even with a knowledge of life, still less with life and the living of it. this knowledge of culture is forced into the young mind in the form of historical knowledge; which means that his head is filled with an enormous mass of ideas, taken second-hand from past times and peoples, not from immediate contact with life. he desires to experience something for himself, and feel a close-knit, living system of experiences growing within himself. but his desire is drowned and dizzied in the sea of shams, as if it were possible to sum up in a few years the highest and notablest experiences of ancient times, and the greatest times too. it is the same mad method that carries our young artists off to picture-galleries, instead of the studio of a master, and above all the one studio of the only master, nature. as if one could discover by a hasty rush through history the ideas and technique of past times, and their individual outlook on life! for life itself is a kind of handicraft that must be learned thoroughly and industriously, and diligently practised, if we are not to have mere botchers and babblers as the issue of it all! plato thought it necessary for the first generation of his new society (in the perfect state) to be brought up with the help of a "mighty lie." the children were to be taught to believe that they had all lain dreaming for a long time under the earth, where they had been moulded and formed by the master-hand of nature. it was impossible to go against the past, and work against the work of gods! and so it had to be an unbreakable law of nature, that he who is born to be a philosopher has gold in his body, the fighter has only silver, and the workman iron and bronze. as it is not possible to blend these metals, according to plato, so there could never be any confusion between the classes: the belief in the _æterna veritas_ of this arrangement was the basis of the new education and the new state. so the modern german believes also in the _æterna veritas_ of his education, of his kind of culture: and yet this belief will fail--as the platonic state would have failed--if the mighty german lie be ever opposed by the truth, that the german has no culture because he cannot build one on the basis of his education. he wishes for the flower without the root or the stalk; and so he wishes in vain. that is the simple truth, a rude and unpleasant truth, but yet a mighty one. but our first generation must be brought up in this "mighty truth," and must suffer from it too; for it must educate itself through it, even against its own nature, to attain a new nature and manner of life, which shall yet proceed from the old. so it might say to itself, in the old spanish phrase, "defienda me dios de my," god keep me from myself, from the character, that is, which has been put into me. it must taste that truth drop by drop, like a bitter, powerful medicine. and every man in this generation must subdue himself to pass the judgment on his own nature, which he might pass more easily on his whole time:--"we are without instruction, nay, we are too corrupt to live, to see and hear truly and simply, to understand what is near and natural to us. we have not yet laid even the foundations of culture, for we are not ourselves convinced that we have a sincere life in us." we crumble and fall asunder, our whole being is divided, half mechanically, into an inner and outer side; we are sown with ideas as with dragon's teeth, and bring forth a new dragon-brood of them; we suffer from the malady of words, and have no trust in any feeling that is not stamped with its special word. and being such a dead fabric of words and ideas, that yet has an uncanny movement in it, i have still perhaps the right to say _cogito ergo sum_, though not _vivo ergo cogito_. i am permitted the empty _esse_, not the full green _vivere_. a primary feeling tells me that i am a thinking being but not a living one, that i am no "animal," but at most a "cogital." "give me life, and i will soon make you a culture out of it"--will be the cry of every man in this new generation, and they will all know each other by this cry. but who will give them this life? no god and no man will give it--only their own _youth_. set this free, and you will set life free as well. for it only lay concealed, in a prison; it is not yet withered or dead--ask your own selves! but it is sick, this life that is set free, and must be healed. it suffers from many diseases, and not only from the memory of its chains. it suffers from the malady which i have spoken of, the _malady of history_. excess of history has attacked the plastic power of life, that no more understands how to use the past as a means of strength and nourishment. it is a fearful disease, and yet, if youth had not a natural gift for clear vision, no one would see that it is a disease, and that a paradise of health has been lost. but the same youth, with that same natural instinct of health, has guessed how the paradise can be regained. it knows the magic herbs and simples for the malady of history, and the excess of it. and what are they called? it is no marvel that they bear the names of poisons:--the antidotes to history are the "unhistorical" and the "super-historical." with these names we return to the beginning of our inquiry and draw near to its final close. by the word "unhistorical" i mean the power, the art of _forgetting_, and of drawing a limited horizon round one's self. i call the power "super-historical" which turns the eyes from the process of becoming to that which gives existence an eternal and stable character, to art and religion. science--for it is science that makes us speak of "poisons"--sees in these powers contrary powers: for it considers only that view of things to be true and right, and therefore scientific, which regards something as finished and historical, not as continuing and eternal. thus it lives in a deep antagonism towards the powers that make for eternity--art and religion,--for it hates the forgetfulness that is the death of knowledge, and tries to remove all limitation of horizon and cast men into an infinite boundless sea, whose waves are bright with the clear knowledge--of becoming! if they could only live therein! just as towns are shaken by an avalanche and become desolate, and man builds his house there in fear and for a season only; so life is broken in sunder and becomes weak and spiritless, if the avalanche of ideas started by science take from man the foundation of his rest and security, the belief in what is stable and eternal. must life dominate knowledge, or knowledge life? which of the two is the higher, and decisive power? there is no room for doubt: life is the higher, and the dominating power, for the knowledge that annihilated life would be itself annihilated too. knowledge presupposes life, and has the same interest in maintaining it that every creature has in its own preservation. science needs very careful watching: there is a hygiene of life near the volumes of science, and one of its sentences runs thus:--the unhistorical and the super-historical are the natural antidotes against the overpowering of life by history; they are the cures for the historical disease. we who are sick of the disease may suffer a little from the antidote. but this is no proof that the treatment we have chosen is wrong. and here i see the mission of the youth that forms the first generation of fighters and dragon-slayers: it will bring a more beautiful and blessed humanity and culture, but will have itself no more than a glimpse of the promised land of happiness and wondrous beauty. this youth will suffer both from the malady and its antidotes: and yet it believes in strength and health and boasts a nature closer to the great nature than its forebears, the cultured men and graybeards of the present. but its mission is to shake to their foundations the present conceptions of "health" and "culture," and erect hatred and scorn in the place of this rococo mass of ideas. and the clearest sign of its own strength and health is just the fact that it can use no idea, no party-cry from the present-day mint of words and ideas to symbolise its own existence: but only claims conviction from the power in it that acts and fights, breaks up and destroys; and from an ever heightened feeling of life when the hour strikes. you may deny this youth any culture--but how would youth count that a reproach? you may speak of its rawness and intemperateness--but it is not yet old and wise enough to be acquiescent. it need not pretend to a ready-made culture at all; but enjoys all the rights--and the consolations--of youth, especially the right of brave unthinking honesty and the consolation of an inspiring hope. i know that such hopeful beings understand all these truisms from within, and can translate them into a doctrine for their own use, through their personal experience. to the others there will appear, in the meantime, nothing but a row of covered dishes, that may perhaps seem empty: until they see one day with astonished eyes that the dishes are full, and that all ideas and impulses and passions are massed together in these truisms that cannot lie covered for long. i leave those doubting ones to time, that brings all things to light; and turn at last to that great company of hope, to tell them the way and the course of their salvation, their rescue from the disease of history, and their own history as well, in a parable; whereby they may again become healthy enough to study history anew, and under the guidance of life make use of the past in that threefold way--monumental, antiquarian, or critical. at first they will be more ignorant than the "educated men" of the present: for they will have unlearnt much and have lost any desire even to discover what those educated men especially wish to know: in fact, their chief mark from the educated point of view will be just their want of science; their indifference and inaccessibility to all the good and famous things. but at the end of the cure, they are men again and have ceased to be mere shadows of humanity. that is something; there is yet hope, and do not ye who hope laugh in your hearts? how can we reach that end? you will ask. the delphian god cries his oracle to you at the beginning of your wanderings, "know thyself." it is a hard saying: for that god "tells nothing and conceals nothing but merely points the way," as heraclitus said. but whither does he point? in certain epochs the greeks were in a similar danger of being overwhelmed by what was past and foreign, and perishing on the rock of "history." they never lived proud and untouched. their "culture" was for a long time a chaos of foreign forms and ideas,--semitic, babylonian, lydian and egyptian,--and their religion a battle of all the gods of the east; just as german culture and religion is at present a death-struggle of all foreign nations and bygone times. and yet, hellenic culture was no mere mechanical unity, thanks to that delphic oracle. the greeks gradually learned to organise the chaos, by taking apollo's advice and thinking back to themselves, to their own true necessities, and letting all the sham necessities go. thus they again came into possession of themselves, and did not remain long the epigoni of the whole east, burdened with their inheritance. after that hard fight, they increased and enriched the treasure they had inherited by their obedience to the oracle, and they became the ancestors and models for all the cultured nations of the future. this is a parable for each one of us: he must organise the chaos in himself by "thinking himself back" to his true needs. he will want all his honesty, all the sturdiness and sincerity in his character to help him to revolt against second-hand thought, second-hand learning, second-hand action. and he will begin then to understand that culture can be something more than a "decoration of life"--a concealment and disfiguring of it, in other words; for all adornment hides what is adorned. and thus the greek idea, as against the roman, will be discovered in him, the idea of culture as a new and finer nature, without distinction of inner and outer, without convention or disguise, as a unity of thought and will, life and appearance. he will learn too, from his own experience, that it was by a greater force of moral character that the greeks were victorious, and that everything which makes for sincerity is a further step towards true culture, however this sincerity may harm the ideals of education that are reverenced at the time, or even have power to shatter a whole system of merely decorative culture. schopenhauer as educator. i. when the traveller, who had seen many countries and nations and continents, was asked what common attribute he had found everywhere existing among men, he answered, "they have a tendency to sloth." many may think that the fuller truth would have been, "they are all timid." they hide themselves behind "manners" and "opinions." at bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvellously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time. he knows this, but hides it like an evil conscience;--and why? from fear of his neighbour, who looks for the latest conventionalities in him, and is wrapped up in them himself. but what is it that forces the man to fear his neighbour, to think and act with his herd, and not seek his own joy? shyness perhaps, in a few rare cases, but in the majority it is idleness, the "taking things easily," in a word the "tendency to sloth," of which the traveller spoke. he was right; men are more slothful than timid, and their greatest fear is of the burdens that an uncompromising honesty and nakedness of speech and action would lay on them. it is only the artists who hate this lazy wandering in borrowed manners and ill-fitting opinions, and discover the secret of the evil conscience, the truth that each human being is a unique marvel. they show us, how in every little movement of his muscles the man is an individual self, and further--as an analytical deduction from his individuality-a beautiful and interesting object, a new and incredible phenomenon (as is every work of nature), that can never become tedious. if the great thinker despise mankind, it is for their laziness; they seem mere indifferent bits of pottery, not worth any commerce or improvement. the man who will not belong to the general mass, has only to stop "taking himself easily"; to follow his conscience, which cries out to him, "be thyself! all that thou doest and thinkest and desirest, is not--thyself!" every youthful soul hears this cry day and night, and quivers to hear it: for she divines the sum of happiness that has been from eternity destined for her, if she think of her true deliverance; and towards this happiness she can in no wise be helped, so long as she lies in the chains of opinion and of fear. and how comfortless and unmeaning may life become without this deliverance! there is no more desolate or ishmaelitish creature in nature than the man who has broken away from his true genius, and does nothing but peer aimlessly about him. there is no reason to attack such a man at all, for he is a mere husk without a kernel, a painted cloth, tattered and sagging, a scarecrow ghost, that can rouse no fear, and certainly no pity. and though one be right in saying of a sluggard that he is "killing time," yet in respect of an age that rests its salvation on public opinion,--that is, on private laziness,--one must be quite determined that such a time shall be "killed," once and for all: i mean that it shall be blotted from life's true history of liberty. later generations will be greatly disgusted, when they come to treat the movements of a period in which no living men ruled, but shadow-men on the screen of public opinion; and to some far posterity our age may well be the darkest chapter of history, the most unknown because the least human. i have walked through the new streets of our cities, and thought how of all the dreadful houses that these gentlemen with their public opinion have built for themselves, not a stone will remain in a hundred years, and that the opinions of these busy masons may well have fallen with them. but how full of hope should they all be who feel that they are no citizens of this age! if they were, they would have to help on the work of "killing their time," and of perishing with it,--when they wish rather to quicken the time to life, and in that life themselves to _live_. but even if the future leave us nothing to hope for, the wonderful fact of our existing at this present moment of time gives us the greatest encouragement to live after our own rule and measure; so inexplicable is it, that we should be living just to-day, though there have been an infinity of time wherein we might have arisen; that we own nothing but a span's length of it, this "to-day," and must show in it wherefore and whereunto we have arisen. we have to answer for our existence to ourselves; and will therefore be our own true pilots, and not admit that our being resembles a blind fortuity. one must take a rather impudent and reckless way with the riddle; especially as the key is apt to be lost, however things turn out. why cling to your bit of earth, or your little business, or listen to what your neighbour says? it is so provincial to bind oneself to views which are no longer binding a couple of hundred miles away. east and west are signs that somebody chalks up in front of us to fool such cowards as we are. "i will make the attempt to gain freedom," says the youthful soul; and will be hindered, just because two nations happen to hate each other and go to war, or because there is a sea between two parts of the earth, or a religion is taught in the vicinity, which did not exist two thousand years ago. "and this is not--thyself," the soul says. "no one can build thee the bridge, over which thou must cross the river of life, save thyself alone. there are paths and bridges and demi-gods without number, that will gladly carry thee over, but only at the price of thine own self: thy self wouldst thou have to give in pawn, and then lose it. there is in the world one road whereon none may go, except thou: ask not whither it lead, but go forward. who was it that spake that true word--'a man has never risen higher than when he knoweth not whither his road may yet lead him'?" but how can we "find ourselves" again, and how can man "know himself"? he is a thing obscure and veiled: if the hare have seven skins, man can cast from him seventy times seven, and yet will not be able to say "here art thou in very truth; this is outer shell no more." also this digging into one's self, this straight, violent descent into the pit of one's being, is a troublesome and dangerous business to start. a man may easily take such hurt, that no physician can heal him. and again, what were the use, since everything bears witness to our essence,--our friendships and enmities, our looks and greetings, our memories and forgetfulnesses, our books and our writing! this is the most effective way:--to let the youthful soul look back on life with the question, "what hast thou up to now truly loved, what has drawn thy soul upward, mastered it and blessed it too?" set up these things that thou hast honoured before thee, and, maybe, they will show thee, in their being and their order, a law which is the fundamental law of thine own self. compare these objects, consider how one completes and broadens and transcends and explains another, how they form a ladder on which thou hast all the time been climbing to thy self: for thy true being lies not deeply hidden in thee, but an infinite height above thee, or at least above that which thou dost commonly take to be thyself. the true educators and moulders reveal to thee the real groundwork and import of thy being, something that in itself cannot be moulded or educated, but is anyhow difficult of approach, bound and crippled: thy educators can be nothing but thy deliverers. and that is the secret of all culture: it does not give artificial limbs, wax noses, or spectacles for the eyes--a thing that could buy such gifts is but the base coin of education. but it is rather a liberation, a removal of all the weeds and rubbish and vermin that attack the delicate shoots, the streaming forth of light and warmth, the tender dropping of the night rain; it is the following and the adoring of nature when she is pitifully-minded as a mother;--her completion, when it bends before her fierce and ruthless blasts and turns them to good, and draws a veil over all expression of her tragic unreason--for she is a step-mother too, sometimes. there are other means of "finding ourselves," of coming to ourselves out of the confusion wherein we all wander as in a dreary cloud; but i know none better than to think on our educators. so i will to-day take as my theme the hard teacher arthur schopenhauer, and speak of others later. ii. in order to describe properly what an event my first look into schopenhauer's writings was for me, i must dwell for a minute on an idea, that recurred more constantly in my youth, and touched me more nearly, than any other. i wandered then as i pleased in a world of wishes, and thought that destiny would relieve me of the dreadful and wearisome duty of educating myself: some philosopher would come at the right moment to do it for me,--some true philosopher, who could be obeyed without further question, as he would be trusted more than one's self. then i said within me: "what would be the principles, on which he might teach thee?" and i pondered in my mind what he would say to the two maxims of education that hold the field in our time. the first demands that the teacher should find out at once the strong point in his pupil, and then direct all his skill and will, all the moisture and all the sunshine, to bring the fruit of that single virtue to maturity. the second requires him to raise to a higher power all the qualities that already exist, cherish them and bring them into a harmonious relation. but, we may ask, should one who has a decided talent for working in gold be made for that reason to learn music? and can we admit that benvenuto cellini's father was right in continually forcing him back to the "dear little horn"--the "cursed piping," as his son called it? we cannot think so in the case of such a strong and clearly marked talent as his, and it may well be that this maxim of harmonious development applies only to weaker natures, in which there is a whole swarm of desires and inclinations, though they may not amount to very much, singly or together. on the other hand, where do we find such a blending of harmonious voices--nay, the soul of harmony itself--as we see in natures like cellini's, where everything--knowledge, desire, love and hate--tends towards a single point, the root of all, and a harmonious system, the resultant of the various forces, is built up through the irresistible domination of this vital centre? and so perhaps the two maxims are not contrary at all; the one merely saying that man must have a centre, the other, a circumference as well. the philosophic teacher of my dream would not only discover the central force, but would know how to prevent its being destructive of the other powers: his task, i thought, would be the welding of the whole man into a solar system with life and movement, and the discovery of its paraphysical laws. in the meantime i could not find my philosopher, however i tried; i saw how badly we moderns compare with the greeks and romans, even in the serious study of educational problems. you can go through all germany, and especially all the universities, with this need in your heart, and will not find what you seek; many humbler wishes than that are still unfulfilled there. for example, if a german seriously wish to make himself an orator, or to enter a "school for authors," he will find neither master nor school: no one yet seems to have thought that speaking and writing are arts which cannot be learnt without the most careful method and untiring application. but, to their shame, nothing shows more clearly the insolent self-satisfaction of our people than the lack of demand for educators; it comes partly from meanness, partly from want of thought. anything will do as a so-called "family tutor," even among our most eminent and cultured people; and what a menagerie of crazy heads and mouldy devices mostly go to make up the belauded gymnasium! and consider what we are satisfied with in our finishing schools,--our universities. look at our professors and their institutions! and compare the difficulty of the task of educating a man to be a man! above all, the wonderful way in which the german savants fall to their dish of knowledge, shows that they are thinking more of science than mankind; and they are trained to lead a forlorn hope in her service, in order to encourage ever new generations to the same sacrifice. if their traffic with knowledge be not limited and controlled by any more general principles of education, but allowed to run on indefinitely,--"the more the better,"--it is as harmful to learning as the economic theory of _laisser faire_ to common morality. no one recognises now that the education of the professors is an exceedingly difficult problem, if their humanity is not to be sacrificed or shrivelled up:--this difficulty can be actually seen in countless examples of natures warped and twisted by their reckless and premature devotion to science. there is a still more important testimony to the complete absence of higher education, pointing to a greater and more universal danger. it is clear at once why an orator or writer cannot now be educated,--because there are no teachers; and why a savant must be a distorted and perverted thing,--because he will have been trained by the inhuman abstraction, science. this being so, let a man ask himself: "where are now the types of moral excellence and fame for all our generation--learned and unlearned, high and low--the visible abstract of constructive ethics for this age? where has vanished all the reflection on moral questions that has occupied every great developed society at all epochs?" there is no fame for that now, and there are none to reflect: we are really drawing on the inherited moral capital which our predecessors accumulated for us, and which we do not know how to increase, but only to squander. such things are either not mentioned in our society, or, if at all, with a naïve want of personal experience that makes one disgusted. it comes to this, that our schools and professors simply turn aside from any moral instruction or content themselves with formulæ; virtue is a word and nothing more, on both sides, an old-fashioned word that they laugh at--and it is worse when they do not laugh, for then they are hypocrites. an explanation of this faint-heartedness and ebbing of all moral strength would be difficult and complex: but whoever is considering the influence of christianity in its hour of victory on the morality of the mediæval world, must not forget that it reacts also in its defeat, which is apparently its position to-day. by its lofty ideal, christianity has outbidden the ancient systems of ethics and their invariable naturalism, with which men came to feel a dull disgust: and afterwards when they did reach the knowledge of what was better and higher, they found they had no longer the power, for all their desire, to return to its embodiment in the antique virtues. and so the life of the modern man is passed in see-sawing between christianity and paganism, between a furtive or hypocritical approach to christian morality, and an equally shy and spiritless dallying with the antique: and he does not thrive under it. his inherited fear of naturalism, and its more recent attraction for him, his desire to come to rest somewhere, while in the impotence of his intellect he swings backwards and forwards between the "good" and the "better" course--all this argues an instability in the modern mind that condemns it to be without joy or fruit. never were moral teachers more necessary and never were they more unlikely to be found: physicians are most in danger themselves in times when they are most needed and many men are sick. for where are our modern physicians who are strong and sure-footed enough to hold up another or lead him by the hand? there lies a certain heavy gloom on the best men of our time, an eternal loathing for the battle that is fought in their hearts between honesty and lies, a wavering of trust in themselves, which makes them quite incapable of showing to others the way they must go. so i was right in speaking of my "wandering in a world of wishes" when i dreamt of finding a true philosopher who could lift me from the slough of insufficiency, and teach me again simply and honestly to be in my thoughts and life, in the deepest sense of the word, "out of season"; simply and honestly--for men have now become such complicated machines that they must be dishonest, if they speak at all, or wish to act on their words. with such needs and desires within me did i come to know schopenhauer. i belong to those readers of schopenhauer who know perfectly well, after they have turned the first page, that they will read all the others, and listen to every word that he has spoken. my trust in him sprang to life at once, and has been the same for nine years. i understood him as though he had written for me (this is the most intelligible, though a rather foolish and conceited way of expressing it). hence i never found a paradox in him, though occasionally some small errors: for paradoxes are only assertions that carry no conviction, because the author has made them himself without any conviction, wishing to appear brilliant, or to mislead, or, above all, to pose. schopenhauer never poses: he writes for himself, and no one likes to be deceived--least of all a philosopher who has set this up as his law: "deceive nobody, not even thyself," neither with the "white lies" of all social intercourse, which writers almost unconsciously imitate, still less with the more conscious deceits of the platform, and the artificial methods of rhetoric. schopenhauer's speeches are to himself alone; or if you like to imagine an auditor, let it be a son whom the father is instructing. it is a rough, honest, good-humoured talk to one who "hears and loves." such writers are rare. his strength and sanity surround us at the first sound of his voice: it is like entering the heights of the forest, where we breathe deep and are well again. we feel a bracing air everywhere, a certain candour and naturalness of his own, that belongs to men who are at home with themselves, and masters of a very rich home indeed: he is quite different from the writers who are surprised at themselves if they have said something intelligent, and whose pronouncements for that reason have something nervous and unnatural about them. we are just as little reminded in schopenhauer of the professor with his stiff joints worse for want of exercise, his narrow chest and scraggy figure, his slinking or strutting gait. and again his rough and rather grim soul leads us not so much to miss as to despise the suppleness and courtly grace of the excellent frenchmen; and no one will find in him the gilded imitations of pseudo-gallicism that our german writers prize so highly. his style in places reminds me a little of goethe, but is not otherwise on any german model. for he knows how to be profound with simplicity, striking without rhetoric, and severely logical without pedantry: and of what german could he have learnt that? he also keeps free from the hair-splitting, jerky and (with all respect) rather un-german manner of lessing: no small merit in him, for lessing is the most tempting of all models for prose style. the highest praise i can give his manner of presentation is to apply his own phrase to himself:--"a philosopher must be very honest to avail himself of no aid from poetry or rhetoric." that honesty is something, and even a virtue, is one of those private opinions which are forbidden in this age of public opinion; and so i shall not be praising schopenhauer, but only giving him a distinguishing mark, when i repeat that he is honest, even as a writer; so few of them are, that we are apt to mistrust every one who writes at all. i only know a single author that i can rank with schopenhauer, or even above him, in the matter of honesty; and that is montaigne. the joy of living on this earth is increased by the existence of such a man. the effect on myself, at any rate, since my first acquaintance with that strong and masterful spirit, has been, that i can say of him as he of plutarch--"as soon as i open him, i seem to grow a pair of wings." if i had the task of making myself at home on the earth, i would choose him as my companion. schopenhauer has a second characteristic in common with montaigne, besides honesty; a joy that really makes others joyful. "aliis lætus, sibi sapiens." there are two very different kinds of joyfulness. the true thinker always communicates joy and life, whether he is showing his serious or comic side, his human insight or his godlike forbearance: without surly looks or trembling hands or watery eyes, but simply and truly, with fearlessness and strength, a little cavalierly perhaps, and sternly, but always as a conqueror: and it is this that brings the deepest and intensest joy, to see the conquering god with all the monsters that he has fought. but the joyfulness one finds here and there in the mediocre writers and limited thinkers makes some of us miserable; i felt this, for example, with the "joyfulness" of david strauss. we are generally ashamed of such a quality in our contemporaries, because they show the nakedness of our time, and of the men in it, to posterity. such _fils de joie_ do not see the sufferings and the monsters, that they pretend, as philosophers, to see and fight; and so their joy deceives us, and we hate it; it tempts to the false belief that they have gained some victory. at bottom there is only joy where there is victory: and this applies to true philosophy as much as to any work of art. the contents may be forbidding and serious, as the problem of existence always is; the work will only prove tiresome and oppressive, if the slip-shod thinker and the dilettante have spread the mist of their insufficiency over it: while nothing happier or better can come to man's lot than to be near one of those conquering spirits whose profound thought has made them love what is most vital, and whose wisdom has found its goal in beauty. they really speak: they are no stammerers or babblers; they live and move, and have no part in the _danse macabre_ of the rest of humanity. and so in their company one feels a natural man again, and could cry out with goethe--"what a wondrous and priceless thing is a living creature! how fitted to his surroundings, how true, and real!" i have been describing nothing but the first, almost physiological, impression made upon me by schopenhauer, the magical emanation of inner force from one plant of nature to another, that follows the slightest contact. analysing it, i find that this influence of schopenhauer has three elements, his honesty, his joy, and his consistency. he is honest, as speaking and writing for himself alone; joyful, because his thought has conquered the greatest difficulties; consistent, because he cannot help being so. his strength rises like a flame in the calm air, straight up, without a tremor or deviation. he finds his way, without our noticing that he has been seeking it: so surely and cleverly and inevitably does he run his course, as if by some law of gravitation. if any one have felt what it means to find, in our present world of centaurs and chimæras, a single-hearted and unaffected child of nature who moves unconstrained on his own road, he will understand my joy and surprise in discovering schopenhauer: i knew in him the educator and philosopher i had so long desired. only, however, in his writings: which was a great loss. all the more did i exert myself to see behind the book the living man whose testament it was, and who promised his inheritance to such as could, and would, be more than his readers--his pupils and his sons. iii. i get profit from a philosopher, just so far as he can be an example to me. there is no doubt that a man can draw whole nations after him by his example; as is shown by indian history, which is practically the history of indian philosophy. but this example must exist in his outward life, not merely in his books; it must follow the way of the grecian philosophers, whose doctrine was in their dress and bearing and general manner of life rather than in their speech or writing. we have nothing yet of this "breathing testimony" in german philosophical life; the spirit has, apparently, long completed its emancipation, while the flesh has hardly begun; yet it is foolish to think that the spirit can be really free and independent when this victory over limitation--which is ultimately a formative limiting of one's self--is not embodied anew in every look and movement. kant held to his university, submitted to its regulations, and belonged, as his colleagues and students thought, to a definite religious faith: and naturally his example has produced, above all, university professors of philosophy. schopenhauer makes small account of the learned tribe, keeps himself exclusive, and cultivates an independence from state and society as his ideal, to escape the chains of circumstance here: that is his value to us. many steps in the enfranchisement of the philosopher are unknown in germany; they cannot always remain so. our artists live more bravely and honourably than our philosophers; and richard wagner, the best example of all, shows how genius need not fear a fight to the death with the established forms and ordinances, if we wish to bring the higher truth and order, that lives in him, to the light. the "truth," however, of which we hear so much from our professors, seems to be a far more modest being, and no kind of disturbance is to be feared from her; she is an easy-going and pleasant creature, who is continually assuring the powers that be that no one need fear any trouble from her quarter: for man is only "pure reason." and therefore i will say, that philosophy in germany has more and more to learn not to be "pure reason": and it may well take as its model "schopenhauer the man." it is no less than a marvel that he should have come to be this human kind of example: for he was beset, within and without, by the most frightful dangers, that would have crushed and broken a weaker nature. i think there was a strong likelihood of schopenhauer the man going under, and leaving at best a residue of "pure reason": and only "at best"--it was more probable that neither man nor reason would survive. a modern englishman sketches the most usual danger to extraordinary men who live in a society that worships the ordinary, in this manner:--"such uncommon characters are first cowed, then become sick and melancholy, and then die. a shelley could never have lived in england: a race of shelleys would have been impossible." our hölderlins and kleists were undone by their unconventionality, and were not strong enough for the climate of the so-called german culture; and only iron natures like beethoven, goethe, schopenhauer and wagner could hold out against it. even in them the effect of this weary toiling and moiling is seen in many lines and wrinkles; their breathing is harder and their voice is forced. the old diplomatist who had only just seen and spoken to goethe, said to a friend--"voilà un homme qui a eu de grands chagrins!" which goethe translated to mean "that is a man who has taken great pains in his life." and he adds, "if the trace of the sorrow and activity we have gone through cannot be wiped from our features, it is no wonder that all that survives of us and our struggles should bear the same impress." and this is the goethe to whom our cultured philistines point as the happiest of germans, that they may prove their thesis, that it must be possible to be happy among them--with the unexpressed corollary that no one can be pardoned for feeling unhappy and lonely among them. hence they push their doctrine, in practice, to its merciless conclusion, that there is always a secret guilt in isolation. poor schopenhauer had this secret guilt too in his heart, the guilt of cherishing his philosophy more than his fellow-men; and he was so unhappy as to have learnt from goethe that he must defend his philosophy at all costs from the neglect of his contemporaries, to save its very existence: for there is a kind of grand inquisitor's censure in which the germans, according to goethe, are great adepts: it is called--inviolable silence. this much at least was accomplished by it;--the greater part of the first edition of schopenhauer's masterpiece had to be turned into waste paper. the imminent risk that his great work would be undone, merely by neglect, bred in him a state of unrest--perilous and uncontrollable;--for no single adherent of any note presented himself. it is tragic to watch his search for any evidence of recognition: and his piercing cry of triumph at last, that he would now really be read (_legor et legar_), touches us with a thrill of pain. all the traits in which we do not see the great philosopher show us the suffering man, anxious for his noblest possessions; he was tortured by the fear of losing his little property, and perhaps of no longer being able to maintain in its purity his truly antique attitude towards philosophy. he often chose falsely in his desire to find real trust and compassion in men, only to return with a heavy heart to his faithful dog again. he was absolutely alone, with no single friend of his own kind to comfort him; and between one and none there lies an infinity--as ever between something and nothing. no one who has true friends knows what real loneliness means, though he may have the whole world in antagonism round him. ah, i see well ye do not know what isolation is! whenever there are great societies with governments and religions and public opinions--where there is a tyranny, in short, there will the lonely philosopher be hated: for philosophy offers an asylum to mankind where no tyranny can penetrate, the inner sanctuary, the centre of the heart's labyrinth: and the tyrants are galled at it. here do the lonely men lie hid: but here too lurks their greatest danger. these men who have saved their inner freedom, must also live and be seen in the outer world: they stand in countless human relations by their birth, position, education and country, their own circumstances and the importunity of others: and so they are presumed to hold an immense number of opinions, simply because these happen to prevail: every look that is not a denial counts as an assent, every motion of the hand that does not destroy is regarded as an aid. these free and lonely men know that they perpetually seem other than they are. while they wish for nothing but truth and honesty, they are in a net of misunderstanding; and that ardent desire cannot prevent a mist of false opinions, of adaptations and wrong conclusions, of partial misapprehension and intentional reticence, from gathering round their actions. and there settles a cloud of melancholy on their brows: for such natures hate the necessity of pretence worse than death: and the continual bitterness gives them a threatening and volcanic character. they take revenge from time to time for their forced concealment and self-restraint: they issue from their dens with lowering looks: their words and deeds are explosive, and may lead to their own destruction. schopenhauer lived amid dangers of this sort. such lonely men need love, and friends, to whom they can be as open and sincere as to themselves, and in whose presence the deadening silence and hypocrisy may cease. take their friends away, and there is left an increasing peril; heinrich von kleist was broken by the lack of love, and the most terrible weapon against unusual men is to drive them into themselves; and then their issuing forth again is a volcanic eruption. yet there are always some demi-gods who can bear life under these fearful conditions and can be their conquerors: and if you would hear their lonely chant, listen to the music of beethoven. so the first danger in whose shadow schopenhauer lived was-isolation. the second is called--doubting of the truth. to this every thinker is liable who sets out from the philosophy of kant, provided he be strong and sincere in his sorrows and his desires, and not a mere tinkling thought-box or calculating machine. we all know the shameful state of things implied by this last reservation, and i believe it is only a very few men that kant has so vitally affected as to change the current of their blood. to judge from what one reads, there must have been a revolution in every domain of thought since the work of this unobtrusive professor: i cannot believe it myself. for i see men, though darkly, as themselves needing to be revolutionised, before any "domains of thought" can be so. in fact, we find the first mark of any influence kant may have had on the popular mind, in a corrosive scepticism and relativity. but it is only in noble and active spirits who could never rest in doubt that the shattering despair of truth itself could take the place of doubt. this was, for example, the effect of the kantian philosophy on heinrich von kleist. "it was only a short time ago," he writes in his poignant way, "that i became acquainted with the kantian philosophy; and i will tell you my thought, though i cannot fear that it will rack you to your inmost soul, as it did me.--we cannot decide, whether what we call truth is really truth, or whether it only seems so to us. if the latter, the truth that we amass here does not exist after death, and all our struggle to gain a possession that may follow us even to the grave is in vain. if the blade of this thought do not cut your heart, yet laugh not at another who feels himself wounded by it in his holy of holies. my one highest aim has vanished, and i have no more." yes, when will men feel again deeply as kleist did, and learn to measure a philosophy by what it means to the "holy of holies"? and yet we must make this estimate of what schopenhauer can mean to us, after kant, as the first pioneer to bring us from the heights of sceptical disillusionment or "critical" renunciation, to the greater height of tragic contemplation, the nocturnal heaven with its endless crown of stars. his greatness is that he can stand opposite the picture of life, and interpret it to us as a whole: while all the clever people cannot escape the error of thinking one comes nearer to the interpretation by a laborious analysis of the colours and material of the picture; with the confession, probably, that the texture of the canvas is very complicated, and the chemical composition of the colours undiscoverable. schopenhauer knew that one must guess the painter in order to understand the picture. but now the whole learned fraternity is engaged on understanding the colours and canvas, and not the picture: and only he who has kept the universal panorama of life and being firmly before his eyes, will use the individual sciences without harm to himself; for, without this general view as a norm, they are threads that lead nowhere and only confuse still more the maze of our existence. here we see, as i said, the greatness of schopenhauer, that he follows up every idea, as hamlet follows the ghost, without allowing himself to turn aside for a learned digression, or be drawn away by the scholastic abstractions of a rabid dialectic. the study of the minute philosophers is only interesting for the recognition that they have reached those stages in the great edifice of philosophy where learned disquisitions for and against, where hair-splitting objections and counter-objections are the rule: and for that reason they evade the demand of every great philosophy to speak _sub specie æternitatis_--"this is the picture of the whole of life: learn thence the meaning of thine own life." and the converse: "read thine own life, and understand thence the hieroglyphs of the universal life." in this way must schopenhauer's philosophy always be interpreted; as an individualist philosophy, starting from the single man, in his own nature, to gain an insight into his personal miseries, and needs, and limitations, and find out the remedies that will console them: namely, the sacrifice of the ego, and its submission to the nobler ends, especially those of justice and mercy. he teaches us to distinguish between the true and the apparent furtherance of man's happiness: how neither the attainment of riches, nor honour, nor learning, can raise the individual from his deep despair at his unworthiness; and how the quest for these good things can only have meaning through a universal end that transcends and explains them;--the gaining of power to aid our physical nature by them and, as far as may be, correct its folly and awkwardness. for one's self only, in the first instance: and finally, through one's self, for all. it is a task that leads to scepticism: for there is so much to be made better yet, in one and all! applying this to schopenhauer himself, we come to the third and most intimate danger in which he lived, and which lay deep in the marrow of his being. every one is apt to discover a limitation in himself, in his gifts of intellect as well as his moral will, that fills him with yearning and melancholy; and as he strives after holiness through a consciousness of sin, so, as an intellectual being, he has a deep longing after the "genius" in himself. this is the root of all true culture; and if we say this means the aspiration of man to be "born again" as saint and genius, i know that one need not be a buddhist to understand the myth. we feel a strong loathing when we find talent without such aspiration, in the circle of the learned, or among the so-called educated; for we see that such men, with all their cleverness, are no aid but a hindrance to the beginnings of culture, and the blossoming of genius, the aim of all culture. there is a rigidity in them, parallel to the cold arrogance of conventional virtue, which also remains at the opposite pole to true holiness. schopenhauer's nature contained an extraordinarily dangerous dualism. few thinkers have felt as he did the complete and unmistakable certainty of genius within them; and his genius made him the highest of all promises,--that there could be no deeper furrow than that which he was ploughing in the ground of the modern world. he knew one half of his being to be fulfilled according to its strength, with no other need; and he followed with greatness and dignity his vocation of consolidating his victory. in the other half there was a gnawing aspiration, which we can understand, when we hear that he turned away with a sad look from the picture of rancé, the founder of the trappists, with the words: "that is a matter of grace." for genius evermore yearns after holiness as it sees further and more clearly from its watch-tower than other men, deep into the reconciliation of thought and being, the kingdom of peace and the denial of the will, and up to that other shore, of which the indians speak. the wonder is, that schopenhauer's nature should have been so inconceivably stable and unshakable that it could neither be destroyed nor petrified by this yearning. every one will understand this after the measure of his own character and greatness: none of us will understand it in the fulness of its meaning. the more one considers these three dangers, the more extraordinary will appear his vigour in opposing them and his safety after the battle. true, he gained many scars and open wounds: and a cast of mind that may seem somewhat too bitter and pugnacious. but his single ideal transcends the highest humanity in him. schopenhauer stands as a pattern to men, in spite of all those scars and scratches. we may even say, that what was imperfect and "all too human" in him, brings us nearer to him as a man, for we see a sufferer and a kinsman to suffering, not merely a dweller on the unattainable heights of genius. these three constitutional dangers that threatened schopenhauer, threaten us all. each one of us bears a creative solitude within himself and his consciousness of it forms an exotic aura of strangeness round him. most men cannot endure it, because they are slothful, as i said, and because their solitude hangs round them a chain of troubles and burdens. no doubt, for the man with this heavy chain, life loses almost everything that one desires from it in youth--joy, safety, honour: his fellow-men pay him his due of--isolation! the wilderness and the cave are about him, wherever he may live. he must look to it that he be not enslaved and oppressed, and become melancholy thereby. and let him surround himself with the pictures of good and brave fighters such as schopenhauer. the second danger, too, is not rare. here and there we find one dowered by nature with a keen vision; his thoughts dance gladly in the witches' sabbath of dialectic; and if he uncautiously give his talent the rein, it is easy to lose all humanity and live a ghostly life in the realm of "pure reason": or through the constant search for the "pros and cons" of things, he may go astray from the truth and live without courage or confidence, in doubt, denial and discontent, and the slender hope that waits on disillusion: "no dog could live long thus!" the third danger is a moral or intellectual hardening: man breaks the bond that united him to his ideal: he ceases to be fruitful and reproduce himself in this or that province, and becomes an enemy or a parasite of culture. the solitude of his being has become an indivisible, unrelated atom, an icy stone. and one can perish of this solitude as well as of the fear of it, of one's self as well as one's self-sacrifice, of both aspiration and petrifaction: and to live is ever to be in danger. beside these dangers to which schopenhauer would have been constitutionally liable, in whatever century he had lived, there were also some produced by his own time; and it is essential to distinguish between these two kinds, in order to grasp the typical and formative elements in his nature. the philosopher casts his eye over existence, and wishes to give it a new standard value; for it has been the peculiar task of all great thinkers to be law-givers for the weight and stamp in the mint of reality. and his task will be hindered if the men he sees near him be a weakly and worm-eaten growth. to be correct in his calculation of existence, the unworthiness of the present time must be a very small item in the addition. the study of ancient or foreign history is valuable, if at all, for a correct judgment on the whole destiny of man; which must be drawn not only from an average estimate but from a comparison of the highest destinies that can befall individuals or nations. the present is too much with us; it directs the vision even against the philosopher's will: and it will inevitably be reckoned too high in the final sum. and so he must put a low figure on his own time as against others, and suppress the present in his picture of life, as well as in himself; must put it into the background or paint it over; a difficult, and almost impossible task. the judgment of the ancient greek philosophers on the value of existence means so much more than our own, because they had the full bloom of life itself before them, and their vision was untroubled by any felt dualism between their wish for freedom and beauty on the grand scale, and their search after truth, with its single question "what is the real _worth_ of life?" empedocles lived when greek culture was full to overflowing with the joy of life, and all ages may take profit from his words; especially as no other great philosopher of that great time ventured to contradict them. empedocles is only the clearest voice among them--they all say the same thing, if a man will but open his ears. a modern thinker is always in the throes of an unfulfilled desire; he is looking for life,--warm, red life,--that he may pass judgment on it: at any rate he will think it necessary to be a living man himself, before he can believe in his power of judging. and this is the title of the modern philosophers to sit among the great aiders of life (or rather of the will to live), and the reason why they can look from their own out-wearied time and aspire to a truer culture, and a clearer explanation. their yearning is, however, their danger; the reformer in them struggles with the critical philosopher. and whichever way the victory incline, it also implies a defeat. how was schopenhauer to escape this danger? we like to consider the great man as the noble child of his age, who feels its defects more strongly and intimately than the smaller men: and therefore the struggle of the great man _against_ his age is apparently nothing but a mad fight to the death with himself. only apparently, however: he only fights the elements in his time that hinder his own greatness, in other words his own freedom and sincerity. and so, at bottom, he is only an enemy to that element which is not truly himself, the irreconcilable antagonism of the temporal and eternal in him. the supposed "child of his age" proves to be but a step-child. from boyhood schopenhauer strove with his time, a false and unworthy mother to him, and as soon as he had banished her, he could bring back his being to its native health and purity. for this very reason we can use his writings as mirrors of his time; it is no fault of the mirror if everything contemporary appear in it stricken by a ravaging disease, pale and thin, with tired looks and hollow eyes,--the step-child's sorrow made visible. the yearning for natural strength, for a healthy and simple humanity, was a yearning for himself: and as soon as he had conquered his time within him, he was face to face with his own genius. the secret of nature's being and his own lay open, the step-mother's plot to conceal his genius from him was foiled. and now he could turn a fearless eye towards the question, "what is the real worth of life?" without having any more to weigh a bloodless and chaotic age of doubt and hypocrisy. he knew that there was something higher and purer to be won on this earth than the life of his time, and a man does bitter wrong to existence who only knows it and criticises it in this hateful form. genius, itself the highest product of life, is now summoned to justify life, if it can: the noble creative soul must answer the question:--"dost thou in thy heart say 'yea!' unto this existence? is it enough for thee? wilt thou be its advocate and its redeemer? one true 'yea!' from thy lips, and the sorely accused life shall go free." how shall he answer? in the words of empedocles. iv. the last hint may well remain obscure for a time: i have something more easy to explain, namely how schopenhauer can help us to educate ourselves _in opposition_ to our age, since we have the advantage of really knowing our age, through him;--if it be an advantage! it may be no longer possible in a couple of hundred years. i sometimes amuse myself with the idea that men may soon grow tired of books and their authors, and the savant of to-morrow come to leave directions in his will that his body be burned in the midst of his books, including of course his own writings. and in the gradual clearing of the forests, might not our libraries be very reasonably used for straw and brushwood? most books are born from the smoke and vapour of the brain: and to vapour and smoke may they well return. for having no fire within themselves, they shall be visited with fire. and possibly to a later century our own may count as the "dark age," because our productions heated the furnace hotter and more continuously than ever before. we are anyhow happy that we can learn to know our time; and if there be any sense in busying ourselves with our time at all, we may as well do it as thoroughly as we can, so that no one may have any doubt about it. the possibility of this we owe to schopenhauer. our happiness would of course be infinitely greater, if our inquiry showed that nothing so hopeful and splendid as our present epoch had ever existed. there are simple people in some corner of the earth to-day--perhaps in germany--who are disposed to believe in all seriousness that the world was put right two years ago,[1] and that all stern and gloomy views of life are now contradicted by "facts." the foundation of the new german empire is, to them, the decisive blow that annihilates all the "pessimistic" philosophisers,--no doubt of it. to judge the philosopher's significance in our time, as an educator, we must oppose a widespread view like this, especially common in our universities. we must say, it is a shameful thing that such abominable flattery of the time-fetish should be uttered by a herd of so-called reflective and honourable men; it is a proof that we no longer see how far the seriousness of philosophy is removed from that of a newspaper. such men have lost the last remnant of feeling, not only for philosophy, but also for religion, and have put in its place a spirit not so much of optimism as of journalism, the evil spirit that broods over the day--and the daily paper. every philosophy that believes the problem of existence to be shelved, or even solved, by a political event, is a sham philosophy. there have been innumerable states founded since the beginning of the world; that is an old story. how should a political innovation manage once and for all to make a contented race of the dwellers on this earth? if any one believe in his heart that this is possible, he should report himself to our authorities: he really deserves to be professor of philosophy in a german university, like harms in berlin, jurgen meyer in bonn, and carrière in munich. [1] this was written in 1873.--tr. we are feeling the consequences of the doctrine, preached lately from all the housetops, that the state is the highest end of man and there is no higher duty than to serve it: i regard this not a relapse into paganism, but into stupidity. a man who thinks state-service to be his highest duty, very possibly knows no higher one; yet there are both men and duties in a region beyond,--and one of these duties, that seems to me at least of higher value than state-service, is to destroy stupidity in all its forms--and this particular stupidity among them. and i have to do with a class of men whose teleological conceptions extend further than the well-being of a state, i mean with philosophers--and only with them in their relation to the world of culture, which is again almost independent of the "good of the state." of the many links that make up the twisted chain of humanity, some are of gold and others of pewter. how does the philosopher of our time regard culture? quite differently, i assure you, from the professors who are so content with their new state. he seems to see the symptoms of an absolute uprooting of culture in the increasing rush and hurry of life, and the decay of all reflection and simplicity. the waters of religion are ebbing, and leaving swamps or stagnant pools: the nations are drawing away in enmity again, and long to tear each other in pieces. the sciences, blindly driving along, on a _laisser faire_ system, without a common standard, are splitting up, and losing hold of every firm principle. the educated classes are being swept along in the contemptible struggle for wealth. never was the world more worldly, never poorer in goodness and love. men of learning are no longer beacons or sanctuaries in the midst of this turmoil of worldliness; they themselves are daily becoming more restless, thoughtless, loveless. everything bows before the coming barbarism, art and science included. the educated men have degenerated into the greatest foes of education, for they will deny the universal sickness and hinder the physician. they become peevish, these poor nerveless creatures, if one speak of their weakness and combat the shameful spirit of lies in them. they would gladly make one believe that they have outstripped all the centuries, and they walk with a pretence of happiness which has something pathetic about it, because their happiness is so inconceivable. one would not even ask them, as tannhäuser did biterolf, "what hast thou, poor wretch, enjoyed!" for, alas! we know far better ourselves, in another way. there is a wintry sky over us, and we dwell on a high mountain, in danger and in need. short-lived is all our joy, and the sun's rays strike palely on our white mountains. music is heard; an old man grinds an organ, and the dancers whirl round, and the heart of the wanderer is shaken within him to see it: everything is so disordered, so drab, so hopeless. even now there is a sound of joy, of clear thoughtless joy! but soon the mist of evening closes round, the note dies away, and the wanderer's footsteps are heard on the gravel; as far as his eye can reach there is nothing but the grim and desolate face of nature. it may be one-sided, to insist only on the blurred lines and the dull colours in the picture of modern life: yet the other side is no more encouraging, it is only more disturbing. there is certainly strength there, enormous strength; but it is wild, primitive and merciless. one looks on with a chill expectancy, as though into the caldron of a witch's kitchen; every moment there may arise sparks and vapour, to herald some fearful apparition. for a century we have been ready for a world-shaking convulsion; and though we have lately been trying to set the conservative strength of the so-called national state against the great modern tendency to volcanic destructiveness, it will only be, for a long time yet, an aggravation of the universal unrest that hangs over us. we need not be deceived by individuals behaving as if they knew nothing of all this anxiety: their own restlessness shows how well they know it. they think more exclusively of themselves than men ever thought before; they plant and build for their little day, and the chase for happiness is never greater than when the quarry must be caught to-day or to-morrow: the next day perhaps there is no more hunting. we live in the atomic age, or rather in the atomic chaos. the opposing forces were practically held together in mediæval times by the church, and in some measure assimilated by the strong pressure which she exerted. when the common tie broke and the pressure relaxed, they rose once more against each other. the reformation taught that many things were "adiaphora"--departments that needed no guidance from religion: this was the price paid for its own existence. christianity paid a similar one to guard itself against the far more religious antiquity: and laid the seeds of discord at once. everything nowadays is directed by the fools and the knaves, the selfishness of the money-makers and the brute forces of militarism. the state in their hands makes a good show of reorganising everything, and of becoming the bond that unites the warring elements; in other words, it wishes for the same idolatry from mankind as they showed to the church. and we shall yet feel the consequences. we are even now on the ice-floes in the stream of the middle ages: they are thawing fast, and their movement is ominous: the banks are flooded, and giving way. the revolution, the atomistic revolution, is inevitable: but what _are_ those smallest indivisible elements of human society? there is surely far more danger to mankind in transitional periods like these than in the actual time of revolution and chaos; they are tortured by waiting, and snatch greedily at every moment; and this breeds all kinds of cowardice and selfishness in them: whereas the true feeling of a great and universal need ever inspires men, and makes them better. in the midst of such dangers, who will provide the guardians and champions for _humanity_, for the holy and inviolate treasure that has been laid up in the temples, little by little, by countless generations? who will set up again the _image of man_, when men in their selfishness and terror see nothing but the trail of the serpent or the cur in them, and have fallen from their high estate to that of the brute or the automaton? there are three images of man fashioned by our modern time, which for a long while yet will urge mortal men to transfigure their own lives; they are the men of rousseau, goethe, and schopenhauer. the first has the greatest fire, and is most calculated to impress the people: the second is only for the few, for those contemplative natures "in the grand style" who are misunderstood by the crowd. the third demands the highest activity in those who will follow it: only such men will look on that image without harm, for it breaks the spirit of that merely contemplative man, and the rabble shudder at it. from the first has come forth a strength that led and still leads to fearful revolution: for in all socialistic upheavals it is ever rousseau's man who is the typhoeus under the etna. oppressed and half crushed to death by the pride of caste and the pitilessness of wealth, spoilt by priests and bad education, a laughing-stock even to himself, man cries in his need on "holy mother nature," and feels suddenly that she is as far from him as any god of the epicureans. his prayers do not reach her; so deeply sunk is he in the chaos of the unnatural. he contemptuously throws aside all the finery that seemed his truest humanity a little while ago--all his arts and sciences, all the refinements of his life,--he beats with his fists against the walls, in whose shadow he has degenerated, and goes forth to seek the light and the sun, the forest and the crag. and crying out, "nature alone is good, the natural man alone is human," he despises himself and aspires beyond himself: a state wherein the soul is ready for a fearful resolve, but calls the noble and the rare as well from their utter depths. goethe's man is no such threatening force; in a certain sense he is a corrective and a sedative to those dangerous agitations of which rousseau's man is a prey. goethe himself in his youth followed the "gospel of kindly nature" with all the ardour of his soul: his faust was the highest and boldest picture of rousseau's man, so far at any rate as his hunger for life, his discontent and yearning, his intercourse with the demons of the heart could be represented. but what comes from these congregated storm-clouds? not a single lightning flash! and here begins the new image of man--the man according to goethe. one might have thought that faust would have lived a continual life of suffering, as a revolutionary and a deliverer, as the negative force that proceeds from goodness, as the genius of ruin, alike religious and dæmonic, in opposition to his utterly undæmonic companion; though of course he could not be free of this companion, and had at once to use and despise his evil and destructive scepticism--which is the tragic destiny of all revolutionary deliverers. one is wrong, however, to expect anything of the sort: goethe's man here parts company with rousseau's; for he hates all violence, all sudden transition--that is, all action: and the universal deliverer becomes merely the universal traveller. all the riches of life and nature, all antiquity--arts, mythologies and sciences--pass before his eager eyes, his deepest desires are aroused and satisfied, helen herself can hold him no more--and the moment must come for which his mocking companion is waiting. at a fair spot on the earth, his flight comes to an end: his pinions drop, and mephistopheles is at his side. when the german ceases to be faust, there is no danger greater than of becoming a philistine and falling into the hands of the devil--heavenly powers alone can save him. goethe's man is, as i said, the contemplative man in the grand style, who is only kept from dying of ennui by feeding on all the great and memorable things that have ever existed, and by living from desire to desire. he is not the active man; and when he does take a place among active men, as things are, you may be sure that no good will come of it (think, for example, of the zeal with which goethe wrote for the stage!); and further, you may be sure that "things as they are" will suffer no change. goethe's man is a conciliatory and conservative spirit, though in danger of degenerating into a philistine, just as rousseau's man may easily become a catiline. all his virtues would be the better by the addition of a little brute force and elemental passion. goethe appears to have seen where the weakness and danger of his creation lay, as is clear from jarno's word to wilhelm meister: "you are bitter and ill-tempered--which is quite an excellent thing: if you could once become really angry, it would be still better." to speak plainly, it is necessary to become really angry in order that things may be better. the picture of schopenhauer's man can help us here. _schopenhauer's man voluntarily takes upon himself the pain of telling the truth:_ this pain serves to quench his individual will and make him ready for the complete transformation of his being, which it is the inner meaning of life to realise. this openness in him appears to other men to be an effect of malice, for they think the preservation of their shifts and pretences to be the first duty of humanity, and any one who destroys their playthings to be merely malicious. they are tempted to cry out to such a man, in faust's words to mephistopheles:- "so to the active and eternal creative force, in cold disdain you now oppose the fist infernal"-and he who would live according to schopenhauer would seem to be more like a mephistopheles than a faust--that is, to our weak modern eyes, which always discover signs of malice in any negation. but there is a kind of denial and destruction that is the effect of that strong aspiration after holiness and deliverance, which schopenhauer was the first philosopher to teach our profane and worldly generation. everything that can be denied, deserves to be denied; and real sincerity means the belief in a state of things which cannot be denied, or in which there is no lie. the sincere man feels that his activity has a metaphysical meaning. it can only be explained by the laws of a different and a higher life; it is in the deepest sense an affirmation: even if everything that he does seem utterly opposed to the laws of our present life. it must lead therefore to constant suffering; but he knows, as meister eckhard did, that "the quickest beast that will carry you to perfection is suffering." every one, i should think, who has such an ideal before him, must feel a wider sympathy; and he will have a burning desire to become a "schopenhauer man";--pure and wonderfully patient, on his intellectual side full of a devouring fire, and far removed from the cold and contemptuous "neutrality" of the so-called scientific man; so high above any warped and morose outlook on life as to offer himself as the first victim of the truth he has won, with a deep consciousness of the sufferings that must spring from his sincerity. his courage will destroy his happiness on earth, he must be an enemy to the men he loves and the institutions in which he grew up, he must spare neither person nor thing, however it may hurt him, he will be misunderstood and thought an ally of forces that he abhors, in his search for righteousness he will seem unrighteous by human standards: but he must comfort himself with the words that his teacher schopenhauer once used: "a happy life is impossible, the highest thing that man can aspire to is a _heroic_ life; such as a man lives, who is always fighting against unequal odds for the good of others; and wins in the end without any thanks. after the battle is over, he stands like the prince in the _re corvo_ of gozzi, with dignity and nobility in his eyes, but turned to stone. his memory remains, and will be reverenced as a hero's; his will, that has been mortified all his life by toiling and struggling, by evil payment and ingratitude, is absorbed into nirvana." such a heroic life, with its full "mortification"-corresponds very little to the paltry ideas of the people who talk most about it, and make festivals in memory of great men, in the belief that a great man is great in the sense that they are small, either through exercise of his gifts to please himself or by a blind mechanical obedience to this inner force; so that the man who does not possess the gift or feel the compulsion has the same right to be small as the other to be great. but "gift" and "compulsion" are contemptible words, mere means of escape from an inner voice, a slander on him who has listened to the voice--the great man; he least of all will allow himself to be given or compelled to anything: for he knows as well as any smaller man how easily life can be taken and how soft the bed whereon he might lie if he went the pleasant and conventional way with himself and his fellow-creatures: all the regulations of mankind are turned to the end that the intense feeling of life may be lost in continual distractions. now why will he so strongly choose the opposite, and try to feel life, which is the same as to suffer from life? because he sees that men will tempt him to betray himself, and that there is a kind of agreement to draw him from his den. he will prick up his ears and gather himself together, and say, "i will remain mine own." he gradually comes to understand what a fearful decision it is. for he must go down into the depths of being, with a string of curious questions on his lips--"why am i alive? what lesson have i to learn from life? how have i become what i am, and why do i suffer in this existence?" he is troubled, and sees that no one is troubled in the same way; but rather that the hands of his fellow-men are passionately stretched out towards the fantastic drama of the political theatre, or they themselves are treading the boards under many disguises, youths, men and graybeards, fathers, citizens, priests, merchants and officials,--busy with the comedy they are all playing, and never thinking of their own selves. to the question "to what end dost thou live?" they would all immediately answer, with pride, "to _become_ a good citizen or professor or statesman,"--and yet they _are_ something which can never be changed: and why are they just--this? ah, and why nothing better? the man who only regards his life as a moment in the evolution of a race or a state or a science, and will belong merely to a history of "becoming," has not understood the lesson of existence, and must learn it over again. this eternal "becoming something" is a lying puppet-show, in which man has forgot himself; it is the force that scatters individuality to the four winds, the eternal childish game that the big baby time is playing in front of us--and with us. the heroism of sincerity lies in ceasing to be the plaything of time. everything in the process of "becoming" is a hollow sham, contemptible and shallow: man can only find the solution of his riddle in "being" something definite and unchangeable. he begins to test how deep both "becoming" and "being" are rooted in him--and a fearful task is before his soul; to destroy the first, and bring all the falsity of things to the light. he wishes to know everything, not to feed a delicate taste, like goethe's man, to take delight, from a safe place in the multiplicity of existence: but he himself is the first sacrifice that he brings. the heroic man does not think of his happiness or misery, his virtues or his vices, or of his being the measure of things; he has no further hopes of himself and will accept the utter consequences of his hopelessness. his strength lies in his self-forgetfulness: if he have a thought for himself, it is only to measure the vast distance between himself and his aim, and to view what he has left behind him as so much dross. the old philosophers sought for happiness and truth, with all their strength: and there is an evil principle in nature that not one shall find that which he cannot help seeking. but the man who looks for a lie in everything, and becomes a willing friend to unhappiness, shall have a marvellous disillusioning: there hovers near him something unutterable, of which truth and happiness are but idolatrous images born of the night; the earth loses her dragging weight, the events and powers of earth become as a dream, and a gradual clearness widens round him like a summer evening. it is as though the beholder of these things began to wake, and it had only been the clouds of a passing dream that had been weaving about him. they will at some time disappear: and then will it be day. v. but i have promised to speak of schopenhauer, as far as my experience goes, as an _educator_, and it is far from being sufficient to paint the ideal humanity which is the "platonic idea" in schopenhauer; especially as my representation is an imperfect one. the most difficult task remains;--to say how a new circle of duties may spring from this ideal, and how one can reconcile such a transcendent aim with ordinary action; to prove, in short, that the ideal is _educative_. one might otherwise think it to be merely the blissful or intoxicating vision of a few rare moments, that leaves us afterwards the prey of a deeper disappointment. it is certain that the ideal begins to affect us in this way when we come suddenly to distinguish light and darkness, bliss and abhorrence; this is an experience that is as old as ideals themselves. but we ought not to stand in the doorway for long; we should soon leave the first stages, and ask the question, seriously and definitely, "is it possible to bring that incredibly high aim so near us, that it should educate us, or 'lead us out,' as well as lead us upward?"--in order that the great words of goethe be not fulfilled in our case--"man is born to a state of limitation: he can understand ends that are simple, present and definite, and is accustomed to make use of means that are near to his hand; but as soon as he comes into the open, he knows neither what he wishes nor what he ought to do, and it is all one whether he be confused by the multitude of objects or set beside himself by their greatness and importance. it is always his misfortune to be led to strive after something which he cannot attain by any ordinary activity of his own." the objection can be made with apparent reason against schopenhauer's man, that his greatness and dignity can only turn our heads, and put us beyond all community with the active men of the world: the common round of duties, the noiseless tenor of life has disappeared. one man may possibly get accustomed to living in a reluctant dualism, that is, in a contradiction with himself;-becoming unstable, daily weaker and less productive:--while another will renounce all action on principle, and scarcely endure to see others active. the danger is always great when a man is too heavy-laden, and cannot really _accomplish_ any duties. stronger natures may be broken by it; the weaker, which are the majority, sink into a speculative laziness, and at last, from their laziness, lose even the power of speculation. with regard to such objections, i will admit that our work has hardly begun, and so far as i know, i only see one thing clearly and definitely--that it is possible for that ideal picture to provide you and me with a chain of duties that may be accomplished; and some of us already feel its pressure. in order, however, to be able to speak in plain language of the formula under which i may gather the new circle of duties, i must begin with the following considerations. the deeper minds of all ages have had pity for animals, because they suffer from life and have not the power to turn the sting of the suffering against themselves, and understand their being metaphysically. the sight of blind suffering is the spring of the deepest emotion. and in many quarters of the earth men have supposed that the souls of the guilty have entered into beasts, and that the blind suffering which at first sight calls for such pity has a clear meaning and purpose to the divine justice,--of punishment and atonement: and a heavy punishment it is, to be condemned to live in hunger and need, in the shape of a beast, and to reach no consciousness of one's self in this life. i can think of no harder lot than the wild beast's; he is driven to the forest by the fierce pang of hunger, that seldom leaves him at peace; and peace is itself a torment, the surfeit after horrid food, won, maybe, by a deadly fight with other animals. to cling to life, blindly and madly, with no other aim, to be ignorant of the reason, or even the fact, of one's punishment, nay, to thirst after it as if it were a pleasure, with all the perverted desire of a fool--this is what it means to be an animal. if universal nature leads up to man, it is to show us that he is necessary to redeem her from the curse of the beast's life, and that in him existence can find a mirror of itself wherein life appears, no longer blind, but in its real metaphysical significance. but we should consider where the beast ends and the man begins--the man, the one concern of nature. as long as any one desires life as a pleasure in itself, he has not raised his eyes above the horizon of the beast; he only desires more consciously what the beast seeks by a blind impulse. it is so with us all, for the greater part of our lives. we do not shake off the beast, but are beasts ourselves, suffering we know not what. but there are moments when we do know; and then the clouds break, and we see how, with the rest of nature, we are straining towards the man, as to something that stands high above us. we look round and behind us, and fear the sudden rush of light; the beasts are transfigured, and ourselves with them. the enormous migrations of mankind in the wildernesses of the world, the cities they found and the wars they wage, their ceaseless gatherings and dispersions and fusions, the doctrines they blindly follow, their mutual frauds and deceits, the cry of distress, the shriek of victory--are all a continuation of the beast in us: as if the education of man has been intentionally set back, and his promise of self-consciousness frustrated; as if, in fact, after yearning for man so long, and at last reaching him by her labour, nature should now recoil from him and wish to return to a state of unconscious instinct. ah! she has need of knowledge, and shrinks before the very knowledge she needs: the flame flickers unsteadily and fears its own brightness, and takes hold of a thousand things before the one thing for which knowledge is necessary. there are moments when we all know that our most elaborate arrangements are only designed to give us refuge from our real task in life; we wish to hide our heads somewhere as if our argus-eyed conscience could not find us out; we are quick to send our hearts on state-service, or money-making, or social duties, or scientific work, in order to possess them no longer ourselves; we are more willing and instinctive slaves of the hard day's work than mere living requires, because it seems to us more necessary not to be in a position to think. the hurry is universal, because every one is fleeing before himself; its concealment is just as universal, as we wish to seem contented and hide our wretchedness from the keener eyes; and so there is a common need for a new carillon of words to hang in the temple of life, and peal for its noisy festival. we all know the curious way in which unpleasant memories suddenly throng on us, and how we do our best by loud talk and violent gestures to put them out of our minds; but the gestures and the talk of our ordinary life make one think we are all in this condition, frightened of any memory or any inward gaze. what is it that is always troubling us? what is the gnat that will not let us sleep? there are spirits all about us, each moment of life has something to say to us, but we will not listen to the spirit-voices. when we are quiet and alone, we fear that something will be whispered in our ears, and so we hate the quiet, and dull our senses in society. we understand this sometimes, as i say, and stand amazed at the whirl and the rush and the anxiety and all the dream that we call our life; we seem to fear the awakening, and our dreams too become vivid and restless, as the awakening draws near. but we feel as well that we are too weak to endure long those intimate moments, and that we are not the men to whom universal nature looks as her redeemers. it is something to be able to raise our heads but for a moment and see the stream in which we are sunk so deep. we cannot gain even this transitory moment of awakening by our own strength; we must be lifted up--and who are they that will uplift us? the sincere men who have cast out the beast, the philosophers, artists and saints. nature--_quæ nunquam facit saltum_--has made her one leap in creating them; a leap of joy, as she feels herself for the first time at her goal, where she begins to see that she must learn not to have goals above her, and that she has played the game of transition too long. the knowledge transfigures her, and there rests on her face the gentle weariness of evening that men call "beauty." her words after this transfiguration are as a great light shed over existence: and the highest wish that mortals can reach is to listen continually to her voice with ears that hear. if a man think of all that schopenhauer, for example, must have _heard_ in his life, he may well say to himself--"the deaf ears, the feeble understanding and shrunken heart, everything that i call mine,--how i despise them! not to be able to fly but only to flutter one's wings! to look above one's self and have no power to rise! to know the road that leads to the wide vision of the philosopher, and to reel back after a few steps! were there but one day when the great wish might be fulfilled, how gladly would we pay for it with the rest of life! to rise as high as any thinker yet into the pure icy air of the mountain, where there are no mists and veils, and the inner constitution of things is shown in a stark and piercing clarity! even by thinking of this the soul becomes infinitely alone; but were its wish fulfilled, did its glance once fall straight as a ray of light on the things below, were shame and anxiety and desire gone for ever--one could find no words for its state then, for the mystic and tranquil emotion with which, like the soul of schopenhauer, it would look down on the monstrous hieroglyphics of existence and the petrified doctrines of "becoming"; not as the brooding night, but as the red and glowing day that streams over the earth. and what a destiny it is only to know enough of the fixity and happiness of the philosopher to feel the complete unfixity and unhappiness of the false philosopher, 'who without hope lives in desire': to know one's self to be the fruit of a tree that is too much in the shade ever to ripen, and to see a world of sunshine in front, where one may not go!" there were sorrow enough here, if ever, to make such a man envious and spiteful: but he will turn aside, that he may not destroy his soul by a vain aspiration; and will discover a new circle of duties. i can now give an answer to the question whether it be possible to approach the great ideal of schopenhauer's man "by any ordinary activity of our own." in the first place, the new duties are certainly not those of a hermit; they imply rather a vast community, held together not by external forms but by a fundamental idea, namely that of _culture_; though only so far as it can put a single task before each of us--to bring the philosopher, the artist and the saint, within and without us, to the light, and to strive thereby for the completion of nature. for nature needs the artist, as she needs the philosopher, for a metaphysical end, the explanation of herself, whereby she may have a clear and sharp picture of what she only saw dimly in the troubled period of transition,--and so may reach self-consciousness. goethe, in an arrogant yet profound phrase, showed how all nature's attempts only have value in so far as the artist interprets her stammering words, meets her half-way, and speaks aloud what she really means. "i have often said, and will often repeat," he exclaims in one place, "the _causa finalis_ of natural and human activity is dramatic poetry. otherwise the stuff is of no use at all." finally, nature needs the saint. in him the ego has melted away, and the suffering of his life is, practically, no longer felt as individual, but as the spring of the deepest sympathy and intimacy with all living creatures: he sees the wonderful transformation scene that the comedy of "becoming" never reaches, the attainment, at length, of the high state of man after which all nature is striving, that she may be delivered from herself. without doubt, we all stand in close relation to him, as well as to the philosopher and the artist: there are moments, sparks from the clear fire of love, in whose light we understand the word "i" no longer; there is something beyond our being that comes, for those moments, to the hither side of it: and this is why we long in our hearts for a bridge from here to there. in our ordinary state we can do nothing towards the production of the new redeemer, and so we hate ourselves in this state with a hatred that is the root of the pessimism which schopenhauer had to teach again to our age, though it is as old as the aspiration after culture.--its root, not its flower; the foundation, not the summit; the beginning of the road, not the end: for we have to learn at some time to hate something else, more universal than our own personality with its wretched limitation, its change and its unrest--and this will be when we shall learn to love something else than we can love now. when we are ourselves received into that high order of philosophers, artists and saints, in this life or a reincarnation of it, a new object for our love and hate will also rise before us. as it is, we have our task and our circle of duties, our hates and our loves. for we know that culture requires us to make ready for the coming of the schopenhauer man;--and this is the "use" we are to make of him;--we must know what obstacles there are and strike them from our path--in fact, wage unceasing war against everything that hindered our fulfilment, and prevented us from becoming schopenhauer's men ourselves. vi. it is sometimes harder to agree to a thing than to understand it; many will feel this when they consider the proposition--"mankind must toil unceasingly to bring forth individual great men: this and nothing else is its task." one would like to apply to society and its ends a fact that holds universally in the animal and vegetable world; where progress depends only on the higher individual types, which are rarer, yet more persistent, complex and productive. but traditional notions of what the end of society is, absolutely bar the way. we can easily understand how in the natural world, where one species passes at some point into a higher one, the aim of their evolution cannot be held to lie in the high level attained by the mass, or in the latest types developed;--but rather in what seem accidental beings produced here and there by favourable circumstances. it should be just as easy to understand that it is the duty of mankind to provide the circumstances favourable to the birth of the new redeemer, simply because men can have a consciousness of their object. but there is always something to prevent them. they find their ultimate aim in the happiness of all, or the greatest number, or in the expansion of a great commonwealth. a man will very readily decide to sacrifice his life for the state; he will be much slower to respond if an individual, and not a state, ask for the sacrifice. it seems to be out of reason that one man should exist for the sake of another: "let it be rather for the sake of every other, or, at any rate, of as many as possible!" o upright judge! as if it were more in reason to let the majority decide a question of value and significance! for the problem is--"in what way may your life, the individual life, retain the highest value and the deepest significance? and how may it least be squandered?" only by your living for the good of the rarest and most valuable types, not for that of the majority,--who are the most worthless types, taken as individuals. this way of thinking should be implanted and fostered in every young man's mind: he should regard himself both as a failure of nature's handiwork and a testimony to her larger ideas. "she has succeeded badly," he should say; "but i will do honour to her great idea by being a means to its better success." with these thoughts he will enter the circle of culture, which is the child of every man's self-knowledge and dissatisfaction. he will approach and say aloud: "i see something above me, higher and more human than i: let all help me to reach it, as i will help all who know and suffer as i do, that the man may arise at last who feels his knowledge and love, vision and power, to be complete and boundless, who in his universality is one with nature, the critic and judge of existence." it is difficult to give any one this courageous self-consciousness, because it is impossible to teach love; from love alone the soul gains, not only the clear vision that leads to self-contempt, but also the desire to look to a higher self which is yet hidden, and strive upward to it with all its strength. and so he who rests his hope on a future great man, receives his first "initiation into culture." the sign of this is shame or vexation at one's self, a hatred of one's own narrowness, a sympathy with the genius that ever raises its head again from our misty wastes, a feeling for all that is struggling into life, the conviction that nature must be helped in her hour of need to press forward to the man, however ill she seem to prosper, whatever success may attend her marvellous forms and projects: so that the men with whom we live are like the débris of some precious sculptures, which cry out--"come and help us! put us together, for we long to become complete." i called this inward condition the "first initiation into culture." i have now to describe the effects of the "second initiation," a task of greater difficulty. it is the passage from the inner life to the criticism of the outer life. the eye must be turned to find in the great world of movement the desire for culture that is known from the immediate experience of the individual; who must use his own strivings and aspirations as the alphabet to interpret those of humanity. he cannot rest here either, but must go higher. culture demands from him not only that inner experience, not only the criticism of the outer world surrounding him, but action too to crown them all, the fight for culture against the influences and conventions and institutions where he cannot find his own aim,--the production of genius. any one who can reach the second step, will see how extremely rare and imperceptible the knowledge of that end is, though all men busy themselves with culture and expend vast labour in her service. he asks himself in amazement--"is not such knowledge, after all, absolutely necessary? can nature be said to attain her end, if men have a false idea of the aim of their own labour?" and any one who thinks a great deal of nature's unconscious adaptation of means to ends, will probably answer at once: "yes, men may think and speak what they like about their ultimate end, their blind instinct will tell them the right road." it requires some experience of life to be able to contradict this: but let a man be convinced of the real aim of culture--the production of the true man and nothing else;--let him consider that amid all the pageantry and ostentation of culture at the present time the conditions for his production are nothing but a continual "battle of the beasts": and he will see that there is great need for a conscious will to take the place of that blind instinct. there is another reason also;--to prevent the possibility of turning this obscure impulse to quite different ends, in a direction where our highest aim can no longer be attained. for we must beware of a certain kind of misapplied and parasitical culture; the powers at present most active in its propagation have other casts of thought that prevent their relation to culture from being pure and disinterested. the first of these is the self-interest of the business men. this needs the help of culture, and helps her in return, though at the price of prescribing her ends and limits. and their favourite sorites is: "we must have as much knowledge and education as possible; this implies as great a need as possible for it, this again as much production, this again as much material wealth and happiness as possible."--this is the seductive formula. its preachers would define education as the insight that makes man through and through a "child of his age" in his desires and their satisfaction, and gives him command over the best means of making money. its aim would be to make "current" men, in the same sense as one speaks of the "currency" in money; and in their view, the more "current" men there are, the happier the people. the object of modern educational systems is therefore to make each man as "current" as his nature will allow him, and to give him the opportunity for the greatest amount of success and happiness that can be got from his particular stock of knowledge. he is required to have just so much idea of his own value (through his liberal education) as to know what he can ask of life; and he is assured that a natural and necessary connection between "intelligence and property" not only exists, but is also a _moral_ necessity. all education is detested that makes for loneliness, and has an aim above money-making, and requires a long time: men look askance on such serious education, as mere "refined egoism" or "immoral epicureanism." the converse of course holds, according to the ordinary morality, that education must be soon over to allow the pursuit of money to be soon begun, and should be just thorough enough to allow of much money being made. the amount of education is determined by commercial interests. in short, "man has a necessary claim to worldly happiness; only for that reason is education necessary." there is, secondly, the self-interest of the state, which requires the greatest possible breadth and universality of culture, and has the most effective weapons to carry out its wishes. if it be firmly enough established not only to initiate but control education and bear its whole weight, such breadth will merely profit the competition of the state with other states. a "highly civilised state" generally implies, at the present time, the task of setting free the spiritual forces of a generation just so far as they may be of use to the existing institutions,--as a mountain stream is split up by embankments and channels, and its diminished power made to drive mill-wheels, its full strength being more dangerous than useful to the mills. and thus "setting free" comes to mean rather "chaining up." compare, for example, what the self-interest of the state has done for christianity. christianity is one of the purest manifestations of the impulse towards culture and the production of the saint: but being used in countless ways to turn the mills of the state authorities, it gradually became sick at heart, hypocritical and degenerate, and in antagonism with its original aim. its last phase, the german reformation, would have been nothing but a sudden flickering of its dying flame, had it not taken new strength and light from the clash and conflagration of states. in the third place, culture will be favoured by all those people who know their own character to be offensive or tiresome, and wish to draw a veil of so-called "good form" over them. words, gestures, dress, etiquette, and such external things, are meant to produce a false impression, the inner side to be judged from the outer. i sometimes think that modern men are eternally bored with each other and look to the arts to make them interesting. they let their artists make savoury and inviting dishes of them; they steep themselves in the spices of the east and west, and have a very interesting aroma after it all. they are ready to suit all palates: and every one will be served, whether he want something with a good or bad taste, something sublime or coarse, greek or chinese, tragedy or gutter-drama. the most celebrated chefs among the moderns who wish to interest and be interested at any price, are the french; the worst are the germans. this is really more comforting for the latter, and we have no reason to mind the french despising us for our want of interest, elegance and politeness, and being reminded of the indian who longs for a ring through his nose, and then proceeds to tattoo himself. here i must digress a little. many things in germany have evidently been altered since the late war with france, and new requirements for german culture brought over. the war was for many their first venture into the more elegant half of the world: and what an admirable simplicity the conqueror shows in not scorning to learn something of culture from the conquered! the applied arts especially will be reformed to emulate our more refined neighbours, the german house furnished like the french, a "sound taste" applied to the german language by means of an academy on the french model, to shake off the doubtful influence of goethe--this is the judgment of our new berlin academician, dubois-raymond. our theatres have been gradually moving, in a dignified way, towards the same goal, even the elegant german savant is now discovered--and we must now expect everything that does not conform to this law of elegance, our music, tragedy and philosophy, to be thrust aside as un-german. but there were no need to raise a finger for german culture, did german culture (which the germans have yet to find) mean nothing but the little amenities that make life more decorative--including the arts of the dancing-master and the upholsterer;--or were they merely interested in academic rules of language and a general atmosphere of politeness. the late war and the self-comparison with the french do not seem to have aroused any further desires, and i suspect that the german has a strong wish for the moment to be free of the old obligations laid on him by his wonderful gifts of seriousness and profundity. he would much rather play the buffoon and the monkey, and learn the arts that make life amusing. but the german spirit cannot be more dishonoured than by being treated as wax for any elegant mould. and if, unfortunately, a good many germans will allow themselves to be thus moulded, one must continually say to them, till at last they listen:--"the old german way is no longer yours: it was hard, rough, and full of resistance; but it is still the most valuable material--one which only the greatest modellers can work with, for they alone are worthy to use it. what you have in you now is a soft pulpy stuff: make what you will out of it,--elegant dolls and interesting idols--richard wagner's phrase will still hold good, 'the german is awkward and ungainly when he wishes to be polite; he is high above all others, when he begins to take fire.'" all the elegant people have reason to beware of this german fire; it may one day devour them with all their wax dolls and idols.--the prevailing love of "good form" in germany may have a deeper cause in the breathless seizing at what the moment can give, the haste that plucks the fruit too green, the race and the struggle that cut the furrows in men's brows and stamp the same mark on all their actions. as if there were a poison in them that would not let them breathe, they rush about in disorder, anxious slaves of the "three m's," the moment, the mode and the mob: they see too well their want of dignity and fitness, and need a false elegance to hide their galloping consumption. the fashionable desire of "good form" is bound up with a loathing of man's inner nature: the one is to conceal, the other to be concealed. education means now the concealment of man's misery and wickedness, his wild-beast quarrels, his eternal greed, his shamelessness in fruition. in pointing out the absence of a german culture, i have often had the reproach flung at me: "this absence is quite natural, for the germans have been too poor and modest up to now. once rich and conscious of themselves, our people will have a culture too." faith may often produce happiness, yet _this_ particular faith makes me unhappy, for i feel that the culture whose future raises such hopes--the culture of riches, politeness, and elegant concealments-is the bitterest foe of that german culture in which i believe. every one who has to live among germans suffers from the dreadful grayness and apathy of their lives, their formlessness, torpor and clumsiness, still more their envy, secretiveness and impurity: he is troubled by their innate love of the false and the ignoble, their wretched mimicry and translation of a good foreign thing into a bad german one. but now that the feverish unrest, the quest of gain and success, the intense prizing of the moment, is added to it all, it makes one furious to think that all this sickness can never be cured, but only painted over, by such a "cult of the interesting." and this among a people that has produced a schopenhauer and a wagner! and will produce others, unless we are blindly deceiving ourselves; for should not their very existence be a guarantee that such forces are even now potential in the german spirit? or will they be exceptions, the last inheritors of the qualities that were once called german? i can see nothing to help me here, and return to my main argument again, from which my doubts and anxieties have made me digress. i have not yet enumerated all the forces that help culture without recognising its end, the production of genius. three have been named; the self-interest of business, of the state, and of those who draw the cloak of "good form" over them. there is fourthly the self-interest of science, and the peculiar nature of her servants--the learned. science has the same relation to wisdom as current morality to holiness: she is cold and dry, loveless, and ignorant of any deep feeling of dissatisfaction and yearning. she injures her servants in helping herself, for she impresses her own character on them and dries up their humanity. as long as we actually mean by culture the progress of science, she will pass by the great suffering man and harden her heart, for science only sees the problems of knowledge, and suffering is something alien and unintelligible to her world--though no less a problem for that! if one accustom himself to put down every experience in a dialectical form of question and answer, and translate it into the language of "pure reason," he will soon wither up and rattle his bones like a skeleton. we all know it: and why is it that the young do not shudder at these skeletons of men, but give themselves blindly to science without motive or measure? it cannot be the so-called "impulse to truth": for how could there be an impulse towards a pure, cold and objectless knowledge? the unprejudiced eye can see the real driving forces only too plainly. the vivisection of the professor has much to recommend it, as he himself is accustomed to finger and analyse all things--even the worthiest! to speak honestly, the savant is a complex of very various impulses and attractive forces--he is a base metal throughout. take first a strong and increasing desire for intellectual adventure, the attraction of the new and rare as against the old and tedious. add to that a certain joy in nosing the trail of dialectic, and beating the cover where the old fox, thought, lies hid; the desire is not so much for truth as the chase of truth, and the chief pleasure is in surrounding and artistically killing it. add thirdly a love of contradiction whereby the personality is able to assert itself against all others: the battle's the thing, and the personal victory its aim,--truth only its pretext. the impulse to discover "particular truths" plays a great part in the professor, coming from his submission to definite ruling persons, classes, opinions, churches, governments, for he feels it a profit to himself to bring truth to their side. the following characteristics of the savant are less common, but still found.--firstly, downrightness and a feeling for simplicity, very valuable if more than a mere awkwardness and inability to deceive, deception requiring some mother-wit.--(actually, we may be on our guard against too obvious cleverness and resource, and doubt the man's sincerity.)--otherwise this downrightness is generally of little value, and rarely of any use to knowledge, as it follows tradition and speaks the truth only in "adiaphora"; it being lazier to speak the truth here than ignore it. everything new means something to be unlearnt, and your downright man will respect the ancient dogmas and accuse the new evangelist of failing in the _sensus recti_. there was a similar opposition, with probability and custom on its side, to the theory of copernicus. the professor's frequent hatred of philosophy is principally a hatred of the long trains of reasoning and artificiality of the proofs. ultimately the savants of every age have a fixed limit; beyond which ingenuity is not allowed, and everything suspected as a conspirator against honesty. secondly, a clear vision of near objects, combined with great shortsightedness for the distant and universal. the professor's range is generally very small, and his eye must be kept close to the object. to pass from a point already considered to another, he has to move his whole optical apparatus. he cuts a picture into small sections, like a man using an opera-glass in the theatre, and sees now a head, now a bit of the dress, but nothing as a whole. the single sections are never combined for him, he only infers their connection, and consequently has no strong general impression. he judges a literary work, for example, by certain paragraphs or sentences or errors, as he can do nothing more; he will be driven to see in an oil painting nothing but a mass of daubs. thirdly, a sober conventionality in his likes and dislikes. thus he especially delights in history because he can put his own motives into the actions of the past. a mole is most comfortable in a mole-hill. he is on his guard against all ingenious and extravagant hypotheses; but digs up industriously all the commonplace motives of the past, because he feels in sympathy with them. he is generally quite incapable of understanding and valuing the rare or the uncommon, the great or the real. fourthly, a lack of feeling, which makes him capable of vivisection. he knows nothing of the suffering that brings knowledge, and does not fear to tread where other men shudder. he is cold and may easily appear cruel. he is thought courageous, but he is not,--any more than the mule who does not feel giddiness. fifthly, diffidence, or a low estimate of himself. though he live in a miserable alley of the world, he has no sense of sacrifice or surrender; he appears often to know in his inmost heart that he is not a flying but a crawling creature. and this makes him seem even pathetic. sixthly, loyalty to his teachers and leaders. from his heart he wishes to help them, and knows he can do it best with the truth. he has a grateful disposition, for he has only gained admittance through them to the high hall of science; he would never have entered by his own road. any man to-day who can throw open a new province where his lesser disciples can work to some purpose, is famous at once; so great is the crowd that presses after him. these grateful pupils are certainly a misfortune to their teacher, as they all imitate him; his faults are exaggerated in their small persons, his virtues correspondingly diminished. seventhly, he will follow the usual road of all the professors, where a feeling for truth springs from a lack of ideas, and the wheel once started goes on. such natures become compilers, commentators, makers of indices and herbaria; they rummage about one special department because they have never thought there are others. their industry has something of the monstrous stupidity of gravitation; and so they can often bring their labours to an end. eighthly, a dread of ennui. while the true thinker desires nothing more than leisure, the professor fears it, not knowing how it is to be used. books are his comfort; he listens to everybody's different thoughts and keeps himself amused all day. he especially chooses books with a personal relation to himself, that make him feel some emotion of like or dislike; books that have to do with himself or his position, his political, æsthetic, or even grammatical doctrines; if he have mastered even one branch of knowledge, the means to flap away the flies of ennui will not fail him. ninthly, the motive of the bread-winner, the "cry of the empty stomach," in fact. truth is used as a direct means of preferment, when she can be attained; or as a way to the good graces of the fountains of honour--and bread. only, however, in the sense of the "particular truth": there is a gulf between the profitable truths that many serve, and the unprofitable truths to which only those few people devote themselves whose motto is not _ingenii largitor venter_. tenthly, a reverence for their fellow-professors and a fear of their displeasure--a higher and rarer motive than the last, though not uncommon. all the members of the guild are jealously on guard, that the truth which means so much bread and honour and position may really be baptized in the name of its discoverer. the one pays the other reverence for the truth he has found, in order to exact the toll again if he should find one himself. the untruth, the error is loudly exploded, that the workers may not be too many; here and there the real truth will be exploded to let a few bold and stiff-necked errors be on show for a time; there is never a lack of "moral idiosyncrasies,"--formerly called rascalities. eleventhly, the "savant for vanity," now rather rare. he will get a department for himself somehow, and investigate curiosities, especially if they demand unusual expenditure, travel, research, or communication with all parts of the world. he is quite satisfied with the honour of being regarded as a curiosity himself, and never dreams of earning a living by his erudite studies. twelfthly, the "savant for amusement." he loves to look for knots in knowledge and to untie them; not too energetically however, lest he lose the spirit of the game. thus he does not penetrate the depths, though he often observes something that the microscopic eyes of the bread-and-butter scientist never see. if i speak, lastly, of the "impulse towards justice" as a further motive of the savant, i may be answered that this noble impulse, being metaphysical in its nature, is too indistinguishable from the rest, and really incomprehensible to mortal mind; and so i leave the thirteenth heading with the pious wish that the impulse may be less rare in the professor than it seems. for a spark in his soul from the fire of justice is sufficient to irradiate and purify it, so that he can rest no more and is driven for ever from the cold or lukewarm condition in which most of his fellows do their daily work. all these elements, or a part of them, must be regarded as fused and pounded together, to form the servant of truth. for the sake of an absolutely inhuman thing--mere purposeless, and therefore motiveless, knowledge--a mass of very human little motives have been chemically combined, and as the result we have the professor,--so transfigured in the light of that pure unearthly object that the mixing and pounding which went to form him are all forgotten! it is very curious. yet there are moments when they must be remembered,--when we have to think of the professor's significance to culture. any one with observation can see that he is in his essence and by his origin unproductive, and has a natural hatred of the productive; and thus there is an endless feud between the genius and the savant in idea and practice. the latter wishes to kill nature by analysing and comprehending it, the former to increase it by a new living nature. the happy age does not need or know the savant; the sick and sluggish time ranks him as its highest and worthiest. who were physician enough to know the health or sickness of our time? it is clear that the professor is valued too highly, with evil consequences for the future genius, for whom he has no compassion, merely a cold, contemptuous criticism, a shrug of the shoulders, as if at something strange and perverted for which he has neither time nor inclination. and so he too knows nothing of the aim of culture. in fact, all these considerations go to prove that the aim of culture is most unknown precisely where the interest in it seems liveliest. the state may trumpet as it will its services to culture, it merely helps culture in order to help itself, and does not comprehend an aim that stands higher than its own well-being or even existence. the business men in their continual demand for education merely wish for--business. when the pioneers of "good form" pretend to be the real helpers of culture, imagining that all art, for example, is merely to serve their own needs, they are clearly affirming themselves in affirming culture. of the savant enough has already been said. all four are emulously thinking how they can benefit _themselves_ with the help of culture, but have no thoughts at all when their own interests are not engaged. and so they have done nothing to improve the conditions for the birth of genius in modern times; and the opposition to original men has grown so far that no socrates could ever live among us, and certainly could never reach the age of seventy. i remember saying in the third chapter that our whole modern world was not so stable that one could prophesy an eternal life to its conception of culture. it is likely that the next millennium may reach two or three new ideas that might well make the hair of our present generation stand on end. the belief in the metaphysical significance of culture would not be such a horrifying thing, but its effects on educational methods might be so. it requires a totally new attitude of mind to be able to look away from the present educational institutions to the strangely different ones that will be necessary for the second or third generation. at present the labours of higher education produce merely the savant or the official or the business man or the philistine or, more commonly, a mixture of all four; and the future institutions will have a harder task;--not in itself harder; as it is really more natural, and so easier; and further, could anything be harder than to make a youth into a savant against nature, as now happens?--but the difficulty lies in unlearning what we know and setting up a new aim; it will be an endless trouble to change the fundamental idea of our present educational system, that has its roots in the middle ages and regards the mediæval savant as the ideal type of culture. it is already time to put these objects before us; for some generation must begin the battle, of which a later generation will reap the victory. the solitary man who has understood the new fundamental idea of culture is at the parting of the ways; on the one he will be welcomed by his age, laurels and rewards will be his, powerful parties will uphold him, he will have as many in sympathy behind him as in front, and when the leader speaks the word of deliverance, it will echo through all the ranks. the first duty is to "fight in line," the second to treat as foes all who will not "fall in." on the other way he will find fewer companions; it is steeper and more tortuous. the travellers on the first road laugh at him, as his way is the more troublesome and dangerous; and they try to entice him over. if the two ways cross, he is ill-treated, cast aside or left alone. what significance has any particular form of culture for these several travellers? the enormous throng that press to their end on the first road, understand by it the laws and institutions that enable them to go forward in regular fashion and rule out all the solitary and obstinate people who look towards higher and remoter objects. to the small company on the other road it has quite a different office: they wish to guard themselves, by means of a strong organisation, from being swept away by the throng, to prevent their individual members from fainting on the way or turning in spirit from their great task. these solitary men must finish their work; that is why they should all hold together; and those who have their part in the scheme will take thought to prepare themselves with ever-increasing purity of aim for the birth of the genius, and ensure that the time be ripe for him. many are destined to help on the labour, even among the second-rate talents, and it is only in submission to such a destiny that they can feel they are living for a duty, and have a meaning and an object in their lives. but at present these talents are being turned from the road their instinct has chosen by the seductive tones of the "fashionable culture," that plays on their selfish side, their vanities and weaknesses; and the time-spirit ever whispers in their ears its flattering counsel:--"follow me and go not thither! there you are only servants and tools, over-shadowed by higher natures with no scope for your own, drawn by threads, hung with fetters, slaves and automatons. with me you may enjoy your true personality, and be masters, your talents may shine with their own light, and yourselves stand in the front ranks with an immense following round you; and the acclamation of public opinion will rejoice you more than a wandering breath of approval sent down from the cold ethereal heights of genius." even the best men are snared by such allurements, and the ultimate difference comes not so much from the rarity and power of their talent, as the influence of a certain heroic disposition at the base of them, and an inner feeling of kinship with genius. for there are men who feel it as their own misery when they see the genius in painful toil and struggle, in danger of self-destruction, or neglected by the short-sighted selfishness of the state, the superficiality of the business men, and the cold arrogance of the professors; and i hope there may be some to understand what i mean by my sketch of schopenhauer's destiny, and to what end schopenhauer can really educate. vii. but setting aside all thoughts of any educational revolution in the distant future;--what provision is required _now_, that our future philosopher may have the best chance of opening his eyes to a life like schopenhauer's--hard as it is, yet still livable? what, further, must be discovered that may make his influence on his contemporaries more certain? and what obstacles must be removed before his example can have its full effect and the philosopher train another philosopher? here we descend to be practical. nature always desires the greatest utility, but does not understand how to find the best and handiest means to her end; that is her great sorrow, and the cause of her melancholy. the impulse towards her own redemption shows clearly her wish to give men a significant existence by the generation of the philosopher and the artist: but how unclear and weak is the effect she generally obtains with her artists and philosophers, and how seldom is there any effect at all! she is especially perplexed in her efforts to make the philosopher useful; her methods are casual and tentative, her failures innumerable; most of her philosophers never touch the common good of mankind at all. her actions seem those of a spendthrift; but the cause lies in no prodigal luxury, but in her inexperience. were she human, she would probably never cease to be dissatisfied with herself and her bungling. nature shoots the philosopher at mankind like an arrow; she does not aim, but hopes that the arrow will stick somewhere. she makes countless mistakes that give her pain. she is as extravagant in the sphere of culture as in her planting and sowing. she fulfils her ends in a large and clumsy fashion, using up far too much of her strength. the artist has the same relation to the connoisseurs and lovers of his art as a piece of heavy artillery to a flock of sparrows. it is a fool's part to use a great avalanche to sweep away a little snow, to kill a man in order to strike the fly on his nose. the artist and the philosopher are witnesses against nature's adaptation of her means, however well they may show the wisdom of her ends. they only reach a few and should reach all--and even these few are not struck with the strength they used when they shot. it is sad to have to value art so differently as cause and effect; how huge in its inception, how faint the echo afterwards! the artist does his work as nature bids him, for the benefit of other men--no doubt of it; but he knows that none of those men will understand and love his work as he understands and loves it himself. that lonely height of love and understanding is necessary, by nature's clumsy law, to produce a lower type; the great and noble are used as the means to the small and ignoble. nature is a bad manager; her expenses are far greater than her profits: for all her riches she must one day go bankrupt. she would have acted more reasonably to make the rule of her household--small expense and hundredfold profit; if there had been, for example, only a few artists with moderate powers, but an immense number of hearers to appreciate them, stronger and more powerful characters than the artists themselves; then the effect of the art-work, in comparison with the cause, might be a hundred-tongued echo. one might at least expect cause and effect to be of equal power; but nature lags infinitely behind this consummation. an artist, and especially a philosopher, seems often to have dropped by chance into his age, as a wandering hermit or straggler cut off from the main body. think how utterly great schopenhauer is, and what a small and absurd effect he has had! an honest man can feel no greater shame at the present time than at the thought of the casual treatment schopenhauer has received and the evil powers that have up to now killed his effect among men. first there was the want of readers,--to the eternal shame of our cultivated age;--then the inadequacy of his first public adherents, as soon as he had any; further, i think, the crassness of the modern man towards books, which he will no longer take seriously. as an outcome of many attempts to adapt schopenhauer to this enervated age, the new danger has gradually arisen of regarding him as an odd kind of pungent herb, of taking him in grains, as a sort of metaphysical pepper. in this way he has gradually become famous, and i should think more have heard his name than hegel's; and, for all that, he is still a solitary being, who has failed of his effect.--though the honour of causing the failure belongs least of all to the barking of his literary antagonists; first because there are few men with the patience to read them, and secondly, because any one who does, is sent immediately to schopenhauer himself; for who will let a donkey-driver prevent him from mounting a fine horse, however much he praise his donkey? whoever has recognised nature's unreason in our time, will have to consider some means to help her; his task will be to bring the free spirits and the sufferers from this age to know schopenhauer; and make them tributaries to the flood that is to overbear all the clumsy uses to which nature even now is accustomed to put her philosophers. such men will see that the identical obstacles hinder the effect of a great philosophy and the production of the great philosopher; and so will direct their aims to prepare the regeneration of schopenhauer, which means that of the philosophical genius. the real opposition to the further spread of his doctrine in the past, and the regeneration of the philosopher in the future, is the perversity of human nature as it is; and all the great men that are to be must spend infinite pains in freeing themselves from it. the world they enter is plastered over with pretence,--including not merely religious dogmas, but such juggling conceptions as "progress," "universal education," "nationalism," "the modern state"; practically all our general terms have an artificial veneer over them that will bring a clearer-sighted posterity to reproach our age bitterly for its warped and stunted growth, however loudly we may boast of our "health." the beauty of the antique vases, says schopenhauer, lies in the simplicity with which they express their meaning and object; it is so with all the ancient implements; if nature produced amphoræ, lamps, tables, chairs, helmets, shields, breastplates and the like, they would resemble these. and, as a corollary, whoever considers how we all manage our art, politics, religion and education--to say nothing of our vases!--will find in them a barbaric exaggeration and arbitrariness of expression. nothing is more unfavourable to the rise of genius than such monstrosities. they are unseen and undiscoverable, the leaden weights on his hand when he will set it to the plough; the weights are only shaken off with violence, and his highest work must to an extent always bear the mark of it. in considering the conditions that, at best, keep the born philosopher from being oppressed by the perversity of the age, i am surprised to find they are partly those in which schopenhauer himself grew up. true, there was no lack of opposing influences; the evil time drew perilously near him in the person of a vain and pretentious mother. but the proud republican character of his father rescued him from her and gave him the first quality of a philosopher--a rude and strong virility. his father was neither an official nor a savant; he travelled much abroad with his son,--a great help to one who must know men rather than books, and worship truth before the state. in time he got accustomed to national peculiarities: he made england, france and italy equally his home, and felt no little sympathy with the spanish character. on the whole, he did not think it an honour to be born in germany, and i am not sure that the new political conditions would have made him change his mind. he held quite openly the opinion that the state's one object was to give protection at home and abroad, and even protection against its "protectors," and to attribute any other object to it was to endanger its true end. and so, to the consternation of all the so-called liberals, he left his property to the survivors of the prussian soldiers who fell in 1848 in the fight for order. to understand the state and its duties in this single sense may seem more and more henceforth the sign of intellectual superiority; for the man with the _furor philosophicus_ in him will no longer have time for the _furor politicus_, and will wisely keep from reading the newspapers or serving a party; though he will not hesitate a moment to take his place in the ranks if his country be in real need. all states are badly managed, when other men than politicians busy themselves with politics; and they deserve to be ruined by their political amateurs. schopenhauer had another great advantage--that he had never been educated for a professor, but worked for some time (though against his will) as a merchant's clerk, and through all his early years breathed the freer air of a great commercial house. a savant can never become a philosopher: kant himself could not, but remained in a chrysalis stage to the end, in spite of the innate force of his genius. any one who thinks i do kant wrong in saying this does not know what a philosopher is--not only a great thinker, but also a real man; and how could a real man have sprung from a savant? he who lets conceptions, opinions, events, books come between himself and things, and is born for history (in the widest sense), will never see anything at once, and never be himself a thing to be "seen at once"; though both these powers should be in the philosopher, as he must take most of his doctrine from himself and be himself the copy and compendium of the whole world. if a man look at himself through a veil of other people's opinions, no wonder he sees nothing but--those opinions. and it is thus that the professors see and live. but schopenhauer had the rare happiness of seeing the genius not only in himself, but also outside himself--in goethe; and this double reflection taught him everything about the aims and culture of the learned. he knew by this experience how the free strong man, to whom all artistic culture was looking, must come to be born; and could he, after this vision, have much desire to busy himself with the so-called "art," in the learned, hypocritical manner of the moderns? he had seen something higher than that--an awful unearthly judgment-scene in which all life, even the highest and completest, was weighed and found too light; he had beheld the saint as the judge of existence. we cannot tell how early schopenhauer reached this view of life, and came to hold it with such intensity as to make all his writings an attempt to mirror it; we know that the youth had this great vision, and can well believe it of the child. everything that he gained later from life and books, from all the realms of knowledge, was only a means of colour and expression to him; the kantian philosophy itself was to him an extraordinary rhetorical instrument for making the utterance of his vision, as he thought, clearer; the buddhist and christian mythologies occasionally served the same end. he had one task and a thousand means to execute it; one meaning, and innumerable hieroglyphs to express it. it was one of the high conditions of his existence that he really could live for such a task--according to his motto _vitam impendere vero_--and none of life's material needs could shake his resolution; and we know the splendid return he made his father for this. the contemplative man in germany usually pursues his scientific studies to the detriment of his sincerity, as a "considerate fool," in search of place and honour, circumspect and obsequious, and fawning on his influential superiors. nothing offended the savants more than schopenhauer's unlikeness to them. viii. these are a few of the conditions under which the philosophical genius can at least come to light in our time, in spite of all thwarting influences;--a virility of character, an early knowledge of mankind, an absence of learned education and narrow patriotism, of compulsion to earn his livelihood or depend on the state,--freedom in fact, and again freedom; the same marvellous and dangerous element in which the greek philosophers grew up. the man who will reproach him, as niebuhr did plato, with being a bad citizen, may do so, and be himself a good one; so he and plato will be right together! another may call this great freedom presumption; he is also right, as he could not himself use the freedom properly if he desired it, and would certainly presume too far with it. this freedom is really a grave burden of guilt; and can only be expiated by great actions. every ordinary son of earth has the right of looking askance on such endowments; and may providence keep him from being so endowed-burdened, that is, with such terrible duties! his freedom and his loneliness would be his ruin, and ennui would turn him into a fool, and a mischievous fool at that. a father may possibly learn something from this that he may use for his son's private education, though one must not expect fathers to have only philosophers for their sons. it is possible that they will always oppose their sons becoming philosophers, and call it mere perversity; socrates was sacrificed to the fathers' anger, for "corrupting the youth," and plato even thought a new ideal state necessary to prevent the philosophers' growth from being dependent on the fathers' folly. it looks at present as though plato had really accomplished something; for the modern state counts the encouragement of philosophy as one of its duties and tries to secure for a number of men at a time the sort of freedom that conditions the philosopher. but, historically, plato has been very unlucky; as soon as a structure has risen corresponding actually to his proposals, it has always turned, on a closer view, into a goblin-child, a monstrous changeling; compare the ecclesiastical state of the middle ages with the government of the "god-born king" of which plato dreamed! the modern state is furthest removed from the idea of the philosopher-king (thank heaven for that! the christian will say); but we must think whether it takes that very "encouragement of philosophy" in a platonic sense, i mean as seriously and honestly as if its highest object were to produce more platos. if the philosopher seem, as usual, an accident of his time, does the state make it its conscious business to turn the accidental into the necessary and help nature here also? experience teaches us a better way--or a worse: it says that nothing so stands in the way of the birth and growth of nature's philosopher as the bad philosophers made "by order." a poor obstacle, isn't it? and the same that schopenhauer pointed out in his famous essay on university philosophy. i return to this point, as men must be forced to take it seriously, to be driven to activity by it; and i think all writing is useless that does not contain such a stimulus to activity. and anyhow it is a good thing to apply schopenhauer's eternal theories once more to our own contemporaries, as some kindly soul might think that everything has changed for the better in germany since his fierce diatribes. unfortunately his work is incomplete on this side as well, unimportant as the side may be. the "freedom" that the state, as i said, bestows on certain men for the sake of philosophy is, properly speaking, no freedom at all, but an office that maintains its holder. the "encouragement of philosophy" means that there are to-day a number of men whom the state enables to make their living out of philosophy; whereas the old sages of greece were not paid by the state, but at best were presented, as zeno was, with a golden crown and a monument in the ceramicus. i cannot say generally whether truth is served by showing the way to live by her, since everything depends on the character of the individual who shows the way. i can imagine a degree of pride in a man saying to his fellow-men, "take care of me, as i have something better to do--namely to take care of you." we should not be angry at such a heightened mode of expression in plato and schopenhauer; and so they might properly have been university philosophers,--as plato, for example, was a court philosopher for a while without lowering the dignity of philosophy. but in kant we have the usual submissive professor, without any nobility in his relations with the state; and thus he could not justify the university philosophy when it was once assailed. if there be natures like schopenhauer's and plato's, which can justify it, i fear they will never have the chance, as the state would never venture to give such men these positions, for the simple reason that every state fears them, and will only favour philosophers it does not fear. the state obviously has a special fear of philosophy, and will try to attract more philosophers, to create the impression that it has philosophy on its side,--because it has those men on its side who have the title without the power. but if there should come one who really proposes to cut everything to the quick, the state included, with the knife of truth, the state, that affirms its own existence above all, is justified in banishing him as an enemy, just as it bans a religion that exalts itself to be its judge. the man who consents to be a state philosopher, must also consent to be regarded as renouncing the search for truth in all its secret retreats. at any rate, so long as he enjoys his position, he must recognise something higher than truth--the state. and not only the state, but everything required by it for existence--a definite form of religion, a social system, a standing army; a _noli me tangere_ is written above all these things. can a university philosopher ever keep clearly before him the whole round of these duties and limitations? i do not know. the man who has done so and remains a state-official, is a false friend to truth; if he has not,--i think he is no friend to truth either. but general considerations like these are always the weakest in their influence on mankind. most people will find it enough to shrug their shoulders and say, "as if anything great and pure has ever been able to maintain itself on this earth without some concession to human vulgarity! would you rather the state persecuted philosophers than paid them for official services?" without answering this last question, i will merely say that these "concessions" of philosophy to the state go rather far at present. in the first place, the state chooses its own philosophical servants, as many as its institutions require; it therefore pretends to be able to distinguish the good and the bad philosophers, and even assumes there must be a sufficient supply of good ones to fill all the chairs. the state is the authority not only for their goodness but their numbers. secondly, it confines those it has chosen to a definite place and a definite activity among particular men; they must instruct every undergraduate who wants instruction, daily, at stated hours. the question is whether a philosopher can bind himself, with a good conscience, to have something to teach every day, to any one who wishes to listen. must he not appear to know more than he does, and speak, before an unknown audience, of things that he could mention without risk only to his most intimate friends? and above all, does he not surrender the precious freedom of following his genius when and wherever it call him, by the mere fact of being bound to think at stated times on a fixed subject? and before young men, too! is not such thinking in its nature emasculate? and suppose he felt some day that he had no ideas just then--and yet must be in his place and appear to be thinking! what then? "but," one will say, "he is not a thinker but mainly a depository of thought, a man of great learning in all previous philosophies. of these he can always say something that his scholars do not know." this is actually the third, and the most dangerous, concession made by philosophy to the state, when it is compelled to appear in the form of erudition, as the knowledge (more specifically) of the history of philosophy. the genius looks purely and lovingly on existence, like a poet, and cannot dive too deep into it;--and nothing is more abhorrent to him than to burrow among the innumerable strange and wrong-headed opinions. the learned history of the past was never a true philosopher's business, in india or greece; and a professor of philosophy who busies himself with such matters must be, at best, content to hear it said of him, "he is an able scholar, antiquary, philologist, historian,"--but never, "he is a philosopher." i said, "at best": for a scholar feels that most of the learned works written by university philosophers are badly done, without any real scientific power, and generally are dreadfully tedious. who will blow aside, for example, the lethean vapour with which the history of greek philosophy has been enveloped by the dull though not very scientific works of ritter, brandis and zeller? i, at any rate, would rather read diogenes laertius than zeller, because at least the spirit of the old philosophers lives in diogenes, but neither that nor any other spirit in zeller. and, after all, what does the history of philosophy matter to our young men? are they to be discouraged by the welter of opinions from having any of their own; or taught to join the chorus that approves the vastness of our progress? are they to learn to hate or perhaps despise philosophy? one might expect the last, knowing the torture the students endure for their philosophical examinations, in having to get into their unfortunate heads the maddest efforts of the human mind as well as the greatest and profoundest. the only method of criticising a philosophy that is possible and proves anything at all--namely to see whether one can live by it--has never been taught at the universities; only the criticism of words, and again words, is taught there. imagine a young head, without much experience of life, being stuffed with fifty systems (in the form of words) and fifty criticisms of them, all mixed up together,--what an overgrown wilderness he will come to be, what contempt he will feel for a philosophical education! it is, of course, not an education in philosophy at all, but in the art of passing a philosophical examination: the usual result being the pious ejaculation of the wearied examinee, "thank god i am no philosopher, but a christian and a good citizen!" what if this cry were the ultimate object of the state, and the "education" or leading to philosophy were merely a leading _from_ philosophy? we may well ask.--but if so, there is one thing to fear--that the youth may some day find out to what end philosophy is thus mis-handled. "is the highest thing of all, the production of the philosophical genius, nothing but a pretext, and the main object perhaps to hinder his production? and is reason turned to unreason?"--then woe to the whole machinery of political and professorial trickery! will it soon become notorious? i do not know; but anyhow university philosophy has fallen into a general state of doubting and despair. the cause lies partly in the feebleness of those who hold the chairs at present: and if schopenhauer had to write his treatise on university philosophy to-day, he would find the club no longer necessary, but could conquer with a bulrush. they are the heirs and successors of those slip-shod thinkers whose crazy heads schopenhauer struck at: their childish natures and dwarfish frames remind one of the indian proverb: "men are born according to their deeds, deaf, dumb, misshapen." those fathers deserved such sons, "according to their deeds," as the proverb says. hence the students will, no doubt, soon get on without the philosophy taught at their university, just as those who are not university men manage to do without it already. this can be tested from one's own experience: in my student-days, for example, i found the university philosophers very ordinary men indeed, who had collected together a few conclusions from the other sciences, and in their leisure hours read the newspapers and went to concerts; they were treated by their academic colleagues with politely veiled contempt. they had the reputation of knowing very little, but of never being at a loss for obscure expressions to conceal their ignorance. they had a preference for those obscure regions where a man could not walk long with clear vision. one said of the natural sciences,--"not one of them can fully explain to me the origin of matter; then what do i care about them all?"--another said of history, "it tells nothing new to the man with ideas": in fact, they always found reasons for its being more philosophical to know nothing than to learn anything. if they let themselves be drawn to learn, a secret instinct made them fly from the actual sciences and found a dim kingdom amid their gaps and uncertainties. they "led the way" in the sciences in the sense that the quarry "leads the way" for the hunters who are behind him. recently they have amused themselves with asserting they are merely the watchers on the frontier of the sciences. the kantian doctrine is of use to them here, and they industriously build up an empty scepticism on it, of which in a short time nobody will take any more notice. here and there one will rise to a little metaphysic of his own, with the general accompaniment of headaches and giddiness and bleeding at the nose. after the usual ill-success of their voyages into the clouds and the mist, some hard-headed young student of the real sciences will pluck them down by the skirts, and their faces will assume the expression now habitual to them, of offended dignity at being found out. they have lost their happy confidence, and not one of them will venture a step further for the sake of his philosophy. some used to believe they could find out new religions or reinstate old ones by their systems. they have given up such pretensions now, and have become mostly mild, muddled folk, with no lucretian boldness, but merely some spiteful complaints of the "dead weight that lies on the intellects of mankind"! no one can even learn logic from them now, and their obvious knowledge of their own powers has made them discontinue the dialectical disputations common in the old days. there is much more care and modesty, logic and inventiveness, in a word, more philosophical method in the work of the special sciences than in the so-called "philosophy," and every one will agree with the temperate words of bagehot[2] on the present system builders: "unproved abstract principles without number have been eagerly caught up by sanguine men, and then carefully spun out into books and theories, which were to explain the whole world. but the world goes clear against these abstractions, and it must do so, as they require it to go in antagonistic directions. the mass of a system attracts the young and impresses the unwary; but cultivated people are very dubious about it. they are ready to receive hints and suggestions, and the smallest real truth is ever welcome. but a large book of deductive philosophy is much to be suspected. who is not almost sure beforehand that the premises will contain a strange mixture of truth and error, and therefore that it will not be worth while to spend life in reasoning over their consequences?" the philosophers, especially in germany, used to sink into such a state of abstraction that they were in continual danger of running their heads against a beam; but there is a whole herd of laputan flappers about them to give them in time a gentle stroke on their eyes or anywhere else. sometimes the blows are too hard; and then these scorners of earth forget themselves and strike back, but the victim always escapes them. "fool, you do not see the beam," says the flapper; and often the philosopher does see the beam, and calms down. these flappers are the natural sciences and history; little by little they have so overawed the german dream-craft which has long taken the place of philosophy, that the dreamer would be only too glad to give up the attempt to run alone: but when they unexpectedly fall into the others' arms, or try to put leading-strings on them that they may be led themselves, those others flap as terribly as they can, as if they would say, "this is all that is wanting,--that a philosophaster like this should lay his impure hands on us, the natural sciences and history! away with him!" then they start back, knowing not where to turn or to ask the way. they wanted to have a little physical knowledge at their back, possibly in the form of empirical psychology (like the herbartians), or perhaps a little history; and then they could at least make a public show of behaving scientifically, although in their hearts they may wish all philosophy and all science at the devil. [2] _physics and politics_, chap. v. nietzsche has altered the order of the sentences without any apparent benefit to his own argument, and to the disadvantage of bagehot's. i have restored the original order.--tr. but granted that this herd of bad philosophers is ridiculous--and who will deny it?--how far are they also harmful? they are harmful just because they make philosophy ridiculous. as long as this imitation-thinking continues to be recognised by the state, the lasting effect of a true philosophy will be destroyed, or at any rate circumscribed; nothing does this so well as the curse of ridicule that the representatives of the great cause have drawn on them, for it attacks that cause itself. and so i think it will encourage culture to deprive philosophy of its political and academic standing, and relieve state and university of the task, impossible for them, of deciding between true and false philosophy. let the philosophers run wild, forbid them any thoughts of office or civic position, hold them out no more bribes,--nay, rather persecute them and treat them ill,--you will see a wonderful result. they will flee in terror and seek a roof where they can, these poor phantasms; one will become a parson, another a schoolmaster, another will creep into an editorship, another write school-books for young ladies' colleges, the wisest of them will plough the fields, the vainest go to court. everything will be left suddenly empty, the birds flown: for it is easy to get rid of bad philosophers,--one only has to cease paying them. and that is a better plan than the open patronage of any philosophy, whatever it be, for state reasons. the state has never any concern with truth, but only with the truth useful to it, or rather, with anything that is useful to it, be it truth, half-truth, or error. a coalition between state and philosophy has only meaning when the latter can promise to be unconditionally useful to the state, to put its well-being higher than truth. it would certainly be a noble thing for the state to have truth as a paid servant; but it knows well enough that it is the essence of truth to be paid nothing and serve nothing. so the state's servant turns out to be merely "false truth," a masked actor who cannot perform the office required from the real truth--the affirmation of the state's worth and sanctity. when a mediæval prince wished to be crowned by the pope, but could not get him to consent, he appointed an antipope to do the business for him. this may serve up to a certain point; but not when the modern state appoints an "anti-philosophy" to legitimise it; for it has true philosophy against it just as much as before, or even more so. i believe in all seriousness that it is to the state's advantage to have nothing further to do with philosophy, to demand nothing from it, and let it go its own way as much as possible. without this indifferent attitude, philosophy may become dangerous and oppressive, and will have to be persecuted.--the only interest the state can have in the university lies in the training of obedient and useful citizens; and it should hesitate to put this obedience and usefulness in doubt by demanding an examination in philosophy from the young men. to make a bogey of philosophy may be an excellent way to frighten the idle and incompetent from its study; but this advantage is not enough to counterbalance the danger that this kind of compulsion may arouse from the side of the more reckless and turbulent spirits. they learn to know about forbidden books, begin to criticise their teachers, and finally come to understand the object of university philosophy and its examinations; not to speak of the doubts that may be fostered in the minds of young theologians, as a consequence of which they are beginning to be extinct in germany, like the ibexes in the tyrol. i know the objections that the state could bring against all this, as long as the lovely hegel-corn was yellowing in all the fields; but now that hail has destroyed the crop and all men's hopes of it, now that nothing has been fulfilled and all the barns are empty,--there are no more objections to be made, but rather rejections of philosophy itself. the state has now the power of rejection; in hegel's time it only wished to have it--and that makes a great difference. the state needs no more the sanction of philosophy, and philosophy has thus become superfluous to it. it will find advantage in ceasing to maintain its professors, or (as i think will soon happen) in merely pretending to maintain them; but it is of still greater importance that the university should see the benefit of this as well. at least i believe the real sciences must see that their interest lies in freeing themselves from all contact with sham science. and further, the reputation of the universities hangs too much in the balance for them not to welcome a severance from methods that are thought little of even in academic circles. the outer world has good reason for its widespread contempt of universities; they are reproached with being cowardly, the small fearing the great, and the great fearing public opinion; it is said that they do not lead the higher thought of the age but hobble slowly behind it, and cleave no longer to the fundamental ideas of the recognised sciences. grammar, for example, is studied more diligently than ever without any one seeing the necessity of a rigorous training in speech and writing. the gates of indian antiquity are being opened, and the scholars have no more idea of the most imperishable works of the indians--their philosophies--than a beast has of playing the harp; though schopenhauer thinks that the acquaintance with indian philosophy is one of the greatest advantages possessed by our century. classical antiquity is the favourite playground nowadays, and its effect is no longer classical and formative; as is shown by the students, who are certainly no models for imitation. where is now the spirit of friedrich august wolf to be found, of whom franz passow could say that he seemed a loyal and humanistic spirit with force enough to set half the world aflame? instead of that a journalistic spirit is arising in the university, often under the name of philosophy; the smooth delivery--the very cosmetics of speech--with faust and nathan the wise for ever on the lips, the accent and the outlook of our worst literary magazines and, more recently, much chatter about our holy german music, and the demand for lectures on schiller and goethe,--all this is a sign that the university spirit is beginning to be confused with the spirit of the age. thus the establishment of a higher tribunal, outside the universities, to protect and criticise them with regard to culture, would seem a most valuable thing, and as soon as philosophy can sever itself from the universities and be purified from every unworthy motive or hypocrisy, it will be able to become such a tribunal. it will do its work without state help in money or honours, free from the spirit of the age as well as from any fear of it; being in fact the judge, as schopenhauer was, of the so-called culture surrounding it. and in this way the philosopher can also be useful to the university, by refusing to be a part of it, but criticising it from afar. distance will lend dignity. but, after all, what does the life of a state or the progress of universities matter in comparison with the life of philosophy on earth! for, to say quite frankly what i mean, it is infinitely more important that a philosopher should arise on the earth than that a state or a university should continue. the dignity of philosophy may rise in proportion as the submission to public opinion and the danger to liberty increase; it was at its highest during the convulsions marking the fall of the roman republic, and in the time of the empire, when the names of both philosophy and history became _ingrata principibus nomina_. brutus shows its dignity better than plato; his was a time when ethics cease to have commonplaces. philosophy is not much regarded now, and we may well ask why no great soldier or statesman has taken it up; and the answer is that a thin phantom has met him under the name of philosophy, the cautious wisdom of the learned professor; and philosophy has soon come to seem ridiculous to him. it ought to have seemed terrible; and men who are called to authority should know the heroic power that has its source there. an american may tell them what a centre of mighty forces a great thinker can prove on this earth. "beware when the great god lets loose a thinker on this planet," says emerson.[3] "then all things are at risk. it is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. there is not a piece of science, but its flank may be turned to-morrow; there is not any literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned.... the things which are dear to men at this hour are so on account of the ideas which have emerged on their mental horizon, and which cause the present order of things as a tree bears its apples. a new degree of culture would instantly revolutionise the entire system of human pursuits." if such thinkers are dangerous, it is clear why our university thinkers are not dangerous; for their thoughts bloom as peacefully in the shade of tradition "as ever tree bore its apples." they do not frighten; they carry away no gates of gaza; and to all their little contemplations one can make the answer of diogenes when a certain philosopher was praised: "what great result has he to show, who has so long practised philosophy and yet has _hurt_ nobody?" yes, the university philosophy should have on its monument, "it has hurt nobody." but this is rather the praise one gives to an old woman than to a goddess of truth; and it is not surprising that those who know the goddess only as an old woman are the less men for that, and are naturally neglected by the real men of power. [3] essay on "circles." if this be the case in our time, the dignity of philosophy is trodden in the mire; and she seems herself to have become ridiculous or insignificant. all her true friends are bound to bear witness against this transformation, at least to show that it is merely her false servants in philosopher's clothing who are so. or better, they must prove by their own deed that the love of truth has itself awe and power. schopenhauer proved this and will continue to prove it, more and more. (images generously made available by the hathi trust.) thoughts out of season part one david strauss, the confessor and the writer richard wagner in bayreuth by friedrich nietzsche translated by anthony m. ludovici the complete works of friedrich nietzsche the first complete and authorised english translation edited by dr oscar levy volume four t.n. foulis 13 & 15 frederick street edinburgh: and london 1910 contents. editorial note nietzsche in england (by the editor) translator's preface to david strauss and richard wagner in bayreuth david strauss, the confessor and the writer richard wagner in bayreuth editorial note. the editor begs to call attention to some of the difficulties he had to encounter in preparing this edition of the complete works of friedrich nietzsche. not being english himself, he had to rely upon the help of collaborators, who were somewhat slow in coming forward. they were also few in number; for, in addition to an exact knowledge of the german language, there was also required sympathy and a certain enthusiasm for the startling ideas of the original, as well as a considerable feeling for poetry, and that highest form of it, religious poetry. such a combination--a biblical mind, yet one open to new thoughts--was not easily found. and yet it was necessary to find translators with such a mind, and not be satisfied, as the french are and must be, with a free though elegant version of nietzsche. what is impossible and unnecessary in french--a faithful and powerful rendering of the psalmistic grandeur of nietzsche--is possible and necessary in english, which is a rougher tongue of the teutonic stamp, and moreover, like german, a tongue influenced and formed by an excellent version of the bible. the english would never be satisfied, as bible-ignorant france is, with a nietzsche _à l'eau de cologne_--they would require the natural, strong, real teacher, and would prefer his outspoken words to the finely-chiselled sentences of the _raconteur_. it may indeed be safely predicted that once the english people have recovered from the first shock of nietzsche's thoughts, their biblical training will enable them, more than any other nation, to appreciate the deep piety underlying nietzsche's cause. as this cause is a somewhat holy one to the editor himself, he is ready to listen to any suggestions as to improvements of style or sense coming from qualified sources. the editor, during a recent visit to mrs. foerster-nietzsche at weimar, acquired the rights of translation by pointing out to her that in this way her brother's works would not fall into the hands of an ordinary publisher and his staff of translators: he has not, therefore, entered into any engagement with publishers, not even with the present one, which could hinder his task, bind him down to any text found faulty, or make him consent to omissions or the falsification or "sugaring" of the original text to further the sale of the books. he is therefore in a position to give every attention to a work which he considers as of no less importance for the country of his residence than for the country of his birth, as well as for the rest of europe. it is the consciousness of the importance of this work which makes the editor anxious to point out several difficulties to the younger student of nietzsche. the first is, of course, not to begin reading nietzsche at too early an age. while fully admitting that others may be more gifted than himself, the editor begs to state that he began to study nietzsche at the age of twenty-six, and would not have been able to endure the weight of such teaching before that time. secondly, the editor wishes to dissuade the student from beginning the study of nietzsche by reading first of all his most complicated works. not having been properly prepared for them, he will find the _zarathustra_ abstruse, the _ecce homo_ conceited, and the _antichrist_ violent. he should rather begin with the little pamphlet on education, the _thoughts out of season, beyond good and evil_, or the _genealogy of morals_. thirdly, the editor wishes to remind students of nietzsche's own advice to them, namely: to read him slowly, to think over what they have read, and not to accept too readily a teaching which they have only half understood. by a too ready acceptance of nietzsche it has come to pass that his enemies are, as a rule, a far superior body of men to those who call themselves his eager and enthusiastic followers. surely it is not every one who is chosen to combat a religion or a morality of two thousand years' standing, first within and then without himself; and whoever feels inclined to do so ought at least to allow his attention to be drawn to the magnitude of his task. nietzsche in england: an introductory essay by the editor. dear englishmen,--in one of my former writings i have made the remark that the world would have seen neither the great jewish prophets nor the great german thinkers, if the people from among whom these eminent men sprang had not been on the whole such a misguided, and, in their misguidedness, such a tough and stubborn race. the arrow that is to fly far must be discharged from a well distended bow: if, therefore, anything is necessary for greatness, it is a fierce and tenacious opposition, an opposition either of open contempt, or of malicious irony, or of sly silence, or of gross stupidity, an opposition regardless of the wounds it inflicts and of the precious lives it sacrifices, an opposition that nobody would dare to attack who was not prepared, like the spartan of old, to return either with his shield or on it. an opposition so devoid of pity is not as a rule found amongst you, dear and fair-minded englishmen, which may account for the fact that you have neither produced the greatest prophets nor the greatest thinkers in this world. you would never have crucified christ, as did the jews, or driven nietzsche into madness, as did the germans--you would have made nietzsche, on account of his literary faculties, minister of state in a whig ministry, you would have invited jesus christ to your country houses, where he would have been worshipped by all the ladies on account of his long hair and interesting looks, and tolerated by all men as an amusing, if somewhat romantic, foreigner. i know that the current opinion is to the contrary, and that your country is constantly accused, even by yourselves, of its insularity; but i, for my part, have found an almost feminine receptivity amongst you in my endeavour to bring you into contact with some ideas of my native country--a receptivity which, however, has also this in common with that of the female mind, that evidently nothing sticks deeply, but is quickly wiped out by what any other lecturer, or writer, or politician has to tell you. i was prepared for indifference--i was not prepared for receptivity and that benign lady's smile, behind which ladies, like all people who are only clever, usually hide their inward contempt for the foolishness of mere men! i was prepared for abuse, and even a good fight--i was not prepared for an extremely faint-hearted criticism; i did not expect that some of my opponents would be so utterly inexperienced in that most necessary work of literary execution. no, no: give me the germans or the jews for executioners: they can do the hanging properly, while the english hangman is like the russian, to whom, when the rope broke, the half-hanged revolutionary said: "what a country, where they cannot hang a man properly!" what a country, where they do not hang philosophers properly--which would be the proper thing to do to them--but smile at them, drink tea with them, discuss with them, and ask them to contribute to their newspapers! to get to the root of the matter: in spite of many encouraging signs, remarks and criticisms, adverse or benevolent, i do not think i have been very successful in my crusade for that european thought which began with goethe and has found so fine a development in nietzsche. true, i have made many a convert, but amongst them are very undesirable ones, as, for instance, some enterprising publishers, who used to be the toughest disbelievers in england, but who have now come to understand the "value" of the new gospel--but as neither this gospel is exactly christian, nor i, the importer of it, i am not allowed to count my success by the conversion of publishers and sinners, but have to judge it by the more spiritual standard of the quality of the converted. in this respect, i am sorry to say, my success has been a very poor one. as an eager missionary, i have naturally asked myself the reason of my failure. why is there no male audience in england willing to listen to a manly and daring philosophy? why are there no eyes to see, no ears to hear, no hearts to feel, no brains to understand? why is my trumpet, which after all i know how to blow pretty well, unable to shatter the walls of english prejudice against a teacher whose school cannot possibly be avoided by any european with a higher purpose in his breast?... there is plenty of time for thought nowadays for a man who does not allow himself to be drawn into that aimless bustle of pleasure business or politics, which is called modern life because outside that life there is--just as outside those noisy oriental cities-a desert, a calmness, a true and almost majestic leisure, a leisure unprecedented in any age, a leisure in which one may arrive at several conclusions concerning english indifference towards the new thought. first of all, of course, there stands in the way the terrible abuse which nietzsche has poured upon the heads of the innocent britishers. while france and the latin countries, while the orient and india, are within the range of his sympathies, this most outspoken of all philosophers, this prophet and poet-philosopher, cannot find words enough to express his disgust at the illogical, plebeian, shallow, utilitarian englishman. it must certainly be disagreeable to be treated like this, especially when one has a fairly good opinion of one's self; but why do you take it so very, very seriously? did nietzsche, perchance, spare the germans? and aren't you accustomed to criticism on the part of german philosophers? is it not the ancient and time-honoured privilege of the whole range of them from leibnitz to hegel--even of german poets, like goethe and heine--to call you bad names and to use unkind language towards you? has there not always been among the few thinking heads in germany a silent consent and an open contempt for you and your ways; the sort of contempt you yourselves have for the even more anglo-saxon culture of the americans? i candidly confess that in my more german moments i have felt and still feel as the german philosophers do; but i have also my european turns and moods, and then i try to understand you and even excuse you, and take your part against earnest and thinking germany. then i feel like telling the german philosophers that if you, poor fellows, had practised everything they preached, they would have had to renounce the pleasure of abusing you long ago, for there would now be no more englishmen left to abuse! as it is, you have suffered enough on account of the wild german ideals you luckily only partly believed in: for what the german thinker wrote on patient paper in his study, you always had to write the whole world over on tender human skins, black and yellow skins, enveloping ungrateful beings who sometimes had no very high esteem for the depth and beauty of german philosophy. and you have never taken revenge upon the inspired masters of the european thinking-shop, you have never reabused them, you have never complained of their want of worldly wisdom: you have invariably suffered in silence and agony, just as brave and staunch sancho panza used to do. for this is what you are, dear englishmen, and however well you brave, practical, materialistic john bulls and sancho panzas may know this world, however much better you may be able to perceive, to count, to judge, and to weigh things than your ideal german knight: there is an eternal law in this world that the sancho panzas have to follow the don quixotes; for matter has to follow the spirit, even the poor spirit of a german philosopher! so it has been in the past, so it is at present, and so it will be in the future; and you had better prepare yourselves in time for the eventuality. for if nietzsche were nothing else but this customary type of german philosopher, you would again have to pay the bill largely; and it would be very wise on your part to study him: sancho panza may escape a good many sad experiences by knowing his master's weaknesses. but as nietzsche no longer belongs to the quixotic class, as germany seems to emerge with him from her youthful and cranky nebulosity, you will not even have the pleasure of being thrashed in the company of your master: no, you will be thrashed all alone, which is an abominable thing for any right-minded human being. "_solamen miseris socios habuisse malorum_."[1] [1] it is a comfort to the afflicted to have companions in their distress. the second reason for the neglect of nietzsche in this country is that you do not need him yet. and you do not need him yet because you have always possessed the british virtue of not carrying things to extremes, which, according to the german version, is an euphemism for the british want of logic and critical capacity. you have, for instance, never let your religion have any great influence upon your politics, which is something quite abhorrent to the moral german, and makes him so angry about you. for the german sees you acting as a moral and law-abiding christian at home, and as an unscrupulous and machiavellian conqueror abroad; and if he refrains from the reproach of hypocrisy, with which the more stupid continentals invariably charge you, he will certainly call you a "british muddlehead." well, i myself do not take things so seriously as that, for i know that men of action have seldom time to think. it is probably for this reason also that liberty of thought and speech has been granted to you, the law-giver knowing very well all the time that you would be much too busy to use and abuse such extraordinary freedom. anyhow, it might now be time to abuse it just a little bit, and to consider what an extraordinary amalgamation is a christian power with imperialistic ideas. true, there has once before been another christian conquering and colonising empire like yours, that of venice--but these venetians were thinkers compared with you, and smuggled their gospel into the paw of their lion.... why don't you follow their example, in order not to be unnecessarily embarrassed by it in your enterprises abroad? in this manner you could also reconcile the proper germans, who invariably act up to their theories, their christianity, their democratic principles, although, on the other hand, in so doing you would, i quite agree, be most unfaithful to your own traditions, which are of a more democratic character than those of any other european nation. for democracy, as every schoolboy knows, was born in an english cradle: individual liberty, parliamentary institutions, the sovereign rights of the people, are ideas of british origin, and have been propagated from this island over the whole of europe. but as the prophet and his words are very often not honoured in his own country, those ideas have been embraced with much more fervour by other nations than by that in which they originated. the continent of europe has taken the desire for liberty and equality much more seriously than their levelling but also level-headed inventors, and the fervent imagination of france has tried to put into practice all that was quite hidden to the more sober english eye. every one nowadays knows the good and the evil consequences of the french revolution, which swept over the whole of europe, throwing it into a state of unrest, shattering thrones and empires, and everywhere undermining authority and traditional institutions. while this was going on in europe, the originator of the merry game was quietly sitting upon his island smiling broadly at the excitable foreigners across the channel, fishing as much as he could out of the water he himself had so cleverly disturbed, and thus in every way reaping the benefit from the mighty fight for the apple of eros which he himself had thrown amongst them. as i have endeavoured above to draw a parallel between the germans and the jews, i may now be allowed to follow this up with one between the jews and the english. it is a striking parallel, which will specially appeal to those religious souls amongst you who consider themselves the lost tribes of our race (and who are perhaps even more lost than they think),--and it is this: just as the jews have brought christianity into the world, but never accepted it themselves, just as they, in spite of their democratic offspring, have always remained the most conservative, exclusive, aristocratic, and religious people, so have the english never allowed themselves to be intoxicated by the strong drink of the natural equality of men, which they once kindly offered to all europe to quaff; but have, on the contrary, remained the most sober, the most exclusive, the most feudal, the most conservative people of our continent. but because the ravages of democracy have been less felt here than abroad, because there is a good deal of the mediæval building left standing over here, because things have never been carried to that excess which invariably brings a reaction with it--this reaction has not set in in this country, and no strong desire for the necessity of it, no craving for the counterbalancing influence of a nietzsche, has arisen yet in the british mind. i cannot help pointing out the grave consequences of this backwardness of england, which has arisen from the fact that you have never taken any ideas or theories, not even your own, seriously. democracy, dear englishmen, is like a stream, which all the peoples of europe will have to cross: they will come out of it cleaner, healthier, and stronger, but while the others are already in the water, plunging, puffing, paddling, losing their ground, trying to swim, and even half-drowned, you are still standing on the other side of it, roaring unmercifully about the poor swimmers, screamers, and fighters below,--but one day you will have to cross this same river too, and when you enter it the others will just be out of it, and will laugh at the poor english straggler in their turn! the third and last reason for the icy silence which has greeted nietzsche in this country is due to the fact that he has--as far as i know--no literary ancestor over here whose teachings could have prepared you for him. germany has had her goethe to do this; france her stendhal; in russia we find that fearless curiosity for all problems, which is the sign of a youthful, perhaps too youthful nation; while in spain, on the other hand, we have an old and experienced people, with a long training away from christianity under the dominion of the semitic arabs, who undoubtedly left some of their blood behind,--but i find great difficulty in pointing out any man over here who could serve as a useful guide to the heights of the nietzschean thought, except one, who was not a britisher. i am alluding to a man whose politics you used to consider and whose writings you even now consider as fantastic, but who, like another fantast of his race, may possess the wonderful gift of resurrection, and come again to life amongst you--to benjamin disraeli. the disraelian novels are in my opinion the best and only preparation for those amongst you who wish gradually to become acquainted with the nietzschean spirit. there, and nowhere else, will you find the true heroes of coming times, men of moral courage, men whose failures and successes are alike admirable, men whose noble passions have altogether superseded the ordinary vulgarities and moralities of lower beings, men endowed with an extraordinary imagination, which, however, is balanced by an equal power of reason, men already anointed with a drop of that sacred and noble oil, without which the high priest-philosopher of modern germany would not have crowned his royal race of the future. both disraeli and nietzsche you perceive starting from the same pessimistic diagnosis of the wild anarchy, the growing melancholy, the threatening nihilism of modern europe, for both recognised the danger of the age behind its loud and forced "shipwreck gaiety," behind its big-mouthed talk about progress and evolution, behind that veil of business-bustle, which hides its fear and utter despair--but for all that black outlook they are not weaklings enough to mourn and let things go, nor do they belong to that cheap class of society doctors who mistake the present wretchedness of humanity for sinfulness, and wish to make their patient less sinful and still more wretched. both nietzsche and disraeli have clearly recognised that this patient of theirs is suffering from weakness and not from sinfulness, for which latter some kind of strength may still be required; both are therefore entirely opposed to a further dieting him down to complete moral emaciation, but are, on the contrary, prescribing a tonic, a roborating, a natural regime for him--advice for which both doctors have been reproached with immorality by their contemporaries as well as by posterity. but the younger doctor has turned the tables upon their accusers, and has openly reproached his nazarene colleagues with the immorality of endangering life itself, he has clearly demonstrated to the world that their trustful and believing patient was shrinking beneath their very fingers, he has candidly foretold these christian quacks that one day they would be in the position of the quack skin-specialist at the fair, who, as a proof of his medical skill, used to show to the peasants around him the skin of a completely cured patient of his. both nietzsche and disraeli know the way to health, for they have had the disease of the age themselves, but they have--the one partly, the other entirely--cured themselves of it, they have resisted the spirit of their time, they have escaped the fate of their contemporaries; they therefore, and they alone, know their danger. this is the reason why they both speak so violently, why they both attack with such bitter fervour the utilitarian and materialistic attitude of english science, why they both so ironically brush aside the airy and fantastic ideals of german philosophy--this is why they both loudly declare (to use disraeli's words) "that we are the slaves of false knowledge; that our memories are filled with ideas that have no origin in truth; that we believe what our fathers credited, who were convinced without a cause; that we study human nature in a charnel house, and, like the nations of the east, pay divine honours to the maniac and the fool." but if these two great men cannot refrain from such outspoken vituperation--they also lead the way: they both teach the divinity of ideas and the vileness of action without principle; they both exalt the value of personality and character; they both deprecate the influence of society and socialisation; they both intensely praise and love life, but they both pour contempt and irony upon the shallow optimist, who thinks it delightful, and the quietist, who wishes it to be calm, sweet, and peaceful. they thus both preach a life of danger, in opposition to that of pleasure, of comfort, of happiness, and they do not only preach this noble life, they also act it: for both have with equal determination staked even their lives on the fulfilment of their ideal. it is astonishing--but only astonishing to your superficial student of the jewish character--that in disraeli also we find an almost nietzschean appreciation of that eternal foe of the jewish race, the hellenist, which makes disraeli, just like nietzsche, confess that the greek and the hebrew are both amongst the highest types of the human kind. it is not less astonishing--but likewise easily intelligible for one who knows something of the great jews of the middle ages--that in disraeli we discover that furious enmity against the doctrine of the natural equality of men which nietzsche combated all his life. it was certainly the great maimonides himself, that spiritual father of spinoza, who guided the pen of his sephardic descendant, when he thus wrote in his _tancred_: "it is to be noted, although the omnipotent creator might have formed, had it pleased him, in the humblest of his creations, an efficient agent for his purpose that divine majesty has never thought fit to communicate except with human beings of the very highest order." but what about christianity, to which disraeli was sincerely attached, and whose creation he always considered as one of the eternal glories of his race? did not the divine majesty think it fit then to communicate with the most humble of its creatures, with the fishermen of galilee, with the rabble of corinth, with the slaves, the women, the criminals of the roman empire? as i wish to be honest about disraeli, i must point out here, that his genius, although the most prominent in england during his lifetime, and although violently opposed to its current superstitions, still partly belongs to his age--and for this very pardonable reason, that in his jewish pride he overrated and even misunderstood christianity. he all but overlooked the narrow connection between christianity and democracy. he did not see that in fighting liberalism and nonconformity all his life, he was really fighting christianity, the protestant form of which is at the root of british liberalism and individualism to this very day. and when later in his life disraeli complained that the disturbance in the mind of nations has been occasioned by "the powerful assault on the divinity of the semitic literature by the germans," he overlooked likewise the connection of this german movement with the same protestantism, from the narrow and vulgar middle-class of which have sprung all those rationalising, unimaginative, and merely clever professors, who have so successfully undermined the ancient and venerable lore. and thirdly, and worst of all, disraeli never suspected that the french revolution, which in the same breath he once contemptuously denounced as "the celtic rebellion against semitic laws," was, in spite of its professed attack against religion, really a profoundly christian, because a democratic and revolutionary movement. what a pity he did not know all this! what a shower of splendid additional sarcasms he would have poured over those flat-nosed franks, had he known what i know now, that it is the eternal way of the christian to be a rebel, and that just as he has once rebelled against us, he has never ceased pestering and rebelling against any one else either of his own or any other creed. but it is so easy for me to be carried away by that favourite sport of mine, of which i am the first inventor among the jews--christian baiting. you must forgive this, however, in a jew, who, while he has been baited for two thousand years by you, likes to turn round now that the opportunity has come, and tries to indulge on his part also in a little bit of that genial pastime. i candidly confess it is delightful, and i now quite understand your ancestors hunting mine as much as they could--had i been a christian, i would, probably, have done the same; perhaps have done it even better, for no one would now be left to write any such impudent truisms against me--rest assured of that! but as i am a jew, and have had too much experience of the other side of the question, i must try to control myself in the midst of victory; i must judge things calmly; i must state fact honestly; i must not allow myself to be unjust towards you. first of all, then, this rebelling faculty of yours is a jewish inheritance, an inheritance, however, of which you have made a more than generous, a truly christian use, because you did not keep it niggardly for yourselves, but have distributed it all over the earth, from nazareth to nishni-novgorod, from jerusalem to jamaica, from palestine to pimlico, so that every one is a rebel and an anarchist nowadays. but, secondly, i must not forget that in every anarchist, and therefore in every christian, there is also, or may be, an aristocrat--a man who, just like the anarchist, but with a perfectly holy right, wishes to obey no laws but those of his own conscience; a man who thinks too highly of his own faith and persuasion, to convert other people to it; a man who, therefore, would never carry it to caffres and coolis; a man, in short, with whom even the noblest and exclusive hebrew could shake hands. in friedrich nietzsche this aristocratic element which may be hidden in a christian has been brought to light, in him the christian's eternal claim for freedom of conscience, for his own priesthood, for justification by his own faith, is no longer used for purposes of destruction and rebellion, but for those of command and creation; in him--and this is the key to the character of this extraordinary man, who both on his father's and mother's side was the descendant of a long line of protestant parsons--the christian and protestant spirit of anarchy became so strong that he rebelled even against his own fellow-anarchists, and told them that anarchy was a low and contemptible thing, and that revolution was an occupation fit only for superior slaves. but with this event the circle of christianity has become closed, and the exclusive house of israel is now under the delightful obligation to make its peace with its once lost and now reforming son. the venerable owner of this old house is still standing on its threshold: his face is pale, his expression careworn, his eyes apparently scanning something far in the distance. the wind--for there is a terrible wind blowing just now--is playing havoc with his long white jew-beard, but this white jew-beard of his is growing black again at the end, and even the sad eyes are still capable of quite youthful flashes, as may be noticed at this very moment. for the eyes of the old jew, apparently so dreamy and so far away, have suddenly become fixed upon something in the distance yonder. the old jew looks and looks--and then he rubs his eyes--and then he eagerly looks again. and now he is sure of himself. his old and haggard face is lighting up, his stooped figure suddenly becomes more erect, and a tear of joy is seen running over his pale cheek into that long beard of his. for the old jew has recognised some one coming from afar--some one whom he had missed, but never mentioned, for his law forbade him to do this--some one, however, for whom he had secretly always mourned, as only the race of the psalmists and the prophets can mourn--and he rushes toward him, and he falls on his neck and he kisses him, and he says to his servants: "bring forth the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet. and bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it and let us eat and be merry!" amen. oscar levy. london, january 1909. translator's preface. to the reader who knows nietzsche, who has studied his _zarathustra_ and understood it, and who, in addition, has digested the works entitled _beyond good and evil, the genealogy of morals, the twilight of the idols_, and _the antichrist_,--to such a reader everything in this volume will be perfectly clear and comprehensible. in the attack on strauss he will immediately detect the germ of the whole of nietzsche's subsequent attitude towards too hasty contentment and the foolish beatitude of the "easily pleased"; in the paper on wagner he will recognise nietzsche the indefatigable borer, miner and underminer, seeking to define his ideals, striving after self-knowledge above all, and availing himself of any contemporary approximation to his ideal man, in order to press it forward as the incarnation of his thoughts. wagner the reformer of mankind! wagner the dithyrambic dramatist!--the reader who knows nietzsche will not be misled by these expressions. to the uninitiated reader, however, some words of explanation are due, not only in regard to the two papers before us, but in regard to nietzsche himself. so much in our time is learnt from hearsay concerning prominent figures in science, art, religion, or philosophy, that it is hardly possible for anybody to-day, however badly informed he may be, to begin the study of any great writer or scientist with a perfectly open mind. it were well, therefore, to begin the study of nietzsche with some definite idea as to his unaltered purpose, if he ever possessed such a thing; as to his lifelong ideal, if he ever kept one so long; and as to the one direction in which he always travelled, despite apparent deviations and windings. had he such a purpose, such an ideal, such a direction? we have no wish to open a controversy here, neither do we think that in replying to this question in the affirmative we shall give rise to one; for every careful student of nietzsche, we know, will uphold us in our view. nietzsche had one very definite and unaltered purpose, ideal and direction, and this was "the elevation of the type man." he tells us in _the will to power_: "all is truth to me that tends to elevate man!" to this principle he was already pledged as a student at leipzig; we owe every line that he ever wrote to his devotion to it, and it is the key to all his complexities, blasphemies, prolixities, and terrible earnestness. all was good to nietzsche that tended to elevate man; all was bad that kept man stationary or sent him backwards. hence he wrote _david strauss, the confessor and writer_ (1873). the franco-german war had only just come to an end, and the keynote of this polemical pamphlet is, "beware of the intoxication of success." when the whole of germany was delirious with joy over her victory, at a time when the unquestioned triumph of her arms tended rather to reflect unearned glory upon every department of her social organisation, it required both courage and discernment to raise the warning voice and to apply the wet blanket. but nietzsche did both, and with spirit, because his worst fears were aroused. smug content (_erbärmliches behagen_) was threatening to thwart his one purpose--the elevation of man; smug content personified in the german scholar was giving itself airs of omniscience, omnipotence, and ubiquity, and all the while it was a mere cover for hidden rottenness and jejune pedantry. nietzsche's attack on hegelian optimism alone (pp. 46, 53-54), in the first paper, fully reveals the fundamental idea underlying this essay; and if the personal attack on strauss seems sometimes to throw the main theme into the background, we must remember the author's own attitude towards this aspect of the case. nietzsche, as a matter of fact, had neither the spite nor the meanness requisite for the purely personal attack. in his _ecce homo_, he tells us most emphatically: "i have no desire to attack particular persons--i do but use a personality as a magnifying glass; i place it over the subject to which i wish to call attention, merely that the appeal may be stronger." david strauss, in a letter to a friend, soon after the publication of the first _thought out of season_, expresses his utter astonishment that a total stranger should have made such a dead set at him. the same problem may possibly face the reader on every page of this essay: if, however, we realise nietzsche's purpose, if we understand his struggle to be one against "culture-philistinism" in general, as a stemming, stultifying and therefore degenerate factor, and regard david strauss--as the author himself did, that is to say, simply as a glass, focusing the whole light of our understanding upon the main theme--then the strauss paper is seen to be one of such enormous power, and its aim appears to us so lofty, that, whatever our views may be concerning the nature of the person assailed, we are forced to conclude that, to nietzsche at least, he was but the incarnation and concrete example of the evil and danger then threatening to overtake his country, which it was the object of this essay to expose. when we read that at the time of strauss's death (february 7th, 1874) nietzsche was greatly tormented by the fear that the old scholar might have been hastened to his end by the use that had been made of his personality in the first _unzeitgemässe betrachtung_; when we remember that in the midst of this torment he ejaculated, "i was indeed not made to hate and have enemies!"--we are then in a better position to judge of the motives which, throughout his life, led him to engage such formidable opponents and to undertake such relentless attacks. it was merely his ruling principle that, all is true and good that tends to elevate man; everything is bad and false that keeps man stationary or sends him backwards. those who may think that his attacks were often unwarrantable and ill-judged will do well, therefore, to bear this in mind, that whatever his value or merits may have been as an iconoclast, at least the aim he had was sufficiently lofty and honourable, and that he never shirked the duties which he rightly or wrongly imagined would help him to. in that wagner paper (1875-1876) we are faced by a somewhat different problem. most readers who will have heard of nietzsche's subsequent denunciation of wagner's music will probably stand aghast before this panegyric of him; those who, like professor saintsbury, will fail to discover the internal evidence in this essay which points so infallibly to nietzsche's _real_ but still subconscious opinion of his hero, may even be content to regard his later attitude as the result of a complete _volte-face_, and at any rate a flat contradiction of the one revealed in this paper. let us, however, examine the internal evidence we speak of, and let us also discuss the purpose and spirit of the essay. we have said that nietzsche was a man with a very fixed and powerful ideal, and we have heard what this ideal was. can we picture him, then,--a young and enthusiastic scholar with a cultured love of music, and particularly of wagner's music, eagerly scanning all his circle, the whole city and country in which he lived--yea, even the whole continent on which he lived--for something or some one that would set his doubts at rest concerning the feasibility of his ideal? can we now picture this young man coming face to face with probably one of the greatest geniuses of his age--with a man whose very presence must have been electric, whose every word or movement must have imparted some power to his surroundings--with richard wagner? if we can conceive of what the mere attention, even, of a man like wagner must have meant to nietzsche in his twenties, if we can form any idea of the intoxicating effect produced upon him when this attention developed into friendship, we almost refuse to believe that nietzsche could have been critical at all at first. in wagner, as was but natural, he soon began to see the ideal, or at least the means to the ideal, which was his one obsession. all his hope for the future of germany and europe cleaved, as it were, to this highest manifestation of their people's life, and gradually he began to invest his already great friend with all the extra greatness which he himself drew from the depths of his own soul. the friendship which grew between them was of that rare order in which neither can tell who influences the other more. wagner would often declare that the beautiful music in the third act of siegfried was to be ascribed to nietzsche's influence over him; he also adopted the young man's terminology in art matters, and the concepts implied by the words "dionysian" and "apollonian" were borrowed by him from his friend's discourses. how much nietzsche owed to wagner may perhaps never be definitely known; to those who are sufficiently interested to undertake the investigation of this matter, we would recommend hans bélart's book, _nietzsche's ethik_; in it references will be found which give some clue as to the probable sources from which the necessary information may be derived. in any case, however, the reciprocal effects of their conversations will never be exactly known; and although it would be ridiculous to assume that nietzsche was essentially the same when he left as when he met him, what the real nature of the change was it is now difficult to say. for some years their friendship continued firm, and grew ever more and more intimate. _the birth of tragedy_ was one of the first public declarations of it, and after its publication many were led to consider that wagner's art was a sort of resurrection of the dionysian grecian art. enemies of nietzsche began to whisper that he was merely wagner's "literary lackey"; many friends frowned upon the promising young philologist, and questioned the exaggerated importance he was beginning to ascribe to the art of music and to art in general, in their influence upon the world; and all the while nietzsche's one thought and one aim was to help the cause and further the prospects of the man who he earnestly believed was destined to be the salvation of european culture. every great ideal coined in his own brain he imagined to be the ideal of his hero; all his sublimest hopes for society were presented gratis, in his writings, to wagner, as though products of the latter's own mind; and just as the prophet of old never possessed the requisite assurance to suppose that his noblest ideas were his own, but attributed them to some higher and supernatural power, whom he thereby learnt to worship for its fancied nobility of sentiment, so nietzsche, still doubting his own powers, created a fetich out of his most distinguished friend, and was ultimately wounded and well-nigh wrecked with disappointment when he found that the wagner of the götterdämmerung and parsifal was not the wagner of his own mind. while writing _ecce homo_, he was so well aware of the extent to which he had gone in idealising his friend, that he even felt able to say: "_wagner in bayreuth_ is a vision of my own future.... now that i can look back upon this work, i would not like to deny that, at bottom, it speaks only of myself" (p. 74). and on another page of the same book we read: "... what i heard, as a young man, in wagnerian music, had absolutely nothing to do with wagner: when i described dionysian music, i only described what i had heard, and i thus translated and transfigured all that i bore in my own soul into the spirit of the new art. the strongest proof of this is my essay, _wagner in bayreuth_: in all decidedly psychological passages of this book the reader may simply read my name, or the name 'zarathustra,' wherever the text contains the name 'wagner'" (p. 68). as we have already hinted, there are evidences of his having subconsciously discerned the _real_ wagner, even in the heyday of their friendship, behind the ideal he had formed of him; for his eyes were too intelligent to be deceived, even though his understanding refused at first to heed the messages they sent it: both the _birth of tragedy_ and _wagner in bayreuth_ are with us to prove this, and not merely when we read these works between the lines, but when we take such passages as those found on pp. 115, 149, 150, 151, 156, 158, 159 of this book quite literally. nietzsche's infatuation we have explained; the consequent idealisation of the object of his infatuation he himself has confessed; we have also pointed certain passages which we believe show beyond a doubt that almost everything to be found in _the case of wagner_ and _nietzsche contra wagner_ was already subconscious in our author, long before he had begun to feel even a coolness towards his hero: let those who think our interpretation of the said passages is either strained or unjustified turn to the literature to which we have referred and judge for themselves. it seems to us that those distinguished critics who complain of nietzsche's complete _volte-face_ and his uncontrollable recantations and revulsions of feeling have completely overlooked this aspect of the question. it were well for us to bear in mind that we are not altogether free to dispose of nietzsche's attitude to wagner, at any given period in their relationship, with a single sentence of praise or of blame. after all, we are faced by a problem which no objectivity or dispassionate detachment on our parts can solve. nietzsche endowed both schopenhauer and wagner with qualities and aspirations so utterly foreign to them both, that neither of them would have recognised himself in the images he painted of them. his love for them was unusual; perhaps it can only be fully understood emotionally by us: like all men who are capable of very great love, nietzsche lent the objects of his affection anything they might happen to lack in the way of greatness, and when at last his eyes were opened, genuine pain, not malice, was the motive of even the most bitter of his diatribes. finally, we should just like to give one more passage from _ecce homo_ bearing upon the subject under discussion. it is particularly interesting from an autobiographical standpoint, and will perhaps afford the best possible conclusion to this preface. nietzsche is writing about wagner's music, and he says: "the world must indeed be empty for him who has never been unhealthy enough for this 'infernal voluptuousness'; it is allowable and yet almost forbidden to use a mystical expression in this behalf. i suppose i know better than any one the prodigies wagner was capable of, the fifty worlds of strange raptures to which no one save him could soar; and as i stand to-day--strong enough to convert even the most suspicious and dangerous phenomenon to my own use and be the stronger for it--i declare wagner to be the great benefactor of my life. something will always keep our names associated in the minds of men, and that is, that we are two who have suffered more excruciatingly--even at each other's hands--than most men are able to suffer nowadays. and just as wagner is merely a misunderstanding among germans, so am i and ever will be. you lack two centuries of psychological and artistic discipline, my dear countrymen!... but it will be impossible for you ever to recover the time now lost" (p. 43). anthony m. ludovici. david strauss, the confessor and the writer. david strauss i. public opinion in germany seems strictly to forbid any allusion to the evil and dangerous consequences of a war, more particularly when the war in question has been a victorious one. those writers, therefore, command a more ready attention who, regarding this public opinion as final, proceed to vie with each other in their jubilant praise of the war, and of the powerful influences it has brought to bear upon morality, culture, and art. yet it must be confessed that a great victory is a great danger. human nature bears a triumph less easily than a defeat; indeed, it might even be urged that it is simpler to gain a victory of this sort than to turn it to such account that it may not ultimately prove a serious rout. but of all evil results due to the last contest with france, the most deplorable, perhaps, is that widespread and even universal error of public opinion and of all who think publicly, that german culture was also victorious in the struggle, and that it should now, therefore, be decked with garlands, as a fit recognition of such extraordinary events and successes. this error is in the highest degree pernicious: not because it is an error,--for there are illusions which are both salutary and blessed,--but because it threatens to convert our victory into a signal defeat. a defeat?--i should say rather, into the uprooting of the "german mind" for the benefit of the "german empire." even supposing that the fight had been between the two cultures, the standard for the value of the victor would still be a very relative one, and, in any case, would certainly not justify such exaggerated triumph or self-glorification. for, in the first place, it would be necessary to ascertain the worth of the conquered culture. this might be very little; in which case, even if the victory had involved the most glorious display of arms, it would still offer no warrant for inordinate rapture. even so, however, there can be no question, in our case, of the victory of german culture; and for the simple reason, that french culture remains as heretofore, and that we depend upon it as heretofore. it did not even help towards the success of our arms. severe military discipline, natural bravery and sustaining power, the superior generalship, unity and obedience in the rank and file--in short, factors which have nothing to do with culture, were instrumental in making us conquer an opponent in whom the most essential of these factors were absent. the only wonder is, that precisely what is now called "culture" in germany did not prove an obstacle to the military operations which seemed vitally necessary to a great victory. perhaps, though, this was only owing to the fact that this "thing" which dubs itself "culture" saw its advantage, for once, in keeping in the background. if however, it be permitted to grow and to spread, if it be spoilt by the flattering and nonsensical assurance that it has been victorious,--then, as i have said, it will have the power to extirpate german mind, and, when that is done, who knows whether there will still be anything to be made out of the surviving german body! provided it were possible to direct that calm and tenacious bravery which the german opposed to the pathetic and spontaneous fury of the frenchman, against the inward enemy, against the highly suspicious and, at all events, unnative "cultivation" which, owing to a dangerous misunderstanding, is called "culture" in germany, then all hope of a really genuine german "culture"--the reverse of that "cultivation"--would not be entirely lost. for the germans have never known any lack of clear-sighted and heroic leaders, though these, often enough, probably, have lacked germans. but whether it be possible to turn german bravery into a new direction seems to me to become ever more and more doubtful; for i realise how fully convinced every one is that such a struggle and such bravery are no longer requisite; on the contrary, that most things are regulated as satisfactorily as they possibly can be--or, at all events, that everything of moment has long ago been discovered and accomplished: in a word, that the seed of culture is already sown everywhere, and is now either shooting up its fresh green blades, or, here and there, even bursting forth into luxuriant blossom. in this sphere, not only happiness but ecstasy reigns supreme. i am conscious of this ecstasy and happiness, in the ineffable, truculent assurance of german journalists and manufacturers of novels, tragedies, poems, and histories (for it must be clear that these people belong to one category), who seem to have conspired to improve the leisure and ruminative hours--that is to say, "the intellectual lapses"--of the modern man, by bewildering him with their printed paper. since the war, all is gladness, dignity, and self-consciousness in this merry throng. after the startling successes of german culture, it regards itself, not only as approved and sanctioned, but almost as sanctified. it therefore speaks with gravity, affects to apostrophise the german people, and issues complete works, after the manner of the classics; nor does it shrink from proclaiming in those journals which are open to it some few of its adherents as new german classical writers and model authors. it might be supposed that the dangers of such an _abuse of success_ would be recognised by the more thoughtful and enlightened among cultivated germans; or, at least, that these would feel how painful is the comedy that is being enacted around them: for what in truth could more readily inspire pity than the sight of a cripple strutting like a cock before a mirror, and exchanging complacent glances with his reflection! but the "scholar" caste willingly allow things to remain as they are, and are too much concerned with their own affairs to busy themselves with the care of the german mind. moreover, the units of this caste are too thoroughly convinced that their own scholarship is the ripest and most perfect fruit of the age--in fact, of all ages--to see any necessity for a care of german culture in general; since, in so far as they and the legion of their brethren are concerned, preoccupations of this order have everywhere been, so to speak, surpassed. the more conscientious observer, more particularly if he be a foreigner, cannot help noticing withal that no great disparity exists between that which the german scholar regards as his culture and that other triumphant culture of the new german classics, save in respect of the quantum of knowledge. everywhere, where knowledge and not ability, where information and not art, hold the first rank,--everywhere, therefore, where life bears testimony to the kind of culture extant, there is now only one specific german culture--and this is the culture that is supposed to have conquered france? the contention appears to be altogether too preposterous. it was solely to the more extensive knowledge of german officers, to the superior training of their soldiers, and to their more scientific military strategy, that all impartial judges, and even the french nation, in the end, ascribed the victory. hence, if it be intended to regard german erudition as a thing apart, in what sense can german culture be said to have conquered? in none whatsoever; for the moral qualities of severe discipline, of more placid obedience, have nothing in common with culture: these were characteristic of the macedonian army, for instance, despite the fact that the greek soldiers were infinitely more cultivated. to speak of german scholarship and culture as having conquered, therefore, can only be the outcome of a misapprehension, probably resulting from the circumstance that every precise notion of culture has now vanished from germany. culture is, before all things, the unity of artistic style, in every expression of the life of a people. abundant knowledge and learning, however, are not essential to it, nor are they a sign of its existence; and, at a pinch, they might coexist much more harmoniously with the very opposite of culture--with barbarity: that is to say, with a complete lack of style, or with a riotous jumble of all styles. but it is precisely amid this riotous jumble that the german of to-day subsists; and the serious problem to be solved is: how, with all his learning, he can possibly avoid noticing it; how, into the bargain, he can rejoice with all his heart in his present "culture"? for everything conduces to open his eyes for him--every glance he casts at his clothes, his room, his house; every walk he takes through the streets of his town; every visit he pays to his art-dealers and to his trader in the articles of fashion. in his social intercourse he ought to realise the origin of his manners and movements; in the heart of our art-institutions, the pleasures of our concerts, theatres, and museums, he ought to become apprised of the superand juxta-position of all imaginable styles. the german heaps up around him the forms, colours, products, and curiosities of all ages and zones, and thereby succeeds in producing that garish newness, as of a country fair, which his scholars then proceed to contemplate and to define as "modernism per se"; and there he remains, squatting peacefully, in the midst of this conflict of styles. but with this kind of culture, which is, at bottom, nothing more nor less than a phlegmatic insensibility to real culture, men cannot vanquish an enemy, least of all an enemy like the french, who, whatever their worth may be, do actually possess a genuine and productive culture, and whom, up to the present, we have systematically copied, though in the majority of cases without skill. even supposing we had really ceased copying them, it would still not mean that we had overcome them, but merely that we had lifted their yoke from our necks. not before we have succeeded in forcing an original german culture upon them can there be any question of the triumph of german culture. meanwhile, let us not forget that in all matters of form we are, and must be, just as dependent upon paris now as we were before the war; for up to the present there has been no such thing as a original german culture. we all ought to have become aware of this, of our own accord. besides, one of the few who had he right to speak to germans in terms of reproach publicly drew attention to the fact. "we germans are of yesterday," goethe once said to eckermann. "true, for the last hundred years we have diligently cultivated ourselves, but a few centuries may yet have to run their course before our fellow-countrymen become permeated with sufficient intellectuality and higher culture to have it said of them, _it is a long time since they were barbarians_." ii. if, however, our public and private life is so manifestly devoid of all signs of a productive and characteristic culture; if, moreover, our great artists, with that earnest vehemence and honesty which is peculiar to greatness admit, and have admitted, this monstrous fact--so very humiliating to a gifted nation; how can it still be possible for contentment to reign to such an astonishing extent among german scholars? and since the last war this complacent spirit has seemed ever more and more ready to break forth into exultant cries and demonstrations of triumph. at all events, the belief seems to be rife that we are in possession of a genuine culture, and the enormous incongruity of this triumphant satisfaction in the face of the inferiority which should be patent to all, seems only to be noticed by the few and the select. for all those who think with the public mind have blindfolded their eyes and closed their ears. the incongruity is not even acknowledged to exist. how is this possible? what power is sufficiently influential to deny this existence? what species of men must have attained to supremacy in germany that feelings which are so strong and simple should be denied or prevented from obtaining expression? this power, this species of men, i will name--they are the _philistines of culture_. as every one knows, the word "philistine" is borrowed from the vernacular of student-life, and, in its widest and most popular sense, it signifies the reverse of a son of the muses, of an artist, and of the genuine man of culture. the philistine of culture, however, the study of whose type and the hearing of whose confessions (when he makes them) have now become tiresome duties, distinguishes himself from the general notion of the order "philistine" by means of a superstition: he fancies that he is himself a son of the muses and a man of culture. this incomprehensible error clearly shows that he does not even know the difference between a philistine and his opposite. we must not be surprised, therefore, if we find him, for the most part, solemnly protesting that he is no philistine. owing to this lack of self-knowledge, he is convinced that his "culture" is the consummate manifestation of real german culture; and, since he everywhere meets with scholars of his own type, since all public institutions, whether schools, universities, or academies, are so organised as to be in complete harmony with his education and needs, wherever he goes he bears with him the triumphant feeling that he is the worthy champion of prevailing german culture, and he frames his pretensions and claims accordingly. if, however, real culture takes unity of style for granted (and even an inferior and degenerate culture cannot be imagined in which a certain coalescence of the profusion of forms has not taken place), it is just possible that the confusion underlying the culture-philistine's error may arise from the fact that, since he comes into contact everywhere with creatures cast in the same mould as himself, he concludes that this uniformity among all "scholars" must point to a certain uniformity in german education--hence to culture. all round him, he sees only needs and views similar to his own; wherever he goes, he finds himself embraced by a ring of tacit conventions concerning almost everything, but more especially matters of religion and art. this imposing sameness, this _tutti unisono_ which, though it responds to no word of command, is yet ever ready to burst forth, cozens him into the belief that here a culture must be established and flourishing. but philistinism, despite its systematic organisation and power, does not constitute a culture by virtue of its system alone; it does not even constitute an inferior culture, but invariably the reverse--namely, firmly established barbarity. for the uniformity of character which is so apparent in the german scholars of to-day is only the result of a conscious or unconscious exclusion and negation of all the artistically productive forms and requirements of a genuine style. the mind of the cultured philistine must have become sadly unhinged; for precisely what culture repudiates he regards as culture itself; and, since he proceeds logically, he succeeds in creating a connected group of these repudiations--a system of non-culture, to which one might at a pinch grant a certain "unity of style," provided of course it were not nonsense to attribute style to barbarity. if he have to choose between a stylish act and its opposite, he will invariably adopt the latter, and, since this rule holds good throughout, every one of his acts bears the same negative stamp. now, it is by means of this stamp that he is able to identify the character of the "german culture," which is his own patent; and all things that do not bear it are so many enemies and obstacles drawn up against him. in the presence of these arrayed forces the culture-philistine either does no more than ward off the blows, or else he denies, holds his tongue, stops his ears, and refuses to face facts. he is a negative creature--even in his hatred and animosity. nobody, however, is more disliked by him than the man who regards him as a philistine, and tells him what he is--namely, the barrier in the way of all powerful men and creators, the labyrinth for all who doubt and go astray, the swamp for all the weak and the weary, the fetters of those who would run towards lofty goals, the poisonous mist that chokes all germinating hopes, the scorching sand to all those german thinkers who seek for, and thirst after, a new life. for the mind of germany is seeking; and ye hate it because it is seeking, and because it will not accept your word, when ye declare that ye have found what it is seeking. how could it have been possible for a type like that of the culture-philistine to develop? and even granting its development, how was it able to rise to the powerful position of supreme judge concerning all questions of german culture? how could this have been possible, seeing that a whole procession of grand and heroic figures has already filed past us, whose every movement, the expression of whose every feature, whose questioning voice and burning eye betrayed the one fact, _that they were seekers_, and that they sought that which the culture-philistine had long fancied he had found--to wit, a genuine original german culture? is there a soil--thus they seemed to ask--a soil that is pure enough, unhandselled enough, of sufficient virgin sanctity, to allow the mind of germany to build its house upon it? questioning thus, they wandered through the wilderness, and the woods of wretched ages and narrow conditions, and as seekers they disappeared from our vision; one of them, at an advanced age, was even able to say, in the name of all: "for half a century my life has been hard and bitter enough; i have allowed myself no rest, but have ever striven, sought and done, to the best and to the utmost of my ability." what does our culture-philistinism say of these seekers? it regards them simply as discoverers, and seems to forget that they themselves only claimed to be seekers. we have our culture, say her sons; for have we not our "classics"? not only is the foundation there, but the building already stands upon it--we ourselves constitute that building. and, so saying, the philistine raises his hand to his brow. but, in order to be able thus to misjudge, and thus to grant left-handed veneration to our classics, people must have ceased to know them. this, generally speaking, is precisely what has happened. for, otherwise, one ought to know that there is only one way of honouring them, and that is to continue seeking with the same spirit and with the same courage, and not to weary of the search. but to foist the doubtful title of "classics" upon them, and to "edify" oneself from time to time by reading their works, means to yield to those feeble and selfish emotions which all the paying public may purchase at concert-halls and theatres. even the raising of monuments to their memory, and the christening of feasts and societies with their names--all these things are but so many ringing cash payments by means of which the culture-philistine discharges his indebtedness to them, so that in all other respects he may be rid of them, and, above all, not bound to follow in their wake and prosecute his search further. for henceforth inquiry is to cease: that is the philistine watchword. this watchword once had some meaning. in germany, during the first decade of the nineteenth century, for instance, when the heyday and confusion of seeking, experimenting, destroying, promising, surmising, and hoping was sweeping in currents and cross-currents over the land, the thinking middle-classes were right in their concern for their own security. it was then quite right of them to dismiss from their minds with a shrug of their shoulders the _omnium gatherum_ of fantastic and language-maiming philosophies, and of rabid special-pleading historical studies, the carnival of all gods and myths, and the poetical affectations and fooleries which a drunken spirit may be responsible for. in this respect they were quite right; for the philistine has not even the privilege of licence. with the cunning proper to base natures, however, he availed himself of the opportunity, in order to throw suspicion even upon the seeking spirit, and to invite people to join in the more comfortable pastime of finding. his eye opened to the joy of philistinism; he saved himself from wild experimenting by clinging to the idyllic, and opposed the restless creative spirit that animates the artist, by means of a certain smug ease--the ease of self-conscious narrowness, tranquillity, and self-sufficiency. his tapering finger pointed, without any affectation of modesty, to all the hidden and intimate incidents of his life, to the many touching and ingenuous joys which sprang into existence in the wretched depths of his uncultivated existence, and which modestly blossomed forth on the bog-land of philistinism. there were, naturally, a few gifted narrators who, with a nice touch, drew vivid pictures of the happiness, the prosaic simplicity, the bucolic robustness, and all the well-being which floods the quarters of children, scholars, and peasants. with picture-books of this class in their hands, these smug ones now once and for all sought to escape from the yoke of these dubious classics and the command which they contained--to seek further and to find. they only started the notion of an epigone-age in order to secure peace for themselves, and to be able to reject all the efforts of disturbing innovators summarily as the work of epigones. with the view of ensuring their own tranquillity, these smug ones even appropriated history, and sought to transform all sciences that threatened to disturb their wretched ease into branches of history--more particularly philosophy and classical philology. through historical consciousness, they saved themselves from enthusiasm; for, in opposition to goethe, it was maintained that history would no longer kindle enthusiasm. no, in their desire to acquire an historical grasp of everything, stultification became the sole aim of these philosophical admirers of "_nil admirari_." while professing to hate every form of fanaticism and intolerance, what they really hated, at bottom, was the dominating genius and the tyranny of the real claims of culture. they therefore concentrated and utilised all their forces in those quarters where a fresh and vigorous movement was to be expected, and then paralysed, stupefied, and tore it to shreds. in this way, a philosophy which veiled the philistine confessions of its founder beneath neat twists and flourishes of language proceeded further to discover a formula for the canonisation of the commonplace. it expatiated upon the rationalism of all reality, and thus ingratiated itself with the culture-philistine, who also loves neat twists and flourishes, and who, above all, considers himself real, and regards his reality as the standard of reason for the world. from this time forward he began to allow every one, and even himself, to reflect, to investigate, to æstheticise, and, more particularly, to make poetry, music, and even pictures--not to mention systems philosophy; provided, of course, that everything were done according to the old pattern, and that no assault were made upon the "reasonable" and the "real"--that is to say, upon the philistine. the latter really does not at all mind giving himself up, from time to time, to the delightful and daring transgressions of art or of sceptical historical studies, and he does not underestimate the charm of such recreations and entertainments; but he strictly separates "the earnestness of life" (under which term he understands his calling, his business, and his wife and child) from such trivialities, and among the latter he includes all things which have any relation to culture. therefore, woe to the art that takes itself seriously, that has a notion of what it may exact, and that dares to endanger his income, his business, and his habits! upon such an art he turns his back, as though it were something dissolute; and, affecting the attitude of a guardian of chastity, he cautions every unprotected virtue on no account to look. being such an adept at cautioning people, he is always grateful to any artist who heeds him and listens to caution. he then assures his protege that things are to be made more easy for him; that, as a kindred spirit, he will no longer be expected to make sublime masterpieces, but that his work must be one of two kinds--either the imitation of reality to the point of simian mimicry, in idylls or gentle and humorous satires, or the free copying of the best-known and most famous classical works, albeit with shamefast concessions to the taste of the age. for, although he may only be able to appreciate slavish copying or accurate portraiture of the present, still he knows that the latter will but glorify him, and increase the well-being of "reality"; while the former, far from doing him any harm, rather helps to establish his reputation as a classical judge of taste, and is not otherwise troublesome; for he has, once and for all, come to terms with the classics. finally, he discovers the general and effective formula "health" for his habits, methods of observation, judgments, and the objects of his patronage; while he dismisses the importunate disturber of the peace with the epithets "hysterical" and "morbid." it is thus that david strauss--a genuine example of the _satisfait_ in regard to our scholastic institutions, and a typical philistine--it is thus that he speaks of "the philosophy of schopenhauer" as being "thoroughly intellectual, yet often unhealthy and unprofitable." it is indeed a deplorable fact that intellect should show such a decided preference for the "unhealthy" and the "unprofitable"; and even the philistine, if he be true to himself, will admit that, in regard to the philosophies which men of his stamp produce, he is conscious of a frequent lack of intellectuality, although of course they are always thoroughly healthy and profitable. now and again, the philistines, provided they are by themselves, indulge in a bottle of wine, and then they grow reminiscent, and speak of the great deeds of the war, honestly and ingenuously. on such occasions it often happens that a great deal comes to light which would otherwise have been most stead-fastly concealed, and one of them may even be heard to blurt out the most precious secrets of the whole brotherhood. indeed, a lapse of this sort occurred but a short while ago, to a well-known æsthete of the hegelian school of reasoning. it must, however, be admitted that the provocation thereto was of an unusual character. a company of philistines were feasting together, in celebration of the memory of a genuine anti-philistine--one who, moreover, had been, in the strictest sense of the words, wrecked by philistinism. this man was hölderlin, and the aforementioned æsthete was therefore justified, under the circumstances, in speaking of the tragic souls who had foundered on "reality"--reality being understood, here, to mean philistine reason. but the "reality" is now different, and it might well be asked whether hölderlin would be able to find his way at all in the present great age. "i doubt," says dr. vischer, "whether his delicate soul could have borne all the roughness which is inseparable from war, and whether it had survived the amount of perversity which, since the war, we now see flourishing in every quarter. perhaps he would have succumbed to despair. his was one of the unarmed souls; he was the werther of greece, a hopeless lover; his life was full of softness and yearning, but there was strength and substance in his will, and in his style, greatness, riches and life; here and there it is even reminiscent of æschylus. his spirit, however, lacked hardness. he lacked the weapon humour; he could not grant that one may be a philistine and still be no barbarian." not the sugary condolence of the post-prandial speaker, but this last sentence concerns us. yes, it is admitted that one is a philistine; but, a barbarian?--no, not at any price! unfortunately, poor hölderlin could not make such fine distinctions. if one reads the reverse of civilisation, or perhaps sea-pirating, or cannibalism, into the word "barbarian," then the distinction is justifiable enough. but what the æsthete obviously wishes to prove to us is, that we may be philistines and at the same time men of culture. therein lies the humour which poor hölderlin lacked and the need of which ultimately wrecked him.[2] [2] nietzsche's allusion to hölderlin here is full of tragic significance; for, like hölderlin, he too was ultimately wrecked and driven insane by the philistinism of his age.--translator's note. on this occasion a second admission was made by the speaker: "it is not always strength of will, but weakness, which makes us superior to those tragic souls which are so passionately responsive to the attractions of beauty," or words to this effect. and this was said in the name of the assembled "we"; that is to say, the "superiors," the "superiors through weakness." let us content ourselves with these admissions. we are now in possession of information concerning two matters from one of the initiated: first, that these "we" stand beyond the passion for beauty; secondly, that their position was reached by means of weakness. in less confidential moments, however, it was just this weakness which masqueraded in the guise of a much more beautiful name: it was the famous "healthiness" of the culture-philistine. in view of this very recent restatement of the case, however, it would be as well not to speak of them any longer as the "healthy ones," but as the "weakly," or, still better, as the "feeble." oh, if only these feeble ones were not in power! how is it that they concern themselves at all about what we call them! they are the rulers, and he is a poor ruler who cannot endure to be called by a nickname. yes, if one only have power, one soon learns to poke fun--even at oneself. it cannot matter so very much, therefore, even if one do give oneself away; for what could not the purple mantle of triumph conceal? the strength of the culture-philistine steps into the broad light of day when he acknowledges his weakness; and the more he acknowledges it--the more cynically he acknowledges it--the more completely he betrays his consciousness of his own importance and superiority. we are living in a period of cynical philistine confessions. just as friedrich vischer gave us his in a word, so has david strauss handed us his in a book; and both that word and that book are cynical. iii. concerning culture-philistinism, david strauss makes a double confession, by word and by deed; that is to say, by the word of the confessor, and the act of the writer. his book entitled _the old faith and the new _is, first in regard to its contents, and secondly in regard to its being a book and a literary production, an uninterrupted confession; while, in the very fact that he allows himself to write confessions at all about his faith, there already lies a confession. presumably, every one seems to have the right to compile an autobiography after his fortieth year; for the humblest amongst us may have experienced things, and may have seen them at such close quarters, that the recording of them may prove of use and value to the thinker. but to write a confession of one's faith cannot but be regarded as a thousand times more pretentious, since it takes for granted that the writer attaches worth, not only to the experiences and investigations of his life, but also to his beliefs. now, what the nice thinker will require to know, above all else, is the kind of faith which happens to be compatible with natures of the straussian order, and what it is they have "half dreamily conjured up" (p. 10) concerning matters of which those alone have the right to speak who are acquainted with them at first hand. whoever would have desired to possess the confessions, say, of a ranke or a mommsen? and these men were scholars and historians of a very different stamp from david strauss. if, however, they had ever ventured to interest us in their faith instead of in their scientific investigations, we should have felt that they were overstepping their limits in a most irritating fashion. yet strauss does this when he discusses his faith. nobody wants to know anything about it, save, perhaps, a few bigoted opponents of the straussian doctrines, who, suspecting, as they do, a substratum of satanic principles beneath these doctrines, hope that he may compromise his learned utterances by revealing the nature of those principles. these clumsy creatures may, perhaps, have found what they sought in the last book; but we, who had no occasion to suspect a satanic substratum, discovered nothing of the sort, and would have felt rather pleased than not had we been able to discern even a dash of the diabolical in any part of the volume. but surely no evil spirit could speak as strauss speaks of his new faith. in fact, spirit in general seems to be altogether foreign to the book--more particularly the spirit of genius. only those whom strauss designates as his "we," speak as he does, and then, when they expatiate upon their faith to us, they bore us even more than when they relate their dreams; be they "scholars, artists, military men, civil employés, merchants, or landed proprietors; come they in their thousands, and not the worst people in the land either!" if they do not wish to remain the peaceful ones in town or county, but threaten to wax noisy, then let not the din of their _unisono_ deceive us concerning the poverty and vulgarity of the melody they sing. how can it dispose us more favourably towards a profession of faith to hear that it is approved by a crowd, when it is of such an order that if any individual of that crowd attempted to make it known to us, we should not only fail to hear him out, but should interrupt him with a yawn? if thou sharest such a belief, we should say unto him, in heaven's name, keep it to thyself! maybe, in the past, some few harmless types looked for the thinker in david strauss; now they have discovered the "believer" in him, and are disappointed. had he kept silent, he would have remained, for these, at least, the philosopher; whereas, now, no one regards him as such. he no longer craved the honours of the thinker, however; all he wanted to be was a new believer, and he is proud of his new belief. in making a written declaration of it, he fancied he was writing the catechism of "modern thought," and building the "broad highway of the world's future." indeed, our philistines have ceased to be faint-hearted and bashful, and have acquired almost cynical assurance. there was a time, long, long ago, when the philistine was only tolerated as something that did not speak, and about which no one spoke; then a period ensued during which his roughness was smoothed, during which he was found amusing, and people talked about him. under this treatment he gradually became a prig, rejoiced with all his heart over his rough places and his wrongheaded and candid singularities, and began to talk, on his own account, after the style of riehl's music for the home. "but what do i see? is it a shadow? is it reality? how long and broad my poodle grows!" for now he is already rolling like a hippopotamus along "the broad highway of the world's future," and his growling and barking have become transformed into the proud incantations of a religious founder. and is it your own sweet wish, great master, to found the religion of the future? "the times seem to us not yet ripe (p. 7). it does not occur to us to wish to destroy a church." but why not, great master? one but needs the ability. besides, to speak quite openly in the latter, you yourself are convinced that you possess this ability. look at the last page of your book. there you actually state, forsooth, that your new way "alone is the future highway of the world, which now only requires partial completion, and especially general use, in order also to become easy and pleasant." make no further denials, then. the religious founder is unmasked, the convenient and agreeable highway leading to the straussian paradise is built. it is only the coach in which you wish to convey us that does not altogether satisfy you, unpretentious man that you are! you tell us in your concluding remarks: "nor will i pretend that the coach to which my esteemed readers have been obliged to trust themselves with me fulfils every requirement,... all through one is much jolted" (p. 438). ah! you are casting about for a compliment, you gallant old religious founder! but let us be straightforward with you. if your reader so regulates the perusal of the 368 pages of your religious catechism as to read only one page a day--that is to say, if he take it in the smallest possible doses-then, perhaps, we should be able to believe that he might suffer some evil effect from the book--if only as the outcome of his vexation when the results he expected fail to make themselves felt. gulped down more heartily, however, and as much as possible being taken at each draught, according to the prescription to be recommended in the case of all modern books, the drink can work no mischief; and, after taking it, the reader will not necessarily be either out of sorts or out of temper, but rather merry and well-disposed, as though nothing had happened; as though no religion had been assailed, no world's highway been built, and no profession of faith been made. and i do indeed call this a result! the doctor, the drug, and the disease--everything forgotten! and the joyous laughter! the continual provocation to hilarity! you are to be envied, sir; for you have founded the most attractive of all religions--one whose followers do honour to its founder by laughing at him. iv. the philistine as founder of the religion of the future--that is the new belief in its most emphatic form of expression. the philistine becomes a dreamer--that is the unheard-of occurrence which distinguishes the german nation of to-day. but for the present, in any case, let us maintain an attitude of caution towards this fantastic exaltation. for does not david strauss himself advise us to exercise such caution, in the following profound passage, the general tone of which leads us to think of the founder of christianity rather than of our particular author? (p. 92): "we know there have been noble enthusiasts--enthusiasts of genius; the influence of an enthusiast can rouse, exalt, and produce prolonged historic effects; but we do not wish to choose him as the guide of our life. he will be sure to mislead us, if we do not subject his influence to the control of reason." but we know something more: we know that there are enthusiasts who are not intellectual, who do not rouse or exalt, and who, nevertheless, not only expect to be the guides of our lives, but, as such, to exercise a very lasting historical influence into the bargain, and to rule the future;--all the more reason why we should place their influence under the control of reason. lichtenberg even said: "there are enthusiasts quite devoid of ability, and these are really dangerous people." in the first place, as regards the above-mentioned control of reason, we should like to have candid answers to the three following questions: first, how does the new believer picture his heaven? secondly, how far does the courage lent him by the new faith extend? and, thirdly, how does he write his books? strauss the confessor must answer the first and second questions; strauss the writer must answer the third. the heaven of the new believer must, perforce, be a heaven upon earth; for the christian "prospect of an immortal life in heaven," together with the other consolations, "must irretrievably vanish" for him who has but "one foot" on the straussian platform. the way in which a religion represents its heaven is significant, and if it be true that christianity knows no other heavenly occupations than singing and making music, the prospect of the philistine, _à la_ strauss, is truly not a very comforting one. in the book of confessions, however, there is a page which treats of paradise (p. 342). happiest of philistines, unroll this parchment scroll before anything else, and the whole of heaven will seem to clamber down to thee! "we would but indicate how we act, how we have acted these many years. besides our profession--for we are members of the most various professions, and by no means exclusively consist of scholars or artists, but of military men and civil employés, of merchants and landed proprietors;... and again, as i have said already, there are not a few of us, but many thousands, and not the worst people in the country;--besides our profession, then, i say, we are eagerly accessible to all the higher interests of humanity; we have taken a vivid interest, during late years, and each after his manner has participated in the great national war, and the reconstruction of the german state; and we have been profoundly exalted by the turn events have taken, as unexpected as glorious, for our much tried nation. to the end of forming just conclusions in these things, we study history, which has now been made easy, even to the unlearned, by a series of attractively and popularly written works; at the same time, we endeavour to enlarge our knowledge of the natural sciences, where also there is no lack of sources of information; and lastly, in the writings of our great poets, in the performances of our great musicians, we find a stimulus for the intellect and heart, for wit and imagination, which leaves nothing to be desired. thus we live, and hold on our way in joy." "here is our man!" cries the philistine exultingly, who reads this: "for this is exactly how we live; it is indeed our daily life."[3] and how perfectly he understands the euphemism! when, for example, he refers to the historical studies by means of which we help ourselves in forming just conclusions regarding the political situation, what can he be thinking of, if it be not our newspaper-reading? when he speaks of the active part we take in the reconstruction of the german state, he surely has only our daily visits to the beer-garden in his mind; and is not a walk in the zoological gardens implied by 'the sources of information through which we endeavour to enlarge our knowledge of the natural sciences'? finally, the theatres and concert-halls are referred to as places from which we take home 'a stimulus for wit and imagination which leaves nothing to be desired.'--with what dignity and wit he describes even the most suspicious of our doings! here indeed is our man; for his heaven is our heaven!" [3] this alludes to a german student-song. thus cries the philistine; and if we are not quite so satisfied as he, it is merely owing to the fact that we wanted to know more. scaliger used to say: "what does it matter to us whether montaigne drank red or white wine?" but, in this more important case, how greatly ought we to value definite particulars of this sort! if we could but learn how many pipes the philistine smokes daily, according to the prescriptions of the new faith, and whether it is the _spener_ or the _national gazette_ that appeals to him over his coffee! but our curiosity is not satisfied. with regard to one point only do we receive more exhaustive information, and fortunately this point relates to the heaven in heaven--the private little art-rooms which will be consecrated to the use of great poets and musicians, and to which the philistine will go to edify himself; in which, moreover, according to his own showing, he will even get "all his stains removed and wiped away" (p. 433); so that we are led to regard these private little art-rooms as a kind of bath-rooms. "but this is only effected for some fleeting moments; it happens and counts only in the realms of phantasy; as soon as we return to rude reality, and the cramping confines of actual life, we are again on all sides assailed by the old cares,"--thus our master sighs. let us, however, avail ourselves of the fleeting moments during which we remain in those little rooms; there is just sufficient time to get a glimpse of the apotheosis of the philistine--that is to say, the philistine whose stains have been removed and wiped away, and who is now an absolutely pure sample of his type. in truth, the opportunity we have here may prove instructive: let no one who happens to have fallen a victim to the confession-book lay it aside before having read the two appendices, "of our great poets" and "of our great musicians." here the rainbow of the new brotherhood is set, and he who can find no pleasure in it "for such an one there is no help," as strauss says on another occasion; and, as he might well say here, "he is not yet ripe for our point of view." for are we not in the heaven of heavens? the enthusiastic explorer undertakes to lead us about, and begs us to excuse him if, in the excess of his joy at all the beauties to be seen, he should by any chance be tempted to talk too much. "if i should, perhaps, become more garrulous than may seem warranted in this place, let the reader be indulgent to me; for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. let him only be assured that what he is now about to read does not consist of older materials, which i take the opportunity of inserting here, but that these remarks have been written for their present place and purpose" (pp. 345-46). this confession surprises us somewhat for the moment. what can it matter to us whether or not the little chapters were freshly written? as if it were a matter of writing! between ourselves, i should have been glad if they had been written a quarter of a century earlier; then, at least, i should have understood why the thoughts seem to be so bleached, and why they are so redolent of resuscitated antiquities. but that a thing should have been written in 1872 and already smell of decay in 1872 strikes me as suspicious. let us imagine some one's falling asleep while reading these chapters--what would he most probably dream about? a friend answered this question for me, because he happened to have had the experience himself. he dreamt of a wax-work show. the classical writers stood there, elegantly represented in wax and beads. their arms and eyes moved, and a screw inside them creaked an accompaniment to their movements. he saw something gruesome among them--a misshapen figure, decked with tapes and jaundiced paper, out of whose mouth a ticket hung, on which "lessing" was written. my friend went close up to it and learned the worst: it was the homeric chimera; in front it was strauss, behind it was gervinus, and in the middle chimera. the _tout-ensemble_ was lessing. this discovery caused him to shriek with terror: he waked, and read no more. in sooth, great master, why have you written such fusty little chapters? we do, indeed, learn something new from them; for instance, that gervinus made it known to the world how and why goethe was no dramatic genius; that, in the second part of faust, he had only produced a world of phantoms and of symbols; that wallenstein is a macbeth as well as a hamlet; that the straussian reader extracts the short stories out of the _wanderjahre_ "much as naughty children pick the raisins and almonds out of a tough plum-cake"; that no complete effect can be produced on the stage without the forcible element, and that schiller emerged from kant as from a cold-water cure. all this is certainly new and striking; but, even so, it does not strike us with wonder, and so sure as it is new, it will never grow old, for it never was young; it was senile at birth. what extraordinary ideas seem to occur to these blessed ones, after the new style, in their æsthetic heaven! and why can they not manage to forget a few of them, more particularly when they are of that unæsthetic, earthly, and ephemeral order to which the scholarly thoughts of gervinus belong, and when they so obviously bear the stamp of puerility? but it almost seems as though the modest greatness of a strauss and the vain insignificance of a gervinus were only too well able to harmonise: then long live all those blessed ones! may we, the rejected, also live long, if this unchallenged judge of art continues any longer to teach his borrowed enthusiasm, and the gallop of that hired steed of which the honest grillparzer speaks with such delightful clearness, until the whole of heaven rings beneath the hoof of that galumphing enthusiasm. then, at least, things will be livelier and noisier than they are at the present moment, in which the carpet-slippered rapture of our heavenly leader and the lukewarm eloquence of his lips only succeed in the end in making us sick and tired. i should like to know how a hallelujah sung by strauss would sound: i believe one would have to listen very carefully, lest it should seem no more than a courteous apology or a lisped compliment. apropos of this, i might adduce an instructive and somewhat forbidding example. strauss strongly resented the action of one of his opponents who happened to refer to his reverence for lessing. the unfortunate man had misunderstood;--true, strauss did declare that one must be of a very obtuse mind not to recognise that the simple words of paragraph 86 come from the writer's heart. now, i do not question this warmth in the very least; on the contrary, the fact that strauss fosters these feelings towards lessing has always excited my suspicion; i find the same warmth for lessing raised almost to heat in gervinus--yea, on the whole, no great german writer is so popular among little german writers as lessing is; but for all that, they deserve no thanks for their predilection; for what is it, in sooth, that they praise in lessing? at one moment it is his catholicity--the fact that he was critic and poet, archæologist and philosopher, dramatist and theologian. anon, "it is the unity in him of the writer and the man, of the head and the heart." the last quality, as a rule, is just as characteristic of the great writer as of the little one; as a rule, a narrow head agrees only too fatally with a narrow heart. and as to the catholicity; this is no distinction, more especially when, as in lessing's case, it was a dire necessity. what astonishes one in regard to lessing-enthusiasts is rather that they have no conception of the devouring necessity which drove him on through life and to this catholicity; no feeling for the fact that such a man is too prone to consume himself rapidly, like a flame; nor any indignation at the thought that the vulgar narrowness and pusillanimity of his whole environment, especially of his learned contemporaries, so saddened, tormented, and stifled the tender and ardent creature that he was, that the very universality for which he is praised should give rise to feelings of the deepest compassion. "have pity on the exceptional man!" goethe cries to us; "for it was his lot to live in such a wretched age that his life was one long polemical effort." how can ye, my worthy philistines, think of lessing without shame? he who was ruined precisely on account of your stupidity, while struggling with your ludicrous fetiches and idols, with the defects of your theatres, scholars, and theologists, without once daring to attempt that eternal flight for which he had been born. and what are your feelings when ye think of winckelman, who, in order to turn his eyes from your grotesque puerilities, went begging to the jesuits for help, and whose ignominious conversion dishonours not him, but you? dare ye mention schiller's name without blushing? look at his portrait. see the flashing eyes that glance contemptuously over your heads, the deadly red cheek--do these things mean nothing to you? in him ye had such a magnificent and divine toy that ye shattered it. suppose, for a moment, it had been possible to deprive this harassed and hunted life of goethe's friendship, ye would then have been responsible for its still earlier end. ye have had no finger in any one of the life-works of your great geniuses, and yet ye would make a dogma to the effect that no one is to be helped in the future. but for every one of them, ye were "the resistance of the obtuse world," which goethe calls by its name in his epilogue to the bell; for all of them ye were the grumbling imbeciles, or the envious bigots, or the malicious egoists: in spite of you each of them created his works, against you each directed his attacks, and thanks to you each prematurely sank, while his work was still unfinished, broken and bewildered by the stress of the battle. and now ye presume that ye are going to be permitted, tamquam re bene gesta, to praise such men! and with words which leave no one in any doubt as to whom ye have in your minds when ye utter your encomiums, which therefore "spring forth with such hearty warmth" that one must be blind not to see to whom ye are really bowing. even goethe in his day had to cry: "upon my honour, we are in need of a lessing, and woe unto all vain masters and to the whole æsthetic kingdom of heaven, when the young tiger, whose restless strength will be visible in his every distended muscle and his every glance, shall sally forth to seek his prey!" v. how clever it was of my friend to read no further, once he had been enlightened (thanks to that chimerical vision) concerning the straussian lessing and strauss himself. we, however, read on further, and even craved admission of the doorkeeper of the new faith to the sanctum of music. the master threw the door open for us, accompanied us, and began quoting certain names, until, at last, overcome with mistrust, we stood still and looked at him. was it possible that we were the victims of the same hallucination as that to which our friend had been subjected in his dream? the musicians to whom strauss referred seemed to us to be wrongly designated as long as he spoke about them, and we began to think that the talk must certainly be about somebody else, even admitting that it did not relate to incongruous phantoms. when, for instance, he mentioned haydn with that same warmth which made us so suspicious when he praised lessing, and when he posed as the epopt and priest of a mysterious haydn cult; when, in a discussion upon quartette-music, if you please, he even likened haydn to a "good unpretending soup" and beethoven to "sweetmeats" (p. 432); then, to our minds, one thing, and one thing alone, became certain--namely, that his sweetmeat-beethoven is not our beethoven, and his soup-haydn is not our haydn. the master was moreover of the opinion that our orchestra is too good to perform haydn, and that only the most unpretentious amateurs can do justice to that music--a further proof that he was referring to some other artist and some other work, possibly to riehl's music for the home. but whoever can this sweetmeat-beethoven of strauss's be? he is said to have composed nine symphonies, of which the pastoral is "the least remarkable"; we are told that "each time in composing the third, he seemed impelled to exceed his bounds, and depart on an adventurous quest," from which we might infer that we are here concerned with a sort of double monster, half horse and half cavalier. with regard to a certain _eroica_, this centaur is very hard pressed, because he did not succeed in making it clear "whether it is a question of a conflict on the open field or in the deep heart of man." in the pastoral there is said to be "a furiously raging storm," for which it is "almost too insignificant" to interrupt a dance of country-folk, and which, owing to "its arbitrary connection with a trivial motive," as strauss so adroitly and correctly puts it, renders this symphony "the least remarkable." a more drastic expression appears to have occurred to the master; but he prefers to speak here, as he says, "with becoming modesty." but no, for once our master is wrong; in this case he is really a little too modest. who, indeed, will enlighten us concerning this sweetmeat-beethoven, if not strauss himself--the only person who seems to know anything about him? but, immediately below, a strong judgment is uttered with becoming non-modesty, and precisely in regard to the ninth symphony. it is said, for instance, that this symphony "is naturally the favourite of a prevalent taste, which in art, and music especially, mistakes the grotesque for the genial, and the formless for the sublime" (p. 428). it is true that a critic as severe as gervinus was gave this work a hearty welcome, because it happened to confirm one of his doctrines; but strauss is "far from going to these problematic productions" in search of the merits of his beethoven. "it is a pity," cries our master, with a convulsive sigh, "that one is compelled, by such reservations, to mar one's enjoyment of beethoven, as well as the admiration gladly accorded to him." for our master is a favourite of the graces, and these have informed him that they only accompanied beethoven part of the way, and that he then lost sight of them. "this is a defect," he cries, "but can you believe that it may also appear as an advantage?" "he who is painfully and breathlessly rolling the musical idea along will seem to be moving the weightier one, and thus appear to be the stronger" (pp. 423-24). this is a confession, and not necessarily one concerning beethoven alone, but concerning "the classical prose-writer" himself. he, the celebrated author, is not abandoned by the graces. from the play of airy jests--that is to say, straussian jests--to the heights of solemn earnestness--that is to say, straussian earnestness--they remain stolidly at his elbow. he, the classical prose-writer, slides his burden along playfully and with a light heart, whereas beethoven rolls his painfully and breathlessly. he seems merely to dandle his load; this is indeed an advantage. but would anybody believe that it might equally be a sign of something wanting? in any case, only those could believe this who mistake the grotesque for the genial, and the formless for the sublime--is not that so, you dandling favourite of the graces? we envy no one the edifying moments he may have, either in the stillness of his little private room or in a new heaven specially fitted out for him; but of all possible pleasures of this order, that of strauss's is surely one of the most wonderful, for he is even edified by a little holocaust. he calmly throws the sublimest works of the german nation into the flames, in order to cense his idols with their smoke. suppose, for a moment, that by some accident, the eroica, the pastoral, and the ninth symphony had fallen into the hands of our priest of the graces, and that it had been in his power to suppress such problematic productions, in order to keep the image of the master pure, who doubts but what he would have burned them? and it is precisely in this way that the strausses of our time demean themselves: they only wish to know so much of an artist as is compatible with the service of their rooms; they know only the extremes--censing or burning. to all this they are heartily welcome; the one surprising feature of the whole case is that public opinion, in matters artistic, should be so feeble, vacillating, and corruptible as contentedly to allow these exhibitions of indigent philistinism to go by without raising an objection; yea, that it does not even possess sufficient sense of humour to feel tickled at the sight of an unæsthetic little master's sitting in judgment upon beethoven. as to mozart, what aristotle says of plato ought really to be applied here: "insignificant people ought not to be permitted even to praise him." in this respect, however, all shame has vanished--from the public as well as from the master's mind: he is allowed, not merely to cross himself before the greatest and purest creations of german genius, as though he had perceived something godless and immoral in them, but people actually rejoice over his candid confessions and admission of sins--more particularly as he makes no mention of his own, but only of those which great men are said to have committed. oh, if only our master be in the right! his readers sometimes think, when attacked by a paroxysm of doubt; he himself, however, stands there, smiling and convinced, perorating, condemning, blessing, raising his hat to himself, and is at any minute capable of saying what the duchesse delaforte said to madame de staël, to wit: "my dear, i must confess that i find no one but myself invariably right." vi. a corpse is a pleasant thought for a worm, and a worm is a dreadful thought for every living creature. worms fancy their kingdom of heaven in a fat body; professors of philosophy seek theirs in rummaging among schopenhauer's entrails, and as long as rodents exist, there will exist a heaven for rodents. in this, we have the answer to our first question: how does the believer in the new faith picture his heaven? the straussian philistine harbours in the works of our great poets and musicians like a parasitic worm whose life is destruction, whose admiration is devouring, and whose worship is digesting. now, however, our second question must be answered: how far does the courage lent to its adherents by this new faith extend? even this question would already have been answered, if courage and pretentiousness had been one; for then strauss would not be lacking even in the just and veritable courage of a mameluke. at all events, the "becoming modesty" of which strauss speaks in the above-mentioned passage, where he is referring to beethoven, can only be a stylistic and not a moral manner of speech. strauss has his full share of the temerity to which every successful hero assumes the right: all flowers grow only for him--the conqueror; and he praises the sun because it shines in at his window just at the right time. he does not even spare the venerable old universe in his eulogies--as though it were only now and henceforward sufficiently sanctified by praise to revolve around the central monad david strauss. the universe, he is happy to inform us, is, it is true, a machine with jagged iron wheels, stamping and hammering ponderously, but: "we do not only find the revolution of pitiless wheels in our world-machine, but also the shedding of soothing oil" (p. 435). the universe, provided it submit to strauss's encomiums, is not likely to overflow with gratitude towards this master of weird metaphors, who was unable to discover better similes in its praise. but what is the oil called which trickles down upon the hammers and stampers? and how would it console a workman who chanced to get one of his limbs caught in the mechanism to know that this oil was trickling over him? passing over this simile as bad, let us turn our attention to another of strauss's artifices, whereby he tries to ascertain how he feels disposed towards the universe; this question of marguerite's, "he loves me--loves me not--loves me?" hanging on his lips the while. now, although strauss is not telling flower-petals or the buttons on his waistcoat, still what he does is not less harmless, despite the fact that it needs perhaps a little more courage. strauss wishes to make certain whether his feeling for the "all" is either paralysed or withered, and he pricks himself; for he knows that one can prick a limb that is either paralysed or withered without causing any pain. as a matter of fact, he does not really prick himself, but selects another more violent method, which he describes thus: "we open schopenhauer, who takes every occasion of slapping our idea in the face" (p. 167). now, as an idea--even that of strauss's concerning the universe--has no face, if there be any face in the question at all it must be that of the idealist, and the procedure may be subdivided into the following separate actions:--strauss, in any case, throws schopenhauer open, whereupon the latter slaps strauss in the face. strauss then reacts religiously; that is to say, he again begins to belabour schopenhauer, to abuse him, to speak of absurdities, blasphemies, dissipations, and even to allege that schopenhauer could not have been in his right senses. result of the dispute: "we demand the same piety for our cosmos that the devout of old demanded for his god"; or, briefly, "he loves me." our favourite of the graces makes his life a hard one, but he is as brave as a mameluke, and fears neither the devil nor schopenhauer. how much "soothing oil" must he use if such incidents are of frequent occurrence! on the other hand, we readily understand strauss's gratitude to this tickling, pricking, and slapping schopenhauer; hence we are not so very much surprised when we find him expressing himself in the following kind way about him: "we need only turn over the leaves of arthur schopenhauer's works (although we shall on many other accounts do well not only to glance over but to study them), etc." (p. 166). now, to whom does this captain of philistines address these words? to him who has clearly never even studied schopenhauer, the latter might well have retorted, "this is an author who does not even deserve to be scanned, much less to be studied." obviously, he gulped schopenhauer down "the wrong way," and this hoarse coughing is merely his attempt to clear his throat. but, in order to fill the measure of his ingenuous encomiums, strauss even arrogates to himself the right of commending old kant: he speaks of the latter's _general history of the heavens of the year 1755_ as of "a work which has always appeared to me not less important than his later _critique of pure reason_. if in the latter we admire the depth of insight, the breadth of observation strikes us in the former. if in the latter we can trace the old man's anxiety to secure even a limited possession of knowledge--so it be but on a firm basis--in the former we encounter the mature man, full of the daring of the discoverer and conqueror in the realm of thought." this judgment of strauss's concerning kant did not strike me as being more modest than the one concerning schopenhauer. in the one case, we have the little captain, who is above all anxious to express even the most insignificant opinion with certainty, and in the other we have the famous prose-writer, who, with all the courage of ignorance, exudes his eulogistic secretions over kant. it is almost incredible that strauss availed himself of nothing in kant's _critique of pure reason _while compiling his testament of modern ideas, and that he knew only how to appeal to the coarsest realistic taste must also be numbered among the more striking characteristics of this new gospel, the which professes to be but the result of the laborious and continuous study of history and science, and therefore tacitly repudiates all connection with philosophy. for the philistine captain and his "we," kantian philosophy does not exist. he does not dream of the fundamental antinomy of idealism and of the highly relative sense of all science and reason. and it is precisely reason that ought to tell him how little it is possible to know of things in themselves. it is true, however, that people of a certain age cannot possibly understand kant, especially when, in their youth, they understood or fancied they understood that "gigantic mind," hegel, as strauss did; and had moreover concerned themselves with schleiermacher, who, according to strauss, "was gifted with perhaps too much acumen." it will sound odd to our author when i tell him that, even now, he stands absolutely dependent upon hegel and schleiermacher, and that his teaching of the cosmos, his way of regarding things _sub specie biennii_, his salaams to the state of affairs now existing in germany, and, above all, his shameless philistine optimism, can only be explained by an appeal to certain impressions of youth, early habits, and disorders; for he who has once sickened on hegel and schleiermacher never completely recovers. there is one passage in the confession-book where the incurable optimism referred to above bursts forth with the full joyousness of holiday spirits (pp. 166-67). "if the universe is a thing which had better not have existed," says strauss, "then surely the speculation of the philosopher, as forming part of this universe, is a speculation which had better not have speculated. the pessimist philosopher fails to perceive that he, above all, declares his own thought, which declares the world to be bad, as bad also; but if the thought which declares the world to be bad is a bad thought, then it follows naturally that the world is good. as a rule, optimism may take things too easily. schopenhauer's references to the colossal part which sorrow and evil play in the world are quite in their right place as a counterpoise; but every true philosophy is necessarily optimistic, as otherwise she hews down the branch on which she herself is sitting." if this refutation of schopenhauer is not the same as that to which strauss refers somewhere else as "the refutation loudly and jubilantly acclaimed in higher spheres," then i quite fail to understand the dramatic phraseology used by him elsewhere to strike an opponent. here optimism has for once intentionally simplified her task. but the master-stroke lay in thus pretending that the refutation of schopenhauer was not such a very difficult task after all, and in playfully wielding the burden in such a manner that the three graces attendant on the dandling optimist might constantly be delighted by his methods. the whole purpose of the deed was to demonstrate this one truth, that it is quite unnecessary to take a pessimist seriously; the most vapid sophisms become justified, provided they show that, in regard to a philosophy as "unhealthy and unprofitable" as schopenhauer's, not proofs but quips and sallies alone are suitable. while perusing such passages, the reader will grasp the full meaning of schopenhauer's solemn utterance to the effect that, where optimism is not merely the idle prattle of those beneath whose flat brows words and only words are stored, it seemed to him not merely an absurd _but a vicious attitude of mind_, and one full of scornful irony towards the indescribable sufferings of humanity. when a philosopher like strauss is able to frame it into a system, it becomes more than a vicious attitude of mind--it is then an imbecile gospel of comfort for the "i" or for the "we," and can only provoke indignation. who could read the following psychological avowal, for instance, without indignation, seeing that it is obviously but an offshoot from this vicious gospel of comfort?--"beethoven remarked that he could never have composed a text like figaro or don juan. _life had not been so profuse of its snubs to him that he could treat it so gaily, or deal so lightly with the foibles of men_" (p. 430). in order, however, to adduce the most striking instance of this dissolute vulgarity of sentiment, let it suffice, here, to observe that strauss knows no other means of accounting for the terribly serious negative instinct and the movement of ascetic sanctification which characterised the first century of the christian era, than by supposing the existence of a previous period of surfeit in the matter of all kinds of sexual indulgence, which of itself brought about a state of revulsion and disgust. "the persians call it _bidamag buden_, germans say '_katzenjammer_.'"[4] [4] remorse for the previous night's excesses.--translator's note. strauss quotes this himself, and is not ashamed. as for us, we turn aside for a moment, that we may overcome our loathing. vii. as a matter of fact, our philistine captain is brave, even audacious, in words; particularly when he hopes by such bravery to delight his noble colleagues--the "we," as he calls them. so the asceticism and self-denial of the ancient anchorite and saint was merely a form of _katzenjammer_? jesus may be described as an enthusiast who nowadays would scarcely have escaped the madhouse, and the story of the resurrection may be termed a "world-wide deception." for once we will allow these views to pass without raising any objection, seeing that they may help us to gauge the amount of courage which our "classical philistine" strauss is capable of. let us first hear his confession: "it is certainly an unpleasant and a thankless task to tell the world those truths which it is least desirous of hearing. it prefers, in fact, to manage its affairs on a profuse scale, receiving and spending after the magnificent fashion of the great, as long as there is anything left; should any person, however, add up the various items of its liabilities, and anxiously call its attention to the sum-total, he is certain to be regarded as an importunate meddler. and yet this has always been the bent of my moral and intellectual nature." a moral and intellectual nature of this sort might possibly be regarded as courageous; but what still remains to be proved is, whether this courage is natural and inborn, or whether it is not rather acquired and artificial. perhaps strauss only accustomed himself by degrees to the rôle of an importunate meddler, until he gradually acquired the courage of his calling. innate cowardice, which is the philistine's birthright, would not be incompatible with this mode of development, and it is precisely this cowardice which is perceptible in the want of logic of those sentences of strauss's which it needed courage to pronounce. they sound like thunder, but they do not clear the air. no aggressive action is performed: aggressive words alone are used, and these he selects from among the most insulting he can find. he moreover exhausts all his accumulated strength and energy in coarse and noisy expression, and when once his utterances have died away he is more of a coward even than he who has always held his tongue. the very shadow of his deeds--his morality--shows us that he is a word-hero, and that he avoids everything which might induce him to transfer his energies from mere verbosity to really serious things. with admirable frankness, he announces that he is no longer a christian, but disclaims all idea of wishing to disturb the contentment of any one: he seems to recognise a contradiction in the notion of abolishing one society by instituting another--whereas there is nothing contradictory in it at all. with a certain rude self-satisfaction, he swathes himself in the hirsute garment of our simian genealogists, and extols darwin as one of mankind's greatest benefactors; but our perplexity is great when we find him constructing his ethics quite independently of the question, "what is our conception of the universe?" in this department he had an opportunity of exhibiting native pluck; for he ought to have turned his back on his "we," and have established a moral code for life out of _bellum omnium contra omnes_ and the privileges of the strong. but it is to be feared that such a code could only have emanated from a bold spirit like that of hobbes', and must have taken its root in a love of truth quite different from that which was only able to vent itself in explosive outbursts against parsons, miracles, and the "world-wide humbug" of the resurrection. for, whereas the philistine remained on strauss's side in regard to these explosive outbursts, he would have been against him had he been confronted with a genuine and seriously constructed ethical system, based upon darwin's teaching. says strauss: "i should say that all moral action arises from the individual's acting in consonance with the idea of kind" (p. 274). put quite clearly and comprehensively, this means: "live as a man, and not as an ape or a seal." unfortunately, this imperative is both useless and feeble; for in the class _man_ what a multitude of different types are included--to mention only the patagonian and the master, strauss; and no one would ever dare to say with any right, "live like a patagonian," and "live like the master strauss"! should any one, however, make it his rule to live like a genius--that is to say, like the ideal type of the genus man--and should he perchance at the same time be either a patagonian or strauss himself, what should we then not have to suffer from the importunities of genius-mad eccentrics (concerning whose mushroom growth in germany even lichtenberg had already spoken), who with savage cries would compel us to listen to the confession of their most recent belief! strauss has not yet learned that no "idea" can ever make man better or more moral, and that the preaching of a morality is as easy as the establishment of it is difficult. his business ought rather to have been, to take the phenomena of human goodness, such--for instance--as pity, love, and self-abnegation, which are already to hand, and seriously to explain them and show their relation to his darwinian first principle. but no; he preferred to soar into the imperative, and thus escape the task of explaining. but even in his flight he was irresponsible enough to soar beyond the very first principles of which we speak. "ever remember," says strauss, "that thou art human, not merely a natural production; ever remember that all others are human also, and, with all individual differences, the same as thou, having the same needs and claims as thyself: this is the sum and the substance of morality" (p. 277). but where does this imperative hail from? how can it be intuitive in man, seeing that, according to darwin, man is indeed a creature of nature, and that his ascent to his present stage of development has been conditioned by quite different laws--by the very fact that he was continually forgetting that others were constituted like him and shared the same rights with him; by the very fact that he regarded himself as the stronger, and thus brought about the gradual suppression of weaker types. though strauss is bound to admit that no two creatures have ever been quite alike, and that the ascent of man from the lowest species of animals to the exalted height of the culture-philistine depended upon the law of individual distinctness, he still sees no difficulty in declaring exactly the reverse in his law: "behave thyself as though there were no such things as individual distinctions." where is the strauss-darwin morality here? whither, above all, has the courage gone? in the very next paragraph we find further evidence tending to show us the point at which this courage veers round to its opposite; for strauss continues: "ever remember that thou, and all that thou beholdest within and around thee, all that befalls thee and others, is no disjointed fragment, no wild chaos of atoms or casualties, but that, following eternal law, it springs from the one primal source of all life, all reason, and all good: this is the essence of religion" (pp. 277-78). out of that "one primal source," however, all ruin and irrationality, all evil flows as well, and its name, according to strauss, is cosmos. now, how can this cosmos, with all the contradictions and the self-annihilating characteristics which strauss gives it, be worthy of religious veneration and be addressed by the name "god," as strauss addresses it?--"our god does not, indeed, take us into his arms from the outside (here one expects, as an antithesis, a somewhat miraculous process of being "taken into his arms from the inside"), but he unseals the well-springs of consolation within our own bosoms. he shows us that although chance would be an unreasonable ruler, yet necessity, or the enchainment of causes in the world, is reason itself." (a misapprehension of which only the "we" can fail to perceive the folly; because they were brought up in the hegelian worship of reality as the reasonable--that is to say, in the canonisation of success.) "he teaches us to perceive that to demand an exception in the accomplishment of a single natural law would be to demand the destruction of the universe" (pp. 435-36). on the contrary, great master: an honest natural scientist believes in the unconditional rule of natural laws in the world, without, however, taking up any position in regard to the ethical or intellectual value of these laws. wherever neutrality is abandoned in this respect, it is owing to an anthropomorphic attitude of mind which allows reason to exceed its proper bounds. but it is just at the point where the natural scientist resigns that strauss, to put it in his own words, "reacts religiously," and leaves the scientific and scholarly standpoint in order to proceed along less honest lines of his own. without any further warrant, he assumes that all that has happened possesses the highest intellectual value; that it was therefore absolutely reasonably and intentionally so arranged, and that it even contained a revelation of eternal goodness. he therefore has to appeal to a complete cosmodicy, and finds himself at a disadvantage in regard to him who is contented with a theodicy, and who, for instance, regards the whole of man's existence as a punishment for sin or a process of purification. at this stage, and in this embarrassing position, strauss even suggests a metaphysical hypothesis--the driest and most palsied ever conceived--and, in reality, but an unconscious parody of one of lessing's sayings. we read on page 255: "and that other saying of lessing's--'if god, holding truth in his right hand, and in his left only the ever-living desire for it, although on condition of perpetual error, left him the choice of the two, he would, considering that truth belongs to god alone, humbly seize his left hand, and beg its contents for himself'--this saying of lessing's has always been accounted one of the most magnificent which he has left us. it has been found to contain the general expression of his restless love of inquiry and activity. the saying has always made a special impression upon me; because, behind its subjective meaning, i still seemed to hear the faint ring of an objective one of infinite import. for does it not contain the best possible answer to the rude speech of schopenhauer, respecting the ill-advised god who had nothing better to do than to transform himself into this miserable world? if, for example, the creator himself had shared lessing's conviction of the superiority of struggle to tranquil possession?" what!--a god who would choose _perpetual error_, together with a striving after truth, and who would, perhaps, fall humbly at strauss's feet and cry to him, "take thou all truth, it is thine!"? if ever a god and a man were ill-advised, they are this straussian god, whose hobby is to err and to fail, and this straussian man, who must atone for this erring and failing. here, indeed, one hears "a faint ring of infinite import"; here flows strauss's cosmic soothing oil; here one has a notion of the _rationale_ of all becoming and all natural laws. really? is not our universe rather the work of an inferior being, as lichtenberg suggests?--of an inferior being who did not quite understand his business; therefore an experiment, an attempt, upon which work is still proceeding? strauss himself, then, would be compelled to admit that our universe is by no means the theatre of reason, but of error, and that no conformity to law can contain anything consoling, since all laws have been promulgated by an erratic god who even finds pleasure in blundering. it really is a most amusing spectacle to watch strauss as a metaphysical architect, building castles in the air. but for whose benefit is this entertainment given? for the smug and noble "we," that they may not lose conceit with themselves: they may possibly have taken sudden fright, in the midst of the inflexible and pitiless wheel-works of the world-machine, and are tremulously imploring their leader to come to their aid. that is why strauss pours forth the "soothing oil," that is why he leads forth on a leash a god whose passion it is to err; it is for the same reason, too, that he assumes for once the utterly unsuitable rôle of a metaphysical architect. he does all this, because the noble souls already referred to are frightened, and because he is too. and it is here that we reach the limit of his courage, even in the presence of his "we." he does not dare to be honest, and to tell them, for instance: "i have liberated you from a helping and pitiful god: the cosmos is no more than an inflexible machine; beware of its wheels, that they do not crush you." he dare not do this. consequently, he must enlist the help of a witch, and he turns to metaphysics. to the philistine, however, even strauss's metaphysics is preferable to christianity's, and the notion of an erratic god more congenial than that of one who works miracles. for the philistine himself errs, but has never yet performed a miracle. hence his hatred of the genius; for the latter is justly famous for the working of miracles. it is therefore highly instructive to ascertain why strauss, in one passage alone, suddenly takes up the cudgels for genius and the aristocracy of intellect in general. whatever does he do it for? he does it out of fear--fear of the social democrat. he refers to bismarck and moltke, "whose greatness is the less open to controversy as it manifests itself in the domain of tangible external facts. no help for it, therefore; even the most stiff-necked and obdurate of these fellows must condescend to look up a little, if only to get a sight, be it no farther than the knees, of those august figures" (p. 327). do you, master metaphysician, perhaps intend to instruct the social democrats in the art of getting kicks? the willingness to bestow them may be met with everywhere, and you are perfectly justified in promising to those who happen to be kicked a sight of those sublime beings as far as the knee. "also in the domain of art and science," strauss continues, "there will never be a dearth of kings whose architectural undertakings will find employment for a multitude of carters." granted; but what if the carters should begin building? it does happen at times, great master, as you know, and then the kings must grin and bear it. as a matter of fact, this union of impudence and weakness, of daring words and cowardly concessions, this cautious deliberation as to which sentences will or will not impress the philistine or smooth him down the right way, this lack of character and power masquerading as character and power, this meagre wisdom in the guise of omniscience,--these are the features in this book which i detest. if i could conceive of young men having patience to read it and to value it, i should sorrowfully renounce all hope for their future. and is this confession of wretched, hopeless, and really despicable philistinism supposed to be the expression of the thousands constituting the "we" of whom strauss speaks, and who are to be the fathers of the coming generation? unto him who would fain help this coming generation to acquire what the present one does not yet possess, namely, a genuine german culture, the prospect is a horrible one. to such a man, the ground seems strewn with ashes, and all stars are obscured; while every withered tree and field laid waste seems to cry to him: barren! forsaken! springtime is no longer possible here! he must feel as young goethe felt when he first peered into the melancholy atheistic twilight of the _système de la nature_; to him this book seemed so grey, so cimmerian and deadly, that he could only endure its presence with difficulty, and shuddered at it as one shudders at a spectre. viii. we ought now to be sufficiently informed concerning the heaven and the courage of our new believer to be able to turn to the last question: how does he write his books? and of what order are his religious documents? he who can answer this question uprightly and without prejudice will be confronted by yet another serious problem, and that is: how this straussian pocket-oracle of the german philistine was able to pass through six editions? and he will grow more than ever suspicious when he hears that it was actually welcomed as a pocket-oracle, not only in scholastic circles, but even in german universities as well. students are said to have greeted it as a canon for strong intellects, and, from all accounts, the professors raised no objections to this view; while here and there people have declared it to be a _religions book for scholars_. strauss himself gave out that he did not intend his profession of faith to be merely a reference-book for learned and cultured people; but here let us abide by the fact that it was first and foremost a work appealing to his colleagues, and was ostensibly a mirror in which they were to see their own way of living faithfully reflected. for therein lay the feat. the master feigned to have presented us with a new ideal conception of the universe, and now adulation is being paid him out of every mouth; because each is in a position to suppose that he too regards the universe and life in the same way. thus strauss has seen fulfilled in each of his readers what he only demanded of the future. in this way, the extraordinary success of his book is partly explained: "thus we live and hold on our way in joy," the scholar cries in his book, and delights to see others rejoicing over the announcement. if the reader happen to think differently from the master in regard to darwin or to capital punishment, it is of very little consequence; for he is too conscious throughout of breathing an atmosphere that is familiar to him, and of hearing but the echoes of his own voice and wants. however painfully this unanimity may strike the true friend of german culture, it is his duty to be unrelenting in his explanation of it as a phenomenon, and not to shrink from making this explanation public. we all know the peculiar methods adopted in our own time of cultivating the sciences: we all know them, because they form a part of our lives. and, for this very reason, scarcely anybody seems to ask himself what the result of such a cultivation of the sciences will mean to culture in general, even supposing that everywhere the highest abilities and the most earnest will be available for the promotion of culture. in the heart of the average scientific type (quite irrespective of the examples thereof with which we meet to-day) there lies a pure paradox: he behaves like the veriest idler of independent means, to whom life is not a dreadful and serious business, but a sound piece of property, settled upon him for all eternity; and it seems to him justifiable to spend his whole life in answering questions which, after all is said and done, can only be of interest to that person who believes in eternal life as an absolute certainty. the heir of but a few hours, he sees himself encompassed by yawning abysses, terrible to behold; and every step he takes should recall the questions, wherefore? whither? and whence? to his mind. but his soul rather warms to his work, and, be this the counting of a floweret's petals or the breaking of stones by the roadside, he spends his whole fund of interest, pleasure, strength, and aspirations upon it. this paradox--the scientific man--has lately dashed ahead at such a frantic speed in germany, that one would almost think the scientific world were a factory, in which every minute wasted meant a fine. to-day the man of science works as arduously as the fourth or slave caste: his study has ceased to be an occupation, it is a necessity; he looks neither to the right nor to the left, but rushes through all things--even through the serious matters which life bears in its train--with that semi-listlessness and repulsive need of rest so characteristic of the exhausted labourer. _this is also his attitude towards culture_. he behaves as if life to him were not only _otium_ but _sine dignitate_: even in his sleep he does not throw off the yoke, but like an emancipated slave still dreams of his misery, his forced haste and his floggings. our scholars can scarcely be distinguished--and, even then, not to their advantage--from agricultural labourers, who in order to increase a small patrimony, assiduously strive, day and night, to cultivate their fields, drive their ploughs, and urge on their oxen. now, pascal suggests that men only endeavour to work hard at their business and sciences with the view of escaping those questions of greatest import which every moment of loneliness or leisure presses upon them--the questions relating to the _wherefore_, the _whence_, and the _whither_ of life. curiously enough, our scholars never think of the most vital question of all--the wherefore of their work, their haste, and their painful ecstasies. surely their object is not the earning of bread or the acquiring of posts of honour? no, certainly not. but ye take as much pains as the famishing and breadless; and, with that eagerness and lack of discernment which characterises the starving, ye even snatch the dishes from the sideboard of science. if, however, as scientific men, ye proceed with science as the labourers with the tasks which the exigencies of life impose upon them, what will become of a culture which must await the hour of its birth and its salvation in the very midst of all this agitated and breathless running to and fro--this sprawling scientifically? for _it_ no one has time--and yet for what shall science have time if not for culture? answer us here, then, at least: whence, whither, wherefore all science, if it do not lead to culture? belike to barbarity? and in this direction we already see the scholar caste ominously advanced, if we are to believe that such superficial books as this one of strauss's meet the demand of their present degree of culture. for precisely in him do we find that repulsive need of rest and that incidental semi-listless attention to, and coming to terms with, philosophy, culture, and every serious thing on earth. it will be remembered that, at the meetings held by scholars, as soon as each individual has had his say in his own particular department of knowledge, signs of fatigue, of a desire for distraction at any price, of waning memory, and of incoherent experiences of life, begin to be noticeable. while listening to strauss discussing any worldly question, be it marriage, the war, or capital punishment, we are startled by his complete lack of anything like first-hand experience, or of any original thought on human nature. all his judgments are so redolent of books, yea even of newspapers. literary reminiscences do duty for genuine ideas and views, and the assumption of a moderate and grandfatherly tone take the place of wisdom and mature thought. how perfectly in keeping all this is with the fulsome spirit animating the holders of the highest places in german science in large cities! how thoroughly this spirit must appeal to that other! for it is precisely in those quarters that culture is in the saddest plight; it is precisely there that its fresh growth is made impossible--so boisterous are the preparations made by science, so sheepishly are favourite subjects of knowledge allowed to oust questions of much greater import. what kind of lantern would be needed here, in order to find men capable of a complete surrender to genius, and of an intimate knowledge of its depths--men possessed of sufficient courage and strength to exorcise the demons that have forsaken our age? viewed from the outside, such quarters certainly do appear to possess the whole pomp of culture; with their imposing apparatus they resemble great arsenals fitted with huge guns and other machinery of war; we see preparations in progress and the most strenuous activity, as though the heavens themselves were to be stormed, and truth were to be drawn out of the deepest of all wells; and yet, in war, the largest machines are the most unwieldy. genuine culture therefore leaves such places as these religiously alone, for its best instincts warn it that in their midst it has nothing to hope for, and very much to fear. for the only kind of culture with which the inflamed eye and obtuse brain of the scholar working-classes concern themselves is of that philistine order of which strauss has announced the gospel. if we consider for a moment the fundamental causes underlying the sympathy which binds the learned working-classes to culture-philistinism, we shall discover the road leading to strauss the writer, who has been acknowledged classical, and thence to our last and principal theme. to begin with, that culture has contentment written in its every feature, and will allow of no important changes being introduced into the present state of german education. it is above all convinced of the originality of all german educational institutions, more particularly the public schools and universities; it does not cease recommending these to foreigners, and never doubts that if the germans have become the most cultivated and discriminating people on earth, it is owing to such institutions. culture-philistinism believes in itself, consequently it also believes in the methods and means at its disposal. secondly, however, it leaves the highest judgment concerning all questions of taste and culture to the scholar, and even regards itself as the ever-increasing compendium of scholarly opinions regarding art, literature, and philosophy. its first care is to urge the scholar to express his opinions; these it proceeds to mix, dilute, and systematise, and then it administers them to the german people in the form of a bottle of medicine. what comes to life outside this circle is either not heard or attended at all, or if heard, is heeded half-heartedly; until, at last, a voice (it does not matter whose, provided it belong to some one who is strictly typical of the scholar tribe) is heard to issue from the temple in which traditional infallibility of taste is said to reside; and from that time forward public opinion has one conviction more, which it echoes and re-echoes hundreds and hundreds of times. as a matter of fact, though, the æsthetic infallibility of any utterance emanating from the temple is the more doubtful, seeing that the lack of taste, thought, and artistic feeling in any scholar can be taken for granted, unless it has previously been proved that, in his particular case, the reverse is true. and only a few can prove this. for how many who have had a share in the breathless and unending scurry of modern science have preserved that quiet and courageous gaze of the struggling man of culture--if they ever possessed it--that gaze which condemns even the scurry we speak of as a barbarous state of affairs? that is why these few are forced to live in an almost perpetual contradiction. what could they do against the uniform belief of the thousands who have enlisted public opinion in their cause, and who mutually defend each other in this belief? what purpose can it serve when one individual openly declares war against strauss, seeing that a crowd have decided in his favour, and that the masses led by this crowd have learned to ask six consecutive times for the master's philistine sleeping-mixture? if, without further ado, we here assumed that the straussian confession-book had triumphed over public opinion and had been acclaimed and welcomed as conqueror, its author might call our attention to the fact that the multitudinous criticisms of his work in the various public organs are not of an altogether unanimous or even favourable character, and that he therefore felt it incumbent upon him to defend himself against some of the more malicious, impudent, and provoking of these newspaper pugilists by means of a postscript. how can there be a public opinion concerning my book, he cries to us, if every journalist is to regard me as an outlaw, and to mishandle me as much as he likes? this contradiction is easily explained, as soon as one considers the two aspects of the straussian book--the theological and the literary, and it is only the latter that has anything to do with german culture. thanks to its theological colouring, it stands beyond the pale of our german culture, and provokes the animosity of the various theological groups--yea, even of every individual german, in so far as he is a theological sectarian from birth, and only invents his own peculiar private belief in order to be able to dissent from every other form of belief. but when the question arises of talking about strauss _the writer_, pray listen to what the theological sectarians have to say about him. as soon as his literary side comes under notice, all theological objections immediately subside, and the dictum comes plain and clear, as if from the lips of one congregation: _in spite of it all, he is still a classical writer!_ everybody--even the most bigoted, orthodox churchman--pays the writer the most gratifying compliments, while there is always a word or two thrown in as a tribute to his almost lessingesque language, his delicacy of touch, or the beauty and accuracy of his æsthetic views. as a book, therefore, the straussian performance appears to meet all the demands of an ideal example of its kind. the theological opponents, despite the fact that their voices were the loudest of all, nevertheless constitute but an infinitesimal portion of the great public; and even with regard to them, strauss still maintains that he is right when he says: "compared with my thousands of readers, a few dozen public cavillers form but an insignificant minority, and they can hardly prove that they are their faithful interpreters. it was obviously in the nature of things that opposition should be clamorous and assent tacit." thus, apart from the angry bitterness which strauss's profession of faith may have provoked here and there, even the most fanatical of his opponents, to whom his voice seems to rise out of an abyss, like the voice of a beast, are agreed as to his merits as a writer; and that is why the treatment which strauss has received at the hands of the literary lackeys of the theological groups proves nothing against our contention that culture-philistinism celebrated its triumph in this book. it must be admitted that the average educated philistine is a degree less honest than strauss, or is at least more reserved in his public utterances. but this fact only tends to increase his admiration for honesty in another. at home, or in the company of his equals, he may applaud with wild enthusiasm, but takes care not to put on paper how entirely strauss's words are in harmony with his own innermost feelings. for, as we have already maintained, our culture-philistine is somewhat of a coward, even in his strongest sympathies; hence strauss, who can boast of a trifle more courage than he, becomes his leader, notwithstanding the fact that even straussian pluck has its very definite limits. if he overstepped these limits, as schopenhauer does in almost every sentence, he would then forfeit his position at the head of the philistines, and everybody would flee from him as precipitately as they are now following in his wake. he who would regard this artful if not sagacious moderation and this mediocre valour as an aristotelian virtue, would certainly be wrong; for the valour in question is not the golden mean between two faults, but between a virtue and a fault--and in this mean, between virtue and fault, all philistine qualities are to be found. ix. "in spite of it all, he is still a classical writer." well, let us see! perhaps we may now be allowed to discuss strauss the stylist and master of language; but in the first place let us inquire whether, as a literary man, he is equal to the task of building his house, and whether he really understands the architecture of a book. from this inquiry we shall be able to conclude whether he is a respectable, thoughtful, and experienced author; and even should we be forced to answer "no" to these questions, he may still, as a last shift, take refuge in his fame as a classical prose-writer. this last-mentioned talent alone, it is true, would not suffice to class him with the classical authors, but at most with the classical improvisers and virtuosos of style, who, however, in regard to power of expression and the whole planning and framing of the work, reveal the awkward hand and the embarrassed eye of the bungler. we therefore put the question, whether strauss really possesses the artistic strength necessary for the purpose of presenting us with a thing that is a whole, _totum ponere_? as a rule, it ought to be possible to tell from the first rough sketch of a work whether the author conceived the thing as a whole, and whether, in view of this original conception, he has discovered the correct way of proceeding with his task and of fixing its proportions. should this most important part of the problem be solved, and should the framework of the building have been given its most favourable proportions, even then there remains enough to be done: how many smaller faults have to be corrected, how many gaps require filling in! here and there a temporary partition or floor was found to answer the requirements; everywhere dust and fragments litter the ground, and no matter where we look, we see the signs of work done and work still to be done. the house, as a whole, is still uninhabitable and gloomy, its walls are bare, and the wind blows in through the open windows. now, whether this remaining, necessary, and very irksome work has been satisfactorily accomplished by strauss does not concern us at present; our question is, whether the building itself has been conceived as a whole, and whether its proportions are good? the reverse of this, of course, would be a compilation of fragments--a method generally adopted by scholars. they rely upon it that these fragments are related among themselves, and thus confound the logical and the artistic relation between them. now, the relation between the four questions which provide the chapter-headings of strauss's book cannot be called a logical one. are we still christians? have we still a religion? what is our conception of the universe? what is our rule of life? and it is by no means contended that the relation is illogical simply because the third question has nothing to do with the second, nor the fourth with the third, nor all three with the first. the natural scientist who puts the third question, for instance, shows his unsullied love of truth by the simple fact that he tacitly passes over the second. and with regard to the subject of the fourth chapter--marriage, republicanism, and capital punishment--strauss himself seems to have been aware that they could only have been muddled and obscured by being associated with the darwinian theory expounded in the third chapter; for he carefully avoids all reference to this theory when discussing them. but the question, "are we still christians?" destroys the freedom of the philosophical standpoint at one stroke, by lending it an unpleasant theological colouring. moreover, in this matter, he quite forgot that the majority of men to-day are not christians at all, but buddhists. why should one, without further ceremony, immediately think of christianity at the sound of the words "old faith"? is this a sign that strauss has never ceased to be a christian theologian, and that he has therefore never learned to be a philosopher? for we find still greater cause for surprise in the fact that he quite fails to distinguish between belief and knowledge, and continually mentions his "new belief" and the still newer science in one breath. or is "new belief" merely an ironical concession to ordinary parlance? this almost seems to be the case; for here and there he actually allows "new belief" and "newer science" to be interchangeable terms, as for instance on page ii, where he asks on which side, whether on that of the ancient orthodoxy or of modern science, "exist more of the obscurities and insufficiencies unavoidable in human speculation." moreover, according to the scheme laid down in the introduction, his desire is to disclose those proofs upon which the modern view of life is based; but he derives all these proofs from science, and in this respect assumes far more the attitude of a scientist than of a believer. at bottom, therefore, the religion is not a new belief, but, being of a piece with modern science, it has nothing to do with religion at all. if strauss, however, persists in his claims to be religious, the grounds for these claims must be beyond the pale of recent science. only the smallest portion of the straussian book--that is to say, but a few isolated pages--refer to what strauss in all justice might call a belief, namely, that feeling for the "all" for which he demands the piety that the old believer demanded for his god. on the pages in question, however, he cannot claim to be altogether scientific; but if only he could lay claim to being a little stronger, more natural, more outspoken, more pious, we should be content. indeed, what perhaps strikes us most forcibly about him is the multitude of artificial procedures of which he avails himself before he ultimately gets the feeling that he still possesses a belief and a religion; he reaches it by means of stings and blows, as we have already seen. how indigently and feebly this emergency-belief presents itself to us! we shiver at the sight of it. although strauss, in the plan laid down in his introduction, promises to compare the two faiths, the old and the new, and to show that the latter will answer the same purpose as the former, even he begins to feel, in the end, that he has promised too much. for the question whether the new belief answers the same purpose as the old, or is better or worse, is disposed of incidentally, so to speak, and with uncomfortable haste, in two or three pages (p. 436 et seq.), and is actually bolstered up by the following subterfuge: "he who cannot help himself in this matter is beyond help, is not yet ripe for our standpoint" (p. 436). how differently, and with what intensity of conviction, did the ancient stoic believe in the all and the rationality of the all! and, viewed in this light, how does strauss's claim to originality appear? but, as we have already observed, it would be a matter of indifference to us whether it were new, old, original, or imitated, so that it were only more powerful, more healthy, and more natural. even strauss himself leaves this double-distilled emergency-belief to take care of itself as often as he can do so, in order to protect himself and us from danger, and to present his recently acquired biological knowledge to his "we" with a clear conscience. the more embarrassed he may happen to be when he speaks of faith, the rounder and fuller his mouth becomes when he quotes the greatest benefactor to modern men--darwin. then he not only exacts belief for the new messiah, but also for himself--the new apostle. for instance, while discussing one of the most intricate questions in natural history, he declares with true ancient pride: "i shall be told that i am here speaking of things about which i understand nothing. very well; but others will come who will understand them, and who will also have understood me" (p. 241). according to this, it would almost seem as though the famous "we" were not only in duty bound to believe in the "all," but also in the naturalist strauss; in this case we can only hope that in order to acquire the feeling for this last belief, other processes are requisite than the painful and cruel ones demanded by the first belief. or is it perhaps sufficient in this case that the subject of belief himself be tormented and stabbed with the view of bringing the believers to that "religious reaction" which is the distinguishing sign of the "new faith." what merit should we then discover in the piety of those whom strauss calls "we"? otherwise, it is almost to be feared that modern men will pass on in pursuit of their business without troubling themselves overmuch concerning the new furniture of faith offered them by the apostle: just as they have done heretofore, without the doctrine of the rationality of the all. the whole of modern biological and historical research has nothing to do with the straussian belief in the all, and the fact that the modern philistine does not require the belief is proved by the description of his life given by strauss in the chapter,"what is our rule of life?" he is therefore quite right in doubting whether the coach to which his esteemed readers have been obliged to trust themselves "with him, fulfils every requirement." it certainly does not; for the modern man makes more rapid progress when he does not take his place in the straussian coach, or rather, he got ahead much more quickly long before the straussian coach ever existed. now, if it be true that the famous "minority" which is "not to be overlooked," and of which, and in whose name, strauss speaks, "attaches great importance to consistency," it must be just as dissatisfied with strauss the coachbuilder as we are with strauss the logician. let us, however, drop the question of the logician. perhaps, from the artistic point of view, the book really is an example of a well-conceived plan, and does, after all, answer to the requirements of the laws of beauty, despite the fact that it fails to meet with the demands of a well-conducted argument. and now, having shown that he is neither a scientist nor a strictly correct and systematic scholar, for the first time we approach the question: is strauss a capable writer? perhaps the task he set himself was not so much to scare people away from the old faith as to captivate them by a picturesque and graceful description of what life would be with the new. if he regarded scholars and educated men as his most probable audience, experience ought certainly to have told him that whereas one can shoot such men down with the heavy guns of scientific proof, but cannot make them surrender, they may be got to capitulate all the more quickly before "lightly equipped" measures of seduction. "lightly equipped," and "intentionally so," thus strauss himself speaks of his own book. nor do his public eulogisers refrain from using the same expression in reference to the work, as the following passage, quoted from one of the least remarkable among them, and in which the same expression is merely paraphrased, will go to prove:-"the discourse flows on with delightful harmony: wherever it directs its criticism against old ideas it wields the art of demonstration, almost playfully; and it is with some spirit that it prepares the new ideas it brings so enticingly, and presents them to the simple as well as to the fastidious taste. the arrangement of such diverse and conflicting material is well thought out for every portion of it required to be touched upon, without being made too prominent; at times the transitions leading from one subject to another are artistically managed, and one hardly knows what to admire most--the skill with which unpleasant questions are shelved, or the discretion with which they are hushed up." the spirit of such eulogies, as the above clearly shows, is not quite so subtle in regard to judging of what an author is able to do as in regard to what he wishes. what strauss wishes, however, is best revealed by his own emphatic and not quite harmless commendation of voltaire's charms, in whose service he might have learned precisely those "lightly equipped" arts of which his admirer speaks--granting, of course, that virtue may be acquired and a pedagogue can ever be a dancer. who could help having a suspicion or two, when reading the following passage, for instance, in which strauss says of voltaire, "as a philosopher [he] is certainly not original, but in the main a mere exponent of english investigations: in this respect, however, he shows himself to be completely master of his subject, which he presents with incomparable skill, in all possible lights and from all possible sides, and is able withal to meet the demands of thoroughness, without, however, being over-severe in his method"? now, all the negative traits mentioned in this passage might be applied to strauss. no one would contend, i suppose, that strauss is original, or that he is over-severe in his method; but the question is whether we can regard him as "master of his subject," and grant him "incomparable skill"? the confession to the effect that the treatise was intentionally "lightly equipped" leads us to think that it at least aimed at incomparable skill. it was not the dream of our architect to build a temple, nor yet a house, but a sort of summer-pavilion, surrounded by everything that the art of gardening can provide. yea, it even seems as if that mysterious feeling for the all were only calculated to produce an æsthetic effect, to be, so to speak, a view of an irrational element, such as the sea, looked at from the most charming and rational of terraces. the walk through the first chapters--that is to say, through the theological catacombs with all their gloominess and their involved and baroque embellishments--was also no more than an æsthetic expedient in order to throw into greater relief the purity, clearness, and common sense of the chapter "what is our conception of the universe?" for, immediately after that walk in the gloaming and that peep into the wilderness of irrationalism, we step into a hall with a skylight to it. soberly and limpidly it welcomes us: its mural decorations consist of astronomical charts and mathematical figures; it is filled with scientific apparatus, and its cupboards contain skeletons, stuffed apes, and anatomical specimens. but now, really rejoicing for the first time, we direct our steps into the innermost chamber of bliss belonging to our pavilion-dwellers; there we find them with their wives, children, and newspapers, occupied in the commonplace discussion of politics; we listen for a moment to their conversation on marriage, universal suffrage, capital punishment, and workmen's strikes, and we can scarcely believe it to be possible that the rosary of public opinions can be told off so quickly. at length an attempt is made to convince us of the classical taste of the inmates. a moment's halt in the library, and the music-room suffices to show us what we had expected all along, namely, that the best books lay on the shelves, and that the most famous musical compositions were in the music-cabinets. some one actually played something to us, and even if it were haydn's music, haydn could not be blamed because it sounded like riehl's music for the home. meanwhile the host had found occasion to announce to us his complete agreement with lessing and goethe, although with the latter only up to the second part of faust. at last our pavilion-owner began to praise himself, and assured us that he who could not be happy under his roof was beyond help and could not be ripe for his standpoint, whereupon he offered us his coach, but with the polite reservation that he could not assert that it would fulfil every requirement, and that, owing to the stones on his road having been newly laid down, we were not to mind if we were very much jolted. our epicurean garden-god then took leave of us with the incomparable skill which he praised in voltaire. who could now persist in doubting the existence of this incomparable skill? the complete master of his subject is revealed; the lightly equipped artist-gardener is exposed, and still we hear the voice of the classical author saying, "as a writer i shall for once cease to be a philistine: i will not be one; i refuse to be one! but a voltaire--the german voltaire--or at least the french lessing." with this we have betrayed a secret. our master does not always know which he prefers to be--voltaire or lessing; but on no account will he be a philistine. at a pinch he would not object to being both lessing and voltaire--that the word might be fulfilled that is written, "he had no character, but when he wished to appear as if he had, he assumed one." x. if we have understood strauss the confessor correctly, he must be a genuine philistine, with a narrow, parched soul and scholarly and common-place needs; albeit no one would be more indignant at the title than david strauss the writer. he would be quite happy to be regarded as mischievous, bold, malicious, daring; but his ideal of bliss would consist in finding himself compared with either lessing or voltaire--because these men were undoubtedly anything but philistines. in striving after this state of bliss, he often seems to waver between two alternatives--either to mimic the brave and dialectical petulance of lessing, or to affect the manner of the faun-like and free-spirited man of antiquity that voltaire was. when taking up his pen to write, he seems to be continually posing for his portrait; and whereas at times his features are drawn to look like lessing's, anon they are made to assume the voltairean mould. while reading his praise of voltaire's manner, we almost seem to see him abjuring the consciences of his contemporaries for not having learned long ago what the modern voltaire had to offer them. "even his excellences are wonderfully uniform," he says: "simple naturalness, transparent clearness, vivacious mobility, seductive charm. warmth and emphasis are also not wanting where they are needed, and voltaire's innermost nature always revolted against stiltedness and affectation; while, on the other hand, if at times wantonness or passion descend to an unpleasantly low level, the fault does not rest so much with the stylist as with the man." according to this, strauss seems only too well aware of the importance of _simplicity in style_; it is ever the sign of genius, which alone has the privilege to express itself naturally and guilelessly. when, therefore, an author selects a simple mode of expression, this is no sign whatever of vulgar ambition; for although many are aware of what such an author would fain be taken for, they are yet kind enough to take him precisely for that. the genial writer, however, not only reveals his true nature in the plain and unmistakable form of his utterance, but his super-abundant strength actually dallies with the material he treats, even when it is dangerous and difficult. nobody treads stiffly along unknown paths, especially when these are broken throughout their course by thousands of crevices and furrows; but the genius speeds nimbly over them, and, leaping with grace and daring, scorns the wistful and timorous step of caution. even strauss knows that the problems he prances over are dreadfully serious, and have ever been regarded as such by the philosophers who have grappled with them; yet he calls his book _lightly equipped_! but of this dreadfulness and of the usual dark nature of our meditations when considering such questions as the worth of existence and the duties of man, we entirely cease to be conscious when the genial master plays his antics before us, "lightly equipped, and intentionally so." yes, even more lightly equipped than his rousseau, of whom he tells us it was said that he stripped himself below and adorned himself on top, whereas goethe did precisely the reverse. perfectly guileless geniuses do not, it appears, adorn themselves at all; possibly the words "lightly equipped" may simply be a euphemism for "naked." the few who happen to have seen the goddess of truth declare that she is naked, and perhaps, in the minds of those who have never seen her, but who implicitly believe those few, nakedness or light equipment is actually a proof, or at least a feature, of truth. even this vulgar superstition turns to the advantage of the author's ambition. some one sees something naked, and he exclaims: "what if this were the truth!" whereupon he grows more solemn than is his wont. by this means, however, the author scores a tremendous advantage; for he compels his reader to approach him with greater solemnity than another and perhaps more heavily equipped writer. this is unquestionably the best way to become a classical author; hence strauss himself is able to tell us: "i even enjoy the unsought honour of being, in the opinion of many, a classical writer of prose. "he has therefore achieved his aim. strauss the genius goes gadding about the streets in the garb of lightly equipped goddesses as a classic, while strauss the philistine, to use an original expression of this genius's, must, at all costs, be "declared to be on the decline," or "irrevocably dismissed." but, alas! in spite of all declarations of decline and dismissal, the philistine still returns, and all too frequently. those features, contorted to resemble lessing and voltaire, must relax from time to time to resume their old and original shape. the mask of genius falls from them too often, and the master's expression is never more sour and his movements never stiffer than when he has just attempted to take the leap, or to glance with the fiery eye, of a genius. precisely owing to the fact that he is too lightly equipped for our zone, he runs the risk of catching cold more often and more severely than another. it may seem a terrible hardship to him that every one should notice this; but if he wishes to be cured, the following diagnosis of his case ought to be publicly presented to him:--once upon a time there lived a strauss, a brave, severe, and stoutly equipped scholar, with whom we sympathised as wholly as with all those in germany who seek to serve truth with earnestness and energy, and to rule within the limits of their powers. he, however, who is now publicly famous as david strauss, is another person. the theologians may be to blame for this metamorphosis; but, at any rate, his present toying with the mask of genius inspires us with as much hatred and scorn as his former earnestness commanded respect and sympathy. when, for instance, he tells us, "it would also argue ingratitude towards _my genius_ if i were not to rejoice that to the faculty of an incisive, analytical criticism was added the innocent pleasure in artistic production," it may astonish him to hear that, in spite of this self-praise, there are still men who maintain exactly the reverse, and who say, not only that he has never possessed the gift of artistic production, but that the "innocent" pleasure he mentions is of all things the least innocent, seeing that it succeeded in gradually undermining and ultimately destroying a nature as strongly and deeply scholarly and critical as strauss's--in fact, the _real straussian genius_. in a moment of unlimited frankness, strauss himself indeed adds: "merck was always in my thoughts, calling out, 'don't produce such child's play again; others can do that too!'" that was the voice of the real straussian genius, which also asked him what the worth of his newest, innocent, and lightly equipped modern philistine's testament was. others can do that too! and many could do it better. and even they who could have done it best, _i.e._ those thinkers who are more widely endowed than strauss, could still only have made nonsense of it. i take it that you are now beginning to understand the value i set on strauss the writer. you are beginning to realise that i regard him as a mummer who would parade as an artless genius and classical writer. when lichtenberg said, "a simple manner of writing is to be recommended, if only in view of the fact that no honest man trims and twists his expressions," he was very far from wishing to imply that a simple style is a proof of literary integrity. i, for my part, only wish that strauss the writer had been more upright, for then he would have written more becomingly and have been less famous. or, if he would be a mummer at all costs, how much more would he not have pleased me if he had been a better mummer--one more able to ape the guileless genius and classical author! for it yet remains to be said that strauss was not only an inferior actor but a very worthless stylist as well. xi. of course, the blame attaching to strauss for being a bad writer is greatly mitigated by the fact that it is extremely difficult in germany to become even a passable or moderately good writer, and that it is more the exception than not, to be a really good one. in this respect the natural soil is wanting, as are also artistic values and the proper method of treating and cultivating oratory. this latter accomplishment, as the various branches of it, _i.e._ drawing-room, ecclesiastical and parliamentary parlance, show, has not yet reached the level of a national style; indeed, it has not yet shown even a tendency to attain to a style at all, and all forms of language in germany do not yet seem to have passed a certain experimental stage. in view of these facts, the writer of to-day, to some extent, lacks an authoritative standard, and he is in some measure excused if, in the matter of language, he attempts to go ahead of his own accord. as to the probable result which the present dilapidated condition of the german language will bring about, schopenhauer, perhaps, has spoken most forcibly. "if the existing state of affairs continues," he says, "in the year 1900 german classics will cease to be understood, for the simple reason that no other language will be known, save the trumpery jargon of the noble present, the chief characteristic of which is impotence." and, in truth, if one turn to the latest periodicals, one will find german philologists and grammarians already giving expression to the view that our classics can no longer serve us as examples of style, owing to the fact that they constantly use words, modes of speech, and syntactic arrangements which are fast dropping out of currency. hence the need of collecting specimens of the finest prose that has been produced by our best modern writers, and of offering them as examples to be followed, after the style of sander's pocket dictionary of bad language. in this book, that repulsive monster of style gutzkow appears as a classic, and, according to its injunctions, we seem to be called upon to accustom ourselves to quite a new and wondrous crowd of classical authors, among which the first, or one of the first, is david strauss: he whom we cannot describe more aptly than we have already--that is to say, as a worthless stylist. now, the notion which the culture-philistine has of a classic and standard author speaks eloquently for his pseudo-culture--he who only shows his strength by opposing a really artistic and severe style, and who, thanks to the persistence of his opposition, finally arrives at a certain uniformity of expression, which again almost appears to possess unity of genuine style. in view, therefore, of the right which is granted to every one to experiment with the language, how is it possible at all for individual authors to discover a generally agreeable tone? what is so generally interesting in them? in the first place, a negative quality--the total lack of offensiveness: but _every really productive thing is offensive_. the greater part of a german's daily reading matter is undoubtedly sought either in the pages of newspapers, periodicals, or reviews. the language of these journals gradually stamps itself on his brain, by means of its steady drip, drip, drip of similar phrases and similar words. and, since he generally devotes to reading those hours of the day during which his exhausted brain is in any case not inclined to offer resistance, his ear for his native tongue so slowly but surely accustoms itself to this everyday german that it ultimately cannot endure its absence without pain. but the manufacturers of these newspapers are, by virtue of their trade, most thoroughly inured to the effluvia of this journalistic jargon; they have literally lost all taste, and their palate is rather gratified than not by the most corrupt and arbitrary innovations. hence the _tutti unisono_ with which, despite the general lethargy and sickliness, every fresh solecism is greeted; it is with such impudent corruptions of the language that her hirelings are avenged against her for the incredible boredom she imposes ever more and more upon them. i remember having read "an appeal to the german nation," by berthold auerbach, in which every sentence was un-german, distorted and false, and which, as a whole, resembled a soulless mosaic of words cemented together with international syntax. as to the disgracefully slipshod german with which edward devrient solemnised the death of mendelssohn, i do not even wish to do more than refer to it. a grammatical error--and this is the most extraordinary feature of the case--does not therefore seem an offence in any sense to our philistine, but a most delightful restorative in the barren wilderness of everyday german. he still, however, considers all _really_ productive things to be offensive. the wholly bombastic, distorted, and threadbare syntax of the modern standard author--yea, even his ludicrous neologisms--are not only tolerated, but placed to his credit as the spicy element in his works. but woe to the stylist with character, who seeks as earnestly and perseveringly to avoid the trite phrases of everyday parlance, as the "yester-night monster blooms of modern ink-flingers," as schopenhauer says! when platitudes, hackneyed, feeble, and vulgar phrases are the rule, and the bad and the corrupt become refreshing exceptions, then all that is strong, distinguished, and beautiful perforce acquires an evil odour. from which it follows that, in germany, the well-known experience which befell the normally built traveller in the land of hunchbacks is constantly being repeated. it will be remembered that he was so shamefully insulted there, owing to his quaint figure and lack of dorsal convexity, that a priest at last had to harangue the people on his behalf as follows: "my brethren, rather pity this poor stranger, and present thank-offerings unto the gods, that ye are blessed with such attractive gibbosities." if any one attempted to compose a positive grammar out of the international german style of to-day, and wished to trace the unwritten and unspoken laws followed by every one, he would get the most extraordinary notions of style and rhetoric. he would meet with laws which are probably nothing more than reminiscences of bygone schooldays, vestiges of impositions for latin prose, and results perhaps of choice readings from french novelists, over whose incredible crudeness every decently educated frenchman would have the right to laugh. but no conscientious native of germany seems to have given a thought to these extraordinary notions under the yoke of which almost every german lives and writes. as an example of what i say, we may find an injunction to the effect that a metaphor or a simile must be introduced from time to time, and that it must be new; but, since to the mind of the shallow-pated writer newness and modernity are identical, he proceeds forthwith to rack his brain for metaphors in the technical vocabularies of the railway, the telegraph, the steamship, and the stock exchange, and is proudly convinced that such metaphors must be new because they are modern. in strauss's confession-book we find liberal tribute paid to modern metaphor. he treats us to a simile, covering a page and a half, drawn from modern road-improvement work; a few pages farther back he likens the world to a machine, with its wheels, stampers, hammers, and "soothing oil" (p. 432); "a repast that begins with champagne" (p. 384); "kant is a cold-water cure" (p. 309); "the swiss constitution is to that of england as a watermill is to a steam-engine, as a waltz-tune or a song to a fugue or symphony" (p. 301); "in every appeal, the sequence of procedure must be observed. now the mean tribunal between the individual and humanity is the nation" (p. 165); "if we would know whether there be still any life in an organism which appears dead to us, we are wont to test it by a powerful, even painful stimulus, as for example a stab" (p. 161); "the religious domain in the human soul resembles the domain of the red indian in america" (p. 160); "virtuosos in piety, in convents" (p. 107); "and place the sum-total of the foregoing in round numbers under the account" (p. 205); "darwin's theory resembles a railway track that is just marked out ... where the flags are fluttering joyfully in the breeze." in this really highly modern way, strauss has met the philistine injunction to the effect that a new simile must be introduced from time to time. another rhetorical rule is also very widespread, namely, that didactic passages should be composed in long periods, and should be drawn out into lengthy abstractions, while all persuasive passages should consist of short sentences followed by striking contrasts. on page 154 in strauss's book we find a standard example of the didactic and scholarly style--a passage blown out after the genuine schleiermacher manner, and made to stumble along at a true tortoise pace: "the reason why, in the earlier stages of religion, there appear many instead of this single whereon, a plurality of gods instead of the one, is explained in this deduction of religion, from the fact that the various forces of nature, or relations of life, which inspire man with the sentiment of unqualified dependence, still act upon him in the commencement with the full force of their distinctive characteristics; that he has not as yet become conscious how, in regard to his unmitigated dependence upon them, there is no distinction between them, and that therefore the whereon of this dependence, or the being to which it conducts in the last instance, can only be one." on pages 7 and 8 we find an example of the other kind of style, that of the short sentences containing that affected liveliness which so excited certain readers that they cannot mention strauss any more without coupling his name with lessing's. "i am well aware that what i propose to delineate in the following pages is known to multitudes as well as to myself, to some even much better. a few have already spoken out on the subject. am i therefore to keep silence? i think not. for do we not all supply each other's deficiencies? if another is better informed as regards some things, i may perhaps be so as regards others; while yet others are known and viewed by me in a different light. out with it, then! let my colours be displayed that it may be seen whether they are genuine or not.'" it is true that strauss's style generally maintains a happy medium between this sort of merry quick-march and the other funereal and indolent pace; but between two vices one does not invariably find a virtue; more often rather only weakness, helpless paralysis, and impotence. as a matter of fact, i was very disappointed when i glanced through strauss's book in search of fine and witty passages; for, not having found anything praiseworthy in the confessor, i had actually set out with the express purpose of meeting here and there with at least some opportunities of praising strauss the writer. i sought and sought, but my purpose remained unfulfilled. meanwhile, however, another duty seemed to press itself strongly on my mind--that of enumerating the solecisms, the strained metaphors, the obscure abbreviations, the instances of bad taste, and the distortions which i encountered; and these were of such a nature that i dare do no more than select a few examples of them from among a collection which is too bulky to be given in full. by means of these examples i may succeed in showing what it is that inspires, in the hearts of modern germans, such faith in this great and seductive stylist strauss: i refer to his eccentricities of expression, which, in the barren waste and dryness of his whole book, jump out at one, not perhaps as pleasant but as painfully stimulating, surprises. when perusing such passages, we are at least assured, to use a straussian metaphor, that we are not quite dead, but still respond to the test of a stab. for the rest of the book is entirely lacking in offensiveness--that quality which alone, as we have seen, is productive, and which our classical author has himself reckoned among the positive virtues. when the educated masses meet with exaggerated dulness and dryness, when they are in the presence of really vapid commonplaces, they now seem to believe that such things are the signs of health; and in this respect the words of the author of the _dialogus de oratoribus_ are very much to the point: "_illam ipsam quam jactant sanitatem non firmitate sed jejunio consequuntur_." that is why they so unanimously hate every firmitas, because it bears testimony to a kind of health quite different from theirs; hence their one wish to throw suspicion upon all austerity and terseness, upon all fiery and energetic movement, and upon every full and delicate play of muscles. they have conspired to twist nature and the names of things completely round, and for the future to speak of health only there where we see weakness, and to speak of illness and excitability where for our part we see genuine vigour. from which it follows that david strauss is to them a classical author. if only this dulness were of a severely logical order! but simplicity and austerity in thought are precisely what these weaklings have lost, and in their hands even our language has become illogically tangled. as a proof of this, let any one try to translate strauss's style into latin: in the case of kant, be it remembered, this is possible, while with schopenhauer it even becomes an agreeable exercise. the reason why this test fails with strauss's german is not owing to the fact that it is more teutonic than theirs, but because his is distorted and illogical, whereas theirs is lofty and simple. moreover, he who knows how the ancients exerted themselves in order to learn to write and speak correctly, and how the moderns omit to do so, must feel, as schopenhauer says, a positive relief when he can turn from a german book like the one under our notice, to dive into those other works, those ancient works which seem to him still to be written in a new language. "for in these books," says schopenhauer, "i find a regular and fixed language which, throughout, faithfully follows the laws of grammar and orthography, so that i can give up my thoughts completely to their matter; whereas in german i am constantly being disturbed by the author's impudence and his continual attempts to establish his own orthographical freaks and absurd ideas--the swaggering foolery of which disgusts me. it is really a painful sight to see a fine old language, possessed of classical literature, being botched by asses and ignoramuses!" thus schopenhauer's holy anger cries out to us, and you cannot say that you have not been warned. he who turns a deaf ear to such warnings, and who absolutely refuses to relinquish his faith in strauss the classical author, can only be given this last word of advice--to imitate his hero. in any case, try it at your own risk; but you will repent it, not only in your style but in your head, that it may be fulfilled which was spoken by the indian prophet, saying, "he who gnaweth a cow's horn gnaweth in vain and shorteneth his life; for he grindeth away his teeth, yet his belly is empty." xii. by way of concluding, we shall proceed to give our classical prose-writer the promised examples of his style which we have collected. schopenhauer would probably have classed the whole lot as "new documents serving to swell the trumpery jargon of the present day"; for david strauss may be comforted to hear (if what follows can be regarded as a comfort at all) that everybody now writes as he does; some, of course, worse, and that among the blind the one-eyed is king. indeed, we allow him too much when we grant him one eye; but we do this willingly, because strauss does not write so badly as the most infamous of all corrupters of german--the hegelians and their crippled offspring. strauss at least wishes to extricate himself from the mire, and he is already partly out of it; still, he is very far from being on dry land, and he still shows signs of having stammered hegel's prose in youth. in those days, possibly, something was sprained in him, some muscle must have been overstrained. his ear, perhaps, like that of a boy brought up amid the beating of drums, grew dull, and became incapable of detecting those artistically subtle and yet mighty laws of sound, under the guidance of which every writer is content to remain who has been strictly trained in the study of good models. but in this way, as a stylist, he has lost his most valuable possessions, and stands condemned to remain reclining, his life long, on the dangerous and barren shifting sand of newspaper style--that is, if he do not wish to fall back into the hegelian mire. nevertheless, he has succeeded in making himself famous for a couple of hours in our time, and perhaps in another couple of hours people will remember that he was once famous; then, however, night will come, and with her oblivion; and already at this moment, while we are entering his sins against style in the black book, the sable mantle of twilight is falling upon his fame. for he who has sinned against the german language has desecrated the mystery of all our germanity. throughout all the confusion and the changes of races and of customs, the german language alone, as though possessed of some supernatural charm, has saved herself; and with her own salvation she has wrought that of the spirit of germany. she alone holds the warrant for this spirit in future ages, provided she be not destroyed at the sacrilegious hands of the modern world. "but _di meliora!_ avaunt, ye pachyderms, avaunt! this is the german language, by means of which men express themselves, and in which great poets have sung and great thinkers have written. hands off!" [5] [5] translator's note.--nietzsche here proceeds to quote those passages he has culled from _the old and the new faith_ with which he undertakes to substantiate all he has said relative to strauss's style; as, however, these passages, with his comments upon them, lose most of their point when rendered into english, it was thought best to omit them altogether. to put it in plain words, what we have seen have been feet of clay, and what appeared to be of the colour of healthy flesh was only applied paint. of course, culture-philistinism in germany will be very angry when it hears its one living god referred to as a series of painted idols. he, however, who dares to overthrow its idols will not shrink, despite all indignation, from telling it to its face that it has forgotten how to distinguish between the quick and the dead, the genuine and the counterfeit, the original and the imitation, between a god and a host of idols; that it has completely lost the healthy and manly instinct for what is real and right. it alone deserves to be destroyed; and already the manifestations of its power are sinking; already are its purple honours falling from it; but when the purple falls, its royal wearer soon follows. here i come to the end of my confession of faith. this is the confession of an individual; and what can such an one do against a whole world, even supposing his voice were heard everywhere! in order for the last time to use a precious straussism, his judgment only possesses "_that amount of subjective truth which is compatible with a complete lack of objective demonstration_"--is not that so, my dear friends? meanwhile, be of good cheer. for the time being let the matter rest at this "amount which is compatible with a complete lack"! for the time being! that is to say, for as long as that is held to be out of season which in reality is always in season, and is now more than ever pressing; i refer to ... speaking the truth.[6] [6] translator's note.--all quotations from _the old faith and the new_ which appear in the above translation have either been taken bodily out of mathilde blind's translation (asher and co., 1873), or are adaptations from that translation. richard wagner in bayreuth. i. for an event to be great, two things must be united--the lofty sentiment of those who accomplish it, and the lofty sentiment of those who witness it. no event is great in itself, even though it be the disappearance of whole constellations, the destruction of several nations, the establishment of vast empires, or the prosecution of wars at the cost of enormous forces: over things of this sort the breath of history blows as if they were flocks of wool. but it often happens, too, that a man of might strikes a blow which falls without effect upon a stubborn stone; a short, sharp report is heard, and all is over. history is able to record little or nothing of such abortive efforts. hence the anxiety which every one must feel who, observing the approach of an event, wonders whether those about to witness it will be worthy of it. this reciprocity between an act and its reception is always taken into account when anything great or small is to be accomplished; and he who would give anything away must see to it that he find recipients who will do justice to the meaning of his gift. this is why even the work of a great man is not necessarily great when it is short, abortive, or fruitless; for at the moment when he performed it he must have failed to perceive that it was really necessary; he must have been careless in his aim, and he cannot have chosen and fixed upon the time with sufficient caution. chance thus became his master; for there is a very intimate relation between greatness and the instinct which discerns the proper moment at which to act. we therefore leave it to those who doubt wagner's power of discerning the proper time for action, to be concerned and anxious as to whether what is now taking place in bayreuth is really opportune and necessary. to us who are more confident, it is clear that he believes as strongly in the greatness of his feat as in the greatness of feeling in those who are to witness it. be their number great or small, therefore, all those who inspire this faith in wagner should feel extremely honoured; for that it was not inspired by everybody, or by the whole age, or even by the whole german people, as they are now constituted, he himself told us in his dedicatory address of the 22nd of may 1872, and not one amongst us could, with any show of conviction, assure him of the contrary. "i had only you to turn to," he said, "when i sought those who i thought would be in sympathy with my plans,--you who are the most personal friends of my own particular art, my work and activity: only you could i invite to help me in my work, that it might be presented pure and whole to those who manifest a genuine interest in my art, despite the fact that it has hitherto made its appeal to them only in a disfigured and adulterated form." it is certain that in bayreuth even the spectator is a spectacle worth seeing. if the spirit of some observant sage were to return, after the absence of a century, and were to compare the most remarkable movements in the present world of culture, he would find much to interest him there. like one swimming in a lake, who encounters a current of warm water issuing from a hot spring, in bayreuth he would certainly feel as though he had suddenly plunged into a more temperate element, and would tell himself that this must rise out of a distant and deeper source: the surrounding mass of water, which at all events is more common in origin, does not account for it. in this way, all those who assist at the bayreuth festival will seem like men out of season; their _raison-d'être_ and the forces which would seem to account for them are elsewhere, and their home is not in the present age. i realise ever more clearly that the scholar, in so far as he is entirely the man of his own day, can only be accessible to all that wagner does and thinks by means of parody,--and since everything is parodied nowadays, he will even get the event of bayreuth reproduced for him, through the very un-magic lanterns of our facetious art-critics. and one ought to be thankful if they stop at parody; for by means of it a spirit of aloofness and animosity finds a vent which might otherwise hit upon a less desirable mode of expression. now, the observant sage already mentioned could not remain blind to this unusual sharpness and tension of contrasts. they who hold by gradual development as a kind of moral law must be somewhat shocked at the sight of one who, in the course of a single lifetime, succeeds in producing something absolutely new. being dawdlers themselves, and insisting upon slowness as a principle, they are very naturally vexed by one who strides rapidly ahead, and they wonder how on earth he does it. no omens, no periods of transition, and no concessions preceded the enterprise at bayreuth; no one except wagner knew either the goal or the long road that was to lead to it. in the realm of art it signifies, so to speak, the first circumnavigation of the world, and by this voyage not only was there discovered an apparently new art, but art itself. in view of this, all modern arts, as arts of luxury which have degenerated through having been insulated, have become almost worthless. and the same applies to the nebulous and inconsistent reminiscences of a genuine art, which we as modern europeans derive from the greeks; let them rest in peace, unless they are now able to shine of their own accord in the light of a new interpretation. the last hour has come for a good many things; this new art is a clairvoyante that sees ruin approaching--not for art alone. her warning voice must strike the whole of our prevailing civilisation with terror the instant the laughter which its parodies have provoked subsides. let it laugh and enjoy itself for yet a while longer! and as for us, the disciples of this revived art, we shall have time and inclination for thoughtfulness, deep thoughtfulness. all the talk and noise about art which has been made by civilisation hitherto must seem like shameless obtrusiveness; everything makes silence a duty with us--the quinquennial silence of the pythagoreans. which of us has not soiled his hands and heart in the disgusting idolatry of modern culture? which of us can exist without the waters of purification? who does not hear the voice which cries, "be silent and cleansed"? be silent and cleansed! only the merit of being included among those who give ear to this voice will grant even us the _lofty_ look necessary to view the event at bayreuth; and only upon this look depends the _great future_ of the event. when on that dismal and cloudy day in may 1872, after the foundation stone had been laid on the height of bayreuth, amid torrents of rain, and while wagner was driving back to the town with a small party of us, he was exceptionally silent, and there was that indescribable look in his eyes as of one who has turned his gaze deeply inwards. the day happened to be the first of his sixtieth year, and his whole past now appeared as but a long preparation for this great moment. it is almost a recognised fact that in times of exceptional danger, or at all decisive and culminating points in their lives, men see the remotest and most recent events of their career with singular vividness, and in one rapid inward glance obtain a sort of panorama of a whole span of years in which every event is faithfully depicted. what, for instance, must alexander the great have seen in that instant when he caused asia and europe to be drunk out of the same goblet? but what went through wagner's mind on that day--how he became what he is, and what he will be--we only can imagine who are nearest to him, and can follow him, up to a certain point, in his self-examination; but through his eyes alone is it possible for us to understand his grand work, and by the help of this understanding vouch for its fruitfulness. ii. it were strange if what a man did best and most liked to do could not be traced in the general outline of his life, and in the case of those who are remarkably endowed there is all the more reason for supposing that their life will present not only the counterpart of their character, as in the case of every one else, but that it will present above all the counterpart of their intellect and their most individual tastes. the life of the epic poet will have a dash of the epos in it--as from all accounts was the case with goethe, whom the germans very wrongly regarded only as a lyrist--and the life of the dramatist will probably be dramatic. the dramatic element in wagner's _development_ cannot be ignored, from the time when his ruling passion became self-conscious and took possession of his whole being. from that time forward there is an end to all groping, straying, and sprouting of offshoots, and over his most tortuous deviations and excursions, over the often eccentric disposition of his plans, a single law and will are seen to rule, in which we have the explanation of his actions, however strange this explanation may sometimes appear. there was, however, an ante-dramatic period in wagner's life--his childhood and youth--which it is impossible to approach without discovering innumerable problems. at this period there seems to be no promise yet of himself, and what one might now, in a retrospect, regard as a pledge for his future greatness, amounts to no more than a juxta-position of traits which inspire more dismay than hope; a restless and excitable spirit, nervously eager to undertake a hundred things at the same time, passionately fond of almost morbidly exalted states of mind, and ready at any moment to veer completely round from calm and profound meditation to a state of violence and uproar. in his case there were no hereditary or family influences at work to constrain him to the sedulous study of one particular art. painting, versifying, acting, and music were just as much within his reach as the learning and the career of a scholar; and the superficial inquirer into this stage of his life might even conclude that he was born to be a dilettante. the small world within the bounds of which he grew up was not of the kind we should choose to be the home of an artist. he ran the constant risk of becoming infected by that dangerously dissipated attitude of mind in which a person will taste of everything, as also by that condition of slackness resulting from the fragmentary knowledge of all things, which is so characteristic of university towns. his feelings were easily roused and but indifferently satisfied; wherever the boy turned he found himself surrounded by a wonderful and would-be learned activity, to which the garish theatres presented a ridiculous contrast, and the entrancing strains of music a perplexing one. now, to the observer who sees things relatively, it must seem strange that the modern man who happens to be gifted with exceptional talent should as a child and a youth so seldom be blessed with the quality of ingenuousness and of simple individuality, that he is so little able to have these qualities at all. as a matter of fact, men of rare talent, like goethe and wagner, much more often attain to ingenuousness in manhood than during the more tender years of childhood and youth. and this is especially so with the artist, who, being born with a more than usual capacity for imitating, succumbs to the morbid multiformity of modern life as to a virulent disease of infancy. as a child he will more closely resemble an old man. the wonderfully accurate and original picture of youth which wagner gives us in the siegfried of the nibelungen ring could only have been conceived by a man, and by one who had discovered his youthfulness but late in life. wagner's maturity, like his adolesence, was also late in making its appearance, and he is thus, in this respect alone, the very reverse of the precocious type. the appearance of his moral and intellectual strength was the prelude to the drama of his soul. and how different it then became! his nature seems to have been simplified at one terrible stroke, and divided against itself into two instincts or spheres. from its innermost depths there gushes forth a passionate will which, like a rapid mountain torrent, endeavours to make its way through all paths, ravines, and crevices, in search of light and power. only a force completely free and pure was strong enough to guide this will to all that is good and beneficial. had it been combined with a narrow intelligence, a will with such a tyrannical and boundless desire might have become fatal; in any case, an exit into the open had to be found for it as quickly as possible, whereby it could rush into pure air and sunshine. lofty aspirations, which continually meet with failure, ultimately turn to evil. the inadequacy of means for obtaining success may, in certain circumstances, be the result of an inexorable fate, and not necessarily of a lack of strength; but he who under such circumstances cannot abandon his aspirations, despite the inadequacy of his means, will only become embittered, and consequently irritable and intolerant. he may possibly seek the cause of his failure in other people; he may even, in a fit of passion, hold the whole world guilty; or he may turn defiantly down secret byways and secluded lanes, or resort to violence. in this way, noble natures, on their road to the most high, may turn savage. even among those who seek but their own personal moral purity, among monks and anchorites, men are to be found who, undermined and devoured by failure, have become barbarous and hopelessly morbid. there was a spirit full of love and calm belief, full of goodness and infinite tenderness, hostile to all violence and self-deterioration, and abhorring the sight of a soul in bondage. and it was this spirit which manifested itself to wagner. it hovered over him as a consoling angel, it covered him with its wings, and showed him the true path. at this stage we bring the other side of wagner's nature into view: but how shall we describe this other side? the characters an artist creates are not himself, but the succession of these characters, to which it is clear he is greatly attached, must at all events reveal something of his nature. now try and recall rienzi, the flying dutchman and senta, tannhäuser and elizabeth, lohengrin and elsa, tristan and marke, hans sachs, woden and brunhilda,--all these characters are correlated by a secret current of ennobling and broadening morality which flows through them and becomes ever purer and clearer as it progresses. and at this point we enter with respectful reserve into the presence of the most hidden development in wagner's own soul. in what other artist do we meet with the like of this, in the same proportion? schiller's characters, from the robbers to wallenstein and tell, do indeed pursue an ennobling course, and likewise reveal something of their author's development; but in wagner the standard is higher and the distance covered is much greater. in the nibelungen ring, for instance, where brunhilda is awakened by siegfried, i perceive the most moral music i have ever heard. here wagner attains to such a high level of sacred feeling that our mind unconsciously wanders to the glistening iceand snow-peaks of the alps, to find a likeness there;--so pure, isolated, inaccessible, chaste, and bathed in love-beams does nature here display herself, that clouds and tempests--yea, and even the sublime itself--seem to lie beneath her. now, looking down from this height upon tannhauser and the flying dutchman, we begin to perceive how the man in wagner was evolved: how restlessly and darkly he began; how tempestuously he strove to gratify his desires, to acquire power and to taste those rapturous delights from which he often fled in disgust; how he wished to throw off a yoke, to forget, to be negative, and to renounce everything. the whole torrent plunged, now into this valley, now into that, and flooded the most secluded chinks and crannies. in the night of these semi-subterranean convulsions a star appeared and glowed high above him with melancholy vehemence; as soon as he recognised it, he named it _fidelity--unselfish fidelity_. why did this star seem to him the brightest and purest of all? what secret meaning had the word "fidelity" to his whole being? for he has graven its image and problems upon all his thoughts and compositions. his works contain almost a complete series of the rarest and most beautiful examples of fidelity: that of brother to sister, of friend to friend, of servant to master; of elizabeth to tannhauser, of senta to the dutchman, of elsa to lohengrin, of isolde, kurvenal, and marke to tristan, of brunhilda to the most secret vows of woden--and many others. it is wagner's most personal and most individual experience, which he reveres like a religious mystery, and which he calls fidelity; he never wearies of breathing it into hundreds of different characters, and of endowing it with the sublimest that in him lies, so overflowing is his gratitude. it is, in short, the recognition of the fact that the two sides of his nature remained faithful to each other, that out of free and unselfish love, the creative, ingenuous, and brilliant side kept loyally abreast of the dark, the intractable, and the tyrannical side. iii. the relation of the two constituent forces to each other, and the yielding of the one to the other, was the great requisite by which alone he could remain wholly and truly himself. at the same time, this was the only thing he could not control, and over which he could only keep a watch, while the temptations to infidelity and its threatening dangers beset him more and more. the uncertainty derived therefrom is an overflowing source of suffering for those in process of development. each of his instincts made constant efforts to attain to unmeasured heights, and each of the capacities he possessed for enjoying life seemed to long to tear itself away from its companions in order to seek satisfaction alone; the greater their exuberance the more terrific was the tumult, and the more bitter the competition between them. in addition, accident and life fired the desire for power and splendour in him; but he was more often tormented by the cruel necessity of having to live at all, while all around him lay obstacles and snares. how is it possible for any one to remain faithful here, to be completely steadfast? this doubt often depressed him, and he expresses it, as an artist expressed his doubt, in artistic forms. elizabeth, for instance, can only suffer, pray, and die; she saves the fickle and intemperate man by her loyalty, though not for this life. in the path of every true artist, whose lot is cast in these modern days, despair and danger are strewn. he has many means whereby he can attain to honour and might; peace and plenty persistently offer themselves to him, but only in that form recognised by the modern man, which to the straightforward artist is no better than choke-damp. in this temptation, and in the act of resisting it, lie the dangers that threaten him--dangers arising from his disgust at the means modernity offers him of acquiring pleasure and esteem, and from the indignation provoked by the selfish ease of modern society. imagine wagner's filling an official position, as for instance that of bandmaster at public and court theatres, both of which positions he has held: think how he, a serious artist, must have struggled in order to enforce seriousness in those very places which, to meet the demands of modern conventions, are designed with almost systematic frivolity to appeal only to the frivolous. think how he must have partially succeeded, though only to fail on the whole. how constantly disgust must have been at his heels despite his repeated attempts to flee it, how he failed to find the haven to which he might have repaired, and how he had ever to return to the bohemians and outlaws of our society, as one of them. if he himself broke loose from any post or position, he rarely found a better one in its stead, while more than once distress was all that his unrest brought him. thus wagner changed his associates, his dwelling-place and country, and when we come to comprehend the nature of the circles into which he gravitated, we can hardly realise how he was able to tolerate them for any length of time. the greater half of his past seems to be shrouded in heavy mist; for a long time he appears to have had no general hopes, but only hopes for the morrow, and thus, although he reposed no faith in the future, he was not driven to despair. he must have felt like a nocturnal traveller, broken with fatigue, exasperated from want of sleep, and tramping wearily along beneath a heavy burden, who, far from fearing the sudden approach of death, rather longs for it as something exquisitely charming. his burden, the road and the night--all would disappear! the thought was a temptation to him. again and again, buoyed up by his temporary hopes, he plunged anew into the turmoil of life, and left all apparatus behind him. but his method of doing this, his lack of moderation in the doing, betrayed what a feeble hold his hopes had upon him; how they were only stimulants to which he had recourse in an extremity. the conflict between his aspirations and his partial or total inability to realise them, tormented him like a thorn in the flesh. infuriated by constant privations, his imagination lapsed into the dissipated, whenever the state of want was momentarily relieved. life grew ever more and more complicated for him; but the means and artifices that he discovered in his art as a dramatist became evermore resourceful and daring. albeit, these were little more than palpable dramatic makeshifts and expedients, which deceived, and were invented, only for the moment. in a flash such means occurred to his mind and were used up. examined closely and without prepossession, wagner's life, to recall one of schopenhauer's expressions, might be said to consist largely of comedy, not to mention burlesque. and what the artist's feelings must have been, conscious as he was, during whole periods of his life, of this undignified element in it,--he who more than any one else, perhaps, breathed freely only in sublime and more than sublime spheres,--the thinker alone can form any idea. in the midst of this mode of life, a detailed description of which is necessary in order to inspire the amount of pity, awe, and admiration which are its due, he developed a _talent for acquiring knowledge_, which even in a german--a son of the nation learned above all others--was really extraordinary. and with this talent yet another danger threatened wagner--a danger more formidable than that involved in a life which was apparently without either a stay or a rule, borne hither and thither by disturbing illusions. from a novice trying his strength, wagner became a thorough master of music and of the theatre, as also a prolific inventor in the preliminary technical conditions for the execution of art. no one will any longer deny him the glory of having given us the supreme model for lofty artistic execution on a large scale. but he became more than this, and in order so to develop, he, no less than any one else in like circumstances, had to reach the highest degree of culture by virtue of his studies. and wonderfully he achieved this end! it is delightful to follow his progress. from all sides material seemed to come unto him and into him, and the larger and heavier the resulting structure became, the more rigid was the arch of the ruling and ordering thought supporting it. and yet access to the sciences and arts has seldom been made more difficult for any man than for wagner; so much so that he had almost to break his own road through to them. the reviver of the simple drama, the discoverer of the position due to art in true human society, the poetic interpreter of bygone views of life, the philosopher, the historian, the æsthete and the critic, the master of languages, the mythologist and the myth poet, who was the first to include all these wonderful and beautiful products of primitive times in a single ring, upon which he engraved the runic characters of his thoughts--what a wealth of knowledge must wagner have accumulated and commanded, in order to have become all that! and yet this mass of material was just as powerless to impede the action of his will as a matter of detail--however attractive--was to draw his purpose from its path. for the exceptional character of such conduct to be appreciated fully, it should be compared with that of goethe,--he who, as a student and as a sage, resembled nothing so much as a huge river-basin, which does not pour all its water into the sea, but spends as much of it on its way there, and at its various twists and turns, as it ultimately disgorges at its mouth. true, a nature like goethe's not only has, but also engenders, more pleasure than any other; there is more mildness and noble profligacy in it; whereas the tenor and tempo of wagner's power at times provoke both fear and flight. but let him fear who will, we shall only be the more courageous, in that we shall be permitted to come face to face with a hero who, in regard to modern culture, "has never learned the meaning of fear." but neither has he learned to look for repose in history and philosophy, nor to derive those subtle influences from their study which tend to paralyse action or to soften a man unduly. neither the creative nor the militant artist in him was ever diverted from his purpose by learning and culture. the moment his constructive powers direct him, history becomes yielding clay in his hands. his attitude towards it then differs from that of every scholar, and more nearly resembles the relation of the ancient greek to his myths; that is to say, his subject is something he may fashion, and about which he may write verses. he will naturally do this with love and a certain becoming reverence, but with the sovereign right of the creator notwithstanding. and precisely because history is more supple and more variable than a dream to him, he can invest the most individual case with the characteristics of a whole age, and thus attain to a vividness of narrative of which historians are quite incapable. in what work of art, of any kind, has the body and soul of the middle ages ever been so thoroughly depicted as in lohengrin? and will not the meistersingers continue to acquaint men, even in the remotest ages to come, with the nature of germany's soul? will they not do more than acquaint men of it? will they not represent its very ripest fruit--the fruit of that spirit which ever wishes to reform and not to overthrow, and which, despite the broad couch of comfort on which it lies, has not forgotten how to endure the noblest discomfort when a worthy and novel deed has to be accomplished? and it is just to this kind of discomfort that wagner always felt himself drawn by his study of history and philosophy: in them he not only found arms and coats of mail, but what he felt in their presence above all was the inspiring breath which is wafted from the graves of all great fighters, sufferers, and thinkers. nothing distinguishes a man more from the general pattern of the age than the use he makes of history and philosophy. according to present views, the former seems to have been allotted the duty of giving modern man breathing-time, in the midst of his panting and strenuous scurry towards his goal, so that he may, for a space, imagine he has slipped his leash. what montaigne was as an individual amid the turmoil of the reformation--that is to say, a creature inwardly coming to peace with himself, serenely secluded in himself and taking breath, as his best reader, shakespeare, understood him,--this is what history is to the modern spirit to-day. the fact that the germans, for a whole century, have devoted themselves more particularly to the study of history, only tends to prove that they are the stemming, retarding, and becalming force in the activity of modern society--a circumstance which some, of course, will place to their credit. on the whole, however, it is a dangerous symptom when the mind of a nation turns with preference to the study of the past. it is a sign of flagging strength, of decline and degeneration; it denotes that its people are perilously near to falling victims to the first fever that may happen to be rif--the political fever among others. now, in the history of modern thought, our scholars are an example of this condition of weakness as opposed to all reformative and revolutionary activity. the mission they have chosen is not of the noblest; they have rather been content to secure smug happiness for their kind, and little more. every independent and manly step leaves them halting in the background, although it by no means outstrips history. for the latter is possessed of vastly different powers, which only natures like wagner have any notion of; but it requires to be written in a much more earnest and severe spirit, by much more vigorous students, and with much less optimism than has been the case hitherto. in fact, it requires to be treated quite differently from the way german scholars have treated it until now. in all their works there is a continual desire to embellish, to submit and to be content, while the course of events invariably seems to have their approbation. it is rather the exception for one of them to imply that he is satisfied only because things might have turned out worse; for most of them believe, almost as a matter of course, that everything has been for the best simply because it has only happened once. were history not always a disguised christian theodicy, were it written with more justice and fervent feeling, it would be the very last thing on earth to be made to serve the purpose it now serves, namely, that of an opiate against everything subversive and novel. and philosophy is in the same plight: all that the majority demand of it is, that it may teach them to understand approximate facts--very approximate facts--in order that they may then become adapted to them. and even its noblest exponents press its soporific and comforting powers so strongly to the fore, that all lovers of sleep and of loafing must think that their aim and the aim of philosophy are one. for my part, the most important question philosophy has to decide seems to be, how far things have acquired an unalterable stamp and form, and, once this question has been answered, i think it the duty of philosophy unhesitatingly and courageously to proceed with the task of _improving that part of the world which has been recognised as still susceptible to change_. but genuine philosophers do, as a matter of fact, teach this doctrine themselves, inasmuch as they work at endeavouring to alter the very changeable views of men, and do not keep their opinions to themselves. genuine disciples of genuine philosophies also teach this doctrine; for, like wagner, they understand the art of deriving a more decisive and inflexible will from their master's teaching, rather than an opiate or a sleeping draught. wagner is most philosophical where he is most powerfully active and heroic. it was as a philosopher that he went, not only through the fire of various philosophical systems without fear, but also through the vapours of science and scholarship, while remaining ever true to his highest self. and it was this highest self which exacted _from his versatile spirit works as complete as his were_, which bade him suffer and learn, that he might accomplish such works. iv. the history of the development of culture since the time of the greeks is short enough, when we take into consideration the actual ground it covers, and ignore the periods during which man stood still, went backwards, hesitated or strayed. the hellenising of the world--and to make this possible, the orientalising of hellenism--that double mission of alexander the great, still remains the most important event: the old question whether a foreign civilisation may be transplanted is still the problem that the peoples of modern times are vainly endeavouring to solve. the rhythmic play of those two factors against each other is the force that has determined the course of history heretofore. thus christianity appears, for instance, as a product of oriental antiquity, which was thought out and pursued to its ultimate conclusions by men, with almost intemperate thoroughness. as its influence began to decay, the power of hellenic culture was revived, and we are now experiencing phenomena so strange that they would hang in the air as unsolved problems, if it were not possible, by spanning an enormous gulf of time, to show their relation to analogous phenomena in hellenistic culture. thus, between kant and the eleatics, schopenhauer and empedocles, æschylus and wagner, there is so much relationship, so many things in common, that one is vividly impressed with the very relative nature of all notions of time. it would even seem as if a whole diversity of things were really all of a piece, and that time is only a cloud which makes it hard for our eyes to perceive the oneness of them. in the history of the exact sciences we are perhaps most impressed by the close bond uniting us with the days of alexander and ancient greece. the pendulum of history seems merely to have swung back to that point from which it started when it plunged forth into unknown and mysterious distance. the picture represented by our own times is by no means a new one: to the student of history it must always seem as though he were merely in the presence of an old familiar face, the features of which he recognises. in our time the spirit of greek culture is scattered broadcast. while forces of all kinds are pressing one upon the other, and the fruits of modern art and science are offering themselves as a means of exchange, the pale outline of hellenism is beginning to dawn faintly in the distance. the earth which, up to the present, has been more than adequately orientalised, begins to yearn once more for hellenism. he who wishes to help her in this respect will certainly need to be gifted for speedy action and to have wings on his heels, in order to synthetise the multitudinous and still undiscovered facts of science and the many conflicting divisions of talent so as to reconnoitre and rule the whole enormous field. it is now necessary that a generation of _anti-alexanders_ should arise, endowed with the supreme strength necessary for gathering up, binding together, and joining the individual threads of the fabric, so as to prevent their being scattered to the four winds. the object is not to cut the gordian knot of greek culture after the manner adopted by alexander, and then to leave its frayed ends fluttering in all directions; it is rather to _bind it after it has been loosed_. that is our task to-day. in the person of wagner i recognise one of these anti-alexanders: he rivets and locks together all that is isolated, weak, or in any way defective; if i may be allowed to use a medical expression, he has an _astringent_ power. and in this respect he is one of the greatest civilising forces of his age. he dominates art, religion, and folklore, yet he is the reverse of a polyhistor or of a mere collecting and classifying spirit; for he constructs with the collected material, and breathes life into it, and is a _simplifier of the universe_. we must not be led away from this idea by comparing the general mission which his genius imposed upon him with the much narrower and more immediate one which we are at present in the habit of associating with the name of wagner. he is expected to effect a reform in the theatre world; but even supposing he should succeed in doing this, what would then have been done towards the accomplishment of that higher, more distant mission? but even with this lesser theatrical reform, modern man would also be altered and reformed; for everything is so intimately related in this world, that he who removes even so small a thing as a rivet from the framework shatters and destroys the whole edifice. and what we here assert, with perhaps seeming exaggeration, of wagner's activity would hold equally good of any other genuine reform. it is quite impossible to reinstate the art of drama in its purest and highest form without effecting changes everywhere in the customs of the people, in the state, in education, and in social intercourse. when love and justice have become powerful in one department of life, namely in art, they must, in accordance with the law of their inner being, spread their influence around them, and can no more return to the stiff stillness of their former pupal condition. in order even to realise how far the attitude of the arts towards life is a sign of their decline, and how far our theatres are a disgrace to those who build and visit them, everything must be learnt over again, and that which is usual and commonplace should be regarded as something unusual and complicated. an extraordinary lack of clear judgment, a badly-concealed lust of pleasure, of entertainment at any cost, learned scruples, assumed airs of importance, and trifling with the seriousness of art on the part of those who represent it; brutality of appetite and money-grubbing on the part of promoters; the empty-mindedness and thoughtlessness of society, which only thinks of the people in so far as these serve or thwart its purpose, and which attends theatres and concerts without giving a thought to its duties,--all these things constitute the stifling and deleterious atmosphere of our modern art conditions: when, however, people like our men of culture have grown accustomed to it, they imagine that it is a condition of their healthy existence, and would immediately feel unwell if, for any reason, they were compelled to dispense with it for a while. in point of fact, there is but one speedy way of convincing oneself of the vulgarity, weirdness, and confusion of our theatrical institutions, and that is to compare them with those which once flourished in ancient greece. if we knew nothing about the greeks, it would perhaps be impossible to assail our present conditions at all, and objections made on the large scale conceived for the first time by wagner would have been regarded as the dreams of people who could only be at home in outlandish places. "for men as we now find them," people would have retorted, "art of this modern kind answers the purpose and is fitting--and men have never been different." but they have been very different, and even now there are men who are far from satisfied with the existing state of affairs--the fact of bayreuth alone demonstrates this point. here you will find prepared and initiated spectators, and the emotion of men conscious of being at the very zenith of their happiness, who concentrate their whole being on that happiness in order to strengthen themselves for a higher and more far-reaching purpose. here you will find the most noble self-abnegation on the part of the artist, and the finest of all spectacles--that of a triumphant creator of works which are in themselves an overflowing treasury of artistic triumphs. does it not seem almost like a fairy tale, to be able to come face to face with such a personality? must not they who take any part whatsoever, active or passive, in the proceedings at bayreuth, already feel altered and rejuvenated, and ready to introduce reforms and to effect renovations in other spheres of life? has not a haven been found for all wanderers on high and desert seas, and has not peace settled over the face of the waters? must not he who leaves these spheres of ruling profundity and loneliness for the very differently ordered world with its plains and lower levels, cry continually like isolde: "oh, how could i bear it? how can i still bear it?" and should he be unable to endure his joy and his sorrow, or to keep them egotistically to himself, he will avail himself from that time forward of every opportunity of making them known to all. "where are they who are suffering under the yoke of modern institutions?" he will inquire. "where are my natural allies, with whom i may struggle against the ever waxing and ever more oppressive pretensions of modern erudition?" for at present, at least, we have but one enemy--at present!--and it is that band of æsthetes, to whom the word bayreuth means the completest rout--they have taken no share in the arrangements, they were rather indignant at the whole movement, or else availed themselves effectively of the deaf-ear policy, which has now become the trusty weapon of all very superior opposition. but this proves that their animosity and knavery were ineffectual in destroying wagner's spirit or in hindering the accomplishment of his plans; it proves even more, for it betrays their weakness and the fact that all those who are at present in possession of power will not be able to withstand many more attacks. the time is at hand for those who would conquer and triumph; the vastest empires lie at their mercy, a note of interrogation hangs to the name of all present possessors of power, so far as possession may be said to exist in this respect. thus educational institutions are said to be decaying, and everywhere individuals are to be found who have secretly deserted them. if only it were possible to invite those to open rebellion and public utterances, who even now are thoroughly dissatisfied with the state of affairs in this quarter! if only it were possible to deprive them of their faint heart and lukewarmness! i am convinced that the whole spirit of modern culture would receive its deadliest blow if the tacit support which these natures give it could in any way be cancelled. among scholars, only those would remain loyal to the old order of things who had been infected with the political mania or who were literary hacks in any form whatever. the repulsive organisation which derives its strength from the violence and injustice upon which it relies--that is to say, from the state and society--and which sees its advantage in making the latter ever more evil and unscrupulous,--this structure which without such support would be something feeble and effete, only needs to be despised in order to perish. he who is struggling to spread justice and love among mankind must regard this organisation as the least significant of the obstacles in his way; for he will only encounter his real opponents once he has successfully stormed and conquered modern culture, which is nothing more than their outworks. for us, bayreuth is the consecration of the dawn of the combat. no greater injustice could be done to us than to suppose that we are concerned with art alone, as though it were merely a means of healing or stupefying us, which we make use of in order to rid our consciousness of all the misery that still remains in our midst. in the image of this tragic art work at bayreuth, we see, rather, the struggle of individuals against everything which seems to oppose them with invincible necessity, with power, law, tradition, conduct, and the whole order of things established. individuals cannot choose a better life than that of holding themselves ready to sacrifice themselves and to die in their fight for love and justice. the gaze which the mysterious eye of tragedy vouchsafes us neither lulls nor paralyses. nevertheless, it demands silence of us as long as it keeps us in view; for art does not serve the purposes of war, but is merely with us to improve our hours of respite, before and during the course of the contest,--to improve those few moments when, looking back, yet dreaming of the future, we seem to understand the symbolical, and are carried away into a refreshing reverie when fatigue overtakes us. day and battle dawn together, the sacred shadows vanish, and art is once more far away from us; but the comfort she dispenses is with men from the earliest hour of day, and never leaves them. wherever he turns, the individual realises only too clearly his own shortcomings, his insufficiency and his incompetence; what courage would he have left were he not previously rendered impersonal by this consecration! the greatest of all torments harassing him, the conflicting beliefs and opinions among men, the unreliability of these beliefs and opinions, and the unequal character of men's abilities--all these things make him hanker after art. we cannot be happy so long as everything about us suffers and causes suffering; we cannot be moral so long as the course of human events is determined by violence, treachery, and injustice; we cannot even be wise, so long as the whole of mankind does not compete for wisdom, and does not lead the individual to the most sober and reasonable form of life and knowledge. how, then, would it be possible to endure this feeling of threefold insufficiency if one were not able to recognise something sublime and valuable in one's struggles, strivings, and defeats, if one did not learn from tragedy how to delight in the rhythm of the great passions, and in their victim? art is certainly no teacher or educator of practical conduct: the artist is never in this sense an instructor or adviser; the things after which a tragic hero strives are not necessarily worth striving after. as in a dream so in art, the valuation of things only holds good while we are under its spell. what we, for the time being, regard as so worthy of effort, and what makes us sympathise with the tragic hero when he prefers death to renouncing the object of his desire, this can seldom retain the same value and energy when transferred to everyday life: that is why art is the business of the man who is recreating himself. the strife it reveals to us is a simplification of life's struggle; its problems are abbreviations of the infinitely complicated phenomena of man's actions and volitions. but from this very fact--that it is the reflection, so to speak, of a simpler world, a more rapid solution of the riddle of life--art derives its greatness and indispensability. no one who suffers from life can do without this reflection, just as no one can exist without sleep. the more difficult the science of natural laws becomes, the more fervently we yearn for the image of this simplification, if only for an instant; and the greater becomes the tension between each man's general knowledge of things and his moral and spiritual faculties. art is with us _to prevent the bow from snapping_. the individual must be consecrated to something impersonal--that is the aim of tragedy: he must forget the terrible anxiety which death and time tend to create in him; for at any moment of his life, at any fraction of time in the whole of his span of years, something sacred may cross his path which will amply compensate him for all his struggles and privations. this means having _a sense for the tragic_. and if all mankind must perish some day--and who could question this! --it has been given its highest aim for the future, namely, to increase and to live in such unity that it may confront its final extermination as a whole, with one spirit--with a common sense of the tragic: in this one aim all the ennobling influences of man lie locked; its complete repudiation by humanity would be the saddest blow which the soul of the philanthropist could receive. that is how i feel in the matter! there is but one hope and guarantee for the future of man, and that is _that his sense for the tragic may not die out_. if he ever completely lost it, an agonised cry, the like of which has never been heard, would have to be raised all over the world; for there is no more blessed joy than that which consists in knowing what we know--how tragic thought was born again on earth. for this joy is thoroughly impersonal and general: it is the wild rejoicing of humanity, anent the hidden relationship and progress of all that is human. v. wagner concentrated upon life, past and present, the light of an intelligence strong enough to embrace the most distant regions in its rays. that is why he is a simplifier of the universe; for the simplification of the universe is only possible to him whose eye has been able to master the immensity and wildness of an apparent chaos, and to relate and unite those things which before had lain hopelessly asunder. wagner did this by discovering a connection between two objects which seemed to exist apart from each other as though in separate spheres--that between music and life, and similarly between music and the drama. not that he invented or was the first to create this relationship, for they must always have existed and have been noticeable to all; but, as is usually the case with a great problem, it is like a precious stone which thousands stumble over before one finally picks it up. wagner asked himself the meaning of the fact that an art such as music should have become so very important a feature of the lives of modern men. it is not necessary to think meanly of life in order to suspect a riddle behind this question. on the contrary, when all the great forces of existence are duly considered, and struggling life is regarded as striving mightily after conscious freedom and independence of thought, only then does music seem to be a riddle in this world. should one not answer: music could not have been born in our time? what then does its presence amongst us signify? an accident? a single great artist might certainly be an accident, but the appearance of a whole group of them, such as the history of modern music has to show, a group only once before equalled on earth, that is to say in the time of the greeks,--a circumstance of this sort leads one to think that perhaps necessity rather than accident is at the root of the whole phenomenon. the meaning of this necessity is the riddle which wagner answers. he was the first to recognise an evil which is as widespread as civilisation itself among men; language is everywhere diseased, and the burden of this terrible disease weighs heavily upon the whole of man's development. inasmuch as language has retreated ever more and more from its true province--the expression of strong feelings, which it was once able to convey in all their simplicity--and has always had to strain after the practically impossible achievement of communicating the reverse of feeling, that is to say thought, its strength has become so exhausted by this excessive extension of its duties during the comparatively short period of modern civilisation, that it is no longer able to perform even that function which alone justifies its existence, to wit, the assisting of those who suffer, in communicating with each other concerning the sorrows of existence. man can no longer make his misery known unto others by means of language; hence he cannot really express himself any longer. and under these conditions, which are only vaguely felt at present, language has gradually become a force in itself which with spectral arms coerces and drives humanity where it least wants to go. as soon as they would fain understand one another and unite for a common cause, the craziness of general concepts, and even of the ring of modern words, lays hold of them. the result of this inability to communicate with one another is that every product of their co-operative action bears the stamp of discord, not only because it fails to meet their real needs, but because of the very emptiness of those all-powerful words and notions already mentioned. to the misery already at hand, man thus adds the curse of convention--that is to say, the agreement between words and actions without an agreement between the feelings. just as, during the decline of every art, a point is reached when the morbid accumulation of its means and forms attains to such tyrannical proportions that it oppresses the tender souls of artists and converts these into slaves, so now, in the period of the decline of language, men have become the slaves of words. under this yoke no one is able to show himself as he is, or to express himself artlessly, while only few are able to preserve their individuality in their fight against a culture which thinks to manifest its success, not by the fact that it approaches definite sensations and desires with the view of educating them, but by the fact that it involves the individual in the snare of "definite notions," and teaches him to think correctly: as if there were any value in making a correctly thinking and reasoning being out of man, before one has succeeded in making him a creature that feels correctly. if now the strains of our german masters' music burst upon a mass of mankind sick to this extent, what is really the meaning of these strains? only _correct feeling_, the enemy of all convention, of all artificial estrangement and misunderstandings between man and man: this music signifies a return to nature, and at the same time a purification and remodelling of it; for the need of such a return took shape in the souls of the most loving of men, and, _through their art, nature transformed into love makes its voice heard_. let us regard this as _one_ of wagner's answers to the question, what does music mean in our time? for he has a second. the relation between music and life is not merely that existing between one kind of language and another; it is, besides, the relation between the perfect world of sound and that of sight. regarded merely as a spectacle, and compared with other and earlier manifestations of human life, the existence of modern man is characterised by indescribable indigence and exhaustion, despite the unspeakable garishness at which only the superficial observer rejoices. if one examines a little more closely the impression which this vehement and kaleidoscopic play of colours makes upon one, does not the whole seem to blaze with the shimmer and sparkle of innumerable little stones borrowed from former civilisations? is not everything one sees merely a complex of inharmonious bombast, aped gesticulations, arrogant superficiality?--a ragged suit of motley for the naked and the shivering? a seeming dance of joy enjoined upon a sufferer? airs of overbearing pride assumed by one who is sick to the backbone? and the whole moving with such rapidity and confusion that it is disguised and masked--sordid impotence, devouring dissension, assiduous ennui, dishonest distress! the appearance of present-day humanity is all appearance, and nothing else: in what he now represents man himself has become obscured and concealed; and the vestiges of the creative faculty in art, which still cling to such countries as france and italy, are all concentrated upon this one task of concealing. wherever form is still in demand in society, conversation, literary style, or the relations between governments, men have unconsciously grown to believe that it is adequately met by a kind of agreeable dissimulation, quite the reverse of genuine form conceived as a necessary relation between the proportions of a figure, having no concern whatever with the notions "agreeable" or "disagreeable," simply because it is necessary and not optional. but even where form is not openly exacted by civilised people, there is no greater evidence of this requisite relation of proportions; a striving after the agreeable dissimulation, already referred to, is on the contrary noticeable, though it is never so successful even if it be more eager than in the first instance. how far this dissimulation is _agreeable_ at times, and why it must please everybody to see how modern men at least endeavour to dissemble, every one is in a position to judge, according to, the extent to which he himself may happen to be modern. "only galley slaves know each other," says tasso, "and if we _mistake_ others, it is only out of courtesy, and with the hope that they, in their turn, should mistake us." now, in this world of forms and intentional misunderstandings, what purpose is served by the appearance of souls overflowing with music? they pursue the course of grand and unrestrained rhythm with noble candour--with a passion more than personal; they glow with the mighty and peaceful fire of music, which wells up to the light of day from their unexhausted depths--and all this to what purpose? by means of these souls music gives expression to the longing that it feels for the company of its natural ally, _gymnastics_--that is to say, its necessary form in the order of visible phenomena. in its search and craving for this ally, it becomes the arbiter of the whole visible world and the world of mere lying appearance of the present day. this is wagner's second answer to the question, what is the meaning of music in our times? "help me," he cries to all who have ears to hear, "help me to discover that culture of which my music, as the rediscovered language of correct feeling, seems to foretell the existence. bear in mind that the soul of music now wishes to acquire a body, that, by means of you all, it would find its way to visibleness in movements, deeds, institutions, and customs!" there are some men who understand this summons, and their number will increase; they have also understood, for the first time, what it means to found the state upon music. it is something that the ancient hellenes not only understood but actually insisted upon; and these enlightened creatures would just as soon have sentenced the modern state to death as modern men now condemn the church. the road to such a new though not unprecedented goal would lead to this: that we should be compelled to acknowledge where the worst faults of our educational system lie, and why it has failed hitherto to elevate us out of barbarity: in reality, it lacks the stirring and creative soul of music; its requirements and arrangements are moreover the product of a period in which the music, to which we seem to attach so much importance, had not yet been born. our education is the most antiquated factor of our present conditions, and it is so more precisely in regard to the one new educational force by which it makes men of to-day in advance of those of bygone centuries, or by which it would make them in advance of their remote ancestors, provided only they did not persist so rashly in hurrying forward in meek response to the scourge of the moment. through not having allowed the soul of music to lodge within them, they have no notion of gymnastics in the greek and wagnerian sense; and that is why their creative artists are condemned to despair, as long as they wish to dispense with music as a guide in a new world of visible phenomena. talent may develop as much as may be desired: it either comes too late or too soon, and at all events out of season; for it is in the main superfluous and abortive, just as even the most perfect and the highest products of earlier times which serve modern artists as models are superfluous and abortive, and add not a stone to the edifice already begun. if their innermost consciousness can perceive no new forms, but only the old ones belonging to the past, they may certainly achieve something for history, but not for life; for they are already dead before having expired. he, however, who feels genuine and fruitful life in him, which at present can only be described by the one term "music," could he allow himself to be deceived for one moment into nursing solid hopes by this something which exhausts all its energy in producing figures, forms, and styles? he stands above all such vanities, and as little expects to meet with artistic wonders outside his ideal world of sound as with great writers bred on our effete and discoloured language. rather than lend an ear to illusive consolations, he prefers to turn his unsatisfied gaze stoically upon our modern world, and if his heart be not warm enough to feel pity, let it at least feel bitterness and hate! it were better for him to show anger and scorn than to take cover in spurious contentment or steadily to drug himself, as our "friends of art" are wont to do. but if he can do more than condemn and despise, if he is capable of loving, sympathising, and assisting in the general work of construction, he must still condemn, notwithstanding, in order to prepare the road for his willing soul. in order that music may one day exhort many men to greater piety and make them privy to her highest aims, an end must first be made to the whole of the pleasure-seeking relations which men now enjoy with such a sacred art. behind all our artistic pastimes--theatres, museums, concerts, and the like--that aforementioned "friend of art" is to be found, and he it is who must be suppressed: the favour he now finds at the hands of the state must be changed into oppression; public opinion, which lays such particular stress upon the training of this love of art, must be routed by better judgment. meanwhile we must reckon the _declared enemy of art_ as our best and most useful ally; for the object of his animosity is precisely art as understood by the "friend of art,"--he knows of no other kind! let him be allowed to call our "friend of art" to account for the nonsensical waste of money occasioned by the building of his theatres and public monuments, the engagement of his celebrated singers and actors, and the support of his utterly useless schools of art and picture-galleries--to say nothing of all the energy, time, and money which every family squanders in pretended "artistic interests." neither hunger nor satiety is to be noticed here, but a dead-and-alive game is played--with the semblance of each, a game invented by the idle desire to produce an effect and to deceive others. or, worse still, art is taken more or less seriously, and then it is itself expected to provoke a kind of hunger and craving, and to fulfil its mission in this artificially induced excitement. it is as if people were afraid of sinking beneath the weight of their loathing and dulness, and invoked every conceivable evil spirit to scare them and drive them about like wild cattle. men hanker after pain, anger, hate, the flush of passion, sudden flight, and breathless suspense, and they appeal to the artist as the conjurer of this demoniacal host. in the spiritual economy of our cultured classes art has become a spurious or ignominious and undignified need--a nonentity or a something evil. the superior and more uncommon artist must be in the throes of a bewildering nightmare in order to be blind to all this, and like a ghost, diffidently and in a quavering voice, he goes on repeating beautiful words which he declares descend to him from higher spheres, but whose sound he can hear only very indistinctly. the artist who happens to be moulded according to the modern pattern, however, regards the dreamy gropings and hesitating speech of his nobler colleague with contempt, and leads forth the whole brawling mob of assembled passions on a leash in order to let them loose upon modern men as he may think fit. for these modern creatures wish rather to be hunted down, wounded, and torn to shreds, than to live alone with themselves in solitary calm. alone with oneself!--this thought terrifies the modern soul; it is his one anxiety, his one ghastly fear. when i watch the throngs that move and linger about the streets of a very populous town, and notice no other expression in their faces than one of hunted stupor, i can never help commenting to myself upon the misery of their condition. for them all, art exists only that they may be still more wretched, torpid, insensible, or even more flurried and covetous. for _incorrect feeling_ governs and drills them unremittingly, and does not even give them time to become aware of their misery. should they wish to speak, convention whispers their cue to them, and this makes them forget what they originally intended to say; should they desire to understand one another, their comprehension is maimed as though by a spell: they declare that to be their joy which in reality is but their doom, and they proceed to collaborate in wilfully bringing about their own damnation. thus they have become transformed into perfectly and absolutely different creatures, and reduced to the state of abject slaves of incorrect feeling. vi. i shall only give two instances showing how utterly the sentiment of our time has been perverted, and how completely unconscious the present age is of this perversion. formerly financiers were looked down upon with honest scorn, even though they were recognised as needful; for it was generally admitted that every society must have its viscera. now, however, they are the ruling power in the soul of modern humanity, for they constitute the most covetous portion thereof. in former times people were warned especially against taking the day or the moment too seriously: the _nil admirari_ was recommended and the care of things eternal. now there is but one kind of seriousness left in the modern mind, and it is limited to the news brought by the newspaper and the telegraph. improve each shining hour, turn it to some account and judge it as quickly as possible!--one would think modern men had but one virtue left--presence of mind. unfortunately, it much more closely resembles the omnipresence of disgusting and insatiable cupidity, and spying inquisitiveness become universal. for the question is whether mind is _present at all to-day_;--but we shall leave this problem for future judges to solve; they, at least, are bound to pass modern men through a sieve. but that this age is vulgar, even we can see now, and it is so because it reveres precisely what nobler ages contemned. if, therefore, it loots all the treasures of bygone wit and wisdom, and struts about in this richest of rich garments, it only proves its sinister consciousness of its own vulgarity in so doing; for it does not don this garb for warmth, but merely in order to mystify its surroundings. the desire to dissemble and to conceal himself seems stronger than the need of protection from the cold in modern man. thus scholars and philosophers of the age do not have recourse to indian and greek wisdom in order to become wise and peaceful: the only purpose of their work seems to be to earn them a fictitious reputation for learning in their own time. the naturalists endeavour to classify the animal outbreaks of violence, ruse and revenge, in the present relations between nations and individual men, as immutable laws of nature. historians are anxiously engaged in proving that every age has its own particular right and special conditions,--with the view of preparing the groundwork of an apology for the day that is to come, when our generation will be called to judgment. the science of government, of race, of commerce, and of jurisprudence, all have that _preparatorily apologetic_ character now; yea, it even seems as though the small amount of intellect which still remains active to-day, and is not used up by the great mechanism of gain and power, has as its sole task the defending--and excusing of the present against what accusers? one asks, surprised. against its own bad conscience. and at this point we plainly discern the task assigned to modern art--that of stupefying or intoxicating, of lulling to sleep or bewildering. by hook or by crook to make conscience unconscious! to assist the modern soul over the sensation of guilt, not to lead it back to innocence! and this for the space of moments only! to defend men against themselves, that their inmost heart may be silenced, that they may turn a deaf ear to its voice! the souls of those few who really feel the utter ignominy of this mission and its terrible humiliation of art, must be filled to the brim with sorrow and pity, but also with a new and overpowering yearning. he who would fain emancipate art, and reinstall its sanctity, now desecrated, must first have freed himself from all contact with modern souls; only as an innocent being himself can he hope to discover the innocence of art, for he must be ready to perform the stupendous tasks of self-purification and self-consecration. if he succeeded, if he were ever able to address men from out his enfranchised soul and by means of his emancipated art, he would then find himself exposed to the greatest of dangers and involved in the most appalling of struggles. man would prefer to tear him and his art to pieces, rather than acknowledge that he must die of shame in presence of them. it is just possible that the emancipation of art is the only ray of hope illuminating the future, an event intended only for a few isolated souls, while the many remain satisfied to gaze into the flickering and smoking flame of their art and can endure to do so. for they do not _want_ to be enlightened, but dazzled. they rather _hate_ light--more particularly when it is thrown on themselves. that is why they evade the new messenger of light; but he follows them--the love which gave him birth compels him to follow them and to reduce them to submission. "ye must go through my mysteries," he cries to them; "ye need to be purified and shaken by them. dare to submit to this for your own salvation, and abandon the gloomily lighted corner of life and nature which alone seems familiar to you. i lead you into a kingdom which is also real, and when i lead you out of my cell into your daylight, ye will be able to judge which life is more real, which, in fact, is day and which night. nature is much richer, more powerful, more blessed and more terrible below the surface; ye cannot divine this from the way in which ye live. o that ye yourselves could learn to become natural again, and then suffer yourselves to be transformed through nature, and into her, by the charm of my ardour and love!" it is the voice _of wagner's art_ which thus appeals to men. and that we, the children of a wretched age, should be the first to hear it, shows how deserving of pity this age must be: it shows, moreover, that real music is of a piece with fate and primitive law; for it is quite impossible to attribute its presence amongst us precisely at the present time to empty and meaningless chance. had wagner been an accident, he would certainly have been crushed by the superior strength of the other elements in the midst of which he was placed, out in the coming of wagner there seems to have been a necessity which both justifies it and makes it glorious. observed from its earliest beginnings, the development of his art constitutes a most magnificent spectacle, and--even though it was attended with great suffering--reason, law, and intention mark its course throughout. under the charm of such a spectacle the observer will be led to take pleasure even in this painful development itself, and will regard it as fortunate. he will see how everything necessarily contributes to the welfare and benefit of talent and a nature foreordained, however severe the trials may be through which it may have to pass. he will realise how every danger gives it more heart, and every triumph more prudence; how it partakes of poison and sorrow and thrives upon them. the mockery and perversity of the surrounding world only goad and spur it on the more. should it happen to go astray, it but returns from its wanderings and exile loaded with the most precious spoil; should it chance to slumber, "it does but recoup its strength." it tempers the body itself and makes it tougher; it does not consume life, however long it lives; it rules over man like a pinioned passion, and allows him to fly just in the nick of time, when his foot has grown weary in the sand or has been lacerated by the stones on his way. it can do nought else but impart; every one must share in its work, and it is no stinted giver. when it is repulsed it is but more prodigal in its gifts; ill used by those it favours, it does but reward them with the richest treasures it possesses,--and, according to the oldest and most recent experience, its favoured ones have never been quite worthy of its gifts. that is why the nature foreordained, through which music expresses itself to this world of appearance, is one of the most mysterious things under the sun--an abyss in which strength and goodness lie united, a bridge between self and non-self. who would undertake to name the object of its existence with any certainty?--even supposing the sort of purpose which it would be likely to have could be divined at all. but a most blessed foreboding leads one to ask whether it is possible for the grandest things to exist for the purpose of the meanest, the greatest talent for the benefit of the smallest, the loftiest virtue and holiness for the sake of the defective and faulty? should real music make itself heard, because mankind of all creatures _least deserves to hear it, though it perhaps need it most_? if one ponder over the transcendental and wonderful character of this possibility, and turn from these considerations to look back on life, a light will then be seen to ascend, however dark and misty it may have seemed a moment before. vii. it is quite impossible otherwise: the observer who is confronted with a nature such as wagner's must, willy-nilly, turn his eyes from time to time upon himself, upon his insignificance and frailty, and ask himself, what concern is this of thine? why, pray, art thou there at all? maybe he will find no answer to these questions, in which case he will remain estranged and confounded, face to face with his own personality. let it then suffice him that he has experienced this feeling; let the fact _that he has felt strange and embarrassed in the presence of his own soul_ be the answer to his question for it is precisely by virtue of this feeling that he shows the most powerful manifestation of life in wagner--the very kernel of his strength--that demoniacal _magnetism_ and gift of imparting oneself to others, which is peculiar to his nature, and by which it not only conveys itself to other beings, but also absorbs other beings into itself; thus attaining to its greatness by giving and by taking. as the observer is apparently subject to wagner's exuberant and prodigally generous nature, he partakes of its strength, and thereby becomes formidable _through him and to him_. and every one who critically examines himself knows that a certain mysterious antagonism is necessary to the process of mutual study. should his art lead us to experience all that falls to the lot of a soul engaged upon a journey, _i.e._ feeling sympathy with others and sharing their fate, and seeing the world through hundreds of different eyes, we are then able, from such a distance, and under such strange influences, to contemplate him, once we have lived his life. we then feel with the utmost certainty that in wagner the whole visible world desires to be spiritualised, absorbed, and lost in the world of sounds. in wagner, too, the world of sounds seeks to manifest itself as a phenomenon for the sight; it seeks, as it were, to incarnate itself. his art always leads him into two distinct directions, from the world of the play of sound to the mysterious and yet related world of visible things, and _vice versâ_. he is continually forced--and the observer with him--to re-translate the visible into spiritual and primeval life, and likewise to perceive the most hidden interstices of the soul as something concrete and to lend it a visible body. this constitutes the nature of the _dithyrambic dramatist_, if the meaning given to the term includes also the actor, the poet, and the musician; a conception necessarily borrowed from æschylus and the contemporary greek artists--the only perfect examples of the dithyrambic dramatist before wagner. if attempts have been made to trace the most wonderful developments to inner obstacles or deficiencies, if, for instance, in goethe's case, poetry was merely the refuge of a foiled talent for painting; if one may speak of schiller's dramas as of vulgar eloquence directed into uncommon channels; if wagner himself tries to account for the development of music among the germans by showing that, inasmuch as they are devoid of the entrancing stimulus of a natural gift for singing, they were compelled to take up instrumental music with the same profound seriousness as that with which their reformers took up christianity,--if, on the same principle, it were sought to associate wagner's development with an inner barrier of the same kind, it would then be necessary to recognise in him a primitive dramatic talent, which had to renounce all possibility of satisfying its needs by the quickest and most methods, and which found its salvation and its means of expression in drawing all arts to it for one great dramatic display. but then one would also have to assume that the most powerful musician, owing to his despair at having to appeal to people who were either only semi-musical or not musical at all, violently opened a road for himself to the other arts, in order to acquire that capacity for diversely communicating himself to others, by which he compelled them to understand him, by which he compelled the masses to understand him. however the development of the born dramatist may be pictured, in his ultimate expression he is a being free from all inner barriers and voids: the real, emancipated artist cannot help himself, he must think in the spirit of all the arts at once, as the mediator and intercessor between apparently separated spheres, the one who reinstalls the unity and wholeness of the artistic faculty, which cannot be divined or reasoned out, but can only be revealed by deeds themselves. but he in whose presence this deed is performed will be overcome by its gruesome and seductive charm: in a flash he will be confronted with a power which cancels both resistance and reason, and makes every detail of life appear irrational and incomprehensible. carried away from himself, he seems to be suspended in a mysterious fiery element; he ceases to understand himself, the standard of everything has fallen from his hands; everything stereotyped and fixed begins to totter; every object seems to acquire a strange colour and to tell us its tale by means of new symbols;--one would need to be a plato in order to discover, amid this confusion of delight and fear, how he accomplishes the feat, and to say to the dramatist: "should a man come into our midst who possessed sufficient knowledge to simulate or imitate anything, we would honour him as something wonderful and holy; we would even anoint him and adorn his brow with a sacred diadem; but we would urge him to leave our circle for another, notwithstanding." it may be that a member of the platonic community would have been able to chasten himself to such conduct: we, however, who live in a very different community, long for, and earnestly desire, the charmer to come to us, although we may fear him already,--and we only desire his presence in order that our society and the mischievous reason and might of which it is the incarnation may be confuted. a state of human civilisation, of human society, morality, order, and general organisation which would be able to dispense with the services of an imitative artist or mimic, is not perhaps so utterly inconceivable; but this perhaps is probably the most daring that has ever been posited, and is equivalent to the gravest expression of doubt. the only man who ought to be at liberty to speak of such a possibility is he who could beget, and have the presentiment of, the highest phase of all that is to come, and who then, like faust, would either be obliged to turn blind, or be permitted to become so. for we have no right to this blindness; whereas plato, after he had cast that one glance into the ideal hellenic, had the right to be blind to all hellenism. for this reason, we others are in much greater need of art; because it was _in the presence of the realistic that our eyes began to see_, and we require the complete dramatist in order that he may relieve us, if only for an hour or so, of the insufferable tension arising from our knowledge of the chasm which lies between our capabilities and the duties we have to perform. with him we ascend to the highest pinnacle of feeling, and only then do we fancy we have returned to nature's unbounded freedom, to the actual realm of liberty. from this point of vantage we can see ourselves and our fellows emerge as something sublime from an immense mirage, and we see the deep meaning in our struggles, in our victories and defeats; we begin to find pleasure in the rhythm of passion and in its victim in the hero's every footfall we distinguish the hollow echo of death, and in its proximity we realise the greatest charm of life: thus transformed into tragic men, we return again to life with comfort in our souls. we are conscious of a new feeling of security, as if we had found a road leading out of the greatest dangers, excesses, and ecstasies, back to the limited and the familiar: there where our relations with our fellows seem to partake of a superior benevolence, and are at all events more noble than they were. for here, everything seemingly serious and needful, which appears to lead to a definite goal, resembles only detached fragments when compared with the path we ourselves have trodden, even in our dreams,--detached fragments of that complete and grand experience whereof we cannot even think without a thrill. yes, we shall even fall into danger and be tempted to take life too easily, simply because in art we were in such deadly earnest concerning it, as wagner says somewhere anent certain incidents in his own life. for if we who are but the spectators and not the creators of this display of dithyrambic dramatic art, can almost imagine a dream to be more real than the actual experiences of our wakeful hours, how much more keenly must the creator realise this contrast! there he stands amid all the clamorous appeals and importunities of the day, and of the necessities of life; in the midst of society and state--and as what does he stand there? maybe he is the only wakeful one, the only being really and truly conscious, among a host of confused and tormented sleepers, among a multitude of deluded and suffering people. he may even feel like a victim of chronic insomnia, and fancy himself obliged to bring his clear, sleepless, and conscious life into touch with somnambulists and ghostly well-intentioned creatures. thus everything that others regard as commonplace strikes him as weird, and he is tempted to meet the whole phenomenon with haughty mockery. but how peculiarly this feeling is crossed, when another force happens to join his quivering pride, the craving of the heights for the depths, the affectionate yearning for earth, for happiness and for fellowship--then, when he thinks of all he misses as a hermit-creator, he feels as though he ought to descend to the earth like a god, and bear all that is weak, human, and lost, "in fiery arms up to heaven," so as to obtain love and no longer worship only, and to be able to lose himself completely in his love. but it is just this contradiction which is the miraculous fact in the soul of the dithyrambic dramatist, and if his nature can be understood at all, surely it must be here. for his creative moments in art occur when the antagonism between his feelings is at its height and when his proud astonishment and wonder at the world combine with the ardent desire to approach that same world as a lover. the glances he then bends towards the earth are always rays of sunlight which "draw up water," form mist, and gather storm-clouds. _clear-sighted and prudent, loving and unselfish at the same time_, his glance is projected downwards; and all things that are illumined by this double ray of light, nature conjures to discharge their strength, to reveal their most hidden secret, and this through bashfulness. it is more than a mere figure of speech to say that he surprised nature with that glance, that he caught her naked; that is why she would conceal her shame by seeming precisely the reverse. what has hitherto been invisible, the inner life, seeks its salvation in the region of the visible; what has hitherto been only visible, repairs to the dark ocean of sound: _thus nature, in trying to conceal herself, unveils the character of her contradictions_. in a dance, wild, rhythmic and gliding, and with ecstatic movements, the born dramatist makes known something of what is going on within him, of what is taking place in nature: the dithyrambic quality of his movements speaks just as eloquently of quivering comprehension and of powerful penetration as of the approach of love and self-renunciation. intoxicated speech follows the course of this rhythm; melody resounds coupled with speech, and in its turn melody projects its sparks into the realm of images and ideas. a dream-apparition, like and unlike the image of nature and her wooer, hovers forward; it condenses into more human shapes; it spreads out in response to its heroically triumphant will, and to a most delicious collapse and cessation of will:--thus tragedy is born; thus life is presented with its grandest knowledge--that of tragic thought; thus, at last, the greatest charmer and benefactor among mortals--the dithyrambic dramatist--is evolved. viii. wagner's actual life--that is to say, the gradual evolution of the dithyrambic dramatist in him--was at the same time an uninterrupted struggle with himself, a struggle which never ceased until his evolution was complete. his fight with the opposing world was grim and ghastly, only because it was this same world--this alluring enemy--which he heard speaking out of his own heart, and because he nourished a violent demon in his breast--the demon of resistance. when the ruling idea of his life gained ascendancy over his mind--the idea that drama is, of all arts, the one that can exercise the greatest amount of influence over the world--it aroused the most active emotions in his whole being. it gave him no very clear or luminous decision, at first, as to what was to be done and desired in the future; for the idea then appeared merely as a form of temptation--that is to say, as the expression of his gloomy, selfish, and insatiable will, eager for _power and glory_. influence--the greatest amount of influence--how? over whom?--these were henceforward the questions and problems which did not cease to engage his head and his heart. he wished to conquer and triumph as no other artist had ever done before, and, if possible, to reach that height of tyrannical omnipotence at one stroke for which all his instincts secretly craved. with a jealous and cautious eye, he took stock of everything successful, and examined with special care all that upon which this influence might be brought to bear. with the magic sight of the dramatist, which scans souls as easily as the most familiar book, he scrutinised the nature of the spectator and the listener, and although he was often perturbed by the discoveries he made, he very quickly found means wherewith he could enthral them. these means were ever within his reach: everything that moved him deeply he desired and could also produce; at every stage in his career he understood just as much of his predecessors as he himself was able to create, and he never doubted that he would be able to do what they had done. in this respect his nature is perhaps more presumptuous even than goethe's, despite the fact that the latter said of himself: "i always thought i had mastered everything; and even had i been crowned king, i should have regarded the honour as thoroughly deserved." wagner's ability, his taste and his aspirations--all of which have ever been as closely related as key to lock--grew and attained to freedom together; but there was a time when it was not so. what did he care about the feeble but noble and egotistically lonely feeling which that friend of art fosters, who, blessed with a literary and æsthetic education, takes his stand far from the common mob! but those violent spiritual tempests which are created by the crowd when under the influence of certain climactic passages of dramatic song, that sudden bewildering ecstasy of the emotions, thoroughly honest and selfless--they were but echoes of his own experiences and sensations, and filled him with glowing hope for the greatest possible power and effect. thus he recognised _grand opera_ as the means whereby he might express his ruling thoughts; towards it his passions impelled him; his eyes turned in the direction of its home. the larger portion of his life, his most daring wanderings, and his plans, studies, sojourns, and acquaintances are only to be explained by an appeal to these passions and the opposition of the outside world, which the poor, restless, passionately ingenuous german artist had to face. another artist than he knew better how to become master of this calling, and now that it has gradually become known by means of what ingenious artifices of all kinds meyerbeer succeeded in preparing and achieving every one of his great successes, and how scrupulously the sequence of "effects" was taken into account in the opera itself, people will begin to understand how bitterly wagner was mortified when his eyes were opened to the tricks of the _métier_ which were indispensable to a great public success. i doubt whether there has ever been another great artist in history who began his career with such extraordinary illusions and who so unsuspectingly and sincerely fell in with the most revolting form of artistic trickery. and yet the way in which he proceeded partook of greatness and was therefore extraordinarily fruitful. for when he perceived his error, despair made him understand the meaning of modern success, of the modern public, and the whole prevaricating spirit of modern art. and while becoming the critic of "effect," indications of his own purification began to quiver through him. it seems as if from that time forward the spirit of music spoke to him with an unprecedented spiritual charm. as though he had just risen from a long illness and had for the first time gone into the open, he scarcely trusted his hand and his eye, and seemed to grope along his way. thus it was an almost delightful surprise to him to find that he was still a musician and an artist, and perhaps then only for the first time. every subsequent stage in wagner's development may be distinguished thus, that the two fundamental powers of his nature drew ever more closely together: the aversion of the one to the other lessened, the higher self no longer condescended to serve its more violent and baser brother; it loved him and felt compelled to serve him. the tenderest and purest thing is ultimately--that is to say, at the highest stage of its evolution--always associated with the mightiest; the storming instincts pursue their course as before, but along different roads, in the direction of the higher self; and this in its turn descends to earth and finds its likeness in everything earthly. if it were possible, on this principle, to speak of the final aims and unravelments of that evolution, and to remain intelligible, it might also be possible to discover the graphic terms with which to describe the long interval preceding that last development; but i doubt whether the first achievement is possible at all, and do not therefore attempt the second. the limits of the interval separating the preceding and the subsequent ages will be described historically in two sentences: wagner was the _revolutionist of society_; wagner recognised the only artistic element that ever existed hitherto--_the poetry of the people_. the ruling idea which in a new form and mightier than it had ever been, obsessed wagner, after he had overcome his share of despair and repentance, led him to both conclusions. influence, the greatest possible amount of influence to be exercised by means of the stage! --but over whom? he shuddered when he thought of those whom he had, until then, sought to influence. his experience led him to realise the utterly ignoble position which art and the artist adorn; how a callous and hard-hearted community that calls itself the good, but which is really the evil, reckons art and the artist among its slavish retinue, and keeps them both in order to minister to its need of deception. modern art is a luxury; he saw this, and understood that it must stand or fall with the luxurious society of which it forms but a part. this society had but one idea, to use its power as hard-heartedly and as craftily as possible in order to render the impotent--the people--ever more and more serviceable, base and unpopular, and to rear the modern workman out of them. it also robbed them of the greatest and purest things which their deepest needs led them to create, and through which they meekly expressed the genuine and unique art within their soul: their myths, songs, dances, and their discoveries in the department of language, in order to distil therefrom a voluptuous antidote against the fatigue and boredom of its existence--modern art. how this society came into being, how it learned to draw new strength for itself from the seemingly antagonistic spheres of power, and how, for instance, decaying christianity allowed itself to be used, under the cover of half measures and subterfuges, as a shield against the masses and as a support of this society and its possessions, and finally how science and men of learning pliantly consented to become its drudges--all this wagner traced through the ages, only to be convulsed with loathing at the end of his researches. through his compassion for the people, he became a revolutionist. from that time forward he loved them and longed for them, as he longed for his art; for, alas! in them alone, in this fast disappearing, scarcely recognisable body, artificially held aloof, he now saw the only spectators and listeners worthy and fit for the power of his masterpieces, as he pictured them. thus his thoughts concentrated themselves upon the question, how do the people come into being? how are they resuscitated? he always found but one answer: if a large number of people were afflicted with the sorrow that afflicted him, that number would constitute the people, he said to himself. and where the same sorrow leads to the same impulses and desires, similar satisfaction would necessarily be sought, and the same pleasure found in this satisfaction. if he inquired into what it was that most consoled him and revived his spirits in his sorrow, what it was that succeeded best in counteracting his affliction, it was with joyful certainty that he discovered this force only in music and myth, the latter of which he had already recognised as the people's creation and their language of distress. it seemed to him that the origin of music must be similar, though perhaps more mysterious. in both of these elements he steeped and healed his soul; they constituted his most urgent need:--in this way he was able to ascertain how like his sorrow was to that of the people, when they came into being, and how they must arise anew if _many wagners_ are going to appear. what part did myth and music play in modern society, wherever they had not been actually sacrificed to it? they shared very much the same fate, a fact which only tends to prove their close relationship: myth had been sadly debased and usurped by idle tales and stories; completely divested of its earnest and sacred virility, it was transformed into the plaything and pleasing bauble of children and women of the afflicted people. music had kept itself alive among the poor, the simple, and the isolated; the german musician had not succeeded in adapting himself to the luxurious traffic of the arts; he himself had become a fairy tale full of monsters and mysteries, full of the most touching omens and auguries--a helpless questioner, something bewitched and in need of rescue. here the artist distinctly heard the command that concerned him alone--to recast myth and make it virile, to break the spell lying over music and to make music speak: he felt his strength for drama liberated at one stroke, and the foundation of his sway established over the hitherto undiscovered province lying between myth and music. his new masterpiece, which included all the most powerful, effective, and entrancing forces that he knew, he now laid before men with this great and painfully cutting question: "where are ye all who suffer and think as i do? where is that number of souls that i wish to see become a people, that ye may share the same joys and comforts with me? in your joy ye will reveal your misery to me." these were his questions in tannhauser and lohengrin, in these operas he looked about him for his equals--the anchorite yearned for the number. but what were his feelings withal? nobody answered him. nobody had understood his question. not that everybody remained silent: on the contrary, answers were given to thousands of questions which he had never put; people gossipped about the new masterpieces as though they had only been composed for the express purpose of supplying subjects for conversation. the whole mania of æsthetic scribbling and small talk overtook the germans like a pestilence, and with that lack of modesty which characterises both german scholars and german journalists, people began measuring, and generally meddling with, these masterpieces, as well as with the person of the artist. wagner tried to help the comprehension of his question by writing about it; but this only led to fresh confusion and more uproar,--for a musician who writes and thinks was, at that time, a thing unknown. the cry arose: "he is a theorist who wishes to remould art with his far-fetched notions--stone him!" wagner was stunned: his question was not understood, his need not felt; his masterpieces seemed a message addressed only to the deaf and blind; his people--an hallucination. he staggered and vacillated. the feasibility of a complete upheaval of all things then suggested itself to him, and he no longer shrank from the thought: possibly, beyond this revolution and dissolution, there might be a chance of a new hope; on the other hand, there might not. but, in any case, would not complete annihilation be better than the wretched existing state of affairs? not very long afterwards, he was a political exile in dire distress. and then only, with this terrible change in his environment and in his soul, there begins that period of the great man's life over which as a golden reflection there is stretched the splendour of highest mastery. now at last the genius of dithyrambic drama doffs its last disguise. he is isolated; the age seems empty to him; he ceases to hope; and his all-embracing glance descend once more into the deep, and finds the bottom, there he sees suffering in the nature of things, and henceforward, having become more impersonal, he accepts his portion of sorrow more calmly. the desire for great power which was but the inheritance of earlier conditions is now directed wholly into the channel of creative art; through his art he now speaks only to himself, and no longer to a public or to a people, and strives to lend this intimate conversation all the distinction and other qualities in keeping with such a mighty dialogue. during the preceding period things had been different with his art; then he had concerned himself, too, albeit with refinement and subtlety, with immediate effects: that artistic production was also meant as a question, and it ought to have called forth an immediate reply. and how often did wagner not try to make his meaning clearer to those he questioned! in view of their inexperience in having questions put to them, he tried to meet them half way and to conform with older artistic notions and means of expression. when he feared that arguments couched in his own terms would only meet with failure, he had tried to persuade and to put his question in a language half strange to himself though familiar to his listeners. now there was nothing to induce him to continue this indulgence: all he desired now was to come to terms with himself, to think of the nature of the world in dramatic actions, and to philosophise in music; _what desires_ he still possessed turned in the direction of the _latest philosophical views_. he who is worthy of knowing what took place in him at that time or what questions were thrashed out in the darkest holy of holies in his soul--and not many are worthy of knowing all this--must hear, observe, and experience tristan and isolde, the real _opus metaphysicum_ of all art, a work upon which rests the broken look of a dying man with his insatiable and sweet craving for the secrets of night and death, far away from life which throws a horribly spectral morning light, sharply, upon all that is evil, delusive, and sundering: moreover, a drama austere in the severity of its form, overpowering in its simple grandeur, and in harmony with the secret of which it treats--lying dead in the midst of life, being one in two. and yet there is something still more wonderful than this work, and that is the artist himself, the man who, shortly after he had accomplished it, was able to create a picture of life so full of clashing colours as the meistersingers of nürnberg, and who in both of these compositions seems merely to have refreshed and equipped himself for the task of completing at his ease that gigantic edifice in four parts which he had long ago planned and begun--the ultimate result of all his meditations and poetical flights for over twenty years, his bayreuth masterpiece, the ring of the nibelung! he who marvels at the rapid succession of the two operas, tristan and the meistersingers, has failed to understand one important side of the life and nature of all great germans: he does not know the peculiar soil out of which that essentially german gaiety, which characterised luther, beethoven, and wagner, can grow, the gaiety which other nations quite fail to understand and which even seems to be missing in the germans of to-day--that clear golden and thoroughly fermented mixture of simplicity, deeply discriminating love, observation, and roguishness which wagner has dispensed, as the most precious of drinks, to all those who have suffered deeply through life, but who nevertheless return to it with the smile of convalescents. and, as he also turned upon the world the eyes of one reconciled, he was more filled with rage and disgust than with sorrow, and more prone to renounce the love of power than to shrink in awe from it. as he thus silently furthered his greatest work and gradually laid score upon score, something happened which caused him to stop and listen: _friends_ were coming, a kind of subterranean movement of many souls approached with a message for him--it was still far from being the people that constituted this movement and which wished to bear him news, but it may have been the nucleus and first living source of a really human community which would reach perfection in some age still remote. for the present they only brought him the warrant that his great work could be entrusted to the care and charge of faithful men, men who would watch and be worthy to watch over this most magnificent of all legacies to posterity. in the love of friends his outlook began to glow with brighter colours; his noblest care--the care that his work should be accomplished and should find a refuge before the evening of his life--was not his only preoccupation, something occurred which he could only understand as a symbol: it was as much as a new comfort and a new token of happiness to him. a great german war caused him to open his eyes, and he observed that those very germans whom he considered so thoroughly degenerate and so inferior to the high standard of real teutonism, of which he had formed an ideal both from self-knowledge and the conscientious study of other great germans in history; he observed that those very germans were, in the midst of terrible circumstances, exhibiting two virtues of the highest order--simple bravery and prudence; and with his heart bounding with delight he conceived the hope that he might not be the last german, and that some day a greater power would perhaps stand by his works than that devoted yet meagre one consisting of his little band of friends--a power able to guard it during that long period preceding its future glory, as the masterpiece of this future. perhaps it was not possible to steel this belief permanently against doubt, more particularly when it sought to rise to hopes of immediate results: suffice it that he derived a tremendous spur from his environment, which constantly reminded him of a lofty duty ever to be fulfilled. his work would not have been complete had he handed it to the world only in the form of silent manuscript. he must make known to the world what it could not guess in regard to his productions, what was his alone to reveal--the new style for the execution and presentation of his works, so that he might set that example which nobody else could set, and thus establish a _tradition of style_, not on paper, not by means of signs, but through impressions made upon the very souls of men. this duty had become all the more pressing with him, seeing that precisely in regard to the style of their execution his other works had meanwhile succumbed to the most insufferable and absurd of fates: they were famous and admired, yet no one manifested the slightest sign of indignation when they were mishandled. for, strange to say, whereas he renounced ever more and more the hope of success among his contemporaries, owing to his all too thorough knowledge of them, and disclaimed all desire for power, both "success" and "power" came to him, or at least everybody told him so. it was in vain that he made repeated attempts to expose, with the utmost clearness, how worthless and humiliating such successes were to him: people were so unused to seeing an artist able to differentiate at all between the effects of his works that even his most solemn protests were never entirely trusted. once he had perceived the relationship existing between our system of theatres and their success, and the men of his time, his soul ceased to be attracted by the stage at all. he had no further concern with æsthetic ecstasies and the exultation of excited crowds, and he must even have felt angry to see his art being gulped down indiscriminately by the yawning abyss of boredom and the insatiable love of distraction. how flat and pointless every effect proved under these circumstances--more especially as it was much more a case of having to minister to one quite insatiable than of cloying the hunger of a starving man--wagner began to perceive from the following repeated experience: everybody, even the performers and promoters, regarded his art as nothing more nor less than any other kind of stage-music, and quite in keeping with the repulsive style of traditional opera; thanks to the efforts of cultivated conductors, his works were even cut and hacked about, until, after they had been bereft of all their spirit, they were held to be nearer the professional singer's plane. but when people tried to follow wagner's instructions to the letter, they proceeded so clumsily and timidly that they were not incapable of representing the midnight riot in the second act of the meistersingers by a group of ballet-dancers. they seemed to do all this, however, in perfectly good faith--without the smallest evil intention. wagner's devoted efforts to show, by means of his own example, the correct and complete way of performing his works, and his attempts at training individual singers in the new style, were foiled time after time, owing only to the thoughtlessness and iron tradition that ruled all around him. moreover, he was always induced to concern himself with that class of theatricals which he most thoroughly loathed. had not even goethe, in his time, once grown tired of attending the rehearsals of his iphigenia? "i suffer unspeakably," he explained, "when i have to tumble about with these spectres, which never seem to act as they should." meanwhile wagner's "success" in the kind of drama which he most disliked steadily increased; so much so, indeed, that the largest theatres began to subsist almost entirely upon the receipts which wagner's art, in the guise of operas, brought into them. this growing passion on the part of the theatre-going public bewildered even some of wagner's friends; but this man who had endured so much, had still to endure the bitterest pain of all--he had to see his friends intoxicated with his "successes" and "triumphs" everywhere where his highest ideal was openly belied and shattered. it seemed almost as though a people otherwise earnest and reflecting had decided to maintain an attitude of systematic levity only towards its most serious artist, and to make him the privileged recipient of all the vulgarity, thoughtlessness, clumsiness, and malice of which the german nature is capable. when, therefore, during the german war, a current of greater magnanimity and freedom seemed to run through every one, wagner remembered the duty to which he had pledged himself, namely, to rescue his greatest work from those successes and affronts which were so largely due to misunderstandings, and to present it in his most personal rhythm as an example for all times. thus he conceived _the idea of bayreuth_. in the wake of that current of better feeling already referred to, he expected to notice an enhanced sense of duty even among those with whom he wished to entrust his most precious possession. out of this two-fold duty, that event took shape which, like a glow of strange sunlight, will illumine the few years that lie behind and before us, and was designed to bless that distant and problematic future which to our time and to the men of our time can be little more than a riddle or a horror, but which to the few who are allowed to assist in its realisation is a foretaste of coming joy, a foretaste of love in a higher sphere, through which they know themselves to be blessed, blessing and fruitful, far beyond their span of years; and which to wagner himself is but a cloud of distress, care, meditation, and grief, a fresh passionate outbreak of antagonistic elements, but all bathed in the starlight of _selfless fidelity_, and changed by this light into indescribable joy. it scarcely need be said that it is the breath of tragedy that fills the lungs of the world. and every one whose innermost soul has a presentiment of this, every one unto whom the yoke of tragic deception concerning the aim of life, the distortion and shattering of intentions, renunciation and purification through love, are not unknown things, must be conscious of a vague reminiscence of wagner's own heroic life, in the masterpieces with which the great man now presents us. we shall feel as though siegfried from some place far away were relating his deeds to us: the most blissful of touching recollections are always draped in the deep mourning of waning summer, when all nature lies still in the sable twilight. ix. all those to whom the thought of wagner's development as a man may have caused pain will find it both restful and healing to reflect upon what he was as an artist, and to observe how his ability and daring attained to such a high degree of independence. if art mean only the faculty of communicating to others what one has oneself experienced, and if every work of art confutes itself which does not succeed in making itself understood, then wagner's greatness as an artist would certainly lie in the almost demoniacal power of his nature to communicate with others, to express itself in all languages at once, and to make known its most intimate and personal experience with the greatest amount of distinctness possible. his appearance in the history of art resembles nothing so much as a volcanic eruption of the united artistic faculties of nature herself, after mankind had grown to regard the practice of a special art as a necessary rule. it is therefore a somewhat moot point whether he ought to be classified as a poet, a painter, or a musician, even using each these words in its widest sense, or whether a new word ought not to be invented in order to describe him. wagner's _poetic_ ability is shown by his thinking in visible and actual facts, and not in ideas; that is to say, he thinks mythically, as the people have always done. no particular thought lies at the bottom of a myth, as the children of an artificial culture would have us believe; but it is in itself a thought: it conveys an idea of the world, but through the medium of a chain of events, actions, and pains. the ring of the nibelung is a huge system of thought without the usual abstractness of the latter. it were perhaps possible for a philosopher to present us with its exact equivalent in pure thought, and to purge it of all pictures drawn from life, and of all living actions, in which case we should be in possession of the same thing portrayed in two completely different forms--the one for the people, and the other for the very reverse of the people; that is to say, men of theory. but wagner makes no appeal to this last class, for the man of theory can know as little of poetry or myth as the deaf man can know of music; both of them being conscious only of movements which seem meaningless to them. it is impossible to appreciate either one of these completely different forms from the standpoint of the other: as long as the poet's spell is upon one, one thinks with him just as though one were merely a feeling, seeing, and hearing creature; the conclusions thus reached are merely the result of the association of the phenomena one sees, and are therefore not logical but actual causalities. if, therefore, the heroes and gods of mythical dramas, as understood by wagner, were to express themselves plainly in words, there would be a danger (inasmuch as the language of words might tend to awaken the theoretical side in us) of our finding ourselves transported from the world of myth to the world of ideas, and the result would be not only that we should fail to understand with greater ease, but that we should probably not understand at all. wagner thus forced language back to a more primeval stage in its development a stage at which it was almost free of the abstract element, and was still poetry, imagery, and feeling; the fearlessness with which wagner undertook this formidable mission shows how imperatively he was led by the spirit of poetry, as one who must follow whithersoever his phantom leader may direct him. every word in these dramas ought to allow of being sung, and gods and heroes should make them their own--that was the task which wagner set his literary faculty. any other person in like circumstances would have given up all hope; for our language seems almost too old and decrepit to allow of one's exacting what wagner exacted from it; and yet, when he smote the rock, he brought forth an abundant flow. precisely owing to the fact that he loved his language and exacted a great deal from it, wagner suffered more than any other german through its decay and enfeeblement, from its manifold losses and mutilations of form, from its unwieldy particles and clumsy construction, and from its unmusical auxiliary verbs. all these are things which have entered the language through sin and depravity. on the other hand, he was exceedingly proud to record the number of primitive and vigorous factors still extant in the current speech; and in the tonic strength of its roots he recognised quite a wonderful affinity and relation to real music, a quality which distinguished it from the highly evolved and artificially rhetorical latin languages. wagner's poetry is eloquent of his affection for the german language, and there is a heartiness and candour in his treatment of it which are scarcely to be met with in any other german writer, save perhaps goethe. forcibleness of diction, daring brevity, power and variety in rhythm, a remarkable wealth of strong and striking words, simplicity in construction, an almost unique inventive faculty in regard to fluctuations of feeling and presentiment, and therewithal a perfectly pure and overflowing stream of colloquialisms--these are the qualities that have to be enumerated, and even then the greatest and most wonderful of all is omitted. whoever reads two such poems as tristan and the meistersingers consecutively will be just as astonished and doubtful in regard to the language as to the music; for he will wonder how it could have been possible for a creative spirit to dominate so perfectly two worlds as different in form, colour, and arrangement, as in soul. this is the most wonderful achievement of wagner's talent; for the ability to give every work its own linguistic stamp and to find a fresh body and a new sound for every thought is a task which only the great master can successfully accomplish. where this rarest of all powers manifests itself, adverse criticism can be but petty and fruitless which confines itself to attacks upon certain excesses and eccentricities in the treatment, or upon the more frequent obscurities of expression and ambiguity of thought. moreover, what seemed to electrify and scandalise those who were most bitter in their criticism was not so much the language as the spirit of the wagnerian operas--that is to say, his whole manner of feeling and suffering. it were well to wait until these very critics have acquired another spirit themselves; they will then also speak a different tongue, and, by that time, it seems to me things will go better with the german language than they do at present. in the first place, however, no one who studies wagner the poet and word-painter should forget that none of his dramas were meant to be read, and that it would therefore be unjust to judge them from the same standpoint as the spoken drama. the latter plays upon the feelings by means of words and ideas, and in this respect it is under the dominion of the laws of rhetoric. but in real life passion is seldom eloquent: in spoken drama it perforce must be, in order to be able to express itself at all. when, however, the language of a people is already in a state of decay and deterioration, the word-dramatist is tempted to impart an undue proportion of new colour and form both to his medium and to his thoughts; he would elevate the language in order to make it a vehicle capable of conveying lofty feelings, and by so doing he runs the risk of becoming abstruse. by means of sublime phrases and conceits he likewise tries to invest passion with some nobility, and thereby runs yet another risk, that of appearing false and artificial. for in real life passions do not speak in sentences, and the poetical element often draws suspicion upon their genuineness when it departs too palpably from reality. now wagner, who was the first to detect the essential feeling in spoken drama, presents every dramatic action threefold: in a word, in a gesture, and in a sound. for, as a matter of fact, music succeeds in conveying the deepest emotions of the dramatic performers direct to the spectators, and while these see the evidence of the actors' states of soul in their bearing and movements, a third though more feeble confirmation of these states, translated into conscious will, quickly follows in the form of the spoken word. all these effects fulfil their purpose simultaneously, without disturbing one another in the least, and urge the spectator to a completely new understanding and sympathy, just as if his senses had suddenly grown more spiritual and his spirit more sensual, and as if everything which seeks an outlet in him, and which makes him thirst for knowledge, were free and joyful in exultant perception. because every essential factor in a wagnerian drama is conveyed to the spectator with the utmost clearness, illumined and permeated throughout by music as by an internal flame, their author can dispense with the expedients usually employed by the writer of the spoken play in order to lend light and warmth to the action. the whole of the dramatist's stock in trade could be more simple, and the architect's sense of rhythm could once more dare to manifest itself in the general proportions of the edifice; for there was no more need of "the deliberate confusion and involved variety of styles, whereby the ordinary playwright strove in the interests of his work to produce that feeling of wonder and thrilling suspense which he ultimately enhanced to one of delighted amazement. the impression of ideal distance and height was no more to be induced by means of tricks and artifices. language withdrew itself from the length and breadth of rhetoric into the strong confines of the speech of the feelings, and although the actor spoke much less about all he did and felt in the performance, his innermost sentiments, which the ordinary playwright had hitherto ignored for fear of being undramatic, was now able to drive the spectators to passionate sympathy, while the accompanying language of gestures could be restricted to the most delicate modulations. now, when passions are rendered in song, they require rather more time than when conveyed by speech; music prolongs, so to speak, the duration of the feeling, from which it follows, as a rule, that the actor who is also a singer must overcome the extremely unplastic animation from which spoken drama suffers. he feels himself incited all the more to a certain nobility of bearing, because music envelopes his feelings in a purer atmosphere, and thus brings them closer to beauty. the extraordinary tasks which wagner set his actors and singers will provoke rivalry between them for ages to come, in the personification of each of his heroes with the greatest possible amount of clearness, perfection, and fidelity, according to that perfect incorporation already typified by the music of drama. following this leader, the eye of the plastic artist will ultimately behold the marvels of another visible world, which, previous to him, was seen for the first time only by the creator of such works as the ring of the nibelung--that creator of highest rank, who, like æschylus, points the way to a coming art. must not jealousy awaken the greatest talent, if the plastic artist ever compares the effect of his productions with that of wagnerian music, in which there is so much pure and sunny happiness that he who hears it feels as though all previous music had been but an alien, faltering, and constrained language; as though in the past it had been but a thing to sport with in the presence of those who were not deserving of serious treatment, or a thing with which to train and instruct those who were not even deserving of play? in the case of this earlier kind of music, the joy we always experience while listening to wagner's compositions is ours only for a short space of time, and it would then seem as though it were overtaken by certain rare moments of forgetfulness, during which it appears to be communing with its inner self and directing its eyes upwards, like raphael's cecilia, away from the listeners and from all those who demand distraction, happiness, or instruction from it. in general it may be said of wagner the musician, that he endowed everything in nature which hitherto had had no wish to speak with the power of speech: he refuses to admit that anything must be dumb, and, resorting to the dawn, the forest, the mist, the cliffs, the hills, the thrill of night and the moonlight, he observes a desire common to them all--they too wish to sing their own melody. if the philosopher says it is will that struggles for existence in animate and inanimate nature, the musician adds: and this will wherever it manifests itself, yearns for a melodious existence. before wagner's time, music for the most part moved in narrow limits: it concerned itself with the permanent states of man, or with what the greeks call ethos. and only with beethoven did it begin to find the language of pathos, of passionate will, and of the dramatic occurrences in the souls of men. formerly, what people desired was to interpret a mood, a stolid, merry, reverential, or penitential state of mind, by means of music; the object was, by means of a certain striking uniformity of treatment and the prolonged duration of this uniformity, to compel the listener to grasp the meaning of the music and to impose its mood upon him. to all such interpretations of mood or atmosphere, distinct and particular forms of treatment were necessary: others were established by convention. the question of length was left to the discretion of the musician, whose aim was not only to put the listener into a certain mood, but also to avoid rendering that mood monotonous by unduly protracting it. a further stage was reached when the interpretations of contrasted moods were made to follow one upon the other, and the charm of light and shade was discovered; and yet another step was made when the same piece of music was allowed to contain a contrast of the ethos--for instance, the contest between a male and a female theme. all these, however, are crude and primitive stages in the development of music. the fear of passion suggested the first rule, and the fear of monotony the second; all depth of feeling and any excess thereof were regarded as "unethical." once, however, the art of the ethos had repeatedly been made to ring all the changes on the moods and situations which convention had decreed as suitable, despite the most astounding resourcefulness on the part of its masters, its powers were exhausted. beethoven was the first to make music speak a new language--till then forbidden--the language of passion; but as his art was based upon the laws and conventions of the ethos, and had to attempt to justify itself in regard to them, his artistic development was beset with peculiar difficulties and obscurities. an inner dramatic factor--and every passion pursues a dramatic course--struggled to obtain a new form, but the traditional scheme of "mood music" stood in its way, and protested--almost after the manner in which morality opposes innovations and immorality. it almost seemed, therefore, as if beethoven had set himself the contradictory task of expressing pathos in the terms of the ethos. this view does not, however, apply to beethoven's latest and greatest works; for he really did succeed in discovering a novel method of expressing the grand and vaulting arch of passion. he merely selected certain portions of its curve; imparted these with the utmost clearness to his listeners, and then left it to them to divine its whole span. viewed superficially, the new form seemed rather like an aggregation of several musical compositions, of which every one appeared to represent a sustained situation, but was in reality but a momentary stage in the dramatic course of a passion. the listener might think that he was hearing the old "mood" music over again, except that he failed to grasp the relation of the various parts to one another, and these no longer conformed with the canon of the law. even among minor musicians, there flourished a certain contempt for the rule which enjoined harmony in the general construction of a composition and the sequence of the parts in their works still remained arbitrary. then, owing to a misunderstanding, the discovery of the majestic treatment of passion led back to the use of the single movement with an optional setting, and the tension between the parts thus ceased completely. that is why the symphony, as beethoven understood it, is such a wonderfully obscure production, more especially when, here and there, it makes faltering attempts at rendering beethoven's pathos. the means ill befit the intention, and the intention is, on the whole, not sufficiently clear to the listener, because it was never really clear, even in the mind of the composer. but the very injunction that something definite must be imparted, and that this must be done as distinctly as possible, becomes ever more and more essential, the higher, more difficult, and more exacting the class of work happens to be. that is why all wagner's efforts were concentrated upon the one object of discovering those means which best served the purpose of _distinctness_, and to this end it was above all necessary for him to emancipate himself from all the prejudices and claims of the old "mood" music, and to give his compositions--the musical interpretations of feelings and passion--a perfectly unequivocal mode of expression. if we now turn to what he has achieved, we see that his services to music are practically equal in rank to those which that sculptor-inventor rendered to sculpture who introduced "sculpture in the round." all previous music seems stiff and uncertain when compared with wagner's, just as though it were ashamed and did not wish to be inspected from all sides. with the most consummate skill and precision, wagner avails himself of every degree and colour in the realm of feeling; without the slightest hesitation or fear of its escaping him, he seizes upon the most delicate, rarest, and mildest emotion, and holds it fast, as though it had hardened at his touch, despite the fact that it may seem like the frailest butterfly to every one else. his music is never vague or dreamy; everything that is allowed to speak through it, whether it be of man or of nature, has a strictly individual passion; storm and fire acquire the ruling power of a personal will in his hands. over all the clamouring characters and the clash of their passions, over the whole torrent of contrasts, an almighty and symphonic understanding hovers with perfect serenity, and continually produces concord out of war. taken as a whole, wagner's music is a reflex of the world as it was understood by the great ephesian poet--that is to say, a harmony resulting from strife, as the union of justice and enmity. i admire the ability which could describe the grand line of universal passion out of a confusion of passions which all seem to be striking out in different directions: the fact that this was a possible achievement i find demonstrated in every individual act of a wagnerian drama, which describes the individual history of various characters side by side with a general history of the whole company. even at the very beginning we know we are watching a host of cross currents dominated by one great violent stream; and though at first this stream moves unsteadily over hidden reefs, and the torrent seems to be torn asunder as if it were travelling towards different points, gradually we perceive the central and general movement growing stronger and more rapid, the convulsive fury of the contending waters is converted into one broad, steady, and terrible flow in the direction of an unknown goal; and suddenly, at the end, the whole flood in all its breadth plunges into the depths, rejoicing demoniacally over the abyss and all its uproar. wagner is never more himself than when he is overwhelmed with difficulties and can exercise power on a large scale with all the joy of a law-giver. to bring restless and contending masses into simple rhythmic movement, and to exercise one will over a bewildering host of claims and desires--these are the tasks for which he feels he was born, and in the performance of which he finds freedom. and he never loses his breath withal, nor does he ever reach his goal panting. he strove just as persistently to impose the severest laws upon himself as to lighten the burden of others in this respect. life and art weigh heavily upon him when he cannot play wit their most difficult questions. if one considers the relation between the melody of song and that of speech, one will perceive how he sought to adopt as his natural model the pitch, strength, and tempo of the passionate man's voice in order to transform it into art; and if one further considers the task of introducing this singing passion into the general symphonic order of music, one gets some idea of the stupendous difficulties he had to overcome. in this behalf, his inventiveness in small things as in great, his omniscience and industry are such, that at the sight of one of wagner's scores one is almost led to believe that no real work or effort had ever existed before his time. it seems almost as if he too could have said, in regard to the hardships of art, that the real virtue of the dramatist lies in self-renunciation. but he would probably have added, there is but one kind of hardship--that of the artist who is not yet free: virtue and goodness are trivial accomplishments. viewing him generally as an artist, and calling to mind a more famous type, we see that wagner is not at all unlike demosthenes: in him also we have the terrible earnestness of purpose and that strong prehensile mind which always obtains a complete grasp of a thing; in him, too, we have the hand's quick clutch and the grip as of iron. like demosthenes, he conceals his art or compels one to forget it by the peremptory way he calls attention to the subject he treats; and yet, like his great predecessor, he is the last and greatest of a whole line of artist-minds, and therefore has more to conceal than his forerunners: his art acts like nature, like nature recovered and restored. unlike all previous musicians, there is nothing bombastic about him; for the former did not mind playing at times with their art, and making an exhibition of their virtuosity. one associates wagner's art neither with interest nor with diversion, nor with wagner himself and art in general. all one is conscious of is of the great _necessity_ of it all. no one will ever be able to appreciate what severity evenness of will, and self-control the artist required during his development, in order, at his zenith, to be able to do the necessary thing joyfully and freely. let it suffice if we can appreciate how, in some respects, his music, with a certain cruelty towards itself, determines to subserve the course of the drama, which is as unrelenting as fate, whereas in reality his art was ever thirsting for a free ramble in the open and over the wilderness. x. an artist who has this empire over himself subjugates all other artists, even though he may not particularly desire to do so. for him alone there lies no danger or stemming-force in those he has subjugated--his friends and his adherents; whereas the weaker natures who learn to rely on their friends pay for this reliance by forfeiting their independence. it is very wonderful to observe how carefully, throughout his life, wagner avoided anything in the nature of heading a party, notwithstanding the fact that at the close of every phase in his career a circle of adherents formed, presumably with the view of holding him fast to his latest development he always succeeded, however, in wringing himself free from them, and never allowed himself to be bound; for not only was the ground he covered too vast for one alone to keep abreast of him with any ease, but his way was so exceptionally steep that the most devoted would have lost his breath. at almost every stage in wagner's progress his friends would have liked to preach to him, and his enemies would fain have done so too--but for other reasons. had the purity of his artist's nature been one degree less decided than it was, he would have attained much earlier than he actually did to the leading position in the artistic and musical world of his time. true, he has reached this now, but in a much higher sense, seeing that every performance to be witnessed in any department of art makes its obeisance, so to speak, before the judgment-stool of his genius and of his artistic temperament. he has overcome the most refractory of his contemporaries; there is not one gifted musician among them but in his innermost heart would willingly listen to him, and find wagner's compositions more worth listening to than his own and all other musical productions taken together. many who wish, by hook or by crook, to make their mark, even wrestle with wagner's secret charm, and unconsciously throw in their lot with the older masters, preferring to ascribe their "independence" to schubert or handel rather than to wagner. but in vain! thanks to their very efforts in contending against the dictates of their own consciences, they become ever meaner and smaller artists; they ruin their own natures by forcing themselves to tolerate undesirable allies and friends and in spite of all these sacrifices, they still find perhaps in their dreams, that their ear turns attentively to wagner. these adversaries are to be pitied: they imagine they lose a great deal when they lose themselves, but here they are mistaken. albeit it is obviously all one to wagner whether musicians compose in his style, or whether they compose at all, he even does his utmost to dissipate the belief that a school of composers should now necessarily follow in his wake; though, in so far as he exercises a direct influence upon musicians, he does indeed try to instruct them concerning the art of grand execution. in his opinion, the evolution of art seems to have reached that stage when the honest endeavour to become an able and masterly exponent or interpreter is ever so much more worth talking about than the longing to be a creator at all costs. for, at the present stage of art, universal creating has this fatal result, that inasmuch as it encourages a much larger output, it tends to exhaust the means and artifices of genius by everyday use, and thus to reduce the real grandeur of its effect. even that which is good in art is superfluous and detrimental when it proceeds from the imitation of what is best. wagnerian ends and means are of one piece: to perceive this, all that is required is honesty in art matters, and it would be dishonest to adopt his means in order to apply them to other and less significant ends. if, therefore, wagner declines to live on amid a multitude of creative musicians, he is only the more desirous of imposing upon all men of talent the new duty of joining him in seeking the _law of style for dramatic performances_. he deeply feels the need of establishing a _traditional style_ for his art, by means of which his work may continue to live from one age to another in a pure form, until it reaches that _future_ which its creator ordained for it. wagner is impelled by an undaunted longing to make known everything relating to that foundation of a style, mentioned above, and, accordingly, everything relating to the continuance of his art. to make his work--as schopenhauer would say--a sacred depository and the real fruit of his life, as well as the inheritance of mankind, and to store it for the benefit of a posterity better able to appreciate it,--these were _the supreme objects_ of his life, and for these he bore that crown of thorns which, one day, will shoot forth leaves of bay. like the insect which, in its last form, concentrates all its energies upon the one object of finding a safe depository for its eggs and of ensuring the future welfare of its posthumous brood,--then only to die content, so wagner strove with equal determination to find a place of security for his works. this subject, which took precedence of all others with him, constantly incited him to new discoveries; and these he sought ever more and more at the spring of his demoniacal gift of communicability, the more distinctly he saw himself in conflict with an age that was both perverse and unwilling to lend him its ear. gradually however, even this same age began to mark his indefatigable efforts, to respond to his subtle advances, and to turn its ear to him. whenever a small or a great opportunity arose, however far away, which suggested to wagner a means wherewith to explain his thoughts, he availed himself of it: he thought his thoughts anew into every fresh set of circumstances, and would make them speak out of the most paltry bodily form. whenever a soul only half capable of comprehending him opened itself to him, he never failed to implant his seed in it. he saw hope in things which caused the average dispassionate observer merely to shrug his shoulders; and he erred again and again, only so as to be able to carry his point against that same observer. just as the sage, in reality, mixes with living men only for the purpose of increasing his store of knowledge, so the artist would almost seem to be unable to associate with his contemporaries at all, unless they be such as can help him towards making his work eternal. he cannot be loved otherwise than with the love of this eternity, and thus he is conscious only of one kind of hatred directed at him, the hatred which would demolish the bridges bearing his art into the future. the pupils wagner educated for his own purpose, the individual musicians and actors whom he advised and whose ear he corrected and improved, the small and large orchestras he led, the towns which witnessed him earnestly fulfilling the duties of us calling, the princes and ladies who half boastfully and half lovingly participated in the framing of his plans, the various european countries to which he temporarily belonged as the judge and evil conscience of their arts,--everything gradually became the echo of his thought and of his indefatigable efforts to attain to fruitfulness in the future. although this echo often sounded so discordant as to confuse him, still the tremendous power of his voice repeatedly crying out into the world must in the end call forth reverberations, and it will soon be impossible to be deaf to him or to misunderstand him. it is this reflected sound which even now causes the art-institutions of modern men to shake: every time the breath of his spirit blew into these coverts, all that was overripe or withered fell to the ground; but the general increase of scepticism in all directions speaks more eloquently than all this trembling. nobody any longer dares to predict where wagner's influence may not unexpectedly break out. he is quite unable to divorce the salvation of art from any other salvation or damnation: wherever modern life conceals a danger, he, with the discriminating eye of mistrust, perceives a danger threatening art. in his imagination he pulls the edifice of modern civilisation to pieces, and allows nothing rotten, no unsound timber-work to escape: if in the process he should happen to encounter weather-tight walls or anything like solid foundations, he immediately casts about for means wherewith he can convert them into bulwarks and shelters for his art. he lives like a fugitive, whose will is not to preserve his own life, but to keep a secret--like an unhappy woman who does not wish to save her own soul, but that of the child lying in her lap: in short, he lives like sieglinde, "for the sake of love." for life must indeed be full of pain and shame to one who can find neither rest nor shelter in this world, and who must nevertheless appeal to it, exact things from it, contemn it, and still be unable to dispense with the thing contemned,--this really constitutes the wretchedness of the artist of the future, who, unlike the philosopher, cannot prosecute his work alone in the seclusion of a study, but who requires human souls as messengers to this future, public institutions as a guarantee of it, and, as it were, bridges between now and hereafter. his art may not, like the philosopher's, be put aboard the boat of written documents: art needs _capable men_, not letters and notes, to transmit it. over whole periods in wagner's life rings a murmur of distress--his distress at not being able to meet with these capable interpreters before whom he longed to execute examples of his work, instead of being confined to written symbols; before whom he yearned to practise his art, instead of showing a pallid reflection of it to those who read books, and who, generally speaking, therefore are not artists. in wagner the man of letters we see the struggle of a brave fighter, whose right hand has, as it were, been lopped off, and who has continued the contest with his left. in his writings he is always the sufferer, because a temporary and insuperable destiny deprives him of his own and the correct way of conveying his thoughts--that is to say, in the form of apocalyptic and triumphant examples. his writings contain nothing canonical or severe: the canons are to be found in his works as a whole. their literary side represents his attempts to understand the instinct which urged him to create his works and to get a glimpse of himself through them. if he succeeded in transforming his instincts into terms of knowledge, it was always with the hope that the reverse process might take place in the souls of his readers--it was with this intention that he wrote. should it ultimately be proved that, in so doing, wagner attempted the impossible, he would still only share the lot of all those who have meditated deeply on art; and even so he would be ahead of most of them in this, namely, that the strongest instinct for all arts harboured in him. i know of no written æsthetics that give more light than those of wagner; all that can possibly be learnt concerning the origin of a work of art is to be found in them. he is one of the very great, who appeared amongst us a witness, and who is continually improving his testimony and making it ever clearer and freer; even when he stumbles as a scientist, sparks rise from the ground. such tracts as "beethoven," "concerning the art of conducting," "concerning actors and singers," "state and religion," silence all contradiction, and, like sacred reliquaries, impose upon all who approach them a calm, earnest, and reverential regard. others, more particularly the earlier ones, including "opera and drama," excite and agitate one; their rhythm is so uneven that, as prose they are bewildering. their dialectics is constantly interrupted, and their course is more retarded than accelerated by outbursts of feeling; a certain reluctance on the part of the writer seems to hang over them like a pall, just as though the artist were somewhat ashamed of speculative discussions. what the reader who is only imperfectly initiated will probably find most oppressive is the general tone of authoritative dignity which is peculiar to wagner, and which is very difficult to describe: it always strikes me as though wagner were continually _addressing enemies_; for the style of all these tracts more resembles that of the spoken than of the written language, hence they will seem much more intelligible if heard read aloud, in the presence of his enemies, with whom he cannot be on familiar terms, and towards whom he must therefore show some reserve and aloofness. the entrancing passion of his feelings, however, constantly pierces this intentional disguise, and then the stilted and heavy periods, swollen with accessary words, vanish, and his pen dashes off sentences, and even whole pages, which belong to the best in german prose. but even admitting that while he wrote such passages he was addressing friends, and that the shadow of his enemies had been removed for a while, all the friends and enemies that wagner, as a man of letters, has, possess one factor in common, which differentiates them fundamentally from the "people" for whom he worked as an artist. owing to the refining and fruitless nature of their education, they are quite_ devoid of the essential traits of the national character_, and he who would appeal to them must speak in a way which is not of the people--that is to say, after the manner of our best prose-writers and wagner himself; though that he did violence to himself in writing thus is evident. but the strength of that almost maternal instinct of prudence in him, which is ready to make any sacrifice, rather tends to reinstall him among the scholars and men of learning, to whom as a creator he always longed to bid farewell. he submits to the language of culture and all the laws governing its use, though he was the first to recognise its profound insufficiency as a means of communication. for if there is anything that distinguishes his art from every other art of modern times, it is that it no longer speaks the language of any particular caste, and refuses to admit the distinctions "literate" and "illiterate." it thus stands as a contrast to every culture of the renaissance, which to this day still bathes us modern men in its light and shade. inasmuch as wagner's art bears us, from time to time, beyond itself, we are enabled to get a general view of its uniform character: we see goethe and leopardi as the last great stragglers of the italian philologist-poets, faust as the incarnation of a most unpopular problem, in the form of a man of theory thirsting for life; even goethe's song is an imitation of the song of the people rather than a standard set before them to which they are expected to attain, and the poet knew very well how truly he spoke when he seriously assured his adherents: "my compositions cannot become popular; he who hopes and strives to make them so is mistaken." that an art could arise which would be so clear and warm as to flood the base and the poor in spirit with its light, as well as to melt the haughtiness of the learned--such a phenomenon had to be experienced though it could not be guessed. but even in the mind of him who experiences it to-day it must upset all preconceived notions concerning education and culture; to such an one the veil will seem to have been rent in twain that conceals a future in which no highest good or highest joys exist that are not the common property of all. the odium attaching to the word "common" will then be abolished. if presentiment venture thus into the remote future, the discerning eye of all will recognise the dreadful social insanity of our present age, and will no longer blind itself to the dangers besetting an art which seems to have roots only in the remote and distant future, and which allows its burgeoning branches to spread before our gaze when it has not yet revealed the ground from which it draws its sap. how can we protect this homeless art through the ages until that remote future is reached? how can we so dam the flood of a revolution seemingly inevitable everywhere, that the blessed prospect and guarantee of a better future--of a freer human life--shall not also be washed away with all that is destined to perish and deserves to perish? he who asks himself this question shares wagner's care: he will feel himself impelled with wagner to seek those established powers that have the goodwill to protect the noblest passions of man during the period of earthquakes and upheavals. in this sense alone wagner questions the learned through his writings, whether they intend storing his legacy to them--the precious ring of his art--among their other treasures. and even the wonderful confidence which he reposes in the german mind and the aims of german politics seems to me to arise from the fact that he grants the people of the reformation that strength, mildness, and bravery which is necessary in order to divert "the torrent of revolution into the tranquil river-bed of a calmly flowing stream of humanity": and i could almost believe that this and only this is what he meant to express by means of the symbol of his imperial march. as a rule, though, the generous impulses of the creative artist and the extent of his philanthropy are too great for his gaze to be confined within the limits of a single nation. his thoughts, like those of every good and great german, are _more_ than german, and the language of his art does not appeal to particular races but to mankind in general. _ but to the men of the future._ this is the belief that is proper to him; this is his torment and his distinction. no artist, of what past soever, has yet received such a remarkable portion of genius; no one, save him, has ever been obliged to mix this bitterest of ingredients with the drink of nectar to which enthusiasm helped him. it is not as one might expect, the misunderstood and mishandled artist, the fugitive of his age, who adopted this faith in self-defence: success or failure at the hands of his contemporaries was unable either to create or to destroy it whether it glorified or reviled him, he did not belong to this generation: that was the conclusion to which his instincts led him. and the possibility of any generation's ever belonging to him is something which he who disbelieves in wagner can never be made to admit. but even this unbeliever may at least ask, what kind of generation it will be in which wagner will recognise his "people," and in which he will see the type of all those who suffer a common distress, and who wish to escape from it by means of an art common to them all. schiller was certainly more hopeful and sanguine; he did not ask what a future must be like if the instinct of the artist that predicts it prove true; his command to every artist was rather- soar aloft in daring flight out of sight of thine own years! in thy mirror, gleaming bright, glimpse of distant dawn appears. xi. may blessed reason preserve us from ever thinking that mankind will at any time discover a final and ideal order of things, and that happiness will then and ever after beam down upon us uniformly, like the rays of the sun in the tropics. wagner has nothing to do with such a hope; he is no utopian. if he was unable to dispense with the belief in a future, it only meant that he observed certain properties in modern men which he did not hold to be essential to their nature, and which did not seem to him to form any necessary part of their constitution; in fact, which were changeable and transient; and that precisely _owing to these properties_ art would find no home among them, and he himself had to be the precursor and prophet of another epoch. no golden age, no cloudless sky will fall to the portion of those future generations, which his instinct led him to expect, and whose approximate characteristics may be gleaned from the cryptic characters of his art, in so far as it is possible to draw conclusions concerning the nature of any pain from the kind of relief it seeks. nor will superhuman goodness and justice stretch like an everlasting rainbow over this future land. belike this coming generation will, on the whole, seem more evil than the present one--for in good as in evil it will be more straightforward. it is even possible, if its soul were ever able to speak out in full and unembarrassed tones, that it might convulse and terrify us, as though the voice of some hitherto concealed and evil spirit had suddenly cried out in our midst. or how do the following propositions strike our ears?--that passion is better than stoicism or hypocrisy; that straightforwardness, even in evil, is better than losing oneself in trying to observe traditional morality; that the free man is just as able to be good as evil, but that the unemancipated man is a disgrace to nature, and has no share in heavenly or earthly bliss; finally, that all who wish to be free must become so through themselves, and that freedom falls to nobody's lot as a gift from heaven. however harsh and strange these propositions may sound, they are nevertheless reverberations from that future world, which _is verily in need of art_, and which expects genuine pleasure from its presence; they are the language of nature--_reinstated_ even in mankind; they stand for what i have already termed correct feeling as opposed to the incorrect feeling that reigns to-day. but real relief or salvation exists only for nature not for that which is contrary to nature or which arises out of incorrect feeling. when all that is unnatural becomes self-conscious, it desires but one thing--nonentity; the natural thing, on the other hand, yearns to be transfigured through love: the former would fain _not_ be, the latter would fain be _otherwise_. let him who has understood this recall, in the stillness of his soul, the simple themes of wagner's art, in order to be able to ask himself whether it were nature or nature's opposite which sought by means of them to achieve the aims just described. the desperate vagabond finds deliverance from his distress in the compassionate love of a woman who would rather die than be unfaithful to him: the theme of the flying dutchman. the sweet-heart, renouncing all personal happiness, owing to a divine transformation of love into charity, becomes a saint, and saves the soul of her loved one: the theme of tannhauser. the sublimest and highest thing descends a suppliant among men, and will not be questioned whence it came; when, however, the fatal question is put, it sorrowfully returns to its higher life: the theme of lohengrin. the loving soul of a wife, and the people besides, joyfully welcome the new benevolent genius, although the retainers of tradition and custom reject and revile him: the theme of the meistersingers. of two lovers, that do not know they are loved, who believe rather that they are deeply wounded and contemned, each demands of the other that he or she should drink a cup of deadly poison, to all intents and purposes as an expiation of the insult; in reality, however, as the result of an impulse which neither of them understands: through death they wish to escape all possibility of separation or deceit. the supposed approach of death loosens their fettered souls and allows them a short moment of thrilling happiness, just as though they had actually escaped from the present, from illusions and from life: the theme of tristan and isolde. in the ring of the nibelung the tragic hero is a god whose heart yearns for power, and who, since he travels along all roads in search of it, finally binds himself to too many undertakings, loses his freedom, and is ultimately cursed by the curse inseparable from power. he becomes aware of his loss of freedom owing to the fact that he no longer has the means to take possession of the golden ring--that symbol of all earthly power, and also of the greatest dangers to himself as long as it lies in the hands of his enemies. the fear of the end and the twilight of all gods overcomes him, as also the despair at being able only to await the end without opposing it. he is in need of the free and fearless man who, without his advice or assistance--even in a struggle against gods--can accomplish single-handed what is denied to the powers of a god. he fails to see him, and just as a new hope finds shape within him, he must obey the conditions to which he is bound: with his own hand he must murder the thing he most loves, and purest pity must be punished by his sorrow. then he begins to loathe power, which bears evil and bondage in its lap; his will is broken, and he himself begins to hanker for the end that threatens him from afar off. at this juncture something happens which had long been the subject of his most ardent desire: the free and fearless man appears, he rises in opposition to everything accepted and established, his parents atone for having been united by a tie which was antagonistic to the order of nature and usage; they perish, but siegfried survives. and at the sight of his magnificent development and bloom, the loathing leaves wotan's soul, and he follows the hero's history with the eye of fatherly love and anxiety. how he forges his sword, kills the dragon, gets possession of the ring, escapes the craftiest ruse, awakens brunhilda; how the curse abiding in the ring gradually overtakes him; how, faithful in faithfulness, he wounds the thing he most loves, out of love; becomes enveloped in the shadow and cloud of guilt, and, rising out of it more brilliantly than the sun, ultimately goes down, firing the whole heavens with his burning glow and purging the world of the curse,--all this is seen by the god whose sovereign spear was broken in the contest with the freest man, and who lost his power through him, rejoicing greatly over his own defeat: full of sympathy for the triumph and pain of his victor, his eye burning with aching joy looks back upon the last events; he has become free through love, free from himself. and now ask yourselves, ye generation of to-day, was all this composed _for you_? have ye the courage to point up to the stars of the whole of this heavenly dome of beauty and goodness and to say, this is our life, that wagner has transferred to a place beneath the stars? where are the men among you who are able to interpret the divine image of wotan in the light of their own lives, and who can become ever greater while, like him, ye retreat? who among you would renounce power, knowing and having learned that power is evil? where are they who like brunhilda abandon their knowledge to love, and finally rob their lives of the highest wisdom, "afflicted love, deepest sorrow, opened my eyes"? and where are the free and fearless, developing and blossoming in innocent egoism? and where are the siegfrieds, among you? he who questions thus and does so in vain, will find himself compelled to look around him for signs of the future; and should his eye, on reaching an unknown distance, espy just that "people" which his own generation can read out of the signs contained in wagnerian art, he will then also understand _what wagner will mean to this people_--something that he cannot be to all of us, namely, not the prophet of the future, as perhaps he would fain appear to us, but the interpreter and clarifier of the past. this ebook was produced by holden mcgroin. thoughts out of season part one by friedrich nietzsche the complete works of friedrich nietzsche the first complete and authorised english translation edited by dr. oscar levy volume one thoughts out of season part one _________________________________________________________________ of the first impression of one thousand copies this is no. 1 friedrich nietzsche thoughts out of season part i david strauss, the confessor and the writer richard wagner in bayreuth translated by anthony m. ludovici _________________________________________________________________ contents. editorial note nietzsche in england (by the editor) translator's preface to david strauss and richard wagner in reuth david strauss, the confessor and the writer richard wagner in bayreuth _________________________________________________________________ editorial note. _______ the editor begs to call attention to some of the difficulties he had to encounter in preparing this edition of the complete works of friedrich nietzsche. not being english himself, he had to rely upon the help of collaborators, who were somewhat slow in coming forward. they were also few in number; for, in addition to an exact knowledge of the german language, there was also required sympathy and a certain enthusiasm for the startling ideas of the original, as well as a considerable feeling for poetry, and that highest form of it, religious poetry. such a combination--a biblical mind, yet one open to new thoughts--was not easily found. and yet it was necessary to find translators with such a mind, and not be satisfied, as the french are and must be, with a free though elegant version of nietzsche. what is impossible and unnecessary in french--a faithful and powerful rendering of the psalmistic grandeur of nietzsche --is possible and necessary in english, which is a rougher tongue of the teutonic stamp, and moreover, like german, a tongue influenced and formed by an excellent version of the bible. the english would never be satisfied, as bible-ignorant france is, with a nietzsche à l'eau de cologne--they would require the natural, strong, real teacher, and would prefer his outspoken words to the finely-chiselled sentences of the raconteur. it may indeed be safely predicted that once the english people have recovered from the first shock of nietzsche's thoughts, their biblical training will enable them, more than any other nation, to appreciate the deep piety underlying nietzsche's cause. as this cause is a somewhat holy one to the editor himself, he is ready to listen to any suggestions as to improvements of style or sense coming from qualified sources. the editor, during a recent visit to mrs. foerster-nietzsche at weimar, acquired the rights of translation by pointing out to her that in this way her brother's works would not fall into the hands of an ordinary publisher and his staff of translators: he has not, therefore, entered into any engagement with publishers, not even with the present one, which could hinder his task, bind him down to any text found faulty, or make him consent to omissions or the falsification or "sugaring" of the original text to further the sale of the books. he is therefore in a position to give every attention to a work which he considers as of no less importance for the country of his residence than for the country of his birth, as well as for the rest of europe. it is the consciousness of the importance of this work which makes the editor anxious to point out several difficulties to the younger student of nietzsche. the first is, of course, not to begin reading nietzsche at too early an age. while fully admitting that others may be more gifted than himself, the editor begs to state that he began to study nietzsche at the age of twenty-six, and would not have been able to endure the weight of such teaching before that time. secondly, the editor wishes to dissuade the student from beginning the study of nietzsche by reading first of all his most complicated works. not having been properly prepared for them, he will find the zarathustra abstruse, the ecce homo conceited, and the antichrist violent. he should rather begin with the little pamphlet on education, the thoughts out of season, beyond good and evil, or the genealogy of morals. thirdly, the editor wishes to remind students of nietzsche's own advice to them, namely: to read him slowly, to think over what they have read, and not to accept too readily a teaching which they have only half understood. by a too ready acceptance of nietzsche it has come to pass that his enemies are, as a rule, a far superior body of men to those who call themselves his eager and enthusiastic followers. surely it is not every one who is chosen to combat a religion or a morality of two thousand years' standing, first within and then without himself; and whoever feels inclined to do so ought at least to allow his attention to be drawn to the magnitude of his task. _________________________________________________________________ nietzsche in england: an introductory essay by the editor. dear englishmen,--in one of my former writings i have made the remark that the world would have seen neither the great jewish prophets nor the great german thinkers, if the people from among whom these eminent men sprang had not been on the whole such a misguided, and, in their misguidedness, such a tough and stubborn race. the arrow that is to fly far must be discharged from a well distended bow: if, therefore, anything is necessary for greatness, it is a fierce and tenacious opposition, an opposition either of open contempt, or of malicious irony, or of sly silence, or of gross stupidity, an opposition regardless of the wounds it inflicts and of the precious lives it sacrifices, an opposition that nobody would dare to attack who was not prepared, like the spartan of old, to return either with his shield or on it. an opposition so devoid of pity is not as a rule found amongst you, dear and fair-minded englishmen, which may account for the fact that you have neither produced the greatest prophets nor the greatest thinkers in this world. you would never have crucified christ, as did the jews, or driven nietzsche into madness, as did the germans--you would have made nietzsche, on account of his literary faculties, minister of state in a whig ministry, you would have invited jesus christ to your country houses, where he would have been worshipped by all the ladies on account of his long hair and interesting looks, and tolerated by all men as an amusing, if somewhat romantic, foreigner. i know that the current opinion is to the contrary, and that your country is constantly accused, even by yourselves, of its insularity; but i, for my part, have found an almost feminine receptivity amongst you in my endeavour to bring you into contact with some ideas of my native country--a receptivity which, however, has also this in common with that of the female mind, that evidently nothing sticks deeply, but is quickly wiped out by what any other lecturer, or writer, or politician has to tell you. i was prepared for indifference--i was not prepared for receptivity and that benign lady's smile, behind which ladies, like all people who are only clever, usually hide their inward contempt for the foolishness of mere men! i was prepared for abuse, and even a good fight--i was not prepared for an extremely faint-hearted criticism; i did not expect that some of my opponents would be so utterly inexperienced in that most necessary work of literary execution. no, no: give me the germans or the jews for executioners: they can do the hanging properly, while the english hangman is like the russian, to whom, when the rope broke, the half-hanged revolutionary said: "what a country, where they cannot hang a man properly!" what a country, where they do not hang philosophers properly--which would be the proper thing to do to them--but smile at them, drink tea with them, discuss with them, and ask them to contribute to their newspapers! to get to the root of the matter: in spite of many encouraging signs, remarks and criticisms, adverse or benevolent, i do not think i have been very successful in my crusade for that european thought which began with goethe and has found so fine a development in nietzsche. true, i have made many a convert, but amongst them are very undesirable ones, as, for instance, some enterprising publishers, who used to be the toughest disbelievers in england, but who have now come to understand the "value" of the new gospel--but as neither this gospel is exactly christian, nor i, the importer of it, i am not allowed to count my success by the conversion of publishers and sinners, but have to judge it by the more spiritual standard of the quality of the converted. in this respect, i am sorry to say, my success has been a very poor one. as an eager missionary, i have naturally asked myself the reason of my failure. why is there no male audience in england willing to listen to a manly and daring philosophy? why are there no eyes to see, no ears to hear, no hearts to feel, no brains to understand? why is my trumpet, which after all i know how to blow pretty well, unable to shatter the walls of english prejudice against a teacher whose school cannot possibly be avoided by any european with a higher purpose in his breast?... there is plenty of time for thought nowadays for a man who does not allow himself to be drawn into that aimless bustle of pleasure business or politics, which is called modern life because outside that life there is--just as outside those noisy oriental cities-a desert, a calmness, a true and almost majestic leisure, a leisure unprecedented in any age, a leisure in which one may arrive at several conclusions concerning english indifference towards the new thought. first of all, of course, there stands in the way the terrible abuse which nietzsche has poured upon the heads of the innocent britishers. while france and the latin countries, while the orient and india, are within the range of his sympathies, this most outspoken of all philosophers, this prophet and poet-philosopher, cannot find words enough to express his disgust at the illogical, plebeian, shallow, utilitarian englishman. it must certainly be disagreeable to be treated like this, especially when one has a fairly good opinion of one's self; but why do you take it so very, very seriously? did nietzsche, perchance, spare the germans? and aren't you accustomed to criticism on the part of german philosophers? is it not the ancient and time-honoured privilege of the whole range of them from leibnitz to hegel -even of german poets, like goethe and heine -to call you bad names and to use unkind language towards you? has there not always been among the few thinking heads in germany a silent consent and an open contempt for you and your ways; the sort of contempt you yourselves have for the even more anglo-saxon culture of the americans? i candidly confess that in my more german moments i have felt and still feel as the german philosophers do; but i have also my european turns and moods, and then i try to understand you and even excuse you, and take your part against earnest and thinking germany. then i feel like telling the german philosophers that if you, poor fellows, had practised everything they preached, they would have had to renounce the pleasure of abusing you long ago, for there would now be no more englishmen left to abuse! as it is, you have suffered enough on account of the wild german ideals you luckily only partly believed in: for what the german thinker wrote on patient paper in his study, you always had to write the whole world over on tender human skins, black and yellow skins, enveloping ungrateful beings who sometimes had no very high esteem for the depth and beauty of german philosophy. and you have never taken revenge upon the inspired masters of the european thinking-shop, you have never reabused them, you have never complained of their want of worldly wisdom: you have invariably suffered in silence and agony, just as brave and staunch sancho panza used to do. for this is what you are, dear englishmen, and however well you brave, practical, materialistic john bulls and sancho panzas may know this world, however much better you may be able to perceive, to count, to judge, and to weigh things than your ideal german knight: there is an eternal law in this world that the sancho panzas have to follow the don quixotes; for matter has to follow the spirit, even the poor spirit of a german philosopher! so it has been in the past, so it is at present, and so it will be in the future; and you had better prepare yourselves in time for the eventuality. for if nietzsche were nothing else but this customary type of german philosopher, you would again have to pay the bill largely; and it would be very wise on your part to study him: sancho panza may escape a good many sad experiences by knowing his master's weaknesses. but as nietzsche no longer belongs to the quixotic class, as germany seems to emerge with him from her youthful and cranky nebulosity, you will not even have the pleasure of being thrashed in the company of your master: no, you will be thrashed all alone, which is an abominable thing for any right-minded human being. "solamen miseris socios habuisse malorum."[6]* [footnote * : it is a comfort to the afflicted to have companions in their distress.] the second reason for the neglect of nietzsche in this country is that you do not need him yet. and you do not need him yet because you have always possessed the british virtue of not carrying things to extremes, which, according to the german version, is an euphemism for the british want of logic and critical capacity. you have, for instance, never let your religion have any great influence upon your politics, which is something quite abhorrent to the moral german, and makes him so angry about you. for the german sees you acting as a moral and law-abiding christian at home, and as an unscrupulous and machiavellian conqueror abroad; and if he refrains from the reproach of hypocrisy, with which the more stupid continentals invariably charge you, he will certainly call you a "british muddlehead." well, i myself do not take things so seriously as that, for i know that men of action have seldom time to think. it is probably for this reason also that liberty of thought and speech has been granted to you, the law-giver knowing very well all the time that you would be much too busy to use and abuse such extraordinary freedom. anyhow, it might now be time to abuse it just a little bit, and to consider what an extraordinary amalgamation is a christian power with imperialistic ideas. true, there has once before been another christian conquering and colonising empire like yours, that of venice--but these venetians were thinkers compared with you, and smuggled their gospel into the paw of their lion.... why don't you follow their example, in order not to be unnecessarily embarrassed by it in your enterprises abroad? in this manner you could also reconcile the proper germans, who invariably act up to their theories, their christianity, their democratic principles, although, on the other hand, in so doing you would, i quite agree, be most unfaithful to your own traditions, which are of a more democratic character than those of any other european nation. for democracy, as every schoolboy knows, was born in an english cradle: individual liberty, parliamentary institutions, the sovereign rights of the people, are ideas of british origin, and have been propagated from this island over the whole of europe. but as the prophet and his words are very often not honoured in his own country, those ideas have been embraced with much more fervour by other nations than by that in which they originated. the continent of europe has taken the desire for liberty and equality much more seriously than their levelling but also level-headed inventors, and the fervent imagination of france has tried to put into practice all that was quite hidden to the more sober english eye. every one nowadays knows the good and the evil consequences of the french revolution, which swept over the whole of europe, throwing it into a state of unrest, shattering thrones and empires, and everywhere undermining authority and traditional institutions. while this was going on in europe, the originator of the merry game was quietly sitting upon his island smiling broadly at the excitable foreigners across the channel, fishing as much as he could out of the water he himself had so cleverly disturbed, and thus in every way reaping the benefit from the mighty fight for the apple of eros which he himself had thrown amongst them. as i have endeavoured above to draw a parallel between the germans and the jews, i may now be allowed to follow this up with one between the jews and the english. it is a striking parallel, which will specially appeal to those religious souls amongst you who consider themselves the lost tribes of our race (and who are perhaps even more lost than they think),--and it is this: just as the jews have brought christianity into the world, but never accepted it themselves, just as they, in spite of their democratic offspring, have always remained the most conservative, exclusive, aristocratic, and religious people, so have the english never allowed themselves to be intoxicated by the strong drink of the natural equality of men, which they once kindly offered to all europe to quaff; but have, on the contrary, remained the most sober, the most exclusive, the most feudal, the most conservative people of our continent. but because the ravages of democracy have been less felt here than abroad, because there is a good deal of the mediaeval building left standing over here, because things have never been carried to that excess which invariably brings a reaction with it--this reaction has not set in in this country, and no strong desire for the necessity of it, no craving for the counterbalancing influence of a nietzsche, has arisen yet in the british mind. i cannot help pointing out the grave consequences of this backwardness of england, which has arisen from the fact that you have never taken any ideas or theories, not even your own, seriously. democracy, dear englishmen, is like a stream, which all the peoples of europe will have to cross: they will come out of it cleaner, healthier, and stronger, but while the others are already in the water, plunging, puffing, paddling, losing their ground, trying to swim, and even half-drowned, you are still standing on the other side of it, roaring unmercifully about the poor swimmers, screamers, and fighters below,--but one day you will have to cross this same river too, and when you enter it the others will just be out of it, and will laugh at the poor english straggler in their turn! the third and last reason for the icy silence which has greeted nietzsche in this country is due to the fact that he has--as far as i know--no literary ancestor over here whose teachings could have prepared you for him. germany has had her goethe to do this; france her stendhal; in russia we find that fearless curiosity for all problems, which is the sign of a youthful, perhaps too youthful nation; while in spain, on the other hand, we have an old and experienced people, with a long training away from christianity under the dominion of the semitic arabs, who undoubtedly left some of their blood behind,--but i find great difficulty in pointing out any man over here who could serve as a useful guide to the heights of the nietzschean thought, except one, who was not a britisher. i am alluding to a man whose politics you used to consider and whose writings you even now consider as fantastic, but who, like another fantast of his race, may possess the wonderful gift of resurrection, and come again to life amongst you--to benjamin disraeli. the disraelian novels are in my opinion the best and only preparation for those amongst you who wish gradually to become acquainted with the nietzschean spirit. there, and nowhere else, will you find the true heroes of coming times, men of moral courage, men whose failures and successes are alike admirable, men whose noble passions have altogether superseded the ordinary vulgarities and moralities of lower beings, men endowed with an extraordinary imagination, which, however, is balanced by an equal power of reason, men already anointed with a drop of that sacred and noble oil, without which the high priest-philosopher of modern germany would not have crowned his royal race of the future. both disraeli and nietzsche you perceive starting from the same pessimistic diagnosis of the wild anarchy, the growing melancholy, the threatening nihilism of modern europe, for both recognised the danger of the age behind its loud and forced "shipwreck gaiety," behind its big-mouthed talk about progress and evolution, behind that veil of business-bustle, which hides its fear and utter despair--but for all that black outlook they are not weaklings enough to mourn and let things go, nor do they belong to that cheap class of society doctors who mistake the present wretchedness of humanity for sinfulness, and wish to make their patient less sinful and still more wretched. both nietzsche and disraeli have clearly recognised that this patient of theirs is suffering from weakness and not from sinfulness, for which latter some kind of strength may still be required; both are therefore entirely opposed to a further dieting him down to complete moral emaciation, but are, on the contrary, prescribing a tonic, a roborating, a natural regime for him --advice for which both doctors have been reproached with immorality by their contemporaries as well as by posterity. but the younger doctor has turned the tables upon their accusers, and has openly reproached his nazarene colleagues with the immorality of endangering life itself, he has clearly demonstrated to the world that their trustful and believing patient was shrinking beneath their very fingers, he has candidly foretold these christian quacks that one day they would be in the position of the quack skin-specialist at the fair, who, as a proof of his medical skill, used to show to the peasants around him the skin of a completly cured patient of his. both nietzsche and disraeli know the way to health, for they have had the disease of the age themselves, but they have--the one partly, the other entirely-cured themselves of it, they have resisted the spirit of their time, they have escaped the fate of their contemporaries; they therefore, and they alone, know their danger. this is the reason why they both speak so violently, why they both attack with such bitter fervour the utilitarian and materialistic attitude of english science, why they both so ironically brush aside the airy and fantastic ideals of german philosophy--this is why they both loudly declare (to use disraeli's words) "that we are the slaves of false knowledge; that our memories are filled with ideas that have no origin in truth; that we believe what our fathers credited, who were convinced without a cause; that we study human nature in a charnel house, and, like the nations of the east, pay divine honours to the maniac and the fool." but if these two great men cannot refrain from such outspoken vituperation--they also lead the way: they both teach the divinity of ideas and the vileness of action without principle; they both exalt the value of personality and character; they both deprecate the influence of society and socialisation; they both intensely praise and love life, but they both pour contempt and irony upon the shallow optimist, who thinks it delightful, and the quietist, who wishes it to be calm, sweet, and peaceful. they thus both preach a life of danger, in opposition to that of pleasure, of comfort, of happiness, and they do not only preach this noble life, they also act it: for both have with equal determination staked even their lives on the fulfilment of their ideal. it is astonishing--but only astonishing to your superficial student of the jewish character--that in disraeli also we find an almost nietzschean appreciation of that eternal foe of the jewish race, the hellenist, which makes disraeli, just like nietzsche, confess that the greek and the hebrew are both amongst the highest types of the human kind. it is not less astonishing--but likewise easily intelligible for one who knows something of the great jews of the middle ages--that in disraeli we discover that furious enmity against the doctrine of the natural equality of men which nietzsche combated all his life. it was certainly the great maimonides himself, that spiritual father of spinoza, who guided the pen of his sephardic descendant, when he thus wrote in his tancred: "it is to be noted, although the omnipotent creator might have formed, had it pleased him, in the humblest of his creations, an efficient agent for his purpose that divine majesty has never thought fit to communicate except with human beings of the very highest order." but what about christianity, to which disraeli was sincerely attached, and whose creation he always considered as one of the eternal glories of his race? did not the divine majesty think it fit then to communicate with the most humble of its creatures, with the fishermen of galilee, with the rabble of corinth, with the slaves, the women, the criminals of the roman empire? as i wish to be honest about disraeli, i must point out here, that his genius, although the most prominent in england during his lifetime, and although violently opposed to its current superstitions, still partly belongs to his age--and for this very pardonable reason, that in his jewish pride he overrated and even misunderstood christianity. he all but overlooked the narrow connection between christianity and democracy. he did not see that in fighting liberalism and nonconformity all his life, he was really fighting christianity, the protestant form of which is at the root of british liberalism and individualism to this very day. and when later in his life disraeli complained that the disturbance in the mind of nations has been occasioned by "the powerful assault on the divinity of the semitic literature by the germans," he overlooked likewise the connection of this german movement with the same protestantism, from the narrow and vulgar middle-class of which have sprung all those rationalising, unimaginative, and merely clever professors, who have so successfully undermined the ancient and venerable lore. and thirdly, and worst of all, disraeli never suspected that the french revolution, which in the same breath he once contemptuously denounced as "the celtic rebellion against semitic laws," was, in spite of its professed attack against religion, really a profoundly christian, because a democratic and revolutionary movement. what a pity he did not know all this! what a shower of splendid additional sarcasms he would have poured over those flat-nosed franks, had he known what i know now, that it is the eternal way of the christian to be a rebel, and that just as he has once rebelled against us, he has never ceased pestering and rebelling against any one else either of his own or any other creed. but it is so easy for me to be carried away by that favourite sport of mine, of which i am the first inventor among the jews--christian baiting. you must forgive this, however, in a jew, who, while he has been baited for two thousand years by you, likes to turn round now that the opportunity has come, and tries to indulge on his part also in a little bit of that genial pastime. i candidly confess it is delightful, and i now quite understand your ancestors hunting mine as much as they could--had i been a christian, i would, probably, have done the same; perhaps have done it even better, for no one would now be left to write any such impudent truisms against me-rest assured of that! but as i am a jew, and have had too much experience of the other side of the question, i must try to control myself in the midst of victory; i must judge things calmly; i must state fact honestly; i must not allow myself to be unjust towards you. first of all, then, this rebelling faculty of yours is a jewish inheritance, an inheritance, however, of which you have made a more than generous, a truly christian use, because you did not keep it niggardly for yourselves, but have distributed it all over the earth, from nazareth to nishni-novgorod, from jerusalem to jamaica, from palestine to pimlico, so that every one is a rebel and an anarchist nowadays. but, secondly, i must not forget that in every anarchist, and therefore in every christian, there is also, or may be, an aristocrat--a man who, just like the anarchist, but with a perfectly holy right, wishes to obey no laws but those of his own conscience; a man who thinks too highly of his own faith and persuasion, to convert other people to it; a man who, therefore, would never carry it to caffres and coolis; a man, in short, with whom even the noblest and exclusive hebrew could shake hands. in friedrich nietzsche this aristocratic element which may be hidden in a christian has been brought to light, in him the christian's eternal claim for freedom of conscience, for his own priesthood, for justification by his own faith, is no longer used for purposes of destruction and rebellion, but for those of command and creation; in him--and this is the key to the character of this extraordinary man, who both on his father's and mother's side was the descendant of a long line of protestant parsons--the christian and protestant spirit of anarchy became so strong that he rebelled even against his own fellow-anarchists, and told them that anarchy was a low and contemptible thing, and that revolution was an occupation fit only for superior slaves. but with this event the circle of christianity has become closed, and the exclusive house of israel is now under the delightful obligation to make its peace with its once lost and now reforming son. the venerable owner of this old house is still standing on its threshold: his face is pale, his expression careworn, his eyes apparently scanning something far in the distance. the wind--for there is a terrible wind blowing just now--is playing havoc with his long white jew-beard, but this white jew-beard of his is growing black again at the end, and even the sad eyes are still capable of quite youthful flashes, as may be noticed at this very moment. for the eyes of the old jew, apparently so dreamy and so far away, have suddenly become fixed upon something in the distance yonder. the old jew looks and looks-and then he rubs his eyes--and then he eagerly looks again. and now he is sure of himself. his old and haggard face is lighting up, his stooped figure suddenly becomes more erect, and a tear of joy is seen running over his pale cheek into that long beard of his. for the old jew has recognised some one coming from afar--some one whom he had missed, but never mentioned, for his law forbade him to do this--some one, however, for whom he had secretly always mourned, as only the race of the psalmists and the prophets can mourn--and he rushes toward him, and he falls on his neck and he kisses him, and he says to his servants: "bring forth the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet. and bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it and let us eat and be merry!" amen. oscar levy. london, january 1909. _________________________________________________________________ translator's preface. to the reader who knows nietzsche, who has studied his zarathustra and understood it, and who, in addition, has digested the works entitled beyond good and evil, the genealogy of morals, the twilight of the idols, and the antichrist,-to such a reader everything in this volume will be perfectly clear and comprehensible. in the attack on strauss he will immediately detect the germ of the whole of nietzsche's subsequent attitude towards too hasty contentment and the foolish beatitude of the "easily pleased"; in the paper on wagner he will recognise nietzsche the indefatigable borer, miner and underminer, seeking to define his ideals, striving after self-knowledge above all, and availing himself of any contemporary approximation to his ideal man, in order to press it forward as the incarnation of his thoughts. wagner the reformer of mankind! wagner the dithyrambic dramatist!--the reader who knows nietzsche will not be misled by these expressions. to the uninitiated reader, however, some words of explanation are due, not only in regard to the two papers before us, but in regard to nietzsche himself. so much in our time is learnt from hearsay concerning prominent figures in science, art, religion, or philosophy, that it is hardly possible for anybody to-day, however badly informed he may be, to begin the study of any great writer or scientist with a perfectly open mind. it were well, therefore, to begin the study of nietzsche with some definite idea as to his unaltered purpose, if he ever possessed such a thing; as to his lifelong ideal, if he ever kept one so long; and as to the one direction in which he always travelled, despite apparent deviations and windings. had he such a purpose, such an ideal, such a direction? we have no wish to open a controversy here, neither do we think that in replying to this question in the affirmative we shall give rise to one; for every careful student of nietzsche, we know, will uphold us in our view. nietzsche had one very definite and unaltered purpose, ideal and direction, and this was "the elevation of the type man." he tells us in the will to power: "all is truth to me that tends to elevate man!" to this principle he was already pledged as a student at leipzig; we owe every line that he ever wrote to his devotion to it, and it is the key to all his complexities, blasphemies, prolixities, and terrible earnestness. all was good to nietzsche that tended to elevate man; all was bad that kept man stationary or sent him backwards. hence he wrote david strauss, the confessor and writer (1873). the franco-german war had only just come to an end, and the keynote of this polemical pamphlet is, "beware of the intoxication of success." when the whole of germany was delirious with joy over her victory, at a time when the unquestioned triumph of her arms tended rather to reflect unearned glory upon every department of her social organisation, it required both courage and discernment to raise the warning voice and to apply the wet blanket. but nietzsche did both, and with spirit, because his worst fears were aroused. smug content (erbärmliches behagen) was threatening to thwart his one purpose--the elevation of man; smug content personified in the german scholar was giving itself airs of omniscience, omnipotence, and ubiquity, and all the while it was a mere cover for hidden rottenness and jejune pedantry. nietzsche's attack on hegelian optimism alone (pp. 46, 53-54), in the first paper, fully reveals the fundamental idea underlying this essay; and if the personal attack on strauss seems sometimes to throw the main theme into the background, we must remember the author's own attitude towards this aspect of the case. nietzsche, as a matter of fact, had neither the spite nor the meanness requisite for the purely personal attack. in his ecce homo, he tells us most emphatically: "i have no desire to attack particular persons--i do but use a personality as a magnifying glass; i place it over the subject to which i wish to call attention, merely that the appeal may be stronger." david strauss, in a letter to a friend, soon after the publication of the first thought out of season, expresses his utter astonishment that a total stranger should have made such a dead set at him. the same problem may possibly face the reader on every page of this fssay: if, however, we realise nietzsche's purpose, if we understand his struggle to be one against "culture-philistinism" in general, as a stemming, stultifying and therefore degenerate factor, and regard david strauss--as the author himself did, that is to say, simply as a glass, focusing the whole light of our understanding upon the main theme-then the strauss paper is seen to be one of such enormous power, and its aim appears to us so lofty, that, whatever our views may be concerning the nature of the person assailed, we are forced to conclude that, to nietzsche at least, he was but the incarnation and concrete example of the evil and danger then threatening to overtake his country, which it was the object of this essay to expose. when we read that at the time of strauss's death (february 7th, 1874) nietzsche was greatly tormented by the fear that the old scholar might have been hastened to his end by the use that had been made of his personality in the first unzeitgemässe betrachtung; when we remember that in the midst of this torment he ejaculated, "i was indeed not made to hate and have enemies!"--we are then in a better position to judge of the motives which, throughout his life, led him to engage such formidable opponents and to undertake such relentless attacks. it was merely his ruling principle that, all is true and good that tends to elevate man; everything is bad and false that keeps man stationary or sends him backwards. those who may think that his attacks were often unwarrantable and ill-judged will do well, therefore, to bear this in mind, that whatever his value or merits may have been as an iconoclast, at least the aim he had was sufficiently lofty and honourable, and that he never shirked the duties which he rightly or wrongly imagined would help him to wagner paper (1875-1876) we are faced by a somewhat different problem. most readers who will have heard of nietzsche's subsequent denunciation of wagner's music will probably stand aghast before this panegyric of him; those who, like professor saintsbury, will fail to discover the internal evidence in this essay which points so infallibly to nietzsche's real but still subconscious opinion of his hero, may even be content to regard his later attitude as the result of a complete volte-face, and at any rate a flat contradiction of the one revealed in this paper. let us, however, examine the internal evidence we speak of, and let us also discuss the purpose and spirit of the essay. we have said that nietzsche was a man with a very fixed and powerful ideal, and we have heard what this ideal was. can we picture him, then,--a young and enthusiastic scholar with a cultured love of music, and particularly of wagner's music, eagerly scanning all his circle, the whole city and country in which he lived--yea, even the whole continent on which he lived--for something or some one that would set his doubts at rest concerning the feasibility of his ideal? can we now picture this young man coming face to face with probably one of the greatest geniuses of his age--with a man whose very presence must have been electric, whose every word or movement must have imparted some power to his surroundings--with richard wagner? if we can conceive of what the mere attention, even, of a man like wagner must have meant to nietzsche in his twenties, if we can form any idea of the intoxicating effect produced upon him when this attention developed into friendship, we almost refuse to believe that nietzsche could have been critical at all at first. in wagner, as was but natural, he soon began to see the ideal, or at least the means to the ideal, which was his one obsession. all his hope for the future of germany and europe cleaved, as it were, to this highest manifestation of their people's life, and gradually he began to invest his already great friend with all the extra greatness which he himself drew from the depths of his own soul. the friendship which grew between them was of that rare order in which neither can tell who influences the other more. wagner would often declare that the beautiful music in the third act of siegfried was to be ascribed to nietzsche's influence over him; he also adopted the young man's terminology in art matters, and the concepts implied by the words "dionysian" and "apollonian" were borrowed by him from his friend's discourses. how much nietzsche owed to wagner may perhaps never be definitely known; to those who are sufficiently interested to undertake the investigation of this matter, we would recommend hans belart's book, nietzsche's ethik; in it references will be found which give some clue as to the probable sources from which the necessary information may be derived. in any case, however, the reciprocal effects of their conversations will never be exactly known; and although it would be ridiculous to assume that nietzsche was essentially the same when he left as when he met him, what the real nature of the change was it is now difficult to say. for some years their friendship continued firm, and grew ever more and more intimate. the birth of tragedy was one of the first public declarations of it, and after its publication many were led to consider that wagner's art was a sort of resurrection of the dionysian grecian art. enemies of nietzsche began to whisper that he was merely wagner's "literary lackey"; many friends frowned upon the promising young philologist, and questioned the exaggerated importance he was beginning to ascribe to the art of music and to art in general, in their influence upon the world; and all the while nietzsche's one thought and one aim was to help the cause and further the prospects of the man who he earnestly believed was destined to be the salvation of european culture. every great ideal coined in his own brain he imagined to be the ideal of his hero; all his sublimest hopes for society were presented gratis, in his writings, to wagner, as though products of the latter's own mind; and just as the prophet of old never possessed the requisite assurance to suppose that his noblest ideas were his own, but attributed them to some higher and supernatural power, whom he thereby learnt to worship for its fancied nobility of sentiment, so nietzsche, still doubting his own powers, created a fetich out of nis most distinguished friend, and was ultimately wounded and well-nigh wrecked with disappointment when he found that the wagner of the gotterdammerung and parsifal was not the wagner of his own mind. while writing ecce homo, he was so well aware of the extent to which he had gone in idealising his friend, that he even felt able to say: "wagner in bayreuth is a vision of my own future.... now that i can look back upon this work, i would not like to deny that, at bottom, it speaks only of myself" (p. 74). and on another page of the same book we read: "... what i heard, as a young man, in wagnerian music, had absolutely nothing to do with wagner: when i described dionysian music, i only described what i had heard, and i thus translated and transfigured all that i bore in my own soul into the spirit of the new art. the strongest proof of this is my essay, wagner in bayreuth: in all decidedly psychological passages of this book the reader may simply read my name, or the name 'zarathustra,' wherever the text contains the name 'wagner'" (p. 68). as we have already hinted, there are evidences of his having subconsciously discerned the real wagner, even in the heyday of their friendship, behind the ideal he had formed of him; for his eyes were too intelligent to be deceived, even though his understanding refused at first to heed the messages they sent it: both the birth of tragedy and wagner in bayreuth are with us to prove this, and not merely when we read these works between the lines, but when we take such passages as those found on pp. 115, 149, 150, 151, 156, 158, 159 of this book quite literally. nietzsche's infatuation we have explained; the consequent idealisation of the object of his infatuation he himself has confessed; we have also pointed certain passages which we believe show beyond a doubt that almost everything to be found in the case of wagner and nietzsche contra wagner was already subconscious in our author, long before he had begun to feel even a coolness towards his hero: let those who think our interpretation of the said passages is either strained or unjustified turn to the literature to which we have referred and judge for themselves. it seems to us that those distinguished critics who complain of nietzsche's complete volte-face and his uncontrollable recantations and revulsions of feeling have completely overlooked this aspect of the question. it were well for us to bear in mind that we are not altogether free to dispose of nietzsche's attitude to wagner, at any given period in their relationship, with a single sentence of praise or of blame. after all, we are faced by a problem which no objectivity or dispassionate detachment on our parts can solve. nietzsche endowed both schopenhauer and wagner with qualities and aspirations so utterly foreign to them both, that neither of them would have recognised himself in the images he painted of them. his love for them was unusual; perhaps it can only be fully understood emotionally by us: like all men who are capable of very great love, nietzsche lent the objects of his affection anything they might happen to lack in the way of greatness, and when at last his eyes were opened, genuine pain, not malice, was the motive of even the most bitter of his diatribes. finally, we should just like to give one more passage from ecce homo bearing upon the subject under discussion. it is particularly interesting from an autobiographical standpoint, and will perhaps afford the best possible conclusion to this preface. nietzsche is writing about wagner's music, and he says: "the world must indeed be empty for him who has never been unhealthy enough for this 'infernal voluptuousness'; it is allowable and yet almost forbidden to use a mystical expression in this behalf. i suppose i know better than any one the prodigies wagner was capable of, the fifty worlds of strange raptures to which no one save him could soar; and as i stand to-day--strong enough to convert even the most suspicious and dangerous phenomenon to my own use and be the stronger for it--i declare wagner to be the great benefactor of my life. something will always keep our names associated in the minds of men, and that is, that we are two who have suffered more excruciatingly--even at each other's hands--than most men are able to suffer nowadays. and just as wagner is merely a misunderstanding among germans, so am i and ever will be. you lack two centuries of psychological and artistic discipline, my dear countrymen!... but it will be impossible for you ever to recover the time now lost" (p. 43). anthony m. ludovici. _________________________________________________________________ david strauss, the confessor and the writer. david strauss _______ i. public opinion in germany seems strictly to forbid any allusion to the evil and dangeious consequences of a war, more particularly when the war in question has been a victorious one. those writers, therefore, command a more ready attention who, regarding this public opinion as final, proceed to vie with each other in their jubilant praise of the war, and of the powerful influences it has brought to bear upon morality, culture, and art. yet it must be confessed that a gieat victory is a great danger. human nature bears a triumph less easily than a defeat; indeed, it might even be urged that it is simpler to gain a victory of this sort than to turn it to such account that it may not ultimately proxe a seiious rout. but of all evil results due to the last contest with france, the most deplorable, peihaps, is that widespread and even universal error of public opinion and of all who think publicly, that german culture was also victorious in the struggle, and that it should now, therefore, be decked with garlands, as a fit recognition of such extraordinary events and successes. this error is in the highest degree pernicious: not because it is an error,--for there are illusions which are both salutary and blessed,--but because it threatens to convert our victory into a signal defeat. a defeat? --i should say rather, into the uprooting of the "german mind" for the benefit of the "german empire." even supposing that the fight had been between the two cultures, the standard for the value of the victor would still be a very relative one, and, in any case, would certainly not justify such exaggerated triumph or self-glorification. for, in the first place, it would be necessary to ascertain the worth of the conquered culture. this might be very little; in which case, even if the victory had involved the most glorious display of arms, it would still offer no warrant for inordinate rapture. even so, however, there can be no question, in our case, of the victory of german culture; and for the simple reason, that french culture remains as heretofore, and that we depend upon it as heretofore. it did not even help towards the success of our arms. severe military discipline, natural bravery and sustaining power, the superior generalship, unity and obedience in the rank and file--in short, factors which have nothing to do with culture, were instrumental in making us conquer an opponent in whom the most essential of these factors were absent. the only wonder is, that precisely what is now called "culture" in germany did not prove an obstacle to the military operations which seemed vitally necessary to a great victory. perhaps, though, this was only owing to the fact that this "thing" which dubs itself "culture" saw its advantage, for once, in keeping in the background. if however, it be permitted to grow and to spread, if it be spoilt by the flattering and nonsensical assurance that it has been victorious,--then, as i have said, it will have the power to extirpate german mind, and, when that is done, who knows whether there will still be anything to be made out of the surviving german body! provided it were possible to direct that calm and tenacious bravery which the german opposed to the pathetic and spontaneous fury of the frenchman, against the inward enemy, against the highly suspicious and, at all events, unnative "cultivation" which, owing to a dangerous misunderstanding, is called "culture" in germany, then all hope of a really genuine german "culture"--the reverse of that "cultivation"--would not be entirely lost. for the germans have never known any lack of clear-sighted and heroic leaders, though these, often enough, probably, have lacked germans. but whether it be possible to turn german bravery into a new direction seems to me to become ever more and more doubtful; for i realise how fully convinced every one is that such a struggle and such bravery are no longer requisite; on the contrary, that most things are regulated as satisactorily as they possibly can be--or, at all events, that everything of moment has long ago been discovered and accomplished: in a word, that the seed of culture is already sown everywhere, and is now either shooting up its fresh green blades, or, here and there, even bursting forth into luxuriant blossom. in this sphere, not only happiness but ecstasy reigns supreme. i am conscious of this ecstasy and happiness, in the ineffable, truculent assurance of german journalists and manufacturers of novels, tragedies, poems, and histories (for it must be clear that these people belong to one category), who seem to have conspired to improve the leisure and ruminative hours--that is to say, "the intellectual lapses"--of the modern man, by bewildering him with their printed paper. since the war, all is gladness, dignity, and self-consciousness in this merry throng. after the startling successes of german culture, it regards itself, not only as approved and sanctioned, but almost as sanctified. it therefore speaks with gravity, affects to apostrophise the german people, and issues complete works, after the manner of the classics; nor does it shrink from proclaiming in those journals which are open to it some few of its adherents as new german classical writers and model authors. it might be supposed that the dangers of such an abuse of success would be recognised by the more thoughtful and enlightened among cultivated germans; or, at least, that these would feel how painful is the comedy that is being enacted around them: for what in truth could more readily inspire pity than the sight of a cripple strutting like a cock before a mirror, and exchanging complacent glances with his reflection! but the "scholar" caste willingly allow things to remain as they are, and re too much concerned with their own affairs to busy themselves with the care of the german mind. moreover, the units of this caste are too thoroughly convinced that their own scholarship is the ripest and most perfect fruit of the age--in fact, of all ages--to see any necessity for a care of german culture in general; since, in so far as they and the legion of their brethren are concerned, preoccupations of this order have everywhere been, so to speak, surpassed. the more conscientious observer, more particularly if he be a foreigner, cannot help noticing withal that no great disparity exists between that which the german scholar regards as his culture and that other triumphant culture of the new german classics, save in respect of the quantum of knowledge. everywhere, where knowledge and not ability, where information and not art, hold the first rank,--everywhere, therefore, where life bears testimony to the kind of culture extant, there is now only one specific german culture--and this is the culture that is supposed to have conquered france? the contention appears to be altogether too preposterous. it was solely to the more extensive knowledge of german officers, to the superior training of their soldiers, and to their more scientific military strategy, that all impartial judges, and even the french nation, in the end, ascribed the victory. hence, if it be intended to regard german erudition as a thing apart, in what sense can german culture be said to have conquered? in none whatsoever; for the moral qualities of severe discipline, of more placid obedience, have nothing in common with culture: these were characteristic of the macedonian army, for instance, despite the fact that the greek soldiers were infinitely more cultivated. to speak of german scholarship and culture as having conquered, therefore, can only be the outcome of a misapprehension, probably resulting from the circumstance that every precise notion of culture has now vanished from germany. culture is, before all things, the unity of artistic style, in every expression of the life of a people. abundant knowledge and learning, however, are not essential to it, nor are they a sign of its existence; and, at a pinch, they might coexist much more harmoniously with the very opposite of culture--with barbarity: that is to say, with a complete lack of style, or with a riotous jumble of all styles. but it is precisely amid this riotous jumble that the german of to-day subsists; and the serious problem to be solved is: how, with all his learning, he can possibly avoid noticing it; how, into the bargain, he can rejoice with all his heart in his present "culture"? for everything conduces to open his eyes for him--every glance he casts at his clothes, his room, his house; every walk he takes through the streets of his town; every visit he pays to his art-dealers and to his trader in the articles of fashion. in his social intercourse he ought to realise the origin of his manners and movements; in the heart of our art-institutions, the pleasures of our concerts, theatres, and museums, he ought to become apprised of the superand juxta-position of all imaginable styles. the german heaps up around him the forms, colours, products, and curiosities of all ages and zones, and thereby succeeds in producing that garish newness, as of a country fair, which his scholars then proceed to contemplate and to define as "modernism per se"; and there he remains, squatting peacefully, in the midst of this conflict of styles. but with this kind of culture, which is, at bottom, nothing more nor less than a phlegmatic insensibility to real culture, men cannot vanquish an enemy, least of all an enemy like the french, who, whatever their worth may be, do actually possess a genuine and productive culture, and whom, up to the present, we have systematically copied, though in the majority of cases without skill. even supposing we had really ceased copying them, it would still not mean that we had overcome them, but merely that we had lifted their yoke from our necks. not before we have succeeded in forcing an original german culture upon them can there be any question of the triumph of german culture. meanwhile, let us not forget that in all matters of form we are, and must be, just as dependent upon paris now as we were before the war; for up to the present there has been no such thing as a original german culture. we all ought to have become aware of this, of our own accord. besides, one of the few who had he right to speak to germans in terms of reproach publicly drew attention to the fact. "we germans are of yesterday," goethe once said to eckermann. "true, for the last hundred years we have diligently cultivated ourselves, but a few centuries may yet have to run their course before our fellow-countrymen become permeated with sufficient intellectuality and higher culture to have it said of them, it is a long time since they were barbarians." ii. if, however, our public and private life is so manifestly devoid of all signs of a productive and characteristic culture; if, moreover, our great artists, with that earnest vehemence and honesty which is peculiar to greatness admit, and have admitted, this monstrous fact--so very humiliating to a gifted nation; how can it still be possible for contentment to reign to such an astonishing extent among german scholars? and since the last war this complacent spirit has seemed ever more and morerready to break forth into exultant cries and demonstrations of triumph. at all events, the belief seems to be rife that we are in possession of a genuine culture, and the enormous incongruity of this triumphant satisfaction in the face of the inferiority which should be patent to all, seems only to be noticed by the few and the select. for all those who think with the public mind have blindfolded their eyes and closed their ears. the incongruity is not even acknowledged to exist. how is this possible? what power is sufficiently influential to deny this existence? what species of men must have attained to supremacy in germany that feelings which are so strong and simple should he denied or prevented from obtaining expression? this power, this species of men, i will name--they are the philistines of culture. as every one knows, the word "philistine" is borrowed from the vernacular of student-life, and, in its widest and most popular sense, it signifies the reverse of a son of the muses, of an artist, and of the genuine man of culture. the philistine of culture, however, the study of whose type and the hearing of whose confessions (when he makes them) have now become tiresome duties, distinguishes himself from the general notion of the order "philistine" by means of a superstition: he fancies that he is himself a son of the muses and a man of culture. this incomprehensible error clearly shows that he does not even know the difference between a philistine and his opposite. we must not be surprised, therefore, if we find him, for the most part, solemnly protesting that he is no philistine. owing to this lack of self-knowledge, he is convinced that his "culture" is the consummate manifestation of real german culture; and, since he everywhere meets with scholars of his own type, since all public institutions, whether schools, universities, or academies, are so organised as to be in complete harmony with his education and needs, wherever he goes he bears with him the triumphant feeling that he is the worthy champion of prevailing german culture, and he frames his pretensions and claims accordingly. if, however, real culture takes unity of style for granted (and even an inferior and degenerate culture cannot be imagined in which a certain coalescence of the profusion of forms has not taken place), it is just possible that the confusion underlying the culture-philistine's error may arise from the fact that, since he comes into contact everywhere with creatures cast in the same mould as himself, he concludes that this uniformity among all "scholars" must point to a certain uniformity in german education--hence to culture. all round him, he sees only needs and views similar to his own; wherever he goes, he finds himself embraced by a ring of tacit conventions concerning almost everything, but more especially matters of religion and art. this imposing sameness, this tutti unisono which, though it responds to no word of command, is yet ever ready to burst forth, cozens him into the belief that here a culture must be established and flourishing. but philistinism, despite its systematic organisation and power, does not constitute a culture by virtue of its system alone; it does not even constitute an inferior culture, but invariably the reverse--namely, firmly established barbarity. for the uniformity of character which is so apparent in the german scholars of to-day is only the result of a conscious or unconscious exclusion and negation of all the artistically productive forms and requirements of a genuine style. the mind of the cultured philistine must have become sadly unhinged; for precisely what culture repudiates he regards as culture itself; and, since he proceeds logically, he succeeds in creating a connected group of these repudiations--a system of non-culture, to which one might at a pinch grant a certain "unity of style," provided of course it were ot nonsense to attribute style to barbarity. if he have to choose between a stylish act and its opposite, he will invariably adopt the latter, and, since this rule holds good throughout, every one of his acts bears the same negative stamp. now, it is by means of this stamp that he is able to identify the character of the "german culture," which is his own patent; and all things that do not bear it are so many enemies and obstacles drawn up against him. in the presence of these arrayed forces the culture-philistine either does no more than ward off the blows, or else he denies, holds his tongue, stops his ears, and refuses to face facts. he is a negative creature--even in his hatred and animosity. nobody, however, is more disliked by him than the man who regards him as a philistine, and tells him what he is--namely, the barrier in the way of all powerful men and creators, the labyrinth for all who doubt and go astray, the swamp for all the weak and the weary, the fetters of those who would run towards lofty goals, the poisonous mist that chokes all germinating hopes, the scorching sand to all those german thinkers who seek for, and thirst after, a new life. for the mind of germany is seeking; and ye hate it because it is seeking, and because it will not accept your word, when ye declare that ye have found what it is seeking. how could it have been possible for a type like that of the culture-philistine to develop? and even granting its development, how was it able to rise to the powerful position of supreme judge concerning all questions of german culture? how could this have been possible, seeing that a whole procession of grand and heroic figures has already filed past us, whose every movement, the expression of whose every feature, whose questioning voice and burning eye betrayed the one fact, that they were seekers, and that they sought that which the culture-philistine had long fancied he had found--to wit, a genuine original german culture? is there a soil--thus they seemed to ask--a soil that is pure enough, unhandselled enough, of sufficient virgin sanctity, to allow the mind of germany to build its house upon it? questioning thus, they wandered through the wilderness, and the woods of wretched ages and narrow conditions, and as seekers they disappeared from our vision; one of them, at an advanced age, was even able to say, in the name of all: "for half a century my life has been hard and bitter enough; i have allowed myself no rest, but have ever striven, sought and done, to the best and to the utmost of my ability." what does our culture-philistinism say of these seekers? it regards them simply as discoverers, and seems to forget that they themselves only claimed to be seekers. we have our culture, say her sons; for have we not our "classics"? not only is the foundation there, but the building already stands upon it--we ourselves constitute that building. and, so saying, the philistine raises his hand to his brow. but, in order to be able thus to misjudge, and thus to grant left-handed veneration to our classics, people must have ceased to know them. this, generally speaking, is precisely what has happened. for, otherwise, one ought to know that there is only one way of honouring them, and that is to continue seeking with the same spirit and with the same courage, and not to weary of the search. but to foist the doubtful title of "classics" upon them, and to "edify" oneself from time to time by reading their works, means to yield to those feeble and selfish emotions which all the paying public may purchase at concert-halls and theatres. even the raising of monuments to their memory, and the christening of feasts and societies with their names--all these things are but so many ringing cash payments by means of which the culture-philistine discharges his indebtedness to them, so that in all other respects he may be rid of them, and, above all, not bound to follow in their wake and prosecute his search further. for henceforth inquiry is to cease: that is the philistine watchword. this watchword once had some meaning. in germany, during the first decade of the nineteenth century, for instance, when the heyday and confusion of seeking, experimenting, destroying, promising, surmising, and hoping was sweeping in currents and cross-currents over the land, the thinking middle-classes were right in their concern for their own security. it was then quite right of them to dismiss from their minds with a shrug of their shoulders the omnium gatherum of fantastic and language-maiming philosophies, and of rabid special-pleading historical studies, the carnival of all gods and myths, and the poetical affectations and fooleries which a drunken spirit may be responsible for. in this respect they were quite right; for the philistine has not even the privilege of licence. with the cunning proper to base natures, however, he availed himself of the opportunity, in order to throw suspicion even upon the seeking spirit, and to invite people to join in the more comfortable pastime of finding. his eye opened to the joy of philistinism; he saved himself from wild experimenting by clinging to the idyllic, and opposed the restless creative spirit that animates the artist, by means of a certain smug ease--the ease of self-conscious narrowness, tranquillity, and self-sufficiency. his tapering finger pointed, without any affectation of modesty, to all the hidden and intimate incidents of his life, to the many touching and ingenuous joys which sprang into existence in the wretched depths of his uncultivated existence, and which modestly blossomed forth on the bog-land of philistinism. there were, naturally, a few gifted narrators who, with a nice touch, drew vivid pictures of the happiness, the prosaic simplicity, the bucolic robustness, and all the well-being which floods the quarters of children, scholars, and peasants. with picture-books of this class in their hands, these smug ones now once and for all sought to escape from the yoke of these dubious classics and the command which they contained--to seek further and to find. they only started the notion of an epigone-age in order to secure peace for themselves, and to be able to reject all the efforts of disturbing innovators summarily as the work of epigones. with the view of ensuring their own tranquillity, these smug ones even appropriated history, and sought to transform all sciences that threatened to disturb their wretched ease into branches of history--more particularly philosophy and classical philology. through historical consciousness, they saved themselves from enthusiasm; for, in opposition to goethe, it was maintained that history would no longer kindle enthusiasm. no, in their desire to acquire an historical grasp of everything, stultification became the sole aim of these philosophical admirers of "nil admirari." while professing to hate every form of fanaticism and intolerance, what they really hated, at bottom, was the dominating genius and the tyranny of the real claims of culture. they therefore concentrated and utilised all their forces in those quarters where a fresh and vigorous movement was to be expected, and then paralysed, stupefied, and tore it to shreds. in this way, a philosophy which veiled the philistine confessions of its founder beneath neat twists and flourishes of language proceeded further to discover a formula for the canonisation of the commonplace. it expatiated upon the rationalism of all reality, and thus ingratiated itself with the culture-philistine, who also loves neat twists and flourishes, and who, above all, considers himself real, and regards his reality as the standard of reason for the world. from this time forward he began to allow every one, and even himself, to reflect, to investigate, to astheticise, and, more particularly, to make poetry, rnusic, and even pictures--not to mention systems philosophy; provided, of course, that everything were done according to the old pattern, and that no assault were made upon the "reasonable" and the "real"--that is to say, upon the philistine. the latter really does not at all mind giving himself up, from time to time, to the delightful and daring transgressions of art or of sceptical historical studies, and he does not underestimate the charm of such recreations and entertainments; but he strictly separates "the earnestness of life" (under which term he understands his calling, his business, and his wife and child) from such trivialities, and among the latter he includes all things which have any relation to culture. therefore, woe to the art that takes itself seriously, that has a notion of what it may exact, and that dares to endanger his income, his business, and his habits! upon such an art he turns his back, as though it were something dissolute; and, affecting the attitude of a. guardian of chastity, he cautions every unprotected virtue on no account to look. being such an adept at cautioning people, he is always grateful to any artist who heeds him and listens to caution. he then assures his protege that things are to be made more easy for him; that, as a kindred spirit, he will no longer be expected to make sublime masterpieces, but that his work must be one of two kinds--either the imitation of reality to the point of simian mimicry, in idylls or gentle and humorous satires, or the free copying of the best-known and most famous classical works, albeit with shamefast concessions to the taste of the age. for, although he may only be able to appreciate slavish copying or accurate portraiture of the present, still he knows that the latter will but glorify him, and increase the well-being of "reality"; while the former, far from doing him any harm, rather helps to establish his reputation as a classical judge of taste, and is not otherwise troublesome; for he has, once and for all, come to terms with the classics. finally, he discovers the general and effective formula "health" for his habits, methods of observation, judgments, and the objects of his patronage; while he dismisses the importunate disturber of the peace with the epithets "hysterical" and "morbid." it is thus that david strauss--a genuine example of the satisfait in regard to our scholastic institutions, and a typical philistine--it is thus that he speaks of "the philosophy of schopenhauer" as being "thoroughly intellectual, yet often unhealthy and unprofitable." it is indeed a deplorable fact that intellect should show such a decided preference for the "unhealthy" and the "unprofitable"; and even the philistine, if he be true to himself, will admit that, in regard to the philosophies which men of his stamp produce, he is conscious of a frequent lack of intellectuality, although of course they are always thoroughly healthy and profitable. now and again, the philistines, provided they are by themselves, indulge in a bottle of wine, and then they grow reminiscent, and speak of the great deeds of the war, honestly and ingenuously. on such occasions it often happens that a great deal comes to light which would otherwise have been most stead-fastly concealed, and one of them may even be heard to blurt out the most precious secrets of the whole brotherhood. indeed, a lapse of this sort occurred but a short while ago, to a well-known aesthete of the hegelian school of reasoning. it must, however, be admitted that the provocation thereto was of an unusual character. a company of philistines were feasting together, in celebration of the memory of a genuine anti-philistine--one who, moreover, had been, in the strictest sense of the words, wrecked by philistinism. this man was holderlin, and the afore-mentioned aesthete was therefore justified, under the circumstances, in speaking of the tragic souls who had foundered on "reality"--reality being understood, here, to mean philistine reason. but the "reality" is now different, and it might well be asked whether holderlin would be able to find his way at all in the present great age. "i doubt," says dr. vischer, "whether his delicate soul could have borne all the roughness which is inseparable from war, and whether it had survived the amount of perversity which, since the war, we now see flourishing in every quarter. perhaps he would have succumbed to despair. his was one of the unarmed souls; he was the werther of greece, a hopeless lover; his life was full of softness and yearning, but there was strength and substance in his will, and in his style, greatness, riches and life; here and there it is even reminiscent of aeschylus. his spirit, however, lacked hardness. he lacked the weapon humour; he could not grant that one may be a philistine and still be no barbarian." not the sugary condolence of the post-prandial speaker, but this last sentence concerns us. yes, it is admitted that one is a philistine; but, a barbarian?--no, not at any price! unfortunately, poor holderlin could not make such flne distinctions. if one reads the reverse of civilisation, or perhaps sea-pirating, or cannibalism, into the word "barbarian," then the distinction is justifiable enough. but what the aesthete obviously wishes to prove to us is, that we may be philistines and at the same time men of culture. therein lies the humour which poor holderlin lacked and the need of which ultimately wrecked him.[7]* [footnote * : nietzsche's allusion to holderlin here is full of tragic significance; for, like holderlin, he too was ultimately wrecked and driven insane by the philistinism of his age. --translator's note.] on this occasion a second admission was made by the speaker: "it is not always strength of will, but weakness, which makes us superior to those tragic souls which are so passionately responsive to the attractions of beauty," or words to this effect. and this was said in the name of the assembled "we"; that is to say, the "superiors," the "superiors through weakness." let us content ourselves with these admissions. we are now in possession of information concerning two matters from one of the initiated: first, that these "we" stand beyond the passion for beauty; secondly, that their position was reached by means of weakness. in less confidential moments, however, it was just this weakness which masqueraded in the guise of a much more beautiful name: it was the famous "healthiness" of the culture-philistine. in view of this very recent restatement of the case, however, it would be as well not to speak of them any longer as the "healthy ones," but as the "weakly," or, still better, as the "feeble." oh, if only these feeble ones were not in power! how is it that they concern themselves at all about what we call them! they are the rulers, and he is a poor ruler who cannot endure to be called by a nickname. yes, if one only have power, one soon learns to poke fun--even at oneself. it cannot matter so very much, therefore, even if one do give oneself away; for what could not the purple mantle of triumph conceal? the strength of the culture-philistine steps into the broad light of day when he acknowledges his weakness; and the more he acknowledges it-the more cynically he acknowledges it--the more completely he betrays his consciousness of his own importance and superiority. we are living in a period of cynical philistine confessions. just as friedrich vischer gave us his in a word, so has david strauss handed us his in a book; and both that word and that book are cynical. iii. concerning culture-philistinism, david strauss makes a double confession, by word and by deed; that is to say, by the word of the confessor, and the act of the writer. his book entitled the old faith and the new is, first in regard to its contents, and secondly in regard to its being a book and a literary production, an uninterrupted confession; while, in the very fact that he allows himself to write confessions at all about his faith, there already lies a confession. presumably, every one seems to have the right to compile an autobiography after his fortieth year; for the humblest amongst us may have experienced things, and may have seen them at such close quarters, that the recording of them may prove of use and value to the thinker. but to write a confession of one's faith cannot but be regarded as a thousand times more pretentious, since it takes for granted that the writer attaches worth, not only to the experiences and investigations of his life, but also to his beliefs. now, what the nice thinker will require to know, above all else, is the kind of faith which happens to be compatible with natures of the straussian order, and what it is they have "half dreamily conjured up" (p. 10) concerning matters of which those alone have the right to speak who are acquainted with them at first hand. whoever would have desired to possess the confessions, say, of a ranke or a mommsen? and these men were scholars and historians of a very different stamp from david strauss. if, however, they had ever ventured to interest us in their faith instead of in their scientific investigations, we should have felt that they were overstepping their limits in a most irritating fashion. yet strauss does this when he discusses his faith. nobody wants to know anything about it, save, perhaps, a few bigoted opponents of the straussian doctrines, who, suspecting, as they do, a substratum of satanic principles beneath these doctrines, hope that he may compromise his learned utterances by revealing the nature of those principles. these clumsy creatures may, perhaps, have found what they sought in the last book; but we, who had no occasion to suspect a satanic substratum, discovered nothing of the sort, and would have felt rather pleased than not had we been able to discern even a dash of the diabolical in any part of the volume. but surely no evil spirit could speak as strauss speaks of his new faith. in fact, spirit in general seems to be altogether foreign to the book-more particularly the spirit of genius. only those whom strauss designates as his "we," speak as he does, and then, when they expatiate upon their faith to us, they bore us even more than when they relate their dreams; be they "scholars, artists, military men, civil employes, merchants, or landed proprietors; come they in their thousands, and not the worst people in the land either!" if they do not wish to remain the peaceful ones in town or county, but threaten to wax noisy, then let not the din of their unisono deceive us concerning the poverty and vulgarity of the melody they sing. how can it dispose us more favourably towards a profession of faith to hear that it is approved by a crowd, when it is of such an order that if any individual of that crowd attempted to make it known to us, we should not only fail to hear him out, but should interrupt him with a yawn? if thou sharest such a belief, we should say unto him, in heaven's name, keep it to thyself! maybe, in the past, some few harmless types looked for the thinker in david strauss; now they have discovered the "believer" in him, and are disappointed. had he kept silent, he would have remained, for these, at least, the philosopher; whereas, now, no one regards him as such. he no longer craved the honours of the thinker, however; all he wanted to be was a new believer, and he is proud of his new belief. in making a written declaration of it, he fancied he was writing the catechism of "modern thought," and building the "broad highway of the world's future." indeed, our philistines have ceased to be faint-hearted and bashful, and have acquired almost cynical assurance. there was a time, long, long ago, when the philistine was only tolerated as something that did not speak, and about which no one spoke; then a period ensued during which his roughness was smoothed, during which he was found amusing, and people talked about him. under this treatment he gradually became a prig, rejoiced with all his heart over his rough places and his wrongheaded and candid singularities, and began to talk, on his own account, after the style of riehl's music for the home. "but what do i see? is it a shadow? is it reality? how long and broad my poodle grows!" for now he is already rolling like a hippopotamus along "the broad highway of the world's future," and his growling and barking have become transformed into the proud incantations of a religious founder. and is it your own sweet wish, great master, to found the religion of the future? "the times seem to us not yet ripe (p. 7). it does not occur to us to wish to destroy a church." but why not, great master? one but needs the ability. besides, to speak quite openly in the latter, you yourself are convinced that you possess this ability. look at the last page of your book. there you actually state, forsooth, that your new way "alone is the future highway of the world, which now only requires partial completion, and especially general use, in order also to become easy and pleasant." make no further denials, then. the religious founder is unmasked, the convenient and agreeable highway leading to the straussian paradise is built. it is only the coach in which you wish to convey us that does not altogether satisfy you, unpretentious man that you are! you tell us in your concluding remarks: "nor will i pretend that the coach to which my esteemed readers have been obliged to trust themselves with me fulfils every requirement,... all through one is much jolted" (p. 438). ah! you are casting about for a compliment, you gallant old religious founder! but let us be straightforward with you. if your reader so regulates the perusal of the 368 pages of your religious catechism as to read only one page a day--that is to say, if he take it in the smallest possible doses-then, perhaps, we should be able to believe that he might suffer some evil effect from the book--if only as the outcome of his vexation when the results he expected fail to make themselves felt. gulped down more heartily, however, and as much as possible being taken at each draught, according to the prescription to be recommended in the case of all modern books, the drink can work no mischief; and, after taking it, the reader will not necessarily be either out of sorts or out of temper, but rather merry and well-disposed, as though nothing had happened; as though no religion had been assailed, no world's highway been built, and no profession of faith been made. and i do indeed call this a result! the doctor, the drug, and the disease--everything forgotten! and the joyous laughter! the continual provocation to hilarity! you are to be envied, sir; for you have founded the most attractive of all religions --one whose followers do honour to its founder by laughing at him. iv. the philistine as founder of the religion of the future--that is the new belief in its most emphatic form of expression. the philistine becomes a dreamer--that is the unheard-of occurrence which distinguishes the german nation of to-day. but for the present, in any case, let us maintain an attitude of caution towards this fantastic exaltation. for does not david strauss himself advise us to exercise such caution, in the following profound passage, the general tone of which leads us to think of the founder of christianity rather than of our particular author? (p. 92): "we know there have been noble enthusiasts--enthusiasts of genius; the influence of an enthusiast can rouse, exalt, and produce prolonged historic effects; but we do not wish to choose him as the guide of our life. he will be sure to mislead us, if we do not subject his influence to the control of reason." but we know something more: we know that there are enthusiasts who are not intellectual, who do not rouse or exalt, and who, nevertheless, not only expect to be the guides of our lives, but, as such, to exercise a very lasting historical influence into the bargain, and to rule the future;--all the more reason why we should place their influence under the control of reason. lichtenberg even said: "there are enthusiasts quite devoid of ability, and these are really dangerous people." in the first place, as regards the above-mentioned control of reason, we should like to have candid answers to the three following questions: first, how does the new believer picture his heaven? secondly, how far does the courage lent him by the new faith extend? and, thirdly, how does he write his books? strauss the confessor must answer the first and second questions; strauss the writer must answer the third. the heaven of the new believer must, perforce, be a heaven upon earth; for the christian "prospect of an immortal life in heaven," together with the other consolations, "must irretrievably vanish" for him who has but "one foot" on the straussian platform. the way in which a religion represents its heaven is significant, and if it be true that christianity knows no other heavenly occupations than singing and making music, the prospect of the philistine, à la strauss, is truly not a very comforting one. in the book of confessions, however, there is a page which treats of paradise (p. 342). happiest of philistines, unroll this parchment scroll before anything else, and the whole of heaven will seem to clamber down to thee! "we would but indicate how we act, how we have acted these many years. besides our profession--for we are members of the most various professions, and by no means exclusively consist of scholars or artists, but of military men and civil employes, of merchants and landed proprietors;... and again, as i have said already, there are not a few of us, but many thousands, and not the worst people in the country;--besides our profession, then, i say, we are eagerly accessible to all the higher interests of humanity; we have taken a vivid interest, during late years, and each after his manner has participated in the great national war, and the reconstruction of the german state; and we have been profoundly exalted by the turn events have taken, as unexpected as glorious, for our much tried nation. to the end of forming just conclusions in these things, we study history, which has now been made easy, even to the unlearned, by a series of attractively and popularly written works; at the same time, we endeavour to enlarge our knowledge of the natural sciences, where also there is no lack of sources of information; and lastly, in the writings of our great poets, in the performances of our great musicians, we find a stimulus for the intellect and heart, for wit and imagination, which leaves nothing to be desired. thus we live, and hold on our way in joy." "here is our man!" cries the philistine exultingly, who reads this: "for this is exactly how we live; it is indeed our daily life."[8]* and how perfectly he understands the euphemism! when, for example, he refers to the historical studies by means of which we help ourselves in forming just conclusions regarding the political situation, what can he be thinking of, if it be not our newspaper-reading? when he speaks of the active part we take in the reconstruction of the german state, he surely has only our daily visits to the beer-garden in his mind; and is not a walk in the zoological gardens implied by 'the sources of information through which we endeavour to enlarge our knowledge of the natural sciences'? finally, the theatres and concert-halls are referred to as places from which we take home 'a stimulus for wit and imagination which leaves nothing to be desired.'--with what dignity and wit he describes even the most suspicious of our doings! here indeed is our man; for his heaven is our heaven!" [footnote * : this alludes to a german student-song.] thus cries the philistine; and if we are not quite so satisfied as he, it is merely owing to the fact that we wanted to know more. scaliger used to say: "what does it matter to us whether montaigne drank red or white wine?" but, in this more important case, how greatly ought we to value definite particulars of this sort! if we could but learn how many pipes the philistine smokes daily, according to the prescriptions of the new faith, and whether it is the spener or the national gazette that appeals to him over his coffee! but our curiosity is not satisfied. with regard to one point only do we receive more exhaustive information, and fortunately this point relates to the heaven in heaven--the private little art-rooms which will be consecrated to the use of great poets and musicians, and to which the philistine will go to edify himself; in which, moreover, according to his own showing, he will even get "all his stains removed and wiped away" (p. 433); so that we are led to regard these private little art-rooms as a kind of bath-rooms. "but this is only effected for some fleeting moments; it happens and counts only in the realms of phantasy; as soon as we return to rude reality, and the cramping confines of actual life, we are again on all sides assailed by the old cares,"--thus our master sighs. let us, however, avail ourselves of the fleeting moments during which we remain in those little rooms; there is just sufficient time to get a glimpse of the apotheosis of the philistine-that is to say, the philistine whose stains have been removed and wiped away, and who is now an absolutely pure sample of his type. in truth, the opportunity we have here may prove instructive: let no one who happens to have fallen a victim to the confession-book lay it aside before having read the two appendices, "of our great poets" and "of our great musicians." here the rainbow of the new brotherhood is set, and he who can find no pleasure in it "for such an one there is no help," as strauss says on another occasion; and, as he might well say here, "he is not yet ripe for our point of view." for are we not in the heaven of heavens? the enthusiastic explorer undertakes to lead us about, and begs us to excuse him if, in the excess of his joy at all the beauties to be seen, he should by any chance be tempted to talk too much. "if i should, perhaps, become more garrulous than may seem warranted in this place, let the reader be indulgent to me; for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. let him only be assured that what he is now about to read does not consist of older materials, which i take the opportunity of inserting here, but that these remarks have been written for their present place and purpose" (pp. 345-46). this confession surprises us somewhat for the moment. what can it matter to us whether or not the little chapters were freshly written? as if it were a matter of writing! between ourselves, i should have been glad if they had been written a quarter of a century earlier; then, at least, i should have understood why the thoughts seem to be so bleached, and why they are so redolent of resuscitated antiquities. but that a thing should have been written in 1872 and already smell of decay in 1872 strikes me as suspicious. let us imagine some one's falling asleep while reading these chapters--what would he most probably dream about? a friend answered this question for me, because he happened to have had the experience himself. he dreamt of a wax-work show. the classical writers stood there, elegantly represented in wax and beads. their arms and eyes moved, and a screw inside them creaked an accompaniment to their movements. he saw something gruesome among them--a misshapen figure, decked with tapes and jaundiced paper, out of whose mouth a ticket hung, on which "lessing" was written. my friend went close up to it and learned the worst: it was the homeric chimera; in front it was strauss, behind it was gervinus, and in the middle chimera. the tout-ensemble was lessing. this discovery caused him to shriek with terror: he waked, and read no more. in sooth, great master, why have you written such fusty little chapters? we do, indeed, learn something new from them; for instance, that gervinus made it known to the world how and why goethe was no dramatic genius; that, in the second part of faust, he had only produced a world of phantoms and of symbols; that wallenstein is a macbeth as well as a hamlet; that the straussian reader extracts the short stories out of the wanderjahre "much as naughty children pick the raisins and almonds out of a tough plum-cake"; that no complete effect can be produced on the stage without the forcible element, and that schiller emerged from kant as from a cold-water cure. all this is certainly new and striking; but, even so, it does not strike us with wonder, and so sure as it is new, it will never grow old, for it never was young; it was senile at birth. what extraordinary ideas seem to occur to these blessed ones, after the new style, in their aesthetic heaven! and why can they not manage to forget a few of them, more particularly when they are of that unaesthetic, earthly, and ephemeral order to which the scholarly thoughts of gervinus belong, and when they so obviously bear the stamp of puerility? but it almost seems as though the modest greatness of a strauss and the vain insignificance of a gervinus were only too well able to harmonise: then long live all those blessed ones! may we, the rejected, also live long, if this unchallenged judge of art continues any longer to teach his borrowed enthusiasm, and the gallop of that hired steed of which the honest grillparzer speaks with such delightful clearness, until the whole of heaven rings beneath the hoof of that galumphing enthusiasm. then, at least, things will be livelier and noisier than they are at the present moment, in which the carpet-slippered rapture of our heavenly leader and the lukewarm eloquence of his lips only succeed in the end in making us sick and tired. i should like to know how a hallelujah sung by strauss would sound: i believe one would have to listen very carefully, lest it should seem no more than a courteous apology or a lisped compliment. apropos of this, i might adduce an instructive and somewhat forbidding example. strauss strongly resented the action of one of his opponents who happened to refer to his reverence for lessing. the unfortunate man had misunderstood;--true, strauss did declare that one must be of a very obtuse mind not to recognise that the simple words of paragraph 86 come from the writer's heart. now, i do not question this warmth in the very least; on the contrary, the fact that strauss fosters these feelings towards lessing has always excited my suspicion; i find the same warmth for lessing raised almost to heat in gervinus--yea, on the whole, no great german writer is so popular among little german writers as lessing is; but for all that, they deserve no thanks for their predilection; for what is it, in sooth, that they praise in lessing? at one moment it is his catholicity-the fact that he was critic and poet, archaeologist and philosopher, dramatist and theologian. anon, "it is the unity in him of the writer and the man, of the head and the heart." the last quality, as a rule, is just as characteristic of the great writer as of the little one; as a rule, a narrow head agrees only too fatally with a narrow heart. and as to the catholicity; this is no distinction, more especially when, as in lessing's case, it was a dire necessity. what astonishes one in regard to lessing-enthusiasts is rather that they have no conception of the devouring necessity which drove him on through life and to this catholicity; no feeling for the fact that such a man is too prone to consume himself rapidly, like a flame; nor any indignation at the thought that the vulgar narrowness and pusillanimity of his whole environment, especially of his learned contemporaries, so saddened, tormented, and stifled the tender and ardent creature that he was, that the very universality for which he is praised should give rise to feelings of the deepest compassion. "have pity on the exceptional man!" goethe cries to us; "for it was his lot to live in such a wretched age that his life was one long polemical effort." how can ye, my worthy philistines, think of lessing without shame? he who was ruined precisely on account of your stupidity, while struggling with your ludicrous fetiches and idols, with the defects of your theatres, scholars, and theologists, without once daring to attempt that eternal flight for which he had been born. and what are your feelings when ye think of winckelman, who, in order to turn his eyes from your grotesque puerilities, went begging to the jesuits for help, and whose ignominious conversion dishonours not him, but you? dare ye mention schiller's name without blushing? look at his portrait. see the flashing eyes that glance contemptuously over your heads, the deadly red cheek--do these things mean nothing to you? in him ye had such a magnificent and divine toy that ye shattered it. suppose, for a moment, it had been possible to deprive this harassed and hunted life of goethe's friendship, ye would then have been reponsible for its still earlier end. ye have had no finger in any one of the life-works of your great geniuses, and yet ye would make a dogma to the effect that no one is to be helped in the future. but for every one of them, ye were "the resistance of the obtuse world," which goethe calls by its name in his epilogue to the bell; for all of them ye were the grumbling imbeciles, or the envious bigots, or the malicious egoists: in spite of you each of them created his works, against you each directed his attacks, and thanks to you each prematurely sank, while his work was still unfinished, broken and bewildered by the stress of the battle. and now ye presume that ye are going to be permitted, tamquam re bene gesta, to praise such men! and with words which leave no one in any doubt as to whom ye have in your minds when ye utter your encomiums, which therefore "spring forth with such hearty warmth" that one must be blind not to see to whom ye are really bowing. even goethe in his day had to cry: "upon my honour, we are in need of a lessing, and woe unto all vain masters and to the whole aesthetic kingdom of heaven, when the young tiger, whose restless strength will be visible in his every distended muscle and his every glance, shall sally forth to seek his prey!" v. how clever it was of my friend to read no further, once he had been enlightened (thanks to that chimerical vision) concerning the straussian lessing and strauss himself. we, however, read on further, and even craved admission of the doorkeeper of the new faith to the sanctum of music. the master threw the door open for us, accompanied us, and began quoting certain names, until, at last, overcome with mistrust, we stood still and looked at him. was it possible that we were the victims of the same hallucination as that to which our friend had been subjected in his dream? the musicians to whom strauss referred seemed to us to be wrongly designated as long as he spoke about them, and we began to think that the talk must certainly be about somebody else, even admitting that it did not relate to incongruous phantoms. when, for instance, he mentioned haydn with that same warmth which made us so suspicious when he praised lessing, and when he posed as the epopt and priest of a mysterious haydn cult; when, in a discussion upon quartette-music, if you please, he even likened haydn to a "good unpretending soup" and beethoven to "sweetmeats" (p. 432); then, to our minds, one thing, and one thing alone, became certain--namely, that his sweetmeat-beethoven is not our beethoven, and his soup-haydn is not our haydn. the master was moreover of the opinion that our orchestra is too good to perform haydn, and that only the most unpretentious amateurs can do justice to that music--a further proof that he was referring to some other artist and some other work, possibly to riehl's music for the home. but whoever can this sweetmeat-beethoven of strauss's be? he is said to have composed nine symphonies, of which the pastoral is "the least remarkable"; we are told that "each time in composing the third, he seemed impelled to exceed his bounds, and depart on an adventurous quest," from which we might infer that we are here concerned with a sort of double monster, half horse and half cavalier. with regard to a certain eroica, this centaur is very hard pressed, because he did not succeed in making it clear "whether it is a question of a conflict on the open field or in the deep heart of man." in the pastoral there is said to be "a furiously raging storm," for which it is "almost too insignificant" to interrupt a dance of country-folk, and which, owing to "its arbitrary connection with a trivial motive," as strauss so adroitly and correctly puts it, renders this symphony "the least remarkable." a more drastic expression appears to have occurred to the master; but he prefers to speak here, as he says, "with becoming modesty." but no, for once our master is wrong; in this case he is really a little too modest. who, indeed, will enlighten us concerning this sweetmeat-beethoven, if not strauss himself--the only person who seems to know anything about him? but, immediately below, a strong judgment is uttered with becoming non-modesty, and precisely in regard to the ninth symphony. it is said, for instance, that this symphony "is naturally the favourite of a prevalent taste, which in art, and music especially, mistakes the grotesque for the genial, and the formless for the sublime" (p. 428). it is true that a critic as severe as gervinus was gave this work a hearty welcome, because it happened to confirm one of his doctrines; but strauss is "far from going to these problematic productions" in search of the merits of his beethoven. "it is a pity," cries our master, with a convulsive sigh, "that one is compelled, by such reservations, to mar one's enjoyment of beethoven, as well as the admiration gladly accorded to him." for our master is a favourite of the graces, and these have informed him that they only accompanied beethoven part of the way, and that he then lost sight of them. "this is a defect," he cries, "but can you believe that it may also appear as an advantage?" "he who is painfully and breathlessly rolling the musical idea along will seem to be moving the weightier one, and thus appear to be the stronger" (pp. 423-24). this is a confession, and not necessarily one concerning beethoven alone, but concerning "the classical prose-writer" himself. he, the celebrated author, is not abandoned by the graces. from the play of airy jests--that is to say, straussian jests-to the heights of solemn earnestness--that is to say, straussian earnestness--they remain stolidly at his elbow. he, the classical prose-writer, slides his burden along playfully and with a light heart, whereas beethoven rolls his painfully and breathlessly. he seems merely to dandle his load; this is indeed an advantage. but would anybody believe that it might equally be a sign of something wanting? in any case, only those could believe this who mistake the grotesque for the genial, and the formless for the sublime--is not that so, you dandling favourite of the graces? we envy no one the edifying moments he may have, either in the stillness of his little private room or in a new heaven specially fitted out for him; but of all possible pleasures of this order, that of strauss's is surely one of the most wonderful, for he is even edified by a little holocaust. he calmly throws the sublimest works of the german nation into the flames, in order to cense his idols with their smoke. suppose, for a moment, that by some accident, the eroica, the pastoral, and the ninth symphony had fallen into the hands of our priest of the graces, and that it had been in his power to suppress such problematic productions, in order to keep the image of the master pure, who doubts but what he would have burned them? and it is precisely in this way that the strausses of our time demean themselves: they only wish to know so much of an artist as is compatible with the service of their rooms; they know only the extremes-censing or burning. to all this they are heartily welcome; the one surprising feature of the whole case is that public opinion, in matters artistic, should be so feeble, vacillating, and corruptible as contentedly to allow these exhibitions of indigent philistinism to go by without raising an objection; yea, that it does not even possess sufficient sense of humour to feel tickled at the sight of an unaesthetic little master's sitting in judgment upon beethoven. as to mozart, what aristotle says of plato ought really to be applied here: "insignificant people ought not to be permitted even to praise him." in this respect, however, all shame has vanished--from the public as well as from the master's mind: he is allowed, not merely to cross himself before the greatest and purest creations of german genius, as though he had perceived something godless and immoral in them, but people actually rejoice over his candid confessions and admission of sins--more particularly as he makes no mention of his own, but only of those which great men are said to have committed. oh, if only our master be in the right! his readers sometimes think, when attacked by a paroxysm of doubt; he himself, however, stands there, smiling and convinced, perorating, condemning, blessing, raising his hat to himself, and is at any minute capable of saying what the duchesse delaforte said to madame de staël, to wit: "my dear, i must confess that i find no one but myself invariably right." vi. a corpse is a pleasant thought for a worm, and a worm is a dreadful thought for every living creature. worms fancy their kingdom of heaven in a fat body; professors of philosophy seek theirs in rummaging among schopenhauer's entrails, and as long as rodents exist, there will exist a heaven for rodents. in this, we have the answer to our first question: how does the believer in the new faith picture his heaven? the straussian philistine harbours in the works of our great poets and musicians like a parasitic worm whose life is destruction, whose admiration is devouring, and whose worship is digesting. now, however, our second question must be answered: how far does the courage lent to its adherents by this new faith extend? even this question would already have been answered, if courage and pretentiousness had been one; for then strauss would not be lacking even in the just and veritable courage of a mameluke. at all events, the "becoming modesty" of which strauss speaks in the above-mentioned passage, where he is referring to beethoven, can only be a stylistic and not a moral manner of speech. strauss has his full share of the temerity to which every successful hero assumes the right: all flowers grow only for him--the conqueror; and he praises the sun because it shines in at his window just at the right time. he does not even spare the venerable old universe in his eulogies--as though it were only now and henceforward sufficiently sanctified by praise to revolve around the central monad david strauss. the universe, he is happy to inform us, is, it is true, a machine with jagged iron wheels, stamping and hammering ponderously, but: "we do not only find the revolution of pitiless wheels in our world-machine, but also the shedding of soothing oil" (p. 435). the universe, provided it submit to strauss's encomiums, is not likely to overflow with gratitude towards this master of weird metaphors, who was unable to discover better similes in its praise. but what is the oil called which trickles down upon the hammers and stampers? and how would it console a workman who chanced to get one of his limbs caught in the mechanism to know that this oil was trickling over him? passing over this simile as bad, let us turn our attention to another of strauss's artifices, whereby he tries to ascertain how he feels disposed towards the universe; this question of marguerite's, "he loves me--loves me not--loves me?" hanging on his lips the while. now, although strauss is not telling flower-petals or the buttons on his waistcoat, still what he does is not less harmless, despite the fact that it needs perhaps a little more courage. strauss wishes to make certain whether his feeling for the "all" is either paralysed or withered, and he pricks himself; for he knows that one can prick a limb that is either paralysed or withered without causing any pain. as a matter of fact, he does not really prick himself, but selects another more violent method, which he describes thus: "we open schopenhauer, who takes every occasion of slapping our idea in the face" (p. 167). now, as an idea--even that of strauss's concerning the universe--has no face, if there be any face in the question at all it must be that of the idealist, and the procedure may be subdivided into the following separate actions:--strauss, in any case, throws schopenhauer open, whereupon the latter slaps strauss in the face. strauss then reacts religiously; that is to say, he again begins to belabour schopenhauer, to abuse him, to speak of absurdities, blasphemies, dissipations, and even to allege that schopenhauer could not have been in his right senses. result of the dispute: "we demand the same piety for our cosmos that the devout of old demanded for his god"; or, briefly, "he loves me." our favourite of the graces makes his life a hard one, but he is as brave as a mameluke, and fears neither the devil nor schopenhauer. how much "soothing oil" must he use if such incidents are of frequent occurrence! on the other hand, we readily understand strauss's gratitude to this tickling, pricking, and slapping schopenhauer; hence we are not so very much surprised when we find him expressing himself in the following kind way about him: "we need only turn over the leaves of arthur schopenhauer's works (although we shall on many other accounts do well not only to glance over but to study them), etc." (p. 166). now, to whom does this captain of philistines address these words? to him who has clearly never even studied schopenhauer, the latter might well have retorted, "this is an author who does not even deserve to be scanned, much less to be studied." obviously, he gulped schopenhauer down "the wrong way," and this hoarse coughing is merely his attempt to clear his throat. but, in order to fill the measure of his ingenuous encomiums, strauss even arrogates to himself the right of commending old kant: he speaks of the latter's general history of the heavens of the year 1755 as of "a work which has always appeared to me not less important than his later critique of pure reason. if in the latter we admire the depth of insight, the breadth of observation strikes us in the former. if in the latter we can trace the old man's anxiety to secure even a limited possession of knowledge--so it be but on a firm basis--in the former we encounter the mature man, full of the daring of the discoverer and conqueror in the realm of thought." this judgment of strauss's concerning kant did not strike me as being more modest than the one concerning schopenhauer. in the one case, we have the little captain, who is above all anxious to express even the most insignificant opinion with certainty, and in the other we have the famous prose-writer, who, with all the courage of ignorance, exudes his eulogistic secretions over kant. it is almost incredible that strauss availed himself of nothing in kant's critique of pure reason while compiling his testament of modern ideas, and that he knew only how to appeal to the coarsest realistic taste must also be numbered among the more striking characteristics of this new gospel, the which professes to be but the result of the laborious and continuous study of history and science, and therefore tacitly repudiates all connection with philosophy. for the philistine captain and his "we," kantian philosophy does not exist. he does not dream of the fundamental antinomy of idealism and of the highly relative sense of all science and reason. and it is precisely reason that ought to tell him how little it is possible to know of things in themselves. it is true, however, that people of a certain age cannot possibly understand kant, especially when, in their youth, they understood or fancied they understood that "gigantic mind," hegel, as strauss did; and had moreover concerned themselves with schleiermacher, who, according to strauss, "was gifted with perhaps too much acumen." it will sound odd to our author when i tell him that, even now, he stands absolutely dependent upon hegel and schleiermacher, and that his teaching of the cosmos, his way of regarding things sub specie biennii, his salaams to the state of affairs now existing in germany, and, above all, his shameless philistine optimism, can only be explained by an appeal to certain impressions of youth, early habits, and disorders; for he who has once sickened on hegel and schleiermacher never completely recovers. there is one passage in the confession-book where the incurable optimism referred to above bursts forth with the full joyousness of holiday spirits (pp. 166-67). "if the universe is a thing which had better not have existed," says strauss, "then surely the speculation of the philosopher, as forming part of this universe, is a speculation which had better not have speculated. the pessimist philosopher fails to perceive that he, above all, declares his own thought, which declares the world to be bad, as bad also; but if the thought which declares the world to be bad is a bad thought, then it follows naturally that the world is good. as a rule, optimism may take things too easily. schopenhauer's references to the colossal part which sorrow and evil play in the world are quite in their right place as a counterpoise; but every true philosophy is necessarily optimistic, as otherwise she hews down the branch on which she herself is sitting." if this refutation of schopenhauer is not the same as that to which strauss refers somewhere else as "the refutation loudly and jubilantly acclaimed in higher spheres," then i quite fail to understand the dramatic phraseology used by him elsewhere to strike an opponent. here optimism has for once intentionally simplified her task. but the master-stroke lay in thus pretending that the refutation of schopenhauer was not such a very difficult task after all, and in playfully wielding the burden in such a manner that the three graces attendant on the dandling optimist might constantly be delighted by his methods. the whole purpose of the deed was to demonstrate this one truth, that it is quite unnecessary to take a pessimist seriously; the most vapid sophisms become justified, provided they show that, in regard to a philosophy as "unhealthy and unprofitable" as schopenhauer's, not proofs but quips and sallies alone are suitable. while perusing such passages, the reader will grasp the full meaning of schopenhauer's solemn utterance to the effect that, where optimism is not merely the idle prattle of those beneath whose flat brows words and only words are stored, it seemed to him not merely an absurd but a vicious attitude of mind, and one full of scornful irony towards the indescribable sufferings of humanity. when a philosopher like strauss is able to frame it into a system, it becomes more than a vicious attitude of mind--it is then an imbecile gospel of comfort for the "i" or for the "we," and can only provoke indignation. who could read the following psychological avowal, for instance, without indignation, seeing that it is obviously but an offshoot from this vicious gospel of comfort?--"beethoven remarked that he could never have composed a text like figaro or don juan. life had not been so profuse of its snubs to him that he could treat it so gaily, or deal so lightly with the foibles of men" (p. 430). in order, however, to adduce the most striking instance of this dissolute vulgarity of sentiment, let it suffice, here, to observe that strauss knows no other means of accounting for the terribly serious negative instinct and the movement of ascetic sanctification which characterised the first century of the christian era, than by supposing the existence of a previous period of surfeit in the matter of all kinds of sexual indulgence, which of itself brought about a state of revulsion and disgust. "the persians call it bidamag buden, the germans say 'katzenjammer.'"[9]* [footnote * : remorse for the previous night's excesses.--translator's note.] strauss quotes this himself, and is not ashamed. as for us, we turn aside for a moment, that we may overcome our loathing. vii. as a matter of fact, our philistine captain is brave, even audacious, in words; particularly when he hopes by such bravery to delight his noble colleagues--the "we," as he calls them. so the asceticism and self-denial of the ancient anchorite and saint was merely a form of katzenjammer? jesus may be described as an enthusiast who nowadays would scarcely have escaped the madhouse, and the story of the resurrection may be termed a "world-wide deception." for once we will allow these views to pass without raising any objection, seeing that they may help us to gauge the amount of courage which our "classical philistine" strauss is capable of. let us first hear his confession: "it is certainly an unpleasant and a thankless task to tell the world those truths which it is least desirous of hearing. it prefers, in fact, to manage its affairs on a profuse scale, receiving and spending after the magnificent fashion of the great, as long as there is anything left; should any person, however, add up the various items of its liabilities, and anxiously call its attention to the sum-total, he is certain to be regarded as an importunate meddler. and yet this has always been the bent of my moral and intellectual nature." a moral and intellectual nature of this sort might possibly be regarded as courageous; but what still remains to be proved is, whether this courage is natural and inborn, or whether it is not rather acquired and artificial. perhaps strauss only accustomed himself by degrees to the rôle of an importunate meddler, until he gradually acquired the courage of his calling. innate cowardice, which is the philistine's birthright, would not be incompatible with this mode of development, and it is precisely this cowardice which is perceptible in the want of logic of those sentences of strauss's which it needed courage to pronounce. they sound like thunder, but they do not clear the air. no aggressive action is performed: aggressive words alone are used, and these he selects from among the most insulting he can find. he moreover exhausts all his accumulated strength and energy in coarse and noisy expression, and when once his utterances have died away he is more of a coward even than he who has always held his tongue. the very shadow of his deeds--his morality--shows us that he is a word-hero, and that he avoids everything which might induce him to transfer his energies from mere verbosity to really serious things. with admirable frankness, he announces that he is no longer a christian, but disclaims all idea of wishing to disturb the contentment of any one: he seems to recognise a contradiction in the notion of abolishing one society by instituting another--whereas there is nothing contradictory in it at all. with a certain rude self-satisfaction, he swathes himself in the hirsute garment of our simian genealogists, and extols darwin as one of mankind's greatest benefactors; but our perplexity is great when we find him constructing his ethics quite independently of the question, "what is our conception of the universe?" in this department he had an opportunity of exhibiting native pluck; for he ought to have turned his back on his "we," and have established a moral code for life out of bellum omnium contra omnes and the privileges of the strong. but it is to be feared that such a code could only have emanated from a bold spirit like that of hobbes', and must have taken its root in a love of truth quite different from that which was only able to vent itself in explosive outbursts against parsons, miracles, and the "world-wide humbug" of the resurrection. for, whereas the philistine remained on strauss's side in regard to these explosive outbursts, he would have been against him had he been confronted with a genuine and seriously constructed ethical system, based upon darwin's teaching. says strauss: "i should say that all moral action arises from the individual's acting in consonance with the idea of kind" (p. 274). put quite clearly and comprehensively, this means: "live as a man, and not as an ape or a seal." unfortunately, this imperative is both useless and feeble; for in the class man what a multitude of different types are included--to mention only the patagonian and the master, strauss; and no one would ever dare to say with any right, "live like a patagonian," and "live like the master strauss"! should any one, however, make it his rule to live like a genius--that is to say, like the ideal type of the genus man--and should he perchance at the same time be either a patagonian or strauss himself, what should we then not have to suffer from the importunities of genius-mad eccentrics (concerning whose mushroom growth in germany even lichtenberg had already spoken), who with savage cries would compel us to listen to the confession of their most recent belief! strauss has not yet learned that no "idea" can ever make man better or more moral, and that the preaching of a morality is as easy as the establishment of it is difficult. his business ought rather to have been, to take the phenomena of human goodness, such--for instance--as pity, love, and self-abnegation, which are already to hand, and seriously to explain them and show their relation to his darwinian first principle. but no; he preferred to soar into the imperative, and thus escape the task of explaining. but even in his flight he was irresponsible enough to soar beyond the very first principles of which we speak. "ever remember," says strauss, "that thou art human, not merely a natural production; ever remember that all others are human also, and, with all individual differences, the same as thou, having the same needs and claims as thyself: this is the sum and the substance of morality" (p. 277). but where does this imperative hail from? how can it be intuitive in man, seeing that, according to darwin, man is indeed a creature of nature, and that his ascent to his present stage of development has been conditioned by quite different laws--by the very fact that be was continually forgetting that others were constituted like him and shared the same rights with him; by the very fact that he regarded himself as the stronger, and thus brought about the gradual suppression of weaker types. though strauss is bound to admit that no two creatures have ever been quite alike, and that the ascent of man from the lowest species of animals to the exalted height of the culture--philistine depended upon the law of individual distinctness, he still sees no difficulty in declaring exactly the reverse in his law: "behave thyself as though there were no such things as individual distinctions." where is the strauss-darwin morality here? whither, above all, has the courage gone? in the very next paragraph we find further evidence tending to show us the point at which this courage veers round to its opposite; for strauss continues: "ever remember that thou, and all that thou beholdest within and around thee, all that befalls thee and others, is no disjointed fragment, no wild chaos of atoms or casualties, but that, following eternal law, it springs from the one primal source of all life, all reason, and all good: this is the essence of religion" (pp. 277-78). out of that "one primal source," however, all ruin and irrationality, all evil flows as well, and its name, according to strauss, is cosmos. now, how can this cosmos, with all the contradictions and the self-annihilating characteristics which strauss gives it, be worthy of religious veneration and be addressed by the name "god," as strauss addresses it?--"our god does not, indeed, take us into his arms from the outside (here one expects, as an antithesis, a somewhat miraculous process of being "taken into his arms from the inside"), but he unseals the well-springs of consolation within our own bosoms. he shows us that although chance would be an unreasonable ruler, yet necessity, or the enchainment of causes in the world, is reason itself." (a misapprehension of which only the "we" can fail to perceive the folly; because they were brought up in the hegelian worship of reality as the reasonable--that is to say, in the canonisation of success.) "he teaches us to perceive that to demand an exception in the accomplishment of a single natural law would be to demand the destruction of the universe" (pp. 435-36). on the contrary, great master: an honest natural scientist believes in the unconditional rule of natural laws in the world, without, however, taking up any position in regard to the ethical or intellectual value of these laws. wherever neutrality is abandoned in this respect, it is owing to an anthropomorphic attitude of mind which allows reason to exceed its proper bounds. but it is just at the point where the natural scientist resigns that strauss, to put it in his own words, "reacts religiously," and leaves the scientific and scholarly standpoint in order to proceed along less honest lines of his own. without any further warrant, he assumes that all that has happened possesses the highest intellectual value; that it was therefore absolutely reasonably and intentionally so arranged, and that it even contained a revelation of eternal goodness. he therefore has to appeal to a complete cosmodicy, and finds himself at a disadvantage in regard to him who is contented with a theodicy, and who, for instance, regards the whole of man's existence as a punishment for sin or a process of purification. at this stage, and in this embarrassing position, strauss even suggests a metaphysical hypothesis--the driest and most palsied ever conceived--and, in reality, but an unconscious parody of one of lessing's sayings. we read on page 255: "and that other saying of lessing's-'if god, holding truth in his right hand, and in his left only the ever-living desire for it, although on condition of perpetual error, left him the choice of the two, he would, considering that truth belongs to god alone, humbly seize his left hand, and beg its contents for himself'-this saying of lessing's has always been accounted one of the most magnificent which he has left us. it has been found to contain the general expression of his restless love of inquiry and activity. the saying has always made a special impression upon me; because, behind its subjective meaning, i still seemed to hear the faint ring of an objective one of infinite import. for does it not contain the best possible answer to the rude speech of schopenhauer, respecting the ill-advised god who had nothing better to do than to transform himself into this miserable world? if, for example, the creator himself had shared lessing's conviction of the superiority of struggle to tranquil possession?" what!--a god who would choose perpetual error, together with a striving after truth, and who would, perhaps, fall humbly at strauss's feet and cry to him,"take thou all truth, it is thine!"? if ever a god and a man were ill-advised, they are this straussian god, whose hobby is to err and to fail, and this straussian man, who must atone for this erring and failing. here, indeed, one hears "a faint ring of infinite import"; here flows strauss's cosmic soothing oil; here one has a notion of the rationale of all becoming and all natural laws. really? is not our universe rather the work of an inferior being, as lichtenberg suggests?--of an inferior being who did not quite understand his business; therefore an experiment, an attempt, upon which work is still proceeding? strauss himself, then, would be compelled to admit that our universe is by no means the theatre of reason, but of error, and that no conformity to law can contain anything consoling, since all laws have been promulgated by an erratic god who even finds pleasure in blundering. it really is a most amusing spectacle to watch strauss as a metaphysical architect, building castles in the air. but for whose benefit is this entertainment given? for the smug and noble "we," that they may not lose conceit with themselves: they may possibly have taken sudden fright, in the midst of the inflexible and pitiless wheel-works of the world-machine, and are tremulously imploring their leader to come to their aid. that is why strauss pours forth the "soothing oil," that is why he leads forth on a leash a god whose passion it is to err; it is for the same reason, too, that he assumes for once the utterly unsuitable rôle of a metaphysical architect. he does all this, because the noble souls already referred to are frightened, and because he is too. and it is here that we reach the limit of his courage, even in the presence of his "we." he does not dare to be honest, and to tell them, for instance: "i have liberated you from a helping and pitiful god: the cosmos is no more than an inflexible machine; beware of its wheels, that they do not crush you." he dare not do this. consequently, he must enlist the help of a witch, and he turns to metaphysics. to the philistine, however, even strauss's metaphysics is preferable to christianity's, and the notion of an erratic god more congenial than that of one who works miracles. for the philistine himself errs, but has never yet performed a miracle. hence his hatred of the genius; for the latter is justly famous for the working of miracles. it is therefore highly instructive to ascertain why strauss, in one passage alone, suddenly takes up the cudgels for genius and the aristocracy of intellect in general. whatever does he do it for? he does it out of fear--fear of the social democrat. he refers to bismarck and moltke, "whose greatness is the less open to controversy as it manifests itself in the domain of tangible external facts. no help for it, therefore; even the most stiff-necked and obdurate of these fellows must condescend to look up a little, if only to get a sight, be it no farther than the knees, of those august figures" (p.327). do you, master metaphysician, perhaps intend to instruct the social democrats in the art of getting kicks? the willingness to bestow them may be met with everywhere, and you are perfectly justified in promising to those who happen to be kicked a sight of those sublime beings as far as the knee. "also in the domain of art and science," strauss continues, "there will never be a dearth of kings whose architectural undertakings will find employment for a multitude of carters." granted; but what if the carters should begin building? it does happen at times, great master, as you know, and then the kings must grin and bear it. as a matter of fact, this union of impudence and weakness, of daring words and cowardly concessions, this cautious deliberation as to which sentences will or will not impress the philistine or smooth him down the right way, this lack of character and power masquerading as character and power, this meagre wisdom in the guise of omniscience,--these are the features in this book which i detest. if i could conceive of young men having patience to read it and to value it, i should sorrowfully renounce all hope for their future. and is this confession of wretched, hopeless, and really despicable philistinism supposed to be the expression of the thousands constituting the "we" of whom strauss speaks, and who are to be the fathers of the coming generation? unto him who would fain help this coming generation to acquire what the present one does not yet possess, namely, a genuine german culture, the prospect is a horrible one. to such a man, the ground seems strewn with ashes, and all stars are obscured; while every withered tree and field laid waste seems to cry to him: barren! forsaken! springtime is no longer possible here! he must feel as young goethe felt when he first peered into the melancholy atheistic twilight of the système de la nature; to him this book seemed so grey, so cimmerian and deadly, that he could only endure its presence with difficulty, and shuddered at it as one shudders at a spectre. viii. we ought now to be sufficiently informed concerning the heaven and the courage of our new believer to be able to turn to the last question: how does he write his books? and of what order are his religious documents? he who can answer this question uprightly and without prejudice will be confronted by yet another serious problem, and that is: how this straussian pocket-oracle of the german philistine was able to pass through six editions? and he will grow more than ever suspicious when he hears that it was actually welcomed as a pocket-oracle, not only in scholastic circles, but even in german universities as well. students are said to have greeted it as a canon for strong intellects, and, from all accounts, the professors raised no objections to this view; while here and there people have declared it to be a religions book for scholars. strauss himself gave out that he did not intend his profession of faith to be merely a reference-book for learned and cultured people; but here let us abide by the fact that it was first and foremost a work appealing to his colleagues, and was ostensibly a mirror in which they were to see their own way of living faithfully reflected. for therein lay the feat. the master feigned to have presented us with a new ideal conception of the universe, and now adulation is being paid him out of every mouth; because each is in a position to suppose that he too regards the universe and life in the same way. thus strauss has seen fulfilled in each of his readers what he only demanded of the future. in this way, the extraordinary success of his book is partly explained: "thus we live and hold on our way in joy," the scholar cries in his book, and delights to see others rejoicing over the announcement. if the reader happen to think differently from the master in regard to darwin or to capital punishment, it is of very little consequence; for he is too conscious throughout of breathing an atmosphere that is familiar to him, and of hearing but the echoes of his own voice and wants. however painfully this unanimity may strike the true friend of german culture, it is his duty to be unrelenting in his explanation of it as a phenomenon, and not to shrink from making this explanation public. we all know the peculiar methods adopted in our own time of cultivating the sciences: we all know them, because they form a part of our lives. and, for this very reason, scarcely anybody seems to ask himself what the result of such a cultivation of the sciences will mean to culture in general, even supposing that everywhere the highest abilities and the most earnest will be available for the promotion of culture. in the heart of the average scientific type (quite irrespective of the examples thereof with which we meet to-day) there lies a pure paradox: he behaves like the veriest idler of independent means, to whom life is not a dreadful and serious business, but a sound piece of property, settled upon him for all eternity; and it seems to him justifiable to spend his whole life in answering questions which, after all is said and done, can only be of interest to that person who believes in eternal life as an absolute certainty. the heir of but a few hours, he sees himself encompassed by yawning abysses, terrible to behold; and every step he takes should recall the questions, wherefore? whither? and whence? to his mind. but his soul rather warms to his work, and, be this the counting of a floweret's petals or the breaking of stones by the roadside, he spends his whole fund of interest, pleasure, strength, and aspirations upon it. this paradox--the scientific man--has lately dashed ahead at such a frantic speed in germany, that one would almost think the scientific world were a factory, in which every minute wasted meant a fine. to-day the man of science works as arduously as the fourth or slave caste: his study has ceased to be an occupation, it is a necessity; he looks neither to the right nor to the left, but rushes through all things--even through the serious matters which life bears in its train--with that semi-listlessness and repulsive need of rest so characteristic of the exhausted labourer. this is also his attitude towards culture. he behaves as if life to him were not only otium but sine dignitate: even in his sleep he does not throw off the yoke, but like an emancipated slave still dreams of his misery, his forced haste and his floggings. our scholars can scarcely be distinguished--and, even then, not to their advantage--from agricultural labourers, who in order to increase a small patrimony, assiduously strive, day and night, to cultivate their fields, drive their ploughs, and urge on their oxen. now, pascal suggests that men only endeavour to work hard at their business and sciences with the view of escaping those questions of greatest import which every moment of loneliness or leisure presses upon them--the questions relating to the wherefore, the whence, and the whither of life. curiously enough, our scholars never think of the most vital question of all--the wherefore of their work, their haste, and their painful ecstasies. surely their object is not the earning of bread or the acquiring of posts of honour? no, certainly not. but ye take as much pains as the famishing and breadless; and, with that eagerness and lack of discernment which characterises the starving, ye even snatch the dishes from the sideboard of science. if, however, as scientific men, ye proceed with science as the labourers with the tasks which the exigencies of life impose upon them, what will become of a culture which must await the hour of its birth and its salvation in the very midst of all this agitated and breathless running to and fro--this sprawling scientifically? for it no one has time--and yet for what shall science have time if not for culture? answer us here, then, at least: whence, whither, wherefore all science, if it do not lead to culture? belike to barbarity? and in this direction we already see the scholar caste ominously advanced, if we are to believe that such superficial books as this one of strauss's meet the demand of their present degree of culture. for precisely in him do we find that repulsive need of rest and that incidental semi-listless attention to, and coming to terms with, philosophy, culture, and every serious thing on earth. it will be remembered that, at the meetings held by scholars, as soon as each individual has had his say in his own particular department of knowledge, signs of fatigue, of a desire for distraction at any price, of waning memory, and of incoherent experiences of life, begin to be noticeable. while listening to strauss discussing any worldly question, be it marriage, the war, or capital punishment, we are startled by his complete lack of anything like first-hand experience, or of any original thought on human nature. all his judgments are so redolent of books, yea even of newspapers. literary reminiscences do duty for genuine ideas and views, and the assumption of a moderate and grandfatherly tone take the place of wisdom and mature thought. how perfectly in keeping all this is with the fulsome spirit animating the holders of the highest places in german science in large cities! how thoroughly this spirit must appeal to that other! for it is precisely in those quarters that culture is in the saddest plight; it is precisely there that its fresh growth is made impossible--so boisterous are the preparations made by science, so sheepishly are favourite subjects of knowledge allowed to oust questions of much greater import. what kind of lantern would be needed here, in order to find men capable of a complete surrender to genius, and of an intimate knowledge of its depths--men possessed of sufficient courage and strength to exorcise the demons that have forsaken our age? viewed from the outside, such quarters certainly do appear to possess the whole pomp of culture; with their imposing apparatus they resemble great arsenals fitted with huge guns and other machinery of war; we see preparations in progress and the most strenuous activity, as though the heavens themselves were to be stormed, and truth were to be drawn out of the deepest of all wells; and yet, in war, the largest machines are the most unwieldy. genuine culture therefore leaves such places as these religiously alone, for its best instincts warn it that in their midst it has nothing to hope for, and very much to fear. for the only kind of culture with which the inflamed eye and obtuse brain of the scholar working-classes concern themselves is of that philistine order of which strauss has announced the gospel. if we consider for a moment the fundamental causes underlying the sympathy which binds the learned working-classes to culture-philistinism, we shall discover the road leading to strauss the writer, who has been acknowledged classical, and tihence to our last and principal theme. to begin with, that culture has contentment written in its every feature, and will allow of no important changes being introduced into the present state of german education. it is above all convinced of the originality of all german educational institutions, more particularly the public schools and universities; it does not cease recommending these to foreigners, and never doubts that if the germans have become the most cultivated and discriminating people on earth, it is owing to such institutions. culture-philistinism believes in itself, consequently it also believes in the methods and means at its disposal. secondly, however, it leaves the highest judgment concerning all questions of taste and culture to the scholar, and even regards itself as the ever-increasing compendium of scholarly opinions regarding art, literature, and philosophy. its first care is to urge the scholar to express his opinions; these it proceeds to mix, dilute, and systematise, and then it administers them to the german people in the form of a bottle of medicine. what conies to life outside this circle is either not heard or attended at all, or if heard, is heeded half-heartedly; until, at last, a voice (it does not matter whose, provided it belong to some one who is strictly typical of the scholar tribe) is heard to issue from the temple in which traditional infallibility of taste is said to reside; and from that time forward public opinion has one conviction more, which it echoes and re-echoes hundreds and hundreds of times. as a matter of fact, though, the aesthetic infallibility of any utterance emanating from the temple is the more doubtful, seeing that the lack of taste, thought, and artistic feeling in any scholar can be taken for granted, unless it has previously been proved that, in his particular case, the reverse is true. and only a few can prove this. for how many who have had a share in the breathless and unending scurry of modern science have preserved that quiet and courageous gaze of the struggling man of culture--if they ever possessed it--that gaze which condemns even the scurry we speak of as a barbarous state of affairs? that is why these few are forced to live in an almost perpetual contradiction. what could they do against the uniform belief of the thousands who have enlisted public opinion in their cause, and who mutually defend each other in this belief? what purpose can it serve when one individual openly declares war against strauss, seeing that a crowd have decided in his favour, and that the masses led by this crowd have learned to ask six consecutive times for the master's philistine sleeping-mixture? if, without further ado, we here assumed that the straussian confession-book had triumphed over public opinion and had been acclaimed and welcomed as conqueror, its author might call our attention to the fact that the multitudinous criticisms of his work in the various public organs are not of an altogether unanimous or even favourable character, and that he therefore felt it incumbent upon him to defend himself against some of the more malicious, impudent, and provoking of these newspaper pugilists by means of a postscript. how can there be a public opinion concerning my book, he cries to us, if every journalist is to regard me as an outlaw, and to mishandle me as much as he likes? this contradiction is easily explained, as soon as one considers the two aspects of the straussian book--the theological and the literary, and it is only the latter that has anything to do with german culture. thanks to its theological colouring, it stands beyond the pale of our german culture, and provokes the animosity of the various theological groups--yea, even of every individual german, in so far as he is a theological sectarian from birth, and only invents his own peculiar private belief in order to be able to dissent from every other form of belief. but when the question arises of talking about strauss the writer, pray listen to what the theological sectarians have to say about him. as soon as his literary side comes under notice, all theological objections immediately subside, and the dictum comes plain and clear, as if from the lips of one congregation: in spite of it all, he is still a classical writer! everybody--even the most bigoted, orthodox churchman--pays the writer the most gratifying compliments, while there is always a word or two thrown in as a tribute to his almost lessingesque language, his delicacy of touch, or the beauty and accuracy of his aesthetic views. as a book, therefore, the straussian performance appears to meet all the demands of an ideal example of its kind. the theological opponents, despite the fact that their voices were the loudest of all, nevertheless constitute but an infinitesimal portion of the great public; and even with regard to them, strauss still maintains that he is right when he says: "compared with my thousands of readers, a few dozen public cavillers form but an insignificant minority, and they can hardly prove that they are their faithful interpreters. it was obviously in the nature of things that opposition should be clamorous and assent tacit." thus, apart from the angry bitterness which strauss's profession of faith may have provoked here and there, even the most fanatical of his opponents, to whom his voice seems to rise out of an abyss, like the voice of a beast, are agreed as to his merits as a writer; and that is why the treatment which strauss has received at the hands of the literary lackeys of the theological groups proves nothing against our contention that culture-philistinism celebrated its triumph in this book. it must be admitted that the average educated philistine is a degree less honest than strauss, or is at least more reserved in his public utterances. but this fact only tends to increase his admiration for honesty in another. at home, or in the company of his equals, he may applaud with wild enthusiasm, but takes care not to put on paper how entirely strauss's words are in harmony with his own innermost feelings. for, as we have already maintained, our culture-philistine is somewhat of a coward, even in his strongest sympathies; hence strauss, who can boast of a trifle more courage than he, becomes his leader, notwithstanding the fact that even straussian pluck has its very definite limits. if he overstepped these limits, as schopenhauer does in almost every sentence, he would then forfeit his position at the head of the philistines, and everybody would flee from him as precipitately as they are now following in his wake. he who would regard this artful if not sagacious moderation and this mediocre valour as an aristotelian virtue, would certainly be wrong; for the valour in question is not the golden mean between two faults, but between a virtue and a fault--and in this mean, between virtue and fault, all philistine qualities are to be found. ix. "in spite of it all, he is still a classical writer." well, let us see! perhaps we may now be allowed to discuss strauss the stylist and master of language; but in the first place let us inquire whether, as a literary man, he is equal to the task of building his house, and whether he really understands the architecture of a book. from this inquiry we shall be able to conclude whether he is a respectable, thoughtful, and experienced author; and even should we be forced to answer "no" to these questions, he may still, as a last shift, take refuge in his fame as a classical prose-writer. this last-mentioned talent alone, it is true, would not suffice to class him with the classical authors, but at most with the classical improvisers and virtuosos of style, who, however, in regard to power of expression and the whole planning and framing of the work, reveal the awkward hand and the embarrassed eye of the bungler. we therefore put the question, whether strauss really possesses the artistic strength necessary for the purpose of presenting us with a thing that is a whole, totum ponere? as a rule, it ought to be possible to tell from the first rough sketch of a work whether the author conceived the thing as a whole, and whether, in view of this original conception, he has discovered the correct way of proceeding with his task and of fixing its proportions. should this most important part of the problem be solved, and should the framework of the building have been given its most favourable proportions, even then there remains enough to be done: how many smaller faults have to be corrected, how many gaps require filling in! here and there a temporary partition or floor was found to answer the requirements; everywhere dust and fragments litter the ground, and no matter where we look, we see the signs of work done and work still to be done. the house, as a whole, is still uninhabitable and gloomy, its walls are bare, and the wind blows in through the open windows. now, whether this remaining, necessary, and very irksome work has been satisfactorily accomplished by strauss does not concern us at present; our question is, whether the building itself has been conceived as a whole, and whether its proportions are good? the reverse of this, of course, would be a compilation of fragments--a method generally adopted by scholars. they rely upon it that these fragments are related among themselves, and thus confound the logical and the artistic relation between them. now, the relation between the four questions which provide the chapter-headings of strauss's book cannot be called a logical one. are we still christians? have we still a religion? what is our conception of the universe? what is our rule of life? and it is by no means contended that the relation is illogical simply because the third question has nothing to do with the second, nor the fourth with the third, nor all three with the first. the natural scientist who puts the third question, for instance, shows his unsullied love of truth by the simple fact that he tacitly passes over the second. and with regard to the subject of the fourth chapter--marriage, republicanism, and capital punishment--strauss himself seems to have been aware that they could only have been muddled and obscured by being associated with the darwinian theory expounded in the third chapter; for he carefully avoids all reference to this theory when discussing them. but the question, "are we still christians?" destroys the freedom of the philosophical standpoint at one stroke, by lending it an unpleasant theological colouring. moreover, in this matter, he quite forgot that the majority of men to-day are not christians at all, but buddhists. why should one, without further ceremony, immediately think of christianity at the sound of the words "old faith"? is this a sign that strauss has never ceased to be a christian theologian, and that he has therefore never learned to be a philosopher? for we find still greater cause for surprise in the fact that he quite fails to distinguish between belief and knowledge, and continually mentions his "new belief" and the still newer science in one breath. or is "new belief" merely an ironical concession to ordinary parlance? this almost seems to be the case; for here and there he actually allows "new belief" and "newer science" to be interchangeable terms, as for instance on page ii, where he asks on which side, whether on that of the ancient orthodoxy or of modern science, "exist more of the obscurities and insufficiencies unavoidable in human speculation." moreover, according to the scheme laid down in the introduction, his desire is to disclose those proofs upon which the modern view of life is based; but he derives all these proofs from science, and in this respect assumes far more the attitude of a scientist than of a believer. at bottom, therefore, the religion is not a new belief, but, being of a piece with modern science, it has nothing to do with religion at all. if strauss, however, persists in his claims to be religious, the grounds for these claims must be beyond the pale of recent science. only the smallest portion of the straussian book--that is to say, but a few isolated pages--refer to what strauss in all justice might call a belief, namely, that feeling for the "all" for which he demands the piety that the old believer demanded for his god. on the pages in question, however, he cannot claim to be altogether scientific; but if only he could lay claim to being a little stronger, more natural, more outspoken, more pious, we should be content. indeed, what perhaps strikes us most forcibly about him is the multitude of artificial procedures of which he avails himself before he ultimately gets the feeling that he still possesses a belief and a religion; he reaches it by means of stings and blows, as we have already seen. how indigently and feebly this emergency-belief presents itself to us! we shiver at the sight of it. although strauss, in the plan laid down in his introduction, promises to compare the two faiths, the old and the new, and to show that the latter will answer the same purpose as the former, even he begins to feel, in the end, that he has promised too much. for the question whether the new belief answers the same purpose as the old, or is better or worse, is disposed of incidentally, so to speak, and with uncomfortable haste, in two or three pages (p. 436 et seq.-), and is actually bolstered up by the following subterfuge: "he who cannot help himself in this matter is beyond help, is not yet ripe for our standpoint" (p. 436). how differently, and with what intensity of conviction, did the ancient stoic believe in the all and the rationality of the all! and, viewed in this light, how does strauss's claim to originality appear? but, as we have already observed, it would be a matter of indifference to us whether it were new, old, original, or imitated, so that it were only more powerful, more healthy, and more natural. even strauss himself leaves this double-distilled emergency-belief to take care of itself as often as he can do so, in order to protect himself and us from danger, and to present his recently acquired biological knowledge to his "we" with a clear conscience. the more embarrassed he may happen to be when he speaks of faith, the rounder and fuller his mouth becomes when he quotes the greatest benefactor to modern men-darwin. then he not only exacts belief for the new messiah, but also for himself--the new apostle. for instance, while discussing one of the most intricate questions in natural history, he declares with true ancient pride: "i shall be told that i am here speaking of things about which i understand nothing. very well; but others will come who will understand them, and who will also have understood me" (p. 241). according to this, it would almost seem as though the famous "we" were not only in duty bound to believe in the "all," but also in the naturalist strauss; in this case we can only hope that in order to acquire the feeling for this last belief, other processes are requisite than the painful and cruel ones demanded by the first belief. or is it perhaps sufficient in this case that the subject of belief himself be tormented and stabbed with the view of bringing the believers to that "religious reaction" which is the distinguishing sign of the "new faith." what merit should we then discover in the piety of those whom strauss calls "we"? otherwise, it is almost to be feared that modern men will pass on in pursuit of their business without troubling themselves overmuch concerning the new furniture of faith offered them by the apostle: just as they have done heretofore, without the doctrine of the rationality of the all. the whole of modern biological and historical research has nothing to do with the straussian belief in the all, and the fact that the modern philistine does not require the belief is proved by the description of his life given by strauss in the chapter,"what is our rule of life?" he is therefore quite right in doubting whether the coach to which his esteemed readers have been obliged to trust themselves "with him, fulfils every requirement." it certainly does not; for the modern man makes more rapid progress when he does not take his place in the straussian coach, or rather, he got ahead much more quickly long before the straussian coach ever existed. now, if it be true that the famous "minority" which is "not to be overlooked," and of which, and in whose name, strauss speaks, "attaches great importance to consistency," it must be just as dissatisfied with strauss the coachbuilder as we are with strauss the logician. let us, however, drop the question of the logician. perhaps, from the artistic point of view, the book really is an example of a. well-conceived plan, and does, after all, answer to the requirements of the laws of beauty, despite the fact that it fails to meet with the demands of a well-conducted argument. and now, having shown that he is neither a scientist nor a strictly correct and systematic scholar, for the first time we approach the question: is strauss a capable writer? perhaps the task he set himself was not so much to scare people away from the old faith as to captivate them by a picturesque and graceful description of what life would be with the new. if he regarded scholars and educated men as his most probable audience, experience ought certainly to have told him that whereas one can shoot such men down with the heavy guns of scientific proof, but cannot make them surrender, they may be got to capitulate all the more quickly before "lightly equipped" measures of seduction. "lightly equipped," and "intentionally so," thus strauss himself speaks of his own book. nor do his public eulogisers refrain from using the same expression in reference to the work, as the following passage, quoted from one of the least remarkable among them, and in which the same expression is merely paraphrased, will go to prove:-"the discourse flows on with delightful harmony: wherever it directs its criticism against old ideas it wields the art of demonstration, almost playfully; and it is with some spirit that it prepares the new ideas it brings so enticingly, and presents them to the simple as well as to the fastidious taste. the arrangement of such diverse and conflicting material is well thought out for every portion of it required to be touched upon, without being made too prominent; at times the transitions leading from one subject to another are artistically managed, and one hardly knows what to admire most--the skill with which unpleasant questions are shelved, or the discretion with which they are hushed up." the spirit of such eulogies, as the above clearly shows, is not quite so subtle in regard to judging of what an author is able to do as in regard to what he wishes. what strauss wishes, however, is best revealed by his own emphatic and not quite harmless commendation of voltaire's charms, in whose service he might have learned precisely those "lightly equipped" arts of which his admirer speaks--granting, of course, that virtue may be acquired and a pedagogue can ever be a dancer. who could help having a suspicion or two, when reading the following passage, for instance, in which strauss says of voltaire, "as a philosopher [he] is certainly not original, but in the main a mere exponent of english investigations: in this respect, however, he shows himself to be completely master of his subject, which he presents with incomparable skill, in all possible lights and from all possible sides, and is able withal to meet the demands of thoroughness, without, however, being over-severe in his method"? now, all the negative traits mentioned in this passage might be applied to strauss. no one would contend, i suppose, that strauss is original, or that he is over-severe in his method; but the question is whether we can regard him as "master of his subject," and grant him "incomparable skill"? the confession to the effect that the treatise was intentionally "lightly equipped" leads us to think that it at least aimed at incomparable skill. it was not the dream of our architect to build a temple, nor yet a house, but a sort of summer-pavilion, surrounded by everything that the art of gardening can provide. yea, it even seems as if that mysterious feeling for the all were only calculated to produce an aesthetic effect, to be, so to speak, a view of an irrational element, such as the sea, looked at from the most charming and rational of terraces. the walk through the first chapters-that is to say, through the theological catacombs with all their gloominess and their involved and baroque embellishments--was also no more than an aesthetic expedient in order to throw into greater relief the purity, clearness, and common sense of the chapter "what is our conception of the universe?" for, immediately after that walk in the gloaming and that peep into the wilderness of irrationalism, we step into a hall with a skylight to it. soberly and limpidly it welcomes us: its mural decorations consist of astronomical charts and mathematical figures; it is filled with scientific apparatus, and its cupboards contain skeletons, stuffed apes, and anatomical specimens. but now, really rejoicing for the first time, we direct our steps into the innermost chamber of bliss belonging to our pavilion-dwellers; there we find them with their wives, children, and newspapers, occupied in the commonplace discussion of politics; we listen for a moment to their conversation on marriage, universal suffrage, capital punishment, and workmen's strikes, and we can scarcely believe it to be possible that the rosary of public opinions can be told off so quickly. at length an attempt is made to convince us of the classical taste of the inmates. a moment's halt in the library, and the music-room suffices to show us what we had expected all along, namely, that the best books lay on the shelves, and that the most famous musical compositions were in the music-cabinets. some one actually played something to us, and even if it were haydn's music, haydn could not be blamed because it sounded like riehl's music for the home. meanwhile the host had found occasion to announce to us his complete agreement with lessing and goethe, although with the latter only up to the second part of faust. at last our pavilion-owner began to praise himself, and assured us that he who could not be happy under his roof was beyond help and could not be ripe for his standpoint, whereupon he offered us his coach, but with the polite reservation that he could not assert that it would fulfil every requirement, and that, owing to the stones on his road having been newly laid down, we were not to mind if we were very much jolted. our epicurean garden-god then took leave of us with the incomparable skill which he praised in voltaire. who could now persist in doubting the existence of this incomparable skill? the complete master of his subject is revealed; the lightly equipped artist-gardener is exposed, and still we hear the voice of the classical author saying, "as a writer i shall for once cease to be a philistine: i will not be one; i refuse to be one! but a voltaire--the german voltaire--or at least the french lessing." with this we have betrayed a secret. our master does not always know which he prefers to be--voltaire or lessing; but on no account will he be a philistine. at a pinch he would not object to being both lessing and voltaire--that the word might be fulfilled that is written, "he had no character, but when he wished to appear as if he had, he assumed one." x. if we have understood strauss the confessor correctly, he must be a genuine philistine, with a narrow, parched soul and scholarly and common-place needs; albeit no one would be more indignant at the title than david strauss the writer. he would be quite happy to be regarded as mischievous, bold, malicious, daring; but his ideal of bliss would consist in finding himself compared with either lessing or voltaire--because these men were undoubtedly anything but philistines. in striving after this state of bliss, he often seems to waver between two alternatives--either to mimic the brave and dialectical petulance of lessing, or to affect the manner of the faun-like and free-spirited man of antiquity that voltaire was. when taking up his pen to write, he seems to be continually posing for his portrait; and whereas at times his features are drawn to look like lessing's, anon they are made to assume the voltairean mould. while reading his praise of voltaire's manner, we almost seem to see him abjuring the consciences of his contemporaries for not having learned long ago what the modern voltaire had to offer them. "even his excellences are wonderfully uniform," he says: "simple naturalness, transparent clearness, vivacious mobility, seductive charm. warmth and emphasis are also not wanting where they are needed, and voltaire's innermost nature always revolted against stiltedness and affectation; while, on the other hand, if at times wantonness or passion descend to an unpleasantly low level, the fault does not rest so much with the stylist as with the man." according to this, strauss seems only too well aware of the importance of simplicity in style; it is ever the sign of genius, which alone has the privilege to express itself naturally and guilelessly. when, therefore, an author selects a simple mode of expression, this is no sign whatever of vulgar ambition; for although many are aware of what such an author would fain be taken for, they are yet kind enough to take him precisely for that. the genial writer, however, not only reveals his true nature in the plain and unmistakable form of his utterance, but his super-abundant strength actually dallies with the material he treats, even when it is dangerous and difficult. nobody treads stiffly along unknown paths, especially when these are broken throughout their course by thousands of crevices and furrows; but the genius speeds nimbly over them, and, leaping with grace and daring, scorns the wistful and timorous step of caution. even strauss knows that the problems he prances over are dreadfully serious, and have ever been regarded as such by the philosophers who have grappled with them; yet he calls his book lightly equipped! but of this dreadfulness and of the usual dark nature of our meditations when considering such questions as the worth of existence and the duties of man, we entirely cease to be conscious when the genial master plays his antics before us, "lightly equipped, and intentionally so." yes, even more lightly equipped than his rousseau, of whom he tells us it was said that he stripped himself below and adorned himself on top, whereas goethe did precisely the reverse. perfectly guileless geniuses do not, it appears, adorn themselves at all; possibly the words "lightly equipped" may simply be a euphemism for "naked." the few who happen to have seen the goddess of truth declare that she is naked, and perhaps, in the minds of those who have never seen her, but who implicitly believe those few, nakedness or light equipment is actually a proof, or at least a feature, of truthi even this vulgar superstition turns to the advantage of the author's ambition. some one sees something naked, and he exclaims: "what if this were the truth!" whereupon he grows more solemn than is his wont. by this means, however, the author scores a tremendous advantage; for he compels his reader to approach him with greater solemnity than another and perhaps more heavily equipped writer. this is unquestionably the best way to become a classical author; hence strauss himself is able to tell us: "i even enjoy the unsought honour of being, in the opinion of many, a classical writer of prose. "he has therefore achieved his aim. strauss the genius goes gadding about the streets in the garb of lightly equipped goddesses as a classic, while strauss the philistine, to use an original expression of this genius's, must, at all costs, be "declared to be on the decline," or "irrevocably dismissed." but, alas! in spite of all declarations of decline and dismissal, the philistine still returns, and all too frequently. those features, contorted to resemble lessing and voltaire, must relax from time to time to resume their old and original shape. the mask of genius falls from them too often, and the master's expression is never more sour and his movements never stiffer than when he has just attempted to take the leap, or to glance with the fiery eye, of a genius. precisely owing to the fact that he is too lightly equipped for our zone, he runs the risk of catching cold more often and more severely than another. it may seem a terrible hardship to him that every one should notice this; but if he wishes to be cured, the following diagnosis of his case ought to be publicly presented to him:-once upon a time there lived a strauss, a brave, severe, and stoutly equipped scholar, with whom we sympathised as wholly as with all those in germany who seek to serve truth with earnestness and energy, and to rule within the limits of their powers. he, however, who is now publicly famous as david strauss, is another person. the theologians may be to blame for this metamorphosis; but, at any rate, his present toying with the mask of genius inspires us with as much hatred and scorn as his former earnestness commanded respect and sympathy. when, for instance, he tells us, "it would also argue ingratitude towards my genius if i were not to rejoice that to the faculty of an incisive, analytical criticism was added the innocent pleasure in artistic production," it may astonish him to hear that, in spite of this self-praise, there are still men who maintain exactly the reverse, and who say, not only that he has never possessed the gift of artistic production, but that the "innocent" pleasure he mentions is of all things the least innocent, seeing that it succeeded in gradually undermining and ultimately destroying a nature as strongly and deeply scholarly and critical as strauss's--in fact, the real straussian genius. in a moment of unlimited frankness, strauss himself indeed adds: "merck was always in my thoughts, calling out, 'don't produce such child's play again; others can do that too!'" that was the voice of the real straussian genius, which also asked him what the worth of his newest, innocent, and lightly equipped modern philistine's testament was. others can do that too! and many could do it better. and even they who could have done it best, i.e. those thinkers who are more widely endowed than strauss, could still only have made nonsense of it. i take it that you are now beginning to understand the value i set on strauss the writer. you are beginning to realise that i regard him as a mummer who would parade as an artless genius and classical writer. when lichtenberg said, "a simple manner of writing is to be recommended, if only in view of the fact that no honest man trims and twists his expressions," he was very far from wishing to imply that a simple style is a proof of literary integrity. i, for my part, only wish that strauss the writer had been more upright, for then he would have written more becomingly and have been less famous. or, if he would be a mummer at all costs, how much more would he not have pleased me if he had been a better mummer--one more able to ape the guileless genius and classical author! for it yet remains to be said that strauss was not only an inferior actor but a very worthless stylist as well. xi. of course, the blame attaching to strauss for being a bad writer is greatly mitigated by the fact that it is extremely difficult in germany to become even a passable or moderately good writer, and that it is more the exception than not, to be a really good one. in this respect the natural soil is wanting, as are also artistic values and the proper method of treating and cultivating oratory. this latter accomplishment, as the various branches of it, i.e. drawing-room, ecclesiastical and parliamentary parlance, show, has not yet reached the level of a national style; indeed, it has not yet shown even a tendency to attain to a style at all, and all forms of language in germany do not yet seem to have passed a certain experimental stage. in view of these facts, the writer of to-day, to some extent, lacks an authoritative standard, and he is in some measure excused if, in the matter of language, he attempts to go ahead of his own accord. as to the probable result which the present dilapidated condition of the german language will bring about, schopenhauer, perhaps, has spoken most forcibly. "if the existing state of affairs continues," he says, "in the year 1900 german classics will cease to be understood, for the simple reason that no other language will be known, save the trumpery jargon of the noble present, the chief characteristic of which is impotence." and, in truth, if one turn to the latest periodicals, one will find german philologists and grammarians already giving expression to the view that our classics can no longer serve us as examples of style, owing to the fact that they constantly use words, modes of speech, and syntactic arrangements which are fast dropping out of currency. hence the need of collecting specimens of the finest prose that has been produced by our best modern writers, and of offering them as examples to be followed, after the style of sander's pocket dictionary of bad language. in this book, that repulsive monster of style gutzkow appears as a classic, and, according to its injunctions, we seem to be called upon to accustom ourselves to quite a new and wondrous crowd of classical authors, among which the first, or one of the first, is david strauss: he whom we cannot describe more aptly than we have already--that is to say, as a worthless stylist. now, the notion which the culture-philistine has of a classic and standard author speaks eloquently for his pseudo-culture--he who only shows his strength by opposing a really artistic and severe style, and who, thanks to the persistence of his opposition, finally arrives at a certain uniformity of expression, which again almost appears to possess unity of genuine style. in view, therefore, of the right which is granted to every one to experiment with the language, how is it possible at all for individual authors to discover a generally agreeable tone? what is so generally interesting in them? in the first place, a negative quality--the total lack of offensiveness: but every really productive thing is offensive. the greater part of a german's daily reading matter is undoubtedly sought either in the pages of newspapers, periodicals, or reviews. the language of these journals gradually stamps itself on his brain, by means of its steady drip, drip, drip of similar phrases and similar words. and, since he generally devotes to reading those hours of the day during which his exhausted brain is in any case not inclined to offer resistance, his ear for his native tongue so slowly but surely accustoms itself to this everyday german that it ultimately cannot endure its absence without pain. but the manufacturers of these newspapers are, by virtue of their trade, most thoroughly inured to the effluvia of this journalistic jargon; they have literally lost all taste, and their palate is rather gratified than not by the most corrupt and arbitrary innovations. hence the tutti unisono with which, despite the general lethargy and sickliness, every fresh solecism is greeted; it is with such impudent corruptions of the language that her hirelings are avenged against her for the incredible boredom she imposes ever more and more upon them. i remember having read "an appeal to the german nation," by berthold auerbach, in which every sentence was un-german, distorted and false, and which, as a whole, resembled a soulless mosaic of words cemented together with international syntax. as to the disgracefully slipshod german with which edward devrient solemnised the death of mendelssohn, i do not even wish to do more than refer to it. a grammatical error--and this is the most extraordinary feature of the case--does not therefore seem an offence in any sense to our philistine, but a most delightful restorative in the barren wilderness of everyday german. he still, however, considers all really productive things to be offensive. the wholly bombastic, distorted, and threadbare syntax of the modern standard author--yea, even his ludicrous neologisms--are not only tolerated, but placed to his credit as the spicy element in his works. but woe to the stylist with character, who seeks as earnestly and perseveringly to avoid the trite phrases of everyday parlance, as the "yester-night monster blooms of modern ink-flingers," as schopenhauer says! when platitudes, hackneyed, feeble, and vulgar phrases are the rule, and the bad and the corrupt become refreshing exceptions, then all that is strong, distinguished, and beautiful perforce acquires an evil odour. from which it follows that, in germany, the well-known experience which befell the normally built traveller in the land of hunchbacks is constantly being repeated. it will be remembered that he was so shamefully insulted there, owing to his quaint figure and lack of dorsal convexity, that a priest at last had to harangue the people on his behalf as follows: "my brethren, rather pity this poor stranger, and present thank-offerings unto the gods, that ye are blessed with such attractive gibbosities." if any one attempted to compose a positive grammar out of the international german style of to-day, and wished to trace the unwritten and unspoken laws followed by every one, he would get the most extraordinary notions of style and rhetoric. he would meet with laws which are probably nothing more than reminiscences of bygone schooldays, vestiges of impositions for latin prose, and results perhaps of choice readings from french novelists, over whose incredible crudeness every decently educated frenchman would have the right to laugh. but no conscientious native of germany seems to have given a thought to these extraordinary notions under the yoke of which almost every german lives and writes. as an example of what i say, we may find an injunction to the effect that a metaphor or a simile must be introduced from time to time, and that it must be new; but, since to the mind of the shallow-pated writer newness and modernity are identical, he proceeds forthwith to rack his brain for metaphors in the technical vocabularies of the railway, the telegraph, the steamship, and the stock exchange, and is proudly convinced that such metaphors must be new because they are modern. in strauss's confession-book we find liberal tribute paid to modern metaphor. he treats us to a simile, covering a page and a half, drawn from modern road-improvement work; a few pages farther back he likens the world to a machine, with its wheels, stampers, hammers, and "soothing oil" (p. 432); "a repast that begins with champagne" (p. 384); "kant is a cold-water cure" (p. 309); "the swiss constitution is to that of england as a watermill is to a steam-engine, as a waltz-tune or a song to a fugue or symphony" (p. 301); "in every appeal, the sequence of procedure must be observed. now the mean tribunal between the individual and humanity is the nation" (p. 165); "if we would know whether there be still any life in an organism which appears dead to us, we are wont to test it by a powerful, even painful stimulus, as for example a stab" (p. 161); "the religious domain in the human soul resembles the domain of the red indian in america" (p. 160); "virtuosos in piety, in convents"(p. 107); "and place the sum-total of the foregoing in round numbers under the account" (p. 205); "darwin's theory resembles a railway track that is just marked out... where the flags are fluttering joyfully in the breeze." in this really highly modern way, strauss has met the philistine injunction to the effect that a new simile must be introduced from time to time. another rhetorical rule is also very widespread, namely, that didactic passages should be composed in long periods, and should be drawn out into lengthy abstractions, while all persuasive passages should consist of short sentences followed by striking contrasts. on page 154 in strauss's book we find a standard example of the didactic and scholarly style--a passage blown out after the genuine schleiermacher manner, and made to stumble along at a true tortoise pace: "the reason why, in the earlier stages of religion, there appear many instead of this single whereon, a plurality of gods instead of the one, is explained in this deduction of religion, from the fact that the various forces of nature, or relations of life, which inspire man with the sentiment of unqualified dependence, still act upon him in the commencement with the full force of their distinctive characteristics; that he has not as yet become conscious how, in regard to his unmitigated dependence upon them, there is no distinction between them, and that therefore the whereon of this dependence, or the being to which it conducts in the last instance, can only be one." on pages 7 and 8 we find an example of the other kind of style, that of the short sentences containing that affected liveliness which so excited certain readers that they cannot mention strauss any more without coupling his name with lessing's. "i am well aware that what i propose to delineate in the following pages is known to multitudes as well as to myself, to some even much better. a few have already spoken out on the subject. am i therefore to keep silence? i think not. for do we not all supply each other's deficiencies? if another is better informed as regards some things, i may perhaps be so as regards others; while yet others are known and viewed by me in a different light. out with it, then! let my colours be displayed that it may be seen whether they are genuine or not.'" it is true that strauss's style generally maintains a happy medium between this sort of merry quick-march and the other funereal and indolent pace; but between two vices one does not invariably find a virtue; more often rather only weakness, helpless paralysis, and impotence. as a matter of fact, i was very disappointed when i glanced through strauss's book in search of fine and witty passages; for, not having found anything praiseworthy in the confessor, i had actually set out with the express purpose of meeting here and there with at least some opportunities of praising strauss the writer. i sought and sought, but my purpose remained unfulfilled. meanwhile, however, another duty seemed to press itself strongly on my mind--that of enumerating the solecisms, the strained metaphors, the obscure abbreviations, the instances of bad taste, and the distortions which i encountered; and these were of such a nature that i dare do no more than select a few examples of them from among a collection which is too bulky to be given in full. by means of these examples i may succeed in showing what it is that inspires, in the hearts of modern germans, such faith in this great and seductive stylist strauss: i refer to his eccentricities of expression, which, in the barren waste and dryness of his whole book, jump out at one, not perhaps as pleasant but as painfully stimulating, surprises. when perusing such passages, we are at least assured, to use a straussian metaphor, that we are not quite dead, but still respond to the test of a stab. for the rest of the book is entirely lacking in offensiveness --that quality which alone, as we have seen, is productive, and which our classical author has himself reckoned among the positive virtues. when the educated masses meet with exaggerated dulness and dryness, when they are in the presence of really vapid commonplaces, they now seem to believe that such things are the signs of health; and in this respect the words of the author of the dialogus de oratoribus are very much to the point: "illam ipsam quam jactant sanitatem non firmitate sed jejunio consequuntur." that is why they so unanimously hate every firmitas, because it bears testimony to a kind of health quite different from theirs; hence their one wish to throw suspicion upon all austerity and terseness, upon all fiery and energetic movement, and upon every full and delicate play of muscles. they have conspired to twist nature and the names of things completely round, and for the future to speak of health only there where we see weakness, and to speak of illness and excitability where for our part we see genuine vigour. from which it follows that david strauss is to them a classical author. if only this dulness were of a severely logical order! but simplicity and austerity in thought are precisely what these weaklings have lost, and in their hands even our language has become illogically tangled. as a proof of this, let any one try to translate strauss's style into latin: in the case of kant, be it remembered, this is possible, while with schopenhauer it even becomes an agreeable exercise. the reason why this test fails with strauss's german is not owing to the fact that it is more teutonic than theirs, but because his is distorted and illogical, whereas theirs is lofty and simple. moreover, he who knows how the ancients exerted themselves in order to learn to write and speak correctly, and how the moderns omit to do so, must feel, as schopenhauer says, a positive relief when he can turn from a german book like the one under our notice, to dive into those other works, those ancient works which seem to him still to be written in a new language. "for in these books," says schopenhauer, "i find a regular and fixed language which, throughout, faithfully follows the laws of grammar and orthography, so that i can give up my thoughts completely to their matter; whereas in german i am constantly being disturbed by the author's impudence and his continual attempts to establish his own orthographical freaks and absurd ideas-the swaggering foolery of which disgusts me. it is really a painful sight to see a fine old language, possessed of classical literature, being botched by asses and ignoramuses!" thus schopenhauer's holy anger cries out to us, and you cannot say that you have not been warned. he who turns a deaf ear to such warnings, and who absolutely refuses to relinquish his faith in strauss the classical author, can only be given this last word of advice--to imitate his hero. in any case, try it at your own risk; but you will repent it, not only in your style but in your head, that it may be fulfilled which was spoken by the indian prophet, saying, "he who gnaweth a cow's horn gnaweth in vain and shorteneth his life; for he grindeth away his teeth, yet his belly is empty." xii. by way of concluding, we shall proceed to give our classical prose-writer the promised examples of his style which we have collected. schopenhauer would probably have classed the whole lot as "new documents serving to swell the trumpery jargon of the present day"; for david strauss may be comforted to hear (if what follows can be regarded as a comfort at all) that everybody now writes as he does; some, of course, worse, and that among the blind the one-eyed is king. indeed, we allow him too much when we grant him one eye; but we do this willingly, because strauss does not write so badly as the most infamous of all corrupters of german--the hegelians and their crippled offspring. strauss at least wishes to extricate himself from the mire, and he is already partly out of it; still, he is very far from being on dry land, and he still shows signs of having stammered hegel's prose in youth. in those days, possibly, something was sprained in him, some muscle must have been overstrained. his ear, perhaps, like that of a boy brought up amid the beating of drums, grew dull, and became incapable of detecting those artistically subtle and yet mighty laws of sound, under the guidance of which every writer is content to remain who has been strictly trained in the study of good models. but in this way, as a stylist, he has lost his most valuable possessions, and stands condemned to remain reclining, his life long, on the dangerous and barren shifting sand of newspaper style--that is, if he do not wish to fall back into the hegelian mire. nevertheless, he has succeeded in making himself famous for a couple of hours in our time, and perhaps in another couple of hours people will remember that he was once famous; then, however, night will come, and with her oblivion; and already at this moment, while we are entering his sins against style in the black book, the sable mantle of twilight is falling upon his fame. for he who has sinned against the german language has desecrated the mystery of all our germanity. throughout all the confusion and the changes of races and of customs, the german language alone, as though possessed of some supernatural charm, has saved herself; and with her own salvation she has wrought that of the spirit of germany. she alone holds the warrant for this spirit in future ages, provided she be not destroyed at the sacrilegious hands of the modern world. "but di meliora! avaunt, ye pachyderms, avaunt! this is the german language, by means of which men express themselves, and in which great poets have sung and great thinkers have written. hands off!" [10]* [footnote * : translator's note.--nietzsche here proceeds to quote those passages he has culled from the old and the new faith with which he undertakes to substantiate all he has said relative to strauss's style; as, however, these passages, with his comments upon them, lose most of their point when rendered into english, it was thought best to omit them altogether.] to put it in plain words, what we have seen have been feet of clay, and what appeared to be of the colour of healthy flesh was only applied paint. of course, culture-philistinism in germany will be very angry when it hears its one living god referred to as a series of painted idols. he, however, who dares to overthrow its idols will not shrink, despite all indignation, from telling it to its face that it has forgotten how to distinguish between the quick and the dead, the genuine and the counterfeit, the original and the imitation, between a god and a host of idols; that it has completely lost the healthy and manly instinct for what is real and right. it alone deserves to be destroyed; and already the manifestations of its power are sinking; already are its purple honours falling from it; but when the purple falls, its royal wearer soon follows. here i come to the end of my confession of faith. this is the confession of an individual; and what can such an one do against a whole world, even supposing his voice were heard everywhere! in order for the last time to use a precious straussism, his judgment only possesses "that amount of subjective truth which is compatible with a complete lack of objective demonstration"--is not that so, my dear friends? meanwhile, be of good cheer. for the time being let the matter rest at this "amount which is compatible with a complete lack"! for the time being! that is to say, for as long as that is held to be out of season which in reality is always in season, and is now more than ever pressing; i refer to...speaking the truth.[11]* [footnote * : translator's note.--all quotations from the old faith and the new which appear in the above translation have either been taken bodily out of mathilde blind's translation (asher and co., 1873), or are adaptations from that translation.] _______ richard wagner in bayreuth. i. for an event to be great, two things must be united--the lofty sentiment of those who accomplish it, and the lofty sentiment of those who witness it. no event is great in itself, even though it be the disappearance of whole constellations, the destruction of several nations, the establishment of vast empires, or the prosecution of wars at the cost of enormous forces: over things of this sort the breath of history blows as if they were flocks of wool. but it often happens, too, that a man of might strikes a blow which falls without effect upon a stubborn stone; a short, sharp report is heard, and all is over. history is able to record little or nothing of such abortive efforts. hence the anxiety which every one must feel who, observing the approach of an event, wonders whether those about to witness it will be worthy of it. this reciprocity between an act and its reception is always taken into account when anything great or small is to be accomplished; and he who would give anything away must see to it that he find recipients who will do justice to the meaning of his gift. this is why even the work of a great man is not necessarily great when it is short, abortive, or fruitless; for at the moment when he performed it he must have failed to perceive that it was really necessary; he must have been careless in his aim, and he cannot have chosen and fixed upon the time with sufficient caution. chance thus became his master; for there is a very intimate relation between greatness and the instinct which discerns the proper moment at which to act. we therefore leave it to those who doubt wagner's power of discerning the proper time for action, to be concerned and anxious as to whether what is now taking place in bayreuth is really opportune and necessary. to us who are more confident, it is clear that he believes as strongly in the greatness of his feat as in the greatness of feeling in those who are to witness it. be their number great or small, therefore, all those who inspire this faith in wagner should feel extremely honoured; for that it was not inspired by everybody, or by the whole age, or even by the whole german people, as they are now constituted, he himself told us in his dedicatory address of the 22nd of may 1872, and not one amongst us could, with any show of conviction, assure him of the contrary. "i had only you to turn to," he said, "when i sought those who i thought would be in sympathy with my plans,-you who are the most personal friends of my own particular art, my work and activity: only you could i invite to help me in my work, that it might be presented pure and whole to those who manifest a genuine interest in my art, despite the fact that it has hitherto made its appeal to them only in a disfigured and adulterated form." it is certain that in bayreuth even the spectator is a spectacle worth seeing. if the spirit of some observant sage were to return, after the absence of a century, and were to compare the most remarkable movements in the present world of culture, he would find much to interest him there. like one swimming in a lake, who encounters a current of warm water issuing from a hot spring, in bayreuth he would certainly feel as though he had suddenly plunged into a more temperate element, and would tell himself that this must rise out of a distant and deeper source: the surrounding mass of water, which at all events is more common in origin, does not account for it. in this way, all those who assist at the bayreuth festival will seem like men out of season; their raison-d'etre and the forces which would seem to account for them are elsewhere, and their home is not in the present age. i realise ever more clearly that the scholar, in so far as he is entirely the man of his own day, can only be accessible to all that wagner does and thinks by means of parody,--and since everything is parodied nowadays, he will even get the event of bayreuth reproduced for him, through the very un-magic lanterns of our facetious art-critics. and one ought to be thankful if they stop at parody; for by means of it a spirit of aloofness and animosity finds a vent which might otherwise hit upon a less desirable mode of expression. now, the observant sage already mentioned could not remain blind to this unusual sharpness and tension of contrasts. they who hold by gradual development as a kind of moral law must be somewhat shocked at the sight of one who, in the course of a single lifetime, succeeds in producing something absolutely new. being dawdlers themselves, and insisting upon slowness as a principle, they are very naturally vexed by one who strides rapidly ahead, and they wonder how on earth he does it. no omens, no periods of transition, and no concessions preceded the enterprise at bayreuth; no one except wagner knew either the goal or the long road that was to lead to it. in the realm of art it signifies, so to speak, the first circumnavigation of the world, and by this voyage not only was there discovered an apparently new art, but art itself. in view of this, all modern arts, as arts of luxury which have degenerated through having been insulated, have become almost worthless. and the same applies to the nebulous and inconsistent reminiscences of a genuine art, which we as modern europeans derive from the greeks; let them rest in peace, unless they are now able to shine of their own accord in the light of a new interpretation. the last hour has come for a good many things; this new art is a clairvoyante that sees ruin approaching--not for art alone. her warning voice must strike the whole of our prevailing civilisation with terror the instant the laughter which its parodies have provoked subsides. let it laugh and enjoy itself for yet a while longer! and as for us, the disciples of this revived art, we shall have time and inclination for thoughtfulness, deep thoughtfulness. all the talk and noise about art which has been made by civilisation hitherto must seem like shameless obtrusiveness; everything makes silence a duty with us--the quinquennial silence of the pythagoreans. which of us has not soiled his hands and heart in the disgusting idolatry of modern culture? which of us can exist without the waters of purification? who does not hear the voice which cries, "be silent and cleansed"? be silent and cleansed! only the merit of being included among those who give ear to this voice will grant even us the lofty look necessary to view the event at bayreuth; and only upon this look depends the great future of the event. when on that dismal and cloudy day in may 1872, after the foundation stone had been laid on the height of bayreuth, amid torrents of rain, and while wagner was driving back to the town with a small party of us, he was exceptionally silent, and there was that indescribable look in his eyes as of one who has turned his gaze deeply inwards. the day happened to be the first of his sixtieth year, and his whole past now appeared as but a long preparation for this great moment. it is almost a recognised fact that in times of exceptional danger, or at all decisive and culminating points in their lives, men see the remotest and most recent events of their career with singular vividness, and in one rapid inward glance obtain a sort of panorama of a whole span of years in which every event is faithfully depicted. what, for instance, must alexander the great have seen in that instant when he caused asia and europe to be drunk out of the same goblet? but what went through wagner's mind on that day--how he became what he is, and what he will be--we only can imagine who are nearest to him, and can follow him, up to a certain point, in his self-examination; but through his eyes alone is it possible for us to understand his grand work, and by the help of this understanding vouch for its fruitfulness. ii. it were strange if what a man did best and most liked to do could not be traced in the general outline of his life, and in the case of those who are remarkably endowed there is all the more reason for supposing that their life will present not only the counterpart of their character, as in the case of every one else, but that it will present above all the counterpart of their intellect and their most individual tastes. the life of the epic poet will have a dash of the epos in it--as from all accounts was the case with goethe, whom the germans very wrongly regarded only as a lyrist--and the life of the dramatist will probably be dramatic. the dramatic element in wagner's development cannot be ignored, from the time when his ruling passion became self-conscious and took possession of his whole being. from that time forward there is an end to all groping, straying, and sprouting of offshoots, and over his most tortuous deviations and excursions, over the often eccentric disposition of his plans, a single law and will are seen to rule, in which we have the explanation of his actions, however strange this explanation may sometimes appear. there was, however, an ante-dramatic period in wagner's life--his childhood and youth-which it is impossible to approach without discovering innumerable problems. at this period there seems to be no promise yet of himself, and what one might now, in a retrospect, regard as a pledge for his future greatness, amounts to no more than a juxtaposition of traits which inspire more dismay than hope; a restless and excitable spirit, nervously eager to undertake a hundred things at the same time, passionately fond of almost morbidly exalted states of mind, and ready at any moment to veer completely round from calm and profound meditation to a state of violence and uproar. in his case there were no hereditary or family influences at work to constrain him to the sedulous study of one particular art. painting, versifying, acting, and music were just as much within his reach as the learning and the career of a scholar; and the superficial inquirer into this stage of his life might even conclude that he was born to be a dilettante. the small world within the bounds of which he grew up was not of the kind we should choose to be the home of an artist. he ran the constant risk of becoming infected by that dangerously dissipated attitude of mind in which a person will taste of everything, as also by that condition of slackness resulting from the fragmentary knowledge of all things, which is so characteristic of university towns. his feelings were easily roused and but indifferently satisfied; wherever the boy turned he found himself surrounded by a wonderful and would-be learned activity, to which the garish theatres presented a ridiculous contrast, and the entrancing strains of music a perplexing one. now, to the observer who sees things relatively, it must seem strange that the modern man who happens to be gifted with exceptional talent should as a child and a youth so seldom be blessed with the quality of ingenuousness and of simple individuality, that he is so little able to have these qualities at all. as a matter of fact, men of rare talent, like goethe and wagner, much more often attain to ingenuousness in manhood than during the more tender years of childhood and youth. and this is especially so with the artist, who, being born with a more than usual capacity for imitating, succumbs to the morbid multiformity of modern life as to a virulent disease of infancy. as a child he will more closely resemble an old man. the wonderfully accurate and original picture of youth which wagner gives us in the siegfried of the nibelungen ring could only have been conceived by a man, and by one who had discovered his youthfulness but late in life. wagner's maturity, like his adolesence, was also late in making its appearance, and he is thus, in this respect alone, the very reverse of the precocious type. the appearance of his moral and intellectual strength was the prelude to the drama of his soul. and how different it then became! his nature seems to have been simplified at one terrible stroke, and divided against itself into two instincts or spheres. from its innermost depths there gushes forth a passionate will which, like a rapid mountain torrent, endeavours to make its way through all paths, ravines, and crevices, in search of light and power. only a force completely free and pure was strong enough to guide this will to all that is good and beneficial. had it been combined with a narrow intelligence, a will with such a tyrannical and boundless desire might have become fatal; in any case, an exit into the open had to be found for it as quickly as possible, whereby it could rush into pure air and sunshine. lofty aspirations, which continually meet with failure, ultimately turn to evil. the inadequacy of means for obtaining success may, in certain circumstances, be the result of an inexorable fate, and not necessarily of a lack of strength; but he who under such circumstances cannot abandon his aspirations, despite the inadequacy of his means, will only become embittered, and consequently irritable and intolerant. he may possibly seek the cause of his failure in other people; he may even, in a fit of passion, hold the whole world guilty; or he may turn defiantly down secret byways and secluded lanes, or resort to violence. in this way, noble natures, on their road to the most high, may turn savage. even among those who seek but their own personal moral purity, among monks and anchorites, men are to be found who, undermined and devoured by failure, have become barbarous and hopelessly morbid. there was a spirit full of love and calm belief, full of goodness and infinite tenderness, hostile to all violence and self-deterioration, and abhorring the sight of a soul in bondage. and it was this spirit which manifested itself to wagner. it hovered over him as a consoling angel, it covered him with its wings, and showed him the true path. at this stage we bring the other side of wagner's nature into view: but how shall we describe this other side? the characters an artist creates are not himself, but the succession of these characters, to which it is clear he is greatly attached, must at all events reveal something of his nature. now try and recall rienzi, the flying dutchman and senta, tannhauser and elizabeth, lohengrin and elsa, tristan and marke, hans sachs, woden and brunhilda,--all these characters are correlated by a secret current of ennobling and broadening morality which flows through them and becomes ever purer and clearer as it progresses. and at this point we enter with respectful reserve into the presence of the most hidden development in wagner's own soul. in what other artist do we meet with the like of this, in the same proportion? schiller's characters, from the robbers to wallenstein and tell, do indeed pursue an ennobling course, and likewise reveal something of their author's development; but in wagner the standard is higher and the distance covered is much greater. in the nibelungen ring, for instance, where brunhilda is awakened by siegfried, i perceive the most moral music i have ever heard. here wagner attains to such a high level of sacred feeling that our mind unconsciously wanders to the glistening ice-and snow-peaks of the alps, to find a likeness there;-so pure, isolated, inaccessible, chaste, and bathed in love-beams does nature here display herself, that clouds and tempests--yea, and even the sublime itself--seem to lie beneath her. now, looking down from this height upon tannhauser and the flying dutchman, we begin to perceive how the man in wagner was evolved: how restlessly and darkly he began; how tempestuously he strove to gratify his desires, to acquire power and to taste those rapturous delights from which he often fled in disgust; how he wished to throw off a yoke, to forget, to be negative, and to renounce everything. the whole torrent plunged, now into this valley, now into that, and flooded the most secluded chinks and crannies. in the night of these semi-subterranean convulsions a star appeared and glowed high above him with melancholy vehemence; as soon as he recognised it, he named it fidelity--unselfish fidelity. why did this star seem to him the brightest and purest of all? what secret meaning had the word "fidelity" to his whole being? for he has graven its image and problems upon all his thoughts and compositions. his works contain almost a complete series of the rarest and most beautiful examples of fidelity: that of brother to sister, of friend to friend, of servant to master; of elizabeth to tannhauser, of senta to the dutchman, of elsa to lohengrin, of isolde, kurvenal, and marke to tristan, of brunhilda to the most secret vows of woden--and many others. it is wagner's most personal and most individual experience, which he reveres like a religious mystery, and which he calls fidelity; he never wearies of breathing it into hundreds of different characters, and of endowing it with the sublimest that in him lies, so overflowing is his gratitude. it is, in short, the recognition of the fact that the two sides of his nature remained faithful to each other, that out of free and unselfish love, the creative, ingenuous, and brilliant side kept loyally abreast of the dark, the intractable, and the tyrannical side. iii. the relation of the two constituent forces to each other, and the yielding of the one to the other, was the great requisite by which alone he could remain wholly and truly himself. at the same time, this was the only thing he could not control, and over which he could only keep a watch, while the temptations to infidelity and its threatening dangers beset him more and more. the uncertainty derived therefrom is an overflowing source of suffering for those in process of development. each of his instincts made constant efforts to attain to unmeasured heights, and each of the capacities he possessed for enjoying life seemed to long to tear itself away from its companions in order to seek satisfaction alone; the greater their exuberance the more terrific was the tumult, and the more bitter the competition between them. in addition, accident and life fired the desire for power and splendour in him; but he was more often tormented by the cruel necessity of having to live at all, while all around him lay obstacles and snares. how is it possible for any one to remain faithful here, to be completely steadfast? this doubt often depressed him, and he expresses it, as an artist expressed his doubt, in artistic forms. elizabeth, for instance, can only suffer, pray, and die; she saves the fickle and intemperate man by her loyalty, though not for this life. in the path of every true artist, whose lot is cast in these modern days, despair and danger are strewn. he has many means whereby he can attain to honour and might; peace and plenty persistently offer themselves to him, but only in that form recognised by the modern man, which to the straightforward artist is no better than choke-damp. in this temptation, and in the act of resisting it, lie the dangers that threaten him--dangers arising from his disgust at the means modernity offers him of acquiring pleasure and esteem, and from the indignation provoked by the selfish ease of modern society. imagine wagner's filling an official position, as for instance that of bandmaster at public and court theatres, both of which positions he has held: think how he, a serious artist, must have struggled in order to enforce seriousness in those very places which, to meet the demands of modern conventions, are designed with almost systematic frivolity to appeal only to the frivolous. think how he must have partially succeeded, though only to fail on the whole. how constantly disgust must have been at his heels despite his repeated attempts to flee it, how he failed to find the haven to which he might have repaired, and how he had ever to return to the bohemians and outlaws of our society, as one of them. if he himself broke loose from any post or position, he rarely found a better one in its stead, while more than once distress was all that his unrest brought him. thus wagner changed his associates, his dwelling-place and country, and when we come to comprehend the nature of the circles into which he gravitated, we can hardly realise how he was able to tolerate them for any length of time. the greater half of his past seems to be shrouded in heavy mist; for a long time he appears to have had no general hopes, but only hopes for the morrow, and thus, although he reposed no faith in the future, he was not driven to despair. he must have felt like a nocturnal traveller, broken with fatigue, exasperated from want of sleep, and tramping wearily along beneath a heavy burden, who, far from fearing the sudden approach of death, rather longs for it as something exquisitely charming. his burden, the road and the night--all would disappear! the thought was a temptation to him. again and again, buoyed up by his temporary hopes, he plunged anew into the turmoil of life, and left all apparatus behind him. but his method of doing this, his lack of moderation in the doing, betrayed what a feeble hold his hopes had upon him; how they were only stimulants to which he had recourse in an extremity. the conflict between his aspirations and his partial or total inability to realise them, tormented him like a thorn in the flesh. infuriated by constant privations, his imagination lapsed into the dissipated, whenever the state of want was momentarily relieved. life grew ever more and more complicated for him; but the means and artifices that he discovered in his art as a dramatist became evermore resourceful and daring. albeit, these were little more than palpable dramatic makeshifts and expedients, which deceived, and were invented, only for the moment. in a flash such means occurred to his mind and were used up. examined closely and without prepossession, wagner's life, to recall one of schopenhauer's expressions, might be said to consist largely of comedy, not to mention burlesque. and what the artist's feelings must have been, conscious as he was, during whole periods of his life, of this undignified element in it,--he who more than any one else, perhaps, breathed freely only in sublime and more than sublime spheres,-the thinker alone can form any idea. in the midst of this mode of life, a detailed description of which is necessary in order to inspire the amount of pity, awe, and admiration which are its due, he developed a talent for acquiring knowledge, which even in a german--a son of the nation learned above all others--was really extraordinary. and with this talent yet another danger threatened wagner--a danger more formidable than that involved in a life which was apparently without either a stay or a rule, borne hither and thither by disturbing illusions. from a novice trying his strength, wagner became a thorough master of music and of the theatre, as also a prolific inventor in the preliminary technical conditions for the execution of art. no one will any longer deny him the glory of having given us the supreme model for lofty artistic execution on a large scale. but he became more than this, and in order so to develop, he, no less than any one else in like circumstances, had to reach the highest degree of culture by virtue of his studies. and wonderfully he achieved this end! it is delightful to follow his progress. from all sides material seemed to come unto him and into him, and the larger and heavier the resulting structure became, the more rigid was the arch of the ruling and ordering thought supporting it. and yet access to the sciences and arts has seldom been made more difficult for any man than for wagner; so much so that he had almost to break his own road through to them. the reviver of the simple drama, the discoverer of the position due to art in true human society, the poetic interpreter of bygone views of life, the philosopher, the historian, the aesthete and the critic, the master of languages, the mythologist and the myth poet, who was the first to include all these wonderful and beautiful products of primitive times in a single ring, upon which he engraved the runic characters of his thoughts-what a wealth of knowledge must wagner have accumulated and commanded, in order to have become all that! and yet this mass of material was just as powerless to impede the action of his will as a matter of detail--however attractive--was to draw his purpose from its path. for the exceptional character of such conduct to be appreciated fully, it should be compared with that of goethe,-he who, as a student and as a sage, resembled nothing so much as a huge river-basin, which does not pour all its water into the sea, but spends as much of it on its way there, and at its various twists and turns, as it ultimately disgorges at its mouth. true, a nature like goethe's not only has, but also engenders, more pleasure than any other; there is more mildness and noble profligacy in it; whereas the tenor and tempo of wagner's power at times provoke both fear and flight. but let him fear who will, we shall only be the more courageous, in that we shall be permitted to come face to face with a hero who, in regard to modern culture, "has never learned the meaning of fear." but neither has he learned to look for repose in history and philosophy, nor to derive those subtle influences from their study which tend to paralyse action or to soften a man unduly. neither the creative nor the militant artist in him was ever diverted from his purpose by learning and culture. the moment his constructive powers direct him, history becomes yielding clay in his hands. his attitude towards it then differs from that of every scholar, and more nearly resembles the relation of the ancient greek to his myths; that is to say, his subject is something he may fashion, and about which he may write verses. he will naturally do this with love and a certain becoming reverence, but with the sovereign right of the creator notwithstanding. and precisely because history is more supple and more variable than a dream to him, he can invest the most individual case with the characteristics of a whole age, and thus attain to a vividness of narrative of which historians are quite incapable. in what work of art, of any kind, has the body and soul of the middle ages ever been so thoroughly depicted as in lohengrin? and will not the meistersingers continue to acquaint men, even in the remotest ages to come, with the nature of germany's soul? will they not do more than acquaint men of it? will they not represent its very ripest fruit--the fruit of that spirit which ever wishes to reform and not to overthrow, and which, despite the broad couch of comfort on which it lies, has not forgotten how to endure the noblest discomfort when a worthy and novel deed has to be accomplished? and it is just to this kind of discomfort that wagner always felt himself drawn by his study of history and philosophy: in them he not only found arms and coats of mail, but what he felt in their presence above all was the inspiring breath which is wafted from the graves of all great fighters, sufferers, and thinkers. nothing distinguishes a man more from the general pattern of the age than the use he makes of history and philosophy. according to present views, the former seems to have been allotted the duty of giving modern man breathing-time, in the midst of his panting and strenuous scurry towards his goal, so that he may, for a space, imagine he has slipped his leash. what montaigne was as an individual amid the turmoil of the reformation--that is to say, a creature inwardly coming to peace with himself, serenely secluded in himself and taking breath, as his best reader, shakespeare, understood him, --this is what history is to the modern spirit today. the fact that the germans, for a whole century, have devoted themselves more particularly to the study of history, only tends to prove that they are the stemming, retarding, and becalming force in the activity of modern society--a circumstance which some, of course, will place to their credit. on the whole, however, it is a dangerous symptom when the mind of a nation turns with preference to the study of the past. it is a sign of flagging strength, of decline and degeneration; it denotes that its people are perilously near to falling victims to the first fever that may happen to be rife --the political fever among others. now, in the history of modern thought, our scholars are an example of this condition of weakness as opposed to all reformative and revolutionary activity. the mission they have chosen is not of the noblest; they have rather been content to secure smug happiness for their kind, and little more. every independent and manly step leaves them halting in the background, although it by no means outstrips history. for the latter is possessed of vastly different powers, which only natures like wagner have any notion of; but it requires to be written in a much more earnest and severe spirit, by much more vigorous students, and with much less optimism than has been the case hitherto. in fact, it requires to be treated quite differently from the way german scholars have treated it until now. in all their works there is a continual desire to embellish, to submit and to be content, while the course of events invariably seems to have their approbation. it is rather the exception for one of them to imply that he is satisfied only because things might have turned out worse; for most of them believe, almost as a matter of course, that everything has been for the best simply because it has only happened once. were history not always a disguised christian theodicy, were it written with more justice and fervent feeling, it would be the very last thing on earth to be made to serve the purpose it now serves, namely, that of an opiate against everything subversive and novel. and philosophy is in the same plight: all that the majority demand of it is, that it may teach them to understand approximate facts--very approximate facts--in order that they may then become adapted to them. and even its noblest exponents press its soporific and comforting powers so strongly to the fore, that all lovers of sleep and of loafing must think that their aim and the aim of philosophy are one. for my part, the most important question philosophy has to decide seems to be, how far things have acquired an unalterable stamp and form, and, once this question has been answered, i think it the duty of philosophy unhesitatingly and courageously to proceed with the task of improving that part of the world which has been recognised as still susceptible to change. but genuine philosophers do, as a matter of fact, teach this doctrine themselves, inasmuch as they work at endeavouring to alter the very changeable views of men, and do not keep their opinions to themselves. genuine disciples of genuine philosophies also teach this doctrine; for, like wagner, they understand the art of deriving a more decisive and inflexible will from their master's teaching, rather than an opiate or a sleeping draught. wagner is most philosophical where he is most powerfully active and heroic. it was as a philosopher that he went, not only through the fire of various philosophical systems without fear, but also through the vapours of science and scholarship, while remaining ever true to his highest self. and it was this highest self which exacted from his versatile spirit works as complete as his were, which bade him suffer and learn, that he might accomplish such works. iv. the history of the development of culture since the time of the greeks is short enough, when we take into consideration the actual ground it covers, and ignore the periods during which man stood still, went backwards, hesitated or strayed. the hellenising of the world--and to make this possible, the orientalising of hellenism--that double mission of alexander the great, still remains the most important event: the old question whether a foreign civilisation may be transplanted is still the problem that the peoples of modern times are vainly endeavouring to solve. the rhythmic play of those two factors against each other is the force that has determined the course of history heretofore. thus christianity appears, for instance, as a product of oriental antiquity, which was thought out and pursued to its ultimate conclusions by men, with almost intemperate thoroughness. as its influence began to decay, the power of hellenic culture was revived, and we are now experiencing phenomena so strange that they would hang in the air as unsolved problems, if it were not possible, by spanning an enormous gulf of time, to show their relation to analogous phenomena in hellenistic culture. thus, between kant and the eleatics, schopenhauer and empedocles, aeschylus and wagner, there is so much relationship, so many things in common, that one is vividly impressed with the very relative nature of all notions of time. it would even seem as if a whole diversity of things were really all of a piece, and that time is only a cloud which makes it hard for our eyes to perceive the oneness of them. in the history of the exact sciences we are perhaps most impressed by the close bond uniting us with the days of alexander and ancient greece. the pendulum of history seems merely to have swung back to that point from which it started when it plunged forth into unknown and mysterious distance. the picture represented by our own times is by no means a new one: to the student of history it must always seem as though he were merely in the presence of an old familiar face, the features of which he recognises. in our time the spirit of greek culture is scattered broadcast. while forces of all kinds are pressing one upon the other, and the fruits of modern art and science are offering themselves as a means of exchange, the pale outline of hellenism is beginning to dawn faintly in the distance. the earth which, up to the present, has been more than adequately orientalised, begins to yearn once more for hellenism. he who wishes to help her in this respect will certainly need to be gifted for speedy action and to have wings on his heels, in order to synthetise the multitudinous and still undiscovered facts of science and the many conflicting divisions of talent so as to reconnoitre and rule the whole enormous field. it is now necessary that a generation of anti-alexanders should arise, endowed with the supreme strength necessary for gathering up, binding together, and joining the individual threads of the fabric, so as to prevent their being scattered to the four winds. the object is not to cut the gordian knot of greek culture after the manner adopted by alexander, and then to leave its frayed ends fluttering in all directions; it is rather to bind it after it has been loosed. that is our task to-day. in the person of wagner i recognise one of these anti-alexanders: he rivets and locks together all that is isolated, weak, or in any way defective; if i may be allowed to use a medical expression, he has an astringent power. and in this respect he is one of the greatest civilising forces of his age. he dominates art, religion, and folklore, yet he is the reverse of a polyhistor or of a mere collecting and classifying spirit; for he constructs with the collected material, and breathes life into it, and is a simplifier of the universe. we must not be led away from this idea by comparing the general mission which his genius imposed upon him with the much narrower and more immediate one which we are at present in the habit of associating with the name of wagner. he is expected to effect a reform in the theatre world; but even supposing he should succeed in doing this, what would then have been done towards the accomplishment of that higher, more distant mission? but even with this lesser theatrical reform, modern man would also be altered and reformed; for everything is so intimately related in this world, that he who removes even so small a thing as a rivet from the framework shatters and destroys the whole edifice. and what we here assert, with perhaps seeming exaggeration, of wagner's activity would hold equally good of any other genuine reform. it is quite impossible to reinstate the art of drama in its purest and highest form without effecting changes everywhere in the customs of the people, in the state, in education, and in social intercourse. when love and justice have become powerful in one department of life, namely in art, they must, in accordance with the law of their inner being, spread their influence around them, and can no more return to the stiff stillness of their former pupal condition. in order even to realise how far the attitude of the arts towards life is a sign of their decline, and how far our theatres are a disgrace to those who build and visit them, everything must be learnt over again, and that which is usual and commonplace should be regarded as something unusual and complicated. an extraordinary lack of clear judgment, a badly-concealed lust of pleasure, of entertainment at any cost, learned scruples, assumed airs of importance, and trifling with the seriousness of art on the part of those who represent it; brutality of appetite and money-grubbing on the part of promoters; the empty-mindedness and thoughtlessness of society, which only thinks of the people in so far as these serve or thwart its purpose, and which attends theatres and concerts without giving a thought to its duties,--all these things constitute the stifling and deleterious atmosphere of our modern art conditions: when, however, people like our men of culture have grown accustomed to it, they imagine that it is a condition of their healthy existence, and would immediately feel unwell if, for any reason, they were compelled to dispense with it for a while. in point of fact, there is but one speedy way of convincing oneself of the vulgarity, weirdness, and confusion of our theatrical institutions, and that is to compare them with those which once flourished in ancient greece. if we knew nothing about the greeks, it would perhaps be impossible to assail our present conditions at all, and objections made on the large scale conceived for the first time by wagner would have been regarded as the dreams of people who could only be at home in outlandish places. "for men as we now find them," people would have retorted, "art of this modern kind answers the purpose and is fitting-and men have never been different." but they have been very different, and even now there are men who are far from satisfied with the existing state of affairs--the fact of bayreuth alone demonstrates this point. here you will find prepared and initiated spectators, and the emotion of men conscious of being at the very zenith of their happiness, who concentrate their whole being on that happiness in order to strengthen themselves for a higher and more far-reaching purpose. here you will find the most noble self-abnegation on the part of the artist, and the finest of all spectacles --that of a triumphant creator of works which are in themselves an overflowing treasury of artistic triumphs. does it not seem almost like a fairy tale, to be able to come face to face with such a personality? must not they who take any part whatsoever, active or passive, in the proceedings at bayreuth, already feel altered and rejuvenated, and ready to introduce reforms and to effect renovations in other spheres of life? has not a haven been found for all wanderers on high and desert seas, and has not peace settled over the face of the waters? must not he who leaves these spheres of ruling profundity and loneliness for the very differently ordered world with its plains and lower levels, cry continually like isolde: "oh, how could i bear it? how can i still bear it?" and should he be unable to endure his joy and his sorrow, or to keep them egotistically to himself, he will avail himself from that time forward of every opportunity of making them known to all. "where are they who are suffering under the yoke of modern institutions?" he will inquire. "where are my natural allies, with whom i may struggle against the ever waxing and ever more oppressive pretensions of modern erudition? for at present, at least, we have but one enemy--at present!--and it is that band of aesthetes, to whom the word bayreuth means the completest rout--they have taken no share in the arrangements, they were rather indignant at the whole movement, or else availed themselves effectively of the deaf-ear policy, which has now become the trusty weapon of all very superior opposition. but this proves that their animosity and knavery were ineffectual in destroying wagner's spirit or in hindering the accomplishment of his plans; it proves even more, for it betrays their weakness and the fact that all those who are at present in possession of power will not be able to withstand many more attacks. the time is at hand for those who would conquer and triumph; the vastest empires lie at their mercy, a note of interrogation hangs to the name of all present possessors of power, so far as possession may be said to exist in this respect. thus educational institutions are said to be decaying, and everywhere individuals are to be found who have secretly deserted them. if only it were possible to invite those to open rebellion and public utterances, who even now are thoroughly dissatisfied with the state of affairs in this quarter! if only it were possible to deprive them of their faint heart and lukewarmness! i am convinced that the whole spirit of modern culture would receive its deadliest blow if the tacit support which these natures give it could in any way be cancelled. among scholars, only those would remain loyal to the old order of things who had been infected with the political mania or who were literary hacks in any form whatever. the repulsive organisation which derives its strength from the violence and injustice upon which it relies--that is to say, from the state and society--and which sees its advantage in making the latter ever more evil and unscrupulous,--this structure which without such support would be something feeble and effete, only needs to be despised in order to perish. he who is struggling to spread justice and love among mankind must regard this organisation as the least significant of the obstacles in his way; for he will only encounter his real opponents once he has successfully stormed and conquered modern culture, which is nothing more than their outworks. for us, bayreuth is the consecration of the dawn of the combat. no greater injustice could be done to us than to suppose that we are concerned with art alone, as though it were merely a means of healing or stupefying us, which we make use of in order to rid our consciousness of all the misery that still remains in our midst. in the image of this tragic art work at bayreuth, we see, rather, the struggle of individuals against everything which seems to oppose them with invincible necessity, with power, law, tradition, conduct, and the whole order of things established. individuals cannot choose a better life than that of holding themselves ready to sacrifice themselves and to die in their fight for love and justice. the gaze which the mysterious eye of tragedy vouchsafes us neither lulls nor paralyses. nevertheless, it demands silence of us as long as it keeps us in view; for art does not serve the purposes of war, but is merely with us to improve our hours of respite, before and during the course of the contest,--to improve those few moments when, looking back, yet dreaming of the future, we seem to understand the symbolical, and are carried away into a refreshing reverie when fatigue overtakes us. day and battle dawn together, the sacred shadows vanish, and art is once more far away from us; but the comfort she dispenses is with men from the earliest hour of day, and never leaves them. wherever he turns, the individual realises only too clearly his own shortcomings, his insufficiency and his incompetence; what courage would he have left were he not previously rendered impersonal by this consecration! the greatest of all torments harassing him, the conflicting beliefs and opinions among men, the unreliability of these beliefs and opinions, and the unequal character of men's abilities--all these things make him hanker after art. we cannot be happy so long as everything about us suffers and causes suffering; we cannot be moral so long as the course of human events is determined by violence, treachery, and injustice; we cannot even be wise, so long as the whole of mankind does not compete for wisdom, and does not lead the individual to the most sober and reasonable form of life and knowledge. how, then, would it be possible to endure this feeling of threefold insufficiency if one were not able to recognise something sublime and valuable in one's struggles, strivings, and defeats, if one did not learn from tragedy how to delight in the rhythm of the great passions, and in their victim? art is certainly no teacher or educator of practical conduct: the artist is never in this sense an instructor or adviser; the things after which a tragic hero strives are not necessarily worth striving after. as in a dream so in art, the valuation of things only holds good while we are under its spell. what we, for the time being, regard as so worthy of effort, and what makes us sympathise with the tragic hero when he prefers death to renouncing the object of his desire, this can seldom retain the same value and energy when transferred to everyday life: that is why art is the business of the man who is recreating himself. the strife it reveals to us is a simplification of life's struggle; its problems are abbreviations of the infinitely complicated phenomena of man's actions and volitions. but from this very fact--that it is the reflection, so to speak, of a simpler world, a more rapid solution of the riddle of life--art derives its greatness and indispensability. no one who suffers from life can do without this reflection, just as no one can exist without sleep. the more difficult the science of natural laws becomes, the more fervently we yearn for the image of this simplification, if only for an instant; and the greater becomes the tension between each man's general knowledge of things and his moral and spiritual faculties. art is with us to prevent the bow from snapping. the individual must be consecrated to something impersonal--that is the aim of tragedy: he must forget the terrible anxiety which death and time tend to create in him; for at any moment of his life, at any fraction of time in the whole of his span of years, something sacred may cross his path which will amply compensate him for all his struggles and privations. this means having a sense for the tragic. and if all mankind must perish some day--and who could question this! --it has been given its highest aim for the future, namely, to increase and to live in such unity that it may confront its final extermination as a whole, with one spirit-with a common sense of the tragic: in this one aim all the ennobling influences of man lie locked; its complete repudiation by humanity would be the saddest blow which the soul of the philanthropist could receive. that is how i feel in the matter! there is but one hope and guarantee for the future of man, and that is that his sense for the tragic may not die out. if he ever completely lost it, an agonised cry, the like of which has never been heard, would have to be raised all over the world; for there is no more blessed joy than that which consists in knowing what we know--how tragic thought was born again on earth. for this joy is thoroughly impersonal and general: it is the wild rejoicing of humanity, anent the hidden relationship and progress of all that is human. v. wagner concentrated upon life, past and present, the light of an intelligence strong enough to embrace the most distant regions in its rays. that is why he is a simplifier of the universe; for the simplification of the universe is only possible to him whose eye has been able to master the immensity and wildness of an apparent chaos, and to relate and unite those things which before had lain hopelessly asunder. wagner did this by discovering a connection between two objects which seemed to exist apart from each other as though in separate spheres--that between music and life, and similarly between music and the drama. not that he invented or was the first to create this relationship, for they must always have existed and have been noticeable to all; but, as is usually the case with a great problem, it is like a precious stone which thousands stumble over before one finally picks it up. wagner asked himself the meaning of the fact that an art such as music should have become so very important a feature of the lives of modern men. it is not necessary to think meanly of life in order to suspect a riddle behind this question. on the contrary, when all the great forces of existence are duly considered, and struggling life is regarded as striving mightily after conscious freedom and independence of thought, only then does music seem to be a riddle in this world. should one not answer: music could not have been born in our time? what then does its presence amongst us signify? an accident? a single great artist might certainly be an accident, but the appearance of a whole group of them, such as the history of modern music has to show, a group only once before equalled on earth, that is to say in the time of the greeks,--a circumstance of this sort leads one to think that perhaps necessity rather than accident is at the root of the whole phenomenon. the meaning of this necessity is the riddle which wagner answers. he was the first to recognise an evil which is as widespread as civilisation itself among men; language is everywhere diseased, and the burden of this terrible disease weighs heavily upon the whole of man's development. inasmuch as language has retreated ever more and more from its true province--the expression of strong feelings, which it was once able to convey in all their simplicity--and has always had to strain after the practically impossible achievement of communicating the reverse of feeling, that is to say thought, its strength has become so exhausted by this excessive extension of its duties during the comparatively short period of modern civilisation, that it is no longer able to perform even that function which alone justifies its existence, to wit, the assisting of those who suffer, in communicating with each other concerning the sorrows of existence. man can no longer make his misery known unto others by means of language; hence he cannot really express himself any longer. and under these conditions, which are only vaguely felt at present, language has gradually become a force in itself which with spectral arms coerces and drives humanity where it least wants to go. as soon as they would fain understand one another and unite for a common cause, the craziness of general concepts, and even of the ring of modern words, lays hold of them. the result of this inability to communicate with one another is that every product of their co-operative action bears the stamp of discord, not only because it fails to meet their real needs, but because of the very emptiness of those all-powerful words and notions already mentioned. to the misery already at hand, man thus adds the curse of convention--that is to say, the agreement between words and actions without an agreement between the feelings. just as, during the decline of every art, a point is reached when the morbid accumulation of its means and forms attains to such tyrannical proportions that it oppresses the tender souls of artists and converts these into slaves, so now, in the period of the decline of language, men have become the slaves of words. under this yoke no one is able to show himself as he is, or to express himself artlessly, while only few are able to preserve their individuality in their fight against a culture which thinks to manifest its success, not by the fact that it approaches definite sensations and desires with the view of educating them, but by the fact that it involves the individual in the snare of "definite notions," and teaches him to think correctly: as if there were any value in making a correctly thinking and reasoning being out of man, before one has succeeded in making him a creature that feels correctly. if now the strains of our german masters' music burst upon a mass of mankind sick to this extent, what is really the meaning of these strains? only correct feeling, the enemy of all convention, of all artificial estrangement and misunderstandings between man and man: this music signifies a return to nature, and at the same time a purification and remodelling of it; for the need of such a return took shape in the souls of the most loving of men, and, through their art, nature transformed into love makes its voice heard. let us regard this as one of wagner's answers to the question, what does music mean in our time? for he has a second. the relation between music and life is not merely that existing between one kind of language and another; it is, besides, the relation between the perfect world of sound and that of sight. regarded merely as a spectacle, and compared with other and earlier manifestations of human life, the existence of modern man is characterised by indescribable indigence and exhaustion, despite the unspeakable garishness at which only the superficial observer rejoices. if one examines a little more closely the impression which this vehement and kaleidoscopic play of colours makes upon one, does not the whole seem to blaze with the shimmer and sparkle of innumerable little stones borrowed from former civilisations? is not everything one sees merely a complex of inharmonious bombast, aped gesticulations, arrogant superficiality?--a ragged suit of motley for the naked and the shivering? a seeming dance of joy enjoined upon a sufferer? airs of overbearing pride assumed by one who is sick to the backbone? and the whole moving with such rapidity and confusion that it is disguised and masked-sordid impotence, devouring dissension, assiduous ennui, dishonest distress! the appearance of present-day humanity is all appearance, and nothing else: in what he now represents man himself has become obscured and concealed; and the vestiges of the creative faculty in art, which still cling to such countries as france and italy, are all concentrated upon this one task of concealing. wherever form is still in demand in society, conversation, literary style, or the relations between governments, men have unconsciously grown to believe that it is adequately met by a kind of agreeable dissimulation, quite the reverse of genuine form conceived as a necessary relation between the proportions of a figure, having no concern whatever with the notions "agreeable" or "disagreeable," simply because it is necessary and not optional. but even where form is not openly exacted by civilised people, there is no greater evidence of this requisite relation of proportions; a striving after the agreeable dissimulation, already referred to, is on the contrary noticeable, though it is never so successful even if it be more eager than in the first instance. how far this dissimulation is agreeable at times, and why it must please everybody to see how modern men at least endeavour to dissemble, every one is in a position to judge, according to, the extent to which he himself may happen to be modern. "only galley slaves know each other," says tasso, "and if we mistake others, it is only out of courtesy, and with the hope that they, in their turn, should mistake us." now, in this world of forms and intentional misunderstandings, what purpose is served by the appearance of souls overflowing with music? they pursue the course of grand and unrestrained rhythm with noble candour--with a passion more than personal; they glow with the mighty and peaceful fire of music, which wells up to the light of day from their unexhausted depths--and all this to what purpose? by means of these souls music gives expression to the longing that it feels for the company of its natural ally, gymnastics--that is to say, its necessary form in the order of visible phenomena. in its search and craving for this ally, it becomes the arbiter of the whole visible world and the world of mere lying appearance of the present day. this is wagner's second answer to the question, what is the meaning of music in our times? "help me," he cries to all who have ears to hear, "help me to discover that culture of which my music, as the rediscovered language of correct feeling, seems to foretell the existence. bear in mind that the soul of music now wishes to acquire a body, that, by means of you all, it would find its way to visibleness in movements, deeds, institutions, and customs!" there are some men who understand this summons, and their number will increase; they have also understood, for the first time, what it means to found the state upon music. it is something that the ancient hellenes not only understood but actually insisted upon; and these enlightened creatures would just as soon have sentenced the modern state to death as modern men now condemn the church. the road to such a new though not unprecedented goal would lead to this: that we should be compelled to acknowledge where the worst faults of our educational system lie, and why it has failed hitherto to elevate us out of barbarity: in reality, it lacks the stirring and creative soul of music; its requirements and arrangements are moreover the product of a period in which the music, to which we seem to attach so much importance, had not yet been born. our education is the most antiquated factor of our present conditions, and it is so more precisely in regard to the one new educational force by which it makes men of to-day in advance of those of bygone centuries, or by which it would make them in advance of their remote ancestors, provided only they did not persist so rashly in hurrying forward in meek response to the scourge of the moment. through not having allowed the soul of music to lodge within them, they have no notion of gymnastics in the greek and wagnerian sense; and that is why their creative artists are condemned to despair, as long as they wish to dispense with music as a guide in a new world of visible phenomena. talent may develop as much as may be desired: it either comes too late or too soon, and at all events out of season; for it is in the main superfluous and abortive, just as even the most perfect and the highest products of earlier times which serve modern artists as models are superfluous and abortive, and add not a stone to the edifice already begun. if their innermost consciousness can perceive no new forms, but only the old ones belonging to the past, they may certainly achieve something for history, but not for life; for they are already dead before having expired. he, however, who feels genuine and fruitful life in him, which at present can only be described by the one term "music," could he allow himself to be deceived for one moment into nursing solid hopes by this something which exhausts all its energy in producing figures, forms, and styles? he stands above all such vanities, and as little expects to meet with artistic wonders outside his ideal world of sound as with great writers bred on our effete and discoloured language. rather than lend an ear to illusive consolations, he prefers to turn his unsatisfied gaze stoically upon our modern world, and if his heart be not warm enough to feel pity, let it at least feel bitterness and hate! it were better for him to show anger and scorn than to take cover in spurious contentment or steadily to drug himself, as our "friends of art" are wont to do. but if he can do more than condemn and despise, if he is capable of loving, sympathising, and assisting in the general work of construction, he must still condemn, notwithstanding, in order to prepare the road for his willing soul. in order that music may one day exhort many men to greater piety and make them privy to her highest aims, an end must first be made to the whole of the pleasure-seeking relations which men now enjoy with such a sacred art. behind all our artistic pastimes-theatres, museums, concerts, and the like--that aforementioned "friend of art" is to be found, and he it is who must be suppressed: the favour he now finds at the hands of the state must be changed into oppression; public opinion, which lays such particular stress upon the training of this love of art, must be routed by better judgment. meanwhile we must reckon the declared enemy of art as our best and most useful ally; for the object of his animosity is precisely art as understood by the "friend of art,"--he knows of no other kind! let him be allowed to call our "friend of art" to account for the nonsensical waste of money occasioned by the building of his theatres and public monuments, the engagement of his celebrated singers and actors, and the support of his utterly useless schools of art and picture-galleries--to say nothing of all the energy, time, and money which every family squanders in pretended "artistic interests." neither hunger nor satiety is to be noticed here, but a dead-and-alive game is played--with the semblance of each, a game invented by the idle desire to produce an effect and to deceive others. or, worse still, art is taken more or less seriously, and then it is itself expected to provoke a kind of hunger and craving, and to fulfil its mission in this artificially induced excitement. it is as if people were afraid of sinking beneath the weight of their loathing and dulness, and invoked every conceivable evil spirit to scare them and drive them about like wild cattle. men hanker after pain, anger, hate, the flush of passion, sudden flight, and breathless suspense, and they appeal to the artist as the conjurer of this demoniacal host. in the spiritual economy of our cultured classes art has become a spurious or ignominious and undignified need--a nonentity or a something evil. the superior and more uncommon artist must be in the throes of a bewildering nightmare in order to be blind to all this, and like a ghost, diffidently and in a quavering voice, he goes on repeating beautiful words which he declares descend to him from higher spheres, but whose sound he can hear only very indistinctly. the artist who happens to be moulded according to the modern pattern, however, regards the dreamy gropings and hesitating speech of his nobler colleague with contempt, and leads forth the whole brawling mob of assembled passions on a leash in order to let them loose upon modern men as he may think fit. for these modern creatures wish rather to be hunted down, wounded, and torn to shreds, than to live alone with themselves in solitary calm. alone with oneself!--this thought terrifies the modern soul; it is his one anxiety, his one ghastly fear. when i watch the throngs that move and linger about the streets of a very populous town, and notice no other expression in their faces than one of hunted stupor, i can never help commenting to myself upon the misery of their condition. for them all, art exists only that they may be still more wretched, torpid, insensible, or even more flurried and covetous. for incorrect feeling governs and drills them unremittingly, and does not even give them time to become aware of their misery. should they wish to speak, convention whispers their cue to them, and this makes them forget what they originally intended to say; should they desire to understand one another, their comprehension is maimed as though by a spell: they declare that to be their joy which in reality is but their doom, and they proceed to collaborate in wilfully bringing about their own damnation. thus they have become transformed into perfectly and absolutely different creatures, and reduced to the state of abject slaves of incorrect feeling. vi. i shall only give two instances showing how utterly the sentiment of our time has been perverted, and how completely unconscious the present age is of this perversion. formerly financiers were looked down upon with honest scorn, even though they were recognised as needful; for it was generally admitted that every society must have its viscera. now, however, they are the ruling power in the soul of modern humanity, for they constitute the most covetous portion thereof. in former times people were warned especially against taking the day or the moment too seriously: the nil admirari was recommended and the care of things eternal. now there is but one kind of seriousness left in the modern mind, and it is limited to the news brought by the newspaper and the telegraph. improve each shining hour, turn it to some account and judge it as quickly as possible!--one would think modern men had but one virtue left--presence of mind. unfortunately, it much more closely resembles the omnipresence of disgusting and insatiable cupidity, and spying inquisitiveness become universal. for the question is whether mind is present at all to-day;--but we shall leave this problem for future judges to solve; they, at least, are bound to pass modern men through a sieve. but that this age is vulgar, even we can see now, and it is so because it reveres precisely what nobler ages contemned. if, therefore, it loots all the treasures of bygone wit and wisdom, and struts about in this richest of rich garments, it only proves its sinister consciousness of its own vulgarity in so doing; for it does not don this garb for warmth, but merely in order to mystify its surroundings. the desire to dissemble and to conceal himself seems stronger than the need of protection from the cold in modern man. thus scholars and philosophers of the age do not have recourse to indian and greek wisdom in order to become wise and peaceful: the only purpose of their work seems to be to earn them a fictitious reputation for learning in their own time. the naturalists endeavour to classify the animal outbreaks of violence, ruse and revenge, in the present relations between nations and individual men, as immutable laws of nature. historians are anxiously engaged in proving that every age has its own particular right and special conditions,-with the view of preparing the groundwork of an apology for the day that is to come, when our generation will be called to judgment. the science of government, of race, of commerce, and of jurisprudence, all have that preparatorily apologetic character now; yea, it even seems as though the small amount of intellect which still remains active to-day, and is not used up by the great mechanism of gain and power, has as its sole task the defending--and excusing of the present against what accusers? one asks, surprised. against its own bad conscience. and at this point we plainly discern the task assigned to modern art--that of stupefying or intoxicating, of lulling to sleep or bewildering. by hook or by crook to make conscience unconscious! to assist the modern soul over the sensation of guilt, not to lead it back to innocence! and this for the space of moments only! to defend men against themselves, that their inmost heart may be silenced, that they may turn a deaf ear to its voice! the souls of those few who really feel the utter ignominy of this mission and its terrible humiliation of art, must be filled to the brim with sorrow and pity, but also with a new and overpowering yearning. he who would fain emancipate art, and reinstall its sanctity, now desecrated, must first have freed himself from all contact with modern souls; only as an innocent being himself can he hope to discover the innocence of art, for he must be ready to perform the stupendous tasks of self-purification and self-consecration. if he succeeded, if he were ever able to address men from out his enfranchised soul and by means of his emancipated art, he would then find himself exposed to the greatest of dangers and involved in the most appalling of struggles. man would prefer to tear him and his art to pieces, rather than acknowledge that he must die of shame in presence of them. it is just possible that the emancipation of art is the only ray of hope illuminating the future, an event intended only for a few isolated souls, while the many remain satisfied to gaze into the flickering and smoking flame of their art and can endure to do so. for they do not want to be enlightened, but dazzled. they rather hate light --more particularly when it is thrown on themselves. that is why they evade the new messenger of light; but he follows them--the love which gave him birth compels him to follow them and to reduce them to submission. "ye must go through my mysteries," he cries to them; "ye need to be purified and shaken by them. dare to submit to this for your own salvation, and abandon the gloomily lighted corner of life and nature which alone seems familiar to you. i lead you into a kingdom which is also real, and when i lead you out of my cell into your daylight, ye will be able to judge which life is more real, which, in fact, is day and which night. nature is much richer, more powerful, more blessed and more terrible below the surface; ye cannot divine this from the way in which ye live. o that ye yourselves could learn to become natural again, and then suffer yourselves to be transformed through nature, and into her, by the charm of my ardour and love!" it is the voice of wagner's art which thus appeals to men. and that we, the children of a wretched age, should be the first to hear it, shows how deserving of pity this age must be: it shows, moreover, that real music is of a piece with fate and primitive law; for it is quite impossible to attribute its presence amongst us precisely at the present time to empty and meaningless chance. had wagner been an accident, he would certainly have been crushed by the superior strength of the other elements in the midst of which he was placed, out in the coming of wagner there seems to have been a necessity which both justifies it and makes it glorious. observed from its earliest beginnings, the development of his art constitutes a most magnificent spectacle, and--even though it was attended with great suffering--reason, law, and intention mark its course throughout. under the charm of such a spectacle the observer will be led to take pleasure even in this painful development itself, and will regard it as fortunate. he will see how everything necessarily contributes to the welfare and benefit of talent and a nature foreordained, however severe the trials may be through which it may have to pass. he will realise how every danger gives it more heart, and every triumph more prudence; how it partakes of poison and sorrow and thrives upon them. the mockery and perversity of the surrounding world only goad and spur it on the more. should it happen to go astray, it but returns from its wanderings and exile loaded with the most precious spoil; should it chance to slumber, "it does but recoup its strength." it tempers the body itself and makes it tougher; it does not consume life, however long it lives; it rules over man like a pinioned passion, and allows him to fly just in the nick of time, when his foot has grown weary in the sand or has been lacerated by the stones on his way. it can do nought else but impart; every one must share in its work, and it is no stinted giver. when it is repulsed it is but more prodigal in its gifts; ill used by those it favours, it does but reward them with the richest treasures it possesses,--and, according to the oldest and most recent experience, its favoured ones have never been quite worthy of its gifts. that is why the nature foreordained, through which music expresses itself to this world of appearance, is one of the most mysterious things under the sun--an abyss in which strength and goodness lie united, a bridge between self and non-self. who would undertake to name the object of its existence with any certainty?--even supposing the sort of purpose which it would be likely to have could be divined at all. but a most blessed foreboding leads one to ask whether it is possible for the grandest things to exist for the purpose of the meanest, the greatest talent for the benefit of the smallest, the loftiest virtue and holiness for the sake of the defective and faulty? should real music make itself heard, because mankind of all creatures least deserves to hear it, though it perhaps need it most? if one ponder over the transcendental and wonderful character of this possibility, and turn from these considerations to look back on life, a light will then be seen to ascend, however dark and misty it may have seemed a moment before. vii. it is quite impossible otherwise: the observer who is confronted with a nature such as wagner's must, willy-nilly, turn his eyes from time to time upon himself, upon his insignificance and frailty, and ask himself, what concern is this of thine? why, pray, art thou there at all? maybe he will find no answer to these questions, in which case he will remain estranged and confounded, face to face with his own personality. let it then suffice him that he has experienced this feeling; let the fact that he has felt strange and embarrassed in the presence of his own soul be the answer to his question for it is precisely by virtue of this feeling that he shows the most powerful manifestation of life in wagner--the very kernel of his strength--that demoniacal magnetism and gift of imparting oneself to others, which is peculiar to his nature, and by which it not only conveys itself to other beings, but also absorbs other beings into itself; thus attaining to its greatness by giving and by taking. as the observer is apparently subject to wagner's exuberant and prodigally generous nature, he partakes of its strength, and thereby becomes formidable through him and to him. and every one who critically examines himself knows that a certain mysterious antagonism is necessary to the process of mutual study. should his art lead us to experience all that falls to the lot of a soul engaged upon a journey, i.e. feeling sympathy with others and sharing their fate, and seeing the world through hundreds of different eyes, we are then able, from such a distance, and under such strange influences, to contemplate him, once we have lived his life. we then feel with the utmost certainty that in wagner the whole visible world desires to be spiritualised, absorbed, and lost in the world of sounds. in wagner, too, the world of sounds seeks to manifest itself as a phenomenon for the sight; it seeks, as it were, to incarnate itself. his art always leads him into two distinct directions, from the world of the play of sound to the mysterious and yet related world of visible things, and vice versa. he is continually forced--and the observer with him--to re-translate the visible into spiritual and primeval life, and likewise to perceive the most hidden interstices of the soul as something concrete and to lend it a visible body. this constitutes the nature of the dithyrambic dramatist, if the meaning given to the term includes also the actor, the poet, and the musician; a conception necessarily borrowed from æschylus and the contemporary greek artists--the only perfect examples of the dithyrambic dramatist before wagner. if attempts have been made to trace the most wonderful developments to inner obstacles or deficiencies, if, for instance, in goethe's case, poetry was merely the refuge of a foiled talent for painting; if one may speak of schiller's dramas as of vulgar eloquence directed into uncommon channels; if wagner himself tries to account for the development of music among the germans by showing that, inasmuch as they are devoid of the entrancing stimulus of a natural gift for singing, they were compelled to take up instrumental music with the same profound seriousness as that with which their reformers took up christianity,--if, on the same principle, it were sought to associate wagner's development with an inner barrier of the same kind, it would then be necessary to recognise in him a primitive dramatic talent, which had to renounce all possibility of satisfying its needs by the quickest and most methods, and which found its salvation and its means of expression in drawing all arts to it for one great dramatic display. but then one would also have to assume that the most powerful musician, owing to his despair at having to appeal to people who were either only semi-musical or not musical at all, violently opened a road for himself to the other arts, in order to acquire that capacity for diversely communicating himself to others, by which he compelled them to understand him, by which he compelled the masses to understand him. however the development of the born dramatist may be pictured, in his ultimate expression he is a being free from all inner barriers and voids: the real, emancipated artist cannot help himself, he must think in the spirit of all the arts at once, as the mediator and intercessor between apparently separated spheres, the one who reinstalls the unity and wholeness of the artistic faculty, which cannot be divined or reasoned out, but can only be revealed by deeds themselves. but he in whose presence this deed is performed will be overcome by its gruesome and seductive charm: in a flash he will be confronted with a power which cancels both resistance and reason, and makes every detail of life appear irrational and incomprehensible. carried away from himself, he seems to be suspended in a mysterious fiery element; he ceases to understand himself, the standard of everything has fallen from his hands; everything stereotyped and fixed begins to totter; every object seems to acquire a strange colour and to tell us its tale by means of new symbols;--one would need to be a plato in order to discover, amid this confusion of delight and fear, how he accomplishes the feat, and to say to the dramatist: "should a man come into our midst who possessed sufficient knowledge to simulate or imitate anything, we would honour him as something wonderful and holy; we would even anoint him and adorn his brow with a sacred diadem; but we would urge him to leave our circle for another, notwithstanding." it may be that a member of the platonic community would have been able to chasten himself to such conduct: we, however, who live in a very different community, long for, and earnestly desire, the charmer to come to us, although we may fear him already,--and we only desire his presence in order that our society and the mischievous reason and might of which it is the incarnation may be confuted. a state of human civilisation, of human society, morality, order, and general organisation which would be able to dispense with the services of an imitative artist or mimic, is not perhaps so utterly inconceivable; but this perhaps is probably the most daring that has ever been posited, and is equivalent to the gravest expression of doubt. the only man who ought to be at liberty to speak of such a possibility is he who could beget, and have the presentiment of, the highest phase of all that is to come, and who then, like faust, would either be obliged to turn blind, or be permitted to become so. for we have no right to this blindness; whereas plato, after he had cast that one glance into the ideal hellenic, had the right to be blind to all hellenism. for this reason, we others are in much greater need of art; because it was in the presence of the realistic that our eyes began to see, and we require the complete dramatist in order that he may relieve us, if only for an hour or so, of the insufferable tension arising from our knowledge of the chasm which lies between our capabilities and the duties we have to perform. with him we ascend to the highest pinnacle of feeling, and only then do we fancy we have returned to nature's unbounded freedom, to the actual realm of liberty. from this point of vantage we can see ourselves and our fellows emerge as something sublime from an immense mirage, and we see the deep meaning in our struggles, in our victories and defeats; we begin to find pleasure in the rhythm of passion and in its victim in the hero's every footfall we distinguish the hollow echo of death, and in its proximity we realise the greatest charm of life: thus transformed into tragic men, we return again to life with comfort in our souls. we are conscious of a new feeling of security, as if we had found a road leading out of the greatest dangers, excesses, and ecstasies, back to the limited and the familiar: there where our relations with our fellows seem to partake of a superior benevolence, and are at all events more noble than they were. for here, everything seemingly serious and needful, which appears to lead to a definite goal, resembles only detached fragments when compared with the path we ourselves have trodden, even in our dreams,-detached fragments of that complete and grand experience whereof we cannot even think without a thrill. yes, we shall even fall into danger and be tempted to take life too easily, simply because in art we were in such deadly earnest concerning it, as wagner says somewhere anent certain incidents in his own life. for if we who are but the spectators and not the creators of this display of dithyrambic dramatic art, can almost imagine a dream to be more real than the actual experiences of our wakeful hours, how much more keenly must the creator realise this contrast! there he stands amid all the clamorous appeals and importunities of the day, and of the necessities of life; in the midst of society and state--and as what does he stand there? maybe he is the only wakeful one, the only being really and truly conscious, among a host of confused and tormented sleepers, among a multitude of deluded and suffering people. he may even feel like a victim of chronic insomnia, and fancy himself obliged to bring his clear, sleepless, and conscious life into touch with somnambulists and ghostly well-intentioned creatures. thus everything that others regard as commonplace strikes him as weird, and he is tempted to meet the whole phenomenon with haughty mockery. but how peculiarly this feeling is crossed, when another force happens to join his quivering pride, the craving of the heights for the depths, the affectionate yearning for earth, for happiness and for fellowship--then, when he thinks of all he misses as a hermit-creator, he feels as though he ought to descend to the earth like a god, and bear all that is weak, human, and lost, "in fiery arms up to heaven," so as to obtain love and no longer worship only, and to be able to lose himself completely in his love. but it is just this contradiction which is the miraculous fact in the soul of the dithyrambic dramatist, and if his nature can be understood at all, surely it must be here. for his creative moments in art occur when the antagonism between his feelings is at its height and when his proud astonishment and wonder at the world combine with the ardent desire to approach that same world as a lover. the glances he then bends towards the earth are always rays of sunlight which "draw up water," form mist, and gather storm-clouds. clear-sighted and prudent, loving and unselfish at the same time, his glance is projected downwards; and all things that are illumined by this double ray of light, nature conjures to discharge their strength, to reveal their most hidden secret, and this through bashfulness. it is more than a mere figure of speech to say that he surprised nature with that glance, that he caught her naked; that is why she would conceal her shame by seeming precisely the reverse. what has hitherto been invisible, the inner life, seeks its salvation in the region of the visible; what has hitherto been only visible, repairs to the dark ocean of sound: thus nature, in trying to conceal herself, unveils the character of her contradictions. in a dance, wild, rhythmic and gliding, and with ecstatic movements, the born dramatist makes known something of what is going on within him, of what is taking place in nature: the dithyrambic quality of his movements speaks just as eloquently of quivering comprehension and of powerful penetration as of the approach of love and self-renunciation. intoxicated speech follows the course of this rhythm; melody resounds coupled with speech, and in its turn melody projects its sparks into the realm of images and ideas. a dream-apparition, like and unlike the image of nature and her wooer, hovers forward; it condenses into more human shapes; it spreads out in response to its heroically triumphant will, and to a most delicious collapse and cessation of will:--thus tragedy is born; thus life is presented with its grandest knowledge-that of tragic thought; thus, at last, the greatest charmer and benefactor among mortals--the dithyrambic dramatist--is evolved. viii. wagner's actual life--that is to say, the gradual evolution of the dithyrambic dramatist in him-was at the same time an uninterrupted struggle with himself, a struggle which never ceased until his evolution was complete. his fight with the opposing world was grim and ghastly, only because it was this same world--this alluring enemy--which he heard speaking out of his own heart, and because he nourished a violent demon in his breast--the demon of resistance. when the ruling idea of his life gained ascendancy over his mind--the idea that drama is, of all arts, the one that can exercise the greatest amount of influence over the world--it aroused the most active emotions in his whole being. it gave him no very clear or luminous decision, at first, as to what was to be done and desired in the future; for the idea then appeared merely as a form of temptation--that is to say, as the expression of his gloomy, selfish, and insatiable will, eager for power and glory. influence--the greatest amount of influence--how? over whom?--these were henceforward the questions and problems which did not cease to engage his head and his heart. he wished to conquer and triumph as no other artist had ever done before, and, if possible, to reach that height of tyrannical omnipotence at one stroke for which all his instincts secretly craved. with a jealous and cautious eye, he took stock of everything successful, and examined with special care all that upon which this influence might be brought to bear. with the magic sight of the dramatist, which scans souls as easily as the most familiar book, he scrutinised the nature of the spectator and the listener, and although he was often perturbed by the discoveries he made, he very quickly found means wherewith he could enthral them. these means were ever within his reach: everything that moved him deeply he desired and could also produce; at every stage in his career he understood just as much of his predecessors as he himself was able to create, and he never doubted that he would be able to do what they had done. in this respect his nature is perhaps more presumptuous even than goethe's, despite the fact that the latter said of himself: "i always thought i had mastered everything; and even had i been crowned king, i should have regarded the honour as thoroughly deserved." wagner's ability. his taste and his aspirations--all of which have ever been as closely related as key to lock--grew and attained to freedom together; but there was a time when it was not so. what did he care about the feeble but noble and egotistically lonely feeling which that friend of art fosters, who, blessed with a literary and aesthetic education, takes his stand far from the common mob! but those violent spiritual tempests which are created by the crowd when under the influence of certain climactic passages of dramatic song, that sudden bewildering ecstasy of the emotions, thoroughly honest and selfless--they were but echoes of his own experiences and sensations, and filled him with glowing hope for the greatest possible power and effect. thus he recognised grand opera as the means whereby he might express his ruling thoughts; towards it his passions impelled him; his eyes turned in the direction of its home. the larger portion of his life, his most daring wanderings, and his plans, studies, sojourns, and acquaintances are only to be explained by an appeal to these passions and the opposition of the outside world, which the poor, restless, passionately ingenuous german artist had to face. another artist than he knew better how to become master of this calling, and now that it has gradually become known by means of what ingenious artifices of all kinds meyerbeer succeeded in preparing and achieving every one of his great successes, and how scrupulously the sequence of "effects" was taken into account in the opera itself, people will begin to understand how bitterly wagner was mortified when his eyes were opened to the tricks of the metier which were indispensable to a great public success. i doubt whether there has ever been another great artist in history who began his career with such extraordinary illusions and who so unsuspectingly and sincerely fell in with the most revolting form of artistic trickery. and yet the way in which he proceeded partook of greatness and was therefore extraordinarily fruitful. for when he perceived his error, despair made him understand the meaning of modern success, of the modern public, and the whole prevaricating spirit of modern art. and while becoming the critic of "effect," indications of his own purification began to quiver through him. it seems as if from that time forward the spirit of music spoke to him with an unprecedented spiritual charm. as though he had just risen from a long illness and had for the first time gone into the open, he scarcely trusted his hand and his eye, and seemed to grope along his way. thus it was an almost delightful surprise to him to find that he was still a musician and an artist, and perhaps then only for the first time. every subsequent stage in wagner's development may be distinguished thus, that the two fundamental powers of his nature drew ever more closely together: the aversion of the one to the other lessened, the higher self no longer condescended to serve its more violent and baser brother; it loved him and felt compelled to serve him. the tenderest and purest thing is ultimately--that is to say, at the highest stage of its evolution-always associated with the mightiest; the storming instincts pursue their course as before, but along different roads, in the direction of the higher self; and this in its turn descends to earth and finds its likeness in everything earthly. if it were possible, on this principle, to speak of the final aims and unravelments of that evolution, and to remain intelligible, it might also be possible to discover the graphic terms with which to describe the long interval preceding that last development; but i doubt whether the first achievement is possible at all, and do not therefore attempt the second. the limits of the interval separating the preceding and the subsequent ages will be described historically in two sentences: wagner was the revolutionist of society; wagner recognised the only artistic element that ever existed hitherto--the poetry of the people. the ruling idea which in a new form and mightier than it had ever been, obsessed wagner, after he had overcome his share of despair and repentance, led him to both conclusions. influence, the greatest possible amount of influence to be exercised by means of the stage! --but over whom? he shuddered when he thought of those whom he had, until then, sought to influence. his experience led him to realise the utterly ignoble position which art and the artist adorn; how a callous and hard-hearted community that calls itself the good, but which is really the evil, reckons art and the artist among its slavish retinue, and keeps them both in order to minister to its need of deception. modern art is a luxury; he saw this, and understood that it must stand or fall with the luxurious society of which it forms but a part. this society had but one idea, to use its power as hard-heartedly and as craftily as possible in order to render the impotent--the people--ever more and more serviceable, base and unpopular, and to rear the modern workman out of them. it also robbed them of the greatest and purest things which their deepest needs led them to create, and through which they meekly expressed the genuine and unique art within their soul: their myths, songs, dances, and their discoveries in the department of language, in order to distil therefrom a voluptuous antidote against the fatigue and boredom of its existence-modern art. how this society came into being, how it learned to draw new strength for itself from the seemingly antagonistic spheres of power, and how, for instance, decaying christianity allowed itself to be used, under the cover of half measures and subterfuges, as a shield against the masses and as a support of this society and its possessions, and finally how science and men of learning pliantly consented to become its drudges--all this wagner traced through the ages, only to be convulsed with loathing at the end of his researches. through his compassion for the people, he became a revolutionist. from that time forward he loved them and longed for them, as he longed for his art; for, alas! in them alone, in this fast disappearing, scarcely recognisable body, artificially held aloof, he now saw the only spectators and listeners worthy and fit for the power of his masterpieces, as he pictured them. thus his thoughts concentrated themselves upon the question, how do the people come into being? how are they resuscitated? he always found but one answer: if a large number of people were afflicted with the sorrow that afflicted him, that number would constitute the people, he said to himself. and where the same sorrow leads to the same impulses and desires, similar satisfaction would necessarily be sought, and the same pleasure found in this satisfaction. if he inquired into what it was that most consoled him and revived his spirits in his sorrow, what it was that succeeded best in counteracting his affliction, it was with joyful certainty that he discovered this force only in music and myth, the latter of which he had already recognised as the people's creation and their language of distress. it seemed to him that the origin of music must be similar, though perhaps more mysterious. in both of these elements he steeped and healed his soul; they constituted his most urgent need:--in this way he was able to ascertain how like his sorrow was to that of the people, when they came into being, and how they must arise anew if many wagners are going to appear. what part did myth and music play in modern society, wherever they had not been actually sacrificed to it? they shared very much the same fate, a fact which only tends to prove their close relationship: myth had been sadly debased and usurped by idle tales and stories; completely divested of its earnest and sacred virility, it was transformed into the plaything and pleasing bauble of children and women of the afflicted people. music had kept itself alive among the poor, the simple, and the isolated; the german musician had not succeeded in adapting himself to the luxurious traffic of the arts; he himself had become a fairy tale full of monsters and mysteries, full of the most touching omens and auguries--a helpless questioner, something bewitched and in need of rescue. here the artist distinctly heard the command that concerned him alone--to recast myth and make it virile, to break the spell lying over music and to make music speak: he felt his strength for drama liberated at one stroke, and the foundation of his sway established over the hitherto undiscovered province lying between myth and music. his new masterpiece, which included all the most powerful, effective, and entrancing forces that he knew, he now laid before men with this great and painfully cutting question: "where are ye all who suffer and think as i do? where is that number of souls that i wish to see become a people, that ye may share the same joys and comforts with me? in your joy ye will reveal your misery to me." these were his questions in tannhauser and lohengrin, in these operas he looked about him for his equals --the anchorite yearned for the number. but what were his feelings withal? nobody answered him. nobody had understood his question. not that everybody remained silent: on the contrary, answers were given to thousands of questions which he had never put; people gossipped about the new masterpieces as though they had only been composed for the express purpose of supplying subjects for conversation. the whole mania of aesthetic scribbling and small talk overtook the germans like a pestilence, and ith that lack of modesty which characterises both german scholars and german journalists, people began measuring, and generally meddling with, these masterpieces, as well as with the person of the artist. wagner tried to help the comprehension of his question by writing about it; but this only led to fresh confusion and more uproar, --for a musician who writes and thinks was, at that time, a thing unknown. the cry arose: "he is a theorist who wishes to remould art with his far-fetched notions--stone him!" wagner was stunned: his question was not understood, his need not felt; his masterpieces seemed a message addressed only to the deaf and blind; his people-an hallucination. he staggered and vacillated. the feasibility of a complete upheaval of all things then suggested itself to him, and he no longer shrank from the thought: possibly, beyond this revolution and dissolution, there might be a chance of a new hope; on the other hand, there might not. but, in any case, would not complete annihilation be better than the wretched existing state of affairs? not very long afterwards, he was a political exile in dire distress. and then only, with this terrible change in his environment and in his soul, there begins that period of the great man's life over which as a golden reflection there is stretched the splendour of highest mastery. now at last the genius of dithyrambic drama doffs its last disguise. he is isolated; the age seems empty to him; he ceases to hope; and his all-embracing glance descend once more into the deep, and finds the bottom, there he sees suffering in the nature of things, and henceforward, having become more impersonal, he accepts his portion of sorrow more calmly. the desire for great power which was but the inheritance of earlier conditions is now directed wholly into the channel of creative art; through his art he now speaks only to himself, and no longer to a public or to a people, and strives to lend this intimate conversation all the distinction and other qualities in keeping with such a mighty dialogue. during the preceding period things had been different with his art; then he had concerned himself, too, albeit with refinement and subtlety, with immediate effects: that artistic production was also meant as a question, and it ought to have called forth an immediate reply. and how often did wagner not try to make his meaning clearer to those he questioned! in view of their inexperience in having questions put to them, he tried to meet them half way and to conform with older artistic notions and means of expression. when he feared that arguments couched in his own terms would only meet with failure, he had tried to persuade and to put his question in a language half strange to himself though familiar to his listeners. now there was nothing to induce him to continue this indulgence: all he desired now was to come to terms with himself, to think of the nature of the world in dramatic actions, and to philosophise in music; what desires he still possessed turned in the direction of the latest philosophical views. he who is worthy of knowing what took place in him at that time or what questions were thrashed out in the darkest holy of holies in his soul--and not many are worthy of knowing all this--must hear, observe, and experience tristan and isolde, the real opus metaphysicum of all art, a work upon which rests the broken look of a dying man with his insatiable and sweet craving for the secrets of night and death, far away from life which throws a horribly spectral morning light, sharply, upon all that is evil, delusive, and sundering: moreover, a drama austere in the severity of its form, overpowering in its simple grandeur, and in harmony with the secret of which it treats--lying dead in the midst of life, being one in two. and yet there is something still more wonderful than this work, and that is the artist himself, the man who, shortly after he had accomplished it, was able to create a picture of life so full of clashing colours as the meistersingers of nurnberg, and who in both of these compositions seems merely to have refreshed and equipped himself for the task of completing at his ease that gigantic edifice in four parts which he had long ago planned and begun--the ultimate result of all his meditations and poetical flights for over twenty years, his bayreuth masterpiece, the ring of the nibelung! he who marvels at the rapid succession of the two operas, tristan and the meistersingers, has failed to understand one important side of the life and nature of all great germans: he does not know the peculiar soil out of which that essentially german gaiety, which characterised luther, beethoven, and wagner, can grow, the gaiety which other nations quite fail to understand and which even seems to be missing in the germans of to-day--that clear golden and thoroughly fermented mixture of simplicity, deeply discriminating love, observation, and roguishness which wagner has dispensed, as the most precious of drinks, to all those who have suffered deeply through life, but who nevertheless return to it with the smile of convalescents. and, as he also turned upon the world the eyes of one reconciled, he was more filled with rage and disgust than with sorrow, and more prone to renounce the love of power than to shrink in awe from it. as he thus silently furthered his greatest work and gradually laid score upon score, something happened which caused him to stop and listen: friends were coming, a kind of subterranean movement of many souls approached with a message for him--it was still far from being the people that constituted this movement and which wished to bear him news, but it may have been the nucleus and first living source of a really human community which would reach perfection in some age still remote. for the present they only brought him the warrant that his great work could be entrusted to the care and charge of faithful men, men who would watch and be worthy to watch over this most magnificent of all legacies to posterity. in the love of friends his outlook began to glow with brighter colours; his noblest care--the care that his work should be accomplished and should find a refuge before the evening of his life--was not his only preoccupation. something occurred which he could only understand as a symbol: it was as much as a new comfort and a new token of happiness to him. a great german war caused him to open his eyes, and he observed that those very germans whom he considered so thoroughly degenerate and so inferior to the high standard of real teutonism, of which he had formed an ideal both from self-knowledge and the conscientious study of other great germans in history; he observed that those very germans were, in the midst of terrible circumstances, exhibiting two virtues of the highest order--simple bravery and prudence; and with his heart bounding with delight he conceived the hope that he might not be the last german, and that some day a greater power would perhaps stand by his works than that devoted yet meagre one consisting of his little band of friends--a power able to guard it during that long period preceding its future glory, as the masterpiece of this future. perhaps it was not possible to steel this belief permanently against doubt, more particularly when it sought to rise to hopes of immediate results: suffice it that he derived a tremendous spur from his environment, which constantly reminded him of a lofty duty ever to be fulfilled. his work would not have been complete had he handed it to the world only in the form of silent manuscript. he must make known to the world what it could not guess in regard to his productions, what was his alone to reveal--the new style for the execution and presentation of his works, so that he might set that example which nobody else could set, and thus establish a tradition of style, not on paper, not by means of signs, but through impressions made upon the very souls of men. this duty had become all the more pressing with him, seeing that precisely in regard to the style of their execution his other works had meanwhile succumbed to the most insufferable and absurd of fates: they were famous and admired, yet no one manifested the slightest sign of indignation when they were mishandled. for, strange to say, whereas he renounced ever more and more the hope of success among his contemporaries, owing to his all too thorough knowledge of them, and disclaimed all desire for power, both "success" and "power" came to him, or at least everybody told him so. it was in vain that he made repeated attempts to expose, with the utmost clearness, how worthless and humiliating such successes were to him: people were so unused to seeing an artist able to differentiate at all between the effects of his works that even his most solemn protests were never entirely trusted. once he had perceived the relationship existing between our system of theatres and their success, and the men of his time, his soul ceased to be attracted by the stage at all. he had no further concern with aesthetic ecstasies and the exultation of excited crowds, and he must even have felt angry to see his art being gulped down indiscriminately by the yawning abyss of boredom and the insatiable love of distraction. how flat and pointless every effect proved under these circumstances-more especially as it was much more a case of having to minister to one quite insatiable than of cloying the hunger of a starving man-wagner began to perceive from the following repeated experience: everybody, even the performers and promoters, regarded his art as nothing more nor less than any other kind of stage-music, and quite in keeping with the repulsive style of traditional opera; thanks to the efforts of cultivated conductors, his works were even cut and hacked about, until, after they had been bereft of all their spirit, they were held to be nearer the professional singer's plane. but when people tried to follow wagner's instructions to the letter, they proceeded so clumsily and timidly that they were not incapable of representing the midnight riot in the second act of the meistersingers by a group of ballet-dancers. they seemed to do all this, however, in perfectly good faith--without the smallest evil intention. wagner's devoted efforts to show, by means of his own example, the correct and complete way of performing his works, and his attempts at training individual singers in the new style, were foiled time after time, owing only to the thoughtlessness and iron tradition that ruled all around him. moreover, he was always induced to concern himself with that class of theatricals which he most thoroughly loathed. had not even goethe, m his time, once grown tired of attending the rehearsals of his iphigenia? "i suffer unspeakably," he explained, "when i have to tumble about wlth these spectres, which never seem to act as they should." meanwhile wagner's "success" in the kind of drama which he most disliked steadily increased; so much so, indeed, that the largest theatres began to subsist almost entirely upon the receipts which wagner's art, in the guise of operas, brought into them. this growing passion on the part of the theatre-going public bewildered even some of wagner's friends; but this man who had endured so much, had still to endure the bitterest pain of all--he had to see his friends intoxicated with his "successes" and "triumphs" everywhere where his highest ideal was openly belied and shattered. it seemed almost as though a people otherwise earnest and reflecting had decided to maintain an attitude of systematic levity only towards its most serious artist, and to make him the privileged recipient of all the vulgarity, thoughtlessness, clumsiness, and malice of which the german nature is capable. when, therefore, during the german war, a current of greater magnanimity and freedom seemed to run through every one, wagner remembered the duty to which he had pledged himself, namely, to rescue his greatest work from those successes and affronts which were so largely due to misunderstandings, and to present it in his most personal rhythm as an example for all times. thus he conceived the idea of bayreuth. in the wake of that current of better feeling already referred to, he expected to notice an enhanced sense of duty even among those with whom he wished to entrust his most precious possession. out of this two-fold duty, that event took shape which, like a glow of strange sunlight, will illumine the few years that lie behind and before us, and was designed to bless that distant and problematic future which to our time and to the men of our time can be little more than a riddle or a horror, but which to the fevv who are allowed to assist in its realisation is a foretaste of coming joy, a foretaste of love in a higher sphere, through which they know themselves to be blessed, blessing and fruitful, far beyond their span of years; and which to wagner himself is but a cloud of distress, care, meditation, and grief, a fresh passionate outbreak of antagonistic elements, but all bathed in the starlight of selfless fidelity, and changed by this light into indescribable joy. it scarcely need be said that it is the breath of tragedy that fills the lungs of the world. and every one whose innermost soul has a presentiment of this, every one unto whom the yoke of tragic deception concerning the aim of life, the distortion and shattering of intentions, renunciation and purification through love, are not unknown things, must be conscious of a vague reminiscence of wagner's own heroic life, in the masterpieces with which the great man now presents us. we shall feel as though siegfried from some place far away were relating his deeds to us: the most blissful of touching recollections are always draped in the deep mourning of waning summer, when all nature lies still in the sable twilight. ix. all those to whom the thought of wagner's development as a man may have caused pain will find it both restful and healing to reflect upon what he was as an artist, and to observe how his ability and daring attained to such a high degree of independence. if art mean only the faculty of communicating to others what one has oneself experienced, and if every work of art confutes itself which does not succeed in making itself understood, then wagner's greatness as an artist would certainly lie in the almost demoniacal power of his nature to communicate with others, to express itself in all languages at once, and to make known its most intimate and personal experience with the greatest amount of distinctness possible. his appearance in the history of art resembles nothing so much as a volcanic eruption of the united artistic faculties of nature herself, after mankind had grown to regard the practice of a special art as a necessary rule. it is therefore a somewhat moot point whether he ought to be classified as a poet, a painter, or a musician, even using each these words in its widest sense, or whether a new word ought not to be invented in order to describe him. wagner's poetic ability is shown by his thinking in visible and actual facts, and not in ideas; that is to say, he thinks mythically, as the people have always done. no particular thought lies at the bottom of a myth, as the children of an artificial ulture would have us believe; but it is in itself a thought: it conveys an idea of the world, but through the medium of a chain of events, actions, and pains. the ring of the nihelung is a huge system of thought without the usual abstractness of the latter. it were perhaps possible for a philosopher to present us with its exact equivalent in pure thought, and to purge it of all pictures drawn from life, and of all living actions, in which case we should be in possession of the same thing portrayed in two completely different forms--the one for the people, and the other for the very reverse of the people; that is to say, men of theory. but wagner makes no appeal to this last class, for the man of theory can know as little of poetry or myth as the deaf man can know of music; both of them being conscious only of movements which seem meaningless to them. it is impossible to appreciate either one of these completely different forms from the standpoint of the other: as long as the poet's spell is upon one, one thinks with him just as though one were merely a feeling, seeing, and hearing creature; the conclusions thus reached are merely the result of the association of the phenomena one sees, and are therefore not logical but actual causalities. if, therefore, the heroes and gods of mythical dramas, as understood by wagner, were to express themselves plainly in words, there would be a danger (inasmuch as the language of words might tend to awaken the theoretical side in us) of our finding ourselves transported from the world of myth to the world of ideas, and the result would be not only that we should fail to understand with greater ease, but that we should probably not understand at all. wagner thus forced language back to a more primeval stage in its development a stage at which it was almost free of the abstract element, and was still poetry, imagery, and feeling; the fearlessness with which wagner undertook this formidable mission shows how imperatively he was led by the spirit of poetry, as one who must follow whithersoever his phantom leader may direct him. every word in these dramas ought to allow of being sung, and gods and heroes should make them their own--that was the task which wagner set his literary faculty. any other person in like circumstances would have given up all hope; for our language seems almost too old and decrepit to allow of one's exacting what wagner exacted from it; and yet, when he smote the rock, he brought forth an abundant flow. precisely owing to the fact that he loved his language and exacted a great deal from it, wagner suffered more than any other german through its decay and enfeeblement, from its manifold losses and mutilations of form, from its unwieldy particles and clumsy construction, and from its unmusical auxiliary verbs. all these are things which have entered the language through sin and depravity. on the other hand, he was exceedingly proud to record the number of primitive and vigorous factors still extant in the current speech; and in the tonic strength of its roots he recognised quite a wonderful affinity and relation to real music, a quality which distinguished it from the highly volved and artificially rhetorical latin languages. wagner's poetry is eloquent of his affection for the german language, and there is a heartiness and candour in his treatment of it which are scarcely to be met with in any other german writer, save perhaps goethe. forcibleness of diction, daring brevity, power and variety in rhythm, a remarkable wealth of strong and striking words, simplicity in construction, an almost unique inventive faculty in regard to fluctuations of feeling and presentiment, and therewithal a perfectly pure and overflowing stream of colloquialisms--these are the qualities that have to be enumerated, and even then the greatest and most wonderful of all is omitted. whoever reads two such poems as tristan and the meistersingers consecutively will be just as astonished and doubtful in regard to the language as to the music; for he will wonder how it could have been possible for a creative spirit to dominate so perfectly two worlds as different in form, colour, and arrangement, as in soul. this is the most wonderful achievement of wagner's talent; for the ability to give every work its own linguistic stamp and to find a fresh body and a new sound for every thought is a task which only the great master can successfully accomplish. where this rarest of all powers manifests itself, adverse criticism can be but petty and fruitless which confines itself to attacks upon certain excesses and eccentricities in the treatment, or upon the more frequent obscurities of expression and ambiguity of thought. moreover, what seemed to electrify and scandalise those who were most bitter in their criticism was not so much the language as the spirit of the wagnerian operas--that is to say, his whole manner of feeling and suffering. it were well to wait until these very critics have acquired another spirit themselves; they will then also speak a different tongue, and, by that time, it seems to me things will go better with the german language than they do at present. in the first place, however, no one who studies wagner the poet and word-painter should forget that none of his dramas were meant to be read, and that it would therefore be unjust to judge them from the same standpoint as the spoken drama. the latter plays upon the feelings by means of words and ideas, and in this respect it is under the dominion of the laws of rhetoric. but in real life passion is seldom eloquent: in spoken drama it perforce must be, in order to be able to express itself at all. when, however, the language of a people is already in a state of decay and deterioration, the word-dramatist is tempted to impart an undue proportion of new colour and form both to his medium and to his thoughts; he would elevate the language in order to make it a vehicle capable of conveying lofty feelings, and by so doing he runs the risk of becoming abstruse. by means of sublime phrases and conceits he likewise tries to invest passion with some nobility, and thereby runs yet another risk, that of appearing false and artificial. for in real life passions do not speak in sentences, and the poetical element often draws suspicion upon their genuineness when it departs too palpably from reality. now wagner, who was the first to detect the essential feeling in spoken drama, presents every dramatic action threefold: in a word, in a gesture, and in a sound. for, as a matter of fact, music succeeds in conveying the deepest emotions of the dramatic performers direct to the spectators, and while these see the evidence of the actors' states of soul in their bearing and movements, a third though more feeble confirmation of these states, translated into conscious will, quickly follows in the form of the spoken word. all these effects fulfil their purpose simultaneously, without disturbing one another in the least, and urge the spectator to a completely new understanding and sympathy, just as if his senses had suddenly grown more spiritual and his spirit more sensual, and as if everything which seeks an outlet in him, and which makes him thirst for knowledge, were free and joyful in exultant perception. because every essential factor in a wagnerian drama is conveyed to the spectator with the utmost clearness, illumined and permeated throughout by music as by an internal flame, their author can dispense with the expedients usually employed by the writer of the spoken play in order to lend light and warmth to the action. the whole of the dramatist's stock in trade could be more simple, and the architect's sense of rhythm could once more dare to manifest itself in the general proportions of the edifice; for there was no more need of "the deliberate confusion and involved variety of tyles, whereby the ordinary playwright strove in the interests of his work to produce that feeling of wonder and thrilling suspense which he ultimately enhanced to one of delighted amazement. the impression of ideal distance and height was no more to be induced by means of tricks and artifices. language withdrew itself from the length and breadth of rhetoric into the strong confines of the speech of the feelings, and although the actor spoke much less about all he did and felt in the performance, his innermost sentiments, which the ordinary playwright had hitherto ignored for fear of being undramatic, was now able to drive the spectators to passionate sympathy, while the accompanying language of gestures could be restricted to the most delicate modulations. now, when passions are rendered in song, they require rather more time than when conveyed by speech; music prolongs, so to speak, the duration of the feeling, from which it follows, as a rule, that the actor who is also a singer must overcome the extremely unplastic animation from which spoken drama suffers. he feels himself incited all the more to a certain nobility of bearing, because music envelopes his feelings in a purer atmosphere, and thus brings them closer to beauty. the extraordinary tasks which wagner set his actors and singers will provoke rivalry between them for ages to come, in the personification of each of his heroes with the greatest possible amount of clearness, perfection, and fidelity, according to that perfect incorporation already typified by the music of drama. following this leader, the eye of the plastic artist will ultimately behold the marvels of another visible world, which, previous to him, was seen for the first time only by the creator of such works as the ring of the nibelung --that creator of highest rank, who, like aeschylus, points the way to a coming art. must not jealousy awaken the greatest talent, if the plastic artist ever compares the effect of his productions with that of wagnerian music, in which there is so much pure and sunny happiness that he who hears it feels as though all previous music had been but an alien, faltering, and constrained language; as though in the past it had been but a thing to sport with in the presence of those who were not deserving of serious treatment, or a thing with which to train and instruct those who were not even deserving of play? in the case of this earlier kind of music, the joy we always experience while listening to wagner's compositions is ours only for a short space of time, and it would then seem as though it were overtaken by certain rare moments of forgetfulness, during which it appears to be communing with its inner self and directing its eyes upwards, like raphael's cecilia, away from the listeners and from all those who demand distraction, happiness, or instruction from it. in general it may be said of wagner the musician, that he endowed everything in nature which hitherto had had no wish to speak with the power of speech: he refuses to admit that anything must be dumb, and, resorting to the dawn, the forest, the mist, the cliffs, the hills, the thrill of night and the moonlight, he observes a desire common to them all--they too wish to sing their own melody. if the philosopher says it is will that struggles for existence in animate and inanimate nature, the musician adds: and this will wherever it manifests itself, yearns for a melodious existence. before wagner's time, music for the most part moved in narrow limits: it concerned itself with the permanent states of man, or with what the greeks call ethos. and only with beethoven did it begin to find the language of pathos, of passionate will, and of the dramatic occurrences in the souls of men. formerly, what people desired was to interpret a mood, a stolid, merry, reverential, or penitential state of mind, by means of music; the object was, by means of a certain striking uniformity of treatment and the prolonged duration of this uniformity, to compel the listener to grasp the meaning of the music and to impose its mood upon him. to all such interpretations of mood or atmosphere, distinct and particular forms of treatment were necessary: others were established by convention. the question of length was left to the discretion of the musician, whose aim was not only to put the listener into a certain mood, but also to avoid rendering that mood monotonous by unduly protracting it. a further stage was reached when the interpretations of contrasted moods were made to follow one upon the other, and the charm of light and shade was discovered; and yet another step was made when the same piece of music was allowed to contain a contrast of the ethos--for instance, the contest between a male and a female theme. all these, however, are crude and primitive stages in the development of music. the fear of passion suggested the first rule, and the fear of monotony the second; all depth of feeling and any excess thereof were regarded as "unethical." once, however, the art of the ethos had repeatedly been made to ring all the changes on the moods and situations which convention had decreed as suitable, despite the most astounding resourcefulness on the part of its masters, its powers were exhausted. beethoven was the first to make music speak a new language--till then forbidden--the language of passion; but as his art was based upon the laws and conventions of the ethos, and had to attempt to justify itself in regard to them, his artistic development was beset with peculiar difficulties and obscurities. an inner dramatic factor--and every passion pursues a dramatic course--struggled to obtain a new form, but the traditional scheme of "mood music" stood in its way, and protested--almost after the manner in which morality opposes innovations and immorality. it almost seemed, therefore, as if beethoven had set himself the contradictory task of expressing pathos in the terms of the ethos. this view does not, however, apply to beethoven's latest and greatest works; for he really did succeed in discovering a novel method of expressing the grand and vaulting arch of passion. he merely selected certain portions of its curve; imparted these with the utmost clearness to his listeners, and then left it to them to divine its whole span. viewed superficially, the new form seemed rather like an aggregation of several musical compositions, of which every one appeared to represent a sustained situation, but was in reality but a momentary stage in the dramatic course of a passion. the listener might think that he was hearing the old "mood" music over again, except that he failed to grasp the relation of the various parts to one another, and these no longer conformed with the canon of the law. even among minor musicians, there flourished a certain contempt for the rule which enjoined harmony in the general construction of a composition and the sequence of the parts in their works still remained arbitrary. then, owing to a misunderstanding, the discovery of the majestic treatment of passion led back to the use of the single movement with an optional setting, and the tension between the parts thus ceased completely. that is why the symphony, as beethoven understood it, is such a wonderfully obscure production, more especially when, here and there, it makes faltering attempts at rendering beethoven's pathos. the means ill befit the intention, and the intention is, on the whole, not sufficiently clear to the listener, because it was never really clear, even in the mind of the composer. but the very injunction that something definite must be imparted, and that this must be done as distinctly as possible, becomes ever more and more essential, the higher, more difficult, and more exacting the class of work happens to be. that is why all wagner's efforts were concentrated upon the one object of discovering those means which best served the purpose of distinctness, and to this end it was above all necessary for him to emancipate himself from all the prejudices and claims of the old "mood" music, and to give his compositions--the musical interpretations of feelings and passion--a perfectly unequivocal mode of expression. if we now turn to what he has achieved, we see that his services to music are practically equal in rank to those which that sculptor-inventor rendered to sculpture who introduced "sculpture in the round." all previous music seems stiff and uncertain when compared with wagner's, just as though it were ashamed and did not wish to be inspected from all sides. with the most consummate skill and precision, wagner avails himself of every degree and colour in the realm of feeling; without the slightest hesitation or fear of its escaping him, he seizes upon the most delicate, rarest, and mildest emotion, and holds it fast, as though it had hardened at his touch, despite the fact that it may seem like the frailest butterfly to every one else. his music is never vague or dreamy; everything that is allowed to speak through it, whether it be of man or of nature, has a strictly individual passion; storm and fire acquire the ruling power of a personal will in his hands. over all the clamouring characters and the clash of their passions, over the whole torrent of contrasts, an almighty and symphonic understanding hovers with perfect serenity, and continually produces concord out of war. taken as a whole, wagner's music is a reflex of the world as it was understood by the great ephesian poet--that is to say, a harmony resulting from strife, as the union of justice and enmity. i admire the ability which could describe the grand line of universal passion out of a confusion of passions which all seem to be striking out in different directions: the fact that this was a possible achievement i find demonstrated in every individual act of a wagnerian drama, which describes the individual history of various characters side by side with a general history of the whole company. even at the very beginning we know we are watching a host of cross currents dominated by one great violent stream; and though at first this stream moves unsteadily over hidden reefs, and the torrent seems to be torn asunder as if it were travelling towards different points, gradually we perceive the central and general movement growing stronger and more rapid, the convulsive fury of the contending waters is converted into one broad, steady, and terrible flow in the direction of an unknown goal; and suddenly, at the end, the whole flood in all its breadth plunges into the depths, rejoicing demoniacally over the abyss and all its uproar. wagner is never more himself than when he is overwhelmed with difficulties and can exercise power on a large scale with all the joy of a lawgiver. to bring restless and contending masses into simple rhythmic movement, and to exercise one will over a bewildering host of claims and desires--these are the tasks for which he feels he was born, and in the performance of which he finds freedom. and he never loses his breath withal, nor does he ever reach his goal panting. he strove just as persistently to impose the severest laws upon himself as to lighten the burden of others in this respect. life and art weigh heavily upon him when he cannot play wit their most difficult questions. if one considers the relation between the melody of song and that of speech, one will perceive how he sought to adopt as his natural model the pitch, strength, and tempo of the passionate man's voice in order to transform it into art; and if one further considers the task of introducing this singing passion into the general symphonic order of music, one gets some idea of the stupendous difficulties he had to overcome. in this behalf, his inventiveness in small things as in great, his omniscience and industry are such, that at the sight of one of wagner's scores one is almost led to believe that no real work or effort had ever existed before his time. it seems almost as if he too could have said, in regard to the hardships of art, that the real virtue of the dramatist lies in self-renunciation. but he would probably have added, there is but one kind of hardship-that of the artist who is not yet free: virtue and goodness are trivial accomplishments. viewing him generally as an artist, and calling to mind a more famous type, we see that wagner is not at all unlike demosthenes: in him also we have the terrible earnestness of purpose and that strong prehensile mind which always obtains a complete grasp of a thing; in him, too, we have the hand's quick clutch and the grip as of iron. like demosthenes, he conceals his art or compels one to forget it by the peremptory way he calls attention to the subject he treats; and yet, like his great predecessor, he is the last and greatest of a whole line of artist-minds, and therefore has more to conceal than his forerunners: his art acts like nature, like nature recovered and restored. unlike all previous musicians, there is nothing bombastic about him; for the former did not mind playing at times with their art, and making an exhibition of their virtuosity. one associates wagner's art neither with interest nor with diversion, nor with wagner himself and art in general. all one is conscious of is of the great necessity of it all. no one will ever be able to appreciate what severity evenness of will, and self-control the artist required during his development, in order, at his zenith, to be able to do the necessary thing joyfully and freely. let it suffice if we can appreciate how, in some respects, his music, with a certain cruelty towards itself, determines to subserve the course of the drama, which is as unrelenting as fate, whereas in reality his art was ever thirsting for a free ramble in the open and over the wilderness. x. an artist who has this empire over himself subjugates all other artists, even though he may not particularly desire to do so. for him alone there lies no danger or stemming-force in those he has subjugated--his friends and his adherents; whereas the weaker natures who learn to rely on their friends pay for this reliance by forfeiting their independence. it is very wonderful to observe how carefully, throughout his life, wagner avoided anything in the nature of heading a party, notwithstanding the fact that at the close of every phase in his career a circle of adherents formed, presumably with the view of holding him fast to his latest development he always succeeded, however, in wringing himself free from them, and never allowed himself to be bound; for not only was the ground he covered too vast for one alone to keep abreast of him with any ease, but his way was so exceptionally steep that the most devoted would have lost his breath. at almost every stage in wagner's progress his friends would have liked to preach to him, and his enemies would fain have done so too--but for other reasons. had the purity of his artist's nature been one degree less decided than it was, he would have attained much earlier than he actually did to the leading position in the artistic and musical world of his time. true, he has reached this now, but in a much higher sense, seeing that every performance to be witnessed in any department of art makes its obeisance, so to speak, before the judgment-stool of his genius and of his artistic temperament. he has overcome the most refractory of his contemporaries; there is not one gifted musician among them but in his innermost heart would willingly listen to him, and find wagner's compositions more worth listening to than his own and all other musical productions taken together. many who wish, by hook or by crook, to make their mark, even wrestle with wagner's secret charm, and unconsciously throw in their lot with the older masters, preferring to ascribe their "independence" to schubert or handel rather than to wagner. but in vain! thanks to their very efforts in contending against the dictates of their own consciences, they become ever meaner and smaller artists; they ruin their own natures by forcing themselves to tolerate undesirable allies and friends and in spite of all these sacrifices, they still find perhaps in their dreams, that their ear turns attentively to wagner. these adversaries are to be pitied: they imagine they lose a great deal when they lose themselves, but here they are mistaken. albeit it is obviously all one to wagner whether musicians compose in his style, or whether they compose at all, he even does his utmost to dissipate the belief that a school of composers should now necessarily follow in his wake; though, in so far as he exercises a direct influence upon musicians, he does indeed try to instruct them concerning the art of grand execution. in his opinion, the evolution of art seems to have reached that stage when the honest endeavour to become an able and masterly exponent or interpreter is ever so much more worth talking about than the longing to be a creator at all costs. for, at the present stage of art, universal creating has this fatal result, that inasmuch as it encourages a much larger output, it tends to exhaust the means and artifices of genius by everyday use, and thus to reduce the real grandeur of its effect. even that which is good in art is superfluous and detrimental when it proceeds from the imitation of what is best. wagnerian ends and means are of one piece: to perceive this, all that is required is honesty in art matters, and it would be dishonest to adopt his means in order to apply them to other and less significant ends. if, therefore, wagner declines to live on amid a multitude of creative musicians, he is only the more desirous of imposing upon all men of talent the new duty of joining him in seeking the law of style for dramatic performances. he deeply feels the need of establishing a traditional style for his art, by means of which his work may continue to live from one age to another in a pure form, until it reaches that future which its creator ordained for it. wagner is impelled by an undaunted longing to make known everything relating to that foundation of a style, mentioned above, and, accordingly, everything relating to the continuance of his art. to make his work--as schopenhauer would say-a sacred depository and the real fruit of his life, as well as the inheritance of mankind, and to store it for the benefit of a posterity better able to appreciate it,--these were the supreme objects of his life, and for these he bore that crown of thorns which, one day, will shoot forth leaves of bay. like the insect which, in its last form, concentrates all its energies upon the one object of finding a safe depository for its eggs and of ensuring the future welfare of its posthumous brood,--then only to die content, so wagner strove with equal determination to find a place of security for his works. this subject, which took precedence of all others with him, constantly incited him to new discoveries; and these he sought ever more and more at the spring of his demoniacal gift of communicability, the more distinctly he saw himself in conflict with an age that was both perverse and unwilling to lend him its ear. gradually however, even this same age began to mark his indefatigable efforts, to respond to his subtle advances, and to turn its ear to him. whenever a small or a great opportunity arose, however far away, which suggested to wagner a means wherewith to explain his thoughts, he availed himself of it: he thought his thoughts anew into every fresh set of circumstances, and would make them speak out of the most paltry bodily form. whenever a soul only half capable of comprehending him opened itself to him, he never failed to implant his seed in it. he saw hope in things which caused the average dispassionate observer merely to shrug his shoulders; and he erred again and again, only so as to be able to carry his point against that same observer. just as the sage, in reality, mixes with living men only for the purpose of increasing his store of knowledge, so the artist would almost seem to be unable to associate with his contemporaries at all, unless they be such as can help him towards making his work eternal. he cannot be loved otherwise than with the love of this eternity, and thus he is conscious only of one kind of hatred directed at him, the hatred which would demolish the bridges bearing his art into the future. the pupils wagner educated for his own purpose, the individual musicians and actors whom he advised and whose ear he corrected and improved, the small and large orchestras he led, the towns which witnessed him earnestly fulfilling the duties of ws calling, the princes and ladies who half boastfully and half lovingly participated in the framing of his plans, the various european countries to which he temporarily belonged as the judge and evil conscience of their arts,--everything gradually became the echo of his thought and of his indefatigable efforts to attain to fruitfulness in the future. although this echo often sounded so discordant as to confuse him, still the tremendous power of his voice repeatedly crying out into the world must in the end call forth reverberations, and it will soon be impossible to be deaf to him or to misunderstand him. it is this reflected sound which even now causes the art-institutions of modern men to shake: every time the breath of his spirit blew into these coverts, all that was overripe or withered fell to the ground; but the general increase of scepticism in all directions speaks more eloquently than all this trembling. nobody any longer dares to predict where wagner's influence may not unexpectedly break out. he is quite unable to divorce the salvation of art from any other salvation or damnation: wherever modern life conceals a danger, he, with the discriminating eye of mistrust, perceives a danger threatening art. in his imagination he pulls the edifice of modern civilisation to pieces, and allows nothing rotten, no unsound timber-work to escape: if in the process he should happen to encounter weather-tight walls or anything like solid foundations, he immediately casts about for means wherewith he can convert them into bulwarks and shelters for his art. he lives like a fugitive, whose will is not to preserve his own life, but to keep a secret-like an unhappy woman who does not wish to save her own soul, but that of the child lying in her lap: in short, he lives like sieglinde, "for the sake of love." for life must indeed be full of pain and shame to one who can find neither rest nor shelter in this world, and who must nevertheless appeal to it, exact things from it, contemn it, and still be unable to dispense with the thing contemned, --this really constitutes the wretchedness of the artist of the future, who, unlike the philosopher, cannot prosecute his work alone in the seclusion of a study, but who requires human souls as messengers to this future, public institutions as a guarantee of it, and, as it were, bridges between now and hereafter. his art may not, like the philosopher's, be put aboard the boat of written documents: art needs capable men, not letters and notes, to transmit it. over whole periods in wagner's life rings a murmur of distress--his distress at not being able to meet with these capable interpreters before whom he longed to execute examples of his work, instead of being confined to written symbols; before whom he yearned to practise his art, instead of showing a pallid reflection of it to those who read books, and who, generally speaking, therefore are not artists. in wagner the man of letters we see the struggle of a brave fighter, whose right hand has, as it were, been lopped off, and who has continued the contest with his left. in his writings he is always the sufferer, because a temporary and insuperable destiny deprives him of his own and the correct way of conveying his thoughts--that is to say, in the form of apocalyptic and triumphant examples. his writings contain nothing canonical or severe: the canons are to be found in his works as a whole. their literary side represents his attempts to understand the instinct which urged him to create his works and to get a glimpse of himself through them. if he succeeded in transforming his instincts into terms of knowledge, it was always with the hope that the reverse process might take place in the souls of his readers--it was with this intention that he wrote. should it ultimately be proved that, in so doing, wagner attempted the impossible, he would still only share the lot of all those who have meditated deeply on art; and even so he would be ahead of most of them in this, namely, that the strongest instinct for all arts harboured in him. i know of no written aesthetics that give more light than those of wagner; all that can possibly be learnt concerning the origin of a work of art is to be found in them. he is one of the very great, who appeared amongst us a witness, and who is continually improving his testimony and making it ever clearer and freer; even when he stumbles as a scientist, sparks rise from the ground. such tracts as "beethoven," "concerning the art of conducting," "concerning actors and singers," "state and religion," silence all contradiction, and, like sacred reliquaries, impose upon all who approach them a calm, earnest, and reverential regard. others, more particularly the earlier ones, including "opera and drama," excite and agitate one; their rhythm is so uneven that, as prose they are bewildering. their dialectics is constantly interrupted, and their course is more retarded than accelerated by outbursts of feeling; a certain reluctance on the part of the writer seems to hang over them like a pall, just as though the artist were somewhat ashamed of speculative discussions. what the reader who is only imperfectly initiated will probably find most oppressive is the general tone of authoritative dignity which is peculiar to wagner, and which is very difficult to describe: it always strikes me as though wagner were continually addressing enemies; for the style of all these tracts more resembles that of the spoken than of the written language, hence they will seem much more intelligible if heard read aloud, in the presence of his enemies, with whom he cannot be on familiar terms, and towards whom he must therefore show some reserve and aloofness, the entrancing passion of his feelings, however, constantly pierces this intentional disguise, and then the stilted and heavy periods, swollen with accessary words, vanish, and his pen dashes off sentences, and even whole pages, which belong to the best in german prose. but even admitting that while he wrote such passages he was addressing friends, and that the shadow of his enemies had been removed for a while, all the friends and enemies that wagner, as a man of letters, has, possess one factor in common, which differentiates them fundamentally from the "people" for whom he worked as an artist. owing to the refining and fruitless nature of their education, they are quite devoid of the essential traits of the national character, and he who would appeal to them must speak in a way which is not of the people--that is to say, after the manner of our best prose-writers and wagner himself; though that he did violence to himself in writing thus is evident. but the strength of that almost maternal instinct of prudence in him, which is ready to make any sacrifice, rather tends to reinstall him among the scholars and men of learning, to whom as a creator he always longed to bid farewell. he submits to the language of culture and all the laws governing its use, though he was the first to recognise its profound insufficiency as a means of communication. for if there is anything that distinguishes his art from every other art of modern times, it is that it no longer speaks the language of any particular caste, and refuses to admit the distinctions "literate" and "illiterate." it thus stands as a contrast to every culture of the renaissance, which to this day still bathes us modern men in its light and shade. inasmuch as wagner's art bears us, from time to time, beyond itself, we are enabled to get a general view of its uniform character: we see goethe and leopardi as the last great stragglers of the italian philologist-poets, faust as the incarnation of a most unpopular problem, in the form of a man of theory thirsting for life; even goethe's song is an imitation of the song of the people rather than a standard set before them to which they are expected to attain, and the poet knew very well how truly he spoke when he seriously assured his adherents: "my compositions cannot become popular; he who hopes and strives to make them so is mistaken." that an art could arise which would be so clear and warm as to flood the base and the poor in spirit with its light, as well as to melt the haughtiness of the learned--such a phenomenon had to be experienced though it could not be guessed. but even in the mind of him who experiences it to-day it must upset all preconceived notions concerning education and culture; to such an one the veil will seem to have been rent in twain that conceals a future in which no highest good or highest joys exist that are not the common property of all. the odium attaching to the word "common" will then be abolished. if presentiment venture thus into the remote future, the discerning eye of all will recognise the dreadful social insanity of our present age, and will no longer blind itself to the dangers besetting an art which seems to have roots only in the remote and distant future, and which allows its burgeoning branches to spread before our gaze when it has not yet revealed the ground from which it draws its sap. how can we protect this homeless art through the ages until that remote future is reached? how can we so dam the flood of a revolution seemingly inevitable everywhere, that the blessed prospect and guarantee of a better future--of a freer human life--shall not also be washed away with all that is destined to perish and deserves to perish? he who asks himself this question shares wagner's care: he will feel himself impelled with wagner to seek those established powers that have the goodwill to protect the noblest passions of man during the period of earthquakes and upheavals. in this sense alone wagner questions the learned through his writings, whether they intend storing his legacy to them--the precious ring of his art--among their other treasures. and even the wonderful confidence which he reposes in the german mind and the aims of german politics seems to me to arise from the fact that he grants the people of the reformation that strength, mildness, and bravery which is necessary in order to divert "the torrent of revolution into the tranquil river-bed of a calmly flowing stream of humanity": and i could almost believe that this and only this is what he meant to express by means of the symbol of his imperial march. as a rule, though, the generous impulses of the creative artist and the extent of his philanthropy are too great for his gaze to be confined within the limits of a single nation. his thoughts, like those of every good and great german, are more than german, and the language of his art does not appeal to particular races but to mankind in general. but to the men of the future. this is the belief that is proper to him; this is his torment and his distinction. no artist, of what past soever, has yet received such a remarkable portion of genius; no one, save him, has ever been obliged to mix this bitterest of ingredients with the drink of nectar to which enthusiasm helped him. it is not as one might expect, the misunderstood and mishandled artist, the fugitive of his age, who adopted this faith in self-defence: success or failure at the hands of his contemporaries was unable either to create or to destroy it whether it glorified or reviled him, he did not belong to this generation: that was the conclusion to which his instincts led him. and the possibility of any generation's ever belonging to him is something which he who disbelieves in wagner can never be made to admit. but even this unbeliever may at least ask, what kind of generation it will be in which wagner will recognise his "people," and in which he will see the type of all those who suffer a common distress, and who wish to escape from it by means of an art common to them all. schiller was certainly more hopeful and sanguine; he did not ask what a future must be like if the instinct of the artist that predicts it prove true; his command to every artist was rather-soar aloft in daring flight out of sight of thine own years! in thy mirror, gleaming bright, glimpse of distant dawn appears. xi. may blessed reason preserve us from ever thinking that mankind will at any time discover a final and ideal order of things, and that happiness will then and ever after beam down upon us uniformly, like the rays of the sun in the tropics. wagner has nothing to do with such a hope; he is no utopian. if he was unable to dispense with the belief in a future, it only meant that he observed certain properties in modern men which he did not hold to be essential to their nature, and which did not seem to him to form any necessary part of their constitution; in fact, which were changeable and transient; and that precisely owing to these properties art would find no home among them, and he himself had to be the precursor and prophet of another epoch. no golden age, no cloudless sky will fall to the portion of those future generations, which his instinct led him to expect, and whose approximate characteristics may be gleaned from the cryptic characters of his art, in so far as it is possible to draw conclusions concerning the nature of any pain from the kind of relief it seeks. nor will superhuman goodness and justice stretch like an everlasting rainbow over this future land. belike this coming generation will, on the whole, seem more evil than the present one--for in good as in evil it will be more straightforward. it is even possible, if its soul were ever able to speak out in full and unembarrassed tones, that it might convulse and terrify us, as though the voice of some hitherto concealed and evil spirit had suddenly cried out in our midst. or how do the following propositions strike our ears?--that passion is better than stocism or hypocrisy; that straightforwardness, even in evil, is better than losing oneself in trying to observe traditional morality; that the free man is just as able to be good as evil, but that the unemancipated man is a disgrace to nature, and has no share in heavenly or earthly bliss; finally, that all who wish to be free must become so through themselves, and that freedom falls to nobody's lot as a gift from heaven. however harsh and strange these propositions may sound, they are nevertheless reverberations from that future world, which is verily in need of art, and which expects genuine pleasure from its presence; they are the language of nature--reinstated even in mankind; they stand for what i have already termed correct feeling as opposed to the incorrect feeling that reigns to-day. but real relief or salvation exists only for nature not for that which is contrary to nature or which arises out of incorrect feeling. when all that is unnatural becomes self-conscious, it desires but one thing--nonentity; the natural thing, on the other hand, yearns to be transfigured through love: the former would fain not be, the latter would fain be otherwise. let him who has understood this recall, in the stillness of his soul, the simple themes of wagner's art, in order to be able to ask himself whether it were nature or nature's opposite which sought by means of them to achieve the aims just described. the desperate vagabond finds deliverance from his distress in the compassionate love of a woman who would rather die than be unfaithful to him: the theme of the flying dutchman. the sweet-heart, renouncing all personal happiness, owing to a divine transformation of love into charity, becomes a saint, and saves the soul of her loved one: the theme of tannhauser. the sublimest and highest thing descends a suppliant among men, and will not be questioned whence it came; when, however, the fatal question is put, it sorrowfully returns to its higher life: the theme of lohengrin. the loving soul of a wife, and the people besides, joyfully welcome the new benevolent genius, although the retainers of tradition and custom reject and revile him: the theme of the meistersingers. of two lovers, that do not know they are loved, who believe rather that they are deeply wounded and contemned, each demands of the other that he or she should drink a cup of deadly poison, to all intents and purposes as an expiation of the insult; in reality, however, as the result of an impulse which neither of them understands: through death they wish to escape all possibility of separation or deceit. the supposed approach of death loosens their fettered souls and allows them a short moment of thrilling happiness, just as though they had actually escaped from the present, from illusions and from life: the theme of tristan and isolde. in the ring of the nibelung the tragic hero is a god whose heart yearns for power, and who, since he travels along all roads in search of it, finally binds himself to too many undertakings, loses his freedom, and is ultimately cursed by the curse inseparable from power. he becomes aware of his loss of freedom owing to the fact that he no longer has the means to take possession of the golden ring--that symbol of all earthly power, and also of the greatest dangers to himself as long as it lies in the hands of his enemies. the fear of the end and the twilight of all gods overcomes him, as also the despair at being able only to await the end without opposing it. he is in need of the free and fearless man who, without his advice or assistance--even in a struggle against gods--can accomplish single-handed what is denied to the powers of a god. he fails to see him, and just as a new hope finds shape within him, he must obey the conditions to which he is bound: with his own hand he must murder the thing he most loves, and purest pity must be punished by his sorrow. then he begins to loathe power, which bears evil and bondage in its lap; his will is broken, and he himself begins to hanker for the end that threatens him from afar off. at this juncture something happens which had long been the subject of his most ardent desire: the free and fearless man appears, he rises in opposition to everything accepted and established, his parents atone for having been united by a tie which was antagonistic to the order of nature and usage; they perish, but siegfried survives. and at the sight of his magnificent development and bloom, the loathing leaves otan's soul, and he follows the hero's history with the eye of fatherly love and anxiety. how he forges his sword, kills the dragon, gets possession of the ring, escapes the craftiest ruse, awakens brunhilda; how the curse abiding in the ring gradually overtakes him; how, faithful in faithfulness, he wounds the thing he most loves, out of love; becomes enveloped in the shadow and cloud of guilt, and, rising out of it more brilliantly than the sun, ultimately goes down, firing the whole heavens with his burning glow and purging the world of the curse,--all this is seen by the god whose sovereign spear was broken in the contest with the freest man, and who lost his power through him, rejoicing greatly over his own defeat: full of sympathy for the triumph and pain of his victor, his eye burning with aching joy looks back upon the last events; he has become free through love, free from himself. and now ask yourselves, ye generation of to-day, was all this composed for you? have ye the courage to point up to the stars of the whole of this heavenly dome of beauty and goodness and to say, this is our life, that wagner has transferred to a place beneath the stars? where are the men among you who are able to interpret the divine image of wotan in the light of their own lives, and who can become ever greater while, like him, ye retreat? who among you would renounce power, knowing and having learned that power is evil? where are they who like brunhilda abandon their knowledge to love, and finally rob their lives of the highest wisdom, "afflicted love, deepest sorrow, opened my eyes"? and where are the free and fearless, developing and blossoming in innocent egoism? and where are the siegfrieds, among you? he who questions thus and does so in vain, will find himself compelled to look around him for signs of the future; and should his eye, on reaching an unknown distance, espy just that "people" which his own generation can read out of the signs contained in wagnerian art, he will then also understand what wagner will mean to this people--something that he cannot be to all of us, namely, not the prophet of the future, as perhaps he would fain appear to us, but the interpreter and clarifier of the past. beyond good and evil by friedrich nietzsche translated by helen zimmern transcriber's note about this e-text edition: the following is a reprint of the helen zimmern translation from german into english of "beyond good and evil," as published in the complete works of friedrich nietzsche (1909-1913). some adaptations from the original text were made to format it into an e-text. italics in the original book are capitalized in this e-text, except for most foreign language phrases that were italicized. original footnotes are put in brackets "[]" at the points where they are cited in the text. some spellings were altered. "to-day" and "to-morrow" are spelled "today" and "tomorrow." some words containing the letters "ise" in the original text, such as "idealise," had these letters changed to "ize," such as "idealize." "sceptic" was changed to "skeptic." table of contents preface beyond good and evil chapter i: prejudices of philosophers chapter ii: the free spirit chapter iii: the religious mood chapter iv: apophthegms and interludes chapter v: the natural history of morals chapter vi: we scholars chapter vii: our virtues chapter viii: peoples and countries chapter ix: what is noble? from the heights (poem translated by l.a. magnus) preface supposing that truth is a woman--what then? is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women--that the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman? certainly she has never allowed herself to be won; and at present every kind of dogma stands with sad and discouraged mien--if, indeed, it stands at all! for there are scoffers who maintain that it has fallen, that all dogma lies on the ground--nay more, that it is at its last gasp. but to speak seriously, there are good grounds for hoping that all dogmatizing in philosophy, whatever solemn, whatever conclusive and decided airs it has assumed, may have been only a noble puerilism and tyronism; and probably the time is at hand when it will be once and again understood what has actually sufficed for the basis of such imposing and absolute philosophical edifices as the dogmatists have hitherto reared: perhaps some popular superstition of immemorial time (such as the soul-superstition, which, in the form of subjectand ego-superstition, has not yet ceased doing mischief): perhaps some play upon words, a deception on the part of grammar, or an audacious generalization of very restricted, very personal, very human--all-too-human facts. the philosophy of the dogmatists, it is to be hoped, was only a promise for thousands of years afterwards, as was astrology in still earlier times, in the service of which probably more labour, gold, acuteness, and patience have been spent than on any actual science hitherto: we owe to it, and to its "super-terrestrial" pretensions in asia and egypt, the grand style of architecture. it seems that in order to inscribe themselves upon the heart of humanity with everlasting claims, all great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe-inspiring caricatures: dogmatic philosophy has been a caricature of this kind--for instance, the vedanta doctrine in asia, and platonism in europe. let us not be ungrateful to it, although it must certainly be confessed that the worst, the most tiresome, and the most dangerous of errors hitherto has been a dogmatist error--namely, plato's invention of pure spirit and the good in itself. but now when it has been surmounted, when europe, rid of this nightmare, can again draw breath freely and at least enjoy a healthier--sleep, we, whose duty is wakefulness itself, are the heirs of all the strength which the struggle against this error has fostered. it amounted to the very inversion of truth, and the denial of the perspective--the fundamental condition--of life, to speak of spirit and the good as plato spoke of them; indeed one might ask, as a physician: "how did such a malady attack that finest product of antiquity, plato? had the wicked socrates really corrupted him? was socrates after all a corrupter of youths, and deserved his hemlock?" but the struggle against plato, or--to speak plainer, and for the "people"--the struggle against the ecclesiastical oppression of millenniums of christianity (for christianity is platonism for the "people"), produced in europe a magnificent tension of soul, such as had not existed anywhere previously; with such a tensely strained bow one can now aim at the furthest goals. as a matter of fact, the european feels this tension as a state of distress, and twice attempts have been made in grand style to unbend the bow: once by means of jesuitism, and the second time by means of democratic enlightenment--which, with the aid of liberty of the press and newspaper-reading, might, in fact, bring it about that the spirit would not so easily find itself in "distress"! (the germans invented gunpowder--all credit to them! but they again made things square--they invented printing.) but we, who are neither jesuits, nor democrats, nor even sufficiently germans, we good europeans, and free, very free spirits--we have it still, all the distress of spirit and all the tension of its bow! and perhaps also the arrow, the duty, and, who knows? the goal to aim at.... sils maria upper engadine, june, 1885. chapter i. prejudices of philosophers 1. the will to truth, which is to tempt us to many a hazardous enterprise, the famous truthfulness of which all philosophers have hitherto spoken with respect, what questions has this will to truth not laid before us! what strange, perplexing, questionable questions! it is already a long story; yet it seems as if it were hardly commenced. is it any wonder if we at last grow distrustful, lose patience, and turn impatiently away? that this sphinx teaches us at last to ask questions ourselves? who is it really that puts questions to us here? what really is this "will to truth" in us? in fact we made a long halt at the question as to the origin of this will--until at last we came to an absolute standstill before a yet more fundamental question. we inquired about the value of this will. granted that we want the truth: why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance? the problem of the value of truth presented itself before us--or was it we who presented ourselves before the problem? which of us is the oedipus here? which the sphinx? it would seem to be a rendezvous of questions and notes of interrogation. and could it be believed that it at last seems to us as if the problem had never been propounded before, as if we were the first to discern it, get a sight of it, and risk raising it? for there is risk in raising it, perhaps there is no greater risk. 2. "how could anything originate out of its opposite? for example, truth out of error? or the will to truth out of the will to deception? or the generous deed out of selfishness? or the pure sun-bright vision of the wise man out of covetousness? such genesis is impossible; whoever dreams of it is a fool, nay, worse than a fool; things of the highest value must have a different origin, an origin of their own--in this transitory, seductive, illusory, paltry world, in this turmoil of delusion and cupidity, they cannot have their source. but rather in the lap of being, in the intransitory, in the concealed god, in the 'thing-in-itself--there must be their source, and nowhere else!"--this mode of reasoning discloses the typical prejudice by which metaphysicians of all times can be recognized, this mode of valuation is at the back of all their logical procedure; through this "belief" of theirs, they exert themselves for their "knowledge," for something that is in the end solemnly christened "the truth." the fundamental belief of metaphysicians is the belief in antitheses of values. it never occurred even to the wariest of them to doubt here on the very threshold (where doubt, however, was most necessary); though they had made a solemn vow, "de omnibus dubitandum." for it may be doubted, firstly, whether antitheses exist at all; and secondly, whether the popular valuations and antitheses of value upon which metaphysicians have set their seal, are not perhaps merely superficial estimates, merely provisional perspectives, besides being probably made from some corner, perhaps from below--"frog perspectives," as it were, to borrow an expression current among painters. in spite of all the value which may belong to the true, the positive, and the unselfish, it might be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life generally should be assigned to pretence, to the will to delusion, to selfishness, and cupidity. it might even be possible that what constitutes the value of those good and respected things, consists precisely in their being insidiously related, knotted, and crocheted to these evil and apparently opposed things--perhaps even in being essentially identical with them. perhaps! but who wishes to concern himself with such dangerous "perhapses"! for that investigation one must await the advent of a new order of philosophers, such as will have other tastes and inclinations, the reverse of those hitherto prevalent--philosophers of the dangerous "perhaps" in every sense of the term. and to speak in all seriousness, i see such new philosophers beginning to appear. 3. having kept a sharp eye on philosophers, and having read between their lines long enough, i now say to myself that the greater part of conscious thinking must be counted among the instinctive functions, and it is so even in the case of philosophical thinking; one has here to learn anew, as one learned anew about heredity and "innateness." as little as the act of birth comes into consideration in the whole process and procedure of heredity, just as little is "being-conscious" opposed to the instinctive in any decisive sense; the greater part of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly influenced by his instincts, and forced into definite channels. and behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, there are valuations, or to speak more plainly, physiological demands, for the maintenance of a definite mode of life for example, that the certain is worth more than the uncertain, that illusion is less valuable than "truth" such valuations, in spite of their regulative importance for us, might notwithstanding be only superficial valuations, special kinds of _niaiserie_, such as may be necessary for the maintenance of beings such as ourselves. supposing, in effect, that man is not just the "measure of things." 4. the falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. the question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong), are the most indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely imagined world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live--that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. to recognise untruth as a condition of life; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil. 5. that which causes philosophers to be regarded half-distrustfully and half-mockingly, is not the oft-repeated discovery how innocent they are--how often and easily they make mistakes and lose their way, in short, how childish and childlike they are,--but that there is not enough honest dealing with them, whereas they all raise a loud and virtuous outcry when the problem of truthfulness is even hinted at in the remotest manner. they all pose as though their real opinions had been discovered and attained through the self-evolving of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic (in contrast to all sorts of mystics, who, fairer and foolisher, talk of "inspiration"), whereas, in fact, a prejudiced proposition, idea, or "suggestion," which is generally their heart's desire abstracted and refined, is defended by them with arguments sought out after the event. they are all advocates who do not wish to be regarded as such, generally astute defenders, also, of their prejudices, which they dub "truths,"--and very far from having the conscience which bravely admits this to itself, very far from having the good taste of the courage which goes so far as to let this be understood, perhaps to warn friend or foe, or in cheerful confidence and self-ridicule. the spectacle of the tartuffery of old kant, equally stiff and decent, with which he entices us into the dialectic by-ways that lead (more correctly mislead) to his "categorical imperative"--makes us fastidious ones smile, we who find no small amusement in spying out the subtle tricks of old moralists and ethical preachers. or, still more so, the hocus-pocus in mathematical form, by means of which spinoza has, as it were, clad his philosophy in mail and mask--in fact, the "love of his wisdom," to translate the term fairly and squarely--in order thereby to strike terror at once into the heart of the assailant who should dare to cast a glance on that invincible maiden, that pallas athene:--how much of personal timidity and vulnerability does this masquerade of a sickly recluse betray! 6. it has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of--namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown. indeed, to understand how the abstrusest metaphysical assertions of a philosopher have been arrived at, it is always well (and wise) to first ask oneself: "what morality do they (or does he) aim at?" accordingly, i do not believe that an "impulse to knowledge" is the father of philosophy; but that another impulse, here as elsewhere, has only made use of knowledge (and mistaken knowledge!) as an instrument. but whoever considers the fundamental impulses of man with a view to determining how far they may have here acted as inspiring genii (or as demons and cobolds), will find that they have all practiced philosophy at one time or another, and that each one of them would have been only too glad to look upon itself as the ultimate end of existence and the legitimate lord over all the other impulses. for every impulse is imperious, and as such, attempts to philosophize. to be sure, in the case of scholars, in the case of really scientific men, it may be otherwise--"better," if you will; there there may really be such a thing as an "impulse to knowledge," some kind of small, independent clock-work, which, when well wound up, works away industriously to that end, without the rest of the scholarly impulses taking any material part therein. the actual "interests" of the scholar, therefore, are generally in quite another direction--in the family, perhaps, or in money-making, or in politics; it is, in fact, almost indifferent at what point of research his little machine is placed, and whether the hopeful young worker becomes a good philologist, a mushroom specialist, or a chemist; he is not characterised by becoming this or that. in the philosopher, on the contrary, there is absolutely nothing impersonal; and above all, his morality furnishes a decided and decisive testimony as to who he is,--that is to say, in what order the deepest impulses of his nature stand to each other. 7. how malicious philosophers can be! i know of nothing more stinging than the joke epicurus took the liberty of making on plato and the platonists; he called them dionysiokolakes. in its original sense, and on the face of it, the word signifies "flatterers of dionysius"--consequently, tyrants' accessories and lick-spittles; besides this, however, it is as much as to say, "they are all actors, there is nothing genuine about them" (for dionysiokolax was a popular name for an actor). and the latter is really the malignant reproach that epicurus cast upon plato: he was annoyed by the grandiose manner, the mise en scene style of which plato and his scholars were masters--of which epicurus was not a master! he, the old school-teacher of samos, who sat concealed in his little garden at athens, and wrote three hundred books, perhaps out of rage and ambitious envy of plato, who knows! greece took a hundred years to find out who the garden-god epicurus really was. did she ever find out? 8. there is a point in every philosophy at which the "conviction" of the philosopher appears on the scene; or, to put it in the words of an ancient mystery: adventavit asinus, pulcher et fortissimus. 9. you desire to live "according to nature"? oh, you noble stoics, what fraud of words! imagine to yourselves a being like nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves indifference as a power--how could you live in accordance with such indifference? to live--is not that just endeavouring to be otherwise than this nature? is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? and granted that your imperative, "living according to nature," means actually the same as "living according to life"--how could you do differently? why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be? in reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! in your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to nature, to nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be nature "according to the stoa," and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of stoicism! with all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to see nature falsely, that is to say, stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise--and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the bedlamite hope that because you are able to tyrannize over yourselves--stoicism is self-tyranny--nature will also allow herself to be tyrannized over: is not the stoic a part of nature?... but this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old times with the stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. it always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual will to power, the will to "creation of the world," the will to the causa prima. 10. the eagerness and subtlety, i should even say craftiness, with which the problem of "the real and the apparent world" is dealt with at present throughout europe, furnishes food for thought and attention; and he who hears only a "will to truth" in the background, and nothing else, cannot certainly boast of the sharpest ears. in rare and isolated cases, it may really have happened that such a will to truth--a certain extravagant and adventurous pluck, a metaphysician's ambition of the forlorn hope--has participated therein: that which in the end always prefers a handful of "certainty" to a whole cartload of beautiful possibilities; there may even be puritanical fanatics of conscience, who prefer to put their last trust in a sure nothing, rather than in an uncertain something. but that is nihilism, and the sign of a despairing, mortally wearied soul, notwithstanding the courageous bearing such a virtue may display. it seems, however, to be otherwise with stronger and livelier thinkers who are still eager for life. in that they side against appearance, and speak superciliously of "perspective," in that they rank the credibility of their own bodies about as low as the credibility of the ocular evidence that "the earth stands still," and thus, apparently, allowing with complacency their securest possession to escape (for what does one at present believe in more firmly than in one's body?),--who knows if they are not really trying to win back something which was formerly an even securer possession, something of the old domain of the faith of former times, perhaps the "immortal soul," perhaps "the old god," in short, ideas by which they could live better, that is to say, more vigorously and more joyously, than by "modern ideas"? there is distrust of these modern ideas in this mode of looking at things, a disbelief in all that has been constructed yesterday and today; there is perhaps some slight admixture of satiety and scorn, which can no longer endure the bric-a-brac of ideas of the most varied origin, such as so-called positivism at present throws on the market; a disgust of the more refined taste at the village-fair motleyness and patchiness of all these reality-philosophasters, in whom there is nothing either new or true, except this motleyness. therein it seems to me that we should agree with those skeptical anti-realists and knowledge-microscopists of the present day; their instinct, which repels them from modern reality, is unrefuted... what do their retrograde by-paths concern us! the main thing about them is not that they wish to go "back," but that they wish to get away therefrom. a little more strength, swing, courage, and artistic power, and they would be off--and not back! 11. it seems to me that there is everywhere an attempt at present to divert attention from the actual influence which kant exercised on german philosophy, and especially to ignore prudently the value which he set upon himself. kant was first and foremost proud of his table of categories; with it in his hand he said: "this is the most difficult thing that could ever be undertaken on behalf of metaphysics." let us only understand this "could be"! he was proud of having discovered a new faculty in man, the faculty of synthetic judgment a priori. granting that he deceived himself in this matter; the development and rapid flourishing of german philosophy depended nevertheless on his pride, and on the eager rivalry of the younger generation to discover if possible something--at all events "new faculties"--of which to be still prouder!--but let us reflect for a moment--it is high time to do so. "how are synthetic judgments a priori possible?" kant asks himself--and what is really his answer? "by means of a means (faculty)"--but unfortunately not in five words, but so circumstantially, imposingly, and with such display of german profundity and verbal flourishes, that one altogether loses sight of the comical niaiserie allemande involved in such an answer. people were beside themselves with delight over this new faculty, and the jubilation reached its climax when kant further discovered a moral faculty in man--for at that time germans were still moral, not yet dabbling in the "politics of hard fact." then came the honeymoon of german philosophy. all the young theologians of the tubingen institution went immediately into the groves--all seeking for "faculties." and what did they not find--in that innocent, rich, and still youthful period of the german spirit, to which romanticism, the malicious fairy, piped and sang, when one could not yet distinguish between "finding" and "inventing"! above all a faculty for the "transcendental"; schelling christened it, intellectual intuition, and thereby gratified the most earnest longings of the naturally pious-inclined germans. one can do no greater wrong to the whole of this exuberant and eccentric movement (which was really youthfulness, notwithstanding that it disguised itself so boldly, in hoary and senile conceptions), than to take it seriously, or even treat it with moral indignation. enough, however--the world grew older, and the dream vanished. a time came when people rubbed their foreheads, and they still rub them today. people had been dreaming, and first and foremost--old kant. "by means of a means (faculty)"--he had said, or at least meant to say. but, is that--an answer? an explanation? or is it not rather merely a repetition of the question? how does opium induce sleep? "by means of a means (faculty)," namely the virtus dormitiva, replies the doctor in moliere, quia est in eo virtus dormitiva, cujus est natura sensus assoupire. but such replies belong to the realm of comedy, and it is high time to replace the kantian question, "how are synthetic judgments a priori possible?" by another question, "why is belief in such judgments necessary?"--in effect, it is high time that we should understand that such judgments must be believed to be true, for the sake of the preservation of creatures like ourselves; though they still might naturally be false judgments! or, more plainly spoken, and roughly and readily--synthetic judgments a priori should not "be possible" at all; we have no right to them; in our mouths they are nothing but false judgments. only, of course, the belief in their truth is necessary, as plausible belief and ocular evidence belonging to the perspective view of life. and finally, to call to mind the enormous influence which "german philosophy"--i hope you understand its right to inverted commas (goosefeet)?--has exercised throughout the whole of europe, there is no doubt that a certain virtus dormitiva had a share in it; thanks to german philosophy, it was a delight to the noble idlers, the virtuous, the mystics, the artiste, the three-fourths christians, and the political obscurantists of all nations, to find an antidote to the still overwhelming sensualism which overflowed from the last century into this, in short--"sensus assoupire."... 12. as regards materialistic atomism, it is one of the best-refuted theories that have been advanced, and in europe there is now perhaps no one in the learned world so unscholarly as to attach serious signification to it, except for convenient everyday use (as an abbreviation of the means of expression)--thanks chiefly to the pole boscovich: he and the pole copernicus have hitherto been the greatest and most successful opponents of ocular evidence. for while copernicus has persuaded us to believe, contrary to all the senses, that the earth does not stand fast, boscovich has taught us to abjure the belief in the last thing that "stood fast" of the earth--the belief in "substance," in "matter," in the earth-residuum, and particle-atom: it is the greatest triumph over the senses that has hitherto been gained on earth. one must, however, go still further, and also declare war, relentless war to the knife, against the "atomistic requirements" which still lead a dangerous after-life in places where no one suspects them, like the more celebrated "metaphysical requirements": one must also above all give the finishing stroke to that other and more portentous atomism which christianity has taught best and longest, the soul-atomism. let it be permitted to designate by this expression the belief which regards the soul as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon: this belief ought to be expelled from science! between ourselves, it is not at all necessary to get rid of "the soul" thereby, and thus renounce one of the oldest and most venerated hypotheses--as happens frequently to the clumsiness of naturalists, who can hardly touch on the soul without immediately losing it. but the way is open for new acceptations and refinements of the soul-hypothesis; and such conceptions as "mortal soul," and "soul of subjective multiplicity," and "soul as social structure of the instincts and passions," want henceforth to have legitimate rights in science. in that the new psychologist is about to put an end to the superstitions which have hitherto flourished with almost tropical luxuriance around the idea of the soul, he is really, as it were, thrusting himself into a new desert and a new distrust--it is possible that the older psychologists had a merrier and more comfortable time of it; eventually, however, he finds that precisely thereby he is also condemned to invent--and, who knows? perhaps to discover the new. 13. psychologists should bethink themselves before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. a living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength--life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results thereof. in short, here, as everywhere else, let us beware of superfluous teleological principles!--one of which is the instinct of self-preservation (we owe it to spinoza's inconsistency). it is thus, in effect, that method ordains, which must be essentially economy of principles. 14. it is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that natural philosophy is only a world-exposition and world-arrangement (according to us, if i may say so!) and not a world-explanation; but in so far as it is based on belief in the senses, it is regarded as more, and for a long time to come must be regarded as more--namely, as an explanation. it has eyes and fingers of its own, it has ocular evidence and palpableness of its own: this operates fascinatingly, persuasively, and convincingly upon an age with fundamentally plebeian tastes--in fact, it follows instinctively the canon of truth of eternal popular sensualism. what is clear, what is "explained"? only that which can be seen and felt--one must pursue every problem thus far. obversely, however, the charm of the platonic mode of thought, which was an aristocratic mode, consisted precisely in resistance to obvious sense-evidence--perhaps among men who enjoyed even stronger and more fastidious senses than our contemporaries, but who knew how to find a higher triumph in remaining masters of them: and this by means of pale, cold, grey conceptional networks which they threw over the motley whirl of the senses--the mob of the senses, as plato said. in this overcoming of the world, and interpreting of the world in the manner of plato, there was an enjoyment different from that which the physicists of today offer us--and likewise the darwinists and anti-teleologists among the physiological workers, with their principle of the "smallest possible effort," and the greatest possible blunder. "where there is nothing more to see or to grasp, there is also nothing more for men to do"--that is certainly an imperative different from the platonic one, but it may notwithstanding be the right imperative for a hardy, laborious race of machinists and bridge-builders of the future, who have nothing but rough work to perform. 15. to study physiology with a clear conscience, one must insist on the fact that the sense-organs are not phenomena in the sense of the idealistic philosophy; as such they certainly could not be causes! sensualism, therefore, at least as regulative hypothesis, if not as heuristic principle. what? and others say even that the external world is the work of our organs? but then our body, as a part of this external world, would be the work of our organs! but then our organs themselves would be the work of our organs! it seems to me that this is a complete reductio ad absurdum, if the conception causa sui is something fundamentally absurd. consequently, the external world is not the work of our organs--? 16. there are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are "immediate certainties"; for instance, "i think," or as the superstition of schopenhauer puts it, "i will"; as though cognition here got hold of its object purely and simply as "the thing in itself," without any falsification taking place either on the part of the subject or the object. i would repeat it, however, a hundred times, that "immediate certainty," as well as "absolute knowledge" and the "thing in itself," involve a contradictio in adjecto; we really ought to free ourselves from the misleading significance of words! the people on their part may think that cognition is knowing all about things, but the philosopher must say to himself: "when i analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence, 'i think,' i find a whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative proof of which would be difficult, perhaps impossible: for instance, that it is _i_ who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an 'ego,' and finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking--that i know what thinking is. for if i had not already decided within myself what it is, by what standard could i determine whether that which is just happening is not perhaps 'willing' or 'feeling'? in short, the assertion 'i think,' assumes that i compare my state at the present moment with other states of myself which i know, in order to determine what it is; on account of this retrospective connection with further 'knowledge,' it has, at any rate, no immediate certainty for me."--in place of the "immediate certainty" in which the people may believe in the special case, the philosopher thus finds a series of metaphysical questions presented to him, veritable conscience questions of the intellect, to wit: "whence did i get the notion of 'thinking'? why do i believe in cause and effect? what gives me the right to speak of an 'ego,' and even of an 'ego' as cause, and finally of an 'ego' as cause of thought?" he who ventures to answer these metaphysical questions at once by an appeal to a sort of intuitive perception, like the person who says, "i think, and know that this, at least, is true, actual, and certain"--will encounter a smile and two notes of interrogation in a philosopher nowadays. "sir," the philosopher will perhaps give him to understand, "it is improbable that you are not mistaken, but why should it be the truth?" 17. with regard to the superstitions of logicians, i shall never tire of emphasizing a small, terse fact, which is unwillingly recognized by these credulous minds--namely, that a thought comes when "it" wishes, and not when "i" wish; so that it is a perversion of the facts of the case to say that the subject "i" is the condition of the predicate "think." one thinks; but that this "one" is precisely the famous old "ego," is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an "immediate certainty." after all, one has even gone too far with this "one thinks"--even the "one" contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. one infers here according to the usual grammatical formula--"to think is an activity; every activity requires an agency that is active; consequently"... it was pretty much on the same lines that the older atomism sought, besides the operating "power," the material particle wherein it resides and out of which it operates--the atom. more rigorous minds, however, learnt at last to get along without this "earth-residuum," and perhaps some day we shall accustom ourselves, even from the logician's point of view, to get along without the little "one" (to which the worthy old "ego" has refined itself). 18. it is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds. it seems that the hundred-times-refuted theory of the "free will" owes its persistence to this charm alone; some one is always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it. 19. philosophers are accustomed to speak of the will as though it were the best-known thing in the world; indeed, schopenhauer has given us to understand that the will alone is really known to us, absolutely and completely known, without deduction or addition. but it again and again seems to me that in this case schopenhauer also only did what philosophers are in the habit of doing--he seems to have adopted a popular prejudice and exaggerated it. willing seems to me to be above all something complicated, something that is a unity only in name--and it is precisely in a name that popular prejudice lurks, which has got the mastery over the inadequate precautions of philosophers in all ages. so let us for once be more cautious, let us be "unphilosophical": let us say that in all willing there is firstly a plurality of sensations, namely, the sensation of the condition "away from which we go," the sensation of the condition "towards which we go," the sensation of this "from" and "towards" itself, and then besides, an accompanying muscular sensation, which, even without our putting in motion "arms and legs," commences its action by force of habit, directly we "will" anything. therefore, just as sensations (and indeed many kinds of sensations) are to be recognized as ingredients of the will, so, in the second place, thinking is also to be recognized; in every act of the will there is a ruling thought;--and let us not imagine it possible to sever this thought from the "willing," as if the will would then remain over! in the third place, the will is not only a complex of sensation and thinking, but it is above all an emotion, and in fact the emotion of the command. that which is termed "freedom of the will" is essentially the emotion of supremacy in respect to him who must obey: "i am free, 'he' must obey"--this consciousness is inherent in every will; and equally so the straining of the attention, the straight look which fixes itself exclusively on one thing, the unconditional judgment that "this and nothing else is necessary now," the inward certainty that obedience will be rendered--and whatever else pertains to the position of the commander. a man who wills commands something within himself which renders obedience, or which he believes renders obedience. but now let us notice what is the strangest thing about the will,--this affair so extremely complex, for which the people have only one name. inasmuch as in the given circumstances we are at the same time the commanding and the obeying parties, and as the obeying party we know the sensations of constraint, impulsion, pressure, resistance, and motion, which usually commence immediately after the act of will; inasmuch as, on the other hand, we are accustomed to disregard this duality, and to deceive ourselves about it by means of the synthetic term "i": a whole series of erroneous conclusions, and consequently of false judgments about the will itself, has become attached to the act of willing--to such a degree that he who wills believes firmly that willing suffices for action. since in the majority of cases there has only been exercise of will when the effect of the command--consequently obedience, and therefore action--was to be expected, the appearance has translated itself into the sentiment, as if there were a necessity of effect; in a word, he who wills believes with a fair amount of certainty that will and action are somehow one; he ascribes the success, the carrying out of the willing, to the will itself, and thereby enjoys an increase of the sensation of power which accompanies all success. "freedom of will"--that is the expression for the complex state of delight of the person exercising volition, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the executor of the order--who, as such, enjoys also the triumph over obstacles, but thinks within himself that it was really his own will that overcame them. in this way the person exercising volition adds the feelings of delight of his successful executive instruments, the useful "underwills" or under-souls--indeed, our body is but a social structure composed of many souls--to his feelings of delight as commander. l'effet c'est moi. what happens here is what happens in every well-constructed and happy commonwealth, namely, that the governing class identifies itself with the successes of the commonwealth. in all willing it is absolutely a question of commanding and obeying, on the basis, as already said, of a social structure composed of many "souls", on which account a philosopher should claim the right to include willing-as-such within the sphere of morals--regarded as the doctrine of the relations of supremacy under which the phenomenon of "life" manifests itself. 20. that the separate philosophical ideas are not anything optional or autonomously evolving, but grow up in connection and relationship with each other, that, however suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the history of thought, they nevertheless belong just as much to a system as the collective members of the fauna of a continent--is betrayed in the end by the circumstance: how unfailingly the most diverse philosophers always fill in again a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies. under an invisible spell, they always revolve once more in the same orbit, however independent of each other they may feel themselves with their critical or systematic wills, something within them leads them, something impels them in definite order the one after the other--to wit, the innate methodology and relationship of their ideas. their thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew: philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order. the wonderful family resemblance of all indian, greek, and german philosophizing is easily enough explained. in fact, where there is affinity of language, owing to the common philosophy of grammar--i mean owing to the unconscious domination and guidance of similar grammatical functions--it cannot but be that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and succession of philosophical systems, just as the way seems barred against certain other possibilities of world-interpretation. it is highly probable that philosophers within the domain of the ural-altaic languages (where the conception of the subject is least developed) look otherwise "into the world," and will be found on paths of thought different from those of the indo-germans and mussulmans, the spell of certain grammatical functions is ultimately also the spell of physiological valuations and racial conditions.--so much by way of rejecting locke's superficiality with regard to the origin of ideas. 21. the causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has yet been conceived, it is a sort of logical violation and unnaturalness; but the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with this very folly. the desire for "freedom of will" in the superlative, metaphysical sense, such as still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated, the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself, and to absolve god, the world, ancestors, chance, and society therefrom, involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui, and, with more than munchausen daring, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the slough of nothingness. if any one should find out in this manner the crass stupidity of the celebrated conception of "free will" and put it out of his head altogether, i beg of him to carry his "enlightenment" a step further, and also put out of his head the contrary of this monstrous conception of "free will": i mean "non-free will," which is tantamount to a misuse of cause and effect. one should not wrongly materialise "cause" and "effect," as the natural philosophers do (and whoever like them naturalize in thinking at present), according to the prevailing mechanical doltishness which makes the cause press and push until it "effects" its end; one should use "cause" and "effect" only as pure conceptions, that is to say, as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and mutual understanding,--not for explanation. in "being-in-itself" there is nothing of "casual-connection," of "necessity," or of "psychological non-freedom"; there the effect does not follow the cause, there "law" does not obtain. it is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, reciprocity, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we interpret and intermix this symbol-world, as "being-in-itself," with things, we act once more as we have always acted--mythologically. the "non-free will" is mythology; in real life it is only a question of strong and weak wills.--it is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself, when a thinker, in every "causal-connection" and "psychological necessity," manifests something of compulsion, indigence, obsequiousness, oppression, and non-freedom; it is suspicious to have such feelings--the person betrays himself. and in general, if i have observed correctly, the "non-freedom of the will" is regarded as a problem from two entirely opposite standpoints, but always in a profoundly personal manner: some will not give up their "responsibility," their belief in themselves, the personal right to their merits, at any price (the vain races belong to this class); others on the contrary, do not wish to be answerable for anything, or blamed for anything, and owing to an inward self-contempt, seek to get out of the business, no matter how. the latter, when they write books, are in the habit at present of taking the side of criminals; a sort of socialistic sympathy is their favourite disguise. and as a matter of fact, the fatalism of the weak-willed embellishes itself surprisingly when it can pose as "la religion de la souffrance humaine"; that is its "good taste." 22. let me be pardoned, as an old philologist who cannot desist from the mischief of putting his finger on bad modes of interpretation, but "nature's conformity to law," of which you physicists talk so proudly, as though--why, it exists only owing to your interpretation and bad "philology." it is no matter of fact, no "text," but rather just a naively humanitarian adjustment and perversion of meaning, with which you make abundant concessions to the democratic instincts of the modern soul! "everywhere equality before the law--nature is not different in that respect, nor better than we": a fine instance of secret motive, in which the vulgar antagonism to everything privileged and autocratic--likewise a second and more refined atheism--is once more disguised. "ni dieu, ni maitre"--that, also, is what you want; and therefore "cheers for natural law!"--is it not so? but, as has been said, that is interpretation, not text; and somebody might come along, who, with opposite intentions and modes of interpretation, could read out of the same "nature," and with regard to the same phenomena, just the tyrannically inconsiderate and relentless enforcement of the claims of power--an interpreter who should so place the unexceptionalness and unconditionalness of all "will to power" before your eyes, that almost every word, and the word "tyranny" itself, would eventually seem unsuitable, or like a weakening and softening metaphor--as being too human; and who should, nevertheless, end by asserting the same about this world as you do, namely, that it has a "necessary" and "calculable" course, not, however, because laws obtain in it, but because they are absolutely lacking, and every power effects its ultimate consequences every moment. granted that this also is only interpretation--and you will be eager enough to make this objection?--well, so much the better. 23. all psychology hitherto has run aground on moral prejudices and timidities, it has not dared to launch out into the depths. in so far as it is allowable to recognize in that which has hitherto been written, evidence of that which has hitherto been kept silent, it seems as if nobody had yet harboured the notion of psychology as the morphology and development-doctrine of the will to power, as i conceive of it. the power of moral prejudices has penetrated deeply into the most intellectual world, the world apparently most indifferent and unprejudiced, and has obviously operated in an injurious, obstructive, blinding, and distorting manner. a proper physio-psychology has to contend with unconscious antagonism in the heart of the investigator, it has "the heart" against it even a doctrine of the reciprocal conditionalness of the "good" and the "bad" impulses, causes (as refined immorality) distress and aversion in a still strong and manly conscience--still more so, a doctrine of the derivation of all good impulses from bad ones. if, however, a person should regard even the emotions of hatred, envy, covetousness, and imperiousness as life-conditioning emotions, as factors which must be present, fundamentally and essentially, in the general economy of life (which must, therefore, be further developed if life is to be further developed), he will suffer from such a view of things as from sea-sickness. and yet this hypothesis is far from being the strangest and most painful in this immense and almost new domain of dangerous knowledge, and there are in fact a hundred good reasons why every one should keep away from it who can do so! on the other hand, if one has once drifted hither with one's bark, well! very good! now let us set our teeth firmly! let us open our eyes and keep our hand fast on the helm! we sail away right over morality, we crush out, we destroy perhaps the remains of our own morality by daring to make our voyage thither--but what do we matter. never yet did a profounder world of insight reveal itself to daring travelers and adventurers, and the psychologist who thus "makes a sacrifice"--it is not the sacrifizio dell' intelletto, on the contrary!--will at least be entitled to demand in return that psychology shall once more be recognized as the queen of the sciences, for whose service and equipment the other sciences exist. for psychology is once more the path to the fundamental problems. chapter ii. the free spirit 24. o sancta simplicitas! in what strange simplification and falsification man lives! one can never cease wondering when once one has got eyes for beholding this marvel! how we have made everything around us clear and free and easy and simple! how we have been able to give our senses a passport to everything superficial, our thoughts a godlike desire for wanton pranks and wrong inferences!--how from the beginning, we have contrived to retain our ignorance in order to enjoy an almost inconceivable freedom, thoughtlessness, imprudence, heartiness, and gaiety--in order to enjoy life! and only on this solidified, granite-like foundation of ignorance could knowledge rear itself hitherto, the will to knowledge on the foundation of a far more powerful will, the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue! not as its opposite, but--as its refinement! it is to be hoped, indeed, that language, here as elsewhere, will not get over its awkwardness, and that it will continue to talk of opposites where there are only degrees and many refinements of gradation; it is equally to be hoped that the incarnated tartuffery of morals, which now belongs to our unconquerable "flesh and blood," will turn the words round in the mouths of us discerning ones. here and there we understand it, and laugh at the way in which precisely the best knowledge seeks most to retain us in this simplified, thoroughly artificial, suitably imagined, and suitably falsified world: at the way in which, whether it will or not, it loves error, because, as living itself, it loves life! 25. after such a cheerful commencement, a serious word would fain be heard; it appeals to the most serious minds. take care, ye philosophers and friends of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom! of suffering "for the truth's sake"! even in your own defense! it spoils all the innocence and fine neutrality of your conscience; it makes you headstrong against objections and red rags; it stupefies, animalizes, and brutalizes, when in the struggle with danger, slander, suspicion, expulsion, and even worse consequences of enmity, ye have at last to play your last card as protectors of truth upon earth--as though "the truth" were such an innocent and incompetent creature as to require protectors! and you of all people, ye knights of the sorrowful countenance, messrs loafers and cobweb-spinners of the spirit! finally, ye know sufficiently well that it cannot be of any consequence if ye just carry your point; ye know that hitherto no philosopher has carried his point, and that there might be a more laudable truthfulness in every little interrogative mark which you place after your special words and favourite doctrines (and occasionally after yourselves) than in all the solemn pantomime and trumping games before accusers and law-courts! rather go out of the way! flee into concealment! and have your masks and your ruses, that ye may be mistaken for what you are, or somewhat feared! and pray, don't forget the garden, the garden with golden trellis-work! and have people around you who are as a garden--or as music on the waters at eventide, when already the day becomes a memory. choose the good solitude, the free, wanton, lightsome solitude, which also gives you the right still to remain good in any sense whatsoever! how poisonous, how crafty, how bad, does every long war make one, which cannot be waged openly by means of force! how personal does a long fear make one, a long watching of enemies, of possible enemies! these pariahs of society, these long-pursued, badly-persecuted ones--also the compulsory recluses, the spinozas or giordano brunos--always become in the end, even under the most intellectual masquerade, and perhaps without being themselves aware of it, refined vengeance-seekers and poison-brewers (just lay bare the foundation of spinoza's ethics and theology!), not to speak of the stupidity of moral indignation, which is the unfailing sign in a philosopher that the sense of philosophical humour has left him. the martyrdom of the philosopher, his "sacrifice for the sake of truth," forces into the light whatever of the agitator and actor lurks in him; and if one has hitherto contemplated him only with artistic curiosity, with regard to many a philosopher it is easy to understand the dangerous desire to see him also in his deterioration (deteriorated into a "martyr," into a stage-and-tribune-bawler). only, that it is necessary with such a desire to be clear what spectacle one will see in any case--merely a satyric play, merely an epilogue farce, merely the continued proof that the long, real tragedy is at an end, supposing that every philosophy has been a long tragedy in its origin. 26. every select man strives instinctively for a citadel and a privacy, where he is free from the crowd, the many, the majority--where he may forget "men who are the rule," as their exception;--exclusive only of the case in which he is pushed straight to such men by a still stronger instinct, as a discerner in the great and exceptional sense. whoever, in intercourse with men, does not occasionally glisten in all the green and grey colours of distress, owing to disgust, satiety, sympathy, gloominess, and solitariness, is assuredly not a man of elevated tastes; supposing, however, that he does not voluntarily take all this burden and disgust upon himself, that he persistently avoids it, and remains, as i said, quietly and proudly hidden in his citadel, one thing is then certain: he was not made, he was not predestined for knowledge. for as such, he would one day have to say to himself: "the devil take my good taste! but 'the rule' is more interesting than the exception--than myself, the exception!" and he would go down, and above all, he would go "inside." the long and serious study of the average man--and consequently much disguise, self-overcoming, familiarity, and bad intercourse (all intercourse is bad intercourse except with one's equals):--that constitutes a necessary part of the life-history of every philosopher; perhaps the most disagreeable, odious, and disappointing part. if he is fortunate, however, as a favourite child of knowledge should be, he will meet with suitable auxiliaries who will shorten and lighten his task; i mean so-called cynics, those who simply recognize the animal, the commonplace and "the rule" in themselves, and at the same time have so much spirituality and ticklishness as to make them talk of themselves and their like before witnesses--sometimes they wallow, even in books, as on their own dung-hill. cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach what is called honesty; and the higher man must open his ears to all the coarser or finer cynicism, and congratulate himself when the clown becomes shameless right before him, or the scientific satyr speaks out. there are even cases where enchantment mixes with the disgust--namely, where by a freak of nature, genius is bound to some such indiscreet billy-goat and ape, as in the case of the abbe galiani, the profoundest, acutest, and perhaps also filthiest man of his century--he was far profounder than voltaire, and consequently also, a good deal more silent. it happens more frequently, as has been hinted, that a scientific head is placed on an ape's body, a fine exceptional understanding in a base soul, an occurrence by no means rare, especially among doctors and moral physiologists. and whenever anyone speaks without bitterness, or rather quite innocently, of man as a belly with two requirements, and a head with one; whenever any one sees, seeks, and wants to see only hunger, sexual instinct, and vanity as the real and only motives of human actions; in short, when any one speaks "badly"--and not even "ill"--of man, then ought the lover of knowledge to hearken attentively and diligently; he ought, in general, to have an open ear wherever there is talk without indignation. for the indignant man, and he who perpetually tears and lacerates himself with his own teeth (or, in place of himself, the world, god, or society), may indeed, morally speaking, stand higher than the laughing and self-satisfied satyr, but in every other sense he is the more ordinary, more indifferent, and less instructive case. and no one is such a liar as the indignant man. 27. it is difficult to be understood, especially when one thinks and lives gangasrotogati [footnote: like the river ganges: presto.] among those only who think and live otherwise--namely, kurmagati [footnote: like the tortoise: lento.], or at best "froglike," mandeikagati [footnote: like the frog: staccato.] (i do everything to be "difficultly understood" myself!)--and one should be heartily grateful for the good will to some refinement of interpretation. as regards "the good friends," however, who are always too easy-going, and think that as friends they have a right to ease, one does well at the very first to grant them a play-ground and romping-place for misunderstanding--one can thus laugh still; or get rid of them altogether, these good friends--and laugh then also! 28. what is most difficult to render from one language into another is the tempo of its style, which has its basis in the character of the race, or to speak more physiologically, in the average tempo of the assimilation of its nutriment. there are honestly meant translations, which, as involuntary vulgarizations, are almost falsifications of the original, merely because its lively and merry tempo (which overleaps and obviates all dangers in word and expression) could not also be rendered. a german is almost incapacitated for presto in his language; consequently also, as may be reasonably inferred, for many of the most delightful and daring nuances of free, free-spirited thought. and just as the buffoon and satyr are foreign to him in body and conscience, so aristophanes and petronius are untranslatable for him. everything ponderous, viscous, and pompously clumsy, all long-winded and wearying species of style, are developed in profuse variety among germans--pardon me for stating the fact that even goethe's prose, in its mixture of stiffness and elegance, is no exception, as a reflection of the "good old time" to which it belongs, and as an expression of german taste at a time when there was still a "german taste," which was a rococo-taste in moribus et artibus. lessing is an exception, owing to his histrionic nature, which understood much, and was versed in many things; he who was not the translator of bayle to no purpose, who took refuge willingly in the shadow of diderot and voltaire, and still more willingly among the roman comedy-writers--lessing loved also free-spiritism in the tempo, and flight out of germany. but how could the german language, even in the prose of lessing, imitate the tempo of machiavelli, who in his "principe" makes us breathe the dry, fine air of florence, and cannot help presenting the most serious events in a boisterous allegrissimo, perhaps not without a malicious artistic sense of the contrast he ventures to present--long, heavy, difficult, dangerous thoughts, and a tempo of the gallop, and of the best, wantonest humour? finally, who would venture on a german translation of petronius, who, more than any great musician hitherto, was a master of presto in invention, ideas, and words? what matter in the end about the swamps of the sick, evil world, or of the "ancient world," when like him, one has the feet of a wind, the rush, the breath, the emancipating scorn of a wind, which makes everything healthy, by making everything run! and with regard to aristophanes--that transfiguring, complementary genius, for whose sake one pardons all hellenism for having existed, provided one has understood in its full profundity all that there requires pardon and transfiguration; there is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on plato's secrecy and sphinx-like nature, than the happily preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his death-bed there was found no "bible," nor anything egyptian, pythagorean, or platonic--but a book of aristophanes. how could even plato have endured life--a greek life which he repudiated--without an aristophanes! 29. it is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong. and whoever attempts it, even with the best right, but without being obliged to do so, proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. he enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life in itself already brings with it; not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. supposing such a one comes to grief, it is so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it, nor sympathize with it. and he cannot any longer go back! he cannot even go back again to the sympathy of men! 30. our deepest insights must--and should--appear as follies, and under certain circumstances as crimes, when they come unauthorizedly to the ears of those who are not disposed and predestined for them. the exoteric and the esoteric, as they were formerly distinguished by philosophers--among the indians, as among the greeks, persians, and mussulmans, in short, wherever people believed in gradations of rank and not in equality and equal rights--are not so much in contradistinction to one another in respect to the exoteric class, standing without, and viewing, estimating, measuring, and judging from the outside, and not from the inside; the more essential distinction is that the class in question views things from below upwards--while the esoteric class views things from above downwards. there are heights of the soul from which tragedy itself no longer appears to operate tragically; and if all the woe in the world were taken together, who would dare to decide whether the sight of it would necessarily seduce and constrain to sympathy, and thus to a doubling of the woe?... that which serves the higher class of men for nourishment or refreshment, must be almost poison to an entirely different and lower order of human beings. the virtues of the common man would perhaps mean vice and weakness in a philosopher; it might be possible for a highly developed man, supposing him to degenerate and go to ruin, to acquire qualities thereby alone, for the sake of which he would have to be honoured as a saint in the lower world into which he had sunk. there are books which have an inverse value for the soul and the health according as the inferior soul and the lower vitality, or the higher and more powerful, make use of them. in the former case they are dangerous, disturbing, unsettling books, in the latter case they are herald-calls which summon the bravest to their bravery. books for the general reader are always ill-smelling books, the odour of paltry people clings to them. where the populace eat and drink, and even where they reverence, it is accustomed to stink. one should not go into churches if one wishes to breathe pure air. 31. in our youthful years we still venerate and despise without the art of nuance, which is the best gain of life, and we have rightly to do hard penance for having fallen upon men and things with yea and nay. everything is so arranged that the worst of all tastes, the taste for the unconditional, is cruelly befooled and abused, until a man learns to introduce a little art into his sentiments, and prefers to try conclusions with the artificial, as do the real artists of life. the angry and reverent spirit peculiar to youth appears to allow itself no peace, until it has suitably falsified men and things, to be able to vent its passion upon them: youth in itself even, is something falsifying and deceptive. later on, when the young soul, tortured by continual disillusions, finally turns suspiciously against itself--still ardent and savage even in its suspicion and remorse of conscience: how it upbraids itself, how impatiently it tears itself, how it revenges itself for its long self-blinding, as though it had been a voluntary blindness! in this transition one punishes oneself by distrust of one's sentiments; one tortures one's enthusiasm with doubt, one feels even the good conscience to be a danger, as if it were the self-concealment and lassitude of a more refined uprightness; and above all, one espouses upon principle the cause against "youth."--a decade later, and one comprehends that all this was also still--youth! 32. throughout the longest period of human history--one calls it the prehistoric period--the value or non-value of an action was inferred from its consequences; the action in itself was not taken into consideration, any more than its origin; but pretty much as in china at present, where the distinction or disgrace of a child redounds to its parents, the retro-operating power of success or failure was what induced men to think well or ill of an action. let us call this period the pre-moral period of mankind; the imperative, "know thyself!" was then still unknown.--in the last ten thousand years, on the other hand, on certain large portions of the earth, one has gradually got so far, that one no longer lets the consequences of an action, but its origin, decide with regard to its worth: a great achievement as a whole, an important refinement of vision and of criterion, the unconscious effect of the supremacy of aristocratic values and of the belief in "origin," the mark of a period which may be designated in the narrower sense as the moral one: the first attempt at self-knowledge is thereby made. instead of the consequences, the origin--what an inversion of perspective! and assuredly an inversion effected only after long struggle and wavering! to be sure, an ominous new superstition, a peculiar narrowness of interpretation, attained supremacy precisely thereby: the origin of an action was interpreted in the most definite sense possible, as origin out of an intention; people were agreed in the belief that the value of an action lay in the value of its intention. the intention as the sole origin and antecedent history of an action: under the influence of this prejudice moral praise and blame have been bestowed, and men have judged and even philosophized almost up to the present day.--is it not possible, however, that the necessity may now have arisen of again making up our minds with regard to the reversing and fundamental shifting of values, owing to a new self-consciousness and acuteness in man--is it not possible that we may be standing on the threshold of a period which to begin with, would be distinguished negatively as ultra-moral: nowadays when, at least among us immoralists, the suspicion arises that the decisive value of an action lies precisely in that which is not intentional, and that all its intentionalness, all that is seen, sensible, or "sensed" in it, belongs to its surface or skin--which, like every skin, betrays something, but conceals still more? in short, we believe that the intention is only a sign or symptom, which first requires an explanation--a sign, moreover, which has too many interpretations, and consequently hardly any meaning in itself alone: that morality, in the sense in which it has been understood hitherto, as intention-morality, has been a prejudice, perhaps a prematureness or preliminariness, probably something of the same rank as astrology and alchemy, but in any case something which must be surmounted. the surmounting of morality, in a certain sense even the self-mounting of morality--let that be the name for the long-secret labour which has been reserved for the most refined, the most upright, and also the most wicked consciences of today, as the living touchstones of the soul. 33. it cannot be helped: the sentiment of surrender, of sacrifice for one's neighbour, and all self-renunciation-morality, must be mercilessly called to account, and brought to judgment; just as the aesthetics of "disinterested contemplation," under which the emasculation of art nowadays seeks insidiously enough to create itself a good conscience. there is far too much witchery and sugar in the sentiments "for others" and "not for myself," for one not needing to be doubly distrustful here, and for one asking promptly: "are they not perhaps--deceptions?"--that they please--him who has them, and him who enjoys their fruit, and also the mere spectator--that is still no argument in their favour, but just calls for caution. let us therefore be cautious! 34. at whatever standpoint of philosophy one may place oneself nowadays, seen from every position, the erroneousness of the world in which we think we live is the surest and most certain thing our eyes can light upon: we find proof after proof thereof, which would fain allure us into surmises concerning a deceptive principle in the "nature of things." he, however, who makes thinking itself, and consequently "the spirit," responsible for the falseness of the world--an honourable exit, which every conscious or unconscious advocatus dei avails himself of--he who regards this world, including space, time, form, and movement, as falsely deduced, would have at least good reason in the end to become distrustful also of all thinking; has it not hitherto been playing upon us the worst of scurvy tricks? and what guarantee would it give that it would not continue to do what it has always been doing? in all seriousness, the innocence of thinkers has something touching and respect-inspiring in it, which even nowadays permits them to wait upon consciousness with the request that it will give them honest answers: for example, whether it be "real" or not, and why it keeps the outer world so resolutely at a distance, and other questions of the same description. the belief in "immediate certainties" is a moral naivete which does honour to us philosophers; but--we have now to cease being "merely moral" men! apart from morality, such belief is a folly which does little honour to us! if in middle-class life an ever-ready distrust is regarded as the sign of a "bad character," and consequently as an imprudence, here among us, beyond the middle-class world and its yeas and nays, what should prevent our being imprudent and saying: the philosopher has at length a right to "bad character," as the being who has hitherto been most befooled on earth--he is now under obligation to distrustfulness, to the wickedest squinting out of every abyss of suspicion.--forgive me the joke of this gloomy grimace and turn of expression; for i myself have long ago learned to think and estimate differently with regard to deceiving and being deceived, and i keep at least a couple of pokes in the ribs ready for the blind rage with which philosophers struggle against being deceived. why not? it is nothing more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than semblance; it is, in fact, the worst proved supposition in the world. so much must be conceded: there could have been no life at all except upon the basis of perspective estimates and semblances; and if, with the virtuous enthusiasm and stupidity of many philosophers, one wished to do away altogether with the "seeming world"--well, granted that you could do that,--at least nothing of your "truth" would thereby remain! indeed, what is it that forces us in general to the supposition that there is an essential opposition of "true" and "false"? is it not enough to suppose degrees of seemingness, and as it were lighter and darker shades and tones of semblance--different valeurs, as the painters say? why might not the world which concerns us--be a fiction? and to any one who suggested: "but to a fiction belongs an originator?"--might it not be bluntly replied: why? may not this "belong" also belong to the fiction? is it not at length permitted to be a little ironical towards the subject, just as towards the predicate and object? might not the philosopher elevate himself above faith in grammar? all respect to governesses, but is it not time that philosophy should renounce governess-faith? 35. o voltaire! o humanity! o idiocy! there is something ticklish in "the truth," and in the search for the truth; and if man goes about it too humanely--"il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le bien"--i wager he finds nothing! 36. supposing that nothing else is "given" as real but our world of desires and passions, that we cannot sink or rise to any other "reality" but just that of our impulses--for thinking is only a relation of these impulses to one another:--are we not permitted to make the attempt and to ask the question whether this which is "given" does not suffice, by means of our counterparts, for the understanding even of the so-called mechanical (or "material") world? i do not mean as an illusion, a "semblance," a "representation" (in the berkeleyan and schopenhauerian sense), but as possessing the same degree of reality as our emotions themselves--as a more primitive form of the world of emotions, in which everything still lies locked in a mighty unity, which afterwards branches off and develops itself in organic processes (naturally also, refines and debilitates)--as a kind of instinctive life in which all organic functions, including self-regulation, assimilation, nutrition, secretion, and change of matter, are still synthetically united with one another--as a primary form of life?--in the end, it is not only permitted to make this attempt, it is commanded by the conscience of logical method. not to assume several kinds of causality, so long as the attempt to get along with a single one has not been pushed to its furthest extent (to absurdity, if i may be allowed to say so): that is a morality of method which one may not repudiate nowadays--it follows "from its definition," as mathematicians say. the question is ultimately whether we really recognize the will as operating, whether we believe in the causality of the will; if we do so--and fundamentally our belief in this is just our belief in causality itself--we must make the attempt to posit hypothetically the causality of the will as the only causality. "will" can naturally only operate on "will"--and not on "matter" (not on "nerves," for instance): in short, the hypothesis must be hazarded, whether will does not operate on will wherever "effects" are recognized--and whether all mechanical action, inasmuch as a power operates therein, is not just the power of will, the effect of will. granted, finally, that we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one fundamental form of will--namely, the will to power, as my thesis puts it; granted that all organic functions could be traced back to this will to power, and that the solution of the problem of generation and nutrition--it is one problem--could also be found therein: one would thus have acquired the right to define all active force unequivocally as will to power. the world seen from within, the world defined and designated according to its "intelligible character"--it would simply be "will to power," and nothing else. 37. "what? does not that mean in popular language: god is disproved, but not the devil?"--on the contrary! on the contrary, my friends! and who the devil also compels you to speak popularly! 38. as happened finally in all the enlightenment of modern times with the french revolution (that terrible farce, quite superfluous when judged close at hand, into which, however, the noble and visionary spectators of all europe have interpreted from a distance their own indignation and enthusiasm so long and passionately, until the text has disappeared under the interpretation), so a noble posterity might once more misunderstand the whole of the past, and perhaps only thereby make its aspect endurable.--or rather, has not this already happened? have not we ourselves been--that "noble posterity"? and, in so far as we now comprehend this, is it not--thereby already past? 39. nobody will very readily regard a doctrine as true merely because it makes people happy or virtuous--excepting, perhaps, the amiable "idealists," who are enthusiastic about the good, true, and beautiful, and let all kinds of motley, coarse, and good-natured desirabilities swim about promiscuously in their pond. happiness and virtue are no arguments. it is willingly forgotten, however, even on the part of thoughtful minds, that to make unhappy and to make bad are just as little counter-arguments. a thing could be true, although it were in the highest degree injurious and dangerous; indeed, the fundamental constitution of existence might be such that one succumbed by a full knowledge of it--so that the strength of a mind might be measured by the amount of "truth" it could endure--or to speak more plainly, by the extent to which it required truth attenuated, veiled, sweetened, damped, and falsified. but there is no doubt that for the discovery of certain portions of truth the wicked and unfortunate are more favourably situated and have a greater likelihood of success; not to speak of the wicked who are happy--a species about whom moralists are silent. perhaps severity and craft are more favourable conditions for the development of strong, independent spirits and philosophers than the gentle, refined, yielding good-nature, and habit of taking things easily, which are prized, and rightly prized in a learned man. presupposing always, to begin with, that the term "philosopher" be not confined to the philosopher who writes books, or even introduces his philosophy into books!--stendhal furnishes a last feature of the portrait of the free-spirited philosopher, which for the sake of german taste i will not omit to underline--for it is opposed to german taste. "pour etre bon philosophe," says this last great psychologist, "il faut etre sec, clair, sans illusion. un banquier, qui a fait fortune, a une partie du caractere requis pour faire des decouvertes en philosophie, c'est-a-dire pour voir clair dans ce qui est." 40. everything that is profound loves the mask: the profoundest things have a hatred even of figure and likeness. should not the contrary only be the right disguise for the shame of a god to go about in? a question worth asking!--it would be strange if some mystic has not already ventured on the same kind of thing. there are proceedings of such a delicate nature that it is well to overwhelm them with coarseness and make them unrecognizable; there are actions of love and of an extravagant magnanimity after which nothing can be wiser than to take a stick and thrash the witness soundly: one thereby obscures his recollection. many a one is able to obscure and abuse his own memory, in order at least to have vengeance on this sole party in the secret: shame is inventive. they are not the worst things of which one is most ashamed: there is not only deceit behind a mask--there is so much goodness in craft. i could imagine that a man with something costly and fragile to conceal, would roll through life clumsily and rotundly like an old, green, heavily-hooped wine-cask: the refinement of his shame requiring it to be so. a man who has depths in his shame meets his destiny and his delicate decisions upon paths which few ever reach, and with regard to the existence of which his nearest and most intimate friends may be ignorant; his mortal danger conceals itself from their eyes, and equally so his regained security. such a hidden nature, which instinctively employs speech for silence and concealment, and is inexhaustible in evasion of communication, desires and insists that a mask of himself shall occupy his place in the hearts and heads of his friends; and supposing he does not desire it, his eyes will some day be opened to the fact that there is nevertheless a mask of him there--and that it is well to be so. every profound spirit needs a mask; nay, more, around every profound spirit there continually grows a mask, owing to the constantly false, that is to say, superficial interpretation of every word he utters, every step he takes, every sign of life he manifests. 41. one must subject oneself to one's own tests that one is destined for independence and command, and do so at the right time. one must not avoid one's tests, although they constitute perhaps the most dangerous game one can play, and are in the end tests made only before ourselves and before no other judge. not to cleave to any person, be it even the dearest--every person is a prison and also a recess. not to cleave to a fatherland, be it even the most suffering and necessitous--it is even less difficult to detach one's heart from a victorious fatherland. not to cleave to a sympathy, be it even for higher men, into whose peculiar torture and helplessness chance has given us an insight. not to cleave to a science, though it tempt one with the most valuable discoveries, apparently specially reserved for us. not to cleave to one's own liberation, to the voluptuous distance and remoteness of the bird, which always flies further aloft in order always to see more under it--the danger of the flier. not to cleave to our own virtues, nor become as a whole a victim to any of our specialties, to our "hospitality" for instance, which is the danger of dangers for highly developed and wealthy souls, who deal prodigally, almost indifferently with themselves, and push the virtue of liberality so far that it becomes a vice. one must know how to conserve oneself--the best test of independence. 42. a new order of philosophers is appearing; i shall venture to baptize them by a name not without danger. as far as i understand them, as far as they allow themselves to be understood--for it is their nature to wish to remain something of a puzzle--these philosophers of the future might rightly, perhaps also wrongly, claim to be designated as "tempters." this name itself is after all only an attempt, or, if it be preferred, a temptation. 43. will they be new friends of "truth," these coming philosophers? very probably, for all philosophers hitherto have loved their truths. but assuredly they will not be dogmatists. it must be contrary to their pride, and also contrary to their taste, that their truth should still be truth for every one--that which has hitherto been the secret wish and ultimate purpose of all dogmatic efforts. "my opinion is my opinion: another person has not easily a right to it"--such a philosopher of the future will say, perhaps. one must renounce the bad taste of wishing to agree with many people. "good" is no longer good when one's neighbour takes it into his mouth. and how could there be a "common good"! the expression contradicts itself; that which can be common is always of small value. in the end things must be as they are and have always been--the great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for the rare. 44. need i say expressly after all this that they will be free, very free spirits, these philosophers of the future--as certainly also they will not be merely free spirits, but something more, higher, greater, and fundamentally different, which does not wish to be misunderstood and mistaken? but while i say this, i feel under obligation almost as much to them as to ourselves (we free spirits who are their heralds and forerunners), to sweep away from ourselves altogether a stupid old prejudice and misunderstanding, which, like a fog, has too long made the conception of "free spirit" obscure. in every country of europe, and the same in america, there is at present something which makes an abuse of this name a very narrow, prepossessed, enchained class of spirits, who desire almost the opposite of what our intentions and instincts prompt--not to mention that in respect to the new philosophers who are appearing, they must still more be closed windows and bolted doors. briefly and regrettably, they belong to the levellers, these wrongly named "free spirits"--as glib-tongued and scribe-fingered slaves of the democratic taste and its "modern ideas" all of them men without solitude, without personal solitude, blunt honest fellows to whom neither courage nor honourable conduct ought to be denied, only, they are not free, and are ludicrously superficial, especially in their innate partiality for seeing the cause of almost all human misery and failure in the old forms in which society has hitherto existed--a notion which happily inverts the truth entirely! what they would fain attain with all their strength, is the universal, green-meadow happiness of the herd, together with security, safety, comfort, and alleviation of life for every one, their two most frequently chanted songs and doctrines are called "equality of rights" and "sympathy with all sufferers"--and suffering itself is looked upon by them as something which must be done away with. we opposite ones, however, who have opened our eye and conscience to the question how and where the plant "man" has hitherto grown most vigorously, believe that this has always taken place under the opposite conditions, that for this end the dangerousness of his situation had to be increased enormously, his inventive faculty and dissembling power (his "spirit") had to develop into subtlety and daring under long oppression and compulsion, and his will to life had to be increased to the unconditioned will to power--we believe that severity, violence, slavery, danger in the street and in the heart, secrecy, stoicism, tempter's art and devilry of every kind,--that everything wicked, terrible, tyrannical, predatory, and serpentine in man, serves as well for the elevation of the human species as its opposite--we do not even say enough when we only say this much, and in any case we find ourselves here, both with our speech and our silence, at the other extreme of all modern ideology and gregarious desirability, as their antipodes perhaps? what wonder that we "free spirits" are not exactly the most communicative spirits? that we do not wish to betray in every respect what a spirit can free itself from, and where perhaps it will then be driven? and as to the import of the dangerous formula, "beyond good and evil," with which we at least avoid confusion, we are something else than "libres-penseurs," "liben pensatori" "free-thinkers," and whatever these honest advocates of "modern ideas" like to call themselves. having been at home, or at least guests, in many realms of the spirit, having escaped again and again from the gloomy, agreeable nooks in which preferences and prejudices, youth, origin, the accident of men and books, or even the weariness of travel seemed to confine us, full of malice against the seductions of dependency which he concealed in honours, money, positions, or exaltation of the senses, grateful even for distress and the vicissitudes of illness, because they always free us from some rule, and its "prejudice," grateful to the god, devil, sheep, and worm in us, inquisitive to a fault, investigators to the point of cruelty, with unhesitating fingers for the intangible, with teeth and stomachs for the most indigestible, ready for any business that requires sagacity and acute senses, ready for every adventure, owing to an excess of "free will", with anterior and posterior souls, into the ultimate intentions of which it is difficult to pry, with foregrounds and backgrounds to the end of which no foot may run, hidden ones under the mantles of light, appropriators, although we resemble heirs and spendthrifts, arrangers and collectors from morning till night, misers of our wealth and our full-crammed drawers, economical in learning and forgetting, inventive in scheming, sometimes proud of tables of categories, sometimes pedants, sometimes night-owls of work even in full day, yea, if necessary, even scarecrows--and it is necessary nowadays, that is to say, inasmuch as we are the born, sworn, jealous friends of solitude, of our own profoundest midnight and midday solitude--such kind of men are we, we free spirits! and perhaps ye are also something of the same kind, ye coming ones? ye new philosophers? chapter iii. the religious mood 45. the human soul and its limits, the range of man's inner experiences hitherto attained, the heights, depths, and distances of these experiences, the entire history of the soul up to the present time, and its still unexhausted possibilities: this is the preordained hunting-domain for a born psychologist and lover of a "big hunt". but how often must he say despairingly to himself: "a single individual! alas, only a single individual! and this great forest, this virgin forest!" so he would like to have some hundreds of hunting assistants, and fine trained hounds, that he could send into the history of the human soul, to drive his game together. in vain: again and again he experiences, profoundly and bitterly, how difficult it is to find assistants and dogs for all the things that directly excite his curiosity. the evil of sending scholars into new and dangerous hunting-domains, where courage, sagacity, and subtlety in every sense are required, is that they are no longer serviceable just when the "big hunt," and also the great danger commences,--it is precisely then that they lose their keen eye and nose. in order, for instance, to divine and determine what sort of history the problem of knowledge and conscience has hitherto had in the souls of homines religiosi, a person would perhaps himself have to possess as profound, as bruised, as immense an experience as the intellectual conscience of pascal; and then he would still require that wide-spread heaven of clear, wicked spirituality, which, from above, would be able to oversee, arrange, and effectively formulize this mass of dangerous and painful experiences.--but who could do me this service! and who would have time to wait for such servants!--they evidently appear too rarely, they are so improbable at all times! eventually one must do everything oneself in order to know something; which means that one has much to do!--but a curiosity like mine is once for all the most agreeable of vices--pardon me! i mean to say that the love of truth has its reward in heaven, and already upon earth. 46. faith, such as early christianity desired, and not infrequently achieved in the midst of a skeptical and southernly free-spirited world, which had centuries of struggle between philosophical schools behind it and in it, counting besides the education in tolerance which the imperium romanum gave--this faith is not that sincere, austere slave-faith by which perhaps a luther or a cromwell, or some other northern barbarian of the spirit remained attached to his god and christianity, it is much rather the faith of pascal, which resembles in a terrible manner a continuous suicide of reason--a tough, long-lived, worm-like reason, which is not to be slain at once and with a single blow. the christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit, it is at the same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation. there is cruelty and religious phoenicianism in this faith, which is adapted to a tender, many-sided, and very fastidious conscience, it takes for granted that the subjection of the spirit is indescribably painful, that all the past and all the habits of such a spirit resist the absurdissimum, in the form of which "faith" comes to it. modern men, with their obtuseness as regards all christian nomenclature, have no longer the sense for the terribly superlative conception which was implied to an antique taste by the paradox of the formula, "god on the cross". hitherto there had never and nowhere been such boldness in inversion, nor anything at once so dreadful, questioning, and questionable as this formula: it promised a transvaluation of all ancient values--it was the orient, the profound orient, it was the oriental slave who thus took revenge on rome and its noble, light-minded toleration, on the roman "catholicism" of non-faith, and it was always not the faith, but the freedom from the faith, the half-stoical and smiling indifference to the seriousness of the faith, which made the slaves indignant at their masters and revolt against them. "enlightenment" causes revolt, for the slave desires the unconditioned, he understands nothing but the tyrannous, even in morals, he loves as he hates, without nuance, to the very depths, to the point of pain, to the point of sickness--his many hidden sufferings make him revolt against the noble taste which seems to deny suffering. the skepticism with regard to suffering, fundamentally only an attitude of aristocratic morality, was not the least of the causes, also, of the last great slave-insurrection which began with the french revolution. 47. wherever the religious neurosis has appeared on the earth so far, we find it connected with three dangerous prescriptions as to regimen: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence--but without its being possible to determine with certainty which is cause and which is effect, or if any relation at all of cause and effect exists there. this latter doubt is justified by the fact that one of the most regular symptoms among savage as well as among civilized peoples is the most sudden and excessive sensuality, which then with equal suddenness transforms into penitential paroxysms, world-renunciation, and will-renunciation, both symptoms perhaps explainable as disguised epilepsy? but nowhere is it more obligatory to put aside explanations around no other type has there grown such a mass of absurdity and superstition, no other type seems to have been more interesting to men and even to philosophers--perhaps it is time to become just a little indifferent here, to learn caution, or, better still, to look away, to go away--yet in the background of the most recent philosophy, that of schopenhauer, we find almost as the problem in itself, this terrible note of interrogation of the religious crisis and awakening. how is the negation of will possible? how is the saint possible?--that seems to have been the very question with which schopenhauer made a start and became a philosopher. and thus it was a genuine schopenhauerian consequence, that his most convinced adherent (perhaps also his last, as far as germany is concerned), namely, richard wagner, should bring his own life-work to an end just here, and should finally put that terrible and eternal type upon the stage as kundry, type vecu, and as it loved and lived, at the very time that the mad-doctors in almost all european countries had an opportunity to study the type close at hand, wherever the religious neurosis--or as i call it, "the religious mood"--made its latest epidemical outbreak and display as the "salvation army"--if it be a question, however, as to what has been so extremely interesting to men of all sorts in all ages, and even to philosophers, in the whole phenomenon of the saint, it is undoubtedly the appearance of the miraculous therein--namely, the immediate succession of opposites, of states of the soul regarded as morally antithetical: it was believed here to be self-evident that a "bad man" was all at once turned into a "saint," a good man. the hitherto existing psychology was wrecked at this point, is it not possible it may have happened principally because psychology had placed itself under the dominion of morals, because it believed in oppositions of moral values, and saw, read, and interpreted these oppositions into the text and facts of the case? what? "miracle" only an error of interpretation? a lack of philology? 48. it seems that the latin races are far more deeply attached to their catholicism than we northerners are to christianity generally, and that consequently unbelief in catholic countries means something quite different from what it does among protestants--namely, a sort of revolt against the spirit of the race, while with us it is rather a return to the spirit (or non-spirit) of the race. we northerners undoubtedly derive our origin from barbarous races, even as regards our talents for religion--we have poor talents for it. one may make an exception in the case of the celts, who have theretofore furnished also the best soil for christian infection in the north: the christian ideal blossomed forth in france as much as ever the pale sun of the north would allow it. how strangely pious for our taste are still these later french skeptics, whenever there is any celtic blood in their origin! how catholic, how un-german does auguste comte's sociology seem to us, with the roman logic of its instincts! how jesuitical, that amiable and shrewd cicerone of port royal, sainte-beuve, in spite of all his hostility to jesuits! and even ernest renan: how inaccessible to us northerners does the language of such a renan appear, in whom every instant the merest touch of religious thrill throws his refined voluptuous and comfortably couching soul off its balance! let us repeat after him these fine sentences--and what wickedness and haughtiness is immediately aroused by way of answer in our probably less beautiful but harder souls, that is to say, in our more german souls!--"disons donc hardiment que la religion est un produit de l'homme normal, que l'homme est le plus dans le vrai quant il est le plus religieux et le plus assure d'une destinee infinie.... c'est quand il est bon qu'il veut que la virtu corresponde a un order eternal, c'est quand il contemple les choses d'une maniere desinteressee qu'il trouve la mort revoltante et absurde. comment ne pas supposer que c'est dans ces moments-la, que l'homme voit le mieux?"... these sentences are so extremely antipodal to my ears and habits of thought, that in my first impulse of rage on finding them, i wrote on the margin, "la niaiserie religieuse par excellence!"--until in my later rage i even took a fancy to them, these sentences with their truth absolutely inverted! it is so nice and such a distinction to have one's own antipodes! 49. that which is so astonishing in the religious life of the ancient greeks is the irrestrainable stream of gratitude which it pours forth--it is a very superior kind of man who takes such an attitude towards nature and life.--later on, when the populace got the upper hand in greece, fear became rampant also in religion; and christianity was preparing itself. 50. the passion for god: there are churlish, honest-hearted, and importunate kinds of it, like that of luther--the whole of protestantism lacks the southern delicatezza. there is an oriental exaltation of the mind in it, like that of an undeservedly favoured or elevated slave, as in the case of st. augustine, for instance, who lacks in an offensive manner, all nobility in bearing and desires. there is a feminine tenderness and sensuality in it, which modestly and unconsciously longs for a unio mystica et physica, as in the case of madame de guyon. in many cases it appears, curiously enough, as the disguise of a girl's or youth's puberty; here and there even as the hysteria of an old maid, also as her last ambition. the church has frequently canonized the woman in such a case. 51. the mightiest men have hitherto always bowed reverently before the saint, as the enigma of self-subjugation and utter voluntary privation--why did they thus bow? they divined in him--and as it were behind the questionableness of his frail and wretched appearance--the superior force which wished to test itself by such a subjugation; the strength of will, in which they recognized their own strength and love of power, and knew how to honour it: they honoured something in themselves when they honoured the saint. in addition to this, the contemplation of the saint suggested to them a suspicion: such an enormity of self-negation and anti-naturalness will not have been coveted for nothing--they have said, inquiringly. there is perhaps a reason for it, some very great danger, about which the ascetic might wish to be more accurately informed through his secret interlocutors and visitors? in a word, the mighty ones of the world learned to have a new fear before him, they divined a new power, a strange, still unconquered enemy:--it was the "will to power" which obliged them to halt before the saint. they had to question him. 52. in the jewish "old testament," the book of divine justice, there are men, things, and sayings on such an immense scale, that greek and indian literature has nothing to compare with it. one stands with fear and reverence before those stupendous remains of what man was formerly, and one has sad thoughts about old asia and its little out-pushed peninsula europe, which would like, by all means, to figure before asia as the "progress of mankind." to be sure, he who is himself only a slender, tame house-animal, and knows only the wants of a house-animal (like our cultured people of today, including the christians of "cultured" christianity), need neither be amazed nor even sad amid those ruins--the taste for the old testament is a touchstone with respect to "great" and "small": perhaps he will find that the new testament, the book of grace, still appeals more to his heart (there is much of the odour of the genuine, tender, stupid beadsman and petty soul in it). to have bound up this new testament (a kind of rococo of taste in every respect) along with the old testament into one book, as the "bible," as "the book in itself," is perhaps the greatest audacity and "sin against the spirit" which literary europe has upon its conscience. 53. why atheism nowadays? "the father" in god is thoroughly refuted; equally so "the judge," "the rewarder." also his "free will": he does not hear--and even if he did, he would not know how to help. the worst is that he seems incapable of communicating himself clearly; is he uncertain?--this is what i have made out (by questioning and listening at a variety of conversations) to be the cause of the decline of european theism; it appears to me that though the religious instinct is in vigorous growth,--it rejects the theistic satisfaction with profound distrust. 54. what does all modern philosophy mainly do? since descartes--and indeed more in defiance of him than on the basis of his procedure--an attentat has been made on the part of all philosophers on the old conception of the soul, under the guise of a criticism of the subject and predicate conception--that is to say, an attentat on the fundamental presupposition of christian doctrine. modern philosophy, as epistemological skepticism, is secretly or openly anti-christian, although (for keener ears, be it said) by no means anti-religious. formerly, in effect, one believed in "the soul" as one believed in grammar and the grammatical subject: one said, "i" is the condition, "think" is the predicate and is conditioned--to think is an activity for which one must suppose a subject as cause. the attempt was then made, with marvelous tenacity and subtlety, to see if one could not get out of this net,--to see if the opposite was not perhaps true: "think" the condition, and "i" the conditioned; "i," therefore, only a synthesis which has been made by thinking itself. kant really wished to prove that, starting from the subject, the subject could not be proved--nor the object either: the possibility of an apparent existence of the subject, and therefore of "the soul," may not always have been strange to him,--the thought which once had an immense power on earth as the vedanta philosophy. 55. there is a great ladder of religious cruelty, with many rounds; but three of these are the most important. once on a time men sacrificed human beings to their god, and perhaps just those they loved the best--to this category belong the firstling sacrifices of all primitive religions, and also the sacrifice of the emperor tiberius in the mithra-grotto on the island of capri, that most terrible of all roman anachronisms. then, during the moral epoch of mankind, they sacrificed to their god the strongest instincts they possessed, their "nature"; this festal joy shines in the cruel glances of ascetics and "anti-natural" fanatics. finally, what still remained to be sacrificed? was it not necessary in the end for men to sacrifice everything comforting, holy, healing, all hope, all faith in hidden harmonies, in future blessedness and justice? was it not necessary to sacrifice god himself, and out of cruelty to themselves to worship stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, nothingness? to sacrifice god for nothingness--this paradoxical mystery of the ultimate cruelty has been reserved for the rising generation; we all know something thereof already. 56. whoever, like myself, prompted by some enigmatical desire, has long endeavoured to go to the bottom of the question of pessimism and free it from the half-christian, half-german narrowness and stupidity in which it has finally presented itself to this century, namely, in the form of schopenhauer's philosophy; whoever, with an asiatic and super-asiatic eye, has actually looked inside, and into the most world-renouncing of all possible modes of thought--beyond good and evil, and no longer like buddha and schopenhauer, under the dominion and delusion of morality,--whoever has done this, has perhaps just thereby, without really desiring it, opened his eyes to behold the opposite ideal: the ideal of the most world-approving, exuberant, and vivacious man, who has not only learnt to compromise and arrange with that which was and is, but wishes to have it again as it was and is, for all eternity, insatiably calling out da capo, not only to himself, but to the whole piece and play; and not only the play, but actually to him who requires the play--and makes it necessary; because he always requires himself anew--and makes himself necessary.--what? and this would not be--circulus vitiosus deus? 57. the distance, and as it were the space around man, grows with the strength of his intellectual vision and insight: his world becomes profounder; new stars, new enigmas, and notions are ever coming into view. perhaps everything on which the intellectual eye has exercised its acuteness and profundity has just been an occasion for its exercise, something of a game, something for children and childish minds. perhaps the most solemn conceptions that have caused the most fighting and suffering, the conceptions "god" and "sin," will one day seem to us of no more importance than a child's plaything or a child's pain seems to an old man;--and perhaps another plaything and another pain will then be necessary once more for "the old man"--always childish enough, an eternal child! 58. has it been observed to what extent outward idleness, or semi-idleness, is necessary to a real religious life (alike for its favourite microscopic labour of self-examination, and for its soft placidity called "prayer," the state of perpetual readiness for the "coming of god"), i mean the idleness with a good conscience, the idleness of olden times and of blood, to which the aristocratic sentiment that work is dishonouring--that it vulgarizes body and soul--is not quite unfamiliar? and that consequently the modern, noisy, time-engrossing, conceited, foolishly proud laboriousness educates and prepares for "unbelief" more than anything else? among these, for instance, who are at present living apart from religion in germany, i find "free-thinkers" of diversified species and origin, but above all a majority of those in whom laboriousness from generation to generation has dissolved the religious instincts; so that they no longer know what purpose religions serve, and only note their existence in the world with a kind of dull astonishment. they feel themselves already fully occupied, these good people, be it by their business or by their pleasures, not to mention the "fatherland," and the newspapers, and their "family duties"; it seems that they have no time whatever left for religion; and above all, it is not obvious to them whether it is a question of a new business or a new pleasure--for it is impossible, they say to themselves, that people should go to church merely to spoil their tempers. they are by no means enemies of religious customs; should certain circumstances, state affairs perhaps, require their participation in such customs, they do what is required, as so many things are done--with a patient and unassuming seriousness, and without much curiosity or discomfort;--they live too much apart and outside to feel even the necessity for a for or against in such matters. among those indifferent persons may be reckoned nowadays the majority of german protestants of the middle classes, especially in the great laborious centres of trade and commerce; also the majority of laborious scholars, and the entire university personnel (with the exception of the theologians, whose existence and possibility there always gives psychologists new and more subtle puzzles to solve). on the part of pious, or merely church-going people, there is seldom any idea of how much good-will, one might say arbitrary will, is now necessary for a german scholar to take the problem of religion seriously; his whole profession (and as i have said, his whole workmanlike laboriousness, to which he is compelled by his modern conscience) inclines him to a lofty and almost charitable serenity as regards religion, with which is occasionally mingled a slight disdain for the "uncleanliness" of spirit which he takes for granted wherever any one still professes to belong to the church. it is only with the help of history (not through his own personal experience, therefore) that the scholar succeeds in bringing himself to a respectful seriousness, and to a certain timid deference in presence of religions; but even when his sentiments have reached the stage of gratitude towards them, he has not personally advanced one step nearer to that which still maintains itself as church or as piety; perhaps even the contrary. the practical indifference to religious matters in the midst of which he has been born and brought up, usually sublimates itself in his case into circumspection and cleanliness, which shuns contact with religious men and things; and it may be just the depth of his tolerance and humanity which prompts him to avoid the delicate trouble which tolerance itself brings with it.--every age has its own divine type of naivete, for the discovery of which other ages may envy it: and how much naivete--adorable, childlike, and boundlessly foolish naivete is involved in this belief of the scholar in his superiority, in the good conscience of his tolerance, in the unsuspecting, simple certainty with which his instinct treats the religious man as a lower and less valuable type, beyond, before, and above which he himself has developed--he, the little arrogant dwarf and mob-man, the sedulously alert, head-and-hand drudge of "ideas," of "modern ideas"! 59. whoever has seen deeply into the world has doubtless divined what wisdom there is in the fact that men are superficial. it is their preservative instinct which teaches them to be flighty, lightsome, and false. here and there one finds a passionate and exaggerated adoration of "pure forms" in philosophers as well as in artists: it is not to be doubted that whoever has need of the cult of the superficial to that extent, has at one time or another made an unlucky dive beneath it. perhaps there is even an order of rank with respect to those burnt children, the born artists who find the enjoyment of life only in trying to falsify its image (as if taking wearisome revenge on it), one might guess to what degree life has disgusted them, by the extent to which they wish to see its image falsified, attenuated, ultrified, and deified,--one might reckon the homines religiosi among the artists, as their highest rank. it is the profound, suspicious fear of an incurable pessimism which compels whole centuries to fasten their teeth into a religious interpretation of existence: the fear of the instinct which divines that truth might be attained too soon, before man has become strong enough, hard enough, artist enough.... piety, the "life in god," regarded in this light, would appear as the most elaborate and ultimate product of the fear of truth, as artist-adoration and artist-intoxication in presence of the most logical of all falsifications, as the will to the inversion of truth, to untruth at any price. perhaps there has hitherto been no more effective means of beautifying man than piety, by means of it man can become so artful, so superficial, so iridescent, and so good, that his appearance no longer offends. 60. to love mankind for god's sake--this has so far been the noblest and remotest sentiment to which mankind has attained. that love to mankind, without any redeeming intention in the background, is only an additional folly and brutishness, that the inclination to this love has first to get its proportion, its delicacy, its gram of salt and sprinkling of ambergris from a higher inclination--whoever first perceived and "experienced" this, however his tongue may have stammered as it attempted to express such a delicate matter, let him for all time be holy and respected, as the man who has so far flown highest and gone astray in the finest fashion! 61. the philosopher, as we free spirits understand him--as the man of the greatest responsibility, who has the conscience for the general development of mankind,--will use religion for his disciplining and educating work, just as he will use the contemporary political and economic conditions. the selecting and disciplining influence--destructive, as well as creative and fashioning--which can be exercised by means of religion is manifold and varied, according to the sort of people placed under its spell and protection. for those who are strong and independent, destined and trained to command, in whom the judgment and skill of a ruling race is incorporated, religion is an additional means for overcoming resistance in the exercise of authority--as a bond which binds rulers and subjects in common, betraying and surrendering to the former the conscience of the latter, their inmost heart, which would fain escape obedience. and in the case of the unique natures of noble origin, if by virtue of superior spirituality they should incline to a more retired and contemplative life, reserving to themselves only the more refined forms of government (over chosen disciples or members of an order), religion itself may be used as a means for obtaining peace from the noise and trouble of managing grosser affairs, and for securing immunity from the unavoidable filth of all political agitation. the brahmins, for instance, understood this fact. with the help of a religious organization, they secured to themselves the power of nominating kings for the people, while their sentiments prompted them to keep apart and outside, as men with a higher and super-regal mission. at the same time religion gives inducement and opportunity to some of the subjects to qualify themselves for future ruling and commanding the slowly ascending ranks and classes, in which, through fortunate marriage customs, volitional power and delight in self-control are on the increase. to them religion offers sufficient incentives and temptations to aspire to higher intellectuality, and to experience the sentiments of authoritative self-control, of silence, and of solitude. asceticism and puritanism are almost indispensable means of educating and ennobling a race which seeks to rise above its hereditary baseness and work itself upwards to future supremacy. and finally, to ordinary men, to the majority of the people, who exist for service and general utility, and are only so far entitled to exist, religion gives invaluable contentedness with their lot and condition, peace of heart, ennoblement of obedience, additional social happiness and sympathy, with something of transfiguration and embellishment, something of justification of all the commonplaceness, all the meanness, all the semi-animal poverty of their souls. religion, together with the religious significance of life, sheds sunshine over such perpetually harassed men, and makes even their own aspect endurable to them, it operates upon them as the epicurean philosophy usually operates upon sufferers of a higher order, in a refreshing and refining manner, almost turning suffering to account, and in the end even hallowing and vindicating it. there is perhaps nothing so admirable in christianity and buddhism as their art of teaching even the lowest to elevate themselves by piety to a seemingly higher order of things, and thereby to retain their satisfaction with the actual world in which they find it difficult enough to live--this very difficulty being necessary. 62. to be sure--to make also the bad counter-reckoning against such religions, and to bring to light their secret dangers--the cost is always excessive and terrible when religions do not operate as an educational and disciplinary medium in the hands of the philosopher, but rule voluntarily and paramountly, when they wish to be the final end, and not a means along with other means. among men, as among all other animals, there is a surplus of defective, diseased, degenerating, infirm, and necessarily suffering individuals; the successful cases, among men also, are always the exception; and in view of the fact that man is the animal not yet properly adapted to his environment, the rare exception. but worse still. the higher the type a man represents, the greater is the improbability that he will succeed; the accidental, the law of irrationality in the general constitution of mankind, manifests itself most terribly in its destructive effect on the higher orders of men, the conditions of whose lives are delicate, diverse, and difficult to determine. what, then, is the attitude of the two greatest religions above-mentioned to the surplus of failures in life? they endeavour to preserve and keep alive whatever can be preserved; in fact, as the religions for sufferers, they take the part of these upon principle; they are always in favour of those who suffer from life as from a disease, and they would fain treat every other experience of life as false and impossible. however highly we may esteem this indulgent and preservative care (inasmuch as in applying to others, it has applied, and applies also to the highest and usually the most suffering type of man), the hitherto paramount religions--to give a general appreciation of them--are among the principal causes which have kept the type of "man" upon a lower level--they have preserved too much that which should have perished. one has to thank them for invaluable services; and who is sufficiently rich in gratitude not to feel poor at the contemplation of all that the "spiritual men" of christianity have done for europe hitherto! but when they had given comfort to the sufferers, courage to the oppressed and despairing, a staff and support to the helpless, and when they had allured from society into convents and spiritual penitentiaries the broken-hearted and distracted: what else had they to do in order to work systematically in that fashion, and with a good conscience, for the preservation of all the sick and suffering, which means, in deed and in truth, to work for the deterioration of the european race? to reverse all estimates of value--that is what they had to do! and to shatter the strong, to spoil great hopes, to cast suspicion on the delight in beauty, to break down everything autonomous, manly, conquering, and imperious--all instincts which are natural to the highest and most successful type of "man"--into uncertainty, distress of conscience, and self-destruction; forsooth, to invert all love of the earthly and of supremacy over the earth, into hatred of the earth and earthly things--that is the task the church imposed on itself, and was obliged to impose, until, according to its standard of value, "unworldliness," "unsensuousness," and "higher man" fused into one sentiment. if one could observe the strangely painful, equally coarse and refined comedy of european christianity with the derisive and impartial eye of an epicurean god, i should think one would never cease marvelling and laughing; does it not actually seem that some single will has ruled over europe for eighteen centuries in order to make a sublime abortion of man? he, however, who, with opposite requirements (no longer epicurean) and with some divine hammer in his hand, could approach this almost voluntary degeneration and stunting of mankind, as exemplified in the european christian (pascal, for instance), would he not have to cry aloud with rage, pity, and horror: "oh, you bunglers, presumptuous pitiful bunglers, what have you done! was that a work for your hands? how you have hacked and botched my finest stone! what have you presumed to do!"--i should say that christianity has hitherto been the most portentous of presumptions. men, not great enough, nor hard enough, to be entitled as artists to take part in fashioning man; men, not sufficiently strong and far-sighted to allow, with sublime self-constraint, the obvious law of the thousandfold failures and perishings to prevail; men, not sufficiently noble to see the radically different grades of rank and intervals of rank that separate man from man:--such men, with their "equality before god," have hitherto swayed the destiny of europe; until at last a dwarfed, almost ludicrous species has been produced, a gregarious animal, something obliging, sickly, mediocre, the european of the present day. chapter iv. apophthegms and interludes 63. he who is a thorough teacher takes things seriously--and even himself--only in relation to his pupils. 64. "knowledge for its own sake"--that is the last snare laid by morality: we are thereby completely entangled in morals once more. 65. the charm of knowledge would be small, were it not so much shame has to be overcome on the way to it. 65a. we are most dishonourable towards our god: he is not permitted to sin. 66. the tendency of a person to allow himself to be degraded, robbed, deceived, and exploited might be the diffidence of a god among men. 67. love to one only is a barbarity, for it is exercised at the expense of all others. love to god also! 68. "i did that," says my memory. "i could not have done that," says my pride, and remains inexorable. eventually--the memory yields. 69. one has regarded life carelessly, if one has failed to see the hand that--kills with leniency. 70. if a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs. 71. the sage as astronomer.--so long as thou feelest the stars as an "above thee," thou lackest the eye of the discerning one. 72. it is not the strength, but the duration of great sentiments that makes great men. 73. he who attains his ideal, precisely thereby surpasses it. 73a. many a peacock hides his tail from every eye--and calls it his pride. 74. a man of genius is unbearable, unless he possess at least two things besides: gratitude and purity. 75. the degree and nature of a man's sensuality extends to the highest altitudes of his spirit. 76. under peaceful conditions the militant man attacks himself. 77. with his principles a man seeks either to dominate, or justify, or honour, or reproach, or conceal his habits: two men with the same principles probably seek fundamentally different ends therewith. 78. he who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself thereby, as a despiser. 79. a soul which knows that it is loved, but does not itself love, betrays its sediment: its dregs come up. 80. a thing that is explained ceases to concern us--what did the god mean who gave the advice, "know thyself!" did it perhaps imply "cease to be concerned about thyself! become objective!"--and socrates?--and the "scientific man"? 81. it is terrible to die of thirst at sea. is it necessary that you should so salt your truth that it will no longer--quench thirst? 82. "sympathy for all"--would be harshness and tyranny for thee, my good neighbour. 83. instinct--when the house is on fire one forgets even the dinner--yes, but one recovers it from among the ashes. 84. woman learns how to hate in proportion as she--forgets how to charm. 85. the same emotions are in man and woman, but in different tempo, on that account man and woman never cease to misunderstand each other. 86. in the background of all their personal vanity, women themselves have still their impersonal scorn--for "woman". 87. fettered heart, free spirit--when one firmly fetters one's heart and keeps it prisoner, one can allow one's spirit many liberties: i said this once before but people do not believe it when i say so, unless they know it already. 88. one begins to distrust very clever persons when they become embarrassed. 89. dreadful experiences raise the question whether he who experiences them is not something dreadful also. 90. heavy, melancholy men turn lighter, and come temporarily to their surface, precisely by that which makes others heavy--by hatred and love. 91. so cold, so icy, that one burns one's finger at the touch of him! every hand that lays hold of him shrinks back!--and for that very reason many think him red-hot. 92. who has not, at one time or another--sacrificed himself for the sake of his good name? 93. in affability there is no hatred of men, but precisely on that account a great deal too much contempt of men. 94. the maturity of man--that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play. 95. to be ashamed of one's immorality is a step on the ladder at the end of which one is ashamed also of one's morality. 96. one should part from life as ulysses parted from nausicaa--blessing it rather than in love with it. 97. what? a great man? i always see merely the play-actor of his own ideal. 98. when one trains one's conscience, it kisses one while it bites. 99. the disappointed one speaks--"i listened for the echo and i heard only praise." 100. we all feign to ourselves that we are simpler than we are, we thus relax ourselves away from our fellows. 101. a discerning one might easily regard himself at present as the animalization of god. 102. discovering reciprocal love should really disenchant the lover with regard to the beloved. "what! she is modest enough to love even you? or stupid enough? or--or---" 103. the danger in happiness.--"everything now turns out best for me, i now love every fate:--who would like to be my fate?" 104. not their love of humanity, but the impotence of their love, prevents the christians of today--burning us. 105. the pia fraus is still more repugnant to the taste (the "piety") of the free spirit (the "pious man of knowledge") than the impia fraus. hence the profound lack of judgment, in comparison with the church, characteristic of the type "free spirit"--as its non-freedom. 106. by means of music the very passions enjoy themselves. 107. a sign of strong character, when once the resolution has been taken, to shut the ear even to the best counter-arguments. occasionally, therefore, a will to stupidity. 108. there is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena. 109. the criminal is often enough not equal to his deed: he extenuates and maligns it. 110. the advocates of a criminal are seldom artists enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the deed to the advantage of the doer. 111. our vanity is most difficult to wound just when our pride has been wounded. 112. to him who feels himself preordained to contemplation and not to belief, all believers are too noisy and obtrusive; he guards against them. 113. "you want to prepossess him in your favour? then you must be embarrassed before him." 114. the immense expectation with regard to sexual love, and the coyness in this expectation, spoils all the perspectives of women at the outset. 115. where there is neither love nor hatred in the game, woman's play is mediocre. 116. the great epochs of our life are at the points when we gain courage to rebaptize our badness as the best in us. 117. the will to overcome an emotion, is ultimately only the will of another, or of several other, emotions. 118. there is an innocence of admiration: it is possessed by him to whom it has not yet occurred that he himself may be admired some day. 119. our loathing of dirt may be so great as to prevent our cleaning ourselves--"justifying" ourselves. 120. sensuality often forces the growth of love too much, so that its root remains weak, and is easily torn up. 121. it is a curious thing that god learned greek when he wished to turn author--and that he did not learn it better. 122. to rejoice on account of praise is in many cases merely politeness of heart--and the very opposite of vanity of spirit. 123. even concubinage has been corrupted--by marriage. 124. he who exults at the stake, does not triumph over pain, but because of the fact that he does not feel pain where he expected it. a parable. 125. when we have to change an opinion about any one, we charge heavily to his account the inconvenience he thereby causes us. 126. a nation is a detour of nature to arrive at six or seven great men.--yes, and then to get round them. 127. in the eyes of all true women science is hostile to the sense of shame. they feel as if one wished to peep under their skin with it--or worse still! under their dress and finery. 128. the more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more must you allure the senses to it. 129. the devil has the most extensive perspectives for god; on that account he keeps so far away from him:--the devil, in effect, as the oldest friend of knowledge. 130. what a person is begins to betray itself when his talent decreases,--when he ceases to show what he can do. talent is also an adornment; an adornment is also a concealment. 131. the sexes deceive themselves about each other: the reason is that in reality they honour and love only themselves (or their own ideal, to express it more agreeably). thus man wishes woman to be peaceable: but in fact woman is essentially unpeaceable, like the cat, however well she may have assumed the peaceable demeanour. 132. one is punished best for one's virtues. 133. he who cannot find the way to his ideal, lives more frivolously and shamelessly than the man without an ideal. 134. from the senses originate all trustworthiness, all good conscience, all evidence of truth. 135. pharisaism is not a deterioration of the good man; a considerable part of it is rather an essential condition of being good. 136. the one seeks an accoucheur for his thoughts, the other seeks some one whom he can assist: a good conversation thus originates. 137. in intercourse with scholars and artists one readily makes mistakes of opposite kinds: in a remarkable scholar one not infrequently finds a mediocre man; and often, even in a mediocre artist, one finds a very remarkable man. 138. we do the same when awake as when dreaming: we only invent and imagine him with whom we have intercourse--and forget it immediately. 139. in revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man. 140. advice as a riddle.--"if the band is not to break, bite it first--secure to make!" 141. the belly is the reason why man does not so readily take himself for a god. 142. the chastest utterance i ever heard: "dans le veritable amour c'est l'ame qui enveloppe le corps." 143. our vanity would like what we do best to pass precisely for what is most difficult to us.--concerning the origin of many systems of morals. 144. when a woman has scholarly inclinations there is generally something wrong with her sexual nature. barrenness itself conduces to a certain virility of taste; man, indeed, if i may say so, is "the barren animal." 145. comparing man and woman generally, one may say that woman would not have the genius for adornment, if she had not the instinct for the secondary role. 146. he who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. and if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee. 147. from old florentine novels--moreover, from life: buona femmina e mala femmina vuol bastone.--sacchetti, nov. 86. 148. to seduce their neighbour to a favourable opinion, and afterwards to believe implicitly in this opinion of their neighbour--who can do this conjuring trick so well as women? 149. that which an age considers evil is usually an unseasonable echo of what was formerly considered good--the atavism of an old ideal. 150. around the hero everything becomes a tragedy; around the demigod everything becomes a satyr-play; and around god everything becomes--what? perhaps a "world"? 151. it is not enough to possess a talent: one must also have your permission to possess it;--eh, my friends? 152. "where there is the tree of knowledge, there is always paradise": so say the most ancient and the most modern serpents. 153. what is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil. 154. objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology. 155. the sense of the tragic increases and declines with sensuousness. 156. insanity in individuals is something rare--but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule. 157. the thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets successfully through many a bad night. 158. not only our reason, but also our conscience, truckles to our strongest impulse--the tyrant in us. 159. one must repay good and ill; but why just to the person who did us good or ill? 160. one no longer loves one's knowledge sufficiently after one has communicated it. 161. poets act shamelessly towards their experiences: they exploit them. 162. "our fellow-creature is not our neighbour, but our neighbour's neighbour":--so thinks every nation. 163. love brings to light the noble and hidden qualities of a lover--his rare and exceptional traits: it is thus liable to be deceptive as to his normal character. 164. jesus said to his jews: "the law was for servants;--love god as i love him, as his son! what have we sons of god to do with morals!" 165. in sight of every party.--a shepherd has always need of a bell-wether--or he has himself to be a wether occasionally. 166. one may indeed lie with the mouth; but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth. 167. to vigorous men intimacy is a matter of shame--and something precious. 168. christianity gave eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to vice. 169. to talk much about oneself may also be a means of concealing oneself. 170. in praise there is more obtrusiveness than in blame. 171. pity has an almost ludicrous effect on a man of knowledge, like tender hands on a cyclops. 172. one occasionally embraces some one or other, out of love to mankind (because one cannot embrace all); but this is what one must never confess to the individual. 173. one does not hate as long as one disesteems, but only when one esteems equal or superior. 174. ye utilitarians--ye, too, love the utile only as a vehicle for your inclinations,--ye, too, really find the noise of its wheels insupportable! 175. one loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired. 176. the vanity of others is only counter to our taste when it is counter to our vanity. 177. with regard to what "truthfulness" is, perhaps nobody has ever been sufficiently truthful. 178. one does not believe in the follies of clever men: what a forfeiture of the rights of man! 179. the consequences of our actions seize us by the forelock, very indifferent to the fact that we have meanwhile "reformed." 180. there is an innocence in lying which is the sign of good faith in a cause. 181. it is inhuman to bless when one is being cursed. 182. the familiarity of superiors embitters one, because it may not be returned. 183. "i am affected, not because you have deceived me, but because i can no longer believe in you." 184. there is a haughtiness of kindness which has the appearance of wickedness. 185. "i dislike him."--why?--"i am not a match for him."--did any one ever answer so? chapter v. the natural history of morals 186. the moral sentiment in europe at present is perhaps as subtle, belated, diverse, sensitive, and refined, as the "science of morals" belonging thereto is recent, initial, awkward, and coarse-fingered:--an interesting contrast, which sometimes becomes incarnate and obvious in the very person of a moralist. indeed, the expression, "science of morals" is, in respect to what is designated thereby, far too presumptuous and counter to good taste,--which is always a foretaste of more modest expressions. one ought to avow with the utmost fairness what is still necessary here for a long time, what is alone proper for the present: namely, the collection of material, the comprehensive survey and classification of an immense domain of delicate sentiments of worth, and distinctions of worth, which live, grow, propagate, and perish--and perhaps attempts to give a clear idea of the recurring and more common forms of these living crystallizations--as preparation for a theory of types of morality. to be sure, people have not hitherto been so modest. all the philosophers, with a pedantic and ridiculous seriousness, demanded of themselves something very much higher, more pretentious, and ceremonious, when they concerned themselves with morality as a science: they wanted to give a basic to morality--and every philosopher hitherto has believed that he has given it a basis; morality itself, however, has been regarded as something "given." how far from their awkward pride was the seemingly insignificant problem--left in dust and decay--of a description of forms of morality, notwithstanding that the finest hands and senses could hardly be fine enough for it! it was precisely owing to moral philosophers' knowing the moral facts imperfectly, in an arbitrary epitome, or an accidental abridgement--perhaps as the morality of their environment, their position, their church, their zeitgeist, their climate and zone--it was precisely because they were badly instructed with regard to nations, eras, and past ages, and were by no means eager to know about these matters, that they did not even come in sight of the real problems of morals--problems which only disclose themselves by a comparison of many kinds of morality. in every "science of morals" hitherto, strange as it may sound, the problem of morality itself has been omitted: there has been no suspicion that there was anything problematic there! that which philosophers called "giving a basis to morality," and endeavoured to realize, has, when seen in a right light, proved merely a learned form of good faith in prevailing morality, a new means of its expression, consequently just a matter-of-fact within the sphere of a definite morality, yea, in its ultimate motive, a sort of denial that it is lawful for this morality to be called in question--and in any case the reverse of the testing, analyzing, doubting, and vivisecting of this very faith. hear, for instance, with what innocence--almost worthy of honour--schopenhauer represents his own task, and draw your conclusions concerning the scientificness of a "science" whose latest master still talks in the strain of children and old wives: "the principle," he says (page 136 of the grundprobleme der ethik), [footnote: pages 54-55 of schopenhauer's basis of morality, translated by arthur b. bullock, m.a. (1903).] "the axiom about the purport of which all moralists are practically agreed: neminem laede, immo omnes quantum potes juva--is really the proposition which all moral teachers strive to establish, ... the real basis of ethics which has been sought, like the philosopher's stone, for centuries."--the difficulty of establishing the proposition referred to may indeed be great--it is well known that schopenhauer also was unsuccessful in his efforts; and whoever has thoroughly realized how absurdly false and sentimental this proposition is, in a world whose essence is will to power, may be reminded that schopenhauer, although a pessimist, actually--played the flute... daily after dinner: one may read about the matter in his biography. a question by the way: a pessimist, a repudiator of god and of the world, who makes a halt at morality--who assents to morality, and plays the flute to laede-neminem morals, what? is that really--a pessimist? 187. apart from the value of such assertions as "there is a categorical imperative in us," one can always ask: what does such an assertion indicate about him who makes it? there are systems of morals which are meant to justify their author in the eyes of other people; other systems of morals are meant to tranquilize him, and make him self-satisfied; with other systems he wants to crucify and humble himself, with others he wishes to take revenge, with others to conceal himself, with others to glorify himself and gave superiority and distinction,--this system of morals helps its author to forget, that system makes him, or something of him, forgotten, many a moralist would like to exercise power and creative arbitrariness over mankind, many another, perhaps, kant especially, gives us to understand by his morals that "what is estimable in me, is that i know how to obey--and with you it shall not be otherwise than with me!" in short, systems of morals are only a sign-language of the emotions. 188. in contrast to laisser-aller, every system of morals is a sort of tyranny against "nature" and also against "reason", that is, however, no objection, unless one should again decree by some system of morals, that all kinds of tyranny and unreasonableness are unlawful what is essential and invaluable in every system of morals, is that it is a long constraint. in order to understand stoicism, or port royal, or puritanism, one should remember the constraint under which every language has attained to strength and freedom--the metrical constraint, the tyranny of rhyme and rhythm. how much trouble have the poets and orators of every nation given themselves!--not excepting some of the prose writers of today, in whose ear dwells an inexorable conscientiousness--"for the sake of a folly," as utilitarian bunglers say, and thereby deem themselves wise--"from submission to arbitrary laws," as the anarchists say, and thereby fancy themselves "free," even free-spirited. the singular fact remains, however, that everything of the nature of freedom, elegance, boldness, dance, and masterly certainty, which exists or has existed, whether it be in thought itself, or in administration, or in speaking and persuading, in art just as in conduct, has only developed by means of the tyranny of such arbitrary law, and in all seriousness, it is not at all improbable that precisely this is "nature" and "natural"--and not laisser-aller! every artist knows how different from the state of letting himself go, is his "most natural" condition, the free arranging, locating, disposing, and constructing in the moments of "inspiration"--and how strictly and delicately he then obeys a thousand laws, which, by their very rigidness and precision, defy all formulation by means of ideas (even the most stable idea has, in comparison therewith, something floating, manifold, and ambiguous in it). the essential thing "in heaven and in earth" is, apparently (to repeat it once more), that there should be long obedience in the same direction, there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living; for instance, virtue, art, music, dancing, reason, spirituality--anything whatever that is transfiguring, refined, foolish, or divine. the long bondage of the spirit, the distrustful constraint in the communicability of ideas, the discipline which the thinker imposed on himself to think in accordance with the rules of a church or a court, or conformable to aristotelian premises, the persistent spiritual will to interpret everything that happened according to a christian scheme, and in every occurrence to rediscover and justify the christian god:--all this violence, arbitrariness, severity, dreadfulness, and unreasonableness, has proved itself the disciplinary means whereby the european spirit has attained its strength, its remorseless curiosity and subtle mobility; granted also that much irrecoverable strength and spirit had to be stifled, suffocated, and spoilt in the process (for here, as everywhere, "nature" shows herself as she is, in all her extravagant and indifferent magnificence, which is shocking, but nevertheless noble). that for centuries european thinkers only thought in order to prove something--nowadays, on the contrary, we are suspicious of every thinker who "wishes to prove something"--that it was always settled beforehand what was to be the result of their strictest thinking, as it was perhaps in the asiatic astrology of former times, or as it is still at the present day in the innocent, christian-moral explanation of immediate personal events "for the glory of god," or "for the good of the soul":--this tyranny, this arbitrariness, this severe and magnificent stupidity, has educated the spirit; slavery, both in the coarser and the finer sense, is apparently an indispensable means even of spiritual education and discipline. one may look at every system of morals in this light: it is "nature" therein which teaches to hate the laisser-aller, the too great freedom, and implants the need for limited horizons, for immediate duties--it teaches the narrowing of perspectives, and thus, in a certain sense, that stupidity is a condition of life and development. "thou must obey some one, and for a long time; otherwise thou wilt come to grief, and lose all respect for thyself"--this seems to me to be the moral imperative of nature, which is certainly neither "categorical," as old kant wished (consequently the "otherwise"), nor does it address itself to the individual (what does nature care for the individual!), but to nations, races, ages, and ranks; above all, however, to the animal "man" generally, to mankind. 189. industrious races find it a great hardship to be idle: it was a master stroke of english instinct to hallow and begloom sunday to such an extent that the englishman unconsciously hankers for his week--and work-day again:--as a kind of cleverly devised, cleverly intercalated fast, such as is also frequently found in the ancient world (although, as is appropriate in southern nations, not precisely with respect to work). many kinds of fasts are necessary; and wherever powerful influences and habits prevail, legislators have to see that intercalary days are appointed, on which such impulses are fettered, and learn to hunger anew. viewed from a higher standpoint, whole generations and epochs, when they show themselves infected with any moral fanaticism, seem like those intercalated periods of restraint and fasting, during which an impulse learns to humble and submit itself--at the same time also to purify and sharpen itself; certain philosophical sects likewise admit of a similar interpretation (for instance, the stoa, in the midst of hellenic culture, with the atmosphere rank and overcharged with aphrodisiacal odours).--here also is a hint for the explanation of the paradox, why it was precisely in the most christian period of european history, and in general only under the pressure of christian sentiments, that the sexual impulse sublimated into love (amour-passion). 190. there is something in the morality of plato which does not really belong to plato, but which only appears in his philosophy, one might say, in spite of him: namely, socratism, for which he himself was too noble. "no one desires to injure himself, hence all evil is done unwittingly. the evil man inflicts injury on himself; he would not do so, however, if he knew that evil is evil. the evil man, therefore, is only evil through error; if one free him from error one will necessarily make him--good."--this mode of reasoning savours of the populace, who perceive only the unpleasant consequences of evil-doing, and practically judge that "it is stupid to do wrong"; while they accept "good" as identical with "useful and pleasant," without further thought. as regards every system of utilitarianism, one may at once assume that it has the same origin, and follow the scent: one will seldom err.--plato did all he could to interpret something refined and noble into the tenets of his teacher, and above all to interpret himself into them--he, the most daring of all interpreters, who lifted the entire socrates out of the street, as a popular theme and song, to exhibit him in endless and impossible modifications--namely, in all his own disguises and multiplicities. in jest, and in homeric language as well, what is the platonic socrates, if not--[greek words inserted here.] 191. the old theological problem of "faith" and "knowledge," or more plainly, of instinct and reason--the question whether, in respect to the valuation of things, instinct deserves more authority than rationality, which wants to appreciate and act according to motives, according to a "why," that is to say, in conformity to purpose and utility--it is always the old moral problem that first appeared in the person of socrates, and had divided men's minds long before christianity. socrates himself, following, of course, the taste of his talent--that of a surpassing dialectician--took first the side of reason; and, in fact, what did he do all his life but laugh at the awkward incapacity of the noble athenians, who were men of instinct, like all noble men, and could never give satisfactory answers concerning the motives of their actions? in the end, however, though silently and secretly, he laughed also at himself: with his finer conscience and introspection, he found in himself the same difficulty and incapacity. "but why"--he said to himself--"should one on that account separate oneself from the instincts! one must set them right, and the reason also--one must follow the instincts, but at the same time persuade the reason to support them with good arguments." this was the real falseness of that great and mysterious ironist; he brought his conscience up to the point that he was satisfied with a kind of self-outwitting: in fact, he perceived the irrationality in the moral judgment.--plato, more innocent in such matters, and without the craftiness of the plebeian, wished to prove to himself, at the expenditure of all his strength--the greatest strength a philosopher had ever expended--that reason and instinct lead spontaneously to one goal, to the good, to "god"; and since plato, all theologians and philosophers have followed the same path--which means that in matters of morality, instinct (or as christians call it, "faith," or as i call it, "the herd") has hitherto triumphed. unless one should make an exception in the case of descartes, the father of rationalism (and consequently the grandfather of the revolution), who recognized only the authority of reason: but reason is only a tool, and descartes was superficial. 192. whoever has followed the history of a single science, finds in its development a clue to the understanding of the oldest and commonest processes of all "knowledge and cognizance": there, as here, the premature hypotheses, the fictions, the good stupid will to "belief," and the lack of distrust and patience are first developed--our senses learn late, and never learn completely, to be subtle, reliable, and cautious organs of knowledge. our eyes find it easier on a given occasion to produce a picture already often produced, than to seize upon the divergence and novelty of an impression: the latter requires more force, more "morality." it is difficult and painful for the ear to listen to anything new; we hear strange music badly. when we hear another language spoken, we involuntarily attempt to form the sounds into words with which we are more familiar and conversant--it was thus, for example, that the germans modified the spoken word arcubalista into armbrust (cross-bow). our senses are also hostile and averse to the new; and generally, even in the "simplest" processes of sensation, the emotions dominate--such as fear, love, hatred, and the passive emotion of indolence.--as little as a reader nowadays reads all the single words (not to speak of syllables) of a page--he rather takes about five out of every twenty words at random, and "guesses" the probably appropriate sense to them--just as little do we see a tree correctly and completely in respect to its leaves, branches, colour, and shape; we find it so much easier to fancy the chance of a tree. even in the midst of the most remarkable experiences, we still do just the same; we fabricate the greater part of the experience, and can hardly be made to contemplate any event, except as "inventors" thereof. all this goes to prove that from our fundamental nature and from remote ages we have been--accustomed to lying. or, to express it more politely and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly--one is much more of an artist than one is aware of.--in an animated conversation, i often see the face of the person with whom i am speaking so clearly and sharply defined before me, according to the thought he expresses, or which i believe to be evoked in his mind, that the degree of distinctness far exceeds the strength of my visual faculty--the delicacy of the play of the muscles and of the expression of the eyes must therefore be imagined by me. probably the person put on quite a different expression, or none at all. 193. quidquid luce fuit, tenebris agit: but also contrariwise. what we experience in dreams, provided we experience it often, pertains at last just as much to the general belongings of our soul as anything "actually" experienced; by virtue thereof we are richer or poorer, we have a requirement more or less, and finally, in broad daylight, and even in the brightest moments of our waking life, we are ruled to some extent by the nature of our dreams. supposing that someone has often flown in his dreams, and that at last, as soon as he dreams, he is conscious of the power and art of flying as his privilege and his peculiarly enviable happiness; such a person, who believes that on the slightest impulse, he can actualize all sorts of curves and angles, who knows the sensation of a certain divine levity, an "upwards" without effort or constraint, a "downwards" without descending or lowering--without trouble!--how could the man with such dream-experiences and dream-habits fail to find "happiness" differently coloured and defined, even in his waking hours! how could he fail--to long differently for happiness? "flight," such as is described by poets, must, when compared with his own "flying," be far too earthly, muscular, violent, far too "troublesome" for him. 194. the difference among men does not manifest itself only in the difference of their lists of desirable things--in their regarding different good things as worth striving for, and being disagreed as to the greater or less value, the order of rank, of the commonly recognized desirable things:--it manifests itself much more in what they regard as actually having and possessing a desirable thing. as regards a woman, for instance, the control over her body and her sexual gratification serves as an amply sufficient sign of ownership and possession to the more modest man; another with a more suspicious and ambitious thirst for possession, sees the "questionableness," the mere apparentness of such ownership, and wishes to have finer tests in order to know especially whether the woman not only gives herself to him, but also gives up for his sake what she has or would like to have--only then does he look upon her as "possessed." a third, however, has not even here got to the limit of his distrust and his desire for possession: he asks himself whether the woman, when she gives up everything for him, does not perhaps do so for a phantom of him; he wishes first to be thoroughly, indeed, profoundly well known; in order to be loved at all he ventures to let himself be found out. only then does he feel the beloved one fully in his possession, when she no longer deceives herself about him, when she loves him just as much for the sake of his devilry and concealed insatiability, as for his goodness, patience, and spirituality. one man would like to possess a nation, and he finds all the higher arts of cagliostro and catalina suitable for his purpose. another, with a more refined thirst for possession, says to himself: "one may not deceive where one desires to possess"--he is irritated and impatient at the idea that a mask of him should rule in the hearts of the people: "i must, therefore, make myself known, and first of all learn to know myself!" among helpful and charitable people, one almost always finds the awkward craftiness which first gets up suitably him who has to be helped, as though, for instance, he should "merit" help, seek just their help, and would show himself deeply grateful, attached, and subservient to them for all help. with these conceits, they take control of the needy as a property, just as in general they are charitable and helpful out of a desire for property. one finds them jealous when they are crossed or forestalled in their charity. parents involuntarily make something like themselves out of their children--they call that "education"; no mother doubts at the bottom of her heart that the child she has borne is thereby her property, no father hesitates about his right to his own ideas and notions of worth. indeed, in former times fathers deemed it right to use their discretion concerning the life or death of the newly born (as among the ancient germans). and like the father, so also do the teacher, the class, the priest, and the prince still see in every new individual an unobjectionable opportunity for a new possession. the consequence is... 195. the jews--a people "born for slavery," as tacitus and the whole ancient world say of them; "the chosen people among the nations," as they themselves say and believe--the jews performed the miracle of the inversion of valuations, by means of which life on earth obtained a new and dangerous charm for a couple of millenniums. their prophets fused into one the expressions "rich," "godless," "wicked," "violent," "sensual," and for the first time coined the word "world" as a term of reproach. in this inversion of valuations (in which is also included the use of the word "poor" as synonymous with "saint" and "friend") the significance of the jewish people is to be found; it is with them that the slave-insurrection in morals commences. 196. it is to be inferred that there are countless dark bodies near the sun--such as we shall never see. among ourselves, this is an allegory; and the psychologist of morals reads the whole star-writing merely as an allegorical and symbolic language in which much may be unexpressed. 197. the beast of prey and the man of prey (for instance, caesar borgia) are fundamentally misunderstood, "nature" is misunderstood, so long as one seeks a "morbidness" in the constitution of these healthiest of all tropical monsters and growths, or even an innate "hell" in them--as almost all moralists have done hitherto. does it not seem that there is a hatred of the virgin forest and of the tropics among moralists? and that the "tropical man" must be discredited at all costs, whether as disease and deterioration of mankind, or as his own hell and self-torture? and why? in favour of the "temperate zones"? in favour of the temperate men? the "moral"? the mediocre?--this for the chapter: "morals as timidity." 198. all the systems of morals which address themselves with a view to their "happiness," as it is called--what else are they but suggestions for behaviour adapted to the degree of danger from themselves in which the individuals live; recipes for their passions, their good and bad propensities, insofar as such have the will to power and would like to play the master; small and great expediencies and elaborations, permeated with the musty odour of old family medicines and old-wife wisdom; all of them grotesque and absurd in their form--because they address themselves to "all," because they generalize where generalization is not authorized; all of them speaking unconditionally, and taking themselves unconditionally; all of them flavoured not merely with one grain of salt, but rather endurable only, and sometimes even seductive, when they are over-spiced and begin to smell dangerously, especially of "the other world." that is all of little value when estimated intellectually, and is far from being "science," much less "wisdom"; but, repeated once more, and three times repeated, it is expediency, expediency, expediency, mixed with stupidity, stupidity, stupidity--whether it be the indifference and statuesque coldness towards the heated folly of the emotions, which the stoics advised and fostered; or the no-more-laughing and no-more-weeping of spinoza, the destruction of the emotions by their analysis and vivisection, which he recommended so naively; or the lowering of the emotions to an innocent mean at which they may be satisfied, the aristotelianism of morals; or even morality as the enjoyment of the emotions in a voluntary attenuation and spiritualization by the symbolism of art, perhaps as music, or as love of god, and of mankind for god's sake--for in religion the passions are once more enfranchised, provided that...; or, finally, even the complaisant and wanton surrender to the emotions, as has been taught by hafis and goethe, the bold letting-go of the reins, the spiritual and corporeal licentia morum in the exceptional cases of wise old codgers and drunkards, with whom it "no longer has much danger."--this also for the chapter: "morals as timidity." 199. inasmuch as in all ages, as long as mankind has existed, there have also been human herds (family alliances, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches), and always a great number who obey in proportion to the small number who command--in view, therefore, of the fact that obedience has been most practiced and fostered among mankind hitherto, one may reasonably suppose that, generally speaking, the need thereof is now innate in every one, as a kind of formal conscience which gives the command "thou shalt unconditionally do something, unconditionally refrain from something", in short, "thou shalt". this need tries to satisfy itself and to fill its form with a content, according to its strength, impatience, and eagerness, it at once seizes as an omnivorous appetite with little selection, and accepts whatever is shouted into its ear by all sorts of commanders--parents, teachers, laws, class prejudices, or public opinion. the extraordinary limitation of human development, the hesitation, protractedness, frequent retrogression, and turning thereof, is attributable to the fact that the herd-instinct of obedience is transmitted best, and at the cost of the art of command. if one imagine this instinct increasing to its greatest extent, commanders and independent individuals will finally be lacking altogether, or they will suffer inwardly from a bad conscience, and will have to impose a deception on themselves in the first place in order to be able to command just as if they also were only obeying. this condition of things actually exists in europe at present--i call it the moral hypocrisy of the commanding class. they know no other way of protecting themselves from their bad conscience than by playing the role of executors of older and higher orders (of predecessors, of the constitution, of justice, of the law, or of god himself), or they even justify themselves by maxims from the current opinions of the herd, as "first servants of their people," or "instruments of the public weal". on the other hand, the gregarious european man nowadays assumes an air as if he were the only kind of man that is allowable, he glorifies his qualities, such as public spirit, kindness, deference, industry, temperance, modesty, indulgence, sympathy, by virtue of which he is gentle, endurable, and useful to the herd, as the peculiarly human virtues. in cases, however, where it is believed that the leader and bell-wether cannot be dispensed with, attempt after attempt is made nowadays to replace commanders by the summing together of clever gregarious men all representative constitutions, for example, are of this origin. in spite of all, what a blessing, what a deliverance from a weight becoming unendurable, is the appearance of an absolute ruler for these gregarious europeans--of this fact the effect of the appearance of napoleon was the last great proof the history of the influence of napoleon is almost the history of the higher happiness to which the entire century has attained in its worthiest individuals and periods. 200. the man of an age of dissolution which mixes the races with one another, who has the inheritance of a diversified descent in his body--that is to say, contrary, and often not only contrary, instincts and standards of value, which struggle with one another and are seldom at peace--such a man of late culture and broken lights, will, on an average, be a weak man. his fundamental desire is that the war which is in him should come to an end; happiness appears to him in the character of a soothing medicine and mode of thought (for instance, epicurean or christian); it is above all things the happiness of repose, of undisturbedness, of repletion, of final unity--it is the "sabbath of sabbaths," to use the expression of the holy rhetorician, st. augustine, who was himself such a man.--should, however, the contrariety and conflict in such natures operate as an additional incentive and stimulus to life--and if, on the other hand, in addition to their powerful and irreconcilable instincts, they have also inherited and indoctrinated into them a proper mastery and subtlety for carrying on the conflict with themselves (that is to say, the faculty of self-control and self-deception), there then arise those marvelously incomprehensible and inexplicable beings, those enigmatical men, predestined for conquering and circumventing others, the finest examples of which are alcibiades and caesar (with whom i should like to associate the first of europeans according to my taste, the hohenstaufen, frederick the second), and among artists, perhaps leonardo da vinci. they appear precisely in the same periods when that weaker type, with its longing for repose, comes to the front; the two types are complementary to each other, and spring from the same causes. 201. as long as the utility which determines moral estimates is only gregarious utility, as long as the preservation of the community is only kept in view, and the immoral is sought precisely and exclusively in what seems dangerous to the maintenance of the community, there can be no "morality of love to one's neighbour." granted even that there is already a little constant exercise of consideration, sympathy, fairness, gentleness, and mutual assistance, granted that even in this condition of society all those instincts are already active which are latterly distinguished by honourable names as "virtues," and eventually almost coincide with the conception "morality": in that period they do not as yet belong to the domain of moral valuations--they are still ultra-moral. a sympathetic action, for instance, is neither called good nor bad, moral nor immoral, in the best period of the romans; and should it be praised, a sort of resentful disdain is compatible with this praise, even at the best, directly the sympathetic action is compared with one which contributes to the welfare of the whole, to the res publica. after all, "love to our neighbour" is always a secondary matter, partly conventional and arbitrarily manifested in relation to our fear of our neighbour. after the fabric of society seems on the whole established and secured against external dangers, it is this fear of our neighbour which again creates new perspectives of moral valuation. certain strong and dangerous instincts, such as the love of enterprise, foolhardiness, revengefulness, astuteness, rapacity, and love of power, which up till then had not only to be honoured from the point of view of general utility--under other names, of course, than those here given--but had to be fostered and cultivated (because they were perpetually required in the common danger against the common enemies), are now felt in their dangerousness to be doubly strong--when the outlets for them are lacking--and are gradually branded as immoral and given over to calumny. the contrary instincts and inclinations now attain to moral honour, the gregarious instinct gradually draws its conclusions. how much or how little dangerousness to the community or to equality is contained in an opinion, a condition, an emotion, a disposition, or an endowment--that is now the moral perspective, here again fear is the mother of morals. it is by the loftiest and strongest instincts, when they break out passionately and carry the individual far above and beyond the average, and the low level of the gregarious conscience, that the self-reliance of the community is destroyed, its belief in itself, its backbone, as it were, breaks, consequently these very instincts will be most branded and defamed. the lofty independent spirituality, the will to stand alone, and even the cogent reason, are felt to be dangers, everything that elevates the individual above the herd, and is a source of fear to the neighbour, is henceforth called evil, the tolerant, unassuming, self-adapting, self-equalizing disposition, the mediocrity of desires, attains to moral distinction and honour. finally, under very peaceful circumstances, there is always less opportunity and necessity for training the feelings to severity and rigour, and now every form of severity, even in justice, begins to disturb the conscience, a lofty and rigorous nobleness and self-responsibility almost offends, and awakens distrust, "the lamb," and still more "the sheep," wins respect. there is a point of diseased mellowness and effeminacy in the history of society, at which society itself takes the part of him who injures it, the part of the criminal, and does so, in fact, seriously and honestly. to punish, appears to it to be somehow unfair--it is certain that the idea of "punishment" and "the obligation to punish" are then painful and alarming to people. "is it not sufficient if the criminal be rendered harmless? why should we still punish? punishment itself is terrible!"--with these questions gregarious morality, the morality of fear, draws its ultimate conclusion. if one could at all do away with danger, the cause of fear, one would have done away with this morality at the same time, it would no longer be necessary, it would not consider itself any longer necessary!--whoever examines the conscience of the present-day european, will always elicit the same imperative from its thousand moral folds and hidden recesses, the imperative of the timidity of the herd "we wish that some time or other there may be nothing more to fear!" some time or other--the will and the way thereto is nowadays called "progress" all over europe. 202. let us at once say again what we have already said a hundred times, for people's ears nowadays are unwilling to hear such truths--our truths. we know well enough how offensive it sounds when any one plainly, and without metaphor, counts man among the animals, but it will be accounted to us almost a crime, that it is precisely in respect to men of "modern ideas" that we have constantly applied the terms "herd," "herd-instincts," and such like expressions. what avail is it? we cannot do otherwise, for it is precisely here that our new insight is. we have found that in all the principal moral judgments, europe has become unanimous, including likewise the countries where european influence prevails in europe people evidently know what socrates thought he did not know, and what the famous serpent of old once promised to teach--they "know" today what is good and evil. it must then sound hard and be distasteful to the ear, when we always insist that that which here thinks it knows, that which here glorifies itself with praise and blame, and calls itself good, is the instinct of the herding human animal, the instinct which has come and is ever coming more and more to the front, to preponderance and supremacy over other instincts, according to the increasing physiological approximation and resemblance of which it is the symptom. morality in europe at present is herding-animal morality, and therefore, as we understand the matter, only one kind of human morality, beside which, before which, and after which many other moralities, and above all higher moralities, are or should be possible. against such a "possibility," against such a "should be," however, this morality defends itself with all its strength, it says obstinately and inexorably "i am morality itself and nothing else is morality!" indeed, with the help of a religion which has humoured and flattered the sublimest desires of the herding-animal, things have reached such a point that we always find a more visible expression of this morality even in political and social arrangements: the democratic movement is the inheritance of the christian movement. that its tempo, however, is much too slow and sleepy for the more impatient ones, for those who are sick and distracted by the herding-instinct, is indicated by the increasingly furious howling, and always less disguised teeth-gnashing of the anarchist dogs, who are now roving through the highways of european culture. apparently in opposition to the peacefully industrious democrats and revolution-ideologues, and still more so to the awkward philosophasters and fraternity-visionaries who call themselves socialists and want a "free society," those are really at one with them all in their thorough and instinctive hostility to every form of society other than that of the autonomous herd (to the extent even of repudiating the notions "master" and "servant"--ni dieu ni maitre, says a socialist formula); at one in their tenacious opposition to every special claim, every special right and privilege (this means ultimately opposition to every right, for when all are equal, no one needs "rights" any longer); at one in their distrust of punitive justice (as though it were a violation of the weak, unfair to the necessary consequences of all former society); but equally at one in their religion of sympathy, in their compassion for all that feels, lives, and suffers (down to the very animals, up even to "god"--the extravagance of "sympathy for god" belongs to a democratic age); altogether at one in the cry and impatience of their sympathy, in their deadly hatred of suffering generally, in their almost feminine incapacity for witnessing it or allowing it; at one in their involuntary beglooming and heart-softening, under the spell of which europe seems to be threatened with a new buddhism; at one in their belief in the morality of mutual sympathy, as though it were morality in itself, the climax, the attained climax of mankind, the sole hope of the future, the consolation of the present, the great discharge from all the obligations of the past; altogether at one in their belief in the community as the deliverer, in the herd, and therefore in "themselves." 203. we, who hold a different belief--we, who regard the democratic movement, not only as a degenerating form of political organization, but as equivalent to a degenerating, a waning type of man, as involving his mediocrising and depreciation: where have we to fix our hopes? in new philosophers--there is no other alternative: in minds strong and original enough to initiate opposite estimates of value, to transvalue and invert "eternal valuations"; in forerunners, in men of the future, who in the present shall fix the constraints and fasten the knots which will compel millenniums to take new paths. to teach man the future of humanity as his will, as depending on human will, and to make preparation for vast hazardous enterprises and collective attempts in rearing and educating, in order thereby to put an end to the frightful rule of folly and chance which has hitherto gone by the name of "history" (the folly of the "greatest number" is only its last form)--for that purpose a new type of philosopher and commander will some time or other be needed, at the very idea of which everything that has existed in the way of occult, terrible, and benevolent beings might look pale and dwarfed. the image of such leaders hovers before our eyes:--is it lawful for me to say it aloud, ye free spirits? the conditions which one would partly have to create and partly utilize for their genesis; the presumptive methods and tests by virtue of which a soul should grow up to such an elevation and power as to feel a constraint to these tasks; a transvaluation of values, under the new pressure and hammer of which a conscience should be steeled and a heart transformed into brass, so as to bear the weight of such responsibility; and on the other hand the necessity for such leaders, the dreadful danger that they might be lacking, or miscarry and degenerate:--these are our real anxieties and glooms, ye know it well, ye free spirits! these are the heavy distant thoughts and storms which sweep across the heaven of our life. there are few pains so grievous as to have seen, divined, or experienced how an exceptional man has missed his way and deteriorated; but he who has the rare eye for the universal danger of "man" himself deteriorating, he who like us has recognized the extraordinary fortuitousness which has hitherto played its game in respect to the future of mankind--a game in which neither the hand, nor even a "finger of god" has participated!--he who divines the fate that is hidden under the idiotic unwariness and blind confidence of "modern ideas," and still more under the whole of christo-european morality--suffers from an anguish with which no other is to be compared. he sees at a glance all that could still be made out of man through a favourable accumulation and augmentation of human powers and arrangements; he knows with all the knowledge of his conviction how unexhausted man still is for the greatest possibilities, and how often in the past the type man has stood in presence of mysterious decisions and new paths:--he knows still better from his painfulest recollections on what wretched obstacles promising developments of the highest rank have hitherto usually gone to pieces, broken down, sunk, and become contemptible. the universal degeneracy of mankind to the level of the "man of the future"--as idealized by the socialistic fools and shallow-pates--this degeneracy and dwarfing of man to an absolutely gregarious animal (or as they call it, to a man of "free society"), this brutalizing of man into a pigmy with equal rights and claims, is undoubtedly possible! he who has thought out this possibility to its ultimate conclusion knows another loathing unknown to the rest of mankind--and perhaps also a new mission! chapter vi. we scholars 204. at the risk that moralizing may also reveal itself here as that which it has always been--namely, resolutely montrer ses plaies, according to balzac--i would venture to protest against an improper and injurious alteration of rank, which quite unnoticed, and as if with the best conscience, threatens nowadays to establish itself in the relations of science and philosophy. i mean to say that one must have the right out of one's own experience--experience, as it seems to me, always implies unfortunate experience?--to treat of such an important question of rank, so as not to speak of colour like the blind, or against science like women and artists ("ah! this dreadful science!" sigh their instinct and their shame, "it always finds things out!"). the declaration of independence of the scientific man, his emancipation from philosophy, is one of the subtler after-effects of democratic organization and disorganization: the self-glorification and self-conceitedness of the learned man is now everywhere in full bloom, and in its best springtime--which does not mean to imply that in this case self-praise smells sweet. here also the instinct of the populace cries, "freedom from all masters!" and after science has, with the happiest results, resisted theology, whose "hand-maid" it had been too long, it now proposes in its wantonness and indiscretion to lay down laws for philosophy, and in its turn to play the "master"--what am i saying! to play the philosopher on its own account. my memory--the memory of a scientific man, if you please!--teems with the naivetes of insolence which i have heard about philosophy and philosophers from young naturalists and old physicians (not to mention the most cultured and most conceited of all learned men, the philologists and schoolmasters, who are both the one and the other by profession). on one occasion it was the specialist and the jack horner who instinctively stood on the defensive against all synthetic tasks and capabilities; at another time it was the industrious worker who had got a scent of otium and refined luxuriousness in the internal economy of the philosopher, and felt himself aggrieved and belittled thereby. on another occasion it was the colour-blindness of the utilitarian, who sees nothing in philosophy but a series of refuted systems, and an extravagant expenditure which "does nobody any good". at another time the fear of disguised mysticism and of the boundary-adjustment of knowledge became conspicuous, at another time the disregard of individual philosophers, which had involuntarily extended to disregard of philosophy generally. in fine, i found most frequently, behind the proud disdain of philosophy in young scholars, the evil after-effect of some particular philosopher, to whom on the whole obedience had been foresworn, without, however, the spell of his scornful estimates of other philosophers having been got rid of--the result being a general ill-will to all philosophy. (such seems to me, for instance, the after-effect of schopenhauer on the most modern germany: by his unintelligent rage against hegel, he has succeeded in severing the whole of the last generation of germans from its connection with german culture, which culture, all things considered, has been an elevation and a divining refinement of the historical sense, but precisely at this point schopenhauer himself was poor, irreceptive, and un-german to the extent of ingeniousness.) on the whole, speaking generally, it may just have been the humanness, all-too-humanness of the modern philosophers themselves, in short, their contemptibleness, which has injured most radically the reverence for philosophy and opened the doors to the instinct of the populace. let it but be acknowledged to what an extent our modern world diverges from the whole style of the world of heraclitus, plato, empedocles, and whatever else all the royal and magnificent anchorites of the spirit were called, and with what justice an honest man of science may feel himself of a better family and origin, in view of such representatives of philosophy, who, owing to the fashion of the present day, are just as much aloft as they are down below--in germany, for instance, the two lions of berlin, the anarchist eugen duhring and the amalgamist eduard von hartmann. it is especially the sight of those hotch-potch philosophers, who call themselves "realists," or "positivists," which is calculated to implant a dangerous distrust in the soul of a young and ambitious scholar those philosophers, at the best, are themselves but scholars and specialists, that is very evident! all of them are persons who have been vanquished and brought back again under the dominion of science, who at one time or another claimed more from themselves, without having a right to the "more" and its responsibility--and who now, creditably, rancorously, and vindictively, represent in word and deed, disbelief in the master-task and supremacy of philosophy after all, how could it be otherwise? science flourishes nowadays and has the good conscience clearly visible on its countenance, while that to which the entire modern philosophy has gradually sunk, the remnant of philosophy of the present day, excites distrust and displeasure, if not scorn and pity philosophy reduced to a "theory of knowledge," no more in fact than a diffident science of epochs and doctrine of forbearance a philosophy that never even gets beyond the threshold, and rigorously denies itself the right to enter--that is philosophy in its last throes, an end, an agony, something that awakens pity. how could such a philosophy--rule! 205. the dangers that beset the evolution of the philosopher are, in fact, so manifold nowadays, that one might doubt whether this fruit could still come to maturity. the extent and towering structure of the sciences have increased enormously, and therewith also the probability that the philosopher will grow tired even as a learner, or will attach himself somewhere and "specialize" so that he will no longer attain to his elevation, that is to say, to his superspection, his circumspection, and his despection. or he gets aloft too late, when the best of his maturity and strength is past, or when he is impaired, coarsened, and deteriorated, so that his view, his general estimate of things, is no longer of much importance. it is perhaps just the refinement of his intellectual conscience that makes him hesitate and linger on the way, he dreads the temptation to become a dilettante, a millepede, a milleantenna, he knows too well that as a discerner, one who has lost his self-respect no longer commands, no longer leads, unless he should aspire to become a great play-actor, a philosophical cagliostro and spiritual rat-catcher--in short, a misleader. this is in the last instance a question of taste, if it has not really been a question of conscience. to double once more the philosopher's difficulties, there is also the fact that he demands from himself a verdict, a yea or nay, not concerning science, but concerning life and the worth of life--he learns unwillingly to believe that it is his right and even his duty to obtain this verdict, and he has to seek his way to the right and the belief only through the most extensive (perhaps disturbing and destroying) experiences, often hesitating, doubting, and dumbfounded. in fact, the philosopher has long been mistaken and confused by the multitude, either with the scientific man and ideal scholar, or with the religiously elevated, desensualized, desecularized visionary and god-intoxicated man; and even yet when one hears anybody praised, because he lives "wisely," or "as a philosopher," it hardly means anything more than "prudently and apart." wisdom: that seems to the populace to be a kind of flight, a means and artifice for withdrawing successfully from a bad game; but the genuine philosopher--does it not seem so to us, my friends?--lives "unphilosophically" and "unwisely," above all, imprudently, and feels the obligation and burden of a hundred attempts and temptations of life--he risks himself constantly, he plays this bad game. 206. in relation to the genius, that is to say, a being who either engenders or produces--both words understood in their fullest sense--the man of learning, the scientific average man, has always something of the old maid about him; for, like her, he is not conversant with the two principal functions of man. to both, of course, to the scholar and to the old maid, one concedes respectability, as if by way of indemnification--in these cases one emphasizes the respectability--and yet, in the compulsion of this concession, one has the same admixture of vexation. let us examine more closely: what is the scientific man? firstly, a commonplace type of man, with commonplace virtues: that is to say, a non-ruling, non-authoritative, and non-self-sufficient type of man; he possesses industry, patient adaptableness to rank and file, equability and moderation in capacity and requirement; he has the instinct for people like himself, and for that which they require--for instance: the portion of independence and green meadow without which there is no rest from labour, the claim to honour and consideration (which first and foremost presupposes recognition and recognisability), the sunshine of a good name, the perpetual ratification of his value and usefulness, with which the inward distrust which lies at the bottom of the heart of all dependent men and gregarious animals, has again and again to be overcome. the learned man, as is appropriate, has also maladies and faults of an ignoble kind: he is full of petty envy, and has a lynx-eye for the weak points in those natures to whose elevations he cannot attain. he is confiding, yet only as one who lets himself go, but does not flow; and precisely before the man of the great current he stands all the colder and more reserved--his eye is then like a smooth and irresponsive lake, which is no longer moved by rapture or sympathy. the worst and most dangerous thing of which a scholar is capable results from the instinct of mediocrity of his type, from the jesuitism of mediocrity, which labours instinctively for the destruction of the exceptional man, and endeavours to break--or still better, to relax--every bent bow to relax, of course, with consideration, and naturally with an indulgent hand--to relax with confiding sympathy that is the real art of jesuitism, which has always understood how to introduce itself as the religion of sympathy. 207. however gratefully one may welcome the objective spirit--and who has not been sick to death of all subjectivity and its confounded ipsisimosity!--in the end, however, one must learn caution even with regard to one's gratitude, and put a stop to the exaggeration with which the unselfing and depersonalizing of the spirit has recently been celebrated, as if it were the goal in itself, as if it were salvation and glorification--as is especially accustomed to happen in the pessimist school, which has also in its turn good reasons for paying the highest honours to "disinterested knowledge" the objective man, who no longer curses and scolds like the pessimist, the ideal man of learning in whom the scientific instinct blossoms forth fully after a thousand complete and partial failures, is assuredly one of the most costly instruments that exist, but his place is in the hand of one who is more powerful he is only an instrument, we may say, he is a mirror--he is no "purpose in himself" the objective man is in truth a mirror accustomed to prostration before everything that wants to be known, with such desires only as knowing or "reflecting" implies--he waits until something comes, and then expands himself sensitively, so that even the light footsteps and gliding-past of spiritual beings may not be lost on his surface and film whatever "personality" he still possesses seems to him accidental, arbitrary, or still oftener, disturbing, so much has he come to regard himself as the passage and reflection of outside forms and events he calls up the recollection of "himself" with an effort, and not infrequently wrongly, he readily confounds himself with other persons, he makes mistakes with regard to his own needs, and here only is he unrefined and negligent perhaps he is troubled about the health, or the pettiness and confined atmosphere of wife and friend, or the lack of companions and society--indeed, he sets himself to reflect on his suffering, but in vain! his thoughts already rove away to the more general case, and tomorrow he knows as little as he knew yesterday how to help himself he does not now take himself seriously and devote time to himself he is serene, not from lack of trouble, but from lack of capacity for grasping and dealing with his trouble the habitual complaisance with respect to all objects and experiences, the radiant and impartial hospitality with which he receives everything that comes his way, his habit of inconsiderate good-nature, of dangerous indifference as to yea and nay: alas! there are enough of cases in which he has to atone for these virtues of his!--and as man generally, he becomes far too easily the caput mortuum of such virtues. should one wish love or hatred from him--i mean love and hatred as god, woman, and animal understand them--he will do what he can, and furnish what he can. but one must not be surprised if it should not be much--if he should show himself just at this point to be false, fragile, questionable, and deteriorated. his love is constrained, his hatred is artificial, and rather un tour de force, a slight ostentation and exaggeration. he is only genuine so far as he can be objective; only in his serene totality is he still "nature" and "natural." his mirroring and eternally self-polishing soul no longer knows how to affirm, no longer how to deny; he does not command; neither does he destroy. "je ne meprise presque rien"--he says, with leibniz: let us not overlook nor undervalue the presque! neither is he a model man; he does not go in advance of any one, nor after, either; he places himself generally too far off to have any reason for espousing the cause of either good or evil. if he has been so long confounded with the philosopher, with the caesarian trainer and dictator of civilization, he has had far too much honour, and what is more essential in him has been overlooked--he is an instrument, something of a slave, though certainly the sublimest sort of slave, but nothing in himself--presque rien! the objective man is an instrument, a costly, easily injured, easily tarnished measuring instrument and mirroring apparatus, which is to be taken care of and respected; but he is no goal, not outgoing nor upgoing, no complementary man in whom the rest of existence justifies itself, no termination--and still less a commencement, an engendering, or primary cause, nothing hardy, powerful, self-centred, that wants to be master; but rather only a soft, inflated, delicate, movable potter's-form, that must wait for some kind of content and frame to "shape" itself thereto--for the most part a man without frame and content, a "selfless" man. consequently, also, nothing for women, in parenthesi. 208. when a philosopher nowadays makes known that he is not a skeptic--i hope that has been gathered from the foregoing description of the objective spirit?--people all hear it impatiently; they regard him on that account with some apprehension, they would like to ask so many, many questions... indeed among timid hearers, of whom there are now so many, he is henceforth said to be dangerous. with his repudiation of skepticism, it seems to them as if they heard some evil-threatening sound in the distance, as if a new kind of explosive were being tried somewhere, a dynamite of the spirit, perhaps a newly discovered russian nihiline, a pessimism bonae voluntatis, that not only denies, means denial, but--dreadful thought! practises denial. against this kind of "good-will"--a will to the veritable, actual negation of life--there is, as is generally acknowledged nowadays, no better soporific and sedative than skepticism, the mild, pleasing, lulling poppy of skepticism; and hamlet himself is now prescribed by the doctors of the day as an antidote to the "spirit," and its underground noises. "are not our ears already full of bad sounds?" say the skeptics, as lovers of repose, and almost as a kind of safety police; "this subterranean nay is terrible! be still, ye pessimistic moles!" the skeptic, in effect, that delicate creature, is far too easily frightened; his conscience is schooled so as to start at every nay, and even at that sharp, decided yea, and feels something like a bite thereby. yea! and nay!--they seem to him opposed to morality; he loves, on the contrary, to make a festival to his virtue by a noble aloofness, while perhaps he says with montaigne: "what do i know?" or with socrates: "i know that i know nothing." or: "here i do not trust myself, no door is open to me." or: "even if the door were open, why should i enter immediately?" or: "what is the use of any hasty hypotheses? it might quite well be in good taste to make no hypotheses at all. are you absolutely obliged to straighten at once what is crooked? to stuff every hole with some kind of oakum? is there not time enough for that? has not the time leisure? oh, ye demons, can ye not at all wait? the uncertain also has its charms, the sphinx, too, is a circe, and circe, too, was a philosopher."--thus does a skeptic console himself; and in truth he needs some consolation. for skepticism is the most spiritual expression of a certain many-sided physiological temperament, which in ordinary language is called nervous debility and sickliness; it arises whenever races or classes which have been long separated, decisively and suddenly blend with one another. in the new generation, which has inherited as it were different standards and valuations in its blood, everything is disquiet, derangement, doubt, and tentativeness; the best powers operate restrictively, the very virtues prevent each other growing and becoming strong, equilibrium, ballast, and perpendicular stability are lacking in body and soul. that, however, which is most diseased and degenerated in such nondescripts is the will; they are no longer familiar with independence of decision, or the courageous feeling of pleasure in willing--they are doubtful of the "freedom of the will" even in their dreams our present-day europe, the scene of a senseless, precipitate attempt at a radical blending of classes, and consequently of races, is therefore skeptical in all its heights and depths, sometimes exhibiting the mobile skepticism which springs impatiently and wantonly from branch to branch, sometimes with gloomy aspect, like a cloud over-charged with interrogative signs--and often sick unto death of its will! paralysis of will, where do we not find this cripple sitting nowadays! and yet how bedecked oftentimes' how seductively ornamented! there are the finest gala dresses and disguises for this disease, and that, for instance, most of what places itself nowadays in the show-cases as "objectiveness," "the scientific spirit," "l'art pour l'art," and "pure voluntary knowledge," is only decked-out skepticism and paralysis of will--i am ready to answer for this diagnosis of the european disease--the disease of the will is diffused unequally over europe, it is worst and most varied where civilization has longest prevailed, it decreases according as "the barbarian" still--or again--asserts his claims under the loose drapery of western culture it is therefore in the france of today, as can be readily disclosed and comprehended, that the will is most infirm, and france, which has always had a masterly aptitude for converting even the portentous crises of its spirit into something charming and seductive, now manifests emphatically its intellectual ascendancy over europe, by being the school and exhibition of all the charms of skepticism the power to will and to persist, moreover, in a resolution, is already somewhat stronger in germany, and again in the north of germany it is stronger than in central germany, it is considerably stronger in england, spain, and corsica, associated with phlegm in the former and with hard skulls in the latter--not to mention italy, which is too young yet to know what it wants, and must first show whether it can exercise will, but it is strongest and most surprising of all in that immense middle empire where europe as it were flows back to asia--namely, in russia there the power to will has been long stored up and accumulated, there the will--uncertain whether to be negative or affirmative--waits threateningly to be discharged (to borrow their pet phrase from our physicists) perhaps not only indian wars and complications in asia would be necessary to free europe from its greatest danger, but also internal subversion, the shattering of the empire into small states, and above all the introduction of parliamentary imbecility, together with the obligation of every one to read his newspaper at breakfast i do not say this as one who desires it, in my heart i should rather prefer the contrary--i mean such an increase in the threatening attitude of russia, that europe would have to make up its mind to become equally threatening--namely, to acquire one will, by means of a new caste to rule over the continent, a persistent, dreadful will of its own, that can set its aims thousands of years ahead; so that the long spun-out comedy of its petty-statism, and its dynastic as well as its democratic many-willed-ness, might finally be brought to a close. the time for petty politics is past; the next century will bring the struggle for the dominion of the world--the compulsion to great politics. 209. as to how far the new warlike age on which we europeans have evidently entered may perhaps favour the growth of another and stronger kind of skepticism, i should like to express myself preliminarily merely by a parable, which the lovers of german history will already understand. that unscrupulous enthusiast for big, handsome grenadiers (who, as king of prussia, brought into being a military and skeptical genius--and therewith, in reality, the new and now triumphantly emerged type of german), the problematic, crazy father of frederick the great, had on one point the very knack and lucky grasp of the genius: he knew what was then lacking in germany, the want of which was a hundred times more alarming and serious than any lack of culture and social form--his ill-will to the young frederick resulted from the anxiety of a profound instinct. men were lacking; and he suspected, to his bitterest regret, that his own son was not man enough. there, however, he deceived himself; but who would not have deceived himself in his place? he saw his son lapsed to atheism, to the esprit, to the pleasant frivolity of clever frenchmen--he saw in the background the great bloodsucker, the spider skepticism; he suspected the incurable wretchedness of a heart no longer hard enough either for evil or good, and of a broken will that no longer commands, is no longer able to command. 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 spirit and its critical and historical distrust owing to the insuperably strong and tough masculine character of the great german philologists and historical critics (who, rightly estimated, were also all of them artists of destruction and dissolution), a new conception of the german spirit gradually established itself--in spite of all romanticism in music and philosophy--in which the leaning towards masculine skepticism was decidedly prominent whether, for instance, as fearlessness of gaze, as courage and sternness of the dissecting hand, or as resolute will to dangerous voyages of discovery, to spiritualized north pole expeditions under barren and dangerous skies. there may be good grounds for it when warm-blooded and superficial humanitarians cross themselves before this spirit, cet esprit fataliste, ironique, mephistophelique, as michelet calls it, not without a shudder. but if one would realize how characteristic is this fear of the "man" in the german spirit which awakened europe out of its "dogmatic slumber," let us call to mind the former conception which had to be overcome by this new one--and that it is not so very long ago that a masculinized woman could dare, with unbridled presumption, to recommend the germans to the interest of europe as gentle, good-hearted, weak-willed, and poetical fools. finally, let us only understand profoundly enough napoleon's astonishment when he saw goethe it reveals what had been regarded for centuries as the "german spirit" "voila un homme!"--that was as much as to say "but this is a man! and i only expected to see a german!" 210. supposing, then, that in the picture of the philosophers of the future, some trait suggests the question whether they must not perhaps be skeptics in the last-mentioned sense, something in them would only be designated thereby--and not they themselves. with equal right they might call themselves critics, and assuredly they will be men of experiments. by the name with which i ventured to baptize them, i have already expressly emphasized their attempting and their love of attempting is this because, as critics in body and soul, they will love to make use of experiments in a new, and perhaps wider and more dangerous sense? in their passion for knowledge, will they have to go further in daring and painful attempts than the sensitive and pampered taste of a democratic century can approve of?--there is no doubt these coming ones will be least able to dispense with the serious and not unscrupulous qualities which distinguish the critic from the skeptic i mean the certainty as to standards of worth, the conscious employment of a unity of method, the wary courage, the standing-alone, and the capacity for self-responsibility, indeed, they will avow among themselves a delight in denial and dissection, and a certain considerate cruelty, which knows how to handle the knife surely and deftly, even when the heart bleeds they will be sterner (and perhaps not always towards themselves only) than humane people may desire, they will not deal with the "truth" in order that it may "please" them, or "elevate" and "inspire" them--they will rather have little faith in "truth" bringing with it such revels for the feelings. they will smile, those rigorous spirits, when any one says in their presence "that thought elevates me, why should it not be true?" or "that work enchants me, why should it not be beautiful?" or "that artist enlarges me, why should he not be great?" perhaps they will not only have a smile, but a genuine disgust for all that is thus rapturous, idealistic, feminine, and hermaphroditic, and if any one could look into their inmost hearts, he would not easily find therein the intention to reconcile "christian sentiments" with "antique taste," or even with "modern parliamentarism" (the kind of reconciliation necessarily found even among philosophers in our very uncertain and consequently very conciliatory century). critical discipline, and every habit that conduces to purity and rigour in intellectual matters, will not only be demanded from themselves by these philosophers of the future, they may even make a display thereof as their special adornment--nevertheless they will not want to be called critics on that account. it will seem to them no small indignity to philosophy to have it decreed, as is so welcome nowadays, that "philosophy itself is criticism and critical science--and nothing else whatever!" though this estimate of philosophy may enjoy the approval of all the positivists of france and germany (and possibly it even flattered the heart and taste of kant: let us call to mind the titles of his principal works), our new philosophers will say, notwithstanding, that critics are instruments of the philosopher, and just on that account, as instruments, they are far from being philosophers themselves! even the great chinaman of konigsberg was only a great critic. 211. i insist upon it that people finally cease confounding philosophical workers, and in general scientific men, with philosophers--that precisely here one should strictly give "each his own," and not give those far too much, these far too little. it may be necessary for the education of the real philosopher that he himself should have once stood upon all those steps upon which his servants, the scientific workers of philosophy, remain standing, and must remain standing he himself must perhaps have been critic, and dogmatist, and historian, and besides, poet, and collector, and traveler, and riddle-reader, and moralist, and seer, and "free spirit," and almost everything, in order to traverse the whole range of human values and estimations, and that he may be able with a variety of eyes and consciences to look from a height to any distance, from a depth up to any height, from a nook into any expanse. but all these are only preliminary conditions for his task; this task itself demands something else--it requires him to create values. the philosophical workers, after the excellent pattern of kant and hegel, have to fix and formalize some great existing body of valuations--that is to say, former determinations of value, creations of value, which have become prevalent, and are for a time called "truths"--whether in the domain of the logical, the political (moral), or the artistic. it is for these investigators to make whatever has happened and been esteemed hitherto, conspicuous, conceivable, intelligible, and manageable, to shorten everything long, even "time" itself, and to subjugate the entire past: an immense and wonderful task, in the carrying out of which all refined pride, all tenacious will, can surely find satisfaction. the real philosophers, however, are commanders and law-givers; they say: "thus shall it be!" they determine first the whither and the why of mankind, and thereby set aside the previous labour of all philosophical workers, and all subjugators of the past--they grasp at the future with a creative hand, and whatever is and was, becomes for them thereby a means, an instrument, and a hammer. their "knowing" is creating, their creating is a law-giving, their will to truth is--will to power.--are there at present such philosophers? have there ever been such philosophers? must there not be such philosophers some day? ... 212. it is always more obvious to me that the philosopher, as a man indispensable for the morrow and the day after the morrow, has ever found himself, and has been obliged to find himself, in contradiction to the day in which he lives; his enemy has always been the ideal of his day. hitherto all those extraordinary furtherers of humanity whom one calls philosophers--who rarely regarded themselves as lovers of wisdom, but rather as disagreeable fools and dangerous interrogators--have found their mission, their hard, involuntary, imperative mission (in the end, however, the greatness of their mission), in being the bad conscience of their age. in putting the vivisector's knife to the breast of the very virtues of their age, they have betrayed their own secret; it has been for the sake of a new greatness of man, a new untrodden path to his aggrandizement. they have always disclosed how much hypocrisy, indolence, self-indulgence, and self-neglect, how much falsehood was concealed under the most venerated types of contemporary morality, how much virtue was outlived, they have always said "we must remove hence to where you are least at home" in the face of a world of "modern ideas," which would like to confine every one in a corner, in a "specialty," a philosopher, if there could be philosophers nowadays, would be compelled to place the greatness of man, the conception of "greatness," precisely in his comprehensiveness and multifariousness, in his all-roundness, he would even determine worth and rank according to the amount and variety of that which a man could bear and take upon himself, according to the extent to which a man could stretch his responsibility nowadays the taste and virtue of the age weaken and attenuate the will, nothing is so adapted to the spirit of the age as weakness of will consequently, in the ideal of the philosopher, strength of will, sternness, and capacity for prolonged resolution, must specially be included in the conception of "greatness", with as good a right as the opposite doctrine, with its ideal of a silly, renouncing, humble, selfless humanity, was suited to an opposite age--such as the sixteenth century, which suffered from its accumulated energy of will, and from the wildest torrents and floods of selfishness in the time of socrates, among men only of worn-out instincts, old conservative athenians who let themselves go--"for the sake of happiness," as they said, for the sake of pleasure, as their conduct indicated--and who had continually on their lips the old pompous words to which they had long forfeited the right by the life they led, irony was perhaps necessary for greatness of soul, the wicked socratic assurance of the old physician and plebeian, who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as into the flesh and heart of the "noble," with a look that said plainly enough "do not dissemble before me! here--we are equal!" at present, on the contrary, when throughout europe the herding-animal alone attains to honours, and dispenses honours, when "equality of right" can too readily be transformed into equality in wrong--i mean to say into general war against everything rare, strange, and privileged, against the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, the creative plenipotence and lordliness--at present it belongs to the conception of "greatness" to be noble, to wish to be apart, to be capable of being different, to stand alone, to have to live by personal initiative, and the philosopher will betray something of his own ideal when he asserts "he shall be the greatest who can be the most solitary, the most concealed, the most divergent, the man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, and of super-abundance of will; precisely this shall be called greatness: as diversified as can be entire, as ample as can be full." and to ask once more the question: is greatness possible--nowadays? 213. it is difficult to learn what a philosopher is, because it cannot be taught: one must "know" it by experience--or one should have the pride not to know it. the fact that at present people all talk of things of which they cannot have any experience, is true more especially and unfortunately as concerns the philosopher and philosophical matters:--the very few know them, are permitted to know them, and all popular ideas about them are false. thus, for instance, the truly philosophical combination of a bold, exuberant spirituality which runs at presto pace, and a dialectic rigour and necessity which makes no false step, is unknown to most thinkers and scholars from their own experience, and therefore, should any one speak of it in their presence, it is incredible to them. they conceive of every necessity as troublesome, as a painful compulsory obedience and state of constraint; thinking itself is regarded by them as something slow and hesitating, almost as a trouble, and often enough as "worthy of the sweat of the noble"--but not at all as something easy and divine, closely related to dancing and exuberance! "to think" and to take a matter "seriously," "arduously"--that is one and the same thing to them; such only has been their "experience."--artists have here perhaps a finer intuition; they who know only too well that precisely when they no longer do anything "arbitrarily," and everything of necessity, their feeling of freedom, of subtlety, of power, of creatively fixing, disposing, and shaping, reaches its climax--in short, that necessity and "freedom of will" are then the same thing with them. there is, in fine, a gradation of rank in psychical states, to which the gradation of rank in the problems corresponds; and the highest problems repel ruthlessly every one who ventures too near them, without being predestined for their solution by the loftiness and power of his spirituality. of what use is it for nimble, everyday intellects, or clumsy, honest mechanics and empiricists to press, in their plebeian ambition, close to such problems, and as it were into this "holy of holies"--as so often happens nowadays! but coarse feet must never tread upon such carpets: this is provided for in the primary law of things; the doors remain closed to those intruders, though they may dash and break their heads thereon. people have always to be born to a high station, or, more definitely, they have to be bred for it: a person has only a right to philosophy--taking the word in its higher significance--in virtue of his descent; the ancestors, the "blood," decide here also. many generations must have prepared the way for the coming of the philosopher; each of his virtues must have been separately acquired, nurtured, transmitted, and embodied; not only the bold, easy, delicate course and current of his thoughts, but above all the readiness for great responsibilities, the majesty of ruling glance and contemning look, the feeling of separation from the multitude with their duties and virtues, the kindly patronage and defense of whatever is misunderstood and calumniated, be it god or devil, the delight and practice of supreme justice, the art of commanding, the amplitude of will, the lingering eye which rarely admires, rarely looks up, rarely loves.... chapter vii. our virtues 214. our virtues?--it is probable that we, too, have still our virtues, although naturally they are not those sincere and massive virtues on account of which we hold our grandfathers in esteem and also at a little distance from us. we europeans of the day after tomorrow, we firstlings of the twentieth century--with all our dangerous curiosity, our multifariousness and art of disguising, our mellow and seemingly sweetened cruelty in sense and spirit--we shall presumably, if we must have virtues, have those only which have come to agreement with our most secret and heartfelt inclinations, with our most ardent requirements: well, then, let us look for them in our labyrinths!--where, as we know, so many things lose themselves, so many things get quite lost! and is there anything finer than to search for one's own virtues? is it not almost to believe in one's own virtues? but this "believing in one's own virtues"--is it not practically the same as what was formerly called one's "good conscience," that long, respectable pigtail of an idea, which our grandfathers used to hang behind their heads, and often enough also behind their understandings? it seems, therefore, that however little we may imagine ourselves to be old-fashioned and grandfatherly respectable in other respects, in one thing we are nevertheless the worthy grandchildren of our grandfathers, we last europeans with good consciences: we also still wear their pigtail.--ah! if you only knew how soon, so very soon--it will be different! 215. as in the stellar firmament there are sometimes two suns which determine the path of one planet, and in certain cases suns of different colours shine around a single planet, now with red light, now with green, and then simultaneously illumine and flood it with motley colours: so we modern men, owing to the complicated mechanism of our "firmament," are determined by different moralities; our actions shine alternately in different colours, and are seldom unequivocal--and there are often cases, also, in which our actions are motley-coloured. 216. to love one's enemies? i think that has been well learnt: it takes place thousands of times at present on a large and small scale; indeed, at times the higher and sublimer thing takes place:--we learn to despise when we love, and precisely when we love best; all of it, however, unconsciously, without noise, without ostentation, with the shame and secrecy of goodness, which forbids the utterance of the pompous word and the formula of virtue. morality as attitude--is opposed to our taste nowadays. this is also an advance, as it was an advance in our fathers that religion as an attitude finally became opposed to their taste, including the enmity and voltairean bitterness against religion (and all that formerly belonged to freethinker-pantomime). it is the music in our conscience, the dance in our spirit, to which puritan litanies, moral sermons, and goody-goodness won't chime. 217. let us be careful in dealing with those who attach great importance to being credited with moral tact and subtlety in moral discernment! they never forgive us if they have once made a mistake before us (or even with regard to us)--they inevitably become our instinctive calumniators and detractors, even when they still remain our "friends."--blessed are the forgetful: for they "get the better" even of their blunders. 218. the psychologists of france--and where else are there still psychologists nowadays?--have never yet exhausted their bitter and manifold enjoyment of the betise bourgeoise, just as though... in short, they betray something thereby. flaubert, for instance, the honest citizen of rouen, neither saw, heard, nor tasted anything else in the end; it was his mode of self-torment and refined cruelty. as this is growing wearisome, i would now recommend for a change something else for a pleasure--namely, the unconscious astuteness with which good, fat, honest mediocrity always behaves towards loftier spirits and the tasks they have to perform, the subtle, barbed, jesuitical astuteness, which is a thousand times subtler than the taste and understanding of the middle-class in its best moments--subtler even than the understanding of its victims:--a repeated proof that "instinct" is the most intelligent of all kinds of intelligence which have hitherto been discovered. in short, you psychologists, study the philosophy of the "rule" in its struggle with the "exception": there you have a spectacle fit for gods and godlike malignity! or, in plainer words, practise vivisection on "good people," on the "homo bonae voluntatis," on yourselves! 219. the practice of judging and condemning morally, is the favourite revenge of the intellectually shallow on those who are less so, it is also a kind of indemnity for their being badly endowed by nature, and finally, it is an opportunity for acquiring spirit and becoming subtle--malice spiritualises. they are glad in their inmost heart that there is a standard according to which those who are over-endowed with intellectual goods and privileges, are equal to them, they contend for the "equality of all before god," and almost need the belief in god for this purpose. it is among them that the most powerful antagonists of atheism are found. if any one were to say to them "a lofty spirituality is beyond all comparison with the honesty and respectability of a merely moral man"--it would make them furious, i shall take care not to say so. i would rather flatter them with my theory that lofty spirituality itself exists only as the ultimate product of moral qualities, that it is a synthesis of all qualities attributed to the "merely moral" man, after they have been acquired singly through long training and practice, perhaps during a whole series of generations, that lofty spirituality is precisely the spiritualising of justice, and the beneficent severity which knows that it is authorized to maintain gradations of rank in the world, even among things--and not only among men. 220. now that the praise of the "disinterested person" is so popular one must--probably not without some danger--get an idea of what people actually take an interest in, and what are the things generally which fundamentally and profoundly concern ordinary men--including the cultured, even the learned, and perhaps philosophers also, if appearances do not deceive. the fact thereby becomes obvious that the greater part of what interests and charms higher natures, and more refined and fastidious tastes, seems absolutely "uninteresting" to the average man--if, notwithstanding, he perceive devotion to these interests, he calls it desinteresse, and wonders how it is possible to act "disinterestedly." there have been philosophers who could give this popular astonishment a seductive and mystical, other-worldly expression (perhaps because they did not know the higher nature by experience?), instead of stating the naked and candidly reasonable truth that "disinterested" action is very interesting and "interested" action, provided that... "and love?"--what! even an action for love's sake shall be "unegoistic"? but you fools--! "and the praise of the self-sacrificer?"--but whoever has really offered sacrifice knows that he wanted and obtained something for it--perhaps something from himself for something from himself; that he relinquished here in order to have more there, perhaps in general to be more, or even feel himself "more." but this is a realm of questions and answers in which a more fastidious spirit does not like to stay: for here truth has to stifle her yawns so much when she is obliged to answer. and after all, truth is a woman; one must not use force with her. 221. "it sometimes happens," said a moralistic pedant and trifle-retailer, "that i honour and respect an unselfish man: not, however, because he is unselfish, but because i think he has a right to be useful to another man at his own expense. in short, the question is always who he is, and who the other is. for instance, in a person created and destined for command, self-denial and modest retirement, instead of being virtues, would be the waste of virtues: so it seems to me. every system of unegoistic morality which takes itself unconditionally and appeals to every one, not only sins against good taste, but is also an incentive to sins of omission, an additional seduction under the mask of philanthropy--and precisely a seduction and injury to the higher, rarer, and more privileged types of men. moral systems must be compelled first of all to bow before the gradations of rank; their presumption must be driven home to their conscience--until they thoroughly understand at last that it is immoral to say that 'what is right for one is proper for another.'"--so said my moralistic pedant and bonhomme. did he perhaps deserve to be laughed at when he thus exhorted systems of morals to practise morality? but one should not be too much in the right if one wishes to have the laughers on one's own side; a grain of wrong pertains even to good taste. 222. wherever sympathy (fellow-suffering) is preached nowadays--and, if i gather rightly, no other religion is any longer preached--let the psychologist have his ears open through all the vanity, through all the noise which is natural to these preachers (as to all preachers), he will hear a hoarse, groaning, genuine note of self-contempt. it belongs to the overshadowing and uglifying of europe, which has been on the increase for a century (the first symptoms of which are already specified documentarily in a thoughtful letter of galiani to madame d'epinay)--if it is not really the cause thereof! the man of "modern ideas," the conceited ape, is excessively dissatisfied with himself--this is perfectly certain. he suffers, and his vanity wants him only "to suffer with his fellows." 223. the hybrid european--a tolerably ugly plebeian, taken all in all--absolutely requires a costume: he needs history as a storeroom of costumes. to be sure, he notices that none of the costumes fit him properly--he changes and changes. let us look at the nineteenth century with respect to these hasty preferences and changes in its masquerades of style, and also with respect to its moments of desperation on account of "nothing suiting" us. it is in vain to get ourselves up as romantic, or classical, or christian, or florentine, or barocco, or "national," in moribus et artibus: it does not "clothe us"! but the "spirit," especially the "historical spirit," profits even by this desperation: once and again a new sample of the past or of the foreign is tested, put on, taken off, packed up, and above all studied--we are the first studious age in puncto of "costumes," i mean as concerns morals, articles of belief, artistic tastes, and religions; we are prepared as no other age has ever been for a carnival in the grand style, for the most spiritual festival--laughter and arrogance, for the transcendental height of supreme folly and aristophanic ridicule of the world. perhaps we are still discovering the domain of our invention just here, the domain where even we can still be original, probably as parodists of the world's history and as god's merry-andrews,--perhaps, though nothing else of the present have a future, our laughter itself may have a future! 224. the historical sense (or the capacity for divining quickly the order of rank of the valuations according to which a people, a community, or an individual has lived, the "divining instinct" for the relationships of these valuations, for the relation of the authority of the valuations to the authority of the operating forces),--this historical sense, which we europeans claim as our specialty, has come to us in the train of the enchanting and mad semi-barbarity into which europe has been plunged by the democratic mingling of classes and races--it is only the nineteenth century that has recognized this faculty as its sixth sense. owing to this mingling, the past of every form and mode of life, and of cultures which were formerly closely contiguous and superimposed on one another, flows forth into us "modern souls"; our instincts now run back in all directions, we ourselves are a kind of chaos: in the end, as we have said, the spirit perceives its advantage therein. by means of our semi-barbarity in body and in desire, we have secret access everywhere, such as a noble age never had; we have access above all to the labyrinth of imperfect civilizations, and to every form of semi-barbarity that has at any time existed on earth; and in so far as the most considerable part of human civilization hitherto has just been semi-barbarity, the "historical sense" implies almost the sense and instinct for everything, the taste and tongue for everything: whereby it immediately proves itself to be an ignoble sense. for instance, we enjoy homer once more: it is perhaps our happiest acquisition that we know how to appreciate homer, whom men of distinguished culture (as the french of the seventeenth century, like saint-evremond, who reproached him for his esprit vaste, and even voltaire, the last echo of the century) cannot and could not so easily appropriate--whom they scarcely permitted themselves to enjoy. the very decided yea and nay of their palate, their promptly ready disgust, their hesitating reluctance with regard to everything strange, their horror of the bad taste even of lively curiosity, and in general the averseness of every distinguished and self-sufficing culture to avow a new desire, a dissatisfaction with its own condition, or an admiration of what is strange: all this determines and disposes them unfavourably even towards the best things of the world which are not their property or could not become their prey--and no faculty is more unintelligible to such men than just this historical sense, with its truckling, plebeian curiosity. the case is not different with shakespeare, that marvelous spanish-moorish-saxon synthesis of taste, over whom an ancient athenian of the circle of aeschylus would have half-killed himself with laughter or irritation: but we--accept precisely this wild motleyness, this medley of the most delicate, the most coarse, and the most artificial, with a secret confidence and cordiality; we enjoy it as a refinement of art reserved expressly for us, and allow ourselves to be as little disturbed by the repulsive fumes and the proximity of the english populace in which shakespeare's art and taste lives, as perhaps on the chiaja of naples, where, with all our senses awake, we go our way, enchanted and voluntarily, in spite of the drain-odour of the lower quarters of the town. that as men of the "historical sense" we have our virtues, is not to be disputed:--we are unpretentious, unselfish, modest, brave, habituated to self-control and self-renunciation, very grateful, very patient, very complaisant--but with all this we are perhaps not very "tasteful." let us finally confess it, that what is most difficult for us men of the "historical sense" to grasp, feel, taste, and love, what finds us fundamentally prejudiced and almost hostile, is precisely the perfection and ultimate maturity in every culture and art, the essentially noble in works and men, their moment of smooth sea and halcyon self-sufficiency, the goldenness and coldness which all things show that have perfected themselves. perhaps our great virtue of the historical sense is in necessary contrast to good taste, at least to the very bad taste; and we can only evoke in ourselves imperfectly, hesitatingly, and with compulsion the small, short, and happy godsends and glorifications of human life as they shine here and there: those moments and marvelous experiences when a great power has voluntarily come to a halt before the boundless and infinite,--when a super-abundance of refined delight has been enjoyed by a sudden checking and petrifying, by standing firmly and planting oneself fixedly on still trembling ground. proportionateness is strange to us, let us confess it to ourselves; our itching is really the itching for the infinite, the immeasurable. like the rider on his forward panting horse, we let the reins fall before the infinite, we modern men, we semi-barbarians--and are only in our highest bliss when we--are in most danger. 225. whether it be hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, or eudaemonism, all those modes of thinking which measure the worth of things according to pleasure and pain, that is, according to accompanying circumstances and secondary considerations, are plausible modes of thought and naivetes, which every one conscious of creative powers and an artist's conscience will look down upon with scorn, though not without sympathy. sympathy for you!--to be sure, that is not sympathy as you understand it: it is not sympathy for social "distress," for "society" with its sick and misfortuned, for the hereditarily vicious and defective who lie on the ground around us; still less is it sympathy for the grumbling, vexed, revolutionary slave-classes who strive after power--they call it "freedom." our sympathy is a loftier and further-sighted sympathy:--we see how man dwarfs himself, how you dwarf him! and there are moments when we view your sympathy with an indescribable anguish, when we resist it,--when we regard your seriousness as more dangerous than any kind of levity. you want, if possible--and there is not a more foolish "if possible"--to do away with suffering; and we?--it really seems that we would rather have it increased and made worse than it has ever been! well-being, as you understand it--is certainly not a goal; it seems to us an end; a condition which at once renders man ludicrous and contemptible--and makes his destruction desirable! the discipline of suffering, of great suffering--know ye not that it is only this discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity hitherto? the tension of soul in misfortune which communicates to it its energy, its shuddering in view of rack and ruin, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, and exploiting misfortune, and whatever depth, mystery, disguise, spirit, artifice, or greatness has been bestowed upon the soul--has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? in man creature and creator are united: in man there is not only matter, shred, excess, clay, mire, folly, chaos; but there is also the creator, the sculptor, the hardness of the hammer, the divinity of the spectator, and the seventh day--do ye understand this contrast? and that your sympathy for the "creature in man" applies to that which has to be fashioned, bruised, forged, stretched, roasted, annealed, refined--to that which must necessarily suffer, and is meant to suffer? and our sympathy--do ye not understand what our reverse sympathy applies to, when it resists your sympathy as the worst of all pampering and enervation?--so it is sympathy against sympathy!--but to repeat it once more, there are higher problems than the problems of pleasure and pain and sympathy; and all systems of philosophy which deal only with these are naivetes. 226. we immoralists.--this world with which we are concerned, in which we have to fear and love, this almost invisible, inaudible world of delicate command and delicate obedience, a world of "almost" in every respect, captious, insidious, sharp, and tender--yes, it is well protected from clumsy spectators and familiar curiosity! we are woven into a strong net and garment of duties, and cannot disengage ourselves--precisely here, we are "men of duty," even we! occasionally, it is true, we dance in our "chains" and betwixt our "swords"; it is none the less true that more often we gnash our teeth under the circumstances, and are impatient at the secret hardship of our lot. but do what we will, fools and appearances say of us: "these are men without duty,"--we have always fools and appearances against us! 227. honesty, granting that it is the virtue of which we cannot rid ourselves, we free spirits--well, we will labour at it with all our perversity and love, and not tire of "perfecting" ourselves in our virtue, which alone remains: may its glance some day overspread like a gilded, blue, mocking twilight this aging civilization with its dull gloomy seriousness! and if, nevertheless, our honesty should one day grow weary, and sigh, and stretch its limbs, and find us too hard, and would fain have it pleasanter, easier, and gentler, like an agreeable vice, let us remain hard, we latest stoics, and let us send to its help whatever devilry we have in us:--our disgust at the clumsy and undefined, our "nitimur in vetitum," our love of adventure, our sharpened and fastidious curiosity, our most subtle, disguised, intellectual will to power and universal conquest, which rambles and roves avidiously around all the realms of the future--let us go with all our "devils" to the help of our "god"! it is probable that people will misunderstand and mistake us on that account: what does it matter! they will say: "their 'honesty'--that is their devilry, and nothing else!" what does it matter! and even if they were right--have not all gods hitherto been such sanctified, re-baptized devils? and after all, what do we know of ourselves? and what the spirit that leads us wants to be called? (it is a question of names.) and how many spirits we harbour? our honesty, we free spirits--let us be careful lest it become our vanity, our ornament and ostentation, our limitation, our stupidity! every virtue inclines to stupidity, every stupidity to virtue; "stupid to the point of sanctity," they say in russia,--let us be careful lest out of pure honesty we eventually become saints and bores! is not life a hundred times too short for us--to bore ourselves? one would have to believe in eternal life in order to... 228. i hope to be forgiven for discovering that all moral philosophy hitherto has been tedious and has belonged to the soporific appliances--and that "virtue," in my opinion, has been more injured by the tediousness of its advocates than by anything else; at the same time, however, i would not wish to overlook their general usefulness. it is desirable that as few people as possible should reflect upon morals, and consequently it is very desirable that morals should not some day become interesting! but let us not be afraid! things still remain today as they have always been: i see no one in europe who has (or discloses) an idea of the fact that philosophizing concerning morals might be conducted in a dangerous, captious, and ensnaring manner--that calamity might be involved therein. observe, for example, the indefatigable, inevitable english utilitarians: how ponderously and respectably they stalk on, stalk along (a homeric metaphor expresses it better) in the footsteps of bentham, just as he had already stalked in the footsteps of the respectable helvetius! (no, he was not a dangerous man, helvetius, ce senateur pococurante, to use an expression of galiani). no new thought, nothing of the nature of a finer turning or better expression of an old thought, not even a proper history of what has been previously thought on the subject: an impossible literature, taking it all in all, unless one knows how to leaven it with some mischief. in effect, the old english vice called cant, which is moral tartuffism, has insinuated itself also into these moralists (whom one must certainly read with an eye to their motives if one must read them), concealed this time under the new form of the scientific spirit; moreover, there is not absent from them a secret struggle with the pangs of conscience, from which a race of former puritans must naturally suffer, in all their scientific tinkering with morals. (is not a moralist the opposite of a puritan? that is to say, as a thinker who regards morality as questionable, as worthy of interrogation, in short, as a problem? is moralizing not-immoral?) in the end, they all want english morality to be recognized as authoritative, inasmuch as mankind, or the "general utility," or "the happiness of the greatest number,"--no! the happiness of england, will be best served thereby. they would like, by all means, to convince themselves that the striving after english happiness, i mean after comfort and fashion (and in the highest instance, a seat in parliament), is at the same time the true path of virtue; in fact, that in so far as there has been virtue in the world hitherto, it has just consisted in such striving. not one of those ponderous, conscience-stricken herding-animals (who undertake to advocate the cause of egoism as conducive to the general welfare) wants to have any knowledge or inkling of the facts that the "general welfare" is no ideal, no goal, no notion that can be at all grasped, but is only a nostrum,--that what is fair to one may not at all be fair to another, that the requirement of one morality for all is really a detriment to higher men, in short, that there is a distinction of rank between man and man, and consequently between morality and morality. they are an unassuming and fundamentally mediocre species of men, these utilitarian englishmen, and, as already remarked, in so far as they are tedious, one cannot think highly enough of their utility. one ought even to encourage them, as has been partially attempted in the following rhymes:- hail, ye worthies, barrow-wheeling, "longer--better," aye revealing, stiffer aye in head and knee; unenraptured, never jesting, mediocre everlasting, sans genie et sans esprit! 229. in these later ages, which may be proud of their humanity, there still remains so much fear, so much superstition of the fear, of the "cruel wild beast," the mastering of which constitutes the very pride of these humaner ages--that even obvious truths, as if by the agreement of centuries, have long remained unuttered, because they have the appearance of helping the finally slain wild beast back to life again. i perhaps risk something when i allow such a truth to escape; let others capture it again and give it so much "milk of pious sentiment" [footnote: an expression from schiller's william tell, act iv, scene 3.] to drink, that it will lie down quiet and forgotten, in its old corner.--one ought to learn anew about cruelty, and open one's eyes; one ought at last to learn impatience, in order that such immodest gross errors--as, for instance, have been fostered by ancient and modern philosophers with regard to tragedy--may no longer wander about virtuously and boldly. almost everything that we call "higher culture" is based upon the spiritualising and intensifying of cruelty--this is my thesis; the "wild beast" has not been slain at all, it lives, it flourishes, it has only been--transfigured. that which constitutes the painful delight of tragedy is cruelty; that which operates agreeably in so-called tragic sympathy, and at the basis even of everything sublime, up to the highest and most delicate thrills of metaphysics, obtains its sweetness solely from the intermingled ingredient of cruelty. what the roman enjoys in the arena, the christian in the ecstasies of the cross, the spaniard at the sight of the faggot and stake, or of the bull-fight, the present-day japanese who presses his way to the tragedy, the workman of the parisian suburbs who has a homesickness for bloody revolutions, the wagnerienne who, with unhinged will, "undergoes" the performance of "tristan and isolde"--what all these enjoy, and strive with mysterious ardour to drink in, is the philtre of the great circe "cruelty." here, to be sure, we must put aside entirely the blundering psychology of former times, which could only teach with regard to cruelty that it originated at the sight of the suffering of others: there is an abundant, super-abundant enjoyment even in one's own suffering, in causing one's own suffering--and wherever man has allowed himself to be persuaded to self-denial in the religious sense, or to self-mutilation, as among the phoenicians and ascetics, or in general, to desensualisation, decarnalisation, and contrition, to puritanical repentance-spasms, to vivisection of conscience and to pascal-like sacrifizia dell' intelleto, he is secretly allured and impelled forwards by his cruelty, by the dangerous thrill of cruelty towards himself.--finally, let us consider that even the seeker of knowledge operates as an artist and glorifier of cruelty, in that he compels his spirit to perceive against its own inclination, and often enough against the wishes of his heart:--he forces it to say nay, where he would like to affirm, love, and adore; indeed, every instance of taking a thing profoundly and fundamentally, is a violation, an intentional injuring of the fundamental will of the spirit, which instinctively aims at appearance and superficiality,--even in every desire for knowledge there is a drop of cruelty. 230. perhaps what i have said here about a "fundamental will of the spirit" may not be understood without further details; i may be allowed a word of explanation.--that imperious something which is popularly called "the spirit," wishes to be master internally and externally, and to feel itself master; it has the will of a multiplicity for a simplicity, a binding, taming, imperious, and essentially ruling will. its requirements and capacities here, are the same as those assigned by physiologists to everything that lives, grows, and multiplies. the power of the spirit to appropriate foreign elements reveals itself in a strong tendency to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, to overlook or repudiate the absolutely contradictory; just as it arbitrarily re-underlines, makes prominent, and falsifies for itself certain traits and lines in the foreign elements, in every portion of the "outside world." its object thereby is the incorporation of new "experiences," the assortment of new things in the old arrangements--in short, growth; or more properly, the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased power--is its object. this same will has at its service an apparently opposed impulse of the spirit, a suddenly adopted preference of ignorance, of arbitrary shutting out, a closing of windows, an inner denial of this or that, a prohibition to approach, a sort of defensive attitude against much that is knowable, a contentment with obscurity, with the shutting-in horizon, an acceptance and approval of ignorance: as that which is all necessary according to the degree of its appropriating power, its "digestive power," to speak figuratively (and in fact "the spirit" resembles a stomach more than anything else). here also belong an occasional propensity of the spirit to let itself be deceived (perhaps with a waggish suspicion that it is not so and so, but is only allowed to pass as such), a delight in uncertainty and ambiguity, an exulting enjoyment of arbitrary, out-of-the-way narrowness and mystery, of the too-near, of the foreground, of the magnified, the diminished, the misshapen, the beautified--an enjoyment of the arbitrariness of all these manifestations of power. finally, in this connection, there is the not unscrupulous readiness of the spirit to deceive other spirits and dissemble before them--the constant pressing and straining of a creating, shaping, changeable power: the spirit enjoys therein its craftiness and its variety of disguises, it enjoys also its feeling of security therein--it is precisely by its protean arts that it is best protected and concealed!--counter to this propensity for appearance, for simplification, for a disguise, for a cloak, in short, for an outside--for every outside is a cloak--there operates the sublime tendency of the man of knowledge, which takes, and insists on taking things profoundly, variously, and thoroughly; as a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste, which every courageous thinker will acknowledge in himself, provided, as it ought to be, that he has sharpened and hardened his eye sufficiently long for introspection, and is accustomed to severe discipline and even severe words. he will say: "there is something cruel in the tendency of my spirit": let the virtuous and amiable try to convince him that it is not so! in fact, it would sound nicer, if, instead of our cruelty, perhaps our "extravagant honesty" were talked about, whispered about, and glorified--we free, very free spirits--and some day perhaps such will actually be our--posthumous glory! meanwhile--for there is plenty of time until then--we should be least inclined to deck ourselves out in such florid and fringed moral verbiage; our whole former work has just made us sick of this taste and its sprightly exuberance. they are beautiful, glistening, jingling, festive words: honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, sacrifice for knowledge, heroism of the truthful--there is something in them that makes one's heart swell with pride. but we anchorites and marmots have long ago persuaded ourselves in all the secrecy of an anchorite's conscience, that this worthy parade of verbiage also belongs to the old false adornment, frippery, and gold-dust of unconscious human vanity, and that even under such flattering colour and repainting, the terrible original text homo natura must again be recognized. in effect, to translate man back again into nature; to master the many vain and visionary interpretations and subordinate meanings which have hitherto been scratched and daubed over the eternal original text, homo natura; to bring it about that man shall henceforth stand before man as he now, hardened by the discipline of science, stands before the other forms of nature, with fearless oedipus-eyes, and stopped ulysses-ears, deaf to the enticements of old metaphysical bird-catchers, who have piped to him far too long: "thou art more! thou art higher! thou hast a different origin!"--this may be a strange and foolish task, but that it is a task, who can deny! why did we choose it, this foolish task? or, to put the question differently: "why knowledge at all?" every one will ask us about this. and thus pressed, we, who have asked ourselves the question a hundred times, have not found and cannot find any better answer.... 231. learning alters us, it does what all nourishment does that does not merely "conserve"--as the physiologist knows. but at the bottom of our souls, quite "down below," there is certainly something unteachable, a granite of spiritual fate, of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined, chosen questions. in each cardinal problem there speaks an unchangeable "i am this"; a thinker cannot learn anew about man and woman, for instance, but can only learn fully--he can only follow to the end what is "fixed" about them in himself. occasionally we find certain solutions of problems which make strong beliefs for us; perhaps they are henceforth called "convictions." later on--one sees in them only footsteps to self-knowledge, guide-posts to the problem which we ourselves are--or more correctly to the great stupidity which we embody, our spiritual fate, the unteachable in us, quite "down below."--in view of this liberal compliment which i have just paid myself, permission will perhaps be more readily allowed me to utter some truths about "woman as she is," provided that it is known at the outset how literally they are merely--my truths. 232. woman wishes to be independent, and therefore she begins to enlighten men about "woman as she is"--this is one of the worst developments of the general uglifying of europe. for what must these clumsy attempts of feminine scientificality and self-exposure bring to light! woman has so much cause for shame; in woman there is so much pedantry, superficiality, schoolmasterliness, petty presumption, unbridledness, and indiscretion concealed--study only woman's behaviour towards children!--which has really been best restrained and dominated hitherto by the fear of man. alas, if ever the "eternally tedious in woman"--she has plenty of it!--is allowed to venture forth! if she begins radically and on principle to unlearn her wisdom and art-of charming, of playing, of frightening away sorrow, of alleviating and taking easily; if she forgets her delicate aptitude for agreeable desires! female voices are already raised, which, by saint aristophanes! make one afraid:--with medical explicitness it is stated in a threatening manner what woman first and last requires from man. is it not in the very worst taste that woman thus sets herself up to be scientific? enlightenment hitherto has fortunately been men's affair, men's gift--we remained therewith "among ourselves"; and in the end, in view of all that women write about "woman," we may well have considerable doubt as to whether woman really desires enlightenment about herself--and can desire it. if woman does not thereby seek a new ornament for herself--i believe ornamentation belongs to the eternally feminine?--why, then, she wishes to make herself feared: perhaps she thereby wishes to get the mastery. but she does not want truth--what does woman care for truth? from the very first, nothing is more foreign, more repugnant, or more hostile to woman than truth--her great art is falsehood, her chief concern is appearance and beauty. let us confess it, we men: we honour and love this very art and this very instinct in woman: we who have the hard task, and for our recreation gladly seek the company of beings under whose hands, glances, and delicate follies, our seriousness, our gravity, and profundity appear almost like follies to us. finally, i ask the question: did a woman herself ever acknowledge profundity in a woman's mind, or justice in a woman's heart? and is it not true that on the whole "woman" has hitherto been most despised by woman herself, and not at all by us?--we men desire that woman should not continue to compromise herself by enlightening us; just as it was man's care and the consideration for woman, when the church decreed: mulier taceat in ecclesia. it was to the benefit of woman when napoleon gave the too eloquent madame de stael to understand: mulier taceat in politicis!--and in my opinion, he is a true friend of woman who calls out to women today: mulier taceat de mulierel. 233. it betrays corruption of the instincts--apart from the fact that it betrays bad taste--when a woman refers to madame roland, or madame de stael, or monsieur george sand, as though something were proved thereby in favour of "woman as she is." among men, these are the three comical women as they are--nothing more!--and just the best involuntary counter-arguments against feminine emancipation and autonomy. 234. stupidity in the kitchen; woman as cook; the terrible thoughtlessness with which the feeding of the family and the master of the house is managed! woman does not understand what food means, and she insists on being cook! if woman had been a thinking creature, she should certainly, as cook for thousands of years, have discovered the most important physiological facts, and should likewise have got possession of the healing art! through bad female cooks--through the entire lack of reason in the kitchen--the development of mankind has been longest retarded and most interfered with: even today matters are very little better. a word to high school girls. 235. there are turns and casts of fancy, there are sentences, little handfuls of words, in which a whole culture, a whole society suddenly crystallises itself. among these is the incidental remark of madame de lambert to her son: "mon ami, ne vous permettez jamais que des folies, qui vous feront grand plaisir"--the motherliest and wisest remark, by the way, that was ever addressed to a son. 236. i have no doubt that every noble woman will oppose what dante and goethe believed about woman--the former when he sang, "ella guardava suso, ed io in lei," and the latter when he interpreted it, "the eternally feminine draws us aloft"; for this is just what she believes of the eternally masculine. 237. seven apophthegms for women how the longest ennui flees, when a man comes to our knees! age, alas! and science staid, furnish even weak virtue aid. sombre garb and silence meet: dress for every dame--discreet. whom i thank when in my bliss? god!--and my good tailoress! young, a flower-decked cavern home; old, a dragon thence doth roam. noble title, leg that's fine, man as well: oh, were he mine! speech in brief and sense in mass--slippery for the jenny-ass! 237a. woman has hitherto been treated by men like birds, which, losing their way, have come down among them from an elevation: as something delicate, fragile, wild, strange, sweet, and animating--but as something also which must be cooped up to prevent it flying away. 238. to be mistaken in the fundamental problem of "man and woman," to deny here the profoundest antagonism and the necessity for an eternally hostile tension, to dream here perhaps of equal rights, equal training, equal claims and obligations: that is a typical sign of shallow-mindedness; and a thinker who has proved himself shallow at this dangerous spot--shallow in instinct!--may generally be regarded as suspicious, nay more, as betrayed, as discovered; he will probably prove too "short" for all fundamental questions of life, future as well as present, and will be unable to descend into any of the depths. on the other hand, a man who has depth of spirit as well as of desires, and has also the depth of benevolence which is capable of severity and harshness, and easily confounded with them, can only think of woman as orientals do: he must conceive of her as a possession, as confinable property, as a being predestined for service and accomplishing her mission therein--he must take his stand in this matter upon the immense rationality of asia, upon the superiority of the instinct of asia, as the greeks did formerly; those best heirs and scholars of asia--who, as is well known, with their increasing culture and amplitude of power, from homer to the time of pericles, became gradually stricter towards woman, in short, more oriental. how necessary, how logical, even how humanely desirable this was, let us consider for ourselves! 239. the weaker sex has in no previous age been treated with so much respect by men as at present--this belongs to the tendency and fundamental taste of democracy, in the same way as disrespectfulness to old age--what wonder is it that abuse should be immediately made of this respect? they want more, they learn to make claims, the tribute of respect is at last felt to be well-nigh galling; rivalry for rights, indeed actual strife itself, would be preferred: in a word, woman is losing modesty. and let us immediately add that she is also losing taste. she is unlearning to fear man: but the woman who "unlearns to fear" sacrifices her most womanly instincts. that woman should venture forward when the fear-inspiring quality in man--or more definitely, the man in man--is no longer either desired or fully developed, is reasonable enough and also intelligible enough; what is more difficult to understand is that precisely thereby--woman deteriorates. this is what is happening nowadays: let us not deceive ourselves about it! wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over the military and aristocratic spirit, woman strives for the economic and legal independence of a clerk: "woman as clerkess" is inscribed on the portal of the modern society which is in course of formation. while she thus appropriates new rights, aspires to be "master," and inscribes "progress" of woman on her flags and banners, the very opposite realises itself with terrible obviousness: woman retrogrades. since the french revolution the influence of woman in europe has declined in proportion as she has increased her rights and claims; and the "emancipation of woman," insofar as it is desired and demanded by women themselves (and not only by masculine shallow-pates), thus proves to be a remarkable symptom of the increased weakening and deadening of the most womanly instincts. there is stupidity in this movement, an almost masculine stupidity, of which a well-reared woman--who is always a sensible woman--might be heartily ashamed. to lose the intuition as to the ground upon which she can most surely achieve victory; to neglect exercise in the use of her proper weapons; to let-herself-go before man, perhaps even "to the book," where formerly she kept herself in control and in refined, artful humility; to neutralize with her virtuous audacity man's faith in a veiled, fundamentally different ideal in woman, something eternally, necessarily feminine; to emphatically and loquaciously dissuade man from the idea that woman must be preserved, cared for, protected, and indulged, like some delicate, strangely wild, and often pleasant domestic animal; the clumsy and indignant collection of everything of the nature of servitude and bondage which the position of woman in the hitherto existing order of society has entailed and still entails (as though slavery were a counter-argument, and not rather a condition of every higher culture, of every elevation of culture):--what does all this betoken, if not a disintegration of womanly instincts, a defeminising? certainly, there are enough of idiotic friends and corrupters of woman among the learned asses of the masculine sex, who advise woman to defeminize herself in this manner, and to imitate all the stupidities from which "man" in europe, european "manliness," suffers,--who would like to lower woman to "general culture," indeed even to newspaper reading and meddling with politics. here and there they wish even to make women into free spirits and literary workers: as though a woman without piety would not be something perfectly obnoxious or ludicrous to a profound and godless man;--almost everywhere her nerves are being ruined by the most morbid and dangerous kind of music (our latest german music), and she is daily being made more hysterical and more incapable of fulfilling her first and last function, that of bearing robust children. they wish to "cultivate" her in general still more, and intend, as they say, to make the "weaker sex" strong by culture: as if history did not teach in the most emphatic manner that the "cultivating" of mankind and his weakening--that is to say, the weakening, dissipating, and languishing of his force of will--have always kept pace with one another, and that the most powerful and influential women in the world (and lastly, the mother of napoleon) had just to thank their force of will--and not their schoolmasters--for their power and ascendancy over men. that which inspires respect in woman, and often enough fear also, is her nature, which is more "natural" than that of man, her genuine, carnivora-like, cunning flexibility, her tiger-claws beneath the glove, her naivete in egoism, her untrainableness and innate wildness, the incomprehensibleness, extent, and deviation of her desires and virtues. that which, in spite of fear, excites one's sympathy for the dangerous and beautiful cat, "woman," is that she seems more afflicted, more vulnerable, more necessitous of love, and more condemned to disillusionment than any other creature. fear and sympathy it is with these feelings that man has hitherto stood in the presence of woman, always with one foot already in tragedy, which rends while it delights--what? and all that is now to be at an end? and the disenchantment of woman is in progress? the tediousness of woman is slowly evolving? oh europe! europe! we know the horned animal which was always most attractive to thee, from which danger is ever again threatening thee! thy old fable might once more become "history"--an immense stupidity might once again overmaster thee and carry thee away! and no god concealed beneath it--no! only an "idea," a "modern idea"! chapter viii. peoples and countries 240. i heard, once again for the first time, richard wagner's overture to the mastersinger: it is a piece of magnificent, gorgeous, heavy, latter-day art, which has the pride to presuppose two centuries of music as still living, in order that it may be understood:--it is an honour to germans that such a pride did not miscalculate! what flavours and forces, what seasons and climes do we not find mingled in it! it impresses us at one time as ancient, at another time as foreign, bitter, and too modern, it is as arbitrary as it is pompously traditional, it is not infrequently roguish, still oftener rough and coarse--it has fire and courage, and at the same time the loose, dun-coloured skin of fruits which ripen too late. it flows broad and full: and suddenly there is a moment of inexplicable hesitation, like a gap that opens between cause and effect, an oppression that makes us dream, almost a nightmare; but already it broadens and widens anew, the old stream of delight--the most manifold delight,--of old and new happiness; including especially the joy of the artist in himself, which he refuses to conceal, his astonished, happy cognizance of his mastery of the expedients here employed, the new, newly acquired, imperfectly tested expedients of art which he apparently betrays to us. all in all, however, no beauty, no south, nothing of the delicate southern clearness of the sky, nothing of grace, no dance, hardly a will to logic; a certain clumsiness even, which is also emphasized, as though the artist wished to say to us: "it is part of my intention"; a cumbersome drapery, something arbitrarily barbaric and ceremonious, a flirring of learned and venerable conceits and witticisms; something german in the best and worst sense of the word, something in the german style, manifold, formless, and inexhaustible; a certain german potency and super-plenitude of soul, which is not afraid to hide itself under the raffinements of decadence--which, perhaps, feels itself most at ease there; a real, genuine token of the german soul, which is at the same time young and aged, too ripe and yet still too rich in futurity. this kind of music expresses best what i think of the germans: they belong to the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow--they have as yet no today. 241. we "good europeans," we also have hours when we allow ourselves a warm-hearted patriotism, a plunge and relapse into old loves and narrow views--i have just given an example of it--hours of national excitement, of patriotic anguish, and all other sorts of old-fashioned floods of sentiment. duller spirits may perhaps only get done with what confines its operations in us to hours and plays itself out in hours--in a considerable time: some in half a year, others in half a lifetime, according to the speed and strength with which they digest and "change their material." indeed, i could think of sluggish, hesitating races, which even in our rapidly moving europe, would require half a century ere they could surmount such atavistic attacks of patriotism and soil-attachment, and return once more to reason, that is to say, to "good europeanism." and while digressing on this possibility, i happen to become an ear-witness of a conversation between two old patriots--they were evidently both hard of hearing and consequently spoke all the louder. "he has as much, and knows as much, philosophy as a peasant or a corps-student," said the one--"he is still innocent. but what does that matter nowadays! it is the age of the masses: they lie on their belly before everything that is massive. and so also in politicis. a statesman who rears up for them a new tower of babel, some monstrosity of empire and power, they call 'great'--what does it matter that we more prudent and conservative ones do not meanwhile give up the old belief that it is only the great thought that gives greatness to an action or affair. supposing a statesman were to bring his people into the position of being obliged henceforth to practise 'high politics,' for which they were by nature badly endowed and prepared, so that they would have to sacrifice their old and reliable virtues, out of love to a new and doubtful mediocrity;--supposing a statesman were to condemn his people generally to 'practise politics,' when they have hitherto had something better to do and think about, and when in the depths of their souls they have been unable to free themselves from a prudent loathing of the restlessness, emptiness, and noisy wranglings of the essentially politics-practising nations;--supposing such a statesman were to stimulate the slumbering passions and avidities of his people, were to make a stigma out of their former diffidence and delight in aloofness, an offence out of their exoticism and hidden permanency, were to depreciate their most radical proclivities, subvert their consciences, make their minds narrow, and their tastes 'national'--what! a statesman who should do all this, which his people would have to do penance for throughout their whole future, if they had a future, such a statesman would be great, would he?"--"undoubtedly!" replied the other old patriot vehemently, "otherwise he could not have done it! it was mad perhaps to wish such a thing! but perhaps everything great has been just as mad at its commencement!"--"misuse of words!" cried his interlocutor, contradictorily--"strong! strong! strong and mad! not great!"--the old men had obviously become heated as they thus shouted their "truths" in each other's faces, but i, in my happiness and apartness, considered how soon a stronger one may become master of the strong, and also that there is a compensation for the intellectual superficialising of a nation--namely, in the deepening of another. 242. whether we call it "civilization," or "humanising," or "progress," which now distinguishes the european, whether we call it simply, without praise or blame, by the political formula the democratic movement in europe--behind all the moral and political foregrounds pointed to by such formulas, an immense physiological process goes on, which is ever extending the process of the assimilation of europeans, their increasing detachment from the conditions under which, climatically and hereditarily, united races originate, their increasing independence of every definite milieu, that for centuries would fain inscribe itself with equal demands on soul and body,--that is to say, the slow emergence of an essentially super-national and nomadic species of man, who possesses, physiologically speaking, a maximum of the art and power of adaptation as his typical distinction. this process of the evolving european, which can be retarded in its tempo by great relapses, but will perhaps just gain and grow thereby in vehemence and depth--the still-raging storm and stress of "national sentiment" pertains to it, and also the anarchism which is appearing at present--this process will probably arrive at results on which its naive propagators and panegyrists, the apostles of "modern ideas," would least care to reckon. the same new conditions under which on an average a levelling and mediocrising of man will take place--a useful, industrious, variously serviceable, and clever gregarious man--are in the highest degree suitable to give rise to exceptional men of the most dangerous and attractive qualities. for, while the capacity for adaptation, which is every day trying changing conditions, and begins a new work with every generation, almost with every decade, makes the powerfulness of the type impossible; while the collective impression of such future europeans will probably be that of numerous, talkative, weak-willed, and very handy workmen who require a master, a commander, as they require their daily bread; while, therefore, the democratising of europe will tend to the production of a type prepared for slavery in the most subtle sense of the term: the strong man will necessarily in individual and exceptional cases, become stronger and richer than he has perhaps ever been before--owing to the unprejudicedness of his schooling, owing to the immense variety of practice, art, and disguise. i meant to say that the democratising of europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the rearing of tyrants--taking the word in all its meanings, even in its most spiritual sense. 243. i hear with pleasure that our sun is moving rapidly towards the constellation hercules: and i hope that the men on this earth will do like the sun. and we foremost, we good europeans! 244. there was a time when it was customary to call germans "deep" by way of distinction; but now that the most successful type of new germanism is covetous of quite other honours, and perhaps misses "smartness" in all that has depth, it is almost opportune and patriotic to doubt whether we did not formerly deceive ourselves with that commendation: in short, whether german depth is not at bottom something different and worse--and something from which, thank god, we are on the point of successfully ridding ourselves. let us try, then, to relearn with regard to german depth; the only thing necessary for the purpose is a little vivisection of the german soul.--the german soul is above all manifold, varied in its source, aggregated and super-imposed, rather than actually built: this is owing to its origin. a german who would embolden himself to assert: "two souls, alas, dwell in my breast," would make a bad guess at the truth, or, more correctly, he would come far short of the truth about the number of souls. as a people made up of the most extraordinary mixing and mingling of races, perhaps even with a preponderance of the pre-aryan element as the "people of the centre" in every sense of the term, the germans are more intangible, more ample, more contradictory, more unknown, more incalculable, more surprising, and even more terrifying than other peoples are to themselves:--they escape definition, and are thereby alone the despair of the french. it is characteristic of the germans that the question: "what is german?" never dies out among them. kotzebue certainly knew his germans well enough: "we are known," they cried jubilantly to him--but sand also thought he knew them. jean paul knew what he was doing when he declared himself incensed at fichte's lying but patriotic flatteries and exaggerations,--but it is probable that goethe thought differently about germans from jean paul, even though he acknowledged him to be right with regard to fichte. it is a question what goethe really thought about the germans?--but about many things around him he never spoke explicitly, and all his life he knew how to keep an astute silence--probably he had good reason for it. it is certain that it was not the "wars of independence" that made him look up more joyfully, any more than it was the french revolution,--the event on account of which he reconstructed his "faust," and indeed the whole problem of "man," was the appearance of napoleon. there are words of goethe in which he condemns with impatient severity, as from a foreign land, that which germans take a pride in, he once defined the famous german turn of mind as "indulgence towards its own and others' weaknesses." was he wrong? it is characteristic of germans that one is seldom entirely wrong about them. the german soul has passages and galleries in it, there are caves, hiding-places, and dungeons therein, its disorder has much of the charm of the mysterious, the german is well acquainted with the bypaths to chaos. and as everything loves its symbol, so the german loves the clouds and all that is obscure, evolving, crepuscular, damp, and shrouded, it seems to him that everything uncertain, undeveloped, self-displacing, and growing is "deep". the german himself does not exist, he is becoming, he is "developing himself". "development" is therefore the essentially german discovery and hit in the great domain of philosophical formulas,--a ruling idea, which, together with german beer and german music, is labouring to germanise all europe. foreigners are astonished and attracted by the riddles which the conflicting nature at the basis of the german soul propounds to them (riddles which hegel systematised and richard wagner has in the end set to music). "good-natured and spiteful"--such a juxtaposition, preposterous in the case of every other people, is unfortunately only too often justified in germany one has only to live for a while among swabians to know this! the clumsiness of the german scholar and his social distastefulness agree alarmingly well with his physical rope-dancing and nimble boldness, of which all the gods have learnt to be afraid. if any one wishes to see the "german soul" demonstrated ad oculos, let him only look at german taste, at german arts and manners what boorish indifference to "taste"! how the noblest and the commonest stand there in juxtaposition! how disorderly and how rich is the whole constitution of this soul! the german drags at his soul, he drags at everything he experiences. he digests his events badly; he never gets "done" with them; and german depth is often only a difficult, hesitating "digestion." and just as all chronic invalids, all dyspeptics like what is convenient, so the german loves "frankness" and "honesty"; it is so convenient to be frank and honest!--this confidingness, this complaisance, this showing-the-cards of german honesty, is probably the most dangerous and most successful disguise which the german is up to nowadays: it is his proper mephistophelean art; with this he can "still achieve much"! the german lets himself go, and thereby gazes with faithful, blue, empty german eyes--and other countries immediately confound him with his dressing-gown!--i meant to say that, let "german depth" be what it will--among ourselves alone we perhaps take the liberty to laugh at it--we shall do well to continue henceforth to honour its appearance and good name, and not barter away too cheaply our old reputation as a people of depth for prussian "smartness," and berlin wit and sand. it is wise for a people to pose, and let itself be regarded, as profound, clumsy, good-natured, honest, and foolish: it might even be--profound to do so! finally, we should do honour to our name--we are not called the "tiusche volk" (deceptive people) for nothing.... 245. the "good old" time is past, it sang itself out in mozart--how happy are we that his rococo still speaks to us, that his "good company," his tender enthusiasm, his childish delight in the chinese and its flourishes, his courtesy of heart, his longing for the elegant, the amorous, the tripping, the tearful, and his belief in the south, can still appeal to something left in us! ah, some time or other it will be over with it!--but who can doubt that it will be over still sooner with the intelligence and taste for beethoven! for he was only the last echo of a break and transition in style, and not, like mozart, the last echo of a great european taste which had existed for centuries. beethoven is the intermediate event between an old mellow soul that is constantly breaking down, and a future over-young soul that is always coming; there is spread over his music the twilight of eternal loss and eternal extravagant hope,--the same light in which europe was bathed when it dreamed with rousseau, when it danced round the tree of liberty of the revolution, and finally almost fell down in adoration before napoleon. but how rapidly does this very sentiment now pale, how difficult nowadays is even the apprehension of this sentiment, how strangely does the language of rousseau, schiller, shelley, and byron sound to our ear, in whom collectively the same fate of europe was able to speak, which knew how to sing in beethoven!--whatever german music came afterwards, belongs to romanticism, that is to say, to a movement which, historically considered, was still shorter, more fleeting, and more superficial than that great interlude, the transition of europe from rousseau to napoleon, and to the rise of democracy. weber--but what do we care nowadays for "freischutz" and "oberon"! or marschner's "hans heiling" and "vampyre"! or even wagner's "tannhauser"! that is extinct, although not yet forgotten music. this whole music of romanticism, besides, was not noble enough, was not musical enough, to maintain its position anywhere but in the theatre and before the masses; from the beginning it was second-rate music, which was little thought of by genuine musicians. it was different with felix mendelssohn, that halcyon master, who, on account of his lighter, purer, happier soul, quickly acquired admiration, and was equally quickly forgotten: as the beautiful episode of german music. but with regard to robert schumann, who took things seriously, and has been taken seriously from the first--he was the last that founded a school,--do we not now regard it as a satisfaction, a relief, a deliverance, that this very romanticism of schumann's has been surmounted? schumann, fleeing into the "saxon switzerland" of his soul, with a half werther-like, half jean-paul-like nature (assuredly not like beethoven! assuredly not like byron!)--his manfred music is a mistake and a misunderstanding to the extent of injustice; schumann, with his taste, which was fundamentally a petty taste (that is to say, a dangerous propensity--doubly dangerous among germans--for quiet lyricism and intoxication of the feelings), going constantly apart, timidly withdrawing and retiring, a noble weakling who revelled in nothing but anonymous joy and sorrow, from the beginning a sort of girl and noli me tangere--this schumann was already merely a german event in music, and no longer a european event, as beethoven had been, as in a still greater degree mozart had been; with schumann german music was threatened with its greatest danger, that of losing the voice for the soul of europe and sinking into a merely national affair. 246. what a torture are books written in german to a reader who has a third ear! how indignantly he stands beside the slowly turning swamp of sounds without tune and rhythms without dance, which germans call a "book"! and even the german who reads books! how lazily, how reluctantly, how badly he reads! how many germans know, and consider it obligatory to know, that there is art in every good sentence--art which must be divined, if the sentence is to be understood! if there is a misunderstanding about its tempo, for instance, the sentence itself is misunderstood! that one must not be doubtful about the rhythm-determining syllables, that one should feel the breaking of the too-rigid symmetry as intentional and as a charm, that one should lend a fine and patient ear to every staccato and every rubato, that one should divine the sense in the sequence of the vowels and diphthongs, and how delicately and richly they can be tinted and retinted in the order of their arrangement--who among book-reading germans is complaisant enough to recognize such duties and requirements, and to listen to so much art and intention in language? after all, one just "has no ear for it"; and so the most marked contrasts of style are not heard, and the most delicate artistry is as it were squandered on the deaf.--these were my thoughts when i noticed how clumsily and unintuitively two masters in the art of prose-writing have been confounded: one, whose words drop down hesitatingly and coldly, as from the roof of a damp cave--he counts on their dull sound and echo; and another who manipulates his language like a flexible sword, and from his arm down into his toes feels the dangerous bliss of the quivering, over-sharp blade, which wishes to bite, hiss, and cut. 247. how little the german style has to do with harmony and with the ear, is shown by the fact that precisely our good musicians themselves write badly. the german does not read aloud, he does not read for the ear, but only with his eyes; he has put his ears away in the drawer for the time. in antiquity when a man read--which was seldom enough--he read something to himself, and in a loud voice; they were surprised when any one read silently, and sought secretly the reason of it. in a loud voice: that is to say, with all the swellings, inflections, and variations of key and changes of tempo, in which the ancient public world took delight. the laws of the written style were then the same as those of the spoken style; and these laws depended partly on the surprising development and refined requirements of the ear and larynx; partly on the strength, endurance, and power of the ancient lungs. in the ancient sense, a period is above all a physiological whole, inasmuch as it is comprised in one breath. such periods as occur in demosthenes and cicero, swelling twice and sinking twice, and all in one breath, were pleasures to the men of antiquity, who knew by their own schooling how to appreciate the virtue therein, the rareness and the difficulty in the deliverance of such a period;--we have really no right to the big period, we modern men, who are short of breath in every sense! those ancients, indeed, were all of them dilettanti in speaking, consequently connoisseurs, consequently critics--they thus brought their orators to the highest pitch; in the same manner as in the last century, when all italian ladies and gentlemen knew how to sing, the virtuosoship of song (and with it also the art of melody) reached its elevation. in germany, however (until quite recently when a kind of platform eloquence began shyly and awkwardly enough to flutter its young wings), there was properly speaking only one kind of public and approximately artistical discourse--that delivered from the pulpit. the preacher was the only one in germany who knew the weight of a syllable or a word, in what manner a sentence strikes, springs, rushes, flows, and comes to a close; he alone had a conscience in his ears, often enough a bad conscience: for reasons are not lacking why proficiency in oratory should be especially seldom attained by a german, or almost always too late. the masterpiece of german prose is therefore with good reason the masterpiece of its greatest preacher: the bible has hitherto been the best german book. compared with luther's bible, almost everything else is merely "literature"--something which has not grown in germany, and therefore has not taken and does not take root in german hearts, as the bible has done. 248. there are two kinds of geniuses: one which above all engenders and seeks to engender, and another which willingly lets itself be fructified and brings forth. and similarly, among the gifted nations, there are those on whom the woman's problem of pregnancy has devolved, and the secret task of forming, maturing, and perfecting--the greeks, for instance, were a nation of this kind, and so are the french; and others which have to fructify and become the cause of new modes of life--like the jews, the romans, and, in all modesty be it asked: like the germans?--nations tortured and enraptured by unknown fevers and irresistibly forced out of themselves, amorous and longing for foreign races (for such as "let themselves be fructified"), and withal imperious, like everything conscious of being full of generative force, and consequently empowered "by the grace of god." these two kinds of geniuses seek each other like man and woman; but they also misunderstand each other--like man and woman. 249. every nation has its own "tartuffery," and calls that its virtue.--one does not know--cannot know, the best that is in one. 250. what europe owes to the jews?--many things, good and bad, and above all one thing of the nature both of the best and the worst: the grand style in morality, the fearfulness and majesty of infinite demands, of infinite significations, the whole romanticism and sublimity of moral questionableness--and consequently just the most attractive, ensnaring, and exquisite element in those iridescences and allurements to life, in the aftersheen of which the sky of our european culture, its evening sky, now glows--perhaps glows out. for this, we artists among the spectators and philosophers, are--grateful to the jews. 251. it must be taken into the bargain, if various clouds and disturbances--in short, slight attacks of stupidity--pass over the spirit of a people that suffers and wants to suffer from national nervous fever and political ambition: for instance, among present-day germans there is alternately the anti-french folly, the anti-semitic folly, the anti-polish folly, the christian-romantic folly, the wagnerian folly, the teutonic folly, the prussian folly (just look at those poor historians, the sybels and treitschkes, and their closely bandaged heads), and whatever else these little obscurations of the german spirit and conscience may be called. may it be forgiven me that i, too, when on a short daring sojourn on very infected ground, did not remain wholly exempt from the disease, but like every one else, began to entertain thoughts about matters which did not concern me--the first symptom of political infection. about the jews, for instance, listen to the following:--i have never yet met a german who was favourably inclined to the jews; and however decided the repudiation of actual anti-semitism may be on the part of all prudent and political men, this prudence and policy is not perhaps directed against the nature of the sentiment itself, but only against its dangerous excess, and especially against the distasteful and infamous expression of this excess of sentiment;--on this point we must not deceive ourselves. that germany has amply sufficient jews, that the german stomach, the german blood, has difficulty (and will long have difficulty) in disposing only of this quantity of "jew"--as the italian, the frenchman, and the englishman have done by means of a stronger digestion:--that is the unmistakable declaration and language of a general instinct, to which one must listen and according to which one must act. "let no more jews come in! and shut the doors, especially towards the east (also towards austria)!"--thus commands the instinct of a people whose nature is still feeble and uncertain, so that it could be easily wiped out, easily extinguished, by a stronger race. the jews, however, are beyond all doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race at present living in europe, they know how to succeed even under the worst conditions (in fact better than under favourable ones), by means of virtues of some sort, which one would like nowadays to label as vices--owing above all to a resolute faith which does not need to be ashamed before "modern ideas", they alter only, when they do alter, in the same way that the russian empire makes its conquest--as an empire that has plenty of time and is not of yesterday--namely, according to the principle, "as slowly as possible"! a thinker who has the future of europe at heart, will, in all his perspectives concerning the future, calculate upon the jews, as he will calculate upon the russians, as above all the surest and likeliest factors in the great play and battle of forces. that which is at present called a "nation" in europe, and is really rather a res facta than nata (indeed, sometimes confusingly similar to a res ficta et picta), is in every case something evolving, young, easily displaced, and not yet a race, much less such a race aere perennus, as the jews are such "nations" should most carefully avoid all hot-headed rivalry and hostility! it is certain that the jews, if they desired--or if they were driven to it, as the anti-semites seem to wish--could now have the ascendancy, nay, literally the supremacy, over europe, that they are not working and planning for that end is equally certain. meanwhile, they rather wish and desire, even somewhat importunely, to be insorbed and absorbed by europe, they long to be finally settled, authorized, and respected somewhere, and wish to put an end to the nomadic life, to the "wandering jew",--and one should certainly take account of this impulse and tendency, and make advances to it (it possibly betokens a mitigation of the jewish instincts) for which purpose it would perhaps be useful and fair to banish the anti-semitic bawlers out of the country. one should make advances with all prudence, and with selection, pretty much as the english nobility do it stands to reason that the more powerful and strongly marked types of new germanism could enter into relation with the jews with the least hesitation, for instance, the nobleman officer from the prussian border it would be interesting in many ways to see whether the genius for money and patience (and especially some intellect and intellectuality--sadly lacking in the place referred to) could not in addition be annexed and trained to the hereditary art of commanding and obeying--for both of which the country in question has now a classic reputation but here it is expedient to break off my festal discourse and my sprightly teutonomania for i have already reached my serious topic, the "european problem," as i understand it, the rearing of a new ruling caste for europe. 252. they are not a philosophical race--the english: bacon represents an attack on the philosophical spirit generally, hobbes, hume, and locke, an abasement, and a depreciation of the idea of a "philosopher" for more than a century. it was against hume that kant uprose and raised himself; it was locke of whom schelling rightly said, "je meprise locke"; in the struggle against the english mechanical stultification of the world, hegel and schopenhauer (along with goethe) were of one accord; the two hostile brother-geniuses in philosophy, who pushed in different directions towards the opposite poles of german thought, and thereby wronged each other as only brothers will do.--what is lacking in england, and has always been lacking, that half-actor and rhetorician knew well enough, the absurd muddle-head, carlyle, who sought to conceal under passionate grimaces what he knew about himself: namely, what was lacking in carlyle--real power of intellect, real depth of intellectual perception, in short, philosophy. it is characteristic of such an unphilosophical race to hold on firmly to christianity--they need its discipline for "moralizing" and humanizing. the englishman, more gloomy, sensual, headstrong, and brutal than the german--is for that very reason, as the baser of the two, also the most pious: he has all the more need of christianity. to finer nostrils, this english christianity itself has still a characteristic english taint of spleen and alcoholic excess, for which, owing to good reasons, it is used as an antidote--the finer poison to neutralize the coarser: a finer form of poisoning is in fact a step in advance with coarse-mannered people, a step towards spiritualization. the english coarseness and rustic demureness is still most satisfactorily disguised by christian pantomime, and by praying and psalm-singing (or, more correctly, it is thereby explained and differently expressed); and for the herd of drunkards and rakes who formerly learned moral grunting under the influence of methodism (and more recently as the "salvation army"), a penitential fit may really be the relatively highest manifestation of "humanity" to which they can be elevated: so much may reasonably be admitted. that, however, which offends even in the humanest englishman is his lack of music, to speak figuratively (and also literally): he has neither rhythm nor dance in the movements of his soul and body; indeed, not even the desire for rhythm and dance, for "music." listen to him speaking; look at the most beautiful englishwoman walking--in no country on earth are there more beautiful doves and swans; finally, listen to them singing! but i ask too much... 253. there are truths which are best recognized by mediocre minds, because they are best adapted for them, there are truths which only possess charms and seductive power for mediocre spirits:--one is pushed to this probably unpleasant conclusion, now that the influence of respectable but mediocre englishmen--i may mention darwin, john stuart mill, and herbert spencer--begins to gain the ascendancy in the middle-class region of european taste. indeed, who could doubt that it is a useful thing for such minds to have the ascendancy for a time? it would be an error to consider the highly developed and independently soaring minds as specially qualified for determining and collecting many little common facts, and deducing conclusions from them; as exceptions, they are rather from the first in no very favourable position towards those who are "the rules." after all, they have more to do than merely to perceive:--in effect, they have to be something new, they have to signify something new, they have to represent new values! the gulf between knowledge and capacity is perhaps greater, and also more mysterious, than one thinks: the capable man in the grand style, the creator, will possibly have to be an ignorant person;--while on the other hand, for scientific discoveries like those of darwin, a certain narrowness, aridity, and industrious carefulness (in short, something english) may not be unfavourable for arriving at them.--finally, let it not be forgotten that the english, with their profound mediocrity, brought about once before a general depression of european intelligence. what is called "modern ideas," or "the ideas of the eighteenth century," or "french ideas"--that, consequently, against which the german mind rose up with profound disgust--is of english origin, there is no doubt about it. the french were only the apes and actors of these ideas, their best soldiers, and likewise, alas! their first and profoundest victims; for owing to the diabolical anglomania of "modern ideas," the ame francais has in the end become so thin and emaciated, that at present one recalls its sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its profound, passionate strength, its inventive excellency, almost with disbelief. one must, however, maintain this verdict of historical justice in a determined manner, and defend it against present prejudices and appearances: the european noblesse--of sentiment, taste, and manners, taking the word in every high sense--is the work and invention of france; the european ignobleness, the plebeianism of modern ideas--is england's work and invention. 254. even at present france is still the seat of the most intellectual and refined culture of europe, it is still the high school of taste; but one must know how to find this "france of taste." he who belongs to it keeps himself well concealed:--they may be a small number in whom it lives and is embodied, besides perhaps being men who do not stand upon the strongest legs, in part fatalists, hypochondriacs, invalids, in part persons over-indulged, over-refined, such as have the ambition to conceal themselves. they have all something in common: they keep their ears closed in presence of the delirious folly and noisy spouting of the democratic bourgeois. in fact, a besotted and brutalized france at present sprawls in the foreground--it recently celebrated a veritable orgy of bad taste, and at the same time of self-admiration, at the funeral of victor hugo. there is also something else common to them: a predilection to resist intellectual germanizing--and a still greater inability to do so! in this france of intellect, which is also a france of pessimism, schopenhauer has perhaps become more at home, and more indigenous than he has ever been in germany; not to speak of heinrich heine, who has long ago been re-incarnated in the more refined and fastidious lyrists of paris; or of hegel, who at present, in the form of taine--the first of living historians--exercises an almost tyrannical influence. as regards richard wagner, however, the more french music learns to adapt itself to the actual needs of the ame moderne, the more will it "wagnerite"; one can safely predict that beforehand,--it is already taking place sufficiently! there are, however, three things which the french can still boast of with pride as their heritage and possession, and as indelible tokens of their ancient intellectual superiority in europe, in spite of all voluntary or involuntary germanizing and vulgarizing of taste. firstly, the capacity for artistic emotion, for devotion to "form," for which the expression, l'art pour l'art, along with numerous others, has been invented:--such capacity has not been lacking in france for three centuries; and owing to its reverence for the "small number," it has again and again made a sort of chamber music of literature possible, which is sought for in vain elsewhere in europe.--the second thing whereby the french can lay claim to a superiority over europe is their ancient, many-sided, moralistic culture, owing to which one finds on an average, even in the petty romanciers of the newspapers and chance boulevardiers de paris, a psychological sensitiveness and curiosity, of which, for example, one has no conception (to say nothing of the thing itself!) in germany. the germans lack a couple of centuries of the moralistic work requisite thereto, which, as we have said, france has not grudged: those who call the germans "naive" on that account give them commendation for a defect. (as the opposite of the german inexperience and innocence in voluptate psychologica, which is not too remotely associated with the tediousness of german intercourse,--and as the most successful expression of genuine french curiosity and inventive talent in this domain of delicate thrills, henri beyle may be noted; that remarkable anticipatory and forerunning man, who, with a napoleonic tempo, traversed his europe, in fact, several centuries of the european soul, as a surveyor and discoverer thereof:--it has required two generations to overtake him one way or other, to divine long afterwards some of the riddles that perplexed and enraptured him--this strange epicurean and man of interrogation, the last great psychologist of france).--there is yet a third claim to superiority: in the french character there is a successful half-way synthesis of the north and south, which makes them comprehend many things, and enjoins upon them other things, which an englishman can never comprehend. their temperament, turned alternately to and from the south, in which from time to time the provencal and ligurian blood froths over, preserves them from the dreadful, northern grey-in-grey, from sunless conceptual-spectrism and from poverty of blood--our german infirmity of taste, for the excessive prevalence of which at the present moment, blood and iron, that is to say "high politics," has with great resolution been prescribed (according to a dangerous healing art, which bids me wait and wait, but not yet hope).--there is also still in france a pre-understanding and ready welcome for those rarer and rarely gratified men, who are too comprehensive to find satisfaction in any kind of fatherlandism, and know how to love the south when in the north and the north when in the south--the born midlanders, the "good europeans." for them bizet has made music, this latest genius, who has seen a new beauty and seduction,--who has discovered a piece of the south in music. 255. i hold that many precautions should be taken against german music. suppose a person loves the south as i love it--as a great school of recovery for the most spiritual and the most sensuous ills, as a boundless solar profusion and effulgence which o'erspreads a sovereign existence believing in itself--well, such a person will learn to be somewhat on his guard against german music, because, in injuring his taste anew, it will also injure his health anew. such a southerner, a southerner not by origin but by belief, if he should dream of the future of music, must also dream of it being freed from the influence of the north; and must have in his ears the prelude to a deeper, mightier, and perhaps more perverse and mysterious music, a super-german music, which does not fade, pale, and die away, as all german music does, at the sight of the blue, wanton sea and the mediterranean clearness of sky--a super-european music, which holds its own even in presence of the brown sunsets of the desert, whose soul is akin to the palm-tree, and can be at home and can roam with big, beautiful, lonely beasts of prey... i could imagine a music of which the rarest charm would be that it knew nothing more of good and evil; only that here and there perhaps some sailor's home-sickness, some golden shadows and tender weaknesses might sweep lightly over it; an art which, from the far distance, would see the colours of a sinking and almost incomprehensible moral world fleeing towards it, and would be hospitable enough and profound enough to receive such belated fugitives. 256. owing to the morbid estrangement which the nationality-craze has induced and still induces among the nations of europe, owing also to the short-sighted and hasty-handed politicians, who with the help of this craze, are at present in power, and do not suspect to what extent the disintegrating policy they pursue must necessarily be only an interlude policy--owing to all this and much else that is altogether unmentionable at present, the most unmistakable signs that europe wishes to be one, are now overlooked, or arbitrarily and falsely misinterpreted. with all the more profound and large-minded men of this century, the real general tendency of the mysterious labour of their souls was to prepare the way for that new synthesis, and tentatively to anticipate the european of the future; only in their simulations, or in their weaker moments, in old age perhaps, did they belong to the "fatherlands"--they only rested from themselves when they became "patriots." i think of such men as napoleon, goethe, beethoven, stendhal, heinrich heine, schopenhauer: it must not be taken amiss if i also count richard wagner among them, about whom one must not let oneself be deceived by his own misunderstandings (geniuses like him have seldom the right to understand themselves), still less, of course, by the unseemly noise with which he is now resisted and opposed in france: the fact remains, nevertheless, that richard wagner and the later french romanticism of the forties, are most closely and intimately related to one another. they are akin, fundamentally akin, in all the heights and depths of their requirements; it is europe, the one europe, whose soul presses urgently and longingly, outwards and upwards, in their multifarious and boisterous art--whither? into a new light? towards a new sun? but who would attempt to express accurately what all these masters of new modes of speech could not express distinctly? it is certain that the same storm and stress tormented them, that they sought in the same manner, these last great seekers! all of them steeped in literature to their eyes and ears--the first artists of universal literary culture--for the most part even themselves writers, poets, intermediaries and blenders of the arts and the senses (wagner, as musician is reckoned among painters, as poet among musicians, as artist generally among actors); all of them fanatics for expression "at any cost"--i specially mention delacroix, the nearest related to wagner; all of them great discoverers in the realm of the sublime, also of the loathsome and dreadful, still greater discoverers in effect, in display, in the art of the show-shop; all of them talented far beyond their genius, out and out virtuosi, with mysterious accesses to all that seduces, allures, constrains, and upsets; born enemies of logic and of the straight line, hankering after the strange, the exotic, the monstrous, the crooked, and the self-contradictory; as men, tantaluses of the will, plebeian parvenus, who knew themselves to be incapable of a noble tempo or of a lento in life and action--think of balzac, for instance,--unrestrained workers, almost destroying themselves by work; antinomians and rebels in manners, ambitious and insatiable, without equilibrium and enjoyment; all of them finally shattering and sinking down at the christian cross (and with right and reason, for who of them would have been sufficiently profound and sufficiently original for an anti-christian philosophy?);--on the whole, a boldly daring, splendidly overbearing, high-flying, and aloft-up-dragging class of higher men, who had first to teach their century--and it is the century of the masses--the conception "higher man."... let the german friends of richard wagner advise together as to whether there is anything purely german in the wagnerian art, or whether its distinction does not consist precisely in coming from super-german sources and impulses: in which connection it may not be underrated how indispensable paris was to the development of his type, which the strength of his instincts made him long to visit at the most decisive time--and how the whole style of his proceedings, of his self-apostolate, could only perfect itself in sight of the french socialistic original. on a more subtle comparison it will perhaps be found, to the honour of richard wagner's german nature, that he has acted in everything with more strength, daring, severity, and elevation than a nineteenth-century frenchman could have done--owing to the circumstance that we germans are as yet nearer to barbarism than the french;--perhaps even the most remarkable creation of richard wagner is not only at present, but for ever inaccessible, incomprehensible, and inimitable to the whole latter-day latin race: the figure of siegfried, that very free man, who is probably far too free, too hard, too cheerful, too healthy, too anti-catholic for the taste of old and mellow civilized nations. he may even have been a sin against romanticism, this anti-latin siegfried: well, wagner atoned amply for this sin in his old sad days, when--anticipating a taste which has meanwhile passed into politics--he began, with the religious vehemence peculiar to him, to preach, at least, the way to rome, if not to walk therein.--that these last words may not be misunderstood, i will call to my aid a few powerful rhymes, which will even betray to less delicate ears what i mean--what i mean counter to the "last wagner" and his parsifal music:---is this our mode?--from german heart came this vexed ululating? from german body, this self-lacerating? is ours this priestly hand-dilation, this incense-fuming exaltation? is ours this faltering, falling, shambling, this quite uncertain ding-dong-dangling? this sly nun-ogling, ave-hour-bell ringing, this wholly false enraptured heaven-o'erspringing?--is this our mode?--think well!--ye still wait for admission--for what ye hear is rome--rome's faith by intuition! chapter ix. what is noble? 257. every elevation of the type "man," has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society and so it will always be--a society believing in a long scale of gradations of rank and differences of worth among human beings, and requiring slavery in some form or other. without the pathos of distance, such as grows out of the incarnated difference of classes, out of the constant out-looking and down-looking of the ruling caste on subordinates and instruments, and out of their equally constant practice of obeying and commanding, of keeping down and keeping at a distance--that other more mysterious pathos could never have arisen, the longing for an ever new widening of distance within the soul itself, the formation of ever higher, rarer, further, more extended, more comprehensive states, in short, just the elevation of the type "man," the continued "self-surmounting of man," to use a moral formula in a supermoral sense. to be sure, one must not resign oneself to any humanitarian illusions about the history of the origin of an aristocratic society (that is to say, of the preliminary condition for the elevation of the type "man"): the truth is hard. let us acknowledge unprejudicedly how every higher civilization hitherto has originated! men with a still natural nature, barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, men of prey, still in possession of unbroken strength of will and desire for power, threw themselves upon weaker, more moral, more peaceful races (perhaps trading or cattle-rearing communities), or upon old mellow civilizations in which the final vital force was flickering out in brilliant fireworks of wit and depravity. at the commencement, the noble caste was always the barbarian caste: their superiority did not consist first of all in their physical, but in their psychical power--they were more complete men (which at every point also implies the same as "more complete beasts"). 258. corruption--as the indication that anarchy threatens to break out among the instincts, and that the foundation of the emotions, called "life," is convulsed--is something radically different according to the organization in which it manifests itself. when, for instance, an aristocracy like that of france at the beginning of the revolution, flung away its privileges with sublime disgust and sacrificed itself to an excess of its moral sentiments, it was corruption:--it was really only the closing act of the corruption which had existed for centuries, by virtue of which that aristocracy had abdicated step by step its lordly prerogatives and lowered itself to a function of royalty (in the end even to its decoration and parade-dress). the essential thing, however, in a good and healthy aristocracy is that it should not regard itself as a function either of the kingship or the commonwealth, but as the significance and highest justification thereof--that it should therefore accept with a good conscience the sacrifice of a legion of individuals, who, for its sake, must be suppressed and reduced to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments. its fundamental belief must be precisely that society is not allowed to exist for its own sake, but only as a foundation and scaffolding, by means of which a select class of beings may be able to elevate themselves to their higher duties, and in general to a higher existence: like those sun-seeking climbing plants in java--they are called sipo matador,--which encircle an oak so long and so often with their arms, until at last, high above it, but supported by it, they can unfold their tops in the open light, and exhibit their happiness. 259. to refrain mutually from injury, from violence, from exploitation, and put one's will on a par with that of others: this may result in a certain rough sense in good conduct among individuals when the necessary conditions are given (namely, the actual similarity of the individuals in amount of force and degree of worth, and their co-relation within one organization). as soon, however, as one wished to take this principle more generally, and if possible even as the fundamental principle of society, it would immediately disclose what it really is--namely, a will to the denial of life, a principle of dissolution and decay. here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation;--but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped? even the organization within which, as was previously supposed, the individuals treat each other as equal--it takes place in every healthy aristocracy--must itself, if it be a living and not a dying organization, do all that towards other bodies, which the individuals within it refrain from doing to each other it will have to be the incarnated will to power, it will endeavour to grow, to gain ground, attract to itself and acquire ascendancy--not owing to any morality or immorality, but because it lives, and because life is precisely will to power. on no point, however, is the ordinary consciousness of europeans more unwilling to be corrected than on this matter, people now rave everywhere, even under the guise of science, about coming conditions of society in which "the exploiting character" is to be absent--that sounds to my ears as if they promised to invent a mode of life which should refrain from all organic functions. "exploitation" does not belong to a depraved, or imperfect and primitive society it belongs to the nature of the living being as a primary organic function, it is a consequence of the intrinsic will to power, which is precisely the will to life--granting that as a theory this is a novelty--as a reality it is the fundamental fact of all history let us be so far honest towards ourselves! 260. in a tour through the many finer and coarser moralities which have hitherto prevailed or still prevail on the earth, i found certain traits recurring regularly together, and connected with one another, until finally two primary types revealed themselves to me, and a radical distinction was brought to light. there is master-morality and slave-morality,--i would at once add, however, that in all higher and mixed civilizations, there are also attempts at the reconciliation of the two moralities, but one finds still oftener the confusion and mutual misunderstanding of them, indeed sometimes their close juxtaposition--even in the same man, within one soul. the distinctions of moral values have either originated in a ruling caste, pleasantly conscious of being different from the ruled--or among the ruled class, the slaves and dependents of all sorts. in the first case, when it is the rulers who determine the conception "good," it is the exalted, proud disposition which is regarded as the distinguishing feature, and that which determines the order of rank. the noble type of man separates from himself the beings in whom the opposite of this exalted, proud disposition displays itself he despises them. let it at once be noted that in this first kind of morality the antithesis "good" and "bad" means practically the same as "noble" and "despicable",--the antithesis "good" and "evil" is of a different origin. the cowardly, the timid, the insignificant, and those thinking merely of narrow utility are despised; moreover, also, the distrustful, with their constrained glances, the self-abasing, the dog-like kind of men who let themselves be abused, the mendicant flatterers, and above all the liars:--it is a fundamental belief of all aristocrats that the common people are untruthful. "we truthful ones"--the nobility in ancient greece called themselves. it is obvious that everywhere the designations of moral value were at first applied to men; and were only derivatively and at a later period applied to actions; it is a gross mistake, therefore, when historians of morals start with questions like, "why have sympathetic actions been praised?" the noble type of man regards himself as a determiner of values; he does not require to be approved of; he passes the judgment: "what is injurious to me is injurious in itself;" he knows that it is he himself only who confers honour on things; he is a creator of values. he honours whatever he recognizes in himself: such morality equals self-glorification. in the foreground there is the feeling of plenitude, of power, which seeks to overflow, the happiness of high tension, the consciousness of a wealth which would fain give and bestow:--the noble man also helps the unfortunate, but not--or scarcely--out of pity, but rather from an impulse generated by the super-abundance of power. the noble man honours in himself the powerful one, him also who has power over himself, who knows how to speak and how to keep silence, who takes pleasure in subjecting himself to severity and hardness, and has reverence for all that is severe and hard. "wotan placed a hard heart in my breast," says an old scandinavian saga: it is thus rightly expressed from the soul of a proud viking. such a type of man is even proud of not being made for sympathy; the hero of the saga therefore adds warningly: "he who has not a hard heart when young, will never have one." the noble and brave who think thus are the furthest removed from the morality which sees precisely in sympathy, or in acting for the good of others, or in desinteressement, the characteristic of the moral; faith in oneself, pride in oneself, a radical enmity and irony towards "selflessness," belong as definitely to noble morality, as do a careless scorn and precaution in presence of sympathy and the "warm heart."--it is the powerful who know how to honour, it is their art, their domain for invention. the profound reverence for age and for tradition--all law rests on this double reverence,--the belief and prejudice in favour of ancestors and unfavourable to newcomers, is typical in the morality of the powerful; and if, reversely, men of "modern ideas" believe almost instinctively in "progress" and the "future," and are more and more lacking in respect for old age, the ignoble origin of these "ideas" has complacently betrayed itself thereby. a morality of the ruling class, however, is more especially foreign and irritating to present-day taste in the sternness of its principle that one has duties only to one's equals; that one may act towards beings of a lower rank, towards all that is foreign, just as seems good to one, or "as the heart desires," and in any case "beyond good and evil": it is here that sympathy and similar sentiments can have a place. the ability and obligation to exercise prolonged gratitude and prolonged revenge--both only within the circle of equals,--artfulness in retaliation, raffinement of the idea in friendship, a certain necessity to have enemies (as outlets for the emotions of envy, quarrelsomeness, arrogance--in fact, in order to be a good friend): all these are typical characteristics of the noble morality, which, as has been pointed out, is not the morality of "modern ideas," and is therefore at present difficult to realize, and also to unearth and disclose.--it is otherwise with the second type of morality, slave-morality. supposing that the abused, the oppressed, the suffering, the unemancipated, the weary, and those uncertain of themselves should moralize, what will be the common element in their moral estimates? probably a pessimistic suspicion with regard to the entire situation of man will find expression, perhaps a condemnation of man, together with his situation. the slave has an unfavourable eye for the virtues of the powerful; he has a skepticism and distrust, a refinement of distrust of everything "good" that is there honoured--he would fain persuade himself that the very happiness there is not genuine. on the other hand, those qualities which serve to alleviate the existence of sufferers are brought into prominence and flooded with light; it is here that sympathy, the kind, helping hand, the warm heart, patience, diligence, humility, and friendliness attain to honour; for here these are the most useful qualities, and almost the only means of supporting the burden of existence. slave-morality is essentially the morality of utility. here is the seat of the origin of the famous antithesis "good" and "evil":--power and dangerousness are assumed to reside in the evil, a certain dreadfulness, subtlety, and strength, which do not admit of being despised. according to slave-morality, therefore, the "evil" man arouses fear; according to master-morality, it is precisely the "good" man who arouses fear and seeks to arouse it, while the bad man is regarded as the despicable being. the contrast attains its maximum when, in accordance with the logical consequences of slave-morality, a shade of depreciation--it may be slight and well-intentioned--at last attaches itself to the "good" man of this morality; because, according to the servile mode of thought, the good man must in any case be the safe man: he is good-natured, easily deceived, perhaps a little stupid, un bonhomme. everywhere that slave-morality gains the ascendancy, language shows a tendency to approximate the significations of the words "good" and "stupid."--a last fundamental difference: the desire for freedom, the instinct for happiness and the refinements of the feeling of liberty belong as necessarily to slave-morals and morality, as artifice and enthusiasm in reverence and devotion are the regular symptoms of an aristocratic mode of thinking and estimating.--hence we can understand without further detail why love as a passion--it is our european specialty--must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its invention is due to the provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant, ingenious men of the "gai saber," to whom europe owes so much, and almost owes itself. 261. vanity is one of the things which are perhaps most difficult for a noble man to understand: he will be tempted to deny it, where another kind of man thinks he sees it self-evidently. the problem for him is to represent to his mind beings who seek to arouse a good opinion of themselves which they themselves do not possess--and consequently also do not "deserve,"--and who yet believe in this good opinion afterwards. this seems to him on the one hand such bad taste and so self-disrespectful, and on the other hand so grotesquely unreasonable, that he would like to consider vanity an exception, and is doubtful about it in most cases when it is spoken of. he will say, for instance: "i may be mistaken about my value, and on the other hand may nevertheless demand that my value should be acknowledged by others precisely as i rate it:--that, however, is not vanity (but self-conceit, or, in most cases, that which is called 'humility,' and also 'modesty')." or he will even say: "for many reasons i can delight in the good opinion of others, perhaps because i love and honour them, and rejoice in all their joys, perhaps also because their good opinion endorses and strengthens my belief in my own good opinion, perhaps because the good opinion of others, even in cases where i do not share it, is useful to me, or gives promise of usefulness:--all this, however, is not vanity." the man of noble character must first bring it home forcibly to his mind, especially with the aid of history, that, from time immemorial, in all social strata in any way dependent, the ordinary man was only that which he passed for:--not being at all accustomed to fix values, he did not assign even to himself any other value than that which his master assigned to him (it is the peculiar right of masters to create values). it may be looked upon as the result of an extraordinary atavism, that the ordinary man, even at present, is still always waiting for an opinion about himself, and then instinctively submitting himself to it; yet by no means only to a "good" opinion, but also to a bad and unjust one (think, for instance, of the greater part of the self-appreciations and self-depreciations which believing women learn from their confessors, and which in general the believing christian learns from his church). in fact, conformably to the slow rise of the democratic social order (and its cause, the blending of the blood of masters and slaves), the originally noble and rare impulse of the masters to assign a value to themselves and to "think well" of themselves, will now be more and more encouraged and extended; but it has at all times an older, ampler, and more radically ingrained propensity opposed to it--and in the phenomenon of "vanity" this older propensity overmasters the younger. the vain person rejoices over every good opinion which he hears about himself (quite apart from the point of view of its usefulness, and equally regardless of its truth or falsehood), just as he suffers from every bad opinion: for he subjects himself to both, he feels himself subjected to both, by that oldest instinct of subjection which breaks forth in him.--it is "the slave" in the vain man's blood, the remains of the slave's craftiness--and how much of the "slave" is still left in woman, for instance!--which seeks to seduce to good opinions of itself; it is the slave, too, who immediately afterwards falls prostrate himself before these opinions, as though he had not called them forth.--and to repeat it again: vanity is an atavism. 262. a species originates, and a type becomes established and strong in the long struggle with essentially constant unfavourable conditions. on the other hand, it is known by the experience of breeders that species which receive super-abundant nourishment, and in general a surplus of protection and care, immediately tend in the most marked way to develop variations, and are fertile in prodigies and monstrosities (also in monstrous vices). now look at an aristocratic commonwealth, say an ancient greek polis, or venice, as a voluntary or involuntary contrivance for the purpose of rearing human beings; there are there men beside one another, thrown upon their own resources, who want to make their species prevail, chiefly because they must prevail, or else run the terrible danger of being exterminated. the favour, the super-abundance, the protection are there lacking under which variations are fostered; the species needs itself as species, as something which, precisely by virtue of its hardness, its uniformity, and simplicity of structure, can in general prevail and make itself permanent in constant struggle with its neighbours, or with rebellious or rebellion-threatening vassals. the most varied experience teaches it what are the qualities to which it principally owes the fact that it still exists, in spite of all gods and men, and has hitherto been victorious: these qualities it calls virtues, and these virtues alone it develops to maturity. it does so with severity, indeed it desires severity; every aristocratic morality is intolerant in the education of youth, in the control of women, in the marriage customs, in the relations of old and young, in the penal laws (which have an eye only for the degenerating): it counts intolerance itself among the virtues, under the name of "justice." a type with few, but very marked features, a species of severe, warlike, wisely silent, reserved, and reticent men (and as such, with the most delicate sensibility for the charm and nuances of society) is thus established, unaffected by the vicissitudes of generations; the constant struggle with uniform unfavourable conditions is, as already remarked, the cause of a type becoming stable and hard. finally, however, a happy state of things results, the enormous tension is relaxed; there are perhaps no more enemies among the neighbouring peoples, and the means of life, even of the enjoyment of life, are present in superabundance. with one stroke the bond and constraint of the old discipline severs: it is no longer regarded as necessary, as a condition of existence--if it would continue, it can only do so as a form of luxury, as an archaizing taste. variations, whether they be deviations (into the higher, finer, and rarer), or deteriorations and monstrosities, appear suddenly on the scene in the greatest exuberance and splendour; the individual dares to be individual and detach himself. at this turning-point of history there manifest themselves, side by side, and often mixed and entangled together, a magnificent, manifold, virgin-forest-like up-growth and up-striving, a kind of tropical tempo in the rivalry of growth, and an extraordinary decay and self-destruction, owing to the savagely opposing and seemingly exploding egoisms, which strive with one another "for sun and light," and can no longer assign any limit, restraint, or forbearance for themselves by means of the hitherto existing morality. it was this morality itself which piled up the strength so enormously, which bent the bow in so threatening a manner:--it is now "out of date," it is getting "out of date." the dangerous and disquieting point has been reached when the greater, more manifold, more comprehensive life is lived beyond the old morality; the "individual" stands out, and is obliged to have recourse to his own law-giving, his own arts and artifices for self-preservation, self-elevation, and self-deliverance. nothing but new "whys," nothing but new "hows," no common formulas any longer, misunderstanding and disregard in league with each other, decay, deterioration, and the loftiest desires frightfully entangled, the genius of the race overflowing from all the cornucopias of good and bad, a portentous simultaneousness of spring and autumn, full of new charms and mysteries peculiar to the fresh, still inexhausted, still unwearied corruption. danger is again present, the mother of morality, great danger; this time shifted into the individual, into the neighbour and friend, into the street, into their own child, into their own heart, into all the most personal and secret recesses of their desires and volitions. what will the moral philosophers who appear at this time have to preach? they discover, these sharp onlookers and loafers, that the end is quickly approaching, that everything around them decays and produces decay, that nothing will endure until the day after tomorrow, except one species of man, the incurably mediocre. the mediocre alone have a prospect of continuing and propagating themselves--they will be the men of the future, the sole survivors; "be like them! become mediocre!" is now the only morality which has still a significance, which still obtains a hearing.--but it is difficult to preach this morality of mediocrity! it can never avow what it is and what it desires! it has to talk of moderation and dignity and duty and brotherly love--it will have difficulty in concealing its irony! 263. there is an instinct for rank, which more than anything else is already the sign of a high rank; there is a delight in the nuances of reverence which leads one to infer noble origin and habits. the refinement, goodness, and loftiness of a soul are put to a perilous test when something passes by that is of the highest rank, but is not yet protected by the awe of authority from obtrusive touches and incivilities: something that goes its way like a living touchstone, undistinguished, undiscovered, and tentative, perhaps voluntarily veiled and disguised. he whose task and practice it is to investigate souls, will avail himself of many varieties of this very art to determine the ultimate value of a soul, the unalterable, innate order of rank to which it belongs: he will test it by its instinct for reverence. difference engendre haine: the vulgarity of many a nature spurts up suddenly like dirty water, when any holy vessel, any jewel from closed shrines, any book bearing the marks of great destiny, is brought before it; while on the other hand, there is an involuntary silence, a hesitation of the eye, a cessation of all gestures, by which it is indicated that a soul feels the nearness of what is worthiest of respect. the way in which, on the whole, the reverence for the bible has hitherto been maintained in europe, is perhaps the best example of discipline and refinement of manners which europe owes to christianity: books of such profoundness and supreme significance require for their protection an external tyranny of authority, in order to acquire the period of thousands of years which is necessary to exhaust and unriddle them. much has been achieved when the sentiment has been at last instilled into the masses (the shallow-pates and the boobies of every kind) that they are not allowed to touch everything, that there are holy experiences before which they must take off their shoes and keep away the unclean hand--it is almost their highest advance towards humanity. on the contrary, in the so-called cultured classes, the believers in "modern ideas," nothing is perhaps so repulsive as their lack of shame, the easy insolence of eye and hand with which they touch, taste, and finger everything; and it is possible that even yet there is more relative nobility of taste, and more tact for reverence among the people, among the lower classes of the people, especially among peasants, than among the newspaper-reading demimonde of intellect, the cultured class. 264. it cannot be effaced from a man's soul what his ancestors have preferably and most constantly done: whether they were perhaps diligent economizers attached to a desk and a cash-box, modest and citizen-like in their desires, modest also in their virtues; or whether they were accustomed to commanding from morning till night, fond of rude pleasures and probably of still ruder duties and responsibilities; or whether, finally, at one time or another, they have sacrificed old privileges of birth and possession, in order to live wholly for their faith--for their "god,"--as men of an inexorable and sensitive conscience, which blushes at every compromise. it is quite impossible for a man not to have the qualities and predilections of his parents and ancestors in his constitution, whatever appearances may suggest to the contrary. this is the problem of race. granted that one knows something of the parents, it is admissible to draw a conclusion about the child: any kind of offensive incontinence, any kind of sordid envy, or of clumsy self-vaunting--the three things which together have constituted the genuine plebeian type in all times--such must pass over to the child, as surely as bad blood; and with the help of the best education and culture one will only succeed in deceiving with regard to such heredity.--and what else does education and culture try to do nowadays! in our very democratic, or rather, very plebeian age, "education" and "culture" must be essentially the art of deceiving--deceiving with regard to origin, with regard to the inherited plebeianism in body and soul. an educator who nowadays preached truthfulness above everything else, and called out constantly to his pupils: "be true! be natural! show yourselves as you are!"--even such a virtuous and sincere ass would learn in a short time to have recourse to the furca of horace, naturam expellere: with what results? "plebeianism" usque recurret. [footnote: horace's "epistles," i. x. 24.] 265. at the risk of displeasing innocent ears, i submit that egoism belongs to the essence of a noble soul, i mean the unalterable belief that to a being such as "we," other beings must naturally be in subjection, and have to sacrifice themselves. the noble soul accepts the fact of his egoism without question, and also without consciousness of harshness, constraint, or arbitrariness therein, but rather as something that may have its basis in the primary law of things:--if he sought a designation for it he would say: "it is justice itself." he acknowledges under certain circumstances, which made him hesitate at first, that there are other equally privileged ones; as soon as he has settled this question of rank, he moves among those equals and equally privileged ones with the same assurance, as regards modesty and delicate respect, which he enjoys in intercourse with himself--in accordance with an innate heavenly mechanism which all the stars understand. it is an additional instance of his egoism, this artfulness and self-limitation in intercourse with his equals--every star is a similar egoist; he honours himself in them, and in the rights which he concedes to them, he has no doubt that the exchange of honours and rights, as the essence of all intercourse, belongs also to the natural condition of things. the noble soul gives as he takes, prompted by the passionate and sensitive instinct of requital, which is at the root of his nature. the notion of "favour" has, inter pares, neither significance nor good repute; there may be a sublime way of letting gifts as it were light upon one from above, and of drinking them thirstily like dew-drops; but for those arts and displays the noble soul has no aptitude. his egoism hinders him here: in general, he looks "aloft" unwillingly--he looks either forward, horizontally and deliberately, or downwards--he knows that he is on a height. 266. "one can only truly esteem him who does not look out for himself."--goethe to rath schlosser. 267. the chinese have a proverb which mothers even teach their children: "siao-sin" ("make thy heart small"). this is the essentially fundamental tendency in latter-day civilizations. i have no doubt that an ancient greek, also, would first of all remark the self-dwarfing in us europeans of today--in this respect alone we should immediately be "distasteful" to him. 268. what, after all, is ignobleness?--words are vocal symbols for ideas; ideas, however, are more or less definite mental symbols for frequently returning and concurring sensations, for groups of sensations. it is not sufficient to use the same words in order to understand one another: we must also employ the same words for the same kind of internal experiences, we must in the end have experiences in common. on this account the people of one nation understand one another better than those belonging to different nations, even when they use the same language; or rather, when people have lived long together under similar conditions (of climate, soil, danger, requirement, toil) there originates therefrom an entity that "understands itself"--namely, a nation. in all souls a like number of frequently recurring experiences have gained the upper hand over those occurring more rarely: about these matters people understand one another rapidly and always more rapidly--the history of language is the history of a process of abbreviation; on the basis of this quick comprehension people always unite closer and closer. the greater the danger, the greater is the need of agreeing quickly and readily about what is necessary; not to misunderstand one another in danger--that is what cannot at all be dispensed with in intercourse. also in all loves and friendships one has the experience that nothing of the kind continues when the discovery has been made that in using the same words, one of the two parties has feelings, thoughts, intuitions, wishes, or fears different from those of the other. (the fear of the "eternal misunderstanding": that is the good genius which so often keeps persons of different sexes from too hasty attachments, to which sense and heart prompt them--and not some schopenhauerian "genius of the species"!) whichever groups of sensations within a soul awaken most readily, begin to speak, and give the word of command--these decide as to the general order of rank of its values, and determine ultimately its list of desirable things. a man's estimates of value betray something of the structure of his soul, and wherein it sees its conditions of life, its intrinsic needs. supposing now that necessity has from all time drawn together only such men as could express similar requirements and similar experiences by similar symbols, it results on the whole that the easy communicability of need, which implies ultimately the undergoing only of average and common experiences, must have been the most potent of all the forces which have hitherto operated upon mankind. the more similar, the more ordinary people, have always had and are still having the advantage; the more select, more refined, more unique, and difficultly comprehensible, are liable to stand alone; they succumb to accidents in their isolation, and seldom propagate themselves. one must appeal to immense opposing forces, in order to thwart this natural, all-too-natural progressus in simile, the evolution of man to the similar, the ordinary, the average, the gregarious--to the ignoble--! 269. the more a psychologist--a born, an unavoidable psychologist and soul-diviner--turns his attention to the more select cases and individuals, the greater is his danger of being suffocated by sympathy: he needs sternness and cheerfulness more than any other man. for the corruption, the ruination of higher men, of the more unusually constituted souls, is in fact, the rule: it is dreadful to have such a rule always before one's eyes. the manifold torment of the psychologist who has discovered this ruination, who discovers once, and then discovers almost repeatedly throughout all history, this universal inner "desperateness" of higher men, this eternal "too late!" in every sense--may perhaps one day be the cause of his turning with bitterness against his own lot, and of his making an attempt at self-destruction--of his "going to ruin" himself. one may perceive in almost every psychologist a tell-tale inclination for delightful intercourse with commonplace and well-ordered men; the fact is thereby disclosed that he always requires healing, that he needs a sort of flight and forgetfulness, away from what his insight and incisiveness--from what his "business"--has laid upon his conscience. the fear of his memory is peculiar to him. he is easily silenced by the judgment of others; he hears with unmoved countenance how people honour, admire, love, and glorify, where he has perceived--or he even conceals his silence by expressly assenting to some plausible opinion. perhaps the paradox of his situation becomes so dreadful that, precisely where he has learnt great sympathy, together with great contempt, the multitude, the educated, and the visionaries, have on their part learnt great reverence--reverence for "great men" and marvelous animals, for the sake of whom one blesses and honours the fatherland, the earth, the dignity of mankind, and one's own self, to whom one points the young, and in view of whom one educates them. and who knows but in all great instances hitherto just the same happened: that the multitude worshipped a god, and that the "god" was only a poor sacrificial animal! success has always been the greatest liar--and the "work" itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer, are disguised in their creations until they are unrecognizable; the "work" of the artist, of the philosopher, only invents him who has created it, is reputed to have created it; the "great men," as they are reverenced, are poor little fictions composed afterwards; in the world of historical values spurious coinage prevails. those great poets, for example, such as byron, musset, poe, leopardi, kleist, gogol (i do not venture to mention much greater names, but i have them in my mind), as they now appear, and were perhaps obliged to be: men of the moment, enthusiastic, sensuous, and childish, light-minded and impulsive in their trust and distrust; with souls in which usually some flaw has to be concealed; often taking revenge with their works for an internal defilement, often seeking forgetfulness in their soaring from a too true memory, often lost in the mud and almost in love with it, until they become like the will-o'-the-wisps around the swamps, and pretend to be stars--the people then call them idealists,--often struggling with protracted disgust, with an ever-reappearing phantom of disbelief, which makes them cold, and obliges them to languish for gloria and devour "faith as it is" out of the hands of intoxicated adulators:--what a torment these great artists are and the so-called higher men in general, to him who has once found them out! it is thus conceivable that it is just from woman--who is clairvoyant in the world of suffering, and also unfortunately eager to help and save to an extent far beyond her powers--that they have learnt so readily those outbreaks of boundless devoted sympathy, which the multitude, above all the reverent multitude, do not understand, and overwhelm with prying and self-gratifying interpretations. this sympathizing invariably deceives itself as to its power; woman would like to believe that love can do everything--it is the superstition peculiar to her. alas, he who knows the heart finds out how poor, helpless, pretentious, and blundering even the best and deepest love is--he finds that it rather destroys than saves!--it is possible that under the holy fable and travesty of the life of jesus there is hidden one of the most painful cases of the martyrdom of knowledge about love: the martyrdom of the most innocent and most craving heart, that never had enough of any human love, that demanded love, that demanded inexorably and frantically to be loved and nothing else, with terrible outbursts against those who refused him their love; the story of a poor soul insatiated and insatiable in love, that had to invent hell to send thither those who would not love him--and that at last, enlightened about human love, had to invent a god who is entire love, entire capacity for love--who takes pity on human love, because it is so paltry, so ignorant! he who has such sentiments, he who has such knowledge about love--seeks for death!--but why should one deal with such painful matters? provided, of course, that one is not obliged to do so. 270. the intellectual haughtiness and loathing of every man who has suffered deeply--it almost determines the order of rank how deeply men can suffer--the chilling certainty, with which he is thoroughly imbued and coloured, that by virtue of his suffering he knows more than the shrewdest and wisest can ever know, that he has been familiar with, and "at home" in, many distant, dreadful worlds of which "you know nothing"!--this silent intellectual haughtiness of the sufferer, this pride of the elect of knowledge, of the "initiated," of the almost sacrificed, finds all forms of disguise necessary to protect itself from contact with officious and sympathizing hands, and in general from all that is not its equal in suffering. profound suffering makes noble: it separates.--one of the most refined forms of disguise is epicurism, along with a certain ostentatious boldness of taste, which takes suffering lightly, and puts itself on the defensive against all that is sorrowful and profound. they are "gay men" who make use of gaiety, because they are misunderstood on account of it--they wish to be misunderstood. there are "scientific minds" who make use of science, because it gives a gay appearance, and because scientificness leads to the conclusion that a person is superficial--they wish to mislead to a false conclusion. there are free insolent minds which would fain conceal and deny that they are broken, proud, incurable hearts (the cynicism of hamlet--the case of galiani); and occasionally folly itself is the mask of an unfortunate over-assured knowledge.--from which it follows that it is the part of a more refined humanity to have reverence "for the mask," and not to make use of psychology and curiosity in the wrong place. 271. that which separates two men most profoundly is a different sense and grade of purity. what does it matter about all their honesty and reciprocal usefulness, what does it matter about all their mutual good-will: the fact still remains--they "cannot smell each other!" the highest instinct for purity places him who is affected with it in the most extraordinary and dangerous isolation, as a saint: for it is just holiness--the highest spiritualization of the instinct in question. any kind of cognizance of an indescribable excess in the joy of the bath, any kind of ardour or thirst which perpetually impels the soul out of night into the morning, and out of gloom, out of "affliction" into clearness, brightness, depth, and refinement:--just as much as such a tendency distinguishes--it is a noble tendency--it also separates.--the pity of the saint is pity for the filth of the human, all-too-human. and there are grades and heights where pity itself is regarded by him as impurity, as filth. 272. signs of nobility: never to think of lowering our duties to the rank of duties for everybody; to be unwilling to renounce or to share our responsibilities; to count our prerogatives, and the exercise of them, among our duties. 273. a man who strives after great things, looks upon every one whom he encounters on his way either as a means of advance, or a delay and hindrance--or as a temporary resting-place. his peculiar lofty bounty to his fellow-men is only possible when he attains his elevation and dominates. impatience, and the consciousness of being always condemned to comedy up to that time--for even strife is a comedy, and conceals the end, as every means does--spoil all intercourse for him; this kind of man is acquainted with solitude, and what is most poisonous in it. 274. the problem of those who wait.--happy chances are necessary, and many incalculable elements, in order that a higher man in whom the solution of a problem is dormant, may yet take action, or "break forth," as one might say--at the right moment. on an average it does not happen; and in all corners of the earth there are waiting ones sitting who hardly know to what extent they are waiting, and still less that they wait in vain. occasionally, too, the waking call comes too late--the chance which gives "permission" to take action--when their best youth, and strength for action have been used up in sitting still; and how many a one, just as he "sprang up," has found with horror that his limbs are benumbed and his spirits are now too heavy! "it is too late," he has said to himself--and has become self-distrustful and henceforth for ever useless.--in the domain of genius, may not the "raphael without hands" (taking the expression in its widest sense) perhaps not be the exception, but the rule?--perhaps genius is by no means so rare: but rather the five hundred hands which it requires in order to tyrannize over the [greek inserted here], "the right time"--in order to take chance by the forelock! 275. he who does not wish to see the height of a man, looks all the more sharply at what is low in him, and in the foreground--and thereby betrays himself. 276. in all kinds of injury and loss the lower and coarser soul is better off than the nobler soul: the dangers of the latter must be greater, the probability that it will come to grief and perish is in fact immense, considering the multiplicity of the conditions of its existence.--in a lizard a finger grows again which has been lost; not so in man.-277. it is too bad! always the old story! when a man has finished building his house, he finds that he has learnt unawares something which he ought absolutely to have known before he--began to build. the eternal, fatal "too late!" the melancholia of everything completed--! 278.--wanderer, who art thou? i see thee follow thy path without scorn, without love, with unfathomable eyes, wet and sad as a plummet which has returned to the light insatiated out of every depth--what did it seek down there?--with a bosom that never sighs, with lips that conceal their loathing, with a hand which only slowly grasps: who art thou? what hast thou done? rest thee here: this place has hospitality for every one--refresh thyself! and whoever thou art, what is it that now pleases thee? what will serve to refresh thee? only name it, whatever i have i offer thee! "to refresh me? to refresh me? oh, thou prying one, what sayest thou! but give me, i pray thee---" what? what? speak out! "another mask! a second mask!" 279. men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a mode of seizing upon happiness as though they would choke and strangle it, out of jealousy--ah, they know only too well that it will flee from them! 280. "bad! bad! what? does he not--go back?" yes! but you misunderstand him when you complain about it. he goes back like every one who is about to make a great spring. 281.--"will people believe it of me? but i insist that they believe it of me: i have always thought very unsatisfactorily of myself and about myself, only in very rare cases, only compulsorily, always without delight in 'the subject,' ready to digress from 'myself,' and always without faith in the result, owing to an unconquerable distrust of the possibility of self-knowledge, which has led me so far as to feel a contradictio in adjecto even in the idea of 'direct knowledge' which theorists allow themselves:--this matter of fact is almost the most certain thing i know about myself. there must be a sort of repugnance in me to believe anything definite about myself.--is there perhaps some enigma therein? probably; but fortunately nothing for my own teeth.--perhaps it betrays the species to which i belong?--but not to myself, as is sufficiently agreeable to me." 282.--"but what has happened to you?"--"i do not know," he said, hesitatingly; "perhaps the harpies have flown over my table."--it sometimes happens nowadays that a gentle, sober, retiring man becomes suddenly mad, breaks the plates, upsets the table, shrieks, raves, and shocks everybody--and finally withdraws, ashamed, and raging at himself--whither? for what purpose? to famish apart? to suffocate with his memories?--to him who has the desires of a lofty and dainty soul, and only seldom finds his table laid and his food prepared, the danger will always be great--nowadays, however, it is extraordinarily so. thrown into the midst of a noisy and plebeian age, with which he does not like to eat out of the same dish, he may readily perish of hunger and thirst--or, should he nevertheless finally "fall to," of sudden nausea.--we have probably all sat at tables to which we did not belong; and precisely the most spiritual of us, who are most difficult to nourish, know the dangerous dyspepsia which originates from a sudden insight and disillusionment about our food and our messmates--the after-dinner nausea. 283. if one wishes to praise at all, it is a delicate and at the same time a noble self-control, to praise only where one does not agree--otherwise in fact one would praise oneself, which is contrary to good taste:--a self-control, to be sure, which offers excellent opportunity and provocation to constant misunderstanding. to be able to allow oneself this veritable luxury of taste and morality, one must not live among intellectual imbeciles, but rather among men whose misunderstandings and mistakes amuse by their refinement--or one will have to pay dearly for it!--"he praises me, therefore he acknowledges me to be right"--this asinine method of inference spoils half of the life of us recluses, for it brings the asses into our neighbourhood and friendship. 284. to live in a vast and proud tranquility; always beyond... to have, or not to have, one's emotions, one's for and against, according to choice; to lower oneself to them for hours; to seat oneself on them as upon horses, and often as upon asses:--for one must know how to make use of their stupidity as well as of their fire. to conserve one's three hundred foregrounds; also one's black spectacles: for there are circumstances when nobody must look into our eyes, still less into our "motives." and to choose for company that roguish and cheerful vice, politeness. and to remain master of one's four virtues, courage, insight, sympathy, and solitude. for solitude is a virtue with us, as a sublime bent and bias to purity, which divines that in the contact of man and man--"in society"--it must be unavoidably impure. all society makes one somehow, somewhere, or sometime--"commonplace." 285. the greatest events and thoughts--the greatest thoughts, however, are the greatest events--are longest in being comprehended: the generations which are contemporary with them do not experience such events--they live past them. something happens there as in the realm of stars. the light of the furthest stars is longest in reaching man; and before it has arrived man denies--that there are stars there. "how many centuries does a mind require to be understood?"--that is also a standard, one also makes a gradation of rank and an etiquette therewith, such as is necessary for mind and for star. 286. "here is the prospect free, the mind exalted." [footnote: goethe's "faust," part ii, act v. the words of dr. marianus.]--but there is a reverse kind of man, who is also upon a height, and has also a free prospect--but looks downwards. 287. what is noble? what does the word "noble" still mean for us nowadays? how does the noble man betray himself, how is he recognized under this heavy overcast sky of the commencing plebeianism, by which everything is rendered opaque and leaden?--it is not his actions which establish his claim--actions are always ambiguous, always inscrutable; neither is it his "works." one finds nowadays among artists and scholars plenty of those who betray by their works that a profound longing for nobleness impels them; but this very need of nobleness is radically different from the needs of the noble soul itself, and is in fact the eloquent and dangerous sign of the lack thereof. it is not the works, but the belief which is here decisive and determines the order of rank--to employ once more an old religious formula with a new and deeper meaning--it is some fundamental certainty which a noble soul has about itself, something which is not to be sought, is not to be found, and perhaps, also, is not to be lost.--the noble soul has reverence for itself.-288. there are men who are unavoidably intellectual, let them turn and twist themselves as they will, and hold their hands before their treacherous eyes--as though the hand were not a betrayer; it always comes out at last that they have something which they hide--namely, intellect. one of the subtlest means of deceiving, at least as long as possible, and of successfully representing oneself to be stupider than one really is--which in everyday life is often as desirable as an umbrella,--is called enthusiasm, including what belongs to it, for instance, virtue. for as galiani said, who was obliged to know it: vertu est enthousiasme. 289. in the writings of a recluse one always hears something of the echo of the wilderness, something of the murmuring tones and timid vigilance of solitude; in his strongest words, even in his cry itself, there sounds a new and more dangerous kind of silence, of concealment. he who has sat day and night, from year's end to year's end, alone with his soul in familiar discord and discourse, he who has become a cave-bear, or a treasure-seeker, or a treasure-guardian and dragon in his cave--it may be a labyrinth, but can also be a gold-mine--his ideas themselves eventually acquire a twilight-colour of their own, and an odour, as much of the depth as of the mould, something uncommunicative and repulsive, which blows chilly upon every passer-by. the recluse does not believe that a philosopher--supposing that a philosopher has always in the first place been a recluse--ever expressed his actual and ultimate opinions in books: are not books written precisely to hide what is in us?--indeed, he will doubt whether a philosopher can have "ultimate and actual" opinions at all; whether behind every cave in him there is not, and must necessarily be, a still deeper cave: an ampler, stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abyss behind every bottom, beneath every "foundation." every philosophy is a foreground philosophy--this is a recluse's verdict: "there is something arbitrary in the fact that the philosopher came to a stand here, took a retrospect, and looked around; that he here laid his spade aside and did not dig any deeper--there is also something suspicious in it." every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a lurking-place, every word is also a mask. 290. every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood. the latter perhaps wounds his vanity; but the former wounds his heart, his sympathy, which always says: "ah, why would you also have as hard a time of it as i have?" 291. man, a complex, mendacious, artful, and inscrutable animal, uncanny to the other animals by his artifice and sagacity, rather than by his strength, has invented the good conscience in order finally to enjoy his soul as something simple; and the whole of morality is a long, audacious falsification, by virtue of which generally enjoyment at the sight of the soul becomes possible. from this point of view there is perhaps much more in the conception of "art" than is generally believed. 292. a philosopher: that is a man who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, and dreams extraordinary things; who is struck by his own thoughts as if they came from the outside, from above and below, as a species of events and lightning-flashes peculiar to him; who is perhaps himself a storm pregnant with new lightnings; a portentous man, around whom there is always rumbling and mumbling and gaping and something uncanny going on. a philosopher: alas, a being who often runs away from himself, is often afraid of himself--but whose curiosity always makes him "come to himself" again. 293. a man who says: "i like that, i take it for my own, and mean to guard and protect it from every one"; a man who can conduct a case, carry out a resolution, remain true to an opinion, keep hold of a woman, punish and overthrow insolence; a man who has his indignation and his sword, and to whom the weak, the suffering, the oppressed, and even the animals willingly submit and naturally belong; in short, a man who is a master by nature--when such a man has sympathy, well! that sympathy has value! but of what account is the sympathy of those who suffer! or of those even who preach sympathy! there is nowadays, throughout almost the whole of europe, a sickly irritability and sensitiveness towards pain, and also a repulsive irrestrainableness in complaining, an effeminizing, which, with the aid of religion and philosophical nonsense, seeks to deck itself out as something superior--there is a regular cult of suffering. the unmanliness of that which is called "sympathy" by such groups of visionaries, is always, i believe, the first thing that strikes the eye.--one must resolutely and radically taboo this latest form of bad taste; and finally i wish people to put the good amulet, "gai saber" ("gay science," in ordinary language), on heart and neck, as a protection against it. 294. the olympian vice.--despite the philosopher who, as a genuine englishman, tried to bring laughter into bad repute in all thinking minds--"laughing is a bad infirmity of human nature, which every thinking mind will strive to overcome" (hobbes),--i would even allow myself to rank philosophers according to the quality of their laughing--up to those who are capable of golden laughter. and supposing that gods also philosophize, which i am strongly inclined to believe, owing to many reasons--i have no doubt that they also know how to laugh thereby in an overman-like and new fashion--and at the expense of all serious things! gods are fond of ridicule: it seems that they cannot refrain from laughter even in holy matters. 295. the genius of the heart, as that great mysterious one possesses it, the tempter-god and born rat-catcher of consciences, whose voice can descend into the nether-world of every soul, who neither speaks a word nor casts a glance in which there may not be some motive or touch of allurement, to whose perfection it pertains that he knows how to appear,--not as he is, but in a guise which acts as an additional constraint on his followers to press ever closer to him, to follow him more cordially and thoroughly;--the genius of the heart, which imposes silence and attention on everything loud and self-conceited, which smoothes rough souls and makes them taste a new longing--to lie placid as a mirror, that the deep heavens may be reflected in them;--the genius of the heart, which teaches the clumsy and too hasty hand to hesitate, and to grasp more delicately; which scents the hidden and forgotten treasure, the drop of goodness and sweet spirituality under thick dark ice, and is a divining-rod for every grain of gold, long buried and imprisoned in mud and sand; the genius of the heart, from contact with which every one goes away richer; not favoured or surprised, not as though gratified and oppressed by the good things of others; but richer in himself, newer than before, broken up, blown upon, and sounded by a thawing wind; more uncertain, perhaps, more delicate, more fragile, more bruised, but full of hopes which as yet lack names, full of a new will and current, full of a new ill-will and counter-current... but what am i doing, my friends? of whom am i talking to you? have i forgotten myself so far that i have not even told you his name? unless it be that you have already divined of your own accord who this questionable god and spirit is, that wishes to be praised in such a manner? for, as it happens to every one who from childhood onward has always been on his legs, and in foreign lands, i have also encountered on my path many strange and dangerous spirits; above all, however, and again and again, the one of whom i have just spoken: in fact, no less a personage than the god dionysus, the great equivocator and tempter, to whom, as you know, i once offered in all secrecy and reverence my first-fruits--the last, as it seems to me, who has offered a sacrifice to him, for i have found no one who could understand what i was then doing. in the meantime, however, i have learned much, far too much, about the philosophy of this god, and, as i said, from mouth to mouth--i, the last disciple and initiate of the god dionysus: and perhaps i might at last begin to give you, my friends, as far as i am allowed, a little taste of this philosophy? in a hushed voice, as is but seemly: for it has to do with much that is secret, new, strange, wonderful, and uncanny. the very fact that dionysus is a philosopher, and that therefore gods also philosophize, seems to me a novelty which is not unensnaring, and might perhaps arouse suspicion precisely among philosophers;--among you, my friends, there is less to be said against it, except that it comes too late and not at the right time; for, as it has been disclosed to me, you are loth nowadays to believe in god and gods. it may happen, too, that in the frankness of my story i must go further than is agreeable to the strict usages of your ears? certainly the god in question went further, very much further, in such dialogues, and was always many paces ahead of me... indeed, if it were allowed, i should have to give him, according to human usage, fine ceremonious tides of lustre and merit, i should have to extol his courage as investigator and discoverer, his fearless honesty, truthfulness, and love of wisdom. but such a god does not know what to do with all that respectable trumpery and pomp. "keep that," he would say, "for thyself and those like thee, and whoever else require it! i--have no reason to cover my nakedness!" one suspects that this kind of divinity and philosopher perhaps lacks shame?--he once said: "under certain circumstances i love mankind"--and referred thereby to ariadne, who was present; "in my opinion man is an agreeable, brave, inventive animal, that has not his equal upon earth, he makes his way even through all labyrinths. i like man, and often think how i can still further advance him, and make him stronger, more evil, and more profound."--"stronger, more evil, and more profound?" i asked in horror. "yes," he said again, "stronger, more evil, and more profound; also more beautiful"--and thereby the tempter-god smiled with his halcyon smile, as though he had just paid some charming compliment. one here sees at once that it is not only shame that this divinity lacks;--and in general there are good grounds for supposing that in some things the gods could all of them come to us men for instruction. we men are--more human.-296. alas! what are you, after all, my written and painted thoughts! not long ago you were so variegated, young and malicious, so full of thorns and secret spices, that you made me sneeze and laugh--and now? you have already doffed your novelty, and some of you, i fear, are ready to become truths, so immortal do they look, so pathetically honest, so tedious! and was it ever otherwise? what then do we write and paint, we mandarins with chinese brush, we immortalisers of things which lend themselves to writing, what are we alone capable of painting? alas, only that which is just about to fade and begins to lose its odour! alas, only exhausted and departing storms and belated yellow sentiments! alas, only birds strayed and fatigued by flight, which now let themselves be captured with the hand--with our hand! we immortalize what cannot live and fly much longer, things only which are exhausted and mellow! and it is only for your afternoon, you, my written and painted thoughts, for which alone i have colours, many colours, perhaps, many variegated softenings, and fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds;--but nobody will divine thereby how ye looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and marvels of my solitude, you, my old, beloved--evil thoughts! from the heights by f w nietzsche translated by l. a. magnus 1. midday of life! oh, season of delight! my summer's park! uneaseful joy to look, to lurk, to hark- i peer for friends, am ready day and night,- where linger ye, my friends? the time is right! 2. is not the glacier's grey today for you rose-garlanded? the brooklet seeks you, wind, cloud, with longing thread and thrust themselves yet higher to the blue, to spy for you from farthest eagle's view. 3. my table was spread out for you on high- who dwelleth so star-near, so near the grisly pit below?- my realm--what realm hath wider boundary? my honey--who hath sipped its fragrancy? 4. friends, ye are there! woe me,--yet i am not he whom ye seek? ye stare and stop--better your wrath could speak! i am not i? hand, gait, face, changed? and what i am, to you my friends, now am i not? 5. am i an other? strange am i to me? yet from me sprung? a wrestler, by himself too oft self-wrung? hindering too oft my own self's potency, wounded and hampered by self-victory? 6. i sought where-so the wind blows keenest. there i learned to dwell where no man dwells, on lonesome ice-lorn fell, and unlearned man and god and curse and prayer? became a ghost haunting the glaciers bare? 7. ye, my old friends! look! ye turn pale, filled o'er with love and fear! go! yet not in wrath. ye could ne'er live here. here in the farthest realm of ice and scaur, a huntsman must one be, like chamois soar. 8. an evil huntsman was i? see how taut my bow was bent! strongest was he by whom such bolt were sent- woe now! that arrow is with peril fraught, perilous as none.--have yon safe home ye sought! 9. ye go! thou didst endure enough, oh, heart;- strong was thy hope; unto new friends thy portals widely ope, let old ones be. bid memory depart! wast thou young then, now--better young thou art! 10. what linked us once together, one hope's tie- (who now doth con those lines, now fading, love once wrote thereon?)- is like a parchment, which the hand is shy to touch--like crackling leaves, all seared, all dry. 11. oh! friends no more! they are--what name for those?- friends' phantom-flight knocking at my heart's window-pane at night, gazing on me, that speaks "we were" and goes,- oh, withered words, once fragrant as the rose! 12. pinings of youth that might not understand! for which i pined, which i deemed changed with me, kin of my kind: but they grew old, and thus were doomed and banned: none but new kith are native of my land! 13. midday of life! my second youth's delight! my summer's park! unrestful joy to long, to lurk, to hark! i peer for friends!--am ready day and night, for my new friends. come! come! the time is right! 14. this song is done,--the sweet sad cry of rue sang out its end; a wizard wrought it, he the timely friend, the midday-friend,--no, do not ask me who; at midday 'twas, when one became as two. 15. we keep our feast of feasts, sure of our bourne, our aims self-same: the guest of guests, friend zarathustra, came! the world now laughs, the grisly veil was torn, and light and dark were one that wedding-morn. 