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+Project Gutenberg's Thoughts Out of Season (Part II), by Friedrich Nietzsche
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Thoughts Out of Season (Part II)
+
+Author: Friedrich Nietzsche
+
+Translator: Adrian Collins
+
+Release Date: December 5, 2011 [EBook #38226]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON (PART II) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Franks, Michael Roe and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  THE COMPLETE WORKS
+  OF
+  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
+
+
+  _The First Complete and Authorised English Translation_
+
+  EDITED BY
+  DR. OSCAR LEVY
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+  VOLUME TWO
+  THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON
+  PART TWO
+
+
+
+  _Of the First Edition of
+  One Thousand Copies
+  this is_
+
+  _No._ ----
+
+
+
+  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
+
+  THOUGHTS
+  OUT OF SEASON
+
+  PART II
+
+
+  _THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY_
+  _SCHOPENHAUER AS EDUCATOR_
+
+  TRANSLATED BY
+  ADRIAN COLLINS, M.A.
+
+  T. N. FOULIS
+  13 & 15 FREDERICK STREET
+  EDINBURGH: AND LONDON
+  1909
+
+
+
+  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+  _Printed by_ MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED, _Edinburgh_
+
+
+
+  TO L. P.
+  FROM THE TRANSLATOR.
+  _EN RECONNAISSANCE._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+                                                          PAGE
+
+  INTRODUCTION                                              ix
+
+  THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY                               1
+
+  SCHOPENHAUER AS EDUCATOR                                 101
+
+
+
+
+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 “outlived” 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
+slipshod 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
+Holderins 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.
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
+
+
+The following printer's errors have been corrected:
+
+  naive corrected to naïve (p. 50)
+
+The original hyphenation has been retained for the following words
+which were inconsistently hyphenated:
+
+  outlived (p. 73) / out-lived (p. 73)
+  slipshod (p. 117) / slip-shod (p. 191)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Thoughts Out of Season (Part II), by 
+Friedrich Nietzsche
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+Project Gutenberg's Thoughts Out of Season (Part II), by Friedrich Nietzsche
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Thoughts Out of Season (Part II)
+
+Author: Friedrich Nietzsche
+
+Translator: Adrian Collins
+
+Release Date: December 5, 2011 [EBook #38226]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON (PART II) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Franks, Michael Roe and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  THE COMPLETE WORKS
+  OF
+  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
+
+
+  _The First Complete and Authorised English Translation_
+
+  EDITED BY
+  DR. OSCAR LEVY
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+  VOLUME TWO
+  THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON
+  PART TWO
+
+
+
+  _Of the First Edition of
+  One Thousand Copies
+  this is_
+
+  _No._ ----
+
+
+
+  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
+
+  THOUGHTS
+  OUT OF SEASON
+
+  PART II
+
+
+  _THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY_
+  _SCHOPENHAUER AS EDUCATOR_
+
+  TRANSLATED BY
+  ADRIAN COLLINS, M.A.
+
+  T. N. FOULIS
+  13 & 15 FREDERICK STREET
+  EDINBURGH: AND LONDON
+  1909
+
+
+
+  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+  _Printed by_ MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED, _Edinburgh_
+
+
+
+  TO L. P.
+  FROM THE TRANSLATOR.
+  _EN RECONNAISSANCE._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+                                                          PAGE
+
+  INTRODUCTION                                              ix
+
+  THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY                               1
+
+  SCHOPENHAUER AS EDUCATOR                                 101
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+The two essays translated in this volume form the second and third
+parts of the _Unzeitgem�sse 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 B�le.
+
+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. K�gel,
+"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
+_G�tzend�mmerung_; "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 C�sar, 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 �sthetic 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 encyclop�dias,
+as an ancient Greek who had strayed into our time would probably call
+us. But the only value of an encyclop�dia 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 na�ve 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 �sthetic 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 na�vely 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 _�crasez_! 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 minuti� 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 H�lderlin'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 medi�val 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 medi�val _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 "outlived" 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 na�vely 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, _anim� magn� 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 �sthetically 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 _�terna veritas_ of
+this arrangement was the basis of the new education and the new
+state. So the modern German believes also in the _�terna 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 na�ve 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 formul�; 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 medi�val 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 l�tus,
+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
+slipshod 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 Chim�ras, 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
+Holderins 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--"Voil�
+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 �ternitatis_--"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 Ranc�, 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 Carri�re 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
+Tannh�user 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 medi�val
+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 d�monic, in opposition to his
+utterly und�monic 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--_qu� 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 d�bris 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, �sthetic, 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 medi�val 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 amphor�, 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 medi�val 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.
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
+
+
+The following printer's errors have been corrected:
+
+  naive corrected to na�ve (p. 50)
+
+The original hyphenation has been retained for the following words
+which were inconsistently hyphenated:
+
+  outlived (p. 73) / out-lived (p. 73)
+  slipshod (p. 117) / slip-shod (p. 191)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Thoughts Out of Season (Part II), by 
+Friedrich Nietzsche
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+Project Gutenberg's Thoughts Out of Season (Part II), by Friedrich Nietzsche
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Thoughts Out of Season (Part II)
+
+Author: Friedrich Nietzsche
+
+Translator: Adrian Collins
+
+Release Date: December 5, 2011 [EBook #38226]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON (PART II) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Franks, Michael Roe and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  THE COMPLETE WORKS
+  OF
+  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
+
+
+  _The First Complete and Authorised English Translation_
+
+  EDITED BY
+  DR. OSCAR LEVY
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+  VOLUME TWO
+  THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON
+  PART TWO
+
+
+
+  _Of the First Edition of
+  One Thousand Copies
+  this is_
+
+  _No._ ----
+
+
+
+  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
+
+  THOUGHTS
+  OUT OF SEASON
+
+  PART II
+
+
+  _THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY_
+  _SCHOPENHAUER AS EDUCATOR_
+
+  TRANSLATED BY
+  ADRIAN COLLINS, M.A.
+
+  T. N. FOULIS
+  13 & 15 FREDERICK STREET
+  EDINBURGH: AND LONDON
+  1909
+
+
+
+  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+  _Printed by_ MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED, _Edinburgh_
+
+
+
+  TO L. P.
+  FROM THE TRANSLATOR.
+  _EN RECONNAISSANCE._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+                                                          PAGE
+
+  INTRODUCTION                                              ix
+
+  THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY                               1
+
+  SCHOPENHAUER AS EDUCATOR                                 101
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+The two essays translated in this volume form the second and third
+parts of the _Unzeitgemaesse 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 Bale.
+
+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. Koegel,
+"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
+_Goetzendaemmerung_; "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 Caesar, 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 aesthetic 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 encyclopaedias,
+as an ancient Greek who had strayed into our time would probably call
+us. But the only value of an encyclopaedia 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 naive 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 aesthetic 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 naively 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 _ecrasez_! 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 minutiae 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 Hoelderlin'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 mediaeval 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 mediaeval _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 "outlived" 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 naively 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, _animae magnae 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 aesthetically 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 _aeterna veritas_ of
+this arrangement was the basis of the new education and the new
+state. So the modern German believes also in the _aeterna 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 naive 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 formulae; 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 mediaeval 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 laetus,
+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
+slipshod 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 Chimaeras, 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
+Holderins 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--"Voila
+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 aeternitatis_--"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 Rance, 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 Carriere 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
+Tannhaeuser 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 mediaeval
+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 daemonic, in opposition to his
+utterly undaemonic 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--_quae 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 debris 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, aesthetic, 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 mediaeval 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 amphorae, 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 mediaeval 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.
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
+
+
+The following printer's errors have been corrected:
+
+  naive corrected to naive (p. 50)
+
+The original hyphenation has been retained for the following words
+which were inconsistently hyphenated:
+
+  outlived (p. 73) / out-lived (p. 73)
+  slipshod (p. 117) / slip-shod (p. 191)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Thoughts Out of Season (Part II), by
+Friedrich Nietzsche
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Thoughts out of Season, Part II, by 
+Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+Title: Thoughts out of Season, Part II
+       The Use and Abuse of History - Schopenhauer as Educator
+
+Author: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
+
+Editor: Oscar Levy
+
+Translator: Adrian Collins
+
+Release Date: April 14, 2016 [EBook #38226]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON, PART II ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org,
+Charles Franks, Michael Roe and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+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 _Unzeitgem�sse 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 B�le.
+
+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. K�gel,
+"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
+_G�tzend�mmerung_; "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 C�sar, 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 �sthetic 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 encyclop�dias,
+as an ancient Greek who had strayed into our time would probably call
+us. But the only value of an encyclop�dia 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 na�ve 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 �sthetic 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 na�vely 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 _�crasez_! 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 minuti� 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 H�lderlin'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 medi�val 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 medi�val _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 na�vely 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, _anim� magn� 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 �sthetically 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 _�terna veritas_ of
+this arrangement was the basis of the new education and the new
+state. So the modern German believes also in the _�terna 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 na�ve 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 formul�; 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 medi�val 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 l�tus,
+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 Chim�ras, 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
+H�lderlins 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--"Voil�
+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 �ternitatis_--"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 Ranc�, 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 Carri�re 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
+Tannh�user 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 medi�val
+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 d�monic, in opposition to his
+utterly und�monic 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--_qu� 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 d�bris 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, �sthetic, 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 medi�val 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 amphor�, 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 medi�val 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
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+<head>
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Thoughts Out of Season: Part II, by Friedrich Nietzsche</title>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's Thoughts Out of Season (Part II), by Friedrich Nietzsche
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Thoughts Out of Season (Part II)
+
+Author: Friedrich Nietzsche
+
+Translator: Adrian Collins
+
+Release Date: December 5, 2011 [EBook #38226]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON (PART II) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Franks, Michael Roe and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<h1>
+<a name="preface1"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;i]</span>
+<a name="chapter1"></a>
+THE COMPLETE WORKS<br />
+OF<br />
+FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE<br />
+</h1>
+<p class="byline">
+<i>The First Complete and Authorised English Translation</i><br />
+</p>
+<p class="byline">
+EDITED BY<br />
+<span class="smcap">Dr.</span> OSCAR LEVY<br />
+</p>
+<p class="figure">
+<img src="images/nietzsche.png" width="378" height="396" alt="Nietzsche" />
+<br />
+</p>
+<p class="byline">
+VOLUME TWO<br />
+THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON<br />
+PART TWO<br />
+<a name="preface2"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;ii]</span>
+</p>
+<p class="bylinebreak">
+<i>Of the First Edition of<br />
+One Thousand Copies<br />
+this is</i><br />
+</p>
+<p class="byline">
+<i>No.</i> &mdash;&mdash;<br />
+<a name="preface3"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;iii]</span>
+</p>
+<p class="halftitle">
+<a name="chapter2"></a>
+FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE<br />
+</p>
+<p class="h1a">
+THOUGHTS<br />
+OUT OF SEASON<br />
+</p>
+<p class="h1a">
+PART II<br />
+</p>
+<p class="byline">
+<i>THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY</i><br />
+<i>SCHOPENHAUER AS EDUCATOR</i><br />
+</p>
+<p class="byline">
+TRANSLATED BY<br />
+ADRIAN COLLINS, M.A.<br />
+</p>
+<p class="byline">
+T. N. FOULIS<br />
+13 &amp; 15 FREDERICK STREET<br />
+EDINBURGH: <span class="allsmcap">AND</span> LONDON<br />
+1909<br />
+<a name="preface4"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;iv]</span>
+</p>
+<p class="bylinebreak">
+ALL RIGHTS RESERVED<br />
+</p>
+<p class="byline">
+<i>Printed by</i> <span class="smcap">Morrison &amp; Gibb Limited</span>, <i>Edinburgh</i><br />
+<a name="preface5"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;v]</span>
+</p>
+<p class="bylinebreak">
+TO L. P.<br />
+FROM THE TRANSLATOR.<br />
+<i>EN RECONNAISSANCE.</i><br />
+<a name="preface6"></a>
+<a name="preface7"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;vii]</span>
+</p>
+<h2>
+<a name="chapter3"></a>
+CONTENTS.
+</h2>
+<table class="toc">
+<tr><td></td><td><span class="allsmcap">PAGE</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#chapter4">Introduction</a></span></td><td class="numeric">ix</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#chapter5">The Use and Abuse of History</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></td><td class="numeric">1</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#chapter9">Schopenhauer as Educator</a></span></td><td class="numeric">101</td></tr>
+</table>
+<h2>
+<a name="preface8"></a>
+<a name="preface9"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;ix]</span>
+<a name="chapter4"></a>
+INTRODUCTION.
+</h2>
+<p>
+The two essays translated in this volume form the
+second and third parts of the <i>Unzeitgem�sse
+Betrachtungen</i>. 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
+B�le.
+</p>
+<p>
+Nietzsche, who served in an ambulance corps in
+'71, had seen something of the Franco-German War,
+and to him it was the &ldquo;honest German bravery&rdquo;
+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, &ldquo;the German does not yet know the
+meaning of the word culture,&rdquo; 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&mdash;the &ldquo;historical sense&rdquo;:
+he had been brought by his spiritual teachers to
+<a name="preface10"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;x]</span>
+believe that he was the &ldquo;crown of the world-process&rdquo;
+and that his highest duty lay in surrendering
+himself to it.
+</p>
+<p>
+With Nietzsche, the historical sense became a
+&ldquo;malady from which men suffer,&rdquo; 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&mdash;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 &ldquo;noisy
+little fellows&rdquo; who measure the motives of the
+great men of the past by their own, and use the
+past to justify their present.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;lonely giants amid the pigmies.&rdquo;
+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
+&ldquo;production of the genius,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Schopenhauer here stands, as a personality, for
+all that makes for life in philosophy, against the
+<a name="preface11"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;xi]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+But &ldquo;there has never been a eulogy on a
+philosopher,&rdquo; says Dr. K�gel, &ldquo;that has had so
+little to say about his philosophy.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;not Schopenhauer as educator is in question,
+but his opposite, Nietzsche as educator&rdquo; (<i>Ecce
+Homo</i>). He could regard Schopenhauer, later, as
+a siren that called to death; he put him among
+the great artists that lead down&mdash;who are worse
+than the bad artists that lead nowhere. &ldquo;We
+must go further in the pessimistic logic than the
+denial of the will,&rdquo; he says in the <i>G�tzend�mmerung</i>;
+&ldquo;we must deny Schopenhauer.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;all-too-human&rdquo;
+side of Schopenhauer, that actually brings
+us nearer to him. Later, he could part the man
+<a name="preface12"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;xii]</span>
+and his work, and speak of Schopenhauer's view as
+the &ldquo;Evil eye.&rdquo; But as yet he is a young man
+who has kept his illusions, and, like Ogniben, he
+judges men by what they might be.
+</p>
+<p>
+Afterwards, he judged himself too in these essays
+by &ldquo;what he might be.&rdquo; &ldquo;To me,&rdquo; he said in <i>Ecce
+Homo</i>, &ldquo;they are promises: I know not what they
+mean to others.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+It is also in the belief they are promises that
+they are here translated &ldquo;for others.&rdquo; The
+<i>Thoughts out of Season</i> are the first announcement
+of the complex theme of the <i>Zarathustra</i>.
+They form the best possible introduction to
+Nietzschean thought. Nietzsche is already the
+knight-errant of philosophy: but his adventure is
+just beginning.
+</p>
+<p class="signature">
+A. C.<br />
+</p>
+<h2>
+<a name="chapter5"></a>
+THE USE AND ABUSE OF
+HISTORY.
+<a name="page2"></a>
+<a name="page3"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;3]</span>
+</h2>
+<h3>
+<a name="chapter6"></a>
+PREFACE.
+</h3>
+<p>
+&ldquo;I hate everything that merely instructs me
+without increasing or directly quickening my
+activity.&rdquo; These words of Goethe, like a sincere
+<i>ceterum censeo</i>, 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 &ldquo;quicken,&rdquo; knowledge that slackens the
+rein of activity, why in fact history, in Goethe's
+phrase, must be seriously &ldquo;hated,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+I have tried to describe a feeling that has often
+<a name="page4"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;4]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+&ldquo;movement.&rdquo; And I gain an advantage for myself
+that is more valuable to me than propriety&mdash;the
+attainment of a correct point of view, through
+my critics, with regard to our age.
+</p>
+<p>
+These thoughts are &ldquo;out of season,&rdquo; because I
+am trying to represent something of which the age
+is rightly proud&mdash;its historical culture&mdash;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,&mdash;and
+<a name="page5"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;5]</span>
+from other sources only for the sake of
+comparison; and that I have only reached such
+&ldquo;unseasonable&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;unseasonable,&rdquo;&mdash;that
+is, contrary to our time, and yet with
+an influence on it for the benefit, it may be hoped,
+of a future time.
+<a name="page6"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;6]</span>
+</p>
+<h3>
+I.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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&mdash;&ldquo;Why do you look at me and
+not speak to me of your happiness?&rdquo; The beast
+wants to answer&mdash;&ldquo;Because I always forget what I
+wished to say&rdquo;: but he forgets this answer too, and
+is silent; and the man is left to wonder.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page7"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;7]</span>
+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&mdash;and suddenly
+it flutters back into the man's lap. Then he says,
+&ldquo;I remember...,&rdquo; 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 <i>unhistorically</i>; for it &ldquo;goes into&rdquo; 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&mdash;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 &ldquo;once
+upon a time,&rdquo; the &ldquo;open sesame&rdquo; 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,
+<a name="page8"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;8]</span>
+it abolishes life and being together, and
+sets the seal on the knowledge that &ldquo;being&rdquo; is
+merely a continual &ldquo;has been,&rdquo; a thing that lives
+by denying and destroying and contradicting itself.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;unhistorically&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;becoming&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="page9"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;9]</span>
+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 &ldquo;historical sense,&rdquo;
+that injures and finally destroys the living thing,
+be it a man or a people or a system of culture.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;plastic power&rdquo; 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,&mdash;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
+<a name="page10"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;10]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page11"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;11]</span>
+righteousness for a downright act of will or desire.
+We saw that the beast, absolutely &ldquo;unhistorical,&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="page12"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;12]</span>
+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 &ldquo;unhistorical&rdquo;
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;super-historical&rdquo; standpoint
+of consciousness, that Niebuhr has described
+as the possible result of historical
+research. &ldquo;History,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;is useful for one
+purpose, if studied in detail: that men may know,
+as the greatest and best spirits of our generation
+<a name="page13"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;13]</span>
+do not know, the accidental nature of the forms
+in which they see and insist on others seeing,&mdash;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.&rdquo; Such
+a standpoint might be called &ldquo;super-historical,&rdquo;
+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,&mdash;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 &ldquo;super-historical standpoint&rdquo;:
+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:&mdash;
+</p>
+<p class="nowrap">
+&ldquo;And from the dregs of life hope to receive,<br />
+What the first sprightly running could not give.&rdquo;<br />
+</p>
+<p>
+We will call them the &ldquo;historical men.&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page14"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;14]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+But that question to which we have heard the
+first answer, is capable of another; also a &ldquo;no,&rdquo;
+but on different grounds. It is the &ldquo;no&rdquo; of the
+&ldquo;super-historical&rdquo; 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?
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;super-historical&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page15"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;15]</span>
+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: &ldquo;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&mdash;nothing else. Be calm.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+History regarded as pure knowledge and allowed
+to sway the intellect would mean for men the final
+<a name="page16"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;16]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section7_2"></a>
+II.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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&mdash;so far as they can be distinguished&mdash;the
+<i>monumental</i>, the <i>antiquarian</i>, and the <i>critical</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page17"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;17]</span>
+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 &ldquo;man&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;monumental&rdquo;
+history.
+<a name="page18"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;18]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+But the fiercest battle is fought round the demand
+for greatness to be eternal. Every other living thing
+cries no. &ldquo;Away with the monuments,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;monumental history&rdquo; 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,&mdash;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&mdash;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,
+<a name="page19"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;19]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+What is the use to the modern man of this
+&ldquo;monumental&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page20"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;20]</span>
+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
+C�sar, 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 <i>deus ex machina</i>, 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&mdash;&ldquo;monumentally,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;effects in themselves,&rdquo;
+than of events that will have an effect on all ages.
+The events of war or religion cherished in our
+popular celebrations are such &ldquo;effects in themselves&rdquo;;
+it is these that will not let ambition sleep,
+and lie like amulets on the bolder hearts&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+As long as the soul of history is found in the
+<a name="page21"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;21]</span>
+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 &ldquo;monumental&rdquo; 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,&mdash;the antiquarian and the critical,&mdash;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&mdash;and
+the head&mdash;of a gifted egoist or an inspired
+scoundrel; kingdoms will be overthrown, princes
+murdered, war and revolution let loose, and the
+number of &ldquo;effects in themselves&rdquo;&mdash;in other words,
+effects without sufficient cause&mdash;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&mdash;or their master!
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page22"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;22]</span>
+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&mdash;and conscientious&mdash;dance
+round the half understood monument of
+a great past. &ldquo;See, that is the true and real art,&rdquo;
+we seem to hear: &ldquo;of what use are these aspiring
+little people of to-day?&rdquo; The dancing crowd has
+apparently the monopoly of &ldquo;good taste&rdquo;: 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 �sthetic dilettanti, you may take
+your oath on his condemnation; although, or rather
+because, his judges had proclaimed solemnly the
+canon of &ldquo;monumental art,&rdquo; the art that has
+&ldquo;had an effect on all ages,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;monumental&rdquo; 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 name="page23"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;23]</span>
+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,
+&ldquo;See, the great thing is already here!&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;let the dead bury the&mdash;living.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+&ldquo;antiquarian historian&rdquo;: 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
+&ldquo;critical history,&rdquo; 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.
+<a name="page24"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;24]</span>
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section7_3"></a>
+III.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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&mdash;his strength, industry, desire,
+reason, faults and follies. &ldquo;Here one could live,&rdquo;
+he says, &ldquo;as one can live here now&mdash;and will go
+on living; for we are tough folk, and will not be
+uprooted in the night.&rdquo; And so, with his &ldquo;we,&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page25"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;25]</span>
+once its palimpsests&mdash;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
+&ldquo;coming from the stern, rough, German soul.&rdquo;
+This was the road that the Italians of the Renaissance
+travelled, the spirit that reawakened the
+ancient Italic genius in their poets to &ldquo;a wondrous
+echo of the immemorial lyre,&rdquo; 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,&mdash;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,&mdash;perhaps in whole peoples,&mdash;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
+<a name="page26"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;26]</span>
+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&mdash;this is
+what we nowadays prefer to call the real historical
+sense.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page27"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;27]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page28"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;28]</span>
+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&mdash;whether it be a custom, a religious
+creed, or a political principle,&mdash;it seems presumptuous,
+even impious, to replace it by a new fact,
+and the ancient congregation of pieties by a new
+piety.
+</p>
+<p>
+Here we see clearly how necessary a third way
+of looking at the past is to man, beside the other
+two. This is the &ldquo;critical&rdquo; 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&mdash;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. &ldquo;For everything that is born is
+<i>worthy</i> of being destroyed: better were it then
+that nothing should be born.&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page29"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;29]</span>
+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&mdash;a monopoly, a caste,
+a dynasty for example&mdash;the thing deserves to
+fall. Its past is critically examined, the knife
+put to its roots, and all the &ldquo;pieties&rdquo; 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 <i>a posteriori</i> 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
+<a name="page30"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;30]</span>
+sake of life. The consolation is the knowledge
+that this &ldquo;first nature&rdquo; was once a second, and
+that every conquering &ldquo;second nature&rdquo; becomes
+a first.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section7_4"></a>
+IV.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;historical deduction.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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?
+<a name="page31"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;31]</span>
+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&mdash;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 &ldquo;science of universal evolution,&rdquo; history; that
+shows it with the dangerous audacity of its motto&mdash;&ldquo;Fiat
+veritas, pereat vita.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page32"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;32]</span>
+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
+&ldquo;real personality.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;inner life&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;education&rdquo; and
+&ldquo;historical education&rdquo; 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,
+<a name="page33"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;33]</span>
+the famous people of a past still near to us, had
+the &ldquo;unhistorical sense&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;uneducated.&rdquo; 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 encyclop�dias, as an
+ancient Greek who had strayed into our time
+would probably call us. But the only value of
+an encyclop�dia 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: &ldquo;Manual of
+internal culture for external barbarians.&rdquo; 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,&mdash;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
+<a name="page34"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;34]</span>
+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
+&ldquo;unity of artistic style in every outward expression
+of the people's life.&rdquo; This must not be misunderstood,
+as though it were merely a question
+of the opposition between barbarism and &ldquo;fine
+style.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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. &ldquo;Form&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="page35"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;35]</span>
+with his &ldquo;therefore.&rdquo; 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&mdash;which is not
+a strong or serious will&mdash;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&mdash;for they have the &ldquo;sense of substance&rdquo;:
+they are famous for their cult of &ldquo;inwardness.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+But there is also a famous danger in their &ldquo;inwardness&rdquo;:
+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
+<a name="page36"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;36]</span>
+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,&mdash;with its vulgar pride and vain
+servility,&mdash;to mark the German. Fearful thought!&mdash;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. &ldquo;We feel by theory,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+This is a single example, its general application
+perhaps too hastily assumed. But how terrible it
+would be were that generalisation justified before
+<a name="page37"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;37]</span>
+our eyes! There would be then a note of despair in
+the phrase, &ldquo;We Germans feel by theory, we are
+all spoilt by history;&rdquo;&mdash;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 &ldquo;with due reflection in
+abstract terms,&rdquo; 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,
+<a name="page38"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;38]</span>
+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,&mdash;&ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section7_5"></a>
+V.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page39"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;39]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page40"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;40]</span>
+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 &ldquo;reason of reasonable men.&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;divine animal&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+If one take hold of these masks, believing he
+<a name="page41"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;41]</span>
+has to do with a serious thing and not a mere
+puppet-show&mdash;for they all have an appearance of
+seriousness&mdash;he will find nothing but rags and
+coloured streamers in his hands. He must
+deceive himself no more, but cry aloud, &ldquo;Off with
+your jackets, or be what you seem!&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;Halt! who goes there?&rdquo; 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
+&ldquo;free personality,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;free,&rdquo; that is, sincere
+<a name="page42"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;42]</span>
+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 &ldquo;liberal education&rdquo; teaches,
+to tell lies about these needs, and thus become a
+walking lie one's self.
+</p>
+<p>
+In such an age, that suffers from its &ldquo;liberal
+education,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;if
+only....&rdquo; and by knowing that &ldquo;it happened once
+upon a time....&rdquo; Philosophy has no place in
+historical education, if it will be more than the
+knowledge that lives indoors, and can have no
+<a name="page43"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;43]</span>
+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 &ldquo;life.&rdquo; Only one thing is
+permitted there, and everything else quite impossible:
+such are the orders of historical education.
+&ldquo;Are these human beings,&rdquo; one might ask, &ldquo;or only
+machines for thinking, writing and speaking?&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+Goethe says of Shakespeare: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;beasts or
+gods,&rdquo; 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:
+<a name="page44"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;44]</span>
+&ldquo;only strong personalities can endure
+history, the weak are extinguished by it.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;how he ought
+to feel now,&rdquo; is insensibly turned by his timidity
+into a play-actor, and plays a part, or generally
+many parts,&mdash;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 <i>corpora</i> for their dissection&mdash;and as <i>vilia</i>
+as their own well-educated <i>corpora</i> 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,
+&ldquo;woman in herself,&rdquo; the Ever-unapproachable.
+And it is indifferent what they study, if history
+itself always remain beautifully &ldquo;objective&rdquo; to
+them, as men, in fact, who could never make history
+themselves. And since the Eternal Feminine
+could never &ldquo;draw you upward,&rdquo; you draw it down
+<a name="page45"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;45]</span>
+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 &ldquo;historically trained&rdquo;
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+If the personality be once emptied of its subjectivity,
+and come to what men call an &ldquo;objective&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;criticism,&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="page46"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;46]</span>
+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 &ldquo;influence&rdquo;: 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 &ldquo;corrections&rdquo;;&mdash;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
+<i>impotentia</i>.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section7_6"></a>
+VI.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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
+&ldquo;objectivity&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page47"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;47]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;thou must&rdquo;; 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.&mdash;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
+<a name="page48"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;48]</span>
+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 &ldquo;serve truth&rdquo;: 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page49"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;49]</span>
+for always treating the &ldquo;servants of truth&rdquo; with
+special kindness, who possess neither the will nor
+the power to judge and have set before them the
+task of finding &ldquo;pure knowledge without reference
+to consequences,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;cold demon of knowledge.&rdquo;
+And yet&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;nothing human is alien to him.&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="page50"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;50]</span>
+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&mdash;clever, stern and honest, but narrow-minded:
+who have the &ldquo;good will&rdquo; 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 <a name="tn1"></a>na�ve 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 &ldquo;objectivity&rdquo; by these simple people: they
+<a name="page51"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;51]</span>
+find the canon of all truth here: their work is to
+adapt the past to the present triviality. And they
+call all historical writing &ldquo;subjective&rdquo; that does not
+regard these popular opinions as canonical.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 �sthetic 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!
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;composition&rdquo; 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&mdash;but
+<a name="page52"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;52]</span>
+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 &ldquo;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.&rdquo; But as a result of this
+so-called &ldquo;objective&rdquo; way of looking at things, such
+a &ldquo;must&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;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&mdash;<i>which is of course only apparent
+in its presentation</i>.&rdquo; But what is one to think of the
+innocent statement, wavering between tautology and
+<a name="page53"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;53]</span>
+nonsense, of a famous historical virtuoso? &ldquo;It seems
+that all human actions and impulses are subordinate
+to the process of the material world, that works unnoticed,
+powerfully and irresistibly.&rdquo; In such a
+sentence one no longer finds obscure wisdom in the
+form of obvious folly; as in the saying of Goethe's
+gardener, &ldquo;Nature may be forced but not compelled,&rdquo;
+or in the notice on the side-show at a fair,
+in Swift: &ldquo;The largest elephant in the world, except
+himself, to be seen here.&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page54"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;54]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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 <i>not affected at all</i> 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&mdash;and this is called
+&ldquo;objectivity&rdquo;! 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 <i>vanity</i> 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;
+<a name="page55"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;55]</span>
+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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+<i>You can only explain the past by what is highest
+in the present.</i> 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
+<a name="page56"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;56]</span>
+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
+na�vely than a German would, of the &ldquo;historiens
+de M. Thiers.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page57"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;57]</span>
+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 &ldquo;Mr. So-and-so and his
+times,&rdquo; but for one whose title-page might be inscribed
+&ldquo;a fighter against his time.&rdquo; Feast your
+souls on Plutarch, and dare to believe in yourselves
+when you believe in his heroes. A hundred such
+men&mdash;educated against the fashion of to-day,
+made familiar with the heroic, and come to
+maturity&mdash;are enough to give an eternal quietus
+to the noisy sham education of this time.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section7_7"></a>
+VII.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page58"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;58]</span>
+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 &ldquo;he who
+destroys illusions in himself and others is punished
+by the ultimate tyrant, Nature.&rdquo; 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 <i>�crasez</i>!
+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
+<a name="page59"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;59]</span>
+Bible, be its John the Baptist. This state
+of innocence may be continued for some time by
+the Hegelian philosophy,&mdash;still seething in some
+of the older heads,&mdash;by which men can distinguish
+the &ldquo;idea of Christianity&rdquo; from its various imperfect
+&ldquo;manifestations&rdquo;; and persuade themselves that it
+is the &ldquo;self-movement of the Idea&rdquo; 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
+<i>theologus liberalis vulgaris</i>. 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 ...&mdash;what are we
+to think? if we find Christianity described by the
+&ldquo;greatest theologians of the century&rdquo; as the religion
+that claims to &ldquo;find itself in all real religions
+and some other barely possible religions,&rdquo; and
+if the &ldquo;true church&rdquo; is to be a thing &ldquo;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&rdquo;&mdash;what, I
+ask again, are we to think?
+</p>
+<p>
+Christianity has been denaturalised by historical
+treatment&mdash;which in its most complete form means
+&ldquo;just&rdquo; treatment&mdash;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
+<a name="page60"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;60]</span>
+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 minuti� 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 &ldquo;action at a distance&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;that never prosper
+without some illusion,&rdquo; as Hans Sachs says in the
+Meistersinger.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;science is now beginning to rule
+life.&rdquo; Possibly it might; but a life thus ruled is
+<a name="page61"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;61]</span>
+not of much value. It is not such true <i>life</i>, 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 &ldquo;common good&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;labour market.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;effects.&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page62"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;62]</span>
+subtler and stronger self-consciousness we find
+another emotion too&mdash;disgust. The young man
+has become homeless: he doubts all ideas, all
+moralities. He knows &ldquo;it was different in every
+age, and what you are does not matter.&rdquo; In a
+heavy apathy he lets opinion on opinion pass by
+him, and understands the meaning of H�lderlin's
+words when he read the work of Diogenes Laertius
+on the lives and doctrines of the Greek philosophers:
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;methods&rdquo; for original work, the &ldquo;correct
+ideas&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;creates&rdquo; something. He becomes a
+&ldquo;servant of truth&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page63"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;63]</span>
+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 &ldquo;factory, labour-market,
+auction-sale, practical use,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;useful.&rdquo; 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&mdash;&ldquo;Division of labour! fall into line!&rdquo; we
+may say roundly: &ldquo;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.&rdquo; The progress of science has been
+amazingly rapid in the last decade; but consider
+the savants, those exhausted hens. They are
+certainly not &ldquo;harmonious&rdquo; natures: they can
+merely cackle more than before, because they lay
+eggs oftener: but the eggs are always smaller,
+<a name="page64"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;64]</span>
+though their books are bigger. The natural result
+of it all is the favourite &ldquo;popularising&rdquo; of science
+(or rather its feminising and infantising), the
+villainous habit of cutting the cloth of science to
+fit the figure of the &ldquo;general public.&rdquo; Goethe saw
+the abuse in this, and demanded that science
+should only influence the outer world by way of
+<i>a nobler ideal of action</i>. 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 &ldquo;general public&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;the
+modest condescension of the savant to the people&rdquo;;
+whereas in reality he has only &ldquo;descended&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;If only the earth last for us: and if
+it do not last, it is no matter.&rdquo; Thus they come
+to live an <i>ironical</i> existence.
+<a name="page65"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;65]</span>
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section7_8"></a>
+VIII.
+</h3>
+<p>
+It may seem a paradox, though it is none, that I
+should attribute a kind of &ldquo;ironical self-consciousness&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;troubled feeling of
+his own error&rdquo; at the base&mdash;or rather on the height&mdash;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 &ldquo;historical men&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;The absurdity and superstition,&rdquo; these
+sceptics say, &ldquo;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.&rdquo; Historical culture is really a kind
+of inherited grayness, and those who have borne
+<a name="page66"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;66]</span>
+its mark from childhood must believe instinctively
+in <i>the old age of mankind</i>. 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,&mdash;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&mdash;the period of
+thirty-four consecutive human lives of sixty years
+each&mdash;to make us speak of youth at the beginning,
+and &ldquo;the old age of mankind&rdquo; 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
+&ldquo;the Son of Man.&rdquo; The <i>memento mori</i>, spoken
+to humanity as well as the individual, was a sting
+that never ceased to pain, the crown of medi�val
+knowledge and consciousness.
+</p>
+<p>
+The opposite message of a later time, <i>memento
+vivere</i>, is spoken rather timidly, without the full
+power of the lungs; and there is something almost
+dishonest about it. For mankind still keeps to
+<a name="page67"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;67]</span>
+its <i>memento mori</i>, 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: &ldquo;it
+might lead life astray and give it a false value.&rdquo;
+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 <i>memento vivere</i> on its standard. And
+if it cannot take the direct way&mdash;the way of main
+force&mdash;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
+<a name="page68"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;68]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+These words may not be very acceptable, any
+more than my derivation of the excess of history
+from the medi�val <i>memento mori</i> 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
+&ldquo;modern consciousness,&rdquo; must itself be known
+by a historical process. History must solve the
+<a name="page69"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;69]</span>
+problem of history, science must turn its sting
+against itself. This threefold &ldquo;must&rdquo; is the imperative
+of the &ldquo;new spirit,&rdquo; if it is really to contain
+something new, powerful, vital and original.
+Or is it true that we Germans&mdash;to leave the
+Romance nations out of account&mdash;must always be
+mere &ldquo;followers&rdquo; in all the higher reaches of
+culture, because that is all we <i>can</i> be? The words
+of Wilhelm Wackernagel are well worth pondering:
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+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,&mdash;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&mdash;through our
+&ldquo;universal history&rdquo;&mdash;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
+<a name="page70"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;70]</span>
+ancient Greek world, where all was great, natural
+and human. But it is just <i>there</i> that we find the
+reality of a true unhistorical culture&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Suppose that these antiquaries, these late
+arrivals, were to change their painful ironic
+modesty for a certain shamelessness. Suppose we
+heard them saying, aloud, &ldquo;The race is at its zenith,
+for it has manifested itself consciously for the first
+time.&rdquo; We should have a comedy, in which the
+dark meaning of a certain very celebrated
+<a name="page71"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;71]</span>
+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 &ldquo;world-process,&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;Idea realising
+itself,&rdquo; the &ldquo;Dialectic of the spirit of the nations,&rdquo;
+and the &ldquo;tribunal of the world.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+History understood in this Hegelian way has
+been contemptuously called God's sojourn upon
+earth,&mdash;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,&mdash;or rather, as simply
+superfluous. He has not said it; and thus he has
+<a name="page72"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;72]</span>
+implanted in a generation leavened throughout by
+him the worship of the &ldquo;power of history,&rdquo; 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
+&ldquo;to adapt ourselves to circumstances.&rdquo; But the
+man who has once learnt to crook the knee and
+bow the head before the power of history, nods
+&ldquo;yes&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;rational necessity,&rdquo; and every
+event show the victory of logic or the &ldquo;Idea,&rdquo;
+then&mdash;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 &ldquo;objective&rdquo; 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&mdash;makes one
+gentle and pliable. Even if a man brought up in
+<a name="page73"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;73]</span>
+this school will show himself openly offended, one
+is just as pleased, knowing it is only meant in the
+artistic sense of <i>ira et studium</i>, though it is really
+<i>sine ira et studio</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;&ldquo;it
+was once,&rdquo; and morality&mdash;&ldquo;it ought not to be, or
+have been.&rdquo; 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: &ldquo;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,&rdquo; and so on. Thus you become an <i>advocatus
+diaboli</i> 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 <i>natura naturans</i>
+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
+&ldquo;outlived&rdquo; years in exchange for whole cartloads
+of fresh modern lifetimes, to have another set of
+such conversations as those with Eckermann, and
+<a name="page74"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;74]</span>
+be preserved from all the &ldquo;modern&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;it was once so&rdquo; against
+the moral judgment &ldquo;it ought not to have been.&rdquo;
+Yes, against the moral judgment! For you may
+speak of what virtue you will, of justice, courage,
+magnanimity, of wisdom and human compassion,&mdash;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 &ldquo;all-embracing system of
+passion and error,&rdquo; man would have to read it as
+Goethe wished Werther to be read;&mdash;just as if it
+called to him, &ldquo;Be a man and follow me not!&rdquo;
+But fortunately history also keeps alive for us the
+memory of the great &ldquo;fighters against history,&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;thus it is,&rdquo; in order that they
+might follow a &ldquo;thus it must be&rdquo; with greater joy
+and greater pride. Not to drag their generation to
+the grave, but to found a new one&mdash;that is the
+motive that ever drives them onward; and even if
+they are born late, there is a way of living by
+<a name="page75"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;75]</span>
+which they can forget it&mdash;and future generations
+will know them only as the first-comers.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section7_9"></a>
+IX.
+</h3>
+<p>
+Is perhaps our time such a &ldquo;first-comer&rdquo;? 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&mdash;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:&mdash;&ldquo;what
+you see now had to come, man had to be
+thus and not otherwise, no one can stand against
+this necessity.&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;the full
+surrender of his personality to the world-process.&rdquo;
+The personality and the world-process! The world-process
+and the personality of the earthworm! If
+only one did not eternally hear the word &ldquo;world,
+world, world,&rdquo; that hyperbole of all hyperboles;
+<a name="page76"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;76]</span>
+when we should only speak, in a decent manner,
+of &ldquo;man, man, man&rdquo;! Heirs of the Greeks and
+Romans, of Christianity? All that seems nothing
+to the cynics. But &ldquo;heirs of the world-process&rdquo;;
+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!&mdash;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: &ldquo;We
+are at the top, we are the top, we are the completion
+of Nature!&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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 <i>do</i>. Thou climbest the
+sunbeams of knowledge up towards heaven&mdash;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
+<a name="page77"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;77]</span>
+knowledge tears asunder.&mdash;But not another serious
+word about this, for there is a lighter side to it all.
+</p>
+<p>
+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, &ldquo;when the spirit makes a fresh start,
+we philosophers are at hand.&rdquo; Our time did make
+a fresh start&mdash;into irony, and lo! Edward von
+Hartmann was at hand, with his famous Philosophy
+of the Unconscious&mdash;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 &ldquo;becoming,&rdquo; 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;&mdash;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,&mdash;such a system shows its creator to be one
+<a name="page78"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;78]</span>
+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?
+</p>
+<p>
+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 na�vely up to us
+by David Strauss as the most beautiful fact of all&mdash;is
+justified by Hartmann not only from the past,
+<i>ex causis efficientibus</i>, but also from the future,
+<i>ex causa finali</i>. The rogue let light stream over
+our time from the last day, and saw that it
+was very good,&mdash;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
+&ldquo;old age of man&rdquo;: but that is the blessed state,
+according to him, where there is only a successful
+mediocrity; where art is the &ldquo;evening's amusement
+of the Berlin financier,&rdquo; and &ldquo;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,&rdquo; to that stage
+<a name="page79"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;79]</span>
+of social evolution, in fact, in which every worker
+&ldquo;leads a comfortable existence, with hours of work
+that leave him sufficient leisure to cultivate his
+intellect.&rdquo; 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.
+&ldquo;Antichrist is visibly extending his arms:&rdquo; yet it
+<i>must be so</i>, for after all we are on the right road&mdash;of
+disgust at all existence. &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+&ldquo;becoming,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;work&rdquo; are they to strive boldly forward?
+Or, to ask another question:&mdash;what further has the
+historically educated fanatic of the world-process
+to do,&mdash;swimming and drowning as he is in the
+sea of becoming,&mdash;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
+<a name="page80"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;80]</span>
+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,
+&ldquo;the full surrender of his personality to the world-process,
+for the sake of his end, the redemption of
+the world&rdquo;: or still more clearly,&mdash;&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;delicacy of perception&rdquo; and dares to
+say that &ldquo;in the German mind there does seem to
+be something splay, something blunt-edged, unhandy
+and infelicitous.&rdquo; Could the great German
+parodist contradict this? According to him, we are
+approaching &ldquo;that ideal condition in which the
+<a name="page81"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;81]</span>
+human race makes its history with full consciousness&rdquo;:
+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 &ldquo;world-process&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;German mind,&rdquo; with &ldquo;the uncanny
+seriousness of an owl,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Our low comedian has his word on this too, with
+<a name="page82"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;82]</span>
+his wonderful dialectic, which is just as genuine
+as its admirers are admirable. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+No, thou clear, scornful spirit, so long as
+the illogical rules as it does to-day,&mdash;so long, for
+example, as the world-process can be spoken of as
+thou speakest of it, amid such deep-throated assent,&mdash;the
+last day is yet far off. For it is still too joyful
+on this earth, many an illusion still blooms here&mdash;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,&mdash;and no one has despised them
+with such loathing as thou,&mdash;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&mdash;from to-morrow time
+<a name="page83"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;83]</span>
+shall not exist, and the <i>Times</i> 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 &ldquo;Unconscious&rdquo; in one of the scales, and
+his &ldquo;World-process&rdquo; in the other. There are some
+who believe they weigh equally; for in each scale
+there is an evil word&mdash;and a good joke.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;historical
+sense,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;world&rdquo; and &ldquo;humanity&rdquo; 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 <i>a
+posteriori</i>, 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, <i>anim� magn� prodigus</i>. But
+if we have the doctrines of the finality of &ldquo;becoming,&rdquo;
+<a name="page84"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;84]</span>
+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),&mdash;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 <i>masses</i>; 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&mdash;laws? We may admit it:
+but we are sure of this too&mdash;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.
+<a name="page85"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;85]</span>
+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 &ldquo;great&rdquo; that has moved the masses
+for some long time, and becomes, as they say, a
+&ldquo;historical power.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;historical
+power,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;historical power&rdquo;; for they were accustomed
+to stand outside the &ldquo;world,&rdquo; and cared
+little for the &ldquo;process of the Christian Idea.&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page86"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;86]</span>
+progress and consequence: he is the power behind
+all &ldquo;historical power,&rdquo; 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
+&ldquo;historical movements&rdquo;: and yet they are in no
+way disturbed by the discovery, but proclaim that
+&ldquo;egoism shall be our god.&rdquo; 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&mdash;natural as well as human history&mdash;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
+&ldquo;fixing themselves with an eye to the future in
+their earthly home, and making themselves comfortable
+there.&rdquo; Hartmann calls this life the &ldquo;manhood
+<a name="page87"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;87]</span>
+of humanity&rdquo; with an ironical reference to
+what is now called &ldquo;manhood&rdquo;;&mdash;as if only our
+sober models of selfishness were embraced by it;
+just as he prophesies an age of graybeards following
+on this stage,&mdash;obviously another ironical glance at
+our ancient time-servers. For he speaks of the ripe
+discretion with which &ldquo;they view all the stormy
+passions of their past life and understand the vanity
+of the ends they seem to have striven for.&rdquo; 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
+</p>
+<p class="nowrap">
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&ldquo;last scene of all<br />
+That ends this strange eventful history,<br />
+Is second childishness and mere oblivion,<br />
+Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.&rdquo;<br />
+</p>
+<p>
+Whether the dangers of our life and culture come
+from these dreary, toothless old men, or from the
+so-called &ldquo;men&rdquo; 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&mdash;that men intentionally
+help, and encourage, and use, the worst
+aberrations of the historical sense from which the
+present time suffers.
+</p>
+<p>
+They use it, however, against youth, in order to
+transform it into that ripe &ldquo;egoism of manhood&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="page88"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;88]</span>
+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 <i>unhistorically</i>:
+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 &ldquo;man&rdquo; or the
+&ldquo;graybeard&rdquo; of Hartmann. And that is what
+they <i>want</i> him to be: that is the meaning of the
+present cynical demand for the &ldquo;full surrender of
+the personality to the world-process&rdquo;&mdash;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 &ldquo;men&rdquo; and
+<a name="page89"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;89]</span>
+&ldquo;graybeards.&rdquo; For then would come the reign
+of youth.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section7_10"></a>
+X.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 <i>youth</i>, 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
+<a name="page90"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;90]</span>
+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 &ldquo;poetry&rdquo; 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&mdash;in &ldquo;words, words, words.&rdquo; 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&mdash;though
+a long time&mdash;is needed for a world to
+perish, so nothing but time&mdash;though still more
+time&mdash;is needed for a false idea to be destroyed in
+Germany, the &ldquo;Land of Little-by-little.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;culture&rdquo; to be merely a kind of knowledge
+<a name="page91"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;91]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+�sthetically 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?
+</p>
+<p>
+Principally by destroying the superstition that
+<a name="page92"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;92]</span>
+this kind of education is <i>necessary</i>. 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&mdash;and pained&mdash;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
+&ldquo;educated man&rdquo; (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
+<a name="page93"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;93]</span>
+diligently practised, if we are not to have mere
+botchers and babblers as the issue of it all!
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;mighty lie.&rdquo; 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 <i>�terna veritas</i> of this arrangement was
+the basis of the new education and the new state.
+So the modern German believes also in the <i>�terna
+veritas</i> of his education, of his kind of culture:
+and yet this belief will fail&mdash;as the Platonic state
+would have failed&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+But our first generation must be brought up in
+this &ldquo;mighty truth,&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page94"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;94]</span>
+it might say to itself, in the old Spanish phrase,
+&ldquo;Defienda me Dios de my,&rdquo; 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:&mdash;&ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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 <i>cogito ergo sum</i>,
+though not <i>vivo ergo cogito</i>. I am permitted the
+empty <i>esse</i>, not the full green <i>vivere</i>. A primary
+feeling tells me that I am a thinking being but not
+a living one, that I am no &ldquo;animal,&rdquo; but at most a
+&ldquo;cogital.&rdquo; &ldquo;Give me life, and I will soon make
+you a culture out of it&rdquo;&mdash;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?
+</p>
+<p>
+No god and no man will give it&mdash;only their own
+<i>youth</i>. Set this free, and you will set life free as
+<a name="page95"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;95]</span>
+well. For it only lay concealed, in a prison; it is
+not yet withered or dead&mdash;ask your own selves!
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<i>malady of history</i>. 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?
+</p>
+<p>
+It is no marvel that they bear the names of
+poisons:&mdash;the antidotes to history are the &ldquo;unhistorical&rdquo;
+and the &ldquo;super-historical.&rdquo; With these
+names we return to the beginning of our inquiry
+and draw near to its final close.
+</p>
+<p>
+By the word &ldquo;unhistorical&rdquo; I mean the power,
+the art of <i>forgetting</i>, and of drawing a limited
+horizon round one's self. I call the power &ldquo;super-historical&rdquo;
+which turns the eyes from the process
+of becoming to that which gives existence an
+eternal and stable character, to art and religion.
+Science&mdash;for it is science that makes us speak of
+&ldquo;poisons&rdquo;&mdash;sees in these powers contrary powers:
+for it considers only that view of things to be true
+and right, and therefore scientific, which regards
+<a name="page96"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;96]</span>
+something as finished and historical, not as continuing
+and eternal. Thus it lives in a deep
+antagonism towards the powers that make for
+eternity&mdash;art and religion,&mdash;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&mdash;of becoming!
+</p>
+<p>
+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:&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+And here I see the mission of the youth that
+<a name="page97"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;97]</span>
+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 &ldquo;health&rdquo; and &ldquo;culture,&rdquo; 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&mdash;but how would youth count
+that a reproach? You may speak of its rawness
+and intemperateness&mdash;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&mdash;and the consolations&mdash;of youth, especially
+the right of brave unthinking honesty and the consolation
+of an inspiring hope.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page98"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;98]</span>
+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&mdash;monumental,
+antiquarian, or critical. At first they will be more
+ignorant than the &ldquo;educated men&rdquo; 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?
+</p>
+<p>
+How can we reach that end? you will ask. The
+Delphian god cries his oracle to you at the beginning
+of your wanderings, &ldquo;Know thyself.&rdquo; It is a
+hard saying: for that god &ldquo;tells nothing and conceals
+nothing but merely points the way,&rdquo; as
+Heraclitus said. But whither does he point?
+</p>
+<p>
+In certain epochs the Greeks were in a similar
+danger of being overwhelmed by what was past
+<a name="page99"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;99]</span>
+and foreign, and perishing on the rock of &ldquo;history.&rdquo;
+They never lived proud and untouched. Their
+&ldquo;culture&rdquo; was for a long time a chaos of foreign
+forms and ideas,&mdash;Semitic, Babylonian, Lydian and
+Egyptian,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+This is a parable for each one of us: he must
+organise the chaos in himself by &ldquo;thinking himself
+back&rdquo; 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
+&ldquo;decoration of life&rdquo;&mdash;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
+<a name="page100"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;100]</span>
+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.
+<a name="page101"></a>
+<a name="page102"></a>
+</p>
+<h2>
+<a name="page103"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;103]</span>
+<a name="chapter9"></a>
+SCHOPENHAUER AS
+EDUCATOR.
+</h2>
+<h3>
+I.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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, &ldquo;They have a tendency to sloth.&rdquo;
+Many may think that the fuller truth would have
+been, &ldquo;They are all timid.&rdquo; They hide themselves
+behind &ldquo;manners&rdquo; and &ldquo;opinions.&rdquo; 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;&mdash;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,
+<a name="page104"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;104]</span>
+the &ldquo;taking things easily,&rdquo; in a word the &ldquo;tendency
+to sloth,&rdquo; 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&mdash;as an analytical
+deduction from his individuality&mdash;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 &ldquo;taking himself
+easily&rdquo;; to follow his conscience, which cries out
+to him, &ldquo;Be thyself! all that thou doest and
+thinkest and desirest, is not&mdash;thyself!&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page105"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;105]</span>
+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 &ldquo;killing time,&rdquo; yet in respect of an age
+that rests its salvation on public opinion,&mdash;that is,
+on private laziness,&mdash;one must be quite determined
+that such a time shall be &ldquo;killed,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;killing their time,&rdquo; and of perishing
+with it,&mdash;when they wish rather to quicken the
+time to life, and in that life themselves to <i>live</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+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;
+<a name="page106"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;106]</span>
+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 &ldquo;to-day,&rdquo;
+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. &ldquo;I
+will make the attempt to gain freedom,&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;And
+this is not&mdash;thyself,&rdquo; the soul says. &ldquo;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&mdash;'A man has never
+<a name="page107"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;107]</span>
+risen higher than when he knoweth not whither his
+road may yet lead him'?&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+But how can we &ldquo;find ourselves&rdquo; again, and how
+can man &ldquo;know himself&rdquo;? 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 &ldquo;Here art thou in very truth;
+this is outer shell no more.&rdquo; 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,&mdash;our friendships and enmities, our
+looks and greetings, our memories and forgetfulnesses,
+our books and our writing! This is the
+most effective way:&mdash;to let the youthful soul look
+back on life with the question, &ldquo;What hast thou
+up to now truly loved, what has drawn thy soul
+upward, mastered it and blessed it too?&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page108"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;108]</span>
+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&mdash;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;&mdash;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&mdash;for she is a step-mother too,
+sometimes.
+</p>
+<p>
+There are other means of &ldquo;finding ourselves,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section9_2"></a>
+II.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page109"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;109]</span>
+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,&mdash;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: &ldquo;What would be the principles, on which he
+might teach thee?&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;dear little horn&rdquo;&mdash;the &ldquo;cursed
+piping,&rdquo; 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&mdash;nay, the soul of harmony itself&mdash;as we
+see in natures like Cellini's, where everything&mdash;knowledge,
+desire, love and hate&mdash;tends towards a
+<a name="page110"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;110]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;school for authors,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;family tutor,&rdquo; even among our
+most eminent and cultured people; and what a
+<a name="page111"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;111]</span>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;&ldquo;the more the
+better,&rdquo;&mdash;it is as harmful to learning as the
+economic theory of <i>laisser faire</i> 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:&mdash;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,&mdash;because there are no teachers;
+and why a savant must be a distorted and perverted
+thing,&mdash;because he will have been trained by the
+inhuman abstraction, science. This being so, let a
+man ask himself: &ldquo;Where are now the types of
+moral excellence and fame for all our generation&mdash;learned
+<a name="page112"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;112]</span>
+and unlearned, high and low&mdash;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?&rdquo; 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 na�ve 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
+formul�; virtue is a word and nothing more, on
+both sides, an old-fashioned word that they laugh
+at&mdash;and it is worse when they do not laugh, for
+then they are hypocrites.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 medi�val 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
+<a name="page113"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;113]</span>
+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 &ldquo;good&rdquo; and the &ldquo;better&rdquo;
+course&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+So I was right in speaking of my &ldquo;wandering in
+a world of wishes&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;out of season&rdquo;; simply
+and honestly&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+With such needs and desires within me did I
+come to know Schopenhauer.
+<a name="page114"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;114]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;least of all a
+philosopher who has set this up as his law:
+&ldquo;deceive nobody, not even thyself,&rdquo; neither with
+the &ldquo;white lies&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;hears and loves.&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="page115"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;115]</span>
+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:&mdash;&ldquo;A philosopher must be
+very honest to avail himself of no aid from poetry
+or rhetoric.&rdquo; 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,
+<a name="page116"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;116]</span>
+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&mdash;&ldquo;As soon as I open
+him, I seem to grow a pair of wings.&rdquo; If I had
+the task of making myself at home on the earth,
+I would choose him as my companion.
+</p>
+<p>
+Schopenhauer has a second characteristic in
+common with Montaigne, besides honesty; a joy
+that really makes others joyful. &ldquo;Aliis l�tus,
+sibi sapiens.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;joyfulness&rdquo; 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 <i>fils de joie</i> do not see the sufferings and
+<a name="page117"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;117]</span>
+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 slipshod
+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 <i>danse macabre</i> of the rest of humanity.
+And so in their company one feels a natural man
+again, and could cry out with Goethe&mdash;&ldquo;What a
+wondrous and priceless thing is a living creature!
+How fitted to his surroundings, how true, and
+real!&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page118"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;118]</span>
+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 Chim�ras, 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&mdash;his pupils and his sons.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section9_3"></a>
+III.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;breathing testimony&rdquo; in German philosophical
+<a name="page119"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;119]</span>
+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&mdash;which is ultimately a formative
+limiting of one's self&mdash;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
+&ldquo;truth,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;pure reason.&rdquo; And
+therefore I will say, that philosophy in Germany
+has more and more to learn not to be &ldquo;pure
+<a name="page120"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;120]</span>
+reason&rdquo;: and it may well take as its model
+&ldquo;Schopenhauer the man.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;pure reason&rdquo;: and
+only &ldquo;at best&rdquo;&mdash;it was more probable that neither
+man nor reason would survive.
+</p>
+<p>
+A modern Englishman sketches the most usual
+danger to extraordinary men who live in a society
+that worships the ordinary, in this manner:&mdash;&ldquo;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.&rdquo; Our
+Holderins 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&mdash;&ldquo;Voil� un homme qui
+a eu de grands chagrins!&rdquo; which Goethe translated
+to mean &ldquo;That is a man who has taken great pains
+in his life.&rdquo; And he adds, &ldquo;If the trace of the
+sorrow and activity we have gone through cannot
+be wiped from our features, it is no wonder that
+<a name="page121"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;121]</span>
+all that survives of us and our struggles should
+bear the same impress.&rdquo; 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&mdash;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&mdash;inviolable silence. This much at least
+was accomplished by it;&mdash;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&mdash;perilous and uncontrollable;&mdash;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 (<i>legor et legar</i>), 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
+<a name="page122"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;122]</span>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;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;
+<a name="page123"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;123]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+So the first danger in whose shadow Schopenhauer
+lived was&mdash;isolation. The second is called&mdash;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
+<a name="page124"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;124]</span>
+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 &ldquo;domains of
+thought&rdquo; 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.
+&ldquo;It was only a short time ago,&rdquo; he writes in his
+poignant way, &ldquo;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.&mdash;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.&rdquo; Yes, when
+will men feel again deeply as Kleist did, and learn
+<a name="page125"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;125]</span>
+to measure a philosophy by what it means to the
+&ldquo;Holy of Holies&rdquo;? 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 &ldquo;critical&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="page126"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;126]</span>
+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 <i>sub specie
+�ternitatis</i>&mdash;&ldquo;this is the picture of the whole of
+life: learn thence the meaning of thine own life.&rdquo;
+And the converse: &ldquo;read thine own life, and
+understand thence the hieroglyphs of the universal
+life.&rdquo; 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;&mdash;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!
+</p>
+<p>
+Applying this to Schopenhauer himself, we
+come to the third and most intimate danger in
+<a name="page127"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;127]</span>
+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 &ldquo;genius&rdquo;
+in himself. This is the root of all true culture;
+and if we say this means the aspiration of man to
+be &ldquo;born again&rdquo; 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,&mdash;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
+<a name="page128"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;128]</span>
+from the picture of Ranc�, the founder of the
+Trappists, with the words: &ldquo;That is a matter of
+grace.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;all too human&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page129"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;129]</span>
+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&mdash;joy, safety, honour: his
+fellow-men pay him his due of&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;pure
+reason&rdquo;: or through the constant search for the
+&ldquo;pros and cons&rdquo; 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: &ldquo;No dog could live
+long thus!&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+<a name="page130"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;130]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page131"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;131]</span>
+for freedom and beauty on the grand scale, and
+their search after truth, with its single question
+&ldquo;What is the real <i>worth</i> of life?&rdquo; 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&mdash;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,&mdash;warm, red life,&mdash;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?
+</p>
+<p>
+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 <i>against</i> 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
+<a name="page132"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;132]</span>
+to that element which is not truly himself, the
+irreconcilable antagonism of the temporal and
+eternal in him. The supposed &ldquo;child of his age&rdquo;
+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,&mdash;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, &ldquo;What is the real worth of
+life?&rdquo; 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:&mdash;&ldquo;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,
+<a name="page133"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;133]</span>
+and the sorely accused life shall go free.&rdquo; How
+shall he answer? In the words of Empedocles.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section9_4"></a>
+IV.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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 <i>in opposition</i> to our age, since we have
+the advantage of really knowing our age, through
+him;&mdash;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 &ldquo;Dark age,&rdquo; 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.
+<a name="page134"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;134]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;perhaps in Germany&mdash;who
+are disposed to believe in all seriousness that
+the world was put right two years ago,<a name="ref_1_1"></a><a href="#footnote_1_1" class="fnref">[1]</a> and that
+all stern and gloomy views of life are now contradicted
+by &ldquo;facts.&rdquo; The foundation of the New
+German Empire is, to them, the decisive blow that
+annihilates all the &ldquo;pessimistic&rdquo; philosophisers,&mdash;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&mdash;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
+<a name="page135"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;135]</span>
+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
+Carri�re in Munich.
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;and
+only with them in their relation to the world
+of culture, which is again almost independent of the
+&ldquo;good of the state.&rdquo; Of the many links that make
+up the twisted chain of humanity, some are of gold
+and others of pewter.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page136"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;136]</span>
+drawing away in enmity again, and long to tear
+each other in pieces. The sciences, blindly driving
+along, on a <i>laisser faire</i> 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
+Tannh�user did Biterolf, &ldquo;What hast thou, poor
+wretch, enjoyed!&rdquo; 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.
+<a name="page137"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;137]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 medi�val times
+<a name="page138"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;138]</span>
+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
+&ldquo;adiaphora&rdquo;&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 <i>are</i> those smallest
+indivisible elements of human society?
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page139"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;139]</span>
+will provide the guardians and champions for
+<i>Humanity</i>, 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 <i>Image of Man</i>, 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?
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+&ldquo;in the grand style&rdquo; 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
+&ldquo;holy mother Nature,&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page140"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;140]</span>
+truest humanity a little while ago&mdash;all his arts
+and sciences, all the refinements of his life,&mdash;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, &ldquo;Nature alone is good, the natural
+man alone is human,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;gospel of kindly Nature&rdquo; 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&mdash;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 d�monic, in opposition to his utterly und�monic
+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&mdash;which
+is the tragic destiny of all revolutionary
+deliverers. One is wrong, however, to expect
+<a name="page141"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;141]</span>
+anything of the sort: Goethe's man here parts
+company with Rousseau's; for he hates all violence,
+all sudden transition&mdash;that is, all action: and the
+universal deliverer becomes merely the universal
+traveller. All the riches of life and nature, all
+antiquity&mdash;arts, mythologies and sciences&mdash;pass
+before his eager eyes, his deepest desires are
+aroused and satisfied, Helen herself can hold him
+no more&mdash;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&mdash;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 &ldquo;things as they are&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="page142"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;142]</span>
+Wilhelm Meister: &ldquo;You are bitter and ill-tempered&mdash;which
+is quite an excellent thing: if you could
+once become really angry, it would be still better.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+<i>Schopenhauer's man voluntarily takes upon himself
+the pain of telling the truth:</i> 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:&mdash;
+</p>
+<p class="nowrap">
+&ldquo;So to the active and eternal<br />
+Creative force, in cold disdain<br />
+You now oppose the fist infernal&rdquo;&mdash;<br />
+</p>
+<p>
+and he who would live according to Schopenhauer
+would seem to be more like a Mephistopheles than
+a Faust&mdash;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
+<a name="page143"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;143]</span>
+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 &ldquo;the quickest beast
+that will carry you to perfection is suffering.&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;Schopenhauer
+man&rdquo;;&mdash;pure and wonderfully patient, on
+his intellectual side full of a devouring fire, and
+far removed from the cold and contemptuous
+&ldquo;neutrality&rdquo; 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: &ldquo;A happy
+life is impossible, the highest thing that man can
+aspire to is a <i>heroic</i> 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
+<a name="page144"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;144]</span>
+the Prince in the <i>re corvo</i> 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.&rdquo; Such a
+heroic life, with its full &ldquo;mortification&rdquo;&mdash;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 &ldquo;gift&rdquo; and
+&ldquo;compulsion&rdquo; are contemptible words, mere means
+of escape from an inner voice, a slander on him
+who has listened to the voice&mdash;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,
+<a name="page145"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;145]</span>
+&ldquo;I will remain mine own.&rdquo; 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&mdash;&ldquo;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?&rdquo; 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,&mdash;busy with the comedy they are all
+playing, and never thinking of their own selves.
+To the question &ldquo;To what end dost thou live?&rdquo;
+they would all immediately answer, with pride,
+&ldquo;To <i>become</i> a good citizen or professor or statesman,&rdquo;&mdash;and
+yet they <i>are</i> something which can
+never be changed: and why are they just&mdash;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 &ldquo;becoming,&rdquo; has not understood
+the lesson of existence, and must learn it over
+again. This eternal &ldquo;becoming something&rdquo; 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&mdash;and with
+us. The heroism of sincerity lies in ceasing to be
+the plaything of time. Everything in the process
+of &ldquo;becoming&rdquo; is a hollow sham, contemptible and
+<a name="page146"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;146]</span>
+shallow: man can only find the solution of his
+riddle in &ldquo;being&rdquo; something definite and unchangeable.
+He begins to test how deep both &ldquo;becoming&rdquo;
+and &ldquo;being&rdquo; are rooted in him&mdash;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.
+<a name="page147"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;147]</span>
+They will at some time disappear: and then will
+it be day.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section9_5"></a>
+V.
+</h3>
+<p>
+But I have promised to speak of Schopenhauer,
+as far as my experience goes, as an <i>educator</i>, and
+it is far from being sufficient to paint the ideal
+humanity which is the &ldquo;Platonic idea&rdquo; in Schopenhauer;
+especially as my representation is an imperfect
+one. The most difficult task remains;&mdash;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 <i>educative</i>. 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, &ldquo;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?&rdquo;&mdash;in order that the great words of
+Goethe be not fulfilled in our case&mdash;&ldquo;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,
+<a name="page148"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;148]</span>
+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.&rdquo; 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;&mdash;becoming
+unstable, daily weaker and less productive:&mdash;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 <i>accomplish</i>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.
+<a name="page149"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;149]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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
+<a name="page150"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;150]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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
+<a name="page151"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;151]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page152"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;152]</span>
+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&mdash;and who are they
+that will uplift us?
+</p>
+<p>
+The sincere men who have cast out the beast,
+the philosophers, artists and saints. Nature&mdash;<i>qu&aelig;
+nunquam facit saltum</i>&mdash;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 &ldquo;beauty.&rdquo; 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 <i>heard</i> in his life,
+he may well say to himself&mdash;&ldquo;The deaf ears, the
+feeble understanding and shrunken heart, everything
+that I call mine,&mdash;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
+<a name="page153"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;153]</span>
+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&mdash;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 &ldquo;becoming&rdquo;; 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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+I can now give an answer to the question whether
+it be possible to approach the great ideal of Schopenhauer's
+man &ldquo;by any ordinary activity of our own.&rdquo;
+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 <i>culture</i>;
+<a name="page154"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;154]</span>
+though only so far as it can put a single task
+before each of us&mdash;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,&mdash;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.
+&ldquo;I have often said, and will often repeat,&rdquo; he
+exclaims in one place, &ldquo;the <i>causa finalis</i> of natural
+and human activity is dramatic poetry. Otherwise
+the stuff is of no use at all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;becoming&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;I&rdquo;
+no longer; there is something beyond our being
+that comes, for those moments, to the hither side
+<a name="page155"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;155]</span>
+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.&mdash;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&mdash;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;&mdash;and
+this is the &ldquo;use&rdquo; we are to make of him;&mdash;we must
+know what obstacles there are and strike them
+from our path&mdash;in fact, wage unceasing war against
+everything that hindered our fulfilment, and prevented
+us from becoming Schopenhauer's men
+ourselves.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section9_6"></a>
+VI.
+</h3>
+<p>
+It is sometimes harder to agree to a thing than
+to understand it; many will feel this when they
+consider the proposition&mdash;&ldquo;Mankind must toil
+<a name="page156"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;156]</span>
+unceasingly to bring forth individual great men:
+this and nothing else is its task.&rdquo; 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;&mdash;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:
+&ldquo;Let it be rather for the sake of every other, or,
+at any rate, of as many as possible!&rdquo; 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&mdash;&ldquo;In what way may
+<a name="page157"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;157]</span>
+your life, the individual life, retain the highest
+value and the deepest significance? and how may
+it least be squandered?&rdquo; Only by your living for
+the good of the rarest and most valuable types,
+not for that of the majority,&mdash;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. &ldquo;She has succeeded
+badly,&rdquo; he should say; &ldquo;but I will do honour to
+her great idea by being a means to its better
+success.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;initiation into culture.&rdquo;
+The sign of this is shame or vexation at one's self,
+a hatred of one's own narrowness, a sympathy with
+<a name="page158"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;158]</span>
+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
+d�bris of some precious sculptures, which cry out&mdash;&ldquo;Come
+and help us! Put us together, for we long
+to become complete.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+I called this inward condition the &ldquo;first initiation
+into culture.&rdquo; I have now to describe the
+effects of the &ldquo;second initiation,&rdquo; 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,&mdash;the
+production of genius.
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;&ldquo;Is
+not such knowledge, after all, absolutely
+<a name="page159"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;159]</span>
+necessary? Can Nature be said to attain her
+end, if men have a false idea of the aim of their
+own labour?&rdquo; And any one who thinks a great
+deal of Nature's unconscious adaptation of means
+to ends, will probably answer at once: &ldquo;Yes, men
+may think and speak what they like about their
+ultimate end, their blind instinct will tell them the
+right road.&rdquo; It requires some experience of life
+to be able to contradict this: but let a man be
+convinced of the real aim of culture&mdash;the production
+of the true man and nothing else;&mdash;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 &ldquo;battle of the beasts&rdquo;: 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;&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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: &ldquo;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
+<a name="page160"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;160]</span>
+happiness as possible.&rdquo;&mdash;This is the seductive
+formula. Its preachers would define education as
+the insight that makes man through and through
+a &ldquo;child of his age&rdquo; in his desires and their
+satisfaction, and gives him command over the
+best means of making money. Its aim would
+be to make &ldquo;current&rdquo; men, in the same sense as
+one speaks of the &ldquo;currency&rdquo; in money; and in
+their view, the more &ldquo;current&rdquo; men there are,
+the happier the people. The object of modern
+educational systems is therefore to make each
+man as &ldquo;current&rdquo; 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
+&ldquo;intelligence and property&rdquo; not only exists, but
+is also a <i>moral</i> 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 &ldquo;refined egoism&rdquo; or &ldquo;immoral Epicureanism.&rdquo;
+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, &ldquo;man has a necessary claim to worldly happiness;
+only for that reason is education necessary.&rdquo;
+<a name="page161"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;161]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;highly civilised state&rdquo; 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,&mdash;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
+&ldquo;setting free&rdquo; comes to mean rather &ldquo;chaining
+up.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;good form&rdquo; over them. Words,
+gestures, dress, etiquette, and such external things,
+<a name="page162"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;162]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;sound taste&rdquo; applied to the
+German language by means of an Academy on the
+<a name="page163"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;163]</span>
+French model, to shake off the doubtful influence
+of Goethe&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;including the arts of
+the dancing-master and the upholsterer;&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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:&mdash;&ldquo;The
+old German way is no longer yours: it was
+hard, rough, and full of resistance; but it is still
+the most valuable material&mdash;one which only the
+greatest modellers can work with, for they alone
+<a name="page164"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;164]</span>
+are worthy to use it. What you have in you now
+is a soft pulpy stuff: make what you will out of
+it,&mdash;elegant dolls and interesting idols&mdash;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.'&rdquo; 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.&mdash;The
+prevailing love of &ldquo;good form&rdquo; 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
+&ldquo;three m's,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;good
+form&rdquo; 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:
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo; Faith may often produce
+happiness, yet <i>this</i> particular faith makes me unhappy,
+<a name="page165"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;165]</span>
+for I feel that the culture whose future
+raises such hopes&mdash;the culture of riches, politeness,
+and elegant concealments&mdash;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 &ldquo;cult of the interesting.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;good form&rdquo; over them. There is
+fourthly the self-interest of science, and the
+peculiar nature of her servants&mdash;the learned.
+<a name="page166"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;166]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;though
+no less a problem for that!
+</p>
+<p>
+If one accustom himself to put down every
+experience in a dialectical form of question and
+answer, and translate it into the language of &ldquo;pure
+reason,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;impulse to truth&rdquo;: 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&mdash;even the worthiest! To speak honestly,
+the savant is a complex of very various impulses
+and attractive forces&mdash;he is a base metal throughout.
+</p>
+<p>
+Take first a strong and increasing desire for
+intellectual adventure, the attraction of the new
+and rare as against the old and tedious. Add
+<a name="page167"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;167]</span>
+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,&mdash;truth only
+its pretext. The impulse to discover &ldquo;particular
+truths&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+The following characteristics of the savant are
+less common, but still found.&mdash;Firstly, downrightness
+and a feeling for simplicity, very valuable if
+more than a mere awkwardness and inability to
+deceive, deception requiring some mother-wit.&mdash;(Actually,
+we may be on our guard against too
+obvious cleverness and resource, and doubt the
+man's sincerity.)&mdash;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 &ldquo;adiaphora&rdquo;; 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
+<i>sensus recti</i>. 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
+<a name="page168"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;168]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Fourthly, a lack of feeling, which makes him
+<a name="page169"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;169]</span>
+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,&mdash;any more than the
+mule who does not feel giddiness.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page170"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;170]</span>
+of gravitation; and so they can often bring their
+labours to an end.
+</p>
+<p>
+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, �sthetic,
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Ninthly, the motive of the bread-winner, the
+&ldquo;cry of the empty stomach,&rdquo; 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&mdash;and bread. Only,
+however, in the sense of the &ldquo;particular truth&rdquo;:
+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 <i>ingenii largitor venter</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+Tenthly, a reverence for their fellow-professors
+and a fear of their displeasure&mdash;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.
+<a name="page171"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;171]</span>
+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 &ldquo;moral idiosyncrasies,&rdquo;&mdash;formerly
+called rascalities.
+</p>
+<p>
+Eleventhly, the &ldquo;savant for vanity,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Twelfthly, the &ldquo;savant for amusement.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+If I speak, lastly, of the &ldquo;impulse towards
+justice&rdquo; 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.
+<a name="page172"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;172]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;mere purposeless, and therefore
+motiveless, knowledge&mdash;a mass of very human
+little motives have been chemically combined, and
+as the result we have the professor,&mdash;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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+In fact, all these considerations go to prove that
+the aim of culture is most unknown precisely where
+<a name="page173"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;173]</span>
+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&mdash;business. When the pioneers of &ldquo;good
+form&rdquo; 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 <i>themselves</i> 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+<a name="page174"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;174]</span>
+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;&mdash;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?&mdash;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 medi�val 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 &ldquo;fight in line,&rdquo; the second to treat as foes all
+who will not &ldquo;fall in.&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page175"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;175]</span>
+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 &ldquo;fashionable culture,&rdquo; that plays on
+their selfish side, their vanities and weaknesses;
+and the time-spirit ever whispers in their ears its
+flattering counsel:&mdash;&ldquo;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
+<a name="page176"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;176]</span>
+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.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section9_7"></a>
+VII.
+</h3>
+<p>
+But setting aside all thoughts of any educational
+revolution in the distant future;&mdash;what provision
+is required <i>now</i>, that our future philosopher
+may have the best chance of opening his eyes to a
+life like Schopenhauer's&mdash;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.
+<a name="page177"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;177]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page178"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;178]</span>
+should reach all&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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
+<a name="page179"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;179]</span>
+that have up to now killed his effect among men.
+First there was the want of readers,&mdash;to the eternal
+shame of our cultivated age;&mdash;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.&mdash;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?
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page180"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;180]</span>
+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,&mdash;including
+not merely religious dogmas, but such
+juggling conceptions as &ldquo;progress,&rdquo; &ldquo;universal
+education,&rdquo; &ldquo;nationalism,&rdquo; &ldquo;the modern state&rdquo;;
+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 &ldquo;health.&rdquo; 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
+amphor�, 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&mdash;to
+say nothing of our vases!&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+In considering the conditions that, at best, keep
+the born philosopher from being oppressed by the
+<a name="page181"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;181]</span>
+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&mdash;a rude and strong virility. His father
+was neither an official nor a savant; he travelled
+much abroad with his son,&mdash;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 &ldquo;protectors,&rdquo; 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 <i>furor philosophicus</i> in him will no longer
+have time for the <i>furor politicus</i>, 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
+<a name="page182"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;182]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Schopenhauer had another great advantage&mdash;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&mdash;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 &ldquo;seen
+at once&rdquo;; 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&mdash;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&mdash;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
+<a name="page183"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;183]</span>
+was looking, must come to be born; and could he,
+after this vision, have much desire to busy himself
+with the so-called &ldquo;art,&rdquo; in the learned, hypocritical
+manner of the moderns? He had seen something
+higher than that&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was one of the high conditions of his existence
+that he really could live for such a task&mdash;according
+to his motto <i>vitam impendere vero</i>&mdash;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 &ldquo;considerate fool,&rdquo; in
+search of place and honour, circumspect and obsequious,
+and fawning on his influential superiors.
+<a name="page184"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;184]</span>
+Nothing offended the savants more than Schopenhauer's
+unlikeness to them.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section9_8"></a>
+VIII.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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;&mdash;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,&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+A father may possibly learn something from
+this that he may use for his son's private education,
+<a name="page185"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;185]</span>
+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 &ldquo;corrupting
+the youth,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;God-born king&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;encouragement of
+philosophy&rdquo; 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?
+</p>
+<p>
+Experience teaches us a better way&mdash;or a worse:
+it says that nothing so stands in the way of the
+birth and growth of Nature's philosopher as the
+<a name="page186"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;186]</span>
+bad philosophers made &ldquo;by order.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+The &ldquo;freedom&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;encouragement
+of philosophy&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;take care of
+me, as I have something better to do&mdash;namely to
+take care of you.&rdquo; We should not be angry at
+such a heightened mode of expression in Plato
+and Schopenhauer; and so they might properly
+<a name="page187"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;187]</span>
+have been University philosophers,&mdash;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,&mdash;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&mdash;the state. And not only
+the state, but everything required by it for existence&mdash;a
+definite form of religion, a social system, a
+standing army; a <i>noli me tangere</i> is written
+above all these things. Can a University
+philosopher ever keep clearly before him the
+<a name="page188"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;188]</span>
+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,&mdash;I think he is no friend to truth either.
+</p>
+<p>
+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, &ldquo;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?&rdquo; Without answering
+this last question, I will merely say that these
+&ldquo;concessions&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page189"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;189]</span>
+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&mdash;and yet must be in his place and appear to
+be thinking! What then?
+</p>
+<p>
+&ldquo;But,&rdquo; one will say, &ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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;&mdash;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, &ldquo;He is an able scholar, antiquary,
+philologist, historian,&rdquo;&mdash;but never, &ldquo;He is a
+philosopher.&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;at best&rdquo;: 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
+<a name="page190"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;190]</span>
+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&mdash;namely to see whether
+one can live by it&mdash;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,&mdash;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, &ldquo;Thank God
+I am no philosopher, but a Christian and a good
+citizen!&rdquo;
+<a name="page191"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;191]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+What if this cry were the ultimate object of the
+state, and the &ldquo;education&rdquo; or leading to philosophy
+were merely a leading <i>from</i> philosophy? We may
+well ask.&mdash;But if so, there is one thing to fear&mdash;that
+the youth may some day find out to what
+end philosophy is thus mis-handled. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;&mdash;Then woe
+to the whole machinery of political and professorial
+trickery!
+</p>
+<p>
+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: &ldquo;men are born according to
+their deeds, deaf, dumb, misshapen.&rdquo; Those fathers
+deserved such sons, &ldquo;according to their deeds,&rdquo; 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,
+<a name="page192"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;192]</span>
+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,&mdash;&ldquo;Not
+one of them can fully explain to me the origin of
+matter; then what do I care about them all?&rdquo;&mdash;Another
+said of history, &ldquo;It tells nothing new to
+the man with ideas&rdquo;: 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
+&ldquo;led the way&rdquo; in the sciences in the sense that the
+quarry &ldquo;leads the way&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page193"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;193]</span>
+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 &ldquo;dead weight that lies on the
+intellects of mankind&rdquo;! 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 &ldquo;philosophy,&rdquo; and every one
+will agree with the temperate words of Bagehot<a name="ref_1_2"></a><a href="#footnote_1_2" class="fnref">[2]</a>
+on the present system builders: &ldquo;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
+<a name="page194"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;194]</span>
+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?&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;Fool, you do not
+see the beam,&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;This is all that is
+wanting,&mdash;that a philosophaster like this should lay
+his impure hands on us, the natural sciences and
+history! Away with him!&rdquo; Then they start
+back, knowing not where to turn or to ask the way.
+They wanted to have a little physical knowledge
+<a name="page195"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;195]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+But granted that this herd of bad philosophers is
+ridiculous&mdash;and who will deny it?&mdash;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,&mdash;nay, rather persecute
+them and treat them ill,&mdash;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,&mdash;one
+only has to cease paying them. And that
+<a name="page196"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;196]</span>
+is a better plan than the open patronage of any
+philosophy, whatever it be, for state reasons.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;false truth,&rdquo; a masked actor who cannot
+perform the office required from the real truth&mdash;the
+affirmation of the state's worth and sanctity.
+When a medi�val 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 &ldquo;anti-philosophy&rdquo;
+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.&mdash;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
+<a name="page197"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;197]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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&mdash;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
+<a name="page198"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;198]</span>
+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&mdash;their
+philosophies&mdash;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&mdash;the very cosmetics of speech&mdash;with
+<a name="page199"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;199]</span>
+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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page200"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;200]</span>
+<i>ingrata principibus nomina</i>. 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. &ldquo;Beware when the great God
+lets loose a thinker on this planet,&rdquo; says Emerson.<a name="ref_1_3"></a><a href="#footnote_1_3" class="fnref">[3]</a>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;as
+<a name="page201"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;201]</span>
+ever tree bore its apples.&rdquo; 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:
+&ldquo;What great result has he to show, who has
+so long practised philosophy and yet has <i>hurt</i>
+nobody?&rdquo; Yes, the university philosophy should
+have on its monument, &ldquo;It has hurt nobody.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Schopenhauer proved this and will continue to
+prove it, more and more.
+</p>
+<h2>
+FOOTNOTES
+</h2>
+<div class="footnote">
+<p>
+<a name="footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#ref_1_1">1</a>: This was written in 1873.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span>
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnote">
+<p>
+<a name="footnote_1_2"></a><a href="#ref_1_2">2</a>: <i>Physics and Politics</i>, 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.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span>
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnote">
+<p>
+<a name="footnote_1_3"></a><a href="#ref_1_3">3</a>: Essay on &ldquo;Circles.&rdquo;
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="trnote">
+<h2>
+<a name="chapter10"></a>
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
+</h2>
+<p>
+The following printer's errors have been corrected:
+</p>
+<p class="nowrap">
+naive corrected to <a href="#tn1">na�ve</a> (<a href="#page50">p. 50</a>)<br />
+</p>
+<p>
+The original hyphenation has been retained for the following words
+which were inconsistently hyphenated:
+</p>
+<p class="nowrap">
+outlived (<a href="#page73">p. 73</a>) / out-lived (<a href="#page73">p. 73</a>)<br />
+slipshod (<a href="#page117">p. 117</a>) / slip-shod (<a href="#page191">p. 191</a>)<br />
+</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Thoughts Out of Season (Part II), by 
+Friedrich Nietzsche
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Thoughts out of Season, Part II, by 
+Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+Title: Thoughts out of Season, Part II
+       The Use and Abuse of History - Schopenhauer as Educator
+
+Author: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
+
+Editor: Oscar Levy
+
+Translator: Adrian Collins
+
+Release Date: April 14, 2016 [EBook #38226]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON, PART II ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org,
+Charles Franks, Michael Roe and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<img src="images/cover.png" width="550" alt="" />
+</div>
+
+<h2>THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON</h2>
+
+<h3>PART TWO </h3>
+
+<h3>THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY<br />
+SCHOPENHAUER AS EDUCATOR</h3>
+
+<h3>By</h3>
+
+<h2>FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE</h2>
+
+<h4>TRANSLATED BY</h4>
+
+<h4>ADRIAN COLLINS, M.A.</h4>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 150px;">
+<img src="images/nietzsche.png" width="150" alt="" />
+</div>
+
+<h4>The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche</h4>
+
+<h5>The First Complete and Authorised English Translation</h5>
+
+<h4>Edited by Dr Oscar Levy</h4>
+
+<h4>Volume Five</h4>
+
+<h5>T.N. FOULIS</h5>
+
+<h5>13 &amp; 15 FREDERICK STREET</h5>
+
+<h5>EDINBURGH: AND LONDON</h5>
+
+<h5>19O9</h5>
+
+<hr class="full" />
+<p class="bylinebreak" style="font-size: 0.8em;">
+<a name="v05_preface5"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;v]</span>
+TO L. P.<br />
+FROM THE TRANSLATOR.<br />
+<i>EN RECONNAISSANCE.</i></p>
+<hr class="chap" />
+<p><a name="v05_preface6"></a>
+<a name="v05_preface7"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;vii]</span>
+</p>
+<p style="font-size: 0.8em;">
+<a name="v05_chapter3"></a>
+<span class="caption">CONTENTS.</span><br />
+<a href="#v05_chapter4">INTRODUCTION</a><br />
+<a href="#v05_chapter5">THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY</a><br />
+<a href="#v05_chapter9">SCHOPENHAUER AS EDUCATOR</a><br />
+</p>
+<hr class="tb" />
+<p>
+<a name="v05_preface8"></a>
+<a name="v05_preface9"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;ix]</span>
+<a name="v05_chapter4"></a>
+</p>
+<h4>INTRODUCTION.</h4>
+<p>
+The two essays translated in this volume form the
+second and third parts of the <i>Unzeitgem�sse
+Betrachtungen</i>. 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
+B�le.
+</p>
+<p>
+Nietzsche, who served in an ambulance corps in
+'71, had seen something of the Franco-German War,
+and to him it was the &ldquo;honest German bravery&rdquo;
+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, &ldquo;the German does not yet know the
+meaning of the word culture,&rdquo; 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&mdash;the &ldquo;historical sense&rdquo;:
+he had been brought by his spiritual teachers to
+<a name="v05_preface10"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;x]</span>
+believe that he was the &ldquo;crown of the world-process&rdquo;
+and that his highest duty lay in surrendering
+himself to it.
+</p>
+<p>
+With Nietzsche, the historical sense became a
+&ldquo;malady from which men suffer,&rdquo; 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&mdash;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 &ldquo;noisy
+little fellows&rdquo; who measure the motives of the
+great men of the past by their own, and use the
+past to justify their present.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;lonely giants amid the pigmies.&rdquo;
+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
+&ldquo;production of the genius,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Schopenhauer here stands, as a personality, for
+all that makes for life in philosophy, against the
+<a name="v05_preface11"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;xi]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+But &ldquo;there has never been a eulogy on a
+philosopher,&rdquo; says Dr. K�gel, &ldquo;that has had so
+little to say about his philosophy.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;not Schopenhauer as educator is in question,
+but his opposite, Nietzsche as educator&rdquo; (<i>Ecce
+Homo</i>). He could regard Schopenhauer, later, as
+a siren that called to death; he put him among
+the great artists that lead down&mdash;who are worse
+than the bad artists that lead nowhere. &ldquo;We
+must go further in the pessimistic logic than the
+denial of the will,&rdquo; he says in the <i>G�tzend�mmerung</i>;
+&ldquo;we must deny Schopenhauer.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;all-too-human&rdquo;
+side of Schopenhauer, that actually brings
+us nearer to him. Later, he could part the man
+<a name="v05_preface12"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;xii]</span>
+and his work, and speak of Schopenhauer's view as
+the &ldquo;Evil eye.&rdquo; But as yet he is a young man
+who has kept his illusions, and, like Ogniben, he
+judges men by what they might be.
+</p>
+<p>
+Afterwards, he judged himself too in these essays
+by &ldquo;what he might be.&rdquo; &ldquo;To me,&rdquo; he said in <i>Ecce
+Homo</i>, &ldquo;they are promises: I know not what they
+mean to others.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+It is also in the belief they are promises that
+they are here translated &ldquo;for others.&rdquo; The
+<i>Thoughts out of Season</i> are the first announcement
+of the complex theme of the <i>Zarathustra</i>.
+They form the best possible introduction to
+Nietzschean thought. Nietzsche is already the
+knight-errant of philosophy: but his adventure is
+just beginning.
+</p>
+<p class="signature">
+A. C.<br />
+</p>
+<hr class="chap" />
+<h3>
+<a name="v05_chapter5"></a>
+THE USE AND ABUSE OF
+HISTORY.
+<a name="v05_page2"></a>
+<a name="v05_page3"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;3]</span>
+</h3>
+<h4>
+<a name="v05_chapter6"></a>
+PREFACE.
+</h4>
+<p>
+&ldquo;I hate everything that merely instructs me
+without increasing or directly quickening my
+activity.&rdquo; These words of Goethe, like a sincere
+<i>ceterum censeo</i>, 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 &ldquo;quicken,&rdquo; knowledge that slackens the
+rein of activity, why in fact history, in Goethe's
+phrase, must be seriously &ldquo;hated,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+I have tried to describe a feeling that has often
+<a name="v05_page4"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;4]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+&ldquo;movement.&rdquo; And I gain an advantage for myself
+that is more valuable to me than propriety&mdash;the
+attainment of a correct point of view, through
+my critics, with regard to our age.
+</p>
+<p>
+These thoughts are &ldquo;out of season,&rdquo; because I
+am trying to represent something of which the age
+is rightly proud&mdash;its historical culture&mdash;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,&mdash;and
+<a name="v05_page5"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;5]</span>
+from other sources only for the sake of
+comparison; and that I have only reached such
+&ldquo;unseasonable&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;unseasonable,&rdquo;&mdash;that
+is, contrary to our time, and yet with
+an influence on it for the benefit, it may be hoped,
+of a future time.
+<a name="v05_page6"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;6]</span>
+</p>
+<h4>
+I.
+</h4>
+<p>
+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&mdash;&ldquo;Why do you look at me and
+not speak to me of your happiness?&rdquo; The beast
+wants to answer&mdash;&ldquo;Because I always forget what I
+wished to say&rdquo;: but he forgets this answer too, and
+is silent; and the man is left to wonder.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page7"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;7]</span>
+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&mdash;and suddenly
+it flutters back into the man's lap. Then he says,
+&ldquo;I remember...,&rdquo; 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 <i>unhistorically</i>; for it &ldquo;goes into&rdquo; 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&mdash;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 &ldquo;once
+upon a time,&rdquo; the &ldquo;open sesame&rdquo; 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,
+<a name="v05_page8"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;8]</span>
+it abolishes life and being together, and
+sets the seal on the knowledge that &ldquo;being&rdquo; is
+merely a continual &ldquo;has been,&rdquo; a thing that lives
+by denying and destroying and contradicting itself.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;unhistorically&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;becoming&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="v05_page9"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;9]</span>
+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 &ldquo;historical sense,&rdquo;
+that injures and finally destroys the living thing,
+be it a man or a people or a system of culture.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;plastic power&rdquo; 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,&mdash;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
+<a name="v05_page10"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;10]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page11"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;11]</span>
+righteousness for a downright act of will or desire.
+We saw that the beast, absolutely &ldquo;unhistorical,&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="v05_page12"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;12]</span>
+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 &ldquo;unhistorical&rdquo;
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;super-historical&rdquo; standpoint
+of consciousness, that Niebuhr has described
+as the possible result of historical
+research. &ldquo;History,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;is useful for one
+purpose, if studied in detail: that men may know,
+as the greatest and best spirits of our generation
+<a name="v05_page13"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;13]</span>
+do not know, the accidental nature of the forms
+in which they see and insist on others seeing,&mdash;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.&rdquo; Such
+a standpoint might be called &ldquo;super-historical,&rdquo;
+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,&mdash;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 &ldquo;super-historical standpoint&rdquo;:
+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:&mdash;
+</p>
+<p class="nowrap">
+&ldquo;And from the dregs of life hope to receive,<br />
+What the first sprightly running could not give.&rdquo;<br />
+</p>
+<p>
+We will call them the &ldquo;historical men.&rdquo; 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
+<a name="v05_page14"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;14]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+But that question to which we have heard the
+first answer, is capable of another; also a &ldquo;no,&rdquo;
+but on different grounds. It is the &ldquo;no&rdquo; of the
+&ldquo;super-historical&rdquo; 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?
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;super-historical&rdquo; 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
+<a name="v05_page15"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;15]</span>
+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: &ldquo;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&mdash;nothing else. Be calm.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+History regarded as pure knowledge and allowed
+to sway the intellect would mean for men the final
+<a name="v05_page16"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;16]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<h4>
+<a name="v05_section7_2"></a>
+II.
+</h4>
+<p>
+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&mdash;so far as they can be distinguished&mdash;the
+<i>monumental</i>, the <i>antiquarian</i>, and the <i>critical</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page17"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;17]</span>
+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 &ldquo;man&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;monumental&rdquo;
+history.
+<a name="v05_page18"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;18]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+But the fiercest battle is fought round the demand
+for greatness to be eternal. Every other living thing
+cries no. &ldquo;Away with the monuments,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;monumental history&rdquo; 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,&mdash;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&mdash;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,
+<a name="v05_page19"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;19]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+What is the use to the modern man of this
+&ldquo;monumental&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page20"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;20]</span>
+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
+C�sar, 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 <i>deus ex machina</i>, 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&mdash;&ldquo;monumentally,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;effects in themselves,&rdquo;
+than of events that will have an effect on all ages.
+The events of war or religion cherished in our
+popular celebrations are such &ldquo;effects in themselves&rdquo;;
+it is these that will not let ambition sleep,
+and lie like amulets on the bolder hearts&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+As long as the soul of history is found in the
+<a name="v05_page21"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;21]</span>
+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 &ldquo;monumental&rdquo; 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,&mdash;the antiquarian and the critical,&mdash;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&mdash;and
+the head&mdash;of a gifted egoist or an inspired
+scoundrel; kingdoms will be overthrown, princes
+murdered, war and revolution let loose, and the
+number of &ldquo;effects in themselves&rdquo;&mdash;in other words,
+effects without sufficient cause&mdash;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&mdash;or their master!
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page22"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;22]</span>
+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&mdash;and conscientious&mdash;dance
+round the half understood monument of
+a great past. &ldquo;See, that is the true and real art,&rdquo;
+we seem to hear: &ldquo;of what use are these aspiring
+little people of to-day?&rdquo; The dancing crowd has
+apparently the monopoly of &ldquo;good taste&rdquo;: 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 �sthetic dilettanti, you may take
+your oath on his condemnation; although, or rather
+because, his judges had proclaimed solemnly the
+canon of &ldquo;monumental art,&rdquo; the art that has
+&ldquo;had an effect on all ages,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;monumental&rdquo; 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 name="v05_page23"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;23]</span>
+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,
+&ldquo;See, the great thing is already here!&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;let the dead bury the&mdash;living.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+&ldquo;antiquarian historian&rdquo;: 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
+&ldquo;critical history,&rdquo; 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.
+<a name="v05_page24"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;24]</span>
+</p>
+<h4>
+<a name="v05_section7_3"></a>
+III.
+</h4>
+<p>
+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&mdash;his strength, industry, desire,
+reason, faults and follies. &ldquo;Here one could live,&rdquo;
+he says, &ldquo;as one can live here now&mdash;and will go
+on living; for we are tough folk, and will not be
+uprooted in the night.&rdquo; And so, with his &ldquo;we,&rdquo; 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
+<a name="v05_page25"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;25]</span>
+once its palimpsests&mdash;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
+&ldquo;coming from the stern, rough, German soul.&rdquo;
+This was the road that the Italians of the Renaissance
+travelled, the spirit that reawakened the
+ancient Italic genius in their poets to &ldquo;a wondrous
+echo of the immemorial lyre,&rdquo; 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,&mdash;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,&mdash;perhaps in whole peoples,&mdash;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
+<a name="v05_page26"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;26]</span>
+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&mdash;this is
+what we nowadays prefer to call the real historical
+sense.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page27"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;27]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page28"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;28]</span>
+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&mdash;whether it be a custom, a religious
+creed, or a political principle,&mdash;it seems presumptuous,
+even impious, to replace it by a new fact,
+and the ancient congregation of pieties by a new
+piety.
+</p>
+<p>
+Here we see clearly how necessary a third way
+of looking at the past is to man, beside the other
+two. This is the &ldquo;critical&rdquo; 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&mdash;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. &ldquo;For everything that is born is
+<i>worthy</i> of being destroyed: better were it then
+that nothing should be born.&rdquo; 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
+<a name="v05_page29"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;29]</span>
+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&mdash;a monopoly, a caste,
+a dynasty for example&mdash;the thing deserves to
+fall. Its past is critically examined, the knife
+put to its roots, and all the &ldquo;pieties&rdquo; 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 <i>a posteriori</i> 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
+<a name="v05_page30"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;30]</span>
+sake of life. The consolation is the knowledge
+that this &ldquo;first nature&rdquo; was once a second, and
+that every conquering &ldquo;second nature&rdquo; becomes
+a first.
+</p>
+<h4>
+<a name="v05_section7_4"></a>
+IV.
+</h4>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;historical deduction.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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?
+<a name="v05_page31"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;31]</span>
+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&mdash;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 &ldquo;science of universal evolution,&rdquo; history; that
+shows it with the dangerous audacity of its motto&mdash;&ldquo;Fiat
+veritas, pereat vita.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page32"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;32]</span>
+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
+&ldquo;real personality.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;inner life&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;education&rdquo; and
+&ldquo;historical education&rdquo; 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,
+<a name="v05_page33"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;33]</span>
+the famous people of a past still near to us, had
+the &ldquo;unhistorical sense&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;uneducated.&rdquo; 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 encyclop�dias, as an
+ancient Greek who had strayed into our time
+would probably call us. But the only value of
+an encyclop�dia 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: &ldquo;Manual of
+internal culture for external barbarians.&rdquo; 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,&mdash;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
+<a name="v05_page34"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;34]</span>
+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
+&ldquo;unity of artistic style in every outward expression
+of the people's life.&rdquo; This must not be misunderstood,
+as though it were merely a question
+of the opposition between barbarism and &ldquo;fine
+style.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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. &ldquo;Form&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="v05_page35"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;35]</span>
+with his &ldquo;therefore.&rdquo; 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&mdash;which is not
+a strong or serious will&mdash;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&mdash;for they have the &ldquo;sense of substance&rdquo;:
+they are famous for their cult of &ldquo;inwardness.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+But there is also a famous danger in their &ldquo;inwardness&rdquo;:
+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
+<a name="v05_page36"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;36]</span>
+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,&mdash;with its vulgar pride and vain
+servility,&mdash;to mark the German. Fearful thought!&mdash;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. &ldquo;We feel by theory,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+This is a single example, its general application
+perhaps too hastily assumed. But how terrible it
+would be were that generalisation justified before
+<a name="v05_page37"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;37]</span>
+our eyes! There would be then a note of despair in
+the phrase, &ldquo;We Germans feel by theory, we are
+all spoilt by history;&rdquo;&mdash;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 &ldquo;with due reflection in
+abstract terms,&rdquo; 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,
+<a name="v05_page38"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;38]</span>
+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,&mdash;&ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<h4>
+<a name="v05_section7_5"></a>
+V.
+</h4>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page39"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;39]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page40"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;40]</span>
+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 &ldquo;reason of reasonable men.&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;divine animal&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+If one take hold of these masks, believing he
+<a name="v05_page41"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;41]</span>
+has to do with a serious thing and not a mere
+puppet-show&mdash;for they all have an appearance of
+seriousness&mdash;he will find nothing but rags and
+coloured streamers in his hands. He must
+deceive himself no more, but cry aloud, &ldquo;Off with
+your jackets, or be what you seem!&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;Halt! who goes there?&rdquo; 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
+&ldquo;free personality,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;free,&rdquo; that is, sincere
+<a name="v05_page42"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;42]</span>
+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 &ldquo;liberal education&rdquo; teaches,
+to tell lies about these needs, and thus become a
+walking lie one's self.
+</p>
+<p>
+In such an age, that suffers from its &ldquo;liberal
+education,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;if
+only....&rdquo; and by knowing that &ldquo;it happened once
+upon a time....&rdquo; Philosophy has no place in
+historical education, if it will be more than the
+knowledge that lives indoors, and can have no
+<a name="v05_page43"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;43]</span>
+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 &ldquo;life.&rdquo; Only one thing is
+permitted there, and everything else quite impossible:
+such are the orders of historical education.
+&ldquo;Are these human beings,&rdquo; one might ask, &ldquo;or only
+machines for thinking, writing and speaking?&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+Goethe says of Shakespeare: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;beasts or
+gods,&rdquo; 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:
+<a name="v05_page44"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;44]</span>
+&ldquo;only strong personalities can endure
+history, the weak are extinguished by it.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;how he ought
+to feel now,&rdquo; is insensibly turned by his timidity
+into a play-actor, and plays a part, or generally
+many parts,&mdash;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 <i>corpora</i> for their dissection&mdash;and as <i>vilia</i>
+as their own well-educated <i>corpora</i> 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,
+&ldquo;woman in herself,&rdquo; the Ever-unapproachable.
+And it is indifferent what they study, if history
+itself always remain beautifully &ldquo;objective&rdquo; to
+them, as men, in fact, who could never make history
+themselves. And since the Eternal Feminine
+could never &ldquo;draw you upward,&rdquo; you draw it down
+<a name="v05_page45"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;45]</span>
+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 &ldquo;historically trained&rdquo;
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+If the personality be once emptied of its subjectivity,
+and come to what men call an &ldquo;objective&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;criticism,&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="v05_page46"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;46]</span>
+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 &ldquo;influence&rdquo;: 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 &ldquo;corrections&rdquo;;&mdash;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
+<i>impotentia</i>.
+</p>
+<h4>
+<a name="v05_section7_6"></a>
+VI.
+</h4>
+<p>
+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
+&ldquo;objectivity&rdquo; 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
+<a name="v05_page47"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;47]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;thou must&rdquo;; 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.&mdash;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
+<a name="v05_page48"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;48]</span>
+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 &ldquo;serve truth&rdquo;: 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page49"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;49]</span>
+for always treating the &ldquo;servants of truth&rdquo; with
+special kindness, who possess neither the will nor
+the power to judge and have set before them the
+task of finding &ldquo;pure knowledge without reference
+to consequences,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;cold demon of knowledge.&rdquo;
+And yet&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;nothing human is alien to him.&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="v05_page50"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;50]</span>
+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&mdash;clever, stern and honest, but narrow-minded:
+who have the &ldquo;good will&rdquo; 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 na�ve 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 &ldquo;objectivity&rdquo; by these simple people: they
+<a name="v05_page51"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;51]</span>
+find the canon of all truth here: their work is to
+adapt the past to the present triviality. And they
+call all historical writing &ldquo;subjective&rdquo; that does not
+regard these popular opinions as canonical.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 �sthetic 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!
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;composition&rdquo; 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&mdash;but
+<a name="v05_page52"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;52]</span>
+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 &ldquo;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.&rdquo; But as a result of this
+so-called &ldquo;objective&rdquo; way of looking at things, such
+a &ldquo;must&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;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&mdash;<i>which is of course only apparent
+in its presentation</i>.&rdquo; But what is one to think of the
+innocent statement, wavering between tautology and
+<a name="v05_page53"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;53]</span>
+nonsense, of a famous historical virtuoso? &ldquo;It seems
+that all human actions and impulses are subordinate
+to the process of the material world, that works unnoticed,
+powerfully and irresistibly.&rdquo; In such a
+sentence one no longer finds obscure wisdom in the
+form of obvious folly; as in the saying of Goethe's
+gardener, &ldquo;Nature may be forced but not compelled,&rdquo;
+or in the notice on the side-show at a fair,
+in Swift: &ldquo;The largest elephant in the world, except
+himself, to be seen here.&rdquo; 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
+<a name="v05_page54"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;54]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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 <i>not affected at all</i> 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&mdash;and this is called
+&ldquo;objectivity&rdquo;! 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 <i>vanity</i> 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;
+<a name="v05_page55"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;55]</span>
+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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+<i>You can only explain the past by what is highest
+in the present.</i> 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
+<a name="v05_page56"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;56]</span>
+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
+na�vely than a German would, of the &ldquo;historiens
+de M. Thiers.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page57"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;57]</span>
+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 &ldquo;Mr. So-and-so and his
+times,&rdquo; but for one whose title-page might be inscribed
+&ldquo;a fighter against his time.&rdquo; Feast your
+souls on Plutarch, and dare to believe in yourselves
+when you believe in his heroes. A hundred such
+men&mdash;educated against the fashion of to-day,
+made familiar with the heroic, and come to
+maturity&mdash;are enough to give an eternal quietus
+to the noisy sham education of this time.
+</p>
+<h4>
+<a name="v05_section7_7"></a>
+VII.
+</h4>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page58"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;58]</span>
+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 &ldquo;he who
+destroys illusions in himself and others is punished
+by the ultimate tyrant, Nature.&rdquo; 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 <i>�crasez</i>!
+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
+<a name="v05_page59"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;59]</span>
+Bible, be its John the Baptist. This state
+of innocence may be continued for some time by
+the Hegelian philosophy,&mdash;still seething in some
+of the older heads,&mdash;by which men can distinguish
+the &ldquo;idea of Christianity&rdquo; from its various imperfect
+&ldquo;manifestations&rdquo;; and persuade themselves that it
+is the &ldquo;self-movement of the Idea&rdquo; 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
+<i>theologus liberalis vulgaris</i>. 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 ...&mdash;what are we
+to think? if we find Christianity described by the
+&ldquo;greatest theologians of the century&rdquo; as the religion
+that claims to &ldquo;find itself in all real religions
+and some other barely possible religions,&rdquo; and
+if the &ldquo;true church&rdquo; is to be a thing &ldquo;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&rdquo;&mdash;what, I
+ask again, are we to think?
+</p>
+<p>
+Christianity has been denaturalised by historical
+treatment&mdash;which in its most complete form means
+&ldquo;just&rdquo; treatment&mdash;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
+<a name="v05_page60"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;60]</span>
+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 minuti� 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 &ldquo;action at a distance&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;that never prosper
+without some illusion,&rdquo; as Hans Sachs says in the
+Meistersinger.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;science is now beginning to rule
+life.&rdquo; Possibly it might; but a life thus ruled is
+<a name="v05_page61"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;61]</span>
+not of much value. It is not such true <i>life</i>, 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 &ldquo;common good&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;labour market.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;effects.&rdquo; 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
+<a name="v05_page62"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;62]</span>
+subtler and stronger self-consciousness we find
+another emotion too&mdash;disgust. The young man
+has become homeless: he doubts all ideas, all
+moralities. He knows &ldquo;it was different in every
+age, and what you are does not matter.&rdquo; In a
+heavy apathy he lets opinion on opinion pass by
+him, and understands the meaning of H�lderlin's
+words when he read the work of Diogenes Laertius
+on the lives and doctrines of the Greek philosophers:
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;methods&rdquo; for original work, the &ldquo;correct
+ideas&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;creates&rdquo; something. He becomes a
+&ldquo;servant of truth&rdquo; 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
+<a name="v05_page63"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;63]</span>
+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 &ldquo;factory, labour-market,
+auction-sale, practical use,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;useful.&rdquo; 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&mdash;&ldquo;Division of labour! fall into line!&rdquo; we
+may say roundly: &ldquo;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.&rdquo; The progress of science has been
+amazingly rapid in the last decade; but consider
+the savants, those exhausted hens. They are
+certainly not &ldquo;harmonious&rdquo; natures: they can
+merely cackle more than before, because they lay
+eggs oftener: but the eggs are always smaller,
+<a name="v05_page64"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;64]</span>
+though their books are bigger. The natural result
+of it all is the favourite &ldquo;popularising&rdquo; of science
+(or rather its feminising and infantising), the
+villainous habit of cutting the cloth of science to
+fit the figure of the &ldquo;general public.&rdquo; Goethe saw
+the abuse in this, and demanded that science
+should only influence the outer world by way of
+<i>a nobler ideal of action</i>. 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 &ldquo;general public&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;the
+modest condescension of the savant to the people&rdquo;;
+whereas in reality he has only &ldquo;descended&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;If only the earth last for us: and if
+it do not last, it is no matter.&rdquo; Thus they come
+to live an <i>ironical</i> existence.
+<a name="v05_page65"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;65]</span>
+</p>
+<h4>
+<a name="v05_section7_8"></a>
+VIII.
+</h4>
+<p>
+It may seem a paradox, though it is none, that I
+should attribute a kind of &ldquo;ironical self-consciousness&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;troubled feeling of
+his own error&rdquo; at the base&mdash;or rather on the height&mdash;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 &ldquo;historical men&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;The absurdity and superstition,&rdquo; these
+sceptics say, &ldquo;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.&rdquo; Historical culture is really a kind
+of inherited grayness, and those who have borne
+<a name="v05_page66"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;66]</span>
+its mark from childhood must believe instinctively
+in <i>the old age of mankind</i>. 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,&mdash;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&mdash;the period of
+thirty-four consecutive human lives of sixty years
+each&mdash;to make us speak of youth at the beginning,
+and &ldquo;the old age of mankind&rdquo; 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
+&ldquo;the Son of Man.&rdquo; The <i>memento mori</i>, spoken
+to humanity as well as the individual, was a sting
+that never ceased to pain, the crown of medi�val
+knowledge and consciousness.
+</p>
+<p>
+The opposite message of a later time, <i>memento
+vivere</i>, is spoken rather timidly, without the full
+power of the lungs; and there is something almost
+dishonest about it. For mankind still keeps to
+<a name="v05_page67"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;67]</span>
+its <i>memento mori</i>, 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: &ldquo;it
+might lead life astray and give it a false value.&rdquo;
+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 <i>memento vivere</i> on its standard. And
+if it cannot take the direct way&mdash;the way of main
+force&mdash;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
+<a name="v05_page68"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;68]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+These words may not be very acceptable, any
+more than my derivation of the excess of history
+from the medi�val <i>memento mori</i> 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
+&ldquo;modern consciousness,&rdquo; must itself be known
+by a historical process. History must solve the
+<a name="v05_page69"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;69]</span>
+problem of history, science must turn its sting
+against itself. This threefold &ldquo;must&rdquo; is the imperative
+of the &ldquo;new spirit,&rdquo; if it is really to contain
+something new, powerful, vital and original.
+Or is it true that we Germans&mdash;to leave the
+Romance nations out of account&mdash;must always be
+mere &ldquo;followers&rdquo; in all the higher reaches of
+culture, because that is all we <i>can</i> be? The words
+of Wilhelm Wackernagel are well worth pondering:
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+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,&mdash;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&mdash;through our
+&ldquo;universal history&rdquo;&mdash;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
+<a name="v05_page70"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;70]</span>
+ancient Greek world, where all was great, natural
+and human. But it is just <i>there</i> that we find the
+reality of a true unhistorical culture&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Suppose that these antiquaries, these late
+arrivals, were to change their painful ironic
+modesty for a certain shamelessness. Suppose we
+heard them saying, aloud, &ldquo;The race is at its zenith,
+for it has manifested itself consciously for the first
+time.&rdquo; We should have a comedy, in which the
+dark meaning of a certain very celebrated
+<a name="v05_page71"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;71]</span>
+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 &ldquo;world-process,&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;Idea realising
+itself,&rdquo; the &ldquo;Dialectic of the spirit of the nations,&rdquo;
+and the &ldquo;tribunal of the world.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+History understood in this Hegelian way has
+been contemptuously called God's sojourn upon
+earth,&mdash;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,&mdash;or rather, as simply
+superfluous. He has not said it; and thus he has
+<a name="v05_page72"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;72]</span>
+implanted in a generation leavened throughout by
+him the worship of the &ldquo;power of history,&rdquo; 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
+&ldquo;to adapt ourselves to circumstances.&rdquo; But the
+man who has once learnt to crook the knee and
+bow the head before the power of history, nods
+&ldquo;yes&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;rational necessity,&rdquo; and every
+event show the victory of logic or the &ldquo;Idea,&rdquo;
+then&mdash;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 &ldquo;objective&rdquo; 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&mdash;makes one
+gentle and pliable. Even if a man brought up in
+<a name="v05_page73"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;73]</span>
+this school will show himself openly offended, one
+is just as pleased, knowing it is only meant in the
+artistic sense of <i>ira et studium</i>, though it is really
+<i>sine ira et studio</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;&ldquo;it
+was once,&rdquo; and morality&mdash;&ldquo;it ought not to be, or
+have been.&rdquo; 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: &ldquo;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,&rdquo; and so on. Thus you become an <i>advocatus
+diaboli</i> 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 <i>natura naturans</i>
+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
+&ldquo;outlived&rdquo; years in exchange for whole cartloads
+of fresh modern lifetimes, to have another set of
+such conversations as those with Eckermann, and
+<a name="v05_page74"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;74]</span>
+be preserved from all the &ldquo;modern&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;it was once so&rdquo; against
+the moral judgment &ldquo;it ought not to have been.&rdquo;
+Yes, against the moral judgment! For you may
+speak of what virtue you will, of justice, courage,
+magnanimity, of wisdom and human compassion,&mdash;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 &ldquo;all-embracing system of
+passion and error,&rdquo; man would have to read it as
+Goethe wished Werther to be read;&mdash;just as if it
+called to him, &ldquo;Be a man and follow me not!&rdquo;
+But fortunately history also keeps alive for us the
+memory of the great &ldquo;fighters against history,&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;thus it is,&rdquo; in order that they
+might follow a &ldquo;thus it must be&rdquo; with greater joy
+and greater pride. Not to drag their generation to
+the grave, but to found a new one&mdash;that is the
+motive that ever drives them onward; and even if
+they are born late, there is a way of living by
+<a name="v05_page75"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;75]</span>
+which they can forget it&mdash;and future generations
+will know them only as the first-comers.
+</p>
+<h4>
+<a name="v05_section7_9"></a>
+IX.
+</h4>
+<p>
+Is perhaps our time such a &ldquo;first-comer&rdquo;? 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&mdash;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:&mdash;&ldquo;what
+you see now had to come, man had to be
+thus and not otherwise, no one can stand against
+this necessity.&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;the full
+surrender of his personality to the world-process.&rdquo;
+The personality and the world-process! The world-process
+and the personality of the earthworm! If
+only one did not eternally hear the word &ldquo;world,
+world, world,&rdquo; that hyperbole of all hyperboles;
+<a name="v05_page76"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;76]</span>
+when we should only speak, in a decent manner,
+of &ldquo;man, man, man&rdquo;! Heirs of the Greeks and
+Romans, of Christianity? All that seems nothing
+to the cynics. But &ldquo;heirs of the world-process&rdquo;;
+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!&mdash;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: &ldquo;We
+are at the top, we are the top, we are the completion
+of Nature!&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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 <i>do</i>. Thou climbest the
+sunbeams of knowledge up towards heaven&mdash;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
+<a name="v05_page77"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;77]</span>
+knowledge tears asunder.&mdash;But not another serious
+word about this, for there is a lighter side to it all.
+</p>
+<p>
+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, &ldquo;when the spirit makes a fresh start,
+we philosophers are at hand.&rdquo; Our time did make
+a fresh start&mdash;into irony, and lo! Edward von
+Hartmann was at hand, with his famous Philosophy
+of the Unconscious&mdash;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 &ldquo;becoming,&rdquo; 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;&mdash;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,&mdash;such a system shows its creator to be one
+<a name="v05_page78"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;78]</span>
+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?
+</p>
+<p>
+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 na�vely up to us
+by David Strauss as the most beautiful fact of all&mdash;is
+justified by Hartmann not only from the past,
+<i>ex causis efficientibus</i>, but also from the future,
+<i>ex causa finali</i>. The rogue let light stream over
+our time from the last day, and saw that it
+was very good,&mdash;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
+&ldquo;old age of man&rdquo;: but that is the blessed state,
+according to him, where there is only a successful
+mediocrity; where art is the &ldquo;evening's amusement
+of the Berlin financier,&rdquo; and &ldquo;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,&rdquo; to that stage
+<a name="v05_page79"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;79]</span>
+of social evolution, in fact, in which every worker
+&ldquo;leads a comfortable existence, with hours of work
+that leave him sufficient leisure to cultivate his
+intellect.&rdquo; 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.
+&ldquo;Antichrist is visibly extending his arms:&rdquo; yet it
+<i>must be so</i>, for after all we are on the right road&mdash;of
+disgust at all existence. &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+&ldquo;becoming,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;work&rdquo; are they to strive boldly forward?
+Or, to ask another question:&mdash;what further has the
+historically educated fanatic of the world-process
+to do,&mdash;swimming and drowning as he is in the
+sea of becoming,&mdash;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
+<a name="v05_page80"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;80]</span>
+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,
+&ldquo;the full surrender of his personality to the world-process,
+for the sake of his end, the redemption of
+the world&rdquo;: or still more clearly,&mdash;&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;delicacy of perception&rdquo; and dares to
+say that &ldquo;in the German mind there does seem to
+be something splay, something blunt-edged, unhandy
+and infelicitous.&rdquo; Could the great German
+parodist contradict this? According to him, we are
+approaching &ldquo;that ideal condition in which the
+<a name="v05_page81"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;81]</span>
+human race makes its history with full consciousness&rdquo;:
+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 &ldquo;world-process&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;German mind,&rdquo; with &ldquo;the uncanny
+seriousness of an owl,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Our low comedian has his word on this too, with
+<a name="v05_page82"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;82]</span>
+his wonderful dialectic, which is just as genuine
+as its admirers are admirable. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+No, thou clear, scornful spirit, so long as
+the illogical rules as it does to-day,&mdash;so long, for
+example, as the world-process can be spoken of as
+thou speakest of it, amid such deep-throated assent,&mdash;the
+last day is yet far off. For it is still too joyful
+on this earth, many an illusion still blooms here&mdash;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,&mdash;and no one has despised them
+with such loathing as thou,&mdash;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&mdash;from to-morrow time
+<a name="v05_page83"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;83]</span>
+shall not exist, and the <i>Times</i> 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 &ldquo;Unconscious&rdquo; in one of the scales, and
+his &ldquo;World-process&rdquo; in the other. There are some
+who believe they weigh equally; for in each scale
+there is an evil word&mdash;and a good joke.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;historical
+sense,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;world&rdquo; and &ldquo;humanity&rdquo; 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 <i>a
+posteriori</i>, 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, <i>anim� magn� prodigus</i>. But
+if we have the doctrines of the finality of &ldquo;becoming,&rdquo;
+<a name="v05_page84"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;84]</span>
+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),&mdash;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 <i>masses</i>; 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&mdash;laws? We may admit it:
+but we are sure of this too&mdash;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.
+<a name="v05_page85"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;85]</span>
+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 &ldquo;great&rdquo; that has moved the masses
+for some long time, and becomes, as they say, a
+&ldquo;historical power.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;historical
+power,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;historical power&rdquo;; for they were accustomed
+to stand outside the &ldquo;world,&rdquo; and cared
+little for the &ldquo;process of the Christian Idea.&rdquo; 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
+<a name="v05_page86"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;86]</span>
+progress and consequence: he is the power behind
+all &ldquo;historical power,&rdquo; 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
+&ldquo;historical movements&rdquo;: and yet they are in no
+way disturbed by the discovery, but proclaim that
+&ldquo;egoism shall be our god.&rdquo; 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&mdash;natural as well as human history&mdash;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
+&ldquo;fixing themselves with an eye to the future in
+their earthly home, and making themselves comfortable
+there.&rdquo; Hartmann calls this life the &ldquo;manhood
+<a name="v05_page87"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;87]</span>
+of humanity&rdquo; with an ironical reference to
+what is now called &ldquo;manhood&rdquo;;&mdash;as if only our
+sober models of selfishness were embraced by it;
+just as he prophesies an age of graybeards following
+on this stage,&mdash;obviously another ironical glance at
+our ancient time-servers. For he speaks of the ripe
+discretion with which &ldquo;they view all the stormy
+passions of their past life and understand the vanity
+of the ends they seem to have striven for.&rdquo; 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
+</p>
+<p class="nowrap">
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&ldquo;last scene of all<br />
+That ends this strange eventful history,<br />
+Is second childishness and mere oblivion,<br />
+Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.&rdquo;<br />
+</p>
+<p>
+Whether the dangers of our life and culture come
+from these dreary, toothless old men, or from the
+so-called &ldquo;men&rdquo; 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&mdash;that men intentionally
+help, and encourage, and use, the worst
+aberrations of the historical sense from which the
+present time suffers.
+</p>
+<p>
+They use it, however, against youth, in order to
+transform it into that ripe &ldquo;egoism of manhood&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="v05_page88"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;88]</span>
+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 <i>unhistorically</i>:
+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 &ldquo;man&rdquo; or the
+&ldquo;graybeard&rdquo; of Hartmann. And that is what
+they <i>want</i> him to be: that is the meaning of the
+present cynical demand for the &ldquo;full surrender of
+the personality to the world-process&rdquo;&mdash;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 &ldquo;men&rdquo; and
+<a name="v05_page89"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;89]</span>
+&ldquo;graybeards.&rdquo; For then would come the reign
+of youth.
+</p>
+<h4>
+<a name="v05_section7_10"></a>
+X.
+</h4>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 <i>youth</i>, 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
+<a name="v05_page90"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;90]</span>
+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 &ldquo;poetry&rdquo; 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&mdash;in &ldquo;words, words, words.&rdquo; 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&mdash;though
+a long time&mdash;is needed for a world to
+perish, so nothing but time&mdash;though still more
+time&mdash;is needed for a false idea to be destroyed in
+Germany, the &ldquo;Land of Little-by-little.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;culture&rdquo; to be merely a kind of knowledge
+<a name="v05_page91"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;91]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+�sthetically 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?
+</p>
+<p>
+Principally by destroying the superstition that
+<a name="v05_page92"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;92]</span>
+this kind of education is <i>necessary</i>. 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&mdash;and pained&mdash;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
+&ldquo;educated man&rdquo; (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
+<a name="v05_page93"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;93]</span>
+diligently practised, if we are not to have mere
+botchers and babblers as the issue of it all!
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;mighty lie.&rdquo; 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 <i>�terna veritas</i> of this arrangement was
+the basis of the new education and the new state.
+So the modern German believes also in the <i>�terna
+veritas</i> of his education, of his kind of culture:
+and yet this belief will fail&mdash;as the Platonic state
+would have failed&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+But our first generation must be brought up in
+this &ldquo;mighty truth,&rdquo; 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
+<a name="v05_page94"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;94]</span>
+it might say to itself, in the old Spanish phrase,
+&ldquo;Defienda me Dios de my,&rdquo; 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:&mdash;&ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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 <i>cogito ergo sum</i>,
+though not <i>vivo ergo cogito</i>. I am permitted the
+empty <i>esse</i>, not the full green <i>vivere</i>. A primary
+feeling tells me that I am a thinking being but not
+a living one, that I am no &ldquo;animal,&rdquo; but at most a
+&ldquo;cogital.&rdquo; &ldquo;Give me life, and I will soon make
+you a culture out of it&rdquo;&mdash;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?
+</p>
+<p>
+No god and no man will give it&mdash;only their own
+<i>youth</i>. Set this free, and you will set life free as
+<a name="v05_page95"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;95]</span>
+well. For it only lay concealed, in a prison; it is
+not yet withered or dead&mdash;ask your own selves!
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<i>malady of history</i>. 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?
+</p>
+<p>
+It is no marvel that they bear the names of
+poisons:&mdash;the antidotes to history are the &ldquo;unhistorical&rdquo;
+and the &ldquo;super-historical.&rdquo; With these
+names we return to the beginning of our inquiry
+and draw near to its final close.
+</p>
+<p>
+By the word &ldquo;unhistorical&rdquo; I mean the power,
+the art of <i>forgetting</i>, and of drawing a limited
+horizon round one's self. I call the power &ldquo;super-historical&rdquo;
+which turns the eyes from the process
+of becoming to that which gives existence an
+eternal and stable character, to art and religion.
+Science&mdash;for it is science that makes us speak of
+&ldquo;poisons&rdquo;&mdash;sees in these powers contrary powers:
+for it considers only that view of things to be true
+and right, and therefore scientific, which regards
+<a name="v05_page96"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;96]</span>
+something as finished and historical, not as continuing
+and eternal. Thus it lives in a deep
+antagonism towards the powers that make for
+eternity&mdash;art and religion,&mdash;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&mdash;of becoming!
+</p>
+<p>
+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:&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+And here I see the mission of the youth that
+<a name="v05_page97"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;97]</span>
+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 &ldquo;health&rdquo; and &ldquo;culture,&rdquo; 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&mdash;but how would youth count
+that a reproach? You may speak of its rawness
+and intemperateness&mdash;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&mdash;and the consolations&mdash;of youth, especially
+the right of brave unthinking honesty and the consolation
+of an inspiring hope.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page98"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;98]</span>
+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&mdash;monumental,
+antiquarian, or critical. At first they will be more
+ignorant than the &ldquo;educated men&rdquo; 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?
+</p>
+<p>
+How can we reach that end? you will ask. The
+Delphian god cries his oracle to you at the beginning
+of your wanderings, &ldquo;Know thyself.&rdquo; It is a
+hard saying: for that god &ldquo;tells nothing and conceals
+nothing but merely points the way,&rdquo; as
+Heraclitus said. But whither does he point?
+</p>
+<p>
+In certain epochs the Greeks were in a similar
+danger of being overwhelmed by what was past
+<a name="v05_page99"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;99]</span>
+and foreign, and perishing on the rock of &ldquo;history.&rdquo;
+They never lived proud and untouched. Their
+&ldquo;culture&rdquo; was for a long time a chaos of foreign
+forms and ideas,&mdash;Semitic, Babylonian, Lydian and
+Egyptian,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+This is a parable for each one of us: he must
+organise the chaos in himself by &ldquo;thinking himself
+back&rdquo; 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
+&ldquo;decoration of life&rdquo;&mdash;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
+<a name="v05_page100"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;100]</span>
+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.
+<a name="v05_page101"></a>
+<a name="v05_page102"></a>
+</p>
+<hr class="chap" />
+<h3>
+<a name="v05_page103"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;103]</span>
+<a name="v05_chapter9"></a>
+SCHOPENHAUER AS
+EDUCATOR.
+</h3>
+<h4>
+I.
+</h4>
+<p>
+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, &ldquo;They have a tendency to sloth.&rdquo;
+Many may think that the fuller truth would have
+been, &ldquo;They are all timid.&rdquo; They hide themselves
+behind &ldquo;manners&rdquo; and &ldquo;opinions.&rdquo; 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;&mdash;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,
+<a name="v05_page104"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;104]</span>
+the &ldquo;taking things easily,&rdquo; in a word the &ldquo;tendency
+to sloth,&rdquo; 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&mdash;as an analytical
+deduction from his individuality&mdash;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 &ldquo;taking himself
+easily&rdquo;; to follow his conscience, which cries out
+to him, &ldquo;Be thyself! all that thou doest and
+thinkest and desirest, is not&mdash;thyself!&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page105"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;105]</span>
+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 &ldquo;killing time,&rdquo; yet in respect of an age
+that rests its salvation on public opinion,&mdash;that is,
+on private laziness,&mdash;one must be quite determined
+that such a time shall be &ldquo;killed,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;killing their time,&rdquo; and of perishing
+with it,&mdash;when they wish rather to quicken the
+time to life, and in that life themselves to <i>live</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+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;
+<a name="v05_page106"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;106]</span>
+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 &ldquo;to-day,&rdquo;
+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. &ldquo;I
+will make the attempt to gain freedom,&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;And
+this is not&mdash;thyself,&rdquo; the soul says. &ldquo;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&mdash;'A man has never
+<a name="v05_page107"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;107]</span>
+risen higher than when he knoweth not whither his
+road may yet lead him'?&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+But how can we &ldquo;find ourselves&rdquo; again, and how
+can man &ldquo;know himself&rdquo;? 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 &ldquo;Here art thou in very truth;
+this is outer shell no more.&rdquo; 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,&mdash;our friendships and enmities, our
+looks and greetings, our memories and forgetfulnesses,
+our books and our writing! This is the
+most effective way:&mdash;to let the youthful soul look
+back on life with the question, &ldquo;What hast thou
+up to now truly loved, what has drawn thy soul
+upward, mastered it and blessed it too?&rdquo; 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
+<a name="v05_page108"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;108]</span>
+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&mdash;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;&mdash;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&mdash;for she is a step-mother too,
+sometimes.
+</p>
+<p>
+There are other means of &ldquo;finding ourselves,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<h4>
+<a name="v05_section9_2"></a>
+II.
+</h4>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page109"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;109]</span>
+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,&mdash;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: &ldquo;What would be the principles, on which he
+might teach thee?&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;dear little horn&rdquo;&mdash;the &ldquo;cursed
+piping,&rdquo; 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&mdash;nay, the soul of harmony itself&mdash;as we
+see in natures like Cellini's, where everything&mdash;knowledge,
+desire, love and hate&mdash;tends towards a
+<a name="v05_page110"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;110]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;school for authors,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;family tutor,&rdquo; even among our
+most eminent and cultured people; and what a
+<a name="v05_page111"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;111]</span>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;&ldquo;the more the
+better,&rdquo;&mdash;it is as harmful to learning as the
+economic theory of <i>laisser faire</i> 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:&mdash;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,&mdash;because there are no teachers;
+and why a savant must be a distorted and perverted
+thing,&mdash;because he will have been trained by the
+inhuman abstraction, science. This being so, let a
+man ask himself: &ldquo;Where are now the types of
+moral excellence and fame for all our generation&mdash;learned
+<a name="v05_page112"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;112]</span>
+and unlearned, high and low&mdash;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?&rdquo; 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 na�ve 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
+formul�; virtue is a word and nothing more, on
+both sides, an old-fashioned word that they laugh
+at&mdash;and it is worse when they do not laugh, for
+then they are hypocrites.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 medi�val 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
+<a name="v05_page113"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;113]</span>
+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 &ldquo;good&rdquo; and the &ldquo;better&rdquo;
+course&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+So I was right in speaking of my &ldquo;wandering in
+a world of wishes&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;out of season&rdquo;; simply
+and honestly&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+With such needs and desires within me did I
+come to know Schopenhauer.
+<a name="v05_page114"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;114]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;least of all a
+philosopher who has set this up as his law:
+&ldquo;deceive nobody, not even thyself,&rdquo; neither with
+the &ldquo;white lies&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;hears and loves.&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="v05_page115"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;115]</span>
+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:&mdash;&ldquo;A philosopher must be
+very honest to avail himself of no aid from poetry
+or rhetoric.&rdquo; 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,
+<a name="v05_page116"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;116]</span>
+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&mdash;&ldquo;As soon as I open
+him, I seem to grow a pair of wings.&rdquo; If I had
+the task of making myself at home on the earth,
+I would choose him as my companion.
+</p>
+<p>
+Schopenhauer has a second characteristic in
+common with Montaigne, besides honesty; a joy
+that really makes others joyful. &ldquo;Aliis l�tus,
+sibi sapiens.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;joyfulness&rdquo; 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 <i>fils de joie</i> do not see the sufferings and
+<a name="v05_page117"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;117]</span>
+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 slipshod
+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 <i>danse macabre</i> of the rest of humanity.
+And so in their company one feels a natural man
+again, and could cry out with Goethe&mdash;&ldquo;What a
+wondrous and priceless thing is a living creature!
+How fitted to his surroundings, how true, and
+real!&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page118"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;118]</span>
+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 Chim�ras, 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&mdash;his pupils and his sons.
+</p>
+<h4>
+<a name="v05_section9_3"></a>
+III.
+</h4>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;breathing testimony&rdquo; in German philosophical
+<a name="v05_page119"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;119]</span>
+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&mdash;which is ultimately a formative
+limiting of one's self&mdash;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
+&ldquo;truth,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;pure reason.&rdquo; And
+therefore I will say, that philosophy in Germany
+has more and more to learn not to be &ldquo;pure
+<a name="v05_page120"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;120]</span>
+reason&rdquo;: and it may well take as its model
+&ldquo;Schopenhauer the man.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;pure reason&rdquo;: and
+only &ldquo;at best&rdquo;&mdash;it was more probable that neither
+man nor reason would survive.
+</p>
+<p>
+A modern Englishman sketches the most usual
+danger to extraordinary men who live in a society
+that worships the ordinary, in this manner:&mdash;&ldquo;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.&rdquo; Our
+Holderins 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&mdash;&ldquo;Voil� un homme qui
+a eu de grands chagrins!&rdquo; which Goethe translated
+to mean &ldquo;That is a man who has taken great pains
+in his life.&rdquo; And he adds, &ldquo;If the trace of the
+sorrow and activity we have gone through cannot
+be wiped from our features, it is no wonder that
+<a name="v05_page121"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;121]</span>
+all that survives of us and our struggles should
+bear the same impress.&rdquo; 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&mdash;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&mdash;inviolable silence. This much at least
+was accomplished by it;&mdash;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&mdash;perilous and uncontrollable;&mdash;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 (<i>legor et legar</i>), 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
+<a name="v05_page122"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;122]</span>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;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;
+<a name="v05_page123"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;123]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+So the first danger in whose shadow Schopenhauer
+lived was&mdash;isolation. The second is called&mdash;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
+<a name="v05_page124"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;124]</span>
+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 &ldquo;domains of
+thought&rdquo; 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.
+&ldquo;It was only a short time ago,&rdquo; he writes in his
+poignant way, &ldquo;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.&mdash;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.&rdquo; Yes, when
+will men feel again deeply as Kleist did, and learn
+<a name="v05_page125"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;125]</span>
+to measure a philosophy by what it means to the
+&ldquo;Holy of Holies&rdquo;? 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 &ldquo;critical&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="v05_page126"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;126]</span>
+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 <i>sub specie
+�ternitatis</i>&mdash;&ldquo;this is the picture of the whole of
+life: learn thence the meaning of thine own life.&rdquo;
+And the converse: &ldquo;read thine own life, and
+understand thence the hieroglyphs of the universal
+life.&rdquo; 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;&mdash;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!
+</p>
+<p>
+Applying this to Schopenhauer himself, we
+come to the third and most intimate danger in
+<a name="v05_page127"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;127]</span>
+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 &ldquo;genius&rdquo;
+in himself. This is the root of all true culture;
+and if we say this means the aspiration of man to
+be &ldquo;born again&rdquo; 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,&mdash;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
+<a name="v05_page128"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;128]</span>
+from the picture of Ranc�, the founder of the
+Trappists, with the words: &ldquo;That is a matter of
+grace.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;all too human&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page129"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;129]</span>
+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&mdash;joy, safety, honour: his
+fellow-men pay him his due of&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;pure
+reason&rdquo;: or through the constant search for the
+&ldquo;pros and cons&rdquo; 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: &ldquo;No dog could live
+long thus!&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+<a name="v05_page130"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;130]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page131"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;131]</span>
+for freedom and beauty on the grand scale, and
+their search after truth, with its single question
+&ldquo;What is the real <i>worth</i> of life?&rdquo; 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&mdash;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,&mdash;warm, red life,&mdash;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?
+</p>
+<p>
+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 <i>against</i> 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
+<a name="v05_page132"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;132]</span>
+to that element which is not truly himself, the
+irreconcilable antagonism of the temporal and
+eternal in him. The supposed &ldquo;child of his age&rdquo;
+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,&mdash;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, &ldquo;What is the real worth of
+life?&rdquo; 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:&mdash;&ldquo;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,
+<a name="v05_page133"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;133]</span>
+and the sorely accused life shall go free.&rdquo; How
+shall he answer? In the words of Empedocles.
+</p>
+<h4>
+<a name="v05_section9_4"></a>
+IV.
+</h4>
+<p>
+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 <i>in opposition</i> to our age, since we have
+the advantage of really knowing our age, through
+him;&mdash;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 &ldquo;Dark age,&rdquo; 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.
+<a name="v05_page134"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;134]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;perhaps in Germany&mdash;who
+are disposed to believe in all seriousness that
+the world was put right two years ago,<a name="ref_1_1"></a><a href="#footnote_1_1" class="fnref">[1]</a> and that
+all stern and gloomy views of life are now contradicted
+by &ldquo;facts.&rdquo; The foundation of the New
+German Empire is, to them, the decisive blow that
+annihilates all the &ldquo;pessimistic&rdquo; philosophisers,&mdash;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&mdash;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
+<a name="v05_v05_page135"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;135]</span>
+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
+Carri�re in Munich.
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;and
+only with them in their relation to the world
+of culture, which is again almost independent of the
+&ldquo;good of the state.&rdquo; Of the many links that make
+up the twisted chain of humanity, some are of gold
+and others of pewter.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page136"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;136]</span>
+drawing away in enmity again, and long to tear
+each other in pieces. The sciences, blindly driving
+along, on a <i>laisser faire</i> 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
+Tannh�user did Biterolf, &ldquo;What hast thou, poor
+wretch, enjoyed!&rdquo; 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.
+<a name="v05_page137"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;137]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 medi�val times
+<a name="v05_page138"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;138]</span>
+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
+&ldquo;adiaphora&rdquo;&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 <i>are</i> those smallest
+indivisible elements of human society?
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page139"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;139]</span>
+will provide the guardians and champions for
+<i>Humanity</i>, 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 <i>Image of Man</i>, 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?
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+&ldquo;in the grand style&rdquo; 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
+&ldquo;holy mother Nature,&rdquo; 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
+<a name="v05_page140"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;140]</span>
+truest humanity a little while ago&mdash;all his arts
+and sciences, all the refinements of his life,&mdash;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, &ldquo;Nature alone is good, the natural
+man alone is human,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;gospel of kindly Nature&rdquo; 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&mdash;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 d�monic, in opposition to his utterly und�monic
+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&mdash;which
+is the tragic destiny of all revolutionary
+deliverers. One is wrong, however, to expect
+<a name="v05_page141"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;141]</span>
+anything of the sort: Goethe's man here parts
+company with Rousseau's; for he hates all violence,
+all sudden transition&mdash;that is, all action: and the
+universal deliverer becomes merely the universal
+traveller. All the riches of life and nature, all
+antiquity&mdash;arts, mythologies and sciences&mdash;pass
+before his eager eyes, his deepest desires are
+aroused and satisfied, Helen herself can hold him
+no more&mdash;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&mdash;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 &ldquo;things as they are&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="v05_page142"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;142]</span>
+Wilhelm Meister: &ldquo;You are bitter and ill-tempered&mdash;which
+is quite an excellent thing: if you could
+once become really angry, it would be still better.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+<i>Schopenhauer's man voluntarily takes upon himself
+the pain of telling the truth:</i> 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:&mdash;
+</p>
+<p class="nowrap">
+&ldquo;So to the active and eternal<br />
+Creative force, in cold disdain<br />
+You now oppose the fist infernal&rdquo;&mdash;<br />
+</p>
+<p>
+and he who would live according to Schopenhauer
+would seem to be more like a Mephistopheles than
+a Faust&mdash;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
+<a name="v05_page143"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;143]</span>
+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 &ldquo;the quickest beast
+that will carry you to perfection is suffering.&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;Schopenhauer
+man&rdquo;;&mdash;pure and wonderfully patient, on
+his intellectual side full of a devouring fire, and
+far removed from the cold and contemptuous
+&ldquo;neutrality&rdquo; 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: &ldquo;A happy
+life is impossible, the highest thing that man can
+aspire to is a <i>heroic</i> 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
+<a name="v05_page144"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;144]</span>
+the Prince in the <i>re corvo</i> 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.&rdquo; Such a
+heroic life, with its full &ldquo;mortification&rdquo;&mdash;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 &ldquo;gift&rdquo; and
+&ldquo;compulsion&rdquo; are contemptible words, mere means
+of escape from an inner voice, a slander on him
+who has listened to the voice&mdash;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,
+<a name="v05_page145"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;145]</span>
+&ldquo;I will remain mine own.&rdquo; 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&mdash;&ldquo;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?&rdquo; 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,&mdash;busy with the comedy they are all
+playing, and never thinking of their own selves.
+To the question &ldquo;To what end dost thou live?&rdquo;
+they would all immediately answer, with pride,
+&ldquo;To <i>become</i> a good citizen or professor or statesman,&rdquo;&mdash;and
+yet they <i>are</i> something which can
+never be changed: and why are they just&mdash;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 &ldquo;becoming,&rdquo; has not understood
+the lesson of existence, and must learn it over
+again. This eternal &ldquo;becoming something&rdquo; 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&mdash;and with
+us. The heroism of sincerity lies in ceasing to be
+the plaything of time. Everything in the process
+of &ldquo;becoming&rdquo; is a hollow sham, contemptible and
+<a name="v05_page146"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;146]</span>
+shallow: man can only find the solution of his
+riddle in &ldquo;being&rdquo; something definite and unchangeable.
+He begins to test how deep both &ldquo;becoming&rdquo;
+and &ldquo;being&rdquo; are rooted in him&mdash;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.
+<a name="v05_page147"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;147]</span>
+They will at some time disappear: and then will
+it be day.
+</p>
+<h4>
+<a name="v05_section9_5"></a>
+V.
+</h4>
+<p>
+But I have promised to speak of Schopenhauer,
+as far as my experience goes, as an <i>educator</i>, and
+it is far from being sufficient to paint the ideal
+humanity which is the &ldquo;Platonic idea&rdquo; in Schopenhauer;
+especially as my representation is an imperfect
+one. The most difficult task remains;&mdash;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 <i>educative</i>. 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, &ldquo;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?&rdquo;&mdash;in order that the great words of
+Goethe be not fulfilled in our case&mdash;&ldquo;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,
+<a name="v05_page148"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;148]</span>
+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.&rdquo; 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;&mdash;becoming
+unstable, daily weaker and less productive:&mdash;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 <i>accomplish</i>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.
+<a name="v05_page149"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;149]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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
+<a name="v05_page150"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;150]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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
+<a name="v05_page151"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;151]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page152"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;152]</span>
+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&mdash;and who are they
+that will uplift us?
+</p>
+<p>
+The sincere men who have cast out the beast,
+the philosophers, artists and saints. Nature&mdash;<i>qu&aelig;
+nunquam facit saltum</i>&mdash;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 &ldquo;beauty.&rdquo; 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 <i>heard</i> in his life,
+he may well say to himself&mdash;&ldquo;The deaf ears, the
+feeble understanding and shrunken heart, everything
+that I call mine,&mdash;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
+<a name="v05_page153"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;153]</span>
+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&mdash;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 &ldquo;becoming&rdquo;; 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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+I can now give an answer to the question whether
+it be possible to approach the great ideal of Schopenhauer's
+man &ldquo;by any ordinary activity of our own.&rdquo;
+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 <i>culture</i>;
+<a name="v05_page154"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;154]</span>
+though only so far as it can put a single task
+before each of us&mdash;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,&mdash;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.
+&ldquo;I have often said, and will often repeat,&rdquo; he
+exclaims in one place, &ldquo;the <i>causa finalis</i> of natural
+and human activity is dramatic poetry. Otherwise
+the stuff is of no use at all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;becoming&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;I&rdquo;
+no longer; there is something beyond our being
+that comes, for those moments, to the hither side
+<a name="v05_page155"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;155]</span>
+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.&mdash;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&mdash;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;&mdash;and
+this is the &ldquo;use&rdquo; we are to make of him;&mdash;we must
+know what obstacles there are and strike them
+from our path&mdash;in fact, wage unceasing war against
+everything that hindered our fulfilment, and prevented
+us from becoming Schopenhauer's men
+ourselves.
+</p>
+<h4>
+<a name="v05_section9_6"></a>
+VI.
+</h4>
+<p>
+It is sometimes harder to agree to a thing than
+to understand it; many will feel this when they
+consider the proposition&mdash;&ldquo;Mankind must toil
+<a name="v05_page156"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;156]</span>
+unceasingly to bring forth individual great men:
+this and nothing else is its task.&rdquo; 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;&mdash;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:
+&ldquo;Let it be rather for the sake of every other, or,
+at any rate, of as many as possible!&rdquo; 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&mdash;&ldquo;In what way may
+<a name="v05_page157"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;157]</span>
+your life, the individual life, retain the highest
+value and the deepest significance? and how may
+it least be squandered?&rdquo; Only by your living for
+the good of the rarest and most valuable types,
+not for that of the majority,&mdash;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. &ldquo;She has succeeded
+badly,&rdquo; he should say; &ldquo;but I will do honour to
+her great idea by being a means to its better
+success.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;initiation into culture.&rdquo;
+The sign of this is shame or vexation at one's self,
+a hatred of one's own narrowness, a sympathy with
+<a name="v05_page158"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;158]</span>
+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
+d�bris of some precious sculptures, which cry out&mdash;&ldquo;Come
+and help us! Put us together, for we long
+to become complete.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+I called this inward condition the &ldquo;first initiation
+into culture.&rdquo; I have now to describe the
+effects of the &ldquo;second initiation,&rdquo; 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,&mdash;the
+production of genius.
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;&ldquo;Is
+not such knowledge, after all, absolutely
+<a name="v05_page159"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;159]</span>
+necessary? Can Nature be said to attain her
+end, if men have a false idea of the aim of their
+own labour?&rdquo; And any one who thinks a great
+deal of Nature's unconscious adaptation of means
+to ends, will probably answer at once: &ldquo;Yes, men
+may think and speak what they like about their
+ultimate end, their blind instinct will tell them the
+right road.&rdquo; It requires some experience of life
+to be able to contradict this: but let a man be
+convinced of the real aim of culture&mdash;the production
+of the true man and nothing else;&mdash;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 &ldquo;battle of the beasts&rdquo;: 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;&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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: &ldquo;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
+<a name="v05_page160"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;160]</span>
+happiness as possible.&rdquo;&mdash;This is the seductive
+formula. Its preachers would define education as
+the insight that makes man through and through
+a &ldquo;child of his age&rdquo; in his desires and their
+satisfaction, and gives him command over the
+best means of making money. Its aim would
+be to make &ldquo;current&rdquo; men, in the same sense as
+one speaks of the &ldquo;currency&rdquo; in money; and in
+their view, the more &ldquo;current&rdquo; men there are,
+the happier the people. The object of modern
+educational systems is therefore to make each
+man as &ldquo;current&rdquo; 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
+&ldquo;intelligence and property&rdquo; not only exists, but
+is also a <i>moral</i> 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 &ldquo;refined egoism&rdquo; or &ldquo;immoral Epicureanism.&rdquo;
+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, &ldquo;man has a necessary claim to worldly happiness;
+only for that reason is education necessary.&rdquo;
+<a name="v05_page161"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;161]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;highly civilised state&rdquo; 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,&mdash;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
+&ldquo;setting free&rdquo; comes to mean rather &ldquo;chaining
+up.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;good form&rdquo; over them. Words,
+gestures, dress, etiquette, and such external things,
+<a name="v05_page162"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;162]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;sound taste&rdquo; applied to the
+German language by means of an Academy on the
+<a name="v05_page163"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;163]</span>
+French model, to shake off the doubtful influence
+of Goethe&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;including the arts of
+the dancing-master and the upholsterer;&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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:&mdash;&ldquo;The
+old German way is no longer yours: it was
+hard, rough, and full of resistance; but it is still
+the most valuable material&mdash;one which only the
+greatest modellers can work with, for they alone
+<a name="v05_page164"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;164]</span>
+are worthy to use it. What you have in you now
+is a soft pulpy stuff: make what you will out of
+it,&mdash;elegant dolls and interesting idols&mdash;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.'&rdquo; 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.&mdash;The
+prevailing love of &ldquo;good form&rdquo; 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
+&ldquo;three m's,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;good
+form&rdquo; 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:
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo; Faith may often produce
+happiness, yet <i>this</i> particular faith makes me unhappy,
+<a name="v05_page165"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;165]</span>
+for I feel that the culture whose future
+raises such hopes&mdash;the culture of riches, politeness,
+and elegant concealments&mdash;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 &ldquo;cult of the interesting.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;good form&rdquo; over them. There is
+fourthly the self-interest of science, and the
+peculiar nature of her servants&mdash;the learned.
+<a name="v05_page166"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;166]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;though
+no less a problem for that!
+</p>
+<p>
+If one accustom himself to put down every
+experience in a dialectical form of question and
+answer, and translate it into the language of &ldquo;pure
+reason,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;impulse to truth&rdquo;: 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&mdash;even the worthiest! To speak honestly,
+the savant is a complex of very various impulses
+and attractive forces&mdash;he is a base metal throughout.
+</p>
+<p>
+Take first a strong and increasing desire for
+intellectual adventure, the attraction of the new
+and rare as against the old and tedious. Add
+<a name="v05_page167"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;167]</span>
+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,&mdash;truth only
+its pretext. The impulse to discover &ldquo;particular
+truths&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+The following characteristics of the savant are
+less common, but still found.&mdash;Firstly, downrightness
+and a feeling for simplicity, very valuable if
+more than a mere awkwardness and inability to
+deceive, deception requiring some mother-wit.&mdash;(Actually,
+we may be on our guard against too
+obvious cleverness and resource, and doubt the
+man's sincerity.)&mdash;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 &ldquo;adiaphora&rdquo;; 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
+<i>sensus recti</i>. 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
+<a name="v05_page168"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;168]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Fourthly, a lack of feeling, which makes him
+<a name="v05_page169"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;169]</span>
+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,&mdash;any more than the
+mule who does not feel giddiness.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page170"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;170]</span>
+of gravitation; and so they can often bring their
+labours to an end.
+</p>
+<p>
+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, �sthetic,
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Ninthly, the motive of the bread-winner, the
+&ldquo;cry of the empty stomach,&rdquo; 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&mdash;and bread. Only,
+however, in the sense of the &ldquo;particular truth&rdquo;:
+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 <i>ingenii largitor venter</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+Tenthly, a reverence for their fellow-professors
+and a fear of their displeasure&mdash;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.
+<a name="v05_page171"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;171]</span>
+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 &ldquo;moral idiosyncrasies,&rdquo;&mdash;formerly
+called rascalities.
+</p>
+<p>
+Eleventhly, the &ldquo;savant for vanity,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Twelfthly, the &ldquo;savant for amusement.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+If I speak, lastly, of the &ldquo;impulse towards
+justice&rdquo; 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.
+<a name="v05_page172"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;172]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;mere purposeless, and therefore
+motiveless, knowledge&mdash;a mass of very human
+little motives have been chemically combined, and
+as the result we have the professor,&mdash;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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+In fact, all these considerations go to prove that
+the aim of culture is most unknown precisely where
+<a name="v05_page173"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;173]</span>
+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&mdash;business. When the pioneers of &ldquo;good
+form&rdquo; 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 <i>themselves</i> 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+<a name="v05_page174"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;174]</span>
+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;&mdash;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?&mdash;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 medi�val 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 &ldquo;fight in line,&rdquo; the second to treat as foes all
+who will not &ldquo;fall in.&rdquo; 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
+<a name="v05_page175"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;175]</span>
+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 &ldquo;fashionable culture,&rdquo; that plays on
+their selfish side, their vanities and weaknesses;
+and the time-spirit ever whispers in their ears its
+flattering counsel:&mdash;&ldquo;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
+<a name="v05_page176"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;176]</span>
+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.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<h4>
+<a name="v05_section9_7"></a>
+VII.
+</h4>
+<p>
+But setting aside all thoughts of any educational
+revolution in the distant future;&mdash;what provision
+is required <i>now</i>, that our future philosopher
+may have the best chance of opening his eyes to a
+life like Schopenhauer's&mdash;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.
+<a name="v05_page177"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;177]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page178"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;178]</span>
+should reach all&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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
+<a name="v05_page179"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;179]</span>
+that have up to now killed his effect among men.
+First there was the want of readers,&mdash;to the eternal
+shame of our cultivated age;&mdash;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.&mdash;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?
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page180"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;180]</span>
+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,&mdash;including
+not merely religious dogmas, but such
+juggling conceptions as &ldquo;progress,&rdquo; &ldquo;universal
+education,&rdquo; &ldquo;nationalism,&rdquo; &ldquo;the modern state&rdquo;;
+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 &ldquo;health.&rdquo; 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
+amphor�, 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&mdash;to
+say nothing of our vases!&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+In considering the conditions that, at best, keep
+the born philosopher from being oppressed by the
+<a name="v05_page181"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;181]</span>
+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&mdash;a rude and strong virility. His father
+was neither an official nor a savant; he travelled
+much abroad with his son,&mdash;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 &ldquo;protectors,&rdquo; 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 <i>furor philosophicus</i> in him will no longer
+have time for the <i>furor politicus</i>, 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
+<a name="v05_page182"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;182]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Schopenhauer had another great advantage&mdash;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&mdash;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 &ldquo;seen
+at once&rdquo;; 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&mdash;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&mdash;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
+<a name="v05_page183"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;183]</span>
+was looking, must come to be born; and could he,
+after this vision, have much desire to busy himself
+with the so-called &ldquo;art,&rdquo; in the learned, hypocritical
+manner of the moderns? He had seen something
+higher than that&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was one of the high conditions of his existence
+that he really could live for such a task&mdash;according
+to his motto <i>vitam impendere vero</i>&mdash;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 &ldquo;considerate fool,&rdquo; in
+search of place and honour, circumspect and obsequious,
+and fawning on his influential superiors.
+<a name="v05_page184"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;184]</span>
+Nothing offended the savants more than Schopenhauer's
+unlikeness to them.
+</p>
+<h4>
+<a name="v05_section9_8"></a>
+VIII.
+</h4>
+<p>
+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;&mdash;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,&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+A father may possibly learn something from
+this that he may use for his son's private education,
+<a name="v05_page185"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;185]</span>
+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 &ldquo;corrupting
+the youth,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;God-born king&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;encouragement of
+philosophy&rdquo; 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?
+</p>
+<p>
+Experience teaches us a better way&mdash;or a worse:
+it says that nothing so stands in the way of the
+birth and growth of Nature's philosopher as the
+<a name="v05_page186"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;186]</span>
+bad philosophers made &ldquo;by order.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+The &ldquo;freedom&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;encouragement
+of philosophy&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;take care of
+me, as I have something better to do&mdash;namely to
+take care of you.&rdquo; We should not be angry at
+such a heightened mode of expression in Plato
+and Schopenhauer; and so they might properly
+<a name="v05_page187"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;187]</span>
+have been University philosophers,&mdash;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,&mdash;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&mdash;the state. And not only
+the state, but everything required by it for existence&mdash;a
+definite form of religion, a social system, a
+standing army; a <i>noli me tangere</i> is written
+above all these things. Can a University
+philosopher ever keep clearly before him the
+<a name="v05_page188"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;188]</span>
+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,&mdash;I think he is no friend to truth either.
+</p>
+<p>
+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, &ldquo;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?&rdquo; Without answering
+this last question, I will merely say that these
+&ldquo;concessions&rdquo; 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
+<a name="v05_page189"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;189]</span>
+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&mdash;and yet must be in his place and appear to
+be thinking! What then?
+</p>
+<p>
+&ldquo;But,&rdquo; one will say, &ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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;&mdash;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, &ldquo;He is an able scholar, antiquary,
+philologist, historian,&rdquo;&mdash;but never, &ldquo;He is a
+philosopher.&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;at best&rdquo;: 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
+<a name="v05_page190"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;190]</span>
+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&mdash;namely to see whether
+one can live by it&mdash;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,&mdash;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, &ldquo;Thank God
+I am no philosopher, but a Christian and a good
+citizen!&rdquo;
+<a name="v05_page191"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;191]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+What if this cry were the ultimate object of the
+state, and the &ldquo;education&rdquo; or leading to philosophy
+were merely a leading <i>from</i> philosophy? We may
+well ask.&mdash;But if so, there is one thing to fear&mdash;that
+the youth may some day find out to what
+end philosophy is thus mis-handled. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;&mdash;Then woe
+to the whole machinery of political and professorial
+trickery!
+</p>
+<p>
+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: &ldquo;men are born according to
+their deeds, deaf, dumb, misshapen.&rdquo; Those fathers
+deserved such sons, &ldquo;according to their deeds,&rdquo; 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,
+<a name="v05_page192"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;192]</span>
+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,&mdash;&ldquo;Not
+one of them can fully explain to me the origin of
+matter; then what do I care about them all?&rdquo;&mdash;Another
+said of history, &ldquo;It tells nothing new to
+the man with ideas&rdquo;: 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
+&ldquo;led the way&rdquo; in the sciences in the sense that the
+quarry &ldquo;leads the way&rdquo; 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
+<a name="v05_page193"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;193]</span>
+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 &ldquo;dead weight that lies on the
+intellects of mankind&rdquo;! 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 &ldquo;philosophy,&rdquo; and every one
+will agree with the temperate words of Bagehot<a name="ref_1_2"></a><a href="#footnote_1_2" class="fnref">[2]</a>
+on the present system builders: &ldquo;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
+<a name="v05_page194"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;194]</span>
+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?&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;Fool, you do not
+see the beam,&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;This is all that is
+wanting,&mdash;that a philosophaster like this should lay
+his impure hands on us, the natural sciences and
+history! Away with him!&rdquo; Then they start
+back, knowing not where to turn or to ask the way.
+They wanted to have a little physical knowledge
+<a name="v05_page195"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;195]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+But granted that this herd of bad philosophers is
+ridiculous&mdash;and who will deny it?&mdash;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,&mdash;nay, rather persecute
+them and treat them ill,&mdash;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,&mdash;one
+only has to cease paying them. And that
+<a name="v05_page196"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;196]</span>
+is a better plan than the open patronage of any
+philosophy, whatever it be, for state reasons.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;false truth,&rdquo; a masked actor who cannot
+perform the office required from the real truth&mdash;the
+affirmation of the state's worth and sanctity.
+When a medi�val 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 &ldquo;anti-philosophy&rdquo;
+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.&mdash;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
+<a name="v05_page197"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;197]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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&mdash;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
+<a name="v05_page198"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;198]</span>
+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&mdash;their
+philosophies&mdash;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&mdash;the very cosmetics of speech&mdash;with
+<a name="v05_page199"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;199]</span>
+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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="v05_page200"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;200]</span>
+<i>ingrata principibus nomina</i>. 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. &ldquo;Beware when the great God
+lets loose a thinker on this planet,&rdquo; says Emerson.<a name="ref_1_3"></a><a href="#footnote_1_3" class="fnref">[3]</a>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;as
+<a name="v05_v05_page201"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;201]</span>
+ever tree bore its apples.&rdquo; 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:
+&ldquo;What great result has he to show, who has
+so long practised philosophy and yet has <i>hurt</i>
+nobody?&rdquo; Yes, the university philosophy should
+have on its monument, &ldquo;It has hurt nobody.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Schopenhauer proved this and will continue to
+prove it, more and more.
+</p>
+<hr class="r5" />
+<div class="footnote">
+<p>
+<a name="footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#ref_1_1">[1]</a> This was written in 1873.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span>
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnote">
+<p>
+<a name="footnote_1_2"></a><a href="#ref_1_2">[2]</a> <i>Physics and Politics</i>, 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.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span>
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnote">
+<p>
+<a name="footnote_1_3"></a><a href="#ref_1_3">[3]</a> Essay on &ldquo;Circles.&rdquo;
+</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Thoughts out of Season, Part II, by 
+Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
+
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+</body>
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+Project Gutenberg's Thoughts Out of Season (Part II), by Friedrich Nietzsche
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Thoughts Out of Season (Part II)
+
+Author: Friedrich Nietzsche
+
+Translator: Adrian Collins
+
+Release Date: December 5, 2011 [EBook #38226]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON (PART II) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Franks, Michael Roe and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  THE COMPLETE WORKS
+  OF
+  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
+
+
+  _The First Complete and Authorised English Translation_
+
+  EDITED BY
+  DR. OSCAR LEVY
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+  VOLUME TWO
+  THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON
+  PART TWO
+
+
+
+  _Of the First Edition of
+  One Thousand Copies
+  this is_
+
+  _No._ ----
+
+
+
+  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
+
+  THOUGHTS
+  OUT OF SEASON
+
+  PART II
+
+
+  _THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY_
+  _SCHOPENHAUER AS EDUCATOR_
+
+  TRANSLATED BY
+  ADRIAN COLLINS, M.A.
+
+  T. N. FOULIS
+  13 & 15 FREDERICK STREET
+  EDINBURGH: AND LONDON
+  1909
+
+
+
+  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+  _Printed by_ MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED, _Edinburgh_
+
+
+
+  TO L. P.
+  FROM THE TRANSLATOR.
+  _EN RECONNAISSANCE._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+                                                          PAGE
+
+  INTRODUCTION                                              ix
+
+  THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY                               1
+
+  SCHOPENHAUER AS EDUCATOR                                 101
+
+
+
+
+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 “outlived” 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
+slipshod 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
+Holderins 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.
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
+
+
+The following printer's errors have been corrected:
+
+  naive corrected to naïve (p. 50)
+
+The original hyphenation has been retained for the following words
+which were inconsistently hyphenated:
+
+  outlived (p. 73) / out-lived (p. 73)
+  slipshod (p. 117) / slip-shod (p. 191)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Thoughts Out of Season (Part II), by 
+Friedrich Nietzsche
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON (PART II) ***
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+Project Gutenberg's Thoughts Out of Season (Part II), by Friedrich Nietzsche
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Thoughts Out of Season (Part II)
+
+Author: Friedrich Nietzsche
+
+Translator: Adrian Collins
+
+Release Date: December 5, 2011 [EBook #38226]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON (PART II) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Franks, Michael Roe and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  THE COMPLETE WORKS
+  OF
+  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
+
+
+  _The First Complete and Authorised English Translation_
+
+  EDITED BY
+  DR. OSCAR LEVY
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+  VOLUME TWO
+  THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON
+  PART TWO
+
+
+
+  _Of the First Edition of
+  One Thousand Copies
+  this is_
+
+  _No._ ----
+
+
+
+  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
+
+  THOUGHTS
+  OUT OF SEASON
+
+  PART II
+
+
+  _THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY_
+  _SCHOPENHAUER AS EDUCATOR_
+
+  TRANSLATED BY
+  ADRIAN COLLINS, M.A.
+
+  T. N. FOULIS
+  13 & 15 FREDERICK STREET
+  EDINBURGH: AND LONDON
+  1909
+
+
+
+  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+  _Printed by_ MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED, _Edinburgh_
+
+
+
+  TO L. P.
+  FROM THE TRANSLATOR.
+  _EN RECONNAISSANCE._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+                                                          PAGE
+
+  INTRODUCTION                                              ix
+
+  THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY                               1
+
+  SCHOPENHAUER AS EDUCATOR                                 101
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+The two essays translated in this volume form the second and third
+parts of the _Unzeitgem�sse 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 B�le.
+
+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. K�gel,
+"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
+_G�tzend�mmerung_; "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 C�sar, 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 �sthetic 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 encyclop�dias,
+as an ancient Greek who had strayed into our time would probably call
+us. But the only value of an encyclop�dia 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 na�ve 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 �sthetic 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 na�vely 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 _�crasez_! 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 minuti� 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 H�lderlin'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 medi�val 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 medi�val _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 "outlived" 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 na�vely 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, _anim� magn� 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 �sthetically 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 _�terna veritas_ of
+this arrangement was the basis of the new education and the new
+state. So the modern German believes also in the _�terna 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 na�ve 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 formul�; 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 medi�val 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 l�tus,
+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
+slipshod 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 Chim�ras, 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
+Holderins 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--"Voil�
+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 �ternitatis_--"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 Ranc�, 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 Carri�re 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
+Tannh�user 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 medi�val
+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 d�monic, in opposition to his
+utterly und�monic 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--_qu� 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 d�bris 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, �sthetic, 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 medi�val 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 amphor�, 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 medi�val 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.
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
+
+
+The following printer's errors have been corrected:
+
+  naive corrected to na�ve (p. 50)
+
+The original hyphenation has been retained for the following words
+which were inconsistently hyphenated:
+
+  outlived (p. 73) / out-lived (p. 73)
+  slipshod (p. 117) / slip-shod (p. 191)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Thoughts Out of Season (Part II), by 
+Friedrich Nietzsche
+
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+Project Gutenberg's Thoughts Out of Season (Part II), by Friedrich Nietzsche
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Thoughts Out of Season (Part II)
+
+Author: Friedrich Nietzsche
+
+Translator: Adrian Collins
+
+Release Date: December 5, 2011 [EBook #38226]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON (PART II) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Franks, Michael Roe and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  THE COMPLETE WORKS
+  OF
+  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
+
+
+  _The First Complete and Authorised English Translation_
+
+  EDITED BY
+  DR. OSCAR LEVY
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+  VOLUME TWO
+  THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON
+  PART TWO
+
+
+
+  _Of the First Edition of
+  One Thousand Copies
+  this is_
+
+  _No._ ----
+
+
+
+  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
+
+  THOUGHTS
+  OUT OF SEASON
+
+  PART II
+
+
+  _THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY_
+  _SCHOPENHAUER AS EDUCATOR_
+
+  TRANSLATED BY
+  ADRIAN COLLINS, M.A.
+
+  T. N. FOULIS
+  13 & 15 FREDERICK STREET
+  EDINBURGH: AND LONDON
+  1909
+
+
+
+  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+  _Printed by_ MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED, _Edinburgh_
+
+
+
+  TO L. P.
+  FROM THE TRANSLATOR.
+  _EN RECONNAISSANCE._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+                                                          PAGE
+
+  INTRODUCTION                                              ix
+
+  THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY                               1
+
+  SCHOPENHAUER AS EDUCATOR                                 101
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+The two essays translated in this volume form the second and third
+parts of the _Unzeitgemaesse 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 Bale.
+
+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. Koegel,
+"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
+_Goetzendaemmerung_; "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 Caesar, 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 aesthetic 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 encyclopaedias,
+as an ancient Greek who had strayed into our time would probably call
+us. But the only value of an encyclopaedia 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 naive 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 aesthetic 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 naively 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 _ecrasez_! 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 minutiae 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 Hoelderlin'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 mediaeval 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 mediaeval _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 "outlived" 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 naively 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, _animae magnae 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 aesthetically 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 _aeterna veritas_ of
+this arrangement was the basis of the new education and the new
+state. So the modern German believes also in the _aeterna 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 naive 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 formulae; 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 mediaeval 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 laetus,
+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
+slipshod 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 Chimaeras, 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
+Holderins 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--"Voila
+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 aeternitatis_--"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 Rance, 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 Carriere 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
+Tannhaeuser 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 mediaeval
+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 daemonic, in opposition to his
+utterly undaemonic 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--_quae 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 debris 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, aesthetic, 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 mediaeval 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 amphorae, 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 mediaeval 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.
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
+
+
+The following printer's errors have been corrected:
+
+  naive corrected to naive (p. 50)
+
+The original hyphenation has been retained for the following words
+which were inconsistently hyphenated:
+
+  outlived (p. 73) / out-lived (p. 73)
+  slipshod (p. 117) / slip-shod (p. 191)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Thoughts Out of Season (Part II), by
+Friedrich Nietzsche
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+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Thoughts Out of Season: Part II, by Friedrich Nietzsche</title>
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+Project Gutenberg's Thoughts Out of Season (Part II), by Friedrich Nietzsche
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Thoughts Out of Season (Part II)
+
+Author: Friedrich Nietzsche
+
+Translator: Adrian Collins
+
+Release Date: December 5, 2011 [EBook #38226]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON (PART II) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Franks, Michael Roe and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<h1>
+<a name="preface1"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;i]</span>
+<a name="chapter1"></a>
+THE COMPLETE WORKS<br />
+OF<br />
+FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE<br />
+</h1>
+<p class="byline">
+<i>The First Complete and Authorised English Translation</i><br />
+</p>
+<p class="byline">
+EDITED BY<br />
+<span class="smcap">Dr.</span> OSCAR LEVY<br />
+</p>
+<p class="figure">
+<img src="images/nietzsche.png" width="378" height="396" alt="Nietzsche" />
+<br />
+</p>
+<p class="byline">
+VOLUME TWO<br />
+THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON<br />
+PART TWO<br />
+<a name="preface2"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;ii]</span>
+</p>
+<p class="bylinebreak">
+<i>Of the First Edition of<br />
+One Thousand Copies<br />
+this is</i><br />
+</p>
+<p class="byline">
+<i>No.</i> &mdash;&mdash;<br />
+<a name="preface3"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;iii]</span>
+</p>
+<p class="halftitle">
+<a name="chapter2"></a>
+FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE<br />
+</p>
+<p class="h1a">
+THOUGHTS<br />
+OUT OF SEASON<br />
+</p>
+<p class="h1a">
+PART II<br />
+</p>
+<p class="byline">
+<i>THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY</i><br />
+<i>SCHOPENHAUER AS EDUCATOR</i><br />
+</p>
+<p class="byline">
+TRANSLATED BY<br />
+ADRIAN COLLINS, M.A.<br />
+</p>
+<p class="byline">
+T. N. FOULIS<br />
+13 &amp; 15 FREDERICK STREET<br />
+EDINBURGH: <span class="allsmcap">AND</span> LONDON<br />
+1909<br />
+<a name="preface4"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;iv]</span>
+</p>
+<p class="bylinebreak">
+ALL RIGHTS RESERVED<br />
+</p>
+<p class="byline">
+<i>Printed by</i> <span class="smcap">Morrison &amp; Gibb Limited</span>, <i>Edinburgh</i><br />
+<a name="preface5"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;v]</span>
+</p>
+<p class="bylinebreak">
+TO L. P.<br />
+FROM THE TRANSLATOR.<br />
+<i>EN RECONNAISSANCE.</i><br />
+<a name="preface6"></a>
+<a name="preface7"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;vii]</span>
+</p>
+<h2>
+<a name="chapter3"></a>
+CONTENTS.
+</h2>
+<table class="toc">
+<tr><td></td><td><span class="allsmcap">PAGE</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#chapter4">Introduction</a></span></td><td class="numeric">ix</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#chapter5">The Use and Abuse of History</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></td><td class="numeric">1</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#chapter9">Schopenhauer as Educator</a></span></td><td class="numeric">101</td></tr>
+</table>
+<h2>
+<a name="preface8"></a>
+<a name="preface9"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;ix]</span>
+<a name="chapter4"></a>
+INTRODUCTION.
+</h2>
+<p>
+The two essays translated in this volume form the
+second and third parts of the <i>Unzeitgem�sse
+Betrachtungen</i>. 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
+B�le.
+</p>
+<p>
+Nietzsche, who served in an ambulance corps in
+'71, had seen something of the Franco-German War,
+and to him it was the &ldquo;honest German bravery&rdquo;
+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, &ldquo;the German does not yet know the
+meaning of the word culture,&rdquo; 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&mdash;the &ldquo;historical sense&rdquo;:
+he had been brought by his spiritual teachers to
+<a name="preface10"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;x]</span>
+believe that he was the &ldquo;crown of the world-process&rdquo;
+and that his highest duty lay in surrendering
+himself to it.
+</p>
+<p>
+With Nietzsche, the historical sense became a
+&ldquo;malady from which men suffer,&rdquo; 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&mdash;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 &ldquo;noisy
+little fellows&rdquo; who measure the motives of the
+great men of the past by their own, and use the
+past to justify their present.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;lonely giants amid the pigmies.&rdquo;
+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
+&ldquo;production of the genius,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Schopenhauer here stands, as a personality, for
+all that makes for life in philosophy, against the
+<a name="preface11"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;xi]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+But &ldquo;there has never been a eulogy on a
+philosopher,&rdquo; says Dr. K�gel, &ldquo;that has had so
+little to say about his philosophy.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;not Schopenhauer as educator is in question,
+but his opposite, Nietzsche as educator&rdquo; (<i>Ecce
+Homo</i>). He could regard Schopenhauer, later, as
+a siren that called to death; he put him among
+the great artists that lead down&mdash;who are worse
+than the bad artists that lead nowhere. &ldquo;We
+must go further in the pessimistic logic than the
+denial of the will,&rdquo; he says in the <i>G�tzend�mmerung</i>;
+&ldquo;we must deny Schopenhauer.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;all-too-human&rdquo;
+side of Schopenhauer, that actually brings
+us nearer to him. Later, he could part the man
+<a name="preface12"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;xii]</span>
+and his work, and speak of Schopenhauer's view as
+the &ldquo;Evil eye.&rdquo; But as yet he is a young man
+who has kept his illusions, and, like Ogniben, he
+judges men by what they might be.
+</p>
+<p>
+Afterwards, he judged himself too in these essays
+by &ldquo;what he might be.&rdquo; &ldquo;To me,&rdquo; he said in <i>Ecce
+Homo</i>, &ldquo;they are promises: I know not what they
+mean to others.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+It is also in the belief they are promises that
+they are here translated &ldquo;for others.&rdquo; The
+<i>Thoughts out of Season</i> are the first announcement
+of the complex theme of the <i>Zarathustra</i>.
+They form the best possible introduction to
+Nietzschean thought. Nietzsche is already the
+knight-errant of philosophy: but his adventure is
+just beginning.
+</p>
+<p class="signature">
+A. C.<br />
+</p>
+<h2>
+<a name="chapter5"></a>
+THE USE AND ABUSE OF
+HISTORY.
+<a name="page2"></a>
+<a name="page3"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;3]</span>
+</h2>
+<h3>
+<a name="chapter6"></a>
+PREFACE.
+</h3>
+<p>
+&ldquo;I hate everything that merely instructs me
+without increasing or directly quickening my
+activity.&rdquo; These words of Goethe, like a sincere
+<i>ceterum censeo</i>, 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 &ldquo;quicken,&rdquo; knowledge that slackens the
+rein of activity, why in fact history, in Goethe's
+phrase, must be seriously &ldquo;hated,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+I have tried to describe a feeling that has often
+<a name="page4"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;4]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+&ldquo;movement.&rdquo; And I gain an advantage for myself
+that is more valuable to me than propriety&mdash;the
+attainment of a correct point of view, through
+my critics, with regard to our age.
+</p>
+<p>
+These thoughts are &ldquo;out of season,&rdquo; because I
+am trying to represent something of which the age
+is rightly proud&mdash;its historical culture&mdash;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,&mdash;and
+<a name="page5"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;5]</span>
+from other sources only for the sake of
+comparison; and that I have only reached such
+&ldquo;unseasonable&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;unseasonable,&rdquo;&mdash;that
+is, contrary to our time, and yet with
+an influence on it for the benefit, it may be hoped,
+of a future time.
+<a name="page6"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;6]</span>
+</p>
+<h3>
+I.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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&mdash;&ldquo;Why do you look at me and
+not speak to me of your happiness?&rdquo; The beast
+wants to answer&mdash;&ldquo;Because I always forget what I
+wished to say&rdquo;: but he forgets this answer too, and
+is silent; and the man is left to wonder.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page7"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;7]</span>
+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&mdash;and suddenly
+it flutters back into the man's lap. Then he says,
+&ldquo;I remember...,&rdquo; 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 <i>unhistorically</i>; for it &ldquo;goes into&rdquo; 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&mdash;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 &ldquo;once
+upon a time,&rdquo; the &ldquo;open sesame&rdquo; 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,
+<a name="page8"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;8]</span>
+it abolishes life and being together, and
+sets the seal on the knowledge that &ldquo;being&rdquo; is
+merely a continual &ldquo;has been,&rdquo; a thing that lives
+by denying and destroying and contradicting itself.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;unhistorically&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;becoming&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="page9"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;9]</span>
+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 &ldquo;historical sense,&rdquo;
+that injures and finally destroys the living thing,
+be it a man or a people or a system of culture.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;plastic power&rdquo; 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,&mdash;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
+<a name="page10"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;10]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page11"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;11]</span>
+righteousness for a downright act of will or desire.
+We saw that the beast, absolutely &ldquo;unhistorical,&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="page12"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;12]</span>
+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 &ldquo;unhistorical&rdquo;
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;super-historical&rdquo; standpoint
+of consciousness, that Niebuhr has described
+as the possible result of historical
+research. &ldquo;History,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;is useful for one
+purpose, if studied in detail: that men may know,
+as the greatest and best spirits of our generation
+<a name="page13"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;13]</span>
+do not know, the accidental nature of the forms
+in which they see and insist on others seeing,&mdash;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.&rdquo; Such
+a standpoint might be called &ldquo;super-historical,&rdquo;
+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,&mdash;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 &ldquo;super-historical standpoint&rdquo;:
+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:&mdash;
+</p>
+<p class="nowrap">
+&ldquo;And from the dregs of life hope to receive,<br />
+What the first sprightly running could not give.&rdquo;<br />
+</p>
+<p>
+We will call them the &ldquo;historical men.&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page14"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;14]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+But that question to which we have heard the
+first answer, is capable of another; also a &ldquo;no,&rdquo;
+but on different grounds. It is the &ldquo;no&rdquo; of the
+&ldquo;super-historical&rdquo; 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?
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;super-historical&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page15"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;15]</span>
+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: &ldquo;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&mdash;nothing else. Be calm.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+History regarded as pure knowledge and allowed
+to sway the intellect would mean for men the final
+<a name="page16"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;16]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section7_2"></a>
+II.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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&mdash;so far as they can be distinguished&mdash;the
+<i>monumental</i>, the <i>antiquarian</i>, and the <i>critical</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page17"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;17]</span>
+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 &ldquo;man&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;monumental&rdquo;
+history.
+<a name="page18"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;18]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+But the fiercest battle is fought round the demand
+for greatness to be eternal. Every other living thing
+cries no. &ldquo;Away with the monuments,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;monumental history&rdquo; 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,&mdash;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&mdash;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,
+<a name="page19"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;19]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+What is the use to the modern man of this
+&ldquo;monumental&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page20"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;20]</span>
+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
+C�sar, 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 <i>deus ex machina</i>, 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&mdash;&ldquo;monumentally,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;effects in themselves,&rdquo;
+than of events that will have an effect on all ages.
+The events of war or religion cherished in our
+popular celebrations are such &ldquo;effects in themselves&rdquo;;
+it is these that will not let ambition sleep,
+and lie like amulets on the bolder hearts&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+As long as the soul of history is found in the
+<a name="page21"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;21]</span>
+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 &ldquo;monumental&rdquo; 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,&mdash;the antiquarian and the critical,&mdash;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&mdash;and
+the head&mdash;of a gifted egoist or an inspired
+scoundrel; kingdoms will be overthrown, princes
+murdered, war and revolution let loose, and the
+number of &ldquo;effects in themselves&rdquo;&mdash;in other words,
+effects without sufficient cause&mdash;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&mdash;or their master!
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page22"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;22]</span>
+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&mdash;and conscientious&mdash;dance
+round the half understood monument of
+a great past. &ldquo;See, that is the true and real art,&rdquo;
+we seem to hear: &ldquo;of what use are these aspiring
+little people of to-day?&rdquo; The dancing crowd has
+apparently the monopoly of &ldquo;good taste&rdquo;: 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 �sthetic dilettanti, you may take
+your oath on his condemnation; although, or rather
+because, his judges had proclaimed solemnly the
+canon of &ldquo;monumental art,&rdquo; the art that has
+&ldquo;had an effect on all ages,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;monumental&rdquo; 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 name="page23"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;23]</span>
+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,
+&ldquo;See, the great thing is already here!&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;let the dead bury the&mdash;living.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+&ldquo;antiquarian historian&rdquo;: 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
+&ldquo;critical history,&rdquo; 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.
+<a name="page24"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;24]</span>
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section7_3"></a>
+III.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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&mdash;his strength, industry, desire,
+reason, faults and follies. &ldquo;Here one could live,&rdquo;
+he says, &ldquo;as one can live here now&mdash;and will go
+on living; for we are tough folk, and will not be
+uprooted in the night.&rdquo; And so, with his &ldquo;we,&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page25"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;25]</span>
+once its palimpsests&mdash;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
+&ldquo;coming from the stern, rough, German soul.&rdquo;
+This was the road that the Italians of the Renaissance
+travelled, the spirit that reawakened the
+ancient Italic genius in their poets to &ldquo;a wondrous
+echo of the immemorial lyre,&rdquo; 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,&mdash;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,&mdash;perhaps in whole peoples,&mdash;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
+<a name="page26"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;26]</span>
+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&mdash;this is
+what we nowadays prefer to call the real historical
+sense.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page27"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;27]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page28"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;28]</span>
+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&mdash;whether it be a custom, a religious
+creed, or a political principle,&mdash;it seems presumptuous,
+even impious, to replace it by a new fact,
+and the ancient congregation of pieties by a new
+piety.
+</p>
+<p>
+Here we see clearly how necessary a third way
+of looking at the past is to man, beside the other
+two. This is the &ldquo;critical&rdquo; 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&mdash;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. &ldquo;For everything that is born is
+<i>worthy</i> of being destroyed: better were it then
+that nothing should be born.&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page29"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;29]</span>
+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&mdash;a monopoly, a caste,
+a dynasty for example&mdash;the thing deserves to
+fall. Its past is critically examined, the knife
+put to its roots, and all the &ldquo;pieties&rdquo; 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 <i>a posteriori</i> 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
+<a name="page30"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;30]</span>
+sake of life. The consolation is the knowledge
+that this &ldquo;first nature&rdquo; was once a second, and
+that every conquering &ldquo;second nature&rdquo; becomes
+a first.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section7_4"></a>
+IV.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;historical deduction.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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?
+<a name="page31"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;31]</span>
+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&mdash;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 &ldquo;science of universal evolution,&rdquo; history; that
+shows it with the dangerous audacity of its motto&mdash;&ldquo;Fiat
+veritas, pereat vita.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page32"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;32]</span>
+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
+&ldquo;real personality.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;inner life&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;education&rdquo; and
+&ldquo;historical education&rdquo; 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,
+<a name="page33"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;33]</span>
+the famous people of a past still near to us, had
+the &ldquo;unhistorical sense&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;uneducated.&rdquo; 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 encyclop�dias, as an
+ancient Greek who had strayed into our time
+would probably call us. But the only value of
+an encyclop�dia 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: &ldquo;Manual of
+internal culture for external barbarians.&rdquo; 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,&mdash;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
+<a name="page34"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;34]</span>
+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
+&ldquo;unity of artistic style in every outward expression
+of the people's life.&rdquo; This must not be misunderstood,
+as though it were merely a question
+of the opposition between barbarism and &ldquo;fine
+style.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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. &ldquo;Form&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="page35"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;35]</span>
+with his &ldquo;therefore.&rdquo; 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&mdash;which is not
+a strong or serious will&mdash;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&mdash;for they have the &ldquo;sense of substance&rdquo;:
+they are famous for their cult of &ldquo;inwardness.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+But there is also a famous danger in their &ldquo;inwardness&rdquo;:
+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
+<a name="page36"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;36]</span>
+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,&mdash;with its vulgar pride and vain
+servility,&mdash;to mark the German. Fearful thought!&mdash;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. &ldquo;We feel by theory,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+This is a single example, its general application
+perhaps too hastily assumed. But how terrible it
+would be were that generalisation justified before
+<a name="page37"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;37]</span>
+our eyes! There would be then a note of despair in
+the phrase, &ldquo;We Germans feel by theory, we are
+all spoilt by history;&rdquo;&mdash;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 &ldquo;with due reflection in
+abstract terms,&rdquo; 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,
+<a name="page38"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;38]</span>
+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,&mdash;&ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section7_5"></a>
+V.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page39"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;39]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page40"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;40]</span>
+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 &ldquo;reason of reasonable men.&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;divine animal&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+If one take hold of these masks, believing he
+<a name="page41"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;41]</span>
+has to do with a serious thing and not a mere
+puppet-show&mdash;for they all have an appearance of
+seriousness&mdash;he will find nothing but rags and
+coloured streamers in his hands. He must
+deceive himself no more, but cry aloud, &ldquo;Off with
+your jackets, or be what you seem!&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;Halt! who goes there?&rdquo; 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
+&ldquo;free personality,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;free,&rdquo; that is, sincere
+<a name="page42"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;42]</span>
+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 &ldquo;liberal education&rdquo; teaches,
+to tell lies about these needs, and thus become a
+walking lie one's self.
+</p>
+<p>
+In such an age, that suffers from its &ldquo;liberal
+education,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;if
+only....&rdquo; and by knowing that &ldquo;it happened once
+upon a time....&rdquo; Philosophy has no place in
+historical education, if it will be more than the
+knowledge that lives indoors, and can have no
+<a name="page43"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;43]</span>
+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 &ldquo;life.&rdquo; Only one thing is
+permitted there, and everything else quite impossible:
+such are the orders of historical education.
+&ldquo;Are these human beings,&rdquo; one might ask, &ldquo;or only
+machines for thinking, writing and speaking?&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+Goethe says of Shakespeare: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;beasts or
+gods,&rdquo; 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:
+<a name="page44"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;44]</span>
+&ldquo;only strong personalities can endure
+history, the weak are extinguished by it.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;how he ought
+to feel now,&rdquo; is insensibly turned by his timidity
+into a play-actor, and plays a part, or generally
+many parts,&mdash;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 <i>corpora</i> for their dissection&mdash;and as <i>vilia</i>
+as their own well-educated <i>corpora</i> 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,
+&ldquo;woman in herself,&rdquo; the Ever-unapproachable.
+And it is indifferent what they study, if history
+itself always remain beautifully &ldquo;objective&rdquo; to
+them, as men, in fact, who could never make history
+themselves. And since the Eternal Feminine
+could never &ldquo;draw you upward,&rdquo; you draw it down
+<a name="page45"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;45]</span>
+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 &ldquo;historically trained&rdquo;
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+If the personality be once emptied of its subjectivity,
+and come to what men call an &ldquo;objective&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;criticism,&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="page46"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;46]</span>
+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 &ldquo;influence&rdquo;: 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 &ldquo;corrections&rdquo;;&mdash;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
+<i>impotentia</i>.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section7_6"></a>
+VI.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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
+&ldquo;objectivity&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page47"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;47]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;thou must&rdquo;; 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.&mdash;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
+<a name="page48"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;48]</span>
+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 &ldquo;serve truth&rdquo;: 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page49"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;49]</span>
+for always treating the &ldquo;servants of truth&rdquo; with
+special kindness, who possess neither the will nor
+the power to judge and have set before them the
+task of finding &ldquo;pure knowledge without reference
+to consequences,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;cold demon of knowledge.&rdquo;
+And yet&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;nothing human is alien to him.&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="page50"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;50]</span>
+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&mdash;clever, stern and honest, but narrow-minded:
+who have the &ldquo;good will&rdquo; 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 <a name="tn1"></a>na�ve 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 &ldquo;objectivity&rdquo; by these simple people: they
+<a name="page51"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;51]</span>
+find the canon of all truth here: their work is to
+adapt the past to the present triviality. And they
+call all historical writing &ldquo;subjective&rdquo; that does not
+regard these popular opinions as canonical.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 �sthetic 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!
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;composition&rdquo; 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&mdash;but
+<a name="page52"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;52]</span>
+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 &ldquo;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.&rdquo; But as a result of this
+so-called &ldquo;objective&rdquo; way of looking at things, such
+a &ldquo;must&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;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&mdash;<i>which is of course only apparent
+in its presentation</i>.&rdquo; But what is one to think of the
+innocent statement, wavering between tautology and
+<a name="page53"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;53]</span>
+nonsense, of a famous historical virtuoso? &ldquo;It seems
+that all human actions and impulses are subordinate
+to the process of the material world, that works unnoticed,
+powerfully and irresistibly.&rdquo; In such a
+sentence one no longer finds obscure wisdom in the
+form of obvious folly; as in the saying of Goethe's
+gardener, &ldquo;Nature may be forced but not compelled,&rdquo;
+or in the notice on the side-show at a fair,
+in Swift: &ldquo;The largest elephant in the world, except
+himself, to be seen here.&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page54"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;54]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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 <i>not affected at all</i> 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&mdash;and this is called
+&ldquo;objectivity&rdquo;! 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 <i>vanity</i> 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;
+<a name="page55"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;55]</span>
+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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+<i>You can only explain the past by what is highest
+in the present.</i> 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
+<a name="page56"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;56]</span>
+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
+na�vely than a German would, of the &ldquo;historiens
+de M. Thiers.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page57"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;57]</span>
+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 &ldquo;Mr. So-and-so and his
+times,&rdquo; but for one whose title-page might be inscribed
+&ldquo;a fighter against his time.&rdquo; Feast your
+souls on Plutarch, and dare to believe in yourselves
+when you believe in his heroes. A hundred such
+men&mdash;educated against the fashion of to-day,
+made familiar with the heroic, and come to
+maturity&mdash;are enough to give an eternal quietus
+to the noisy sham education of this time.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section7_7"></a>
+VII.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page58"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;58]</span>
+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 &ldquo;he who
+destroys illusions in himself and others is punished
+by the ultimate tyrant, Nature.&rdquo; 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 <i>�crasez</i>!
+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
+<a name="page59"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;59]</span>
+Bible, be its John the Baptist. This state
+of innocence may be continued for some time by
+the Hegelian philosophy,&mdash;still seething in some
+of the older heads,&mdash;by which men can distinguish
+the &ldquo;idea of Christianity&rdquo; from its various imperfect
+&ldquo;manifestations&rdquo;; and persuade themselves that it
+is the &ldquo;self-movement of the Idea&rdquo; 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
+<i>theologus liberalis vulgaris</i>. 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 ...&mdash;what are we
+to think? if we find Christianity described by the
+&ldquo;greatest theologians of the century&rdquo; as the religion
+that claims to &ldquo;find itself in all real religions
+and some other barely possible religions,&rdquo; and
+if the &ldquo;true church&rdquo; is to be a thing &ldquo;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&rdquo;&mdash;what, I
+ask again, are we to think?
+</p>
+<p>
+Christianity has been denaturalised by historical
+treatment&mdash;which in its most complete form means
+&ldquo;just&rdquo; treatment&mdash;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
+<a name="page60"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;60]</span>
+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 minuti� 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 &ldquo;action at a distance&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;that never prosper
+without some illusion,&rdquo; as Hans Sachs says in the
+Meistersinger.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;science is now beginning to rule
+life.&rdquo; Possibly it might; but a life thus ruled is
+<a name="page61"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;61]</span>
+not of much value. It is not such true <i>life</i>, 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 &ldquo;common good&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;labour market.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;effects.&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page62"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;62]</span>
+subtler and stronger self-consciousness we find
+another emotion too&mdash;disgust. The young man
+has become homeless: he doubts all ideas, all
+moralities. He knows &ldquo;it was different in every
+age, and what you are does not matter.&rdquo; In a
+heavy apathy he lets opinion on opinion pass by
+him, and understands the meaning of H�lderlin's
+words when he read the work of Diogenes Laertius
+on the lives and doctrines of the Greek philosophers:
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;methods&rdquo; for original work, the &ldquo;correct
+ideas&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;creates&rdquo; something. He becomes a
+&ldquo;servant of truth&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page63"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;63]</span>
+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 &ldquo;factory, labour-market,
+auction-sale, practical use,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;useful.&rdquo; 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&mdash;&ldquo;Division of labour! fall into line!&rdquo; we
+may say roundly: &ldquo;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.&rdquo; The progress of science has been
+amazingly rapid in the last decade; but consider
+the savants, those exhausted hens. They are
+certainly not &ldquo;harmonious&rdquo; natures: they can
+merely cackle more than before, because they lay
+eggs oftener: but the eggs are always smaller,
+<a name="page64"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;64]</span>
+though their books are bigger. The natural result
+of it all is the favourite &ldquo;popularising&rdquo; of science
+(or rather its feminising and infantising), the
+villainous habit of cutting the cloth of science to
+fit the figure of the &ldquo;general public.&rdquo; Goethe saw
+the abuse in this, and demanded that science
+should only influence the outer world by way of
+<i>a nobler ideal of action</i>. 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 &ldquo;general public&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;the
+modest condescension of the savant to the people&rdquo;;
+whereas in reality he has only &ldquo;descended&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;If only the earth last for us: and if
+it do not last, it is no matter.&rdquo; Thus they come
+to live an <i>ironical</i> existence.
+<a name="page65"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;65]</span>
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section7_8"></a>
+VIII.
+</h3>
+<p>
+It may seem a paradox, though it is none, that I
+should attribute a kind of &ldquo;ironical self-consciousness&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;troubled feeling of
+his own error&rdquo; at the base&mdash;or rather on the height&mdash;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 &ldquo;historical men&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;The absurdity and superstition,&rdquo; these
+sceptics say, &ldquo;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.&rdquo; Historical culture is really a kind
+of inherited grayness, and those who have borne
+<a name="page66"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;66]</span>
+its mark from childhood must believe instinctively
+in <i>the old age of mankind</i>. 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,&mdash;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&mdash;the period of
+thirty-four consecutive human lives of sixty years
+each&mdash;to make us speak of youth at the beginning,
+and &ldquo;the old age of mankind&rdquo; 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
+&ldquo;the Son of Man.&rdquo; The <i>memento mori</i>, spoken
+to humanity as well as the individual, was a sting
+that never ceased to pain, the crown of medi�val
+knowledge and consciousness.
+</p>
+<p>
+The opposite message of a later time, <i>memento
+vivere</i>, is spoken rather timidly, without the full
+power of the lungs; and there is something almost
+dishonest about it. For mankind still keeps to
+<a name="page67"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;67]</span>
+its <i>memento mori</i>, 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: &ldquo;it
+might lead life astray and give it a false value.&rdquo;
+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 <i>memento vivere</i> on its standard. And
+if it cannot take the direct way&mdash;the way of main
+force&mdash;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
+<a name="page68"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;68]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+These words may not be very acceptable, any
+more than my derivation of the excess of history
+from the medi�val <i>memento mori</i> 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
+&ldquo;modern consciousness,&rdquo; must itself be known
+by a historical process. History must solve the
+<a name="page69"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;69]</span>
+problem of history, science must turn its sting
+against itself. This threefold &ldquo;must&rdquo; is the imperative
+of the &ldquo;new spirit,&rdquo; if it is really to contain
+something new, powerful, vital and original.
+Or is it true that we Germans&mdash;to leave the
+Romance nations out of account&mdash;must always be
+mere &ldquo;followers&rdquo; in all the higher reaches of
+culture, because that is all we <i>can</i> be? The words
+of Wilhelm Wackernagel are well worth pondering:
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+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,&mdash;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&mdash;through our
+&ldquo;universal history&rdquo;&mdash;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
+<a name="page70"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;70]</span>
+ancient Greek world, where all was great, natural
+and human. But it is just <i>there</i> that we find the
+reality of a true unhistorical culture&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Suppose that these antiquaries, these late
+arrivals, were to change their painful ironic
+modesty for a certain shamelessness. Suppose we
+heard them saying, aloud, &ldquo;The race is at its zenith,
+for it has manifested itself consciously for the first
+time.&rdquo; We should have a comedy, in which the
+dark meaning of a certain very celebrated
+<a name="page71"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;71]</span>
+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 &ldquo;world-process,&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;Idea realising
+itself,&rdquo; the &ldquo;Dialectic of the spirit of the nations,&rdquo;
+and the &ldquo;tribunal of the world.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+History understood in this Hegelian way has
+been contemptuously called God's sojourn upon
+earth,&mdash;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,&mdash;or rather, as simply
+superfluous. He has not said it; and thus he has
+<a name="page72"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;72]</span>
+implanted in a generation leavened throughout by
+him the worship of the &ldquo;power of history,&rdquo; 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
+&ldquo;to adapt ourselves to circumstances.&rdquo; But the
+man who has once learnt to crook the knee and
+bow the head before the power of history, nods
+&ldquo;yes&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;rational necessity,&rdquo; and every
+event show the victory of logic or the &ldquo;Idea,&rdquo;
+then&mdash;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 &ldquo;objective&rdquo; 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&mdash;makes one
+gentle and pliable. Even if a man brought up in
+<a name="page73"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;73]</span>
+this school will show himself openly offended, one
+is just as pleased, knowing it is only meant in the
+artistic sense of <i>ira et studium</i>, though it is really
+<i>sine ira et studio</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;&ldquo;it
+was once,&rdquo; and morality&mdash;&ldquo;it ought not to be, or
+have been.&rdquo; 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: &ldquo;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,&rdquo; and so on. Thus you become an <i>advocatus
+diaboli</i> 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 <i>natura naturans</i>
+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
+&ldquo;outlived&rdquo; years in exchange for whole cartloads
+of fresh modern lifetimes, to have another set of
+such conversations as those with Eckermann, and
+<a name="page74"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;74]</span>
+be preserved from all the &ldquo;modern&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;it was once so&rdquo; against
+the moral judgment &ldquo;it ought not to have been.&rdquo;
+Yes, against the moral judgment! For you may
+speak of what virtue you will, of justice, courage,
+magnanimity, of wisdom and human compassion,&mdash;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 &ldquo;all-embracing system of
+passion and error,&rdquo; man would have to read it as
+Goethe wished Werther to be read;&mdash;just as if it
+called to him, &ldquo;Be a man and follow me not!&rdquo;
+But fortunately history also keeps alive for us the
+memory of the great &ldquo;fighters against history,&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;thus it is,&rdquo; in order that they
+might follow a &ldquo;thus it must be&rdquo; with greater joy
+and greater pride. Not to drag their generation to
+the grave, but to found a new one&mdash;that is the
+motive that ever drives them onward; and even if
+they are born late, there is a way of living by
+<a name="page75"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;75]</span>
+which they can forget it&mdash;and future generations
+will know them only as the first-comers.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section7_9"></a>
+IX.
+</h3>
+<p>
+Is perhaps our time such a &ldquo;first-comer&rdquo;? 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&mdash;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:&mdash;&ldquo;what
+you see now had to come, man had to be
+thus and not otherwise, no one can stand against
+this necessity.&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;the full
+surrender of his personality to the world-process.&rdquo;
+The personality and the world-process! The world-process
+and the personality of the earthworm! If
+only one did not eternally hear the word &ldquo;world,
+world, world,&rdquo; that hyperbole of all hyperboles;
+<a name="page76"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;76]</span>
+when we should only speak, in a decent manner,
+of &ldquo;man, man, man&rdquo;! Heirs of the Greeks and
+Romans, of Christianity? All that seems nothing
+to the cynics. But &ldquo;heirs of the world-process&rdquo;;
+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!&mdash;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: &ldquo;We
+are at the top, we are the top, we are the completion
+of Nature!&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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 <i>do</i>. Thou climbest the
+sunbeams of knowledge up towards heaven&mdash;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
+<a name="page77"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;77]</span>
+knowledge tears asunder.&mdash;But not another serious
+word about this, for there is a lighter side to it all.
+</p>
+<p>
+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, &ldquo;when the spirit makes a fresh start,
+we philosophers are at hand.&rdquo; Our time did make
+a fresh start&mdash;into irony, and lo! Edward von
+Hartmann was at hand, with his famous Philosophy
+of the Unconscious&mdash;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 &ldquo;becoming,&rdquo; 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;&mdash;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,&mdash;such a system shows its creator to be one
+<a name="page78"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;78]</span>
+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?
+</p>
+<p>
+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 na�vely up to us
+by David Strauss as the most beautiful fact of all&mdash;is
+justified by Hartmann not only from the past,
+<i>ex causis efficientibus</i>, but also from the future,
+<i>ex causa finali</i>. The rogue let light stream over
+our time from the last day, and saw that it
+was very good,&mdash;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
+&ldquo;old age of man&rdquo;: but that is the blessed state,
+according to him, where there is only a successful
+mediocrity; where art is the &ldquo;evening's amusement
+of the Berlin financier,&rdquo; and &ldquo;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,&rdquo; to that stage
+<a name="page79"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;79]</span>
+of social evolution, in fact, in which every worker
+&ldquo;leads a comfortable existence, with hours of work
+that leave him sufficient leisure to cultivate his
+intellect.&rdquo; 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.
+&ldquo;Antichrist is visibly extending his arms:&rdquo; yet it
+<i>must be so</i>, for after all we are on the right road&mdash;of
+disgust at all existence. &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+&ldquo;becoming,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;work&rdquo; are they to strive boldly forward?
+Or, to ask another question:&mdash;what further has the
+historically educated fanatic of the world-process
+to do,&mdash;swimming and drowning as he is in the
+sea of becoming,&mdash;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
+<a name="page80"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;80]</span>
+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,
+&ldquo;the full surrender of his personality to the world-process,
+for the sake of his end, the redemption of
+the world&rdquo;: or still more clearly,&mdash;&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;delicacy of perception&rdquo; and dares to
+say that &ldquo;in the German mind there does seem to
+be something splay, something blunt-edged, unhandy
+and infelicitous.&rdquo; Could the great German
+parodist contradict this? According to him, we are
+approaching &ldquo;that ideal condition in which the
+<a name="page81"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;81]</span>
+human race makes its history with full consciousness&rdquo;:
+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 &ldquo;world-process&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;German mind,&rdquo; with &ldquo;the uncanny
+seriousness of an owl,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Our low comedian has his word on this too, with
+<a name="page82"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;82]</span>
+his wonderful dialectic, which is just as genuine
+as its admirers are admirable. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+No, thou clear, scornful spirit, so long as
+the illogical rules as it does to-day,&mdash;so long, for
+example, as the world-process can be spoken of as
+thou speakest of it, amid such deep-throated assent,&mdash;the
+last day is yet far off. For it is still too joyful
+on this earth, many an illusion still blooms here&mdash;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,&mdash;and no one has despised them
+with such loathing as thou,&mdash;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&mdash;from to-morrow time
+<a name="page83"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;83]</span>
+shall not exist, and the <i>Times</i> 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 &ldquo;Unconscious&rdquo; in one of the scales, and
+his &ldquo;World-process&rdquo; in the other. There are some
+who believe they weigh equally; for in each scale
+there is an evil word&mdash;and a good joke.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;historical
+sense,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;world&rdquo; and &ldquo;humanity&rdquo; 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 <i>a
+posteriori</i>, 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, <i>anim� magn� prodigus</i>. But
+if we have the doctrines of the finality of &ldquo;becoming,&rdquo;
+<a name="page84"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;84]</span>
+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),&mdash;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 <i>masses</i>; 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&mdash;laws? We may admit it:
+but we are sure of this too&mdash;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.
+<a name="page85"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;85]</span>
+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 &ldquo;great&rdquo; that has moved the masses
+for some long time, and becomes, as they say, a
+&ldquo;historical power.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;historical
+power,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;historical power&rdquo;; for they were accustomed
+to stand outside the &ldquo;world,&rdquo; and cared
+little for the &ldquo;process of the Christian Idea.&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page86"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;86]</span>
+progress and consequence: he is the power behind
+all &ldquo;historical power,&rdquo; 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
+&ldquo;historical movements&rdquo;: and yet they are in no
+way disturbed by the discovery, but proclaim that
+&ldquo;egoism shall be our god.&rdquo; 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&mdash;natural as well as human history&mdash;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
+&ldquo;fixing themselves with an eye to the future in
+their earthly home, and making themselves comfortable
+there.&rdquo; Hartmann calls this life the &ldquo;manhood
+<a name="page87"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;87]</span>
+of humanity&rdquo; with an ironical reference to
+what is now called &ldquo;manhood&rdquo;;&mdash;as if only our
+sober models of selfishness were embraced by it;
+just as he prophesies an age of graybeards following
+on this stage,&mdash;obviously another ironical glance at
+our ancient time-servers. For he speaks of the ripe
+discretion with which &ldquo;they view all the stormy
+passions of their past life and understand the vanity
+of the ends they seem to have striven for.&rdquo; 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
+</p>
+<p class="nowrap">
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&ldquo;last scene of all<br />
+That ends this strange eventful history,<br />
+Is second childishness and mere oblivion,<br />
+Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.&rdquo;<br />
+</p>
+<p>
+Whether the dangers of our life and culture come
+from these dreary, toothless old men, or from the
+so-called &ldquo;men&rdquo; 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&mdash;that men intentionally
+help, and encourage, and use, the worst
+aberrations of the historical sense from which the
+present time suffers.
+</p>
+<p>
+They use it, however, against youth, in order to
+transform it into that ripe &ldquo;egoism of manhood&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="page88"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;88]</span>
+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 <i>unhistorically</i>:
+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 &ldquo;man&rdquo; or the
+&ldquo;graybeard&rdquo; of Hartmann. And that is what
+they <i>want</i> him to be: that is the meaning of the
+present cynical demand for the &ldquo;full surrender of
+the personality to the world-process&rdquo;&mdash;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 &ldquo;men&rdquo; and
+<a name="page89"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;89]</span>
+&ldquo;graybeards.&rdquo; For then would come the reign
+of youth.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section7_10"></a>
+X.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 <i>youth</i>, 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
+<a name="page90"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;90]</span>
+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 &ldquo;poetry&rdquo; 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&mdash;in &ldquo;words, words, words.&rdquo; 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&mdash;though
+a long time&mdash;is needed for a world to
+perish, so nothing but time&mdash;though still more
+time&mdash;is needed for a false idea to be destroyed in
+Germany, the &ldquo;Land of Little-by-little.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;culture&rdquo; to be merely a kind of knowledge
+<a name="page91"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;91]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+�sthetically 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?
+</p>
+<p>
+Principally by destroying the superstition that
+<a name="page92"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;92]</span>
+this kind of education is <i>necessary</i>. 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&mdash;and pained&mdash;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
+&ldquo;educated man&rdquo; (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
+<a name="page93"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;93]</span>
+diligently practised, if we are not to have mere
+botchers and babblers as the issue of it all!
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;mighty lie.&rdquo; 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 <i>�terna veritas</i> of this arrangement was
+the basis of the new education and the new state.
+So the modern German believes also in the <i>�terna
+veritas</i> of his education, of his kind of culture:
+and yet this belief will fail&mdash;as the Platonic state
+would have failed&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+But our first generation must be brought up in
+this &ldquo;mighty truth,&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page94"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;94]</span>
+it might say to itself, in the old Spanish phrase,
+&ldquo;Defienda me Dios de my,&rdquo; 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:&mdash;&ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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 <i>cogito ergo sum</i>,
+though not <i>vivo ergo cogito</i>. I am permitted the
+empty <i>esse</i>, not the full green <i>vivere</i>. A primary
+feeling tells me that I am a thinking being but not
+a living one, that I am no &ldquo;animal,&rdquo; but at most a
+&ldquo;cogital.&rdquo; &ldquo;Give me life, and I will soon make
+you a culture out of it&rdquo;&mdash;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?
+</p>
+<p>
+No god and no man will give it&mdash;only their own
+<i>youth</i>. Set this free, and you will set life free as
+<a name="page95"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;95]</span>
+well. For it only lay concealed, in a prison; it is
+not yet withered or dead&mdash;ask your own selves!
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<i>malady of history</i>. 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?
+</p>
+<p>
+It is no marvel that they bear the names of
+poisons:&mdash;the antidotes to history are the &ldquo;unhistorical&rdquo;
+and the &ldquo;super-historical.&rdquo; With these
+names we return to the beginning of our inquiry
+and draw near to its final close.
+</p>
+<p>
+By the word &ldquo;unhistorical&rdquo; I mean the power,
+the art of <i>forgetting</i>, and of drawing a limited
+horizon round one's self. I call the power &ldquo;super-historical&rdquo;
+which turns the eyes from the process
+of becoming to that which gives existence an
+eternal and stable character, to art and religion.
+Science&mdash;for it is science that makes us speak of
+&ldquo;poisons&rdquo;&mdash;sees in these powers contrary powers:
+for it considers only that view of things to be true
+and right, and therefore scientific, which regards
+<a name="page96"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;96]</span>
+something as finished and historical, not as continuing
+and eternal. Thus it lives in a deep
+antagonism towards the powers that make for
+eternity&mdash;art and religion,&mdash;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&mdash;of becoming!
+</p>
+<p>
+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:&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+And here I see the mission of the youth that
+<a name="page97"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;97]</span>
+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 &ldquo;health&rdquo; and &ldquo;culture,&rdquo; 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&mdash;but how would youth count
+that a reproach? You may speak of its rawness
+and intemperateness&mdash;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&mdash;and the consolations&mdash;of youth, especially
+the right of brave unthinking honesty and the consolation
+of an inspiring hope.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page98"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;98]</span>
+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&mdash;monumental,
+antiquarian, or critical. At first they will be more
+ignorant than the &ldquo;educated men&rdquo; 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?
+</p>
+<p>
+How can we reach that end? you will ask. The
+Delphian god cries his oracle to you at the beginning
+of your wanderings, &ldquo;Know thyself.&rdquo; It is a
+hard saying: for that god &ldquo;tells nothing and conceals
+nothing but merely points the way,&rdquo; as
+Heraclitus said. But whither does he point?
+</p>
+<p>
+In certain epochs the Greeks were in a similar
+danger of being overwhelmed by what was past
+<a name="page99"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;99]</span>
+and foreign, and perishing on the rock of &ldquo;history.&rdquo;
+They never lived proud and untouched. Their
+&ldquo;culture&rdquo; was for a long time a chaos of foreign
+forms and ideas,&mdash;Semitic, Babylonian, Lydian and
+Egyptian,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+This is a parable for each one of us: he must
+organise the chaos in himself by &ldquo;thinking himself
+back&rdquo; 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
+&ldquo;decoration of life&rdquo;&mdash;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
+<a name="page100"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;100]</span>
+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.
+<a name="page101"></a>
+<a name="page102"></a>
+</p>
+<h2>
+<a name="page103"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;103]</span>
+<a name="chapter9"></a>
+SCHOPENHAUER AS
+EDUCATOR.
+</h2>
+<h3>
+I.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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, &ldquo;They have a tendency to sloth.&rdquo;
+Many may think that the fuller truth would have
+been, &ldquo;They are all timid.&rdquo; They hide themselves
+behind &ldquo;manners&rdquo; and &ldquo;opinions.&rdquo; 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;&mdash;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,
+<a name="page104"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;104]</span>
+the &ldquo;taking things easily,&rdquo; in a word the &ldquo;tendency
+to sloth,&rdquo; 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&mdash;as an analytical
+deduction from his individuality&mdash;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 &ldquo;taking himself
+easily&rdquo;; to follow his conscience, which cries out
+to him, &ldquo;Be thyself! all that thou doest and
+thinkest and desirest, is not&mdash;thyself!&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page105"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;105]</span>
+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 &ldquo;killing time,&rdquo; yet in respect of an age
+that rests its salvation on public opinion,&mdash;that is,
+on private laziness,&mdash;one must be quite determined
+that such a time shall be &ldquo;killed,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;killing their time,&rdquo; and of perishing
+with it,&mdash;when they wish rather to quicken the
+time to life, and in that life themselves to <i>live</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+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;
+<a name="page106"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;106]</span>
+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 &ldquo;to-day,&rdquo;
+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. &ldquo;I
+will make the attempt to gain freedom,&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;And
+this is not&mdash;thyself,&rdquo; the soul says. &ldquo;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&mdash;'A man has never
+<a name="page107"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;107]</span>
+risen higher than when he knoweth not whither his
+road may yet lead him'?&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+But how can we &ldquo;find ourselves&rdquo; again, and how
+can man &ldquo;know himself&rdquo;? 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 &ldquo;Here art thou in very truth;
+this is outer shell no more.&rdquo; 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,&mdash;our friendships and enmities, our
+looks and greetings, our memories and forgetfulnesses,
+our books and our writing! This is the
+most effective way:&mdash;to let the youthful soul look
+back on life with the question, &ldquo;What hast thou
+up to now truly loved, what has drawn thy soul
+upward, mastered it and blessed it too?&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page108"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;108]</span>
+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&mdash;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;&mdash;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&mdash;for she is a step-mother too,
+sometimes.
+</p>
+<p>
+There are other means of &ldquo;finding ourselves,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section9_2"></a>
+II.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page109"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;109]</span>
+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,&mdash;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: &ldquo;What would be the principles, on which he
+might teach thee?&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;dear little horn&rdquo;&mdash;the &ldquo;cursed
+piping,&rdquo; 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&mdash;nay, the soul of harmony itself&mdash;as we
+see in natures like Cellini's, where everything&mdash;knowledge,
+desire, love and hate&mdash;tends towards a
+<a name="page110"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;110]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;school for authors,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;family tutor,&rdquo; even among our
+most eminent and cultured people; and what a
+<a name="page111"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;111]</span>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;&ldquo;the more the
+better,&rdquo;&mdash;it is as harmful to learning as the
+economic theory of <i>laisser faire</i> 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:&mdash;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,&mdash;because there are no teachers;
+and why a savant must be a distorted and perverted
+thing,&mdash;because he will have been trained by the
+inhuman abstraction, science. This being so, let a
+man ask himself: &ldquo;Where are now the types of
+moral excellence and fame for all our generation&mdash;learned
+<a name="page112"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;112]</span>
+and unlearned, high and low&mdash;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?&rdquo; 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 na�ve 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
+formul�; virtue is a word and nothing more, on
+both sides, an old-fashioned word that they laugh
+at&mdash;and it is worse when they do not laugh, for
+then they are hypocrites.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 medi�val 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
+<a name="page113"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;113]</span>
+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 &ldquo;good&rdquo; and the &ldquo;better&rdquo;
+course&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+So I was right in speaking of my &ldquo;wandering in
+a world of wishes&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;out of season&rdquo;; simply
+and honestly&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+With such needs and desires within me did I
+come to know Schopenhauer.
+<a name="page114"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;114]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;least of all a
+philosopher who has set this up as his law:
+&ldquo;deceive nobody, not even thyself,&rdquo; neither with
+the &ldquo;white lies&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;hears and loves.&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="page115"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;115]</span>
+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:&mdash;&ldquo;A philosopher must be
+very honest to avail himself of no aid from poetry
+or rhetoric.&rdquo; 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,
+<a name="page116"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;116]</span>
+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&mdash;&ldquo;As soon as I open
+him, I seem to grow a pair of wings.&rdquo; If I had
+the task of making myself at home on the earth,
+I would choose him as my companion.
+</p>
+<p>
+Schopenhauer has a second characteristic in
+common with Montaigne, besides honesty; a joy
+that really makes others joyful. &ldquo;Aliis l�tus,
+sibi sapiens.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;joyfulness&rdquo; 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 <i>fils de joie</i> do not see the sufferings and
+<a name="page117"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;117]</span>
+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 slipshod
+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 <i>danse macabre</i> of the rest of humanity.
+And so in their company one feels a natural man
+again, and could cry out with Goethe&mdash;&ldquo;What a
+wondrous and priceless thing is a living creature!
+How fitted to his surroundings, how true, and
+real!&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page118"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;118]</span>
+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 Chim�ras, 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&mdash;his pupils and his sons.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section9_3"></a>
+III.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;breathing testimony&rdquo; in German philosophical
+<a name="page119"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;119]</span>
+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&mdash;which is ultimately a formative
+limiting of one's self&mdash;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
+&ldquo;truth,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;pure reason.&rdquo; And
+therefore I will say, that philosophy in Germany
+has more and more to learn not to be &ldquo;pure
+<a name="page120"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;120]</span>
+reason&rdquo;: and it may well take as its model
+&ldquo;Schopenhauer the man.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;pure reason&rdquo;: and
+only &ldquo;at best&rdquo;&mdash;it was more probable that neither
+man nor reason would survive.
+</p>
+<p>
+A modern Englishman sketches the most usual
+danger to extraordinary men who live in a society
+that worships the ordinary, in this manner:&mdash;&ldquo;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.&rdquo; Our
+Holderins 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&mdash;&ldquo;Voil� un homme qui
+a eu de grands chagrins!&rdquo; which Goethe translated
+to mean &ldquo;That is a man who has taken great pains
+in his life.&rdquo; And he adds, &ldquo;If the trace of the
+sorrow and activity we have gone through cannot
+be wiped from our features, it is no wonder that
+<a name="page121"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;121]</span>
+all that survives of us and our struggles should
+bear the same impress.&rdquo; 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&mdash;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&mdash;inviolable silence. This much at least
+was accomplished by it;&mdash;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&mdash;perilous and uncontrollable;&mdash;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 (<i>legor et legar</i>), 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
+<a name="page122"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;122]</span>
+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&mdash;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&mdash;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;
+<a name="page123"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;123]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+So the first danger in whose shadow Schopenhauer
+lived was&mdash;isolation. The second is called&mdash;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
+<a name="page124"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;124]</span>
+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 &ldquo;domains of
+thought&rdquo; 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.
+&ldquo;It was only a short time ago,&rdquo; he writes in his
+poignant way, &ldquo;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.&mdash;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.&rdquo; Yes, when
+will men feel again deeply as Kleist did, and learn
+<a name="page125"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;125]</span>
+to measure a philosophy by what it means to the
+&ldquo;Holy of Holies&rdquo;? 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 &ldquo;critical&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="page126"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;126]</span>
+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 <i>sub specie
+�ternitatis</i>&mdash;&ldquo;this is the picture of the whole of
+life: learn thence the meaning of thine own life.&rdquo;
+And the converse: &ldquo;read thine own life, and
+understand thence the hieroglyphs of the universal
+life.&rdquo; 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;&mdash;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!
+</p>
+<p>
+Applying this to Schopenhauer himself, we
+come to the third and most intimate danger in
+<a name="page127"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;127]</span>
+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 &ldquo;genius&rdquo;
+in himself. This is the root of all true culture;
+and if we say this means the aspiration of man to
+be &ldquo;born again&rdquo; 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,&mdash;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
+<a name="page128"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;128]</span>
+from the picture of Ranc�, the founder of the
+Trappists, with the words: &ldquo;That is a matter of
+grace.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;all too human&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page129"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;129]</span>
+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&mdash;joy, safety, honour: his
+fellow-men pay him his due of&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;pure
+reason&rdquo;: or through the constant search for the
+&ldquo;pros and cons&rdquo; 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: &ldquo;No dog could live
+long thus!&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+<a name="page130"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;130]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page131"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;131]</span>
+for freedom and beauty on the grand scale, and
+their search after truth, with its single question
+&ldquo;What is the real <i>worth</i> of life?&rdquo; 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&mdash;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,&mdash;warm, red life,&mdash;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?
+</p>
+<p>
+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 <i>against</i> 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
+<a name="page132"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;132]</span>
+to that element which is not truly himself, the
+irreconcilable antagonism of the temporal and
+eternal in him. The supposed &ldquo;child of his age&rdquo;
+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,&mdash;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, &ldquo;What is the real worth of
+life?&rdquo; 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:&mdash;&ldquo;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,
+<a name="page133"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;133]</span>
+and the sorely accused life shall go free.&rdquo; How
+shall he answer? In the words of Empedocles.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section9_4"></a>
+IV.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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 <i>in opposition</i> to our age, since we have
+the advantage of really knowing our age, through
+him;&mdash;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 &ldquo;Dark age,&rdquo; 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.
+<a name="page134"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;134]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;perhaps in Germany&mdash;who
+are disposed to believe in all seriousness that
+the world was put right two years ago,<a name="ref_1_1"></a><a href="#footnote_1_1" class="fnref">[1]</a> and that
+all stern and gloomy views of life are now contradicted
+by &ldquo;facts.&rdquo; The foundation of the New
+German Empire is, to them, the decisive blow that
+annihilates all the &ldquo;pessimistic&rdquo; philosophisers,&mdash;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&mdash;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
+<a name="page135"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;135]</span>
+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
+Carri�re in Munich.
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;and
+only with them in their relation to the world
+of culture, which is again almost independent of the
+&ldquo;good of the state.&rdquo; Of the many links that make
+up the twisted chain of humanity, some are of gold
+and others of pewter.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page136"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;136]</span>
+drawing away in enmity again, and long to tear
+each other in pieces. The sciences, blindly driving
+along, on a <i>laisser faire</i> 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
+Tannh�user did Biterolf, &ldquo;What hast thou, poor
+wretch, enjoyed!&rdquo; 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.
+<a name="page137"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;137]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 medi�val times
+<a name="page138"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;138]</span>
+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
+&ldquo;adiaphora&rdquo;&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 <i>are</i> those smallest
+indivisible elements of human society?
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page139"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;139]</span>
+will provide the guardians and champions for
+<i>Humanity</i>, 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 <i>Image of Man</i>, 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?
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+&ldquo;in the grand style&rdquo; 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
+&ldquo;holy mother Nature,&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page140"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;140]</span>
+truest humanity a little while ago&mdash;all his arts
+and sciences, all the refinements of his life,&mdash;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, &ldquo;Nature alone is good, the natural
+man alone is human,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;gospel of kindly Nature&rdquo; 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&mdash;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 d�monic, in opposition to his utterly und�monic
+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&mdash;which
+is the tragic destiny of all revolutionary
+deliverers. One is wrong, however, to expect
+<a name="page141"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;141]</span>
+anything of the sort: Goethe's man here parts
+company with Rousseau's; for he hates all violence,
+all sudden transition&mdash;that is, all action: and the
+universal deliverer becomes merely the universal
+traveller. All the riches of life and nature, all
+antiquity&mdash;arts, mythologies and sciences&mdash;pass
+before his eager eyes, his deepest desires are
+aroused and satisfied, Helen herself can hold him
+no more&mdash;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&mdash;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 &ldquo;things as they are&rdquo;
+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
+<a name="page142"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;142]</span>
+Wilhelm Meister: &ldquo;You are bitter and ill-tempered&mdash;which
+is quite an excellent thing: if you could
+once become really angry, it would be still better.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+<i>Schopenhauer's man voluntarily takes upon himself
+the pain of telling the truth:</i> 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:&mdash;
+</p>
+<p class="nowrap">
+&ldquo;So to the active and eternal<br />
+Creative force, in cold disdain<br />
+You now oppose the fist infernal&rdquo;&mdash;<br />
+</p>
+<p>
+and he who would live according to Schopenhauer
+would seem to be more like a Mephistopheles than
+a Faust&mdash;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
+<a name="page143"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;143]</span>
+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 &ldquo;the quickest beast
+that will carry you to perfection is suffering.&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;Schopenhauer
+man&rdquo;;&mdash;pure and wonderfully patient, on
+his intellectual side full of a devouring fire, and
+far removed from the cold and contemptuous
+&ldquo;neutrality&rdquo; 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: &ldquo;A happy
+life is impossible, the highest thing that man can
+aspire to is a <i>heroic</i> 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
+<a name="page144"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;144]</span>
+the Prince in the <i>re corvo</i> 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.&rdquo; Such a
+heroic life, with its full &ldquo;mortification&rdquo;&mdash;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 &ldquo;gift&rdquo; and
+&ldquo;compulsion&rdquo; are contemptible words, mere means
+of escape from an inner voice, a slander on him
+who has listened to the voice&mdash;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,
+<a name="page145"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;145]</span>
+&ldquo;I will remain mine own.&rdquo; 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&mdash;&ldquo;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?&rdquo; 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,&mdash;busy with the comedy they are all
+playing, and never thinking of their own selves.
+To the question &ldquo;To what end dost thou live?&rdquo;
+they would all immediately answer, with pride,
+&ldquo;To <i>become</i> a good citizen or professor or statesman,&rdquo;&mdash;and
+yet they <i>are</i> something which can
+never be changed: and why are they just&mdash;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 &ldquo;becoming,&rdquo; has not understood
+the lesson of existence, and must learn it over
+again. This eternal &ldquo;becoming something&rdquo; 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&mdash;and with
+us. The heroism of sincerity lies in ceasing to be
+the plaything of time. Everything in the process
+of &ldquo;becoming&rdquo; is a hollow sham, contemptible and
+<a name="page146"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;146]</span>
+shallow: man can only find the solution of his
+riddle in &ldquo;being&rdquo; something definite and unchangeable.
+He begins to test how deep both &ldquo;becoming&rdquo;
+and &ldquo;being&rdquo; are rooted in him&mdash;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.
+<a name="page147"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;147]</span>
+They will at some time disappear: and then will
+it be day.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section9_5"></a>
+V.
+</h3>
+<p>
+But I have promised to speak of Schopenhauer,
+as far as my experience goes, as an <i>educator</i>, and
+it is far from being sufficient to paint the ideal
+humanity which is the &ldquo;Platonic idea&rdquo; in Schopenhauer;
+especially as my representation is an imperfect
+one. The most difficult task remains;&mdash;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 <i>educative</i>. 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, &ldquo;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?&rdquo;&mdash;in order that the great words of
+Goethe be not fulfilled in our case&mdash;&ldquo;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,
+<a name="page148"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;148]</span>
+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.&rdquo; 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;&mdash;becoming
+unstable, daily weaker and less productive:&mdash;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 <i>accomplish</i>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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.
+<a name="page149"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;149]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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
+<a name="page150"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;150]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;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
+<a name="page151"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;151]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page152"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;152]</span>
+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&mdash;and who are they
+that will uplift us?
+</p>
+<p>
+The sincere men who have cast out the beast,
+the philosophers, artists and saints. Nature&mdash;<i>qu&aelig;
+nunquam facit saltum</i>&mdash;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 &ldquo;beauty.&rdquo; 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 <i>heard</i> in his life,
+he may well say to himself&mdash;&ldquo;The deaf ears, the
+feeble understanding and shrunken heart, everything
+that I call mine,&mdash;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
+<a name="page153"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;153]</span>
+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&mdash;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 &ldquo;becoming&rdquo;; 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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+I can now give an answer to the question whether
+it be possible to approach the great ideal of Schopenhauer's
+man &ldquo;by any ordinary activity of our own.&rdquo;
+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 <i>culture</i>;
+<a name="page154"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;154]</span>
+though only so far as it can put a single task
+before each of us&mdash;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,&mdash;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.
+&ldquo;I have often said, and will often repeat,&rdquo; he
+exclaims in one place, &ldquo;the <i>causa finalis</i> of natural
+and human activity is dramatic poetry. Otherwise
+the stuff is of no use at all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;becoming&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;I&rdquo;
+no longer; there is something beyond our being
+that comes, for those moments, to the hither side
+<a name="page155"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;155]</span>
+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.&mdash;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&mdash;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;&mdash;and
+this is the &ldquo;use&rdquo; we are to make of him;&mdash;we must
+know what obstacles there are and strike them
+from our path&mdash;in fact, wage unceasing war against
+everything that hindered our fulfilment, and prevented
+us from becoming Schopenhauer's men
+ourselves.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section9_6"></a>
+VI.
+</h3>
+<p>
+It is sometimes harder to agree to a thing than
+to understand it; many will feel this when they
+consider the proposition&mdash;&ldquo;Mankind must toil
+<a name="page156"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;156]</span>
+unceasingly to bring forth individual great men:
+this and nothing else is its task.&rdquo; 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;&mdash;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:
+&ldquo;Let it be rather for the sake of every other, or,
+at any rate, of as many as possible!&rdquo; 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&mdash;&ldquo;In what way may
+<a name="page157"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;157]</span>
+your life, the individual life, retain the highest
+value and the deepest significance? and how may
+it least be squandered?&rdquo; Only by your living for
+the good of the rarest and most valuable types,
+not for that of the majority,&mdash;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. &ldquo;She has succeeded
+badly,&rdquo; he should say; &ldquo;but I will do honour to
+her great idea by being a means to its better
+success.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+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: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+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 &ldquo;initiation into culture.&rdquo;
+The sign of this is shame or vexation at one's self,
+a hatred of one's own narrowness, a sympathy with
+<a name="page158"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;158]</span>
+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
+d�bris of some precious sculptures, which cry out&mdash;&ldquo;Come
+and help us! Put us together, for we long
+to become complete.&rdquo;
+</p>
+<p>
+I called this inward condition the &ldquo;first initiation
+into culture.&rdquo; I have now to describe the
+effects of the &ldquo;second initiation,&rdquo; 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,&mdash;the
+production of genius.
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;&ldquo;Is
+not such knowledge, after all, absolutely
+<a name="page159"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;159]</span>
+necessary? Can Nature be said to attain her
+end, if men have a false idea of the aim of their
+own labour?&rdquo; And any one who thinks a great
+deal of Nature's unconscious adaptation of means
+to ends, will probably answer at once: &ldquo;Yes, men
+may think and speak what they like about their
+ultimate end, their blind instinct will tell them the
+right road.&rdquo; It requires some experience of life
+to be able to contradict this: but let a man be
+convinced of the real aim of culture&mdash;the production
+of the true man and nothing else;&mdash;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 &ldquo;battle of the beasts&rdquo;: 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;&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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: &ldquo;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
+<a name="page160"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;160]</span>
+happiness as possible.&rdquo;&mdash;This is the seductive
+formula. Its preachers would define education as
+the insight that makes man through and through
+a &ldquo;child of his age&rdquo; in his desires and their
+satisfaction, and gives him command over the
+best means of making money. Its aim would
+be to make &ldquo;current&rdquo; men, in the same sense as
+one speaks of the &ldquo;currency&rdquo; in money; and in
+their view, the more &ldquo;current&rdquo; men there are,
+the happier the people. The object of modern
+educational systems is therefore to make each
+man as &ldquo;current&rdquo; 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
+&ldquo;intelligence and property&rdquo; not only exists, but
+is also a <i>moral</i> 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 &ldquo;refined egoism&rdquo; or &ldquo;immoral Epicureanism.&rdquo;
+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, &ldquo;man has a necessary claim to worldly happiness;
+only for that reason is education necessary.&rdquo;
+<a name="page161"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;161]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;highly civilised state&rdquo; 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,&mdash;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
+&ldquo;setting free&rdquo; comes to mean rather &ldquo;chaining
+up.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;good form&rdquo; over them. Words,
+gestures, dress, etiquette, and such external things,
+<a name="page162"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;162]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;sound taste&rdquo; applied to the
+German language by means of an Academy on the
+<a name="page163"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;163]</span>
+French model, to shake off the doubtful influence
+of Goethe&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;including the arts of
+the dancing-master and the upholsterer;&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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:&mdash;&ldquo;The
+old German way is no longer yours: it was
+hard, rough, and full of resistance; but it is still
+the most valuable material&mdash;one which only the
+greatest modellers can work with, for they alone
+<a name="page164"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;164]</span>
+are worthy to use it. What you have in you now
+is a soft pulpy stuff: make what you will out of
+it,&mdash;elegant dolls and interesting idols&mdash;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.'&rdquo; 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.&mdash;The
+prevailing love of &ldquo;good form&rdquo; 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
+&ldquo;three m's,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;good
+form&rdquo; 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:
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo; Faith may often produce
+happiness, yet <i>this</i> particular faith makes me unhappy,
+<a name="page165"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;165]</span>
+for I feel that the culture whose future
+raises such hopes&mdash;the culture of riches, politeness,
+and elegant concealments&mdash;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 &ldquo;cult of the interesting.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;good form&rdquo; over them. There is
+fourthly the self-interest of science, and the
+peculiar nature of her servants&mdash;the learned.
+<a name="page166"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;166]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;though
+no less a problem for that!
+</p>
+<p>
+If one accustom himself to put down every
+experience in a dialectical form of question and
+answer, and translate it into the language of &ldquo;pure
+reason,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;impulse to truth&rdquo;: 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&mdash;even the worthiest! To speak honestly,
+the savant is a complex of very various impulses
+and attractive forces&mdash;he is a base metal throughout.
+</p>
+<p>
+Take first a strong and increasing desire for
+intellectual adventure, the attraction of the new
+and rare as against the old and tedious. Add
+<a name="page167"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;167]</span>
+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,&mdash;truth only
+its pretext. The impulse to discover &ldquo;particular
+truths&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+The following characteristics of the savant are
+less common, but still found.&mdash;Firstly, downrightness
+and a feeling for simplicity, very valuable if
+more than a mere awkwardness and inability to
+deceive, deception requiring some mother-wit.&mdash;(Actually,
+we may be on our guard against too
+obvious cleverness and resource, and doubt the
+man's sincerity.)&mdash;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 &ldquo;adiaphora&rdquo;; 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
+<i>sensus recti</i>. 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
+<a name="page168"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;168]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Fourthly, a lack of feeling, which makes him
+<a name="page169"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;169]</span>
+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,&mdash;any more than the
+mule who does not feel giddiness.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page170"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;170]</span>
+of gravitation; and so they can often bring their
+labours to an end.
+</p>
+<p>
+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, �sthetic,
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Ninthly, the motive of the bread-winner, the
+&ldquo;cry of the empty stomach,&rdquo; 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&mdash;and bread. Only,
+however, in the sense of the &ldquo;particular truth&rdquo;:
+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 <i>ingenii largitor venter</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+Tenthly, a reverence for their fellow-professors
+and a fear of their displeasure&mdash;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.
+<a name="page171"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;171]</span>
+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 &ldquo;moral idiosyncrasies,&rdquo;&mdash;formerly
+called rascalities.
+</p>
+<p>
+Eleventhly, the &ldquo;savant for vanity,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Twelfthly, the &ldquo;savant for amusement.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+If I speak, lastly, of the &ldquo;impulse towards
+justice&rdquo; 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.
+<a name="page172"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;172]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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&mdash;mere purposeless, and therefore
+motiveless, knowledge&mdash;a mass of very human
+little motives have been chemically combined, and
+as the result we have the professor,&mdash;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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+In fact, all these considerations go to prove that
+the aim of culture is most unknown precisely where
+<a name="page173"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;173]</span>
+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&mdash;business. When the pioneers of &ldquo;good
+form&rdquo; 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 <i>themselves</i> 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+<a name="page174"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;174]</span>
+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;&mdash;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?&mdash;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 medi�val 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 &ldquo;fight in line,&rdquo; the second to treat as foes all
+who will not &ldquo;fall in.&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page175"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;175]</span>
+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 &ldquo;fashionable culture,&rdquo; that plays on
+their selfish side, their vanities and weaknesses;
+and the time-spirit ever whispers in their ears its
+flattering counsel:&mdash;&ldquo;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
+<a name="page176"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;176]</span>
+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.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section9_7"></a>
+VII.
+</h3>
+<p>
+But setting aside all thoughts of any educational
+revolution in the distant future;&mdash;what provision
+is required <i>now</i>, that our future philosopher
+may have the best chance of opening his eyes to a
+life like Schopenhauer's&mdash;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.
+<a name="page177"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;177]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page178"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;178]</span>
+should reach all&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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
+<a name="page179"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;179]</span>
+that have up to now killed his effect among men.
+First there was the want of readers,&mdash;to the eternal
+shame of our cultivated age;&mdash;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.&mdash;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?
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page180"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;180]</span>
+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,&mdash;including
+not merely religious dogmas, but such
+juggling conceptions as &ldquo;progress,&rdquo; &ldquo;universal
+education,&rdquo; &ldquo;nationalism,&rdquo; &ldquo;the modern state&rdquo;;
+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 &ldquo;health.&rdquo; 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
+amphor�, 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&mdash;to
+say nothing of our vases!&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+In considering the conditions that, at best, keep
+the born philosopher from being oppressed by the
+<a name="page181"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;181]</span>
+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&mdash;a rude and strong virility. His father
+was neither an official nor a savant; he travelled
+much abroad with his son,&mdash;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 &ldquo;protectors,&rdquo; 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 <i>furor philosophicus</i> in him will no longer
+have time for the <i>furor politicus</i>, 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
+<a name="page182"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;182]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Schopenhauer had another great advantage&mdash;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&mdash;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 &ldquo;seen
+at once&rdquo;; 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&mdash;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&mdash;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
+<a name="page183"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;183]</span>
+was looking, must come to be born; and could he,
+after this vision, have much desire to busy himself
+with the so-called &ldquo;art,&rdquo; in the learned, hypocritical
+manner of the moderns? He had seen something
+higher than that&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was one of the high conditions of his existence
+that he really could live for such a task&mdash;according
+to his motto <i>vitam impendere vero</i>&mdash;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 &ldquo;considerate fool,&rdquo; in
+search of place and honour, circumspect and obsequious,
+and fawning on his influential superiors.
+<a name="page184"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;184]</span>
+Nothing offended the savants more than Schopenhauer's
+unlikeness to them.
+</p>
+<h3>
+<a name="section9_8"></a>
+VIII.
+</h3>
+<p>
+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;&mdash;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,&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+A father may possibly learn something from
+this that he may use for his son's private education,
+<a name="page185"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;185]</span>
+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 &ldquo;corrupting
+the youth,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;God-born king&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;encouragement of
+philosophy&rdquo; 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?
+</p>
+<p>
+Experience teaches us a better way&mdash;or a worse:
+it says that nothing so stands in the way of the
+birth and growth of Nature's philosopher as the
+<a name="page186"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;186]</span>
+bad philosophers made &ldquo;by order.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+The &ldquo;freedom&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;encouragement
+of philosophy&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;take care of
+me, as I have something better to do&mdash;namely to
+take care of you.&rdquo; We should not be angry at
+such a heightened mode of expression in Plato
+and Schopenhauer; and so they might properly
+<a name="page187"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;187]</span>
+have been University philosophers,&mdash;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,&mdash;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&mdash;the state. And not only
+the state, but everything required by it for existence&mdash;a
+definite form of religion, a social system, a
+standing army; a <i>noli me tangere</i> is written
+above all these things. Can a University
+philosopher ever keep clearly before him the
+<a name="page188"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;188]</span>
+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,&mdash;I think he is no friend to truth either.
+</p>
+<p>
+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, &ldquo;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?&rdquo; Without answering
+this last question, I will merely say that these
+&ldquo;concessions&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page189"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;189]</span>
+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&mdash;and yet must be in his place and appear to
+be thinking! What then?
+</p>
+<p>
+&ldquo;But,&rdquo; one will say, &ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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;&mdash;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, &ldquo;He is an able scholar, antiquary,
+philologist, historian,&rdquo;&mdash;but never, &ldquo;He is a
+philosopher.&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;at best&rdquo;: 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
+<a name="page190"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;190]</span>
+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&mdash;namely to see whether
+one can live by it&mdash;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,&mdash;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, &ldquo;Thank God
+I am no philosopher, but a Christian and a good
+citizen!&rdquo;
+<a name="page191"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;191]</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+What if this cry were the ultimate object of the
+state, and the &ldquo;education&rdquo; or leading to philosophy
+were merely a leading <i>from</i> philosophy? We may
+well ask.&mdash;But if so, there is one thing to fear&mdash;that
+the youth may some day find out to what
+end philosophy is thus mis-handled. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;&mdash;Then woe
+to the whole machinery of political and professorial
+trickery!
+</p>
+<p>
+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: &ldquo;men are born according to
+their deeds, deaf, dumb, misshapen.&rdquo; Those fathers
+deserved such sons, &ldquo;according to their deeds,&rdquo; 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,
+<a name="page192"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;192]</span>
+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,&mdash;&ldquo;Not
+one of them can fully explain to me the origin of
+matter; then what do I care about them all?&rdquo;&mdash;Another
+said of history, &ldquo;It tells nothing new to
+the man with ideas&rdquo;: 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
+&ldquo;led the way&rdquo; in the sciences in the sense that the
+quarry &ldquo;leads the way&rdquo; 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
+<a name="page193"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;193]</span>
+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 &ldquo;dead weight that lies on the
+intellects of mankind&rdquo;! 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 &ldquo;philosophy,&rdquo; and every one
+will agree with the temperate words of Bagehot<a name="ref_1_2"></a><a href="#footnote_1_2" class="fnref">[2]</a>
+on the present system builders: &ldquo;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
+<a name="page194"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;194]</span>
+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?&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;Fool, you do not
+see the beam,&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;This is all that is
+wanting,&mdash;that a philosophaster like this should lay
+his impure hands on us, the natural sciences and
+history! Away with him!&rdquo; Then they start
+back, knowing not where to turn or to ask the way.
+They wanted to have a little physical knowledge
+<a name="page195"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;195]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+But granted that this herd of bad philosophers is
+ridiculous&mdash;and who will deny it?&mdash;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,&mdash;nay, rather persecute
+them and treat them ill,&mdash;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,&mdash;one
+only has to cease paying them. And that
+<a name="page196"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;196]</span>
+is a better plan than the open patronage of any
+philosophy, whatever it be, for state reasons.
+</p>
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;false truth,&rdquo; a masked actor who cannot
+perform the office required from the real truth&mdash;the
+affirmation of the state's worth and sanctity.
+When a medi�val 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 &ldquo;anti-philosophy&rdquo;
+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.&mdash;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
+<a name="page197"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;197]</span>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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&mdash;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
+<a name="page198"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;198]</span>
+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&mdash;their
+philosophies&mdash;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&mdash;the very cosmetics of speech&mdash;with
+<a name="page199"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;199]</span>
+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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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
+<a name="page200"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;200]</span>
+<i>ingrata principibus nomina</i>. 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. &ldquo;Beware when the great God
+lets loose a thinker on this planet,&rdquo; says Emerson.<a name="ref_1_3"></a><a href="#footnote_1_3" class="fnref">[3]</a>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;as
+<a name="page201"></a><span class="pagenum">[Pg&nbsp;201]</span>
+ever tree bore its apples.&rdquo; 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:
+&ldquo;What great result has he to show, who has
+so long practised philosophy and yet has <i>hurt</i>
+nobody?&rdquo; Yes, the university philosophy should
+have on its monument, &ldquo;It has hurt nobody.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+<p>
+Schopenhauer proved this and will continue to
+prove it, more and more.
+</p>
+<h2>
+FOOTNOTES
+</h2>
+<div class="footnote">
+<p>
+<a name="footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#ref_1_1">1</a>: This was written in 1873.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span>
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnote">
+<p>
+<a name="footnote_1_2"></a><a href="#ref_1_2">2</a>: <i>Physics and Politics</i>, 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.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span>
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnote">
+<p>
+<a name="footnote_1_3"></a><a href="#ref_1_3">3</a>: Essay on &ldquo;Circles.&rdquo;
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="trnote">
+<h2>
+<a name="chapter10"></a>
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
+</h2>
+<p>
+The following printer's errors have been corrected:
+</p>
+<p class="nowrap">
+naive corrected to <a href="#tn1">na�ve</a> (<a href="#page50">p. 50</a>)<br />
+</p>
+<p>
+The original hyphenation has been retained for the following words
+which were inconsistently hyphenated:
+</p>
+<p class="nowrap">
+outlived (<a href="#page73">p. 73</a>) / out-lived (<a href="#page73">p. 73</a>)<br />
+slipshod (<a href="#page117">p. 117</a>) / slip-shod (<a href="#page191">p. 191</a>)<br />
+</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
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+Friedrich Nietzsche
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