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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 38226 ***
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Thoughts out of Season, Part II, by 
+Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 38226 ***