← catalogue

Human, All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Part 2

by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche · English · Gutenberg #37841 · 517,780 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Human, All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Part 2
    
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 will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Human, All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Part 2

Author: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Translator: Paul V. Cohn


        
Release date: October 24, 2011 [eBook #37841]
                Most recently updated: June 17, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37841


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN: A BOOK FOR FREE SPIRITS, PART 2 ***





                           Friedrich Nietzsche

                                  Human

                              All-Too-Human

                         A Book For Free Spirits

                                 Part II

                              Translated By

                            Paul V. Cohn, B.A.

                                 New York

                          The MacMillan Company

                                   1913





CONTENTS


Translator’s Introduction.
Preface.
Part I. Miscellaneous Maxims And Opinions.
Part II. The Wanderer And His Shadow.
Footnotes






TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION.


The publication of _Human, all-too-Human_ extends over the period
1878-1880. Of the two divisions which constitute the Second Part,
“Miscellaneous Maxims and Opinions” appeared in 1879, and “The Wanderer
and his Shadow” in 1880, Nietzsche being then in his thirty-sixth year.
The Preface was added in 1886. The whole book forms Nietzsche’s first
lengthy contribution to literature. His previous works comprise only the
philological treatises, _The Birth of Tragedy_, and the essays on Strauss,
Schopenhauer, and Wagner in _Thoughts out of Season_.

With the volumes of _Human, all-too-Human_ Nietzsche appears for the first
time in his true colours as philosopher. His purely scholarly
publications, his essays in literary and musical criticism—especially the
essay on Richard Wagner at Bayreuth—had, of course, foreshadowed his work
as a thinker.

These efforts, however, had been mere fragments, from which hardly any one
could observe that a new philosophical star had arisen on the horizon. But
by 1878 the period of transition had definitely set in. Outwardly, the new
departure is marked by Nietzsche’s resignation in that year of his
professorship at Bâle—a resignation due partly to ill-health, and partly
to his conviction that his was a voice that should speak not merely to
students of philology, but to all mankind.

Nietzsche himself characterises _Human, all-too-Human_ as “the monument of
a crisis.” He might as fitly have called it the first-fruits of a new
harvest. Now, for the first time, he practises the form which he was to
make so peculiarly his own. We are told—and we may well believe—that the
book came as a surprise even to his most intimate friends. Wagner had
already seen how matters stood at the publication of the first part, and
the gulf between the two probably widened on the appearance of the Second
Part.

Several aphorisms are here, varying in length as in subject, and ranging
over the whole human province—the emotions and aspirations, the religions
and cultures and philosophies, the arts and literatures and politics of
mankind. Equally varied is the range of style, the incisive epigram and
the passage of pure poetry jostling each other on the same page. In this
curious power of alternating between cynicism and lyricism, Nietzsche
appears as the prose counterpart of Heine.

One or two of the aphorisms are of peculiar interest to English readers.
The essay (as it may almost be called) on Sterne (p. 60, No. 113) does
ample justice, if not more than justice, to that wayward genius. The
allusion to Milton (p. 77, No. 150) will come as somewhat of a shock to
English readers, especially to those who hold that in Milton Art triumphed
over Puritanism. It should be remembered, however, that Nietzsche’s view
coincides with Goethe’s. The dictum that Shakespeare’s gold is to be
valued for its quantity rather than its quality (p. 81, No. 162) also
betrays a certain exclusiveness—a legacy from that eighteenth-century
France which appealed so strongly to Nietzsche on its intellectual side.
To Nietzsche, as to Voltaire, Shakespeare is after all “the great
barbarian.”

The title of the book may be explained from a phrase in _Thus Spake
Zarathustra_: “Verily, even the greatest I found—all-too-human.” The
keynote of these volumes is indeed disillusion and destruction. Nor is
this to be wondered at, for all men must sweep away the rubbish before
they can build. Hence we find here little of the constructive philosophy
of Nietzsche—so far as he had a constructive philosophy. The Superman
appears but faintly, the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence not at all. For
this very reason, _Human, all-too-Human_ is perhaps the best
starting-point for the study of Nietzsche. The difficulties in style and
thought of the later work—difficulties that at times become well-nigh
insuperable in _Thus Spake Zarathustra_—are here practically absent. The
book may, in fact, almost be described as “popular,” bearing the same
relation to Nietzsche’s later productions as Wagner’s _Tannhäuser_ and
_Lohengrin_ bear to the _Ring_.

The translator’s thanks are due to Mr. Thomas Common for his careful
revision of the manuscript and many valuable suggestions.

P. V. C.





PREFACE.




1.


One should only speak where one cannot remain silent, and only speak of
what one has _conquered_—the rest is all chatter, “literature,” bad
breeding. My writings speak only of my conquests, “I” am in them, with all
that is hostile to me, _ego ipsissimus_, or, if a more haughty expression
be permitted, _ego ipsissimum_. It may be guessed that I have many below
me.... But first I always needed time, convalescence, distance,
separation, before I felt the stirrings of a desire to flay, despoil, lay
bare, “represent” (or whatever one likes to call it) for the additional
knowledge of the world, something that I had lived through and outlived,
something done or suffered. Hence all my writings,—with one exception,
important, it is true,—must be _ante-dated_—they always tell of a
“behind-me.” Some even, like the first three _Thoughts out of Season_,
must be thrown back before the period of creation and experience of a
previously published book (_The Birth of Tragedy_ in the case cited, as
any one with subtle powers of observation and comparison could not fail to
perceive). That wrathful outburst against the Germanism, smugness, and
raggedness of speech of old David Strauss, the contents of the first
_Thought out of Season_, gave a vent to feelings that had inspired me long
before, as a student, in the midst of German culture and cultured
Philistinism (I claim the paternity of the now much used and misused
phrase “cultured Philistinism”). What I said against the “historical
disease” I said as one who had slowly and laboriously recovered from that
disease, and who was not at all disposed to renounce “history” in the
future because he had suffered from her in the past. When in the third
_Thought out of Season_ I gave expression to my reverence for my first and
only teacher, the _great_ Arthur Schopenhauer—I should now give it a far
more personal and emphatic voice—I was for my part already in the throes
of moral scepticism and dissolution, that is, as much concerned with the
criticism as with the study of all pessimism down to the present day. I
already did not believe in “a blessed thing,” as the people say, not even
in Schopenhauer. It was at this very period that an unpublished essay of
mine, “On Truth and Falsehood in an Extra-Moral Sense,” came into being.
Even my ceremonial oration in honour of Richard Wagner, on the occasion of
his triumphal celebration at Bayreuth in 1876—Bayreuth signifies the
greatest triumph that an artist has ever won—a work that bears the
strongest stamp of “individuality,” was in the background an act of homage
and gratitude to a bit of the past in me, to the fairest but most perilous
calm of my sea-voyage ... and as a matter of fact a severance and a
farewell. (Was Richard Wagner mistaken on this point? I do not think so.
So long as we still love, we do not paint such pictures, we do not yet
“examine,” we do not place ourselves so far away as is essential for one
who “examines.” “Examining needs at least a secret antagonism, that of an
opposite point of view,” it is said on page 46 of the above-named work
itself, with an insidious, melancholy application that was perhaps
understood by few.) The composure that gave me the _power_ to speak after
many intervening years of solitude and abstinence, first came with the
book, _Human, All-too Human_, to which this second preface and apologia(1)
is dedicated. As a book for “free spirits” it shows some trace of that
almost cheerful and inquisitive coldness of the psychologist, who has
_behind_ him many painful things that he keeps _under_ him, and moreover
establishes them for himself and fixes them firmly as with a needle-point.
Is it to be wondered at that at such sharp, ticklish work blood flows now
and again, that indeed the psychologist has blood on his fingers and not
_only_ on his fingers?




2.


The _Miscellaneous Maxims and Opinions_ were in the first place, like _The
Wanderer and His Shadow_, published separately as continuations and
appendices to the above-mentioned human, all-too human _Book for Free
Spirits_: and at the same time, as a continuation and confirmation of an
intellectual cure, consisting in a course of anti-romantic self-treatment,
such as my instinct, which had always remained healthy, had itself
discovered and prescribed against a temporary attack of the most dangerous
form of romantics. After a convalescence of six years I may well be
permitted to collect these same writings and publish them as a second
volume of _Human, All-too Human_. Perhaps, if surveyed together, they will
more clearly and effectively teach their lesson—a lesson of health that
may be recommended as a _disciplina voluntatis_ to the more intellectual
natures of the rising generation. Here speaks a pessimist who has often
leaped out of his skin but has always returned into it, thus, a pessimist
with goodwill towards pessimism—at all events a romanticist no longer. And
has not a pessimist, who possesses this serpentine knack of changing his
skin, the right to read a lecture to our pessimists of to-day, who are one
and all still in the toils of romanticism? Or at least to show them how it
is—done?




3.


It was then, in fact, high time to bid farewell, and I soon received
proof. Richard Wagner, who seemed all-conquering, but was in reality only
a decayed and despairing romantic, suddenly collapsed, helpless and
broken, before the Christian Cross.... Was there not a single German with
eyes in his head and sympathy in his heart for this appalling spectacle?
Was I the only one whom he caused—suffering? In any case, the unexpected
event illumined for me in one lightning flash the place that I had
abandoned, and also the horror that is felt by every one who is
unconscious of a great danger until he has passed through it. As I went
forward alone, I shuddered, and not long afterwards I was ill, or rather
more than ill—weary: weary from my ceaseless disappointment about all that
remained to make us modern men enthusiastic, at the thought of the power,
work, hope, youth, love, flung to all the winds: weary from disgust at the
effeminacy and undisciplined rhapsody of this romanticism, at the whole
tissue of idealistic lies and softening of conscience, which here again
had won the day over one of the bravest of men: last, and not least, weary
from the bitterness of an inexorable suspicion—that after this
disappointment I was doomed to mistrust more thoroughly, to despise more
thoroughly, to be alone more thoroughly than ever before. My task—whither
had it flown? Did it not look now as if my task were retreating from me
and as if I should for a long future period have no more right to it? What
was I to do to endure this most terrible privation?—I began by entirely
forbidding myself all romantic music, that ambiguous, pompous, stifling
art, which robs the mind of its sternness and its joyousness and provides
a fertile soil for every kind of vague yearning and spongy sensuality.
“Cave musicam” is even to-day my advice to all who are enough of men to
cling to purity in matters of the intellect. Such music enervates,
softens, feminises, its “eternal feminine” draws us—_down_!(2) My first
suspicion, my most immediate precaution, was directed against romantic
music. If I hoped for anything at all from music, it was in the
expectation of the coming of a musician bold, subtle, malignant, southern,
healthy enough to take an immortal revenge upon that other music.




4.


Lonely now and miserably self-distrustful, I took sides, not without
resentment, _against_ myself and _for_ everything that hurt me and was
hard to me. Thus I once more found the way to that courageous pessimism
that is the antithesis of all romantic fraud, and, as it seems to me
to-day, the way to “myself,” to my task. That hidden masterful Something,
for which we long have no name until at last it shows itself as our
task—that tyrant in us exacts a terrible price for every attempt that we
make to escape him or give him the slip, for every premature act of
self-constraint, for every reconciliation with those to whom we do not
belong, for every activity, however reputable, which turns us aside from
our main purpose, yes, even for every virtue that would fain protect us
from the cruelty of our most individual responsibility. “Disease” is
always the answer when we wish to have doubts of our rights to our own
task, when we begin to make it easier for ourselves in any way. How
strange and how terrible! It is our very alleviations for which we have to
make the severest atonement! And if we want to return to health, we have
no choice left—we must load ourselves _more heavily_ than we were ever
laden before.




5.


It was then that I learnt the hermitical habit of speech acquired only by
the most silent and suffering. I spoke without witnesses, or rather
indifferent to the presence of witnesses, so as not to suffer from
silence, I spoke of various things that did not concern me in a style that
gave the impression that they did. Then, too, I learnt the art of showing
myself cheerful, objective, inquisitive in the presence of all that is
healthy and evil—is this, in an invalid, as it seems to me, his “good
taste”? Nevertheless, a more subtle eye and sympathy will not miss what
perhaps gives a charm to these writings—the fact that here speaks one who
has suffered and abstained in such a way as if he had never suffered or
abstained. Here equipoise, composure, even gratitude towards life _shall_
be maintained, here rules a stern, proud, ever vigilant, ever susceptible
will, which has undertaken the task of defending life against pain and
snapping off all conclusions that are wont to grow like poisonous fungi
from pain, disappointment, satiety, isolation and other morasses. Perhaps
this gives our pessimists a hint to self-examination? For it was then that
I hit upon the aphorism, “a sufferer has as yet no right to pessimism,”
and that I engaged in a tedious, patient campaign against the unscientific
first principles of all romantic pessimism, which seeks to magnify and
interpret individual, personal experiences into “general judgments,”
universal condemnations—it was then, in short, that I sighted a new world.
Optimism for the sake of restitution, in order at some time to have the
right to become a pessimist—do you understand that? Just as a physician
transfers his patient to totally strange surroundings, in order to
displace him from his entire “past,” his troubles, friends, letters,
duties, stupid mistakes and painful memories, and teaches him to stretch
out hands and senses towards new nourishment, a new sun, a new future: so
I, as physician and invalid in one, forced myself into an utterly
different and untried zone of the soul, and particularly into an absorbing
journey to a strange land, a strange atmosphere, into a curiosity for all
that was strange. A long process of roaming, seeking, changing followed, a
distaste for fixity of any kind—a dislike for clumsy affirmation and
negation: and at the same time a dietary and discipline which aimed at
making it as easy as possible for the soul to fly high, and above all
constantly to fly away. In fact a minimum of life, an unfettering from all
coarser forms of sensuality, an independence in the midst of all marks of
outward disfavour, together with the pride in being able to live in the
midst of all this disfavour: a little cynicism perhaps, a little of the
“tub of Diogenes,” a good deal of whimsical happiness, whimsical gaiety,
much calm, light, subtle folly, hidden enthusiasm—all this produced in the
end a great spiritual strengthening, a growing joy and exuberance of
health. Life itself rewards us for our tenacious will to life, for such a
long war as I waged against the pessimistic weariness of life, even for
every observant glance of our gratitude, glances that do not miss the
smallest, most delicate, most fugitive gifts.... In the end we receive
Life’s great gifts, perhaps the greatest it can bestow—we regain _our_
task.




6.


Should my experience—the history of an illness and a convalescence, for it
resulted in a convalescence—be only my personal experience? and merely
just my “Human, All-too-human”? To-day I would fain believe the reverse,
for I am becoming more and more confident that my books of travel were not
penned for my sole benefit, as appeared for a time to be the case. May I,
after six years of growing assurance, send them once more on a journey for
an experiment?—May I commend them particularly to the ears and hearts of
those who are afflicted with some sort of a “past,” and have enough
intellect left to suffer even intellectually from their past? But above
all would I commend them to you whose burden is heaviest, you choice
spirits, most encompassed with perils, most intellectual, most courageous,
who must be the _conscience_ of the modern soul and as such be versed in
its _science_:(3) in whom is concentrated all of disease, poison or danger
that can exist to-day: whose lot decrees that you must be more sick than
any individual because you are not “mere individuals”: whose consolation
it is to know and, ah! to walk the path to a new health, a health of
to-morrow and the day after: you men of destiny, triumphant, conquerors of
time, the healthiest and the strongest, you _good Europeans_!




7.


To express finally in a single formula my opposition to the romantic
pessimism of the abstinent, the unfortunate, the conquered: there is a
will to the tragic and to pessimism, which is a sign as much of the
severity as of the strength of the intellect (taste, emotion, conscience).
With this will in our hearts we do not fear, but we investigate ourselves
the terrible and the problematical elements characteristic of all
existence. Behind such a will stand courage and pride and the desire for a
really great enemy. That was _my_ pessimistic outlook from the first—a new
outlook, methinks, an outlook that even at this day is new and strange? To
this moment I hold to it firmly and (if it will be believed) not only
_for_ myself but occasionally _against_ myself.... You would prefer to
have that proved first? Well, what else does all this long preface—prove?

SILS-MARIA, UPPER ENGADINE,
_September, 1886_.





PART I. MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS.




1.


TO THE DISILLUSIONED IN PHILOSOPHY.—If you hitherto believed in the
highest value of life and now find yourselves disillusioned, must you
immediately get rid of life at the lowest possible price?




2.


OVERNICE.—One can even become overnice as regards the clearness of
concepts. How disgusted one is then at having truck with the half-clear,
the hazy, the aspiring, the doubting! How ridiculous and yet not
mirth-provoking is their eternal fluttering and straining without ever
being able to fly or to grasp!




3.


THE WOOERS OF REALITY.—He who realises at last how long and how thoroughly
he has been befooled, embraces out of spite even the ugliest reality. So
that in the long run of the world’s history the best men have always been
wooers of reality, for the best have always been longest and most
thoroughly deceived.




4.


ADVANCE OF FREETHINKING.—The difference between past and present
freethinking cannot better be characterised than by that aphorism for the
recognition and expression of which all the fearlessness of the eighteenth
century was needed, and which even then, if measured by our modern view,
sinks into an unconscious naïveté. I mean Voltaire’s aphorism,
“croyez-moi, mon ami, l’erreur aussi a son mérite.”




5.


A HEREDITARY SIN OF PHILOSOPHERS.—Philosophers have at all times
appropriated and _corrupted_ the maxims of censors of men (moralists), by
taking them over without qualification and trying to prove as necessary
what the moralists only meant as a rough indication or as a truth suited
to their fellow-countrymen or fellow-townsmen for a single decade.
Moreover, the philosophers thought that they were thereby raising
themselves above the moralists! Thus it will be found that the celebrated
teachings of Schopenhauer as to the supremacy of the will over the
intellect, of the immutability of character, the negativity of
pleasure—all errors, in the sense in which he understands them—rest upon
principles of popular wisdom enunciated by the moralists. Take the very
word “will,” which Schopenhauer twisted so as to become a common
denotation of several human conditions and with which he filled a gap in
the language (to his own great advantage, in so far as he was a moralist,
for he became free to speak of the will as Pascal had spoken of it). In
the hands of its creator, Schopenhauer’s “will,” through the philosophic
craze for generalisation, already turned out to be a bane to knowledge.
For this will was made into a poetic metaphor, when it was held that all
things in nature possess will. Finally, that it might be applied to all
kinds of disordered mysticism, the word was misused by a fraudulent
convention. So now all our fashionable philosophers repeat it and seem to
be perfectly certain that all things have a will and are in fact One Will.
According to the description generally given of this All-One-Will, this is
much as if one should positively try to have the stupid Devil for one’s
God.




6.


AGAINST VISIONARIES.—The visionary denies the truth to himself, the liar
only to others.




7.


ENMITY TO LIGHT.—If we make it clear to any one that, strictly, he can
never speak of truth, but only of probability and of its degrees, we
generally discover, from the undisguised joy of our pupil, how greatly men
prefer the uncertainty of their intellectual horizon, and how in their
heart of hearts they hate truth because of its definiteness.—Is this due
to a secret fear felt by all that the light of truth may at some time be
turned too brightly upon themselves? To their wish to be of some
consequence, and accordingly their concealment from the world of what they
are? Or is it to be traced to their horror of the all-too brilliant light,
to which their crepuscular, easily dazzled, bat-like souls are not
accustomed, so that hate it they must?




8.


CHRISTIAN SCEPTICISM.—Pilate, with his question, “What is Truth?” is now
gleefully brought on the scene as an advocate of Christ, in order to cast
suspicion on all that is known or knowable as being mere appearance, and
to erect the Cross on the appalling background of the Impossibility of
Knowledge.




9.


“NATURAL LAW,” A PHRASE OF SUPERSTITION.—When you talk so delightedly of
Nature acting according to law, you must either assume that all things in
Nature follow their law from a voluntary obedience imposed by
themselves—in which case you admire the morality of Nature: or you are
enchanted with the idea of a creative mechanician, who has made a most
cunning watch with human beings as accessory ornaments.—Necessity, through
the expression, “conformity to law,” then becomes more human and a coign
of refuge in the last instance for mythological reveries.




10.


FALLEN FORFEIT TO HISTORY.—All misty philosophers and obscurers of the
world, in other words all metaphysicians of coarse or refined texture are
seized with eyeache, earache, and toothache when they begin to suspect
that there is truth in the saying: “All philosophy has from now fallen
forfeit to history.” In view of their aches and pains we may pardon them
for throwing stones and filth at him who talks like this, but this
teaching may itself thereby become dirty and disreputable for a time and
lose in effect.




11.


THE PESSIMIST OF THE INTELLECT.—He whose intellect is really free will
think freely about the intellect itself, and will not shut his eyes to
certain terrible aspects of its source and tendency. For this reason
others will perhaps designate him the bitterest opponent of free thought
and give him that dreadful, abusive name of “pessimist of the intellect”:
accustomed as they are to typify a man not by his strong point, his
pre-eminent virtue, but by the quality that is most foreign to his nature.




12.


THE METAPHYSICIANS’ KNAPSACK.—To all who talk so boastfully of the
scientific basis of their metaphysics it is best to make no reply. It is
enough to tug at the bundle that they rather shyly keep hidden behind
their backs. If one succeeds in lifting it, the results of that
“scientific basis” come to light, to their great confusion: a dear little
“God,” a genteel immortality, perhaps a little spiritualism, and in any
case a complicated mass of poor-sinners’-misery and pharisee-arrogance.




13.


OCCASIONAL HARMFULNESS OF KNOWLEDGE.—The utility involved in the unchecked
investigation of knowledge is so constantly proved in a hundred different
ways that one must remember to include in the bargain the subtler and
rarer damage which individuals must suffer on that account. The chemist
cannot avoid occasionally being poisoned or burnt at his experiments. What
applies to the chemist, is true of the whole of our culture. This, it may
be added, clearly shows that knowledge should provide itself with healing
balsam against burns and should always have antidotes ready against
poisons.




14.


THE CRAVING OF THE PHILISTINE.—The Philistine thinks that his most urgent
need is a purple patch or turban of metaphysics, nor will he let it slip.
Yet he would look less ridiculous without this adornment.




15.


ENTHUSIASTS.—With all that enthusiasts say in favour of their gospel or
their master they are defending themselves, however much they comport
themselves as the judges and not the accused: because they are
involuntarily reminded almost at every moment that they are exceptions and
have to assert their legitimacy.




16.


THE GOOD SEDUCES TO LIFE.—All good things, even all good books that are
written against life, are strong means of attraction to life.




17.


THE HAPPINESS OF THE HISTORIAN.—“When we hear the hair-splitting
metaphysicians and prophets of the after-world speak, we others feel
indeed that we are the ‘poor in spirit,’ but that ours is the heavenly
kingdom of change, with spring and autumn, summer and winter, and theirs
the after-world, with its grey, everlasting frosts and shadows.” Thus
soliloquised a man as he walked in the morning sunshine, a man who in his
pursuit of history has constantly changed not only his mind but his heart.
In contrast to the metaphysicians, he is happy to harbour in himself not
an “immortal soul” but many _mortal_ souls.




18.


THREE VARIETIES OF THINKERS.—There are streaming, flowing, trickling
mineral springs, and three corresponding varieties of thinkers. The layman
values them by the volume of the water, the expert by the contents of the
water—in other words, by the elements in them that are not water.




19.


THE PICTURE OF LIFE.—The task of painting the picture of life, often as it
has been attempted by poets and philosophers, is nevertheless irrational.
Even in the hands of the greatest artist-thinkers, pictures and miniatures
of one life only—their own—have come into being, and indeed no other
result is possible. While in the process of developing, a thing that
develops, cannot mirror itself as fixed and permanent, as a _definite
object_.




20.


TRUTH WILL HAVE NO GODS BEFORE IT.—The belief in truth begins with the
doubt of all truths in which one has previously believed.




21.


WHERE SILENCE IS REQUIRED.—If we speak of freethinking as of a highly
dangerous journey over glaciers and frozen seas, we find that those who do
not care to travel on this track are offended, as if they had been
reproached with cowardice and weak knees. The difficult, which we find to
be beyond our powers, must not even be mentioned in our presence.




22.


_Historia in Nuce._—The most serious parody I ever heard was this: “In the
beginning was the nonsense, and the nonsense was with God, and the
nonsense was God.”(4)




23.


INCURABLE.—The idealist is incorrigible: if he be thrown out of his
Heaven, he makes himself a suitable ideal out of Hell. Disillusion him,
and lo! he will embrace disillusionment with no less ardour than he
recently embraced hope. In so far as his impulse belongs to the great
incurable impulses of human nature, he can bring about tragic destinies
and later become a subject for tragedy himself, for such tragedies as deal
with the incurable, implacable, inevitable in the lot and character of
man.




24.


APPLAUSE ITSELF AS THE CONTINUATION OF THE PLAY.—Sparkling eyes and an
amiable smile are the tributes of applause paid to all the great comedy of
world and existence—but this applause is a comedy within a comedy, meant
to tempt the other spectators to a _plaudite amici_.




25.


COURAGE FOR TEDIUM.—He who has not the courage to allow himself and his
work to be considered tedious, is certainly no intellect of the first
rank, whether in the arts or in the sciences.—A scoffer, who happened for
once in a way to be a thinker, might add, with a glance at the world and
at history: “God did not possess this courage, for he wanted to make and
he made all things so interesting.”




26.


FROM THE MOST INTIMATE EXPERIENCE OF THE THINKER.—Nothing is harder for a
man than to conceive of an object impersonally, I mean to see in it an
object and not a person. One may even ask whether it is possible for him
to dispense for a single moment with the machinery of his instinct to
create and construct a personality. After all, he associates with his
thoughts, however abstract they may be, as with individuals, against whom
he must fight or to whom he must attach himself, whom he must protect,
support and nourish. Let us watch or listen to ourselves at the moment
when we hear or discover a new idea. Perhaps it displeases us because it
is so defiant and so autocratic, and we unconsciously ask ourselves
whether we cannot place a contradiction of it by its side as an enemy, or
fasten on to it a “perhaps” or a “sometimes”: the mere little word
“probably” gives us a feeling of satisfaction, for it shatters the
oppressive tyranny of the unconditional. If, on the other hand, the new
idea enters in gentle shape, sweetly patient and humble, and falling at
once into the arms of contradiction, we put our autocracy to the test in
another way. Can we not come to the aid of this weak creature, stroke it
and feed it, give it strength and fulness, and truth and even
unconditionality? Is it possible for us to show ourselves parental or
chivalrous or compassionate towards our idea?—Then again, we see here a
judgment and there a judgment, sundered from each other, never looking at
or making any movement towards each other. So we are tickled by the
thought, whether it be not here feasible to make a match, to draw a
_conclusion_, with the anticipation that if a consequence follows this
conclusion it is not only the two judgments united in wedlock but the
matchmakers that will gain honour. If, however, we cannot acquire a hold
upon that thought either on the path of defiance and ill-will or on that
of good-will (if we hold it to be true)—then we submit to it and do homage
to it as a leader and a prince, give it a chair of honour, and speak not
of it without a flourish of trumpets: for we are bright in its brightness.
Woe to him who tries to dim this brightness! Perhaps we ourselves one day
grow suspicious of our idea. Then we, the indefatigable “king-makers” of
the history of the intellect, cast it down from its throne and immediately
exalt its adversary. Surely if this be considered and thought out a little
further, no one will speak of an “absolute impulse to knowledge”!

Why, then, does man prefer the true to the untrue, in this secret combat
with thought-personalities, in this generally clandestine match-making of
thoughts, constitution-founding of thoughts, child-rearing of thoughts,
nursing and almsgiving of thoughts? For the same reason that he practises
honesty in intercourse with real persons: _now_ from habit, heredity, and
training, _originally_ because the true, like the fair and the just, is
more expedient and more reputable than the untrue. For in the realm of
thought it is difficult to assume a power and glory that are built on
error or on falsehood. The feeling that such an edifice might at some time
collapse is humiliating to the self-esteem of the architect—he is ashamed
of the fragility of the material, and, as he considers himself more
important than the rest of the world, he would fain construct nothing that
is less durable than the rest of the world. In his longing for truth he
embraces the belief in a personal immortality, the most arrogant and
defiant idea that exists, closely allied as it is to the underlying
thought, _pereat mundus, dum ego salvus sim!_ His work has become his
“ego,” he transforms himself into the Imperishable with its universal
challenge. It is his immeasurable pride that will only employ the best and
hardest stones for the work—truths, or what he holds for such. Arrogance
has always been justly called the “vice of the sage”; yet without this
vice, fruitful in impulses, Truth and her status on earth would be in a
parlous plight. In our propensity to fear our thoughts, concepts and
words, and yet to honour ourselves in them, unconsciously to ascribe to
them the power of rewarding, despising, praising, and blaming us, and so
to associate with them as with free intellectual personalities, as with
independent powers, as with our equals—herein lie the roots of the
remarkable phenomenon which I have called “intellectual conscience.” Thus
something of the highest moral species has bloomed from a black root.




27.


THE OBSCURANTISTS.—The essential feature of the black art of obscurantism
is not its intention of clouding the brain, but its attempt to darken the
picture of the world and cloud our idea of existence. It often employs the
method of thwarting all illumination of the intellect, but at times it
uses the very opposite means, seeking by the highest refinement of the
intellect to induce a satiety of the intellect’s fruits. Hair-splitting
metaphysicians, who pave the way for scepticism and by their excessive
acumen provoke a distrust of acumen, are excellent instruments of the more
subtle form of obscurantism.—Is it possible that even Kant may be applied
to this purpose? Did he even _intend_ something of the sort, for a time at
least, to judge from his own notorious exposition: “to clear the way for
belief by setting limitations to knowledge”?—Certainly he did not succeed,
nor did his followers, on the wolf and fox tracks of this highly refined
and dangerous form of obscurantism—the most dangerous of all, for the
black art here appears in the garb of light.




28.


BY WHAT KIND OF PHILOSOPHY ART IS CORRUPTED.—When the mists of a
metaphysical-mystical philosophy succeed in making all æsthetic phenomena
_opaque_, it follows that these phenomena cannot be comparatively valued,
inasmuch as each becomes individually inexplicable. But when once they
cannot be compared for the sake of valuation, there arises an entire
absence-of-criticism, a blind indulgence. From this source springs a
continual diminution of the enjoyment of art (which is only distinguished
from the crude satisfaction of a need by the highest refinement of taste
and appreciation). The more taste diminishes, the more does the desire for
art change and revert to a vulgar hunger, which the artist henceforth
seeks to appease by ever coarser fare.




29.


ON GETHSEMANE.—The most painful thing a thinker can say to artists is:
“Could ye not _watch_ with me one hour?”




30.


AT THE LOOM.—There are many (artists and women, for instance) who work
against the few that take a pleasure in untying the knot of things and
unravelling their woof. The former always want to weave the woof together
again and entangle it and so turn the conceived into the unconceived and
if possible inconceivable. Whatever the result may be, the woof and knot
always look rather untidy, because too many hands are working and tugging
at them.




31.


IN THE DESERT OF SCIENCE.—As the man of science proceeds on his modest and
toilsome wanderings, which must often enough be journeys in the desert, he
is confronted with those brilliant mirages known as “philosophic systems.”
With magic powers of deception they show him that the solution of all
riddles and the most refreshing draught of true water of life are close at
hand. His weary heart rejoices, and he well-nigh touches with his lips the
goal of all scientific endurance and hardship, so that almost
unconsciously he presses forward. Other natures stand still, as if
spellbound by the beautiful illusion: the desert swallows them up, they
become lost to science. Other natures, again, that have often experienced
these subjective consolations, become very disheartened and curse the
salty taste which these mirages leave behind in the mouth and from which
springs a raging thirst—without one’s having come one step nearer to any
sort of a spring.




32.


THE SO-CALLED “REAL REALITY.”—When the poet depicts the various
callings—such as those of the warrior, the silk-weaver, the sailor—he
feigns to know all these things thoroughly, to be an expert. Even in the
exposition of human actions and destinies he behaves as if he had been
present at the spinning of the whole web of existence. In so far he is an
impostor. He practises his frauds on pure ignoramuses, and that is why he
succeeds. They praise him for his deep, genuine knowledge, and lead him
finally into the delusion that he really knows as much as the individual
experts and creators, yes, even as the great world-spinners themselves. In
the end, the impostor becomes honest, and actually believes in his own
sincerity. Emotional people say to his very face that he has the “higher”
truth and sincerity—for they are weary of reality for the time being, and
accept the poetic dream as a pleasant relaxation and a night’s rest for
head and heart. The visions of the dream now appear to them of more value,
because, as has been said, they find them more beneficial, and mankind has
always held that what is apparently of more value is more true, more real.
All that is generally called reality, the poets, conscious of this power,
proceed with intention to disparage and to distort into the uncertain, the
illusory, the spurious, the impure, the sinful, sorrowful, and deceitful.
They make use of all doubts about the limits of knowledge, of all
sceptical excesses, in order to spread over everything the rumpled veil of
uncertainty. For they desire that when this darkening process is complete
their wizardry and soul-magic may be accepted without hesitation as the
path to “true truth” and “real reality.”




33.


THE WISH TO BE JUST AND THE WISH TO BE A JUDGE.—Schopenhauer, whose
profound understanding of what is human and all-too-human and original
sense for facts was not a little impaired by the bright leopard-skin of
his metaphysic (the skin must first be pulled off him if one wants to find
the real moralist genius beneath)—Schopenhauer makes this admirable
distinction, wherein he comes far nearer the mark than he would himself
dare to admit: “Insight into the stern necessity of human actions is the
boundary line that divides philosophic from other brains.” He worked
against that wonderful insight of which he was sometimes capable by the
prejudice that he had in common with the moral man (not the moralist), a
prejudice that he expresses quite guilelessly and devoutly as follows:
“The ultimate and true explanation of the inner being of the entirety of
things must of necessity be closely connected with that about the ethical
significance of human actions.” This connection is not “necessary” at all:
such a connection must rather be rejected by that principle of the stern
necessity of human actions, that is, the unconditioned non-freedom and
non-responsibility of the will. Philosophic brains will accordingly be
distinguished from others by their disbelief in the metaphysical
significance of morality. This must create between the two kinds of brain
a gulf of a depth and unbridgeableness of which the much-deplored gulf
between “cultured” and “uncultured” scarcely gives a conception. It is
true that many back doors, which the “philosophic brains,” like
Schopenhauer’s own, have left for themselves, must be recognised as
useless. None leads into the open, into the fresh air of the free will,
but every door through which people had slipped hitherto showed behind it
once more the gleaming brass wall of fate. For we are in a prison, and can
only dream of freedom, not make ourselves free. That the recognition of
this fact cannot be resisted much longer is shown by the despairing and
incredible postures and grimaces of those who still press against it and
continue their wrestling-bout with it. Their attitude at present is
something like this: “So no one is responsible for his actions? And all is
full of guilt and the consciousness of guilt? But some one _must_ be the
sinner. If it is no longer possible or permissible to accuse and sentence
the individual, the one poor wave in the inevitable rough-and-tumble of
the waves of development—well, then, let this stormy sea, this development
itself, be the sinner. Here is free will: this totality can be accused and
sentenced, can atone and expiate. _So let God be the sinner and man his
redeemer._ Let the world’s history be guilt, expiation, and self-murder.
Let the evil-doer be his own judge, the judge his own hangman.” This
Christianity strained to its limits—for what else is it?—is the last
thrust in the fencing-match between the teaching of unconditioned morality
and the teaching of unconditioned non-freedom. It would be quite horrible
if it were anything more than a logical pose, a hideous grimace of the
underlying thought, perhaps the death-convulsion of the heart that seeks a
remedy in its despair, the heart to which delirium whispers: “Behold, thou
art the lamb which taketh away the sin of God.” This error lies not only
in the feeling, “I am responsible,” but just as much in the contradiction,
“I am not responsible, but some one must be.” That is simply not true.
Hence the philosopher must say, like Christ, “Judge not,” and the final
distinction between the philosophic brains and the others would be that
the former wish to be just and the latter wish to be judges.




34.


_Sacrifice._—You hold that sacrifice is the hallmark of moral action?—Just
consider whether in every action that is done with deliberation, in the
best as in the worst, there be not a sacrifice.




35.


AGAINST THE “TRIERS OF THE REINS” OF MORALITY.—One must know the best and
the worst that a man is capable of in theory and in practice before one
can judge how strong his moral nature is and can be. But this is an
experiment that one can never carry out.




36.


SERPENT’S TOOTH.—Whether we have a serpent’s tooth or not we cannot know
before some one has set his heel upon our necks. A wife or a mother could
say: until some one has put his heel upon the neck of our darling, our
child.—Our character is determined more by the absence of certain
experiences than by the experiences we have undergone.




37.


DECEPTION IN LOVE.—We forget and purposely banish from our minds a good
deal of our past. In other words, we wish our picture, that beams at us
from the past, to belie us, to flatter our vanity—we are constantly
engaged in this self-deception. And you who talk and boast so much of
“self-oblivion in love,” of the “absorption of the ego in the other
person”—you hold that this is something different? So you break the
mirror, throw yourselves into another personality that you admire, and
enjoy the new portrait of your ego, though calling it by the other
person’s name—and this whole proceeding is not to be thought
self-deception, self-seeking, you marvellous beings?—It seems to me that
those who hide something of themselves from themselves, or hide their
whole selves from themselves, are alike committing a theft from the
treasury of knowledge. It is clear, then, against what transgression the
maxim “Know thyself” is a warning.




38.


TO THE DENIER OF HIS VANITY.—He who denies his own vanity usually
possesses it in so brutal a form that he instinctively shuts his eyes to
avoid the necessity of despising himself.




39.


WHY THE STUPID SO OFTEN BECOME MALIGNANT.—To those arguments of our
adversary against which our head feels too weak our heart replies by
throwing suspicion on the motives of his arguments.




40.


THE ART OF MORAL EXCEPTIONS.—An art that points out and glorifies the
exceptional cases of morality—where the good becomes bad and the unjust
just—should rarely be given a hearing: just as now and again we buy
something from gipsies, with the fear that they are diverting to their own
pockets much more than their mere profit from the purchase.




41.


ENJOYMENT AND NON-ENJOYMENT OF POISONS.—The only decisive argument that
has always deterred men from drinking a poison is not that it is deadly,
but that it has an unpleasant taste.




42.


THE WORLD WITHOUT CONSCIOUSNESS OF SIN.—If men only committed such deeds
as do not give rise to a bad conscience, the human world would still look
bad and rascally enough, but not so sickly and pitiable as at
present.—Enough wicked men without conscience have existed at all times,
and many good honest folk lack the feeling of pleasure in a good
conscience.




43.


THE CONSCIENTIOUS.—It is more convenient to follow one’s conscience than
one’s intelligence, for at every failure conscience finds an excuse and an
encouragement in itself. That is why there are so many conscientious and
so few intelligent people.




44.


OPPOSITE MEANS OF AVOIDING BITTERNESS.—One temperament finds it useful to
be able to give vent to its disgust in words, being made sweeter by
speech. Another reaches its full bitterness only by speaking out: it is
more advisable for it to have to gulp down something—the restraint that
men of this stamp place upon themselves in the presence of enemies and
superiors improves their character and prevents it from becoming too acrid
and sour.




45.


NOT TO BE TOO DEJECTED.—To get bed-sores is unpleasant, but no proof
against the merits of the cure that prescribes that you should take to
your bed. Men who have long lived outside themselves, and have at last
devoted themselves to the inward philosophic life, know that one can also
get sores of character and intellect. This, again, is on the whole no
argument against the chosen way of life, but necessitates a few small
exceptions and apparent relapses.




46.


THE HUMAN “THING IN ITSELF.”—The most vulnerable and yet most
unconquerable of things is human vanity: nay, through being wounded its
strength increases and can grow to giant proportions.




47.


THE FARCE OF MANY INDUSTRIOUS PERSONS.—By an excess of effort they win
leisure for themselves, and then they can do nothing with it but count the
hours until the tale is ended.




48.


THE POSSESSION OF JOY ABOUNDING.—He that has joy abounding must be a good
man, but perhaps he is not the cleverest of men, although he has reached
the very goal towards which the cleverest man is striving with all his
cleverness.




49.


IN THE MIRROR OF NATURE.—Is not a man fairly well described, when we are
told that he likes to walk between tall fields of golden corn: that he
prefers the forest and flower colours of sere and chilly autumn to all
others, because they point to something more beautiful than Nature has
ever attained: that he feels as much at home under big broad-leaved walnut
trees as among his nearest kinsfolk: that in the mountains his greatest
joy is to come across those tiny distant lakes from which the very eyes of
solitude seem to peer at him: that he loves that grey calm of the misty
twilight that steals along the windows on autumn and early winter evenings
and shuts out all soulless sounds as with velvet curtains: that in unhewn
stones he recognises the last remaining traces of the primeval age, eager
for speech, and honours them from childhood upwards: that, lastly, the sea
with its shifting serpent skin and wild-beast beauty is, and remains to
him, unfamiliar?—Yes, something of the man is described herewith, but the
mirror of Nature does not say that the same man, with (and not even “in
spite of”) all his idyllic sensibilities, might be disagreeable, stingy,
and conceited. Horace, who was a good judge of such matters, in his famous
_beatus ille qui procul negotiis_ puts the tenderest feeling for country
life into the mouth of a Roman money-lender.




50.


POWER WITHOUT VICTORY.—The strongest cognition (that of the complete
non-freedom of the human will) is yet the poorest in results, for it has
always had the mightiest of opponents—human vanity.




51.


PLEASURE AND ERROR.—A beneficial influence on friends is exerted by one
man unconsciously, through his nature; by another consciously, through
isolated actions. Although the former nature is held to be the higher, the
latter alone is allied to good conscience and pleasure—the pleasure in
justification by good works, which rests upon a belief in the volitional
character of our good and evil doing—that is to say, upon a mistake.




52.


THE FOLLY OF COMMITTING INJUSTICE.—The injustice we have inflicted
ourselves is far harder to bear than the injustice inflicted upon us by
others (not always from moral grounds, be it observed). After all, the
doer is always the sufferer—that is, if he be capable of feeling the sting
of conscience or of perceiving that by his action he has armed society
against himself and cut himself off. For this reason we should beware
still more of doing than of suffering injustice, for the sake of our own
inward happiness—so as not to lose our feeling of well-being—quite apart
from any consideration of the precepts of religion and morality. For in
suffering injustice we have the consolation of a good conscience, of hope
and of revenge, together with the sympathy and applause of the just, nay
of the whole of society, which is afraid of the evil-doer. Not a few are
skilled in the impure self-deception that enables them to transform every
injustice of their own into an injustice inflicted upon them from without,
and to reserve for their own acts the exceptional right to the plea of
self-defence. Their object, of course, is to make their own burden
lighter.




53.


ENVY WITH OR WITHOUT A MOUTHPIECE.—Ordinary envy is wont to cackle when
the envied hen has laid an egg, thereby relieving itself and becoming
milder. But there is a yet deeper envy that in such a case becomes dead
silent, desiring that every mouth should be sealed and always more and
more angry because this desire is not gratified. Silent envy grows in
silence.




54.


ANGER AS A SPY.—Anger exhausts the soul and brings its very dregs to
light. Hence, if we know no other means of gaining certainty, we must
understand how to arouse anger in our dependents and adversaries, in order
to learn what is really done and thought to our detriment.




55.


DEFENCE MORALLY MORE DIFFICULT THAN ATTACK.—The true heroic deed and
masterpiece of the good man does not lie in attacking opinions and
continuing to love their propounders, but in the far harder task of
defending his own position without causing or intending to cause bitter
heartburns to his opponent. The sword of attack is honest and broad, the
sword of defence usually runs out to a needle point.




56.


HONEST TOWARDS HONESTY.—One who is openly honest towards himself ends by
being rather conceited about this honesty. He knows only too well why he
is honest—for the same reason that another man prefers outward show and
hypocrisy.




57.


COALS OF FIRE.—The heaping of coals of fire on another’s head is generally
misunderstood and falls flat, because the other knows himself to be just
as much in the right, and on his side too has thought of collecting coals.




58.


DANGEROUS BOOKS.—A man says: “Judging from my own case, I find that this
book is harmful.” Let him but wait, and perhaps one day he will confess
that the book did him a great service by thrusting forward and bringing to
light the hidden disease of his soul.—Altered opinions alter not at all
(or very little) the character of a man: but they illuminate individual
facets of his personality, which hitherto, in another constellation of
opinions, had remained dark and unrecognisable.




59.


SIMULATED PITY.—We simulate pity when we wish to show ourselves superior
to the feeling of animosity, but generally in vain. This point is not
noticed without a considerable enhancement of that feeling of animosity.




60.


OPEN CONTRADICTION OFTEN CONCILIATORY.—At the moment when a man openly
makes known his difference of opinion from a well-known party leader, the
whole world thinks that he must be angry with the latter. Sometimes,
however, he is just on the point of ceasing to be angry with him. He
ventures to put himself on the same plane as his opponent, and is free
from the tortures of suppressed envy.




61.


SEEING OUR LIGHT SHINING.—In the darkest hour of depression, sickness, and
guilt, we are still glad to see others taking a light from us and making
use of us as of the disk of the moon. By this roundabout route we derive
some light from our own illuminating faculty.




62.


FELLOWSHIP IN JOY.(5)—The snake that stings us means to hurt us and
rejoices in so doing: the lowest animal can picture to itself the _pain_
of others. But to picture to oneself the _joy_ of others and to rejoice
thereat is the highest privilege of the highest animals, and again,
amongst them, is the property only of the most select
specimens—accordingly a rare “human thing.” Hence there have been
philosophers who denied fellowship in joy.




63.


_Supplementary Pregnancy._—Those who have arrived at works and deeds are
in an obscure way, they know not how, all the more pregnant with them, as
if to prove supplementarily that these are their children and not those of
chance.




64.


HARD-HEARTED FROM VANITY.—Just as justice is so often a cloak for
weakness, so men who are fairly intelligent, but weak, sometimes attempt
dissimulation from ambitious motives and purposely show themselves unjust
and hard, in order to leave behind them the impression of strength.




65.


HUMILIATION.—If in a large sack of profit we find a single grain of
humiliation we still make a wry face even at our good luck.




66.


EXTREME HEROSTRATISM.(6)—There might be Herostratuses who set fire to
their own temple, in which their images are honoured.




67.


A WORLD OF DIMINUTIVES.—The fact that all that is weak and in need of help
appeals to the heart induces in us the habit of designating by diminutive
and softening terms all that appeals to our hearts—and accordingly
_making_ such things weak and clinging to our imaginations.




68.


THE BAD CHARACTERISTIC OF SYMPATHY.—Sympathy has a peculiar impudence for
its companion. For, wishing to help at all costs, sympathy is in no
perplexity either as to the means of assistance or as to the nature and
cause of the disease, and goes on courageously administering all its quack
medicines to restore the health and reputation of the patient.




69.


IMPORTUNACY.—There is even an importunacy in relation to works, and the
act of associating oneself from early youth on an intimate footing with
the illustrious works of all times evinces an entire absence of
shame.—Others are only importunate from ignorance, not knowing with whom
they have to do—for instance classical scholars young and old in relation
to the works of the Greeks.




70.


THE WILL IS ASHAMED OF THE INTELLECT.—In all coolness we make reasonable
plans against our passions. But we make the most serious mistake in this
connection in being often ashamed, when the design has to be carried out,
of the coolness and calculation with which we conceived it. So we do just
the unreasonable thing, from that sort of defiant magnanimity that every
passion involves.




71.


WHY THE SCEPTICS OFFEND MORALITY.—He who takes his morality solemnly and
seriously is enraged against the sceptics in the domain of morals. For
where he lavishes all his force, he wishes others to marvel but not to
investigate and doubt. Then there are natures whose last shred of morality
is just the belief in morals. They behave in the same way towards
sceptics, if possible still more passionately.




72.


SHYNESS.—All moralists are shy, because they know they are confounded with
spies and traitors, so soon as their penchant is noticed. Besides, they
are generally conscious of being impotent in action, for in the midst of
work the motives of their activity almost withdraw their attention from
the work.




73.


A DANGER TO UNIVERSAL MORALITY.—People who are at the same time noble and
honest come to deify every devilry that brings out their honesty, and to
suspend for a time the balance of their moral judgment.




74.


THE SADDEST ERROR.—It is an unpardonable offence when one discovers that
where one was convinced of being loved, one is only regarded as a
household utensil and decoration, whereby the master of the house can find
an outlet for his vanity before his guests.




75.


LOVE AND DUALITY.—What else is love but understanding and rejoicing that
another lives, works, and feels in a different and opposite way to
ourselves? That love may be able to bridge over the contrasts by joys, we
must not remove or deny those contrasts. Even self-love presupposes an
irreconcileable duality (or plurality) in one person.




76.


SIGNS FROM DREAMS.—What one sometimes does not know and feel accurately in
waking hours—whether one has a good or a bad conscience as regards some
person—is revealed completely and unambiguously by dreams.




77.


DEBAUCHERY.—Not joy but joylessness is the mother of debauchery.




78.


REWARD AND PUNISHMENT.—No one accuses without an underlying notion of
punishment and revenge, even when he accuses his fate or himself. All
complaint is accusation, all self-congratulation is praise. Whether we do
one or the other, we always make some one responsible.




79.


DOUBLY UNJUST.—We sometimes advance truth by a twofold injustice: when we
see and represent consecutively the two sides of a case which we are not
in a position to see together, but in such a way that every time we
mistake or deny the other side, fancying that what we see is the whole
truth.




80.


MISTRUST.—Self-mistrust does not always proceed uncertainly and shyly, but
sometimes in a furious rage, having worked itself into a frenzy in order
not to tremble.




81.


PHILOSOPHY OF PARVENUS.—If you want to be a personality you must even hold
your shadow in honour.




82.


KNOWING HOW TO WASH ONESELF CLEAN.—We must know how to emerge cleaner from
unclean conditions, and, if necessary, how to wash ourselves even with
dirty water.




83.


LETTING YOURSELF GO.—The more you let yourself go, the less others let you
go.




84.


THE INNOCENT ROGUE.—There is a slow, gradual path to vice and rascality of
every description. In the end, the traveller is quite abandoned by the
insect-swarms of a bad conscience, and although a thorough scoundrel he
walks in innocence.




85.


MAKING PLANS.—Making plans and conceiving projects involves many agreeable
sentiments. He that had the strength to be nothing but a contriver of
plans all his life would be a happy man. But one must occasionally have a
rest from this activity by carrying a plan into execution, and then comes
anger and sobriety.




86.


WHEREWITH WE SEE THE IDEAL.—Every efficient man is blocked by his
efficiency and cannot look out freely from its prison. Had he not also a
goodly share of imperfection, he could, by reason of his virtue, never
arrive at an intellectual or moral freedom. Our shortcomings are the eyes
with which we see the ideal.




87.


DISHONEST PRAISE.—Dishonest praise causes many more twinges of conscience
than dishonest blame, probably only because we have exposed our capacity
for judgment far more completely through excessive praise than through
excessive and unjust blame.




88.


HOW ONE DIES IS INDIFFERENT.—The whole way in which a man thinks of death
during the prime of his life and strength is very expressive and
significant for what we call his character. But the hour of death itself,
his behaviour on the death-bed, is almost indifferent. The exhaustion of
waning life, especially when old people die, the irregular or insufficient
nourishment of the brain during this last period, the occasionally violent
pain, the novel and untried nature of the whole position, and only too
often the ebb and flow of superstitious impressions and fears, as if dying
were of much consequence and meant the crossing of bridges of the most
terrible kind—all this forbids our using death as a testimony concerning
the living. Nor is it true that the dying man is generally more honest
than the living. On the contrary, through the solemn attitude of the
bystanders, the repressed or flowing streams of tears and emotions, every
one is inveigled into a comedy of vanity, now conscious, now unconscious.
The serious way in which every dying man is treated must have been to many
a poor despised devil the highest joy of his whole life and a sort of
compensation and repayment for many privations.




89.


MORALITY AND ITS SACRIFICE.—The origin of morality may be traced to two
ideas: “The community is of more value than the individual,” and “The
permanent interest is to be preferred to the temporary.” The conclusion
drawn is that the permanent interest of the community is unconditionally
to be set above the temporary interest of the individual, especially his
momentary well-being, but also his permanent interest and even the
prolongation of his existence. Even if the individual suffers by an
arrangement that suits the mass, even if he is depressed and ruined by it,
morality must be maintained and the victim brought to the sacrifice. Such
a trend of thought arises, however, only in those who are _not_ the
victims—for in the victim’s case it enforces the claim that the individual
might be worth more than the many, and that the present enjoyment, the
“moment in paradise,”(7) should perhaps be rated higher than a tame
succession of untroubled or comfortable circumstances. But the philosophy
of the sacrificial victim always finds voice too late, and so victory
remains with morals and morality: which are really nothing more than the
sentiment for the whole concept of morals under which one lives and has
been reared—and reared not as an individual but as a member of the whole,
as a cipher in a majority. Hence it constantly happens that the individual
makes himself into a majority by means of his morality.




90.


THE GOOD AND THE GOOD CONSCIENCE.—You hold that all good things have at
all times had a good conscience? Science, which is certainly a very good
thing, has come into the world without such a conscience and quite free
from all pathos, rather clandestinely, by roundabout ways, walking with
shrouded or masked face like a sinner, and always with the feeling at
least of being a smuggler. Good conscience has bad conscience for its
stepping-stone, not for its opposite. For all that is good has at one time
been new and consequently strange, against morals, immoral, and has gnawed
like a worm at the heart of the fortunate discoverer.




91.


SUCCESS SANCTIFIES THE INTENTIONS.—We should not shrink from treading the
road to a virtue, even when we see clearly that nothing but egotism, and
accordingly utility, personal comfort, fear, considerations of health,
reputation, or glory, are the impelling motives. These motives are styled
ignoble and selfish. Very well, but if they stimulate us to some
virtue—for example, self-denial, dutifulness, order, thrift, measure, and
moderation—let us listen to them, whatever their epithets may be! For if
we reach the goal to which they summon us, then the virtue we have
attained, by means of the pure air it makes us breathe and the spiritual
well-being it communicates, ennobles the remoter impulses of our action,
and afterwards we no longer perform those actions from the same coarse
motives that inspired us before.—Education should therefore force the
virtues on the pupil, as far as possible, according to his disposition.
Then virtue, the sunshine and summer atmosphere of the soul, can
contribute her own share of work and add mellowness and sweetness.




92.


DABBLERS IN CHRISTIANITY, NOT CHRISTIANS.—So that is your Christianity!—To
annoy humanity you praise “God and His Saints,” and again when you want to
praise humanity you go so far that God and His Saints must be annoyed.—I
wish you would at least learn Christian manners, as you are so deficient
in the civility of the Christian heart.




93.


THE RELIGIOUS AND IRRELIGIOUS IMPRESSION OF NATURE.—A true believer must
be to us an object of veneration, but the same holds good of a true,
sincere, convinced unbeliever. With men of the latter stamp we are near to
the high mountains where mighty rivers have their source, and with
believers we are under vigorous, shady, restful trees.




94.


JUDICIAL MURDER.—The two greatest judicial murders(8) in the world’s
history are, to speak without exaggeration, concealed and well-concealed
suicide. In both cases a man _willed_ to die, and in both cases he let his
breast be pierced by the sword in the hand of human injustice.




95.


“LOVE.”—The finest artistic conception wherein Christianity had the
advantage over other religious systems lay in one word—Love. Hence it
became the _lyric_ religion (whereas in its two other creations Semitism
bestowed heroico-epical religions upon the world). In the word “love”
there is so much meaning, so much that stimulates and appeals to memory
and hope, that even the meanest intelligence and the coldest heart feel
some glimmering of its sense. The cleverest woman and the lowest man think
of the comparatively unselfish moments of their whole life, even if with
them Eros never soared high: and the vast number of beings who _miss_ love
from their parents or children or sweethearts, especially those whose
sexual instincts have been refined away, have found their heart’s desire
in Christianity.




96.


THE FULFILMENT OF CHRISTIANITY.—In Christianity there is also an Epicurean
trend of thought, starting from the idea that God can only demand of man,
his creation and his image, what it is possible for man to fulfil, and
accordingly that Christian virtue and perfection are attainable and often
attained. Now, for instance, the belief in loving one’s enemies—even if it
is only a belief or fancy, and by no means a psychological reality (a real
love)—gives unalloyed happiness, so long as it is genuinely believed. (As
to the reason of this, psychologist and Christian might well differ.)
Hence earthly life, through the belief, I mean the fancy, that it
satisfies not only the injunction to love our enemies, but all the other
injunctions of Christianity, and that it has really assimilated and
embodied in itself the Divine perfection according to the command, “Be
perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,” might actually become a holy
life. Thus error can make Christ’s promise come true.




97.


OF THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY.—We may be allowed to form a conjecture as
to the disappearance of Christianity and as to the places where it will be
the slowest to retreat, if we consider where and for what reasons
Protestantism spread with such startling rapidity. As is well known,
Protestantism promised to do far more cheaply all that the old Church did,
without costly masses, pilgrimages, and priestly pomp and circumstance. It
spread particularly among the Northern nations, which were not so deeply
rooted as those of the South in the old Church’s symbolism and love of
ritual. In the South the more powerful pagan religion survived in
Christianity, whereas in the North Christianity meant an opposition to and
a break with the old-time creed, and hence was from the first more
thoughtful and less sensual, but for that very reason, in times of peril,
more fanatical and more obstinate. If from the standpoint of _thought_ we
succeed in uprooting Christianity, we can at once know the point where it
will begin to disappear—the very point at which it will be most stubborn
in defence. In other places it will bend but not break, lose its leaves
but burst into leaf afresh, because the senses, and not thought, have gone
over to its side. But it is the senses that maintain the belief that with
all its expensive outlay the Church is more cheaply and conveniently
managed than under the stern conditions of work and wages. Yet what does
one hold leisure (or semi-idleness) to be worth, when once one has become
accustomed to it? The senses plead against a dechristianised world, saying
that there would be too much work to do in it and an insufficient supply
of leisure. They take the part of magic—that is, they let God work himself
(_oremus nos, Deus laboret_).




98.


THEATRICALITY AND HONESTY OF UNBELIEVERS.—There is no book that contains
in such abundance or expresses so faithfully all that man occasionally
finds salutary—ecstatic inward happiness, ready for sacrifice or death in
the belief in and contemplation of _his_ truth—as the book that tells of
Christ. From that book a clever man may learn all the means whereby a book
can be made into a world-book, a vade-mecum for all, and especially that
master-means of representing everything as discovered, nothing as future
and uncertain. All influential books try to leave the same impression, as
if the widest intellectual horizon were circumscribed here and as if about
the sun that shines here every constellation visible at present or in the
future must revolve.—Must not then all purely scientific books be poor in
influence on the same grounds as such books are rich in influence? Is not
the book fated to live humble and among humble folk, in order to be
crucified in the end and never resurrected? In relation to what the
religious inform us of their “knowledge” and their “holy spirit,” are not
all upright men of science “poor in spirit”? Can any religion demand more
self-denial and draw the selfish out of themselves more inexorably than
science?—This and similar things we may say, in any case with a certain
theatricality, when we have to defend ourselves against believers, for it
is impossible to conduct a defence without a certain amount of
theatricality. But between ourselves our language must be more honest, and
we employ a freedom that those believers are not even allowed, in their
own interests, to understand. Away, then, with the monastic cowl of
self-denial, with the appearance of humility! Much more and much better—so
rings our truth! If science were not linked with the pleasure of
knowledge, the utility of the thing known, what should we care for
science? If a little faith, love, and hope did not lead our souls to
knowledge, what would attract us to science? And if in science the ego
means nothing, still the inventive, happy ego, every upright and
industrious ego, means a great deal in the republic of the men of science.
The homage of those who pay homage, the joy of those whom we wish well or
honour, in some cases glory and a fair share of immortality, is the
personal reward for every suppression of personality: to say nothing here
of meaner views and rewards, although it is just on this account that the
majority have sworn and always continue to swear fidelity to the laws of
the republic and of science. If we had not remained in some degree
unscientific, what would science matter to us? Taking everything together
and speaking in plain language: “To a purely knowing being knowledge would
be indifferent.”—Not the quality but the quantity of faith and devoutness
distinguishes us from the pious, the believers. We are content with less.
But should one of them cry out to us: “Be content and show yourselves
contented!” we could easily answer: “As a matter of fact, we do not belong
to the most discontented class. But you, if your faith makes you happy,
show yourselves to be happy. Your faces have always done more harm to your
faith than our reasons! If that glad message of your Bible were written in
your faces, you would not need to demand belief in the authority of that
book in such stiff-necked fashion. Your words, your actions should
continually make the Bible superfluous—in fact, through you a new Bible
should continually come into being. As it is, your apologia for
Christianity is rooted in your unchristianity, and with your defence you
write your own condemnation. If you, however, should wish to emerge from
your dissatisfaction with Christianity, you should ponder over the
experience of two thousand years, which, clothed in the modest form of a
question, may be voiced as follows: ‘If Christ really intended to redeem
the world, may he not be said to have failed?’ ”




99.


THE POET AS GUIDE TO THE FUTURE.—All the surplus poetical force that still
exists in modern humanity, but is not used under our conditions of life,
should (without any deduction) be devoted to a definite goal—not to
depicting the present nor to reviving and summarising the past, but to
pointing the way to the future. Nor should this be so done as if the poet,
like an imaginative political economist, had to anticipate a more
favourable national and social state of things and picture their
realisation. Rather will he, just as the earlier poets portrayed the
images of the Gods, portray the fair images of men. He will divine those
cases where, in the midst of our modern world and reality (which will not
be shirked or repudiated in the usual poetic fashion), a great, noble soul
is still possible, where it may be embodied in harmonious, equable
conditions, where it may become permanent, visible, and representative of
a type, and so, by the stimulus to imitation and envy, help to create the
future. The poems of such a poet would be distinguished by appearing
secluded and protected from the heated atmosphere of the passions. The
irremediable failure, the shattering of all the strings of the human
instrument, the scornful laughter and gnashing of teeth, and all tragedy
and comedy in the usual old sense, would appear by the side of this new
art as mere archaic lumber, a blurring of the outlines of the
world-picture. Strength, kindness, gentleness, purity, and an unsought,
innate moderation in the personalities and their action: a levelled soil,
giving rest and pleasure to the foot: a shining heaven mirrored in faces
and events: science and art welded into a new unity: the mind living
together with her sister, the soul, without arrogance or jealousy, and
enticing from contrasts the grace of seriousness, not the impatience of
discord—all this would be the general environment, the background on which
the delicate differences of the embodied ideals would make the real
picture, that of ever-growing human majesty. Many roads to this poetry of
the future start from Goethe, but the quest needs good pathfinders and
above all a far greater strength than is possessed by modern poets, who
unscrupulously represent the half-animal and the immaturity and
intemperance that are mistaken by them for power and naturalness.




100.


THE MUSE AS PENTHESILEA.(9)—“Better to rot than to be a woman without
charm.” When once the Muse thinks thus, the end of her art is again at
hand. But it can be a tragic and also a comic finale.




101.


THE CIRCUITOUS PATH TO THE BEAUTIFUL.—If the beautiful is to be identified
with that which gives pleasure—and thus sang the Muses once—the useful is
often the necessary circuitous path to the beautiful, and has a perfect
right to spurn the short-sighted censure of men who live for the moment,
who will not wait, and who think that they can reach all good things
without ever taking a circuitous path.




102.


AN EXCUSE FOR MANY A TRANSGRESSION.—The ceaseless desire to create, the
eternal looking outward of the artist, hinders him from becoming better
and more beautiful as a personality: unless his craving for glory be great
enough to compel him to exhibit in his relations with other men a growth
corresponding to the growing beauty and greatness of his works. In any
case he has but a limited measure of strength, and how could the
proportion of strength that he spends on himself be of any benefit to his
work—or _vice versa_?




103.


SATISFYING THE BEST PEOPLE.—If we have satisfied the best people of our
time with our art, it is a sign that we shall not satisfy the best people
of the succeeding period. We have indeed “lived for all time,” and the
applause of the best people ensures our fame.(10)




104.


OF ONE SUBSTANCE.—If we are of one substance with a book or a work of art,
we think in our heart of hearts that it must be excellent, and are
offended if others find it ugly, over-spiced, or pretentious.




105.


SPEECH AND EMOTION.—That speech is not given to us to communicate our
emotions may be seen from the fact that all simple men are ashamed to seek
for words to express their deeper feelings. These feelings are expressed
only in actions, and even here such men blush if others seem to divine
their motives. After all, among poets, to whom God generally denies this
shame, the more noble are more monosyllabic in the language of emotion,
and evince a certain constraint: whereas the real poets of emotion are for
the most part shameless in practical life.




106.


A MISTAKE ABOUT A PRIVATION.—He that has not for a long time been
completely weaned from an art, and is still always at home in it, has no
idea how small a privation it is to live without that art.




107.


THREE-QUARTER STRENGTH.—A work that is meant to give an impression of
health should be produced with three-quarters, at the most, of the
strength of its creator. If he has gone to his farthest limit, the work
excites the observer and disconcerts him by its tension. All good things
have something lazy about them and lie like cows in the meadow.




108.


REFUSING TO HAVE HUNGER AS A GUEST.—As refined fare serves a hungry man as
well as and no better than coarser food, the more pretentious artist will
not dream of inviting the hungry man to his meal.




109.


LIVING WITHOUT ART AND WINE.—It is with works of art as with wine—it is
better if one can do without both and keep to water, and if from the inner
fire and inner sweetness of the soul the water spontaneously changes again
into wine.




110.


THE PIRATE-GENIUS.—The pirate-genius in art, who even knows how to deceive
subtle minds, arises when some one unscrupulously and from youth upwards
regards all good things, that are not protected by law, as the property of
a particular person, as his legitimate spoil. Now all the good things of
past ages and masters lie free around us, hedged about and protected by
the reverential awe of the few who know them. To these few our
robber-genius, by the force of his impudence, bids defiance and
accumulates for himself a wealth that once more calls forth homage and
awe.




111.


TO THE POETS OF GREAT TOWNS.—In the gardens of modern poetry it will
clearly be observed that the sewers of great towns are too near. With the
fragrance of flowers is mingled something that betrays abomination and
putrescence. With pain I ask: “Must you poets always request wit and dirt
to stand godfather, when an innocent and beautiful sensation has to be
christened by you? Are you obliged to dress your noble goddess in a hood
of devilry and caricature? But whence this necessity, this obligation?”
The reason is—because you live too near the sewers.




112.


OF THE SALT OF SPEECH.—No one has ever explained why the Greek writers,
having at command such an unparalleled wealth and power of language, made
so sparing a use of their resources that every post-classical Greek book
appears by comparison crude, over-coloured, and extravagant. It is said
that towards the North Polar ice and in the hottest countries salt is
becoming less and less used, whereas on the other hand the dwellers on the
plains and by the coast in the more temperate zones use salt in great
abundance. Is it possible that the Greeks from a twofold reason—because
their intellect was colder and clearer but their fundamental passionate
nature far more tropical than ours—did not need salt and spice to the same
extent that we do?




113.


THE FREEST WRITER.—In a book for free spirits one cannot avoid mention of
Laurence Sterne, the man whom Goethe honoured as the freest spirit of his
century. May he be satisfied with the honour of being called the freest
writer of all times, in comparison with whom all others appear stiff,
square-toed, intolerant, and downright boorish! In his case we should not
speak of the clear and rounded but of “the endless melody”—if by this
phrase we arrive at a name for an artistic style in which the definite
form is continually broken, thrust aside and transferred to the realm of
the indefinite, so that it signifies one and the other at the same time.
Sterne is the great master of _double entendre_, this phrase being
naturally used in a far wider sense than is commonly done when one applies
it to sexual relations. We may give up for lost the reader who always
wants to know exactly what Sterne thinks about a matter, and whether he be
making a serious or a smiling face (for he can do both with one wrinkling
of his features; he can be and even wishes to be right and wrong at the
same moment, to interweave profundity and farce). His digressions are at
once continuations and further developments of the story, his maxims
contain a satire on all that is sententious, his dislike of seriousness is
bound up with a disposition to take no matter merely externally and on the
surface. So in the proper reader he arouses a feeling of uncertainty
whether he be walking, lying, or standing, a feeling most closely akin to
that of floating in the air. He, the most versatile of writers,
communicates something of this versatility to his reader. Yes, Sterne
unexpectedly changes the parts, and is often as much reader as author, his
book being like a play within a play, a theatre audience before another
theatre audience. We must surrender at discretion to the mood of Sterne,
although we can always expect it to be gracious. It is strangely
instructive to see how so great a writer as Diderot has affected this
_double entendre_ of Sterne’s—to be equally ambiguous throughout is just
the Sternian super-humour. Did Diderot imitate, admire, ridicule, or
parody Sterne in his _Jacques le Fataliste_? One cannot be exactly
certain, and this uncertainty was perhaps intended by the author. This
very doubt makes the French unjust to the work of one of their first
masters, one who need not be ashamed of comparison with any of the
ancients or moderns. For humour (and especially for this humorous attitude
towards humour itself) the French are too serious. Is it necessary to add
that of all great authors Sterne is the worst model, in fact the
inimitable author, and that even Diderot had to pay for his daring? What
the worthy Frenchmen and before them some Greeks and Romans aimed at and
attained in prose is the very opposite of what Sterne aims at and attains.
He raises himself as a masterly exception above all that artists in
writing demand of themselves—propriety, reserve, character, steadfastness
of purpose, comprehensiveness, perspicuity, good deportment in gait and
feature. Unfortunately Sterne the man seems to have been only too closely
related to Sterne the writer. His squirrel-soul sprang with insatiable
unrest from branch to branch; he knew what lies between sublimity and
rascality; he had sat on every seat, always with unabashed watery eyes and
mobile play of feature. He was—if language does not revolt from such a
combination—of a hard-hearted kindness, and in the midst of the joys of a
grotesque and even corrupt imagination he showed the bashful grace of
innocence. Such a carnal and spiritual hermaphroditism, such untrammelled
wit penetrating into every vein and muscle, was perhaps never possessed by
any other man.




114.


A CHOICE REALITY.—Just as the good prose writer only takes words that
belong to the language of daily intercourse, though not by a long way all
its words—whence arises a choice style—so the good poet of the future will
only represent the real and turn his eyes away from all fantastic,
superstitious, half-voiced, forgotten stories, to which earlier poets
devoted their powers. Only reality, though by a long way not every
reality—but a choice reality.




115.


DEGENERATE SPECIES OF ART.—Side by side with the genuine species of art,
those of great repose and great movement, there are degenerate
species—weary, blasé art and excited art. Both would have their weakness
taken for strength and wish to be confounded with the genuine species.




116.


A HERO IMPOSSIBLE FROM LACK OF COLOUR.—The typical poets and artists of
our age like to compose their pictures upon a background of shimmering
red, green, grey, and gold, on the background of nervous sensuality—a
condition well understood by the children of this century. The drawback
comes when we do _not_ look at these pictures with the eyes of our
century. Then we see that the great figures painted by these artists have
something flickering, tremulous, and dizzy about them, and accordingly we
do not ascribe to them heroic deeds, but at best mock-heroic, swaggering
_mis_deeds.




117.


OVERLADEN STYLE.—The overladen style is a consequence of the
impoverishment of the organising force together with a lavish stock of
expedients and intentions. At the beginnings of art the very reverse
conditions sometimes appear.




118.


_PULCHRUM EST PAUCORUM HOMINUM._—History and experience tell us that the
significant grotesqueness that mysteriously excites the imagination and
carries one beyond everyday reality, is older and grows more luxuriantly
than the beautiful and reverence for the beautiful in art: and that it
begins to flourish exceedingly when the sense for beauty is on the wane.
For the vast majority of mankind this grotesque seems to be a higher need
than the beautiful, presumably because it contains a coarser narcotic.




119.


ORIGINS OF TASTE IN WORKS OF ART.—If we consider the primary germs of the
artistic sense, and ask ourselves what are the various kinds of joy
produced by the firstlings of art—as, for example, among savage tribes—we
find first of all the joy of understanding what another means. Art in this
case is a sort of conundrum, which causes its solver pleasure in his own
quick and keen perceptions.—Then the roughest works of art remind us of
the pleasant things we have actually experienced, and so give joy—as, for
example, when the artist alludes to a chase, a victory, a wedding.—Again,
the representation may cause us to feel excited, touched, inflamed, as for
instance in the glorification of revenge and danger. Here the enjoyment
lies in the excitement itself, in the victory over tedium.—The memory,
too, of unpleasant things, so far as they have been overcome or make us
appear interesting to the listener as subjects for art (as when the singer
describes the mishaps of a daring seaman), can inspire great joy, the
credit for which is given to art.—A more subtle variety is the joy that
arises at the sight of all that is regular and symmetrical in lines,
points, and rhythms. For by a certain analogy is awakened the feeling for
all that is orderly and regular in life, which one has to thank alone for
all well-being. So in the cult of symmetry we unconsciously do homage to
rule and proportion as the source of our previous happiness, and the joy
in this case is a kind of hymn of thanksgiving. Only when a certain
satiety of the last-mentioned joy arises does a more subtle feeling step
in, that enjoyment might even lie in a violation of the symmetrical and
regular. This feeling, for example, impels us to seek reason in apparent
unreason, and the sort of æsthetic riddle-guessing that results is in a
way the higher species of the first-named artistic joy.—He who pursues
this speculation still further will know what kind of hypotheses for the
explanation of æsthetic phenomena are hereby fundamentally rejected.




120.


NOT TOO NEAR.—It is a disadvantage for good thoughts when they follow too
closely on one another, for they hide the view from each other. That is
why great artists and writers have made an abundant use of the mediocre.




121.


ROUGHNESS AND WEAKNESS.—Artists of all periods have made the discovery
that in roughness lies a certain strength, and that not every one can be
rough who wants to be: also that many varieties of weakness have a
powerful effect on the emotions. From this source are derived many
artistic substitutes, which not even the greatest and most conscientious
artists can abstain from using.




122.


GOOD MEMORY.—Many a man fails to become a thinker for the sole reason that
his memory is too good.




123.


AROUSING INSTEAD OF APPEASING HUNGER.—Great artists fancy that they have
taken full possession of a soul. In reality, and often to their painful
disappointment, that soul has only been made more capacious and
insatiable, so that a dozen greater artists could plunge into its depths
without filling it up.




124.


ARTISTS’ ANXIETY.—The anxiety lest people may not believe that their
figures are _alive_ can mislead many artists of declining taste to portray
these figures so that they appear as if mad. From the same anxiety, on the
other hand, Greek artists of the earliest ages gave even dead and sorely
wounded men that smile which they knew as the most vivid sign of
life—careless of the actual forms bestowed by nature on life at its last
gasp.




125.


THE CIRCLE MUST BE COMPLETED.—He who follows a philosophy or a genre of
art to the end of its career and beyond, understands from inner experience
why the masters and disciples who come after have so often turned, with a
depreciatory gesture, into a new groove. The circle must be described—but
the individual, even the greatest, sits firm on his point of the
circumference, with an inexorable look of obstinacy, as if the circle
ought never to be completed.




126.


THE OLDER ART AND THE SOUL OF THE PRESENT.—Since every art becomes more
and more adapted to the expression of spiritual states, of the more
lively, delicate, energetic, and passionate states, the later masters,
spoilt by these means of expression, do not feel at their ease in the
presence of the old-time works of art. They feel as if the ancients had
merely been lacking in the means of making their souls speak clearly, also
perhaps in some necessary technical preliminaries. They think that they
must render some assistance in this quarter, for they believe in the
similarity or even unity of all souls. In truth, however, measure,
symmetry, a contempt for graciousness and charm, an unconscious severity
and morning chilliness, an evasion of passion, as if passion meant the
death of art—such are the constituents of sentiment and morality in all
old masters, who selected and arranged their means of expression not at
random but in a necessary connection with their morality. Knowing this,
are we to deny those that come after the right to animate the older works
with their soul? No, for these works can only survive through our giving
them our soul, and our blood alone enables them to speak to _us_. The real
“historic” discourse would talk ghostly speech to ghosts. We honour the
great artists less by that barren timidity that allows every word, every
note to remain intact than by energetic endeavours to aid them continually
to a new life.—True, if Beethoven were suddenly to come to life and hear
one of his works performed with that modern animation and nervous
refinement that bring glory to our masters of execution, he would probably
be silent for a long while, uncertain whether he should raise his hand to
curse or to bless, but perhaps say at last: “Well, well! That is neither I
nor not-I, but a third thing—it seems to me, too, something right, if not
just _the_ right thing. But you must know yourselves what to do, as in any
case it is you who have to listen. As our Schiller says, ‘the living man
is right.’ So have it your own way, and let me go down again.”




127.


AGAINST THE DISPARAGERS OF BREVITY.—A brief dictum may be the fruit and
harvest of long reflection. The reader, however, who is a novice in this
field and has never considered the case in point, sees something embryonic
in all brief dicta, not without a reproachful hint to the author,
requesting him not to serve up such raw and ill-prepared food.




128.


AGAINST THE SHORT-SIGHTED.—Do you think it is piece-work because it is
(and must be) offered you in pieces?




129.


READERS OF APHORISMS.—The worst readers of aphorisms are the friends of
the author, if they make a point of referring the general to the
particular instance to which the aphorism owes its origin. This
namby-pamby attitude brings all the author’s trouble to naught, and
instead of a philosophic lesson and a philosophic frame of mind, they
deservedly gain nothing but the satisfaction of a vulgar curiosity.




130.


READERS’ INSULTS.—The reader offers a two-fold insult to the author by
praising his second book at the expense of his first (or _vice versa_) and
by expecting the author to be grateful to him on that account.




131.


THE EXCITING ELEMENT IN THE HISTORY OF ART.—We fall into a state of
terrible tension when we follow the history of an art—as, for example,
that of Greek oratory—and, passing from master to master, observe their
increasing precautions to obey the old and the new laws and all these
self-imposed limitations. We see that the bow _must_ snap, and that the
so-called “loose” composition, with the wonderful means of expression
smothered and concealed (in this particular case the florid style of
Asianism), was once necessary and almost _beneficial_.




132.


TO THE GREAT IN ART.—That enthusiasm for some object which you, O great
man, introduce into this world causes the intelligence of the many to be
stunted. The knowledge of this fact spells humiliation. But the enthusiast
wears his hump with pride and pleasure, and you have the consolation of
feeling that you have increased the world’s happiness.




133.


CONSCIENCELESS ÆSTHETES.—The real fanatics of an artistic school are
perhaps those utterly inartistic natures that are not even grounded in the
elements of artistic study and creation, but are impressed with the
strongest of all the elementary influences of an art. For them there is no
æsthetic conscience—hence nothing to hold them back from fanaticism.




134.


HOW THE SOUL SHOULD BE MOVED BY THE NEW MUSIC.—The artistic purpose
followed by the new music, in what is now forcibly but none too lucidly
termed “endless melody,” can be understood by going into the sea,
gradually losing one’s firm tread on the bottom, and finally surrendering
unconditionally to the fluid element. One has to _swim_. In the previous,
older music one was forced, with delicate or stately or impassioned
movement, to _dance_. The measure necessary for dancing, the observance of
a distinct balance of time and force in the soul of the hearer, imposed a
continual self-control. Through the counteraction of the cooler draught of
air which came from this caution and the warmer breath of musical
enthusiasm, that music exercised its spell.—Richard Wagner aimed at a
different excitation of the soul, allied, as above said, to swimming and
floating. This is perhaps the most essential of his innovations. His
famous method, originating from this aim and adapted to it—the “endless
melody”—strives to break and sometimes even to despise all mathematical
equilibrium of time and force. He is only too rich in the invention of
such effects, which sound to the old school like rhythmic paradoxes and
blasphemies. He dreads petrifaction, crystallisation, the development of
music into the architectural. He accordingly sets up a three-time rhythm
in opposition to the double-time, not infrequently introduces five-time
and seven-time, immediately repeats a phrase, but with a prolation, so
that its time is again doubled and trebled. From an easy-going imitation
of such art may arise a great danger to music, for by the side of the
superabundance of rhythmic emotion demoralisation and decadence lurk in
ambush. The danger will become very great if such music comes to associate
itself more and more closely with a quite naturalistic art of acting and
pantomime, trained and dominated by no higher plastic models; an art that
knows no measure in itself and can impart no measure to the kindred
element, the all-too-womanish nature of music.




135.


POET AND REALITY.—The Muse of the poet who is not in love with reality
will not be reality, and will bear him children with hollow eyes and all
too tender bones.




136.


MEANS AND END.—In art the end does not justify the means, but holy means
can justify the end.




137.


THE WORST READERS.—The worst readers are those who act like plundering
soldiers. They take out some things that they might use, cover the rest
with filth and confusion, and blaspheme about the whole.




138.


SIGNS OF A GOOD WRITER.—Good writers have two things in common: they
prefer being understood to being admired, and they do not write for the
critical and over-shrewd reader.




139.


THE MIXED SPECIES.—The mixed species in art bear witness to their authors’
distrust of their own strength. They seek auxiliary powers, advocates,
hiding-places—such is the case with the poet who calls in philosophy, the
musician who calls in the drama, and the thinker who calls in rhetoric to
his aid.




140.


SHUTTING ONE’S MOUTH.—When his book opens its mouth, the author must shut
his.




141.


BADGES OF RANK.—All poets and men of letters who are in love with the
superlative want to do more than they can.




142.


COLD BOOKS.—The deep thinker reckons on readers who feel with him the
happiness that lies in deep thinking. Hence a book that looks cold and
sober, if seen in the right light, may seem bathed in the sunshine of
spiritual cheerfulness and become a genuine soul-comforter.




143.


A KNACK OF THE SLOW-WITTED.—The slow-witted thinker generally allies
himself with loquacity and ceremoniousness. By the former he thinks he is
gaining mobility and fluency, by the latter he gives his peculiarity the
appearance of being a result of free will and artistic purpose, with a
view to dignity, which needs slow movement.




144.


_LE STYLE BAROQUE._(11)—He who as thinker and writer is not born or
trained to dialectic and the consecutive arrangement of ideas, will
unconsciously turn to the rhetoric and dramatic forms. For, after all, his
object is to make himself understood and to carry the day by force, and he
is indifferent whether, as shepherd, he honestly guides to himself the
hearts of his fellow-men, or, as robber, he captures them by surprise.
This is true of the plastic arts as of music: where the feeling of
insufficient dialectic or a deficiency in expression or narration,
together with an urgent, over-powerful impulse to form, gives birth to
that species of style known as “baroque.” Only the ill-educated and the
arrogant will at once find a depreciatory force in this word. The baroque
style always arises at the time of decay of a great art, when the demands
of art in classical expression have become too great. It is a natural
phenomenon which will be observed with melancholy—for it is a forerunner
of the night—but at the same time with admiration for its peculiar
compensatory arts of expression and narration. To this style belongs
already a choice of material and subjects of the highest dramatic tension,
at which the heart trembles even when there is no art, because heaven and
hell are all too near the emotions: then, the oratory of strong passion
and gestures, of ugly sublimity, of great masses, in fact of absolute
quantity _per se_ (as is shown in Michael Angelo, the father or
grandfather of the Italian baroque stylists): the lights of dusk,
illumination and conflagration playing upon those strongly moulded forms:
ever-new ventures in means and aims, strongly underscored by artists for
artists, while the layman must fancy he sees an unconscious overflowing of
all the horns of plenty of an original nature-art: all these
characteristics that constitute the greatness of that style are neither
possible nor permitted in the earlier ante-classical and classical periods
of a branch of art. Such luxuries hang long on the tree like forbidden
fruit. Just now, when music is passing into this last phase, we may learn
to know the phenomenon of the baroque style in peculiar splendour, and, by
comparison, find much that is instructive for earlier ages. For from Greek
times onward there has often been a baroque style, in poetry, oratory,
prose writing, sculpture, and, as is well known, in architecture. This
style, though wanting in the highest nobility,—the nobility of an
innocent, unconscious, triumphant perfection,—has nevertheless given
pleasure to many of the best and most serious minds of their time. Hence,
as aforesaid, it is presumptuous to depreciate it without reserve, however
happy we may feel because our taste for it has not made us insensible to
the purer and greater style.




145.


THE VALUE OF HONEST BOOKS.—Honest books make the reader honest, at least
by exciting his hatred and aversion, which otherwise cunning cleverness
knows so well how to conceal. Against a book, however, we let ourselves
go, however restrained we may be in our relations with men.




146.


HOW ART MAKES PARTISANS.—Individual fine passages, an exciting general
tenor, a moving and absorbing finale—so much of a work of art is
accessible even to most laymen. In an art period when it is desired to win
over the great majority of the laymen to the side of the artists and to
make a party perhaps for the very preservation of art, the creative artist
will do well to offer nothing more than the above. Then he will not be a
squanderer of his strength, in spheres where no one is grateful to him.
For to perform the remaining functions, the imitation of Nature in her
organic development and growth, would in that case be like sowing seeds in
water.




147.


BECOMING GREAT TO THE DETRIMENT OF HISTORY.—Every later master who leads
the taste of art-lovers into his channel unconsciously gives rise to a
selection and revaluation of the older masters and their works. Whatever
in them is conformable and akin to him, and anticipates and foreshadows
him, appears henceforth as the only important element in them and their
works—a fruit in which a great error usually lies hidden like a worm.




148.


HOW AN EPOCH BECOMES LURED TO ART.—If we teach people by all the
enchantments of artists and thinkers to feel reverence for their defects,
their intellectual poverty, their absurd infatuations and passions (as it
is quite possible to do); if we show them only the lofty side of crime and
folly, only the touching and appealing element in weakness and flabbiness
and blind devotion (that too has often enough been done):—we have employed
the means for inspiring even an unphilosophical and inartistic age with an
ecstatic love of philosophy and art (especially of thinkers and artists as
personalities) and, in the worst case, perhaps with the only means of
defending the existence of such tender and fragile beings.




149.


CRITICISM AND JOY.—Criticism, one-sided and unjust as well as intelligent
criticism, gives so much pleasure to him who exercises it that the world
is indebted to every work and every action that inspires much criticism
and many critics. For criticism draws after it a glittering train of
joyousness, wit, self-admiration, pride, instruction, designs of
improvement.—The God of joy created the bad and the mediocre for the same
reason that he created the good.




150.


BEYOND HIS LIMITS.—When an artist wants to be more than an artist—for
example, the moral awakener of his people—he at last falls in love, as a
punishment, with a monster of moral substance. The Muse laughs, for,
though a kind-hearted Goddess, she can also be malignant from jealousy.
Milton and Klopstock are cases in point.




151.


A GLASS EYE.—The tendency of a talent towards moral subjects, characters,
motives, towards the “beautiful soul” of the work of art, is often only a
glass eye put on by the artist who lacks a beautiful soul. It may result,
though rarely, that his eye finally becomes living Nature, if indeed it be
Nature with a somewhat troubled look. But the ordinary result is that the
whole world thinks it sees Nature where there is only cold glass.




152.


WRITING AND DESIRE FOR VICTORY.—Writing should always indicate a victory,
indeed a conquest of oneself which must be communicated to others for
their behoof. There are, however, dyspeptic authors who only write when
they cannot digest something, or when something has remained stuck in
their teeth. Through their anger they try unconsciously to disgust the
reader too, and to exercise violence upon him—that is, they desire
victory, but victory over others.




153.


A GOOD BOOK NEEDS TIME.—Every good book tastes bitter when it first comes
out, for it has the defect of newness. Moreover, it suffers damage from
its living author, if he is well known and much talked about. For all the
world is accustomed to confuse the author with his work. Whatever of
profundity, sweetness, and brilliance the work may contain must be
developed as the years go by, under the care of growing, then old, and
lastly traditional reverence. Many hours must pass, many a spider must
have woven its web about the book. A book is made better by good readers
and clearer by good opponents.




154.


EXTRAVAGANCE AS AN ARTISTIC MEANS.—Artists well understand the idea of
using extravagance as an artistic means in order to convey an impression
of wealth. This is one of those innocent wiles of soul-seduction that the
artist must know, for in his world, which has only appearance in view, the
means to appearance need not necessarily be genuine.




155.


THE HIDDEN BARREL-ORGAN.—Genius, by virtue of its more ample drapery,
knows better than talent how to hide its barrel-organ. Yet after all it
too can only play its seven old pieces over and over again.




156.


THE NAME ON THE TITLE-PAGE.—It is now a matter of custom and almost of
duty for the author’s name to appear on the book, and this is a main cause
of the fact that books have so little influence. If they are good, they
are worth more than the personalities of their authors, of which they are
the quintessences. But as soon as the author makes himself known on the
title-page, the quintessence, from the reader’s point of view, becomes
diluted with the personal, the most personal element, and the aim of the
book is frustrated. It is the ambition of the intellect no longer to
appear individual.




157.


THE MOST CUTTING CRITICISM.—We make the most cutting criticism of a man or
a book when we indicate his or its ideal.




158.


LITTLE OR NO LOVE.—Every good book is written for a particular reader and
men of his stamp, and for that very reason is looked upon unfavourably by
all other readers, by the vast majority. Its reputation accordingly rests
on a narrow basis and must be built up by degrees.—The mediocre and bad
book is mediocre and bad because it seeks to please, and does please, a
great number.




159.


MUSIC AND DISEASE.—The danger of the new music lies in the fact that it
puts the cup of rapture and exaltation to the lips so invitingly, and with
such a show of moral ecstasy, that even the noble and temperate man always
drinks a drop too much. This minimum of intemperance, constantly repeated,
can in the end bring about a deeper convulsion and destruction of mental
health than any coarse excess could do. Hence nothing remains but some day
to fly from the grotto of the nymph, and through perils and billowy seas
to forge one’s way to the smoke of Ithaca and the embraces of a simpler
and more human spouse.




160.


ADVANTAGE FOR OPPONENTS.—A book full of intellect communicates something
thereof even to its opponents.




161.


YOUTH AND CRITICISM.—To criticise a book means, for the young, not to let
oneself be touched by a single productive thought therefrom, and to
protect one’s skin with hands and feet. The youngster lives in opposition
to all novelty that he cannot love in the lump, in a position of
self-defence, and in this connection he commits, as often as he can, a
superfluous sin.




162.


EFFECT OF QUANTITY.—The greatest paradox in the history of poetic art lies
in this: that in all that constitutes the greatness of the old poets a man
may be a barbarian, faulty and deformed from top to toe, and still remain
the greatest of poets. This is the case with Shakespeare, who, as compared
with Sophocles, is like a mine of immeasurable wealth in gold, lead, and
rubble, whereas Sophocles is not merely gold, but gold in its noblest
form, one that almost makes us forget the money-value of the metal. But
quantity in its highest intensity has the same effect as quality. That is
a good thing for Shakespeare.




163.


ALL BEGINNING IS DANGEROUS.—The Poet can choose whether to raise emotion
from one grade to another, and so finally to exalt it to a great height—or
to try a surprise attack, and from the start to pull the bell-rope with
might and main. Both processes have their danger—in the first case his
hearer may run away from him through boredom, in the second through
terror.




164.


IN FAVOUR OF CRITICS.—Insects sting, not from malice, but because they too
want to live. It is the same with our critics—they desire our blood, not
our pain.




165.


SUCCESS OF APHORISMS.—The inexperienced, when an aphorism at once
illuminates their minds with its naked truth, always think that it is old
and well known. They look askance at the author, as if he had wanted to
steal the common property of all, whereas they enjoy highly spiced
half-truths, and give the author to understand as much. He knows how to
appreciate the hint, and easily guesses thereby where he has succeeded and
failed.




166.


THE DESIRE FOR VICTORY.—An artist who exceeds the limit of his strength in
all that he undertakes will end by carrying the multitude along with him
through the spectacle of violent wrestling that he affords. Success is not
always the accompaniment only of victory, but also of the desire for
victory.




167.


_SIBI SCRIBERE._—The sensible author writes for no other posterity than
his own—that is, for his age—so as to be able even then to take pleasure
in himself.




168.


PRAISE OF THE APHORISM.—A good aphorism is too hard for the tooth of time,
and is not worn away by all the centuries, although it serves as food for
every epoch. Hence it is the greatest paradox in literature, the
imperishable in the midst of change, the nourishment which always remains
highly valued, as salt does, and never becomes stupid like salt.




169.


THE ART-NEED OF THE SECOND ORDER.—The people may have something of what
can be called art-need, but it is small, and can be cheaply satisfied. On
the whole, the remnant of art (it must be honestly confessed) suffices for
this need. Let us consider, for example, the kind of melodies and songs in
which the most vigorous, unspoiled, and true-hearted classes of the
population find genuine delight; let us live among shepherds, cowherds,
peasants, huntsmen, soldiers, and sailors, and give ourselves the answer.
And in the country town, just in the houses that are the homes of
inherited civic virtue, is it not the worst music at present produced that
is loved and, one might say, cherished? He who speaks of deeper needs and
unsatisfied yearnings for art among the people, as it is, is a crank or an
impostor. Be honest! Only in exceptional men is there now an art-need in
the highest sense—because art is once more on the down-grade, and human
powers and hopes are for the time being directed to other matters.—Apart
from this, outside the populace, there exists indeed, in the higher and
highest strata of society, a broader and more comprehensive art-need, but
_of the second order_. Here there is a sort of artistic commune, which
possibly means to be sincere. But let us look at the elements! They are in
general the more refined malcontents, who attain no genuine pleasure in
themselves; the cultured, who have not become free enough to dispense with
the consolations of religion, and yet do not find its incense sufficiently
fragrant; the half-aristocratic, who are too weak to combat by a heroic
conversion or renunciation the one fundamental error of their lives or the
pernicious bent of their characters; the highly gifted, who think
themselves too dignified to be of service by modest activity, and are too
lazy for real, self-sacrificing work; girls who cannot create for
themselves a satisfactory sphere of duties; women who have tied themselves
by a light-hearted or nefarious marriage, and know that they are not tied
securely enough; scholars, physicians, merchants, officials who
specialised too early and never gave their lives a free enough scope—who
do their work efficiently, it is true, but with a worm gnawing at their
hearts; finally, all imperfect artists—these are nowadays the true needers
of art! What do they really desire from art? Art is to drive away hours
and moments of discomfort, boredom, half-bad conscience, and, if possible,
transform the faults of their lives and characters into faults of
world-destiny. Very different were the Greeks, who realised in their art
the outflow and overflow of their own sense of well-being and health, and
loved to see their perfection once more from a standpoint outside
themselves. They were led to art by delight in themselves; our
contemporaries—by disgust of themselves.




170.


THE GERMANS IN THE THEATRE.—The real theatrical talent of the Germans was
Kotzebue. He and his Germans, those of higher as well as those of
middle-class society, were necessarily associated, and his contemporaries
should have said of him in all seriousness, “in him we live and move and
have our being.” Here was nothing—no constraint, pretence, or
half-enjoyment: what he could and would do was understood. Yes, until now
the honest theatrical success on the German stage has been in the hands of
the shamefaced or unashamed heirs of Kotzebue’s methods and influence—that
is, as far as comedy still flourishes at all. The result is that much of
the Germanism of that age, sometimes far off from the great towns, still
survives. Good-natured; incontinent in small pleasures; always ready for
tears; with the desire, in the theatre at any rate, to be able to get rid
of their innate sobriety and strict attention to duty and exercise; a
smiling, nay, a laughing indulgence; confusing goodness and sympathy and
welding them into one, as is the essential characteristic of German
sentimentality; exceedingly happy at a noble, magnanimous action; for the
rest, submissive towards superiors, envious of each other, and yet in
their heart of hearts thoroughly self-satisfied—such were they and such
was he.—The second dramatic talent was Schiller. He discovered a class of
hearers which had hitherto never been taken into consideration: among the
callow German youth of both sexes. His poetry responded to their higher,
nobler, more violent if more confused emotions, their delight in the
jingle of moral words (a delight that begins to disappear when we reach
the thirties). Thus he won for himself, by virtue of the passionateness
and partisanship of the young, a success which gradually reacted with
advantage upon those of riper years. Generally speaking, Schiller
rejuvenated the Germans. Goethe stood and still stands above the Germans
in every respect. To them he will never belong. How could a nation in
well-being and well-wishing come up to the intellectuality of Goethe?
Beethoven composed and Schopenhauer philosophised above the heads of the
Germans, and it was above their heads, in the same way, that Goethe wrote
his _Tasso_, his _Iphigenie_. He was followed by a small company of highly
cultured persons, who were educated by antiquity, life, and travel, and
had grown out of German ways of thought. He himself did not wish it to be
otherwise.—When the Romantics set up their well-conceived Goethe cult;
when their amazing skill in appreciation was passed on to the disciples of
Hegel, the real educators of the Germans of this century; when the
awakening national ambition turned out advantageous to the fame of the
German poets; when the real standard of the nation, as to whether it could
honestly find enjoyment in anything, became inexorably subordinated to the
judgment of individuals and to that national ambition,—that is, when
people began to enjoy by compulsion,—then arose that false, spurious
German culture which was ashamed of Kotzebue; which brought Sophocles,
Calderon, and even the Second Part of Goethe’s _Faust_ on the stage; and
which, on account of its foul tongue and congested stomach, no longer
knows now what it likes and what it finds tedious.—Happy are those who
have taste, even if it be a bad taste! Only by this characteristic can one
be wise as well as happy. Hence the Greeks, who were very refined in such
matters, designated the sage by a word that means “man of taste,” and
called wisdom, artistic as well as scientific, “taste” (_sophia_).




171.


MUSIC AS A LATE-COMER IN EVERY CULTURE.—Among all the arts that are
accustomed to grow on a definite culture-soil and under definite social
and political conditions, music is the last plant to come up, arising in
the autumn and fading-season of the culture to which it belongs. At the
same time, the first signs and harbingers of a new spring are usually
already noticeable, and sometimes music, like the language of a forgotten
age, rings out into a new, astonished world, and comes too late. In the
art of the Dutch and Flemish musicians the soul of the Christian middle
ages at last found its fullest tone: their sound-architecture is the
posthumous but legitimate and equal sister of Gothic. Not until Handel’s
music was heard the note of the best in the soul of Luther and his kin,
the great Judæo-heroical impulse that created the whole Reformation
movement. Mozart first expressed in golden melody the age of Louis XIV.
and the art of Racine and Claude Lorrain. The eighteenth century—that
century of rhapsody, of broken ideals and transitory happiness—only sang
itself out in the music of Beethoven and Rossini. A lover of sentimental
similes might say that all really important music was a swan-song.—Music
is, in fact, not a universal language for all time, as is so often said in
its praise, but responds exactly to a particular period and warmth of
emotion which involves a quite definite, individual culture, determined by
time and place, as its inner law. The music of Palestrina would be quite
unintelligible to a Greek; and again, what would the music of Rossini
convey to Palestrina?—It may be that our most modern German music, with
all its pre-eminence and desire of pre-eminence, will soon be no longer
understood. For this music sprang from a culture that is undergoing a
rapid decay, from the soil of that epoch of reaction and restoration in
which a certain Catholicism of feeling, as well as a delight in all
indigenous, national, primitive manners, burst into bloom and scattered a
blended perfume over Europe. These two emotional tendencies, adopted in
their greatest strength and carried to their farthest limits, found final
expression in the music of Wagner. Wagner’s predilection for the old
native sagas, his free idealisation of their unfamiliar gods and
heroes,—who are really sovereign beasts of prey with occasional fits of
thoughtfulness, magnanimity, and boredom,—his re-animation of those
figures, to which he gave in addition the mediæval Christian thirst for
ecstatic sensuality and spiritualisation—all this Wagnerian give-and-take
with regard to materials, souls, figures, and words—would clearly express
the spirit of his music, if it could not, like all music, speak quite
unambiguously of itself. This spirit wages the last campaign of reaction
against the spirit of illumination which passed into this century from the
last, and also against the super-national ideas of French revolutionary
romanticism and of English and American insipidity in the reconstruction
of state and society.—But is it not evident that the spheres of thought
and emotion apparently suppressed by Wagner and his school have long since
acquired fresh strength, and that his late musical protest against them
generally rings into ears that prefer to hear different and opposite
notes; so that one day that high and wonderful art will suddenly become
unintelligible and will be covered by the spider’s web of oblivion?—In
considering this state of affairs we must not let ourselves be led astray
by those transitory fluctuations which arise like a reaction within a
reaction, as a temporary sinking of the mountainous wave in the midst of
the general upheaval. Thus, this decade of national war, ultramontane
martyrdom, and socialistic unrest may, in its remoter after-effect, even
aid the Wagnerian art to acquire a sudden halo, without guaranteeing that
it “has a future” or that it has _the_ future. It is in the very nature of
music that the fruits of its great culture-vintage should lose their taste
and wither earlier than the fruits of the plastic arts or those that grow
on the tree of knowledge. Among all the products of the human artistic
sense ideas are the most solid and lasting.




172.


THE POET NO LONGER A TEACHER.—Strange as it may sound to our time, there
were once poets and artists whose soul was above the passions with their
delights and convulsions, and who therefore took their pleasure in purer
materials, worthier men, more delicate complications and dénouements. If
the artists of our day for the most part unfetter the will, and so are
under certain circumstances for that very reason emancipators of life,
those were tamers of the will, enchanters of animals, creators of men. In
fact, they moulded, re-moulded, and new-moulded life, whereas the fame of
poets of our day lies in unharnessing, unchaining, and shattering.—The
ancient Greeks demanded of the poet that he should be the teacher of grown
men. How ashamed the poet would be now if this demand were made of him! He
is not even a good student of himself, and so never himself becomes a good
poem or a fine picture. Under the most favourable circumstances he remains
the shy, attractive ruin of a temple, but at the same time a cavern of
cravings, overgrown like a ruin with flowers, nettles, and poisonous
weeds, inhabited and haunted by snakes, worms, spiders, and birds; an
object for sad reflection as to why the noblest and most precious must
grow up at once like a ruin, without the past and future of perfection.




173.


LOOKING FORWARD AND BACKWARD.—An art like that which streams out of Homer,
Sophocles, Theocritus, Calderon, Racine, Goethe, as the superabundance of
a wise and harmonious conduct of life—that is the true art, at which we
grasp when we have ourselves become wiser and more harmonious. It is not
that barbaric, if ever so delightful, outpouring of hot and highly
coloured things from an undisciplined, chaotic soul, which is what we
understood by “art” in our youth. It is obvious from the nature of the
case that for certain periods of life an art of overstrain, excitement,
antipathy to the orderly, monotonous, simple, logical, is an inevitable
need, to which artists must respond, lest the soul of such periods should
unburden itself in other ways, through all kinds of disorder and
impropriety. Hence youths as they generally are, full, fermenting,
tortured above all things by boredom, and women who lack work that fully
occupies their soul, require that art of delightful disorder. All the more
violently on that account are they inflamed with a desire for satisfaction
without change, happiness without stupor and intoxication.




174.


AGAINST THE ART OF WORKS OF ART.—Art is above all and first of all meant
to embellish life, to make us ourselves endurable and if possible
agreeable in the eyes of others. With this task in view, art moderates us
and holds us in restraint, creates forms of intercourse, binds over the
uneducated to laws of decency, cleanliness, politeness, well-timed speech
and silence. Hence art must conceal or transfigure everything that is
ugly—the painful, terrible, and disgusting elements which in spite of
every effort will always break out afresh in accordance with the very
origin of human nature. Art has to perform this duty especially in regard
to the passions and spiritual agonies and anxieties, and to cause the
significant factor to shine through unavoidable or unconquerable ugliness.
To this great, super-great task the so-called art proper, that of works of
art, is a mere accessary. A man who feels within himself a surplus of such
powers of embellishment, concealment, and transfiguration will finally
seek to unburden himself of this surplus in works of art. The same holds
good, under special circumstances, of a whole nation.—But as a rule we
nowadays begin art at the end, hang on to its tail, and think that works
of art constitute art proper, and that life should be improved and
transformed by this means—fools that we are! If we begin a dinner with
dessert, and try sweet after sweet, small wonder that we ruin our
digestions and even our appetites for the good, hearty, nourishing meal to
which art invites us!




175.


CONTINUED EXISTENCE OF ART.—Why, really, does a creative art nowadays
continue to exist? Because the majority who have hours of leisure (and
such an art is for them only) think that they cannot fill up their time
without music, theatres and picture-galleries, novels and poetry. Granted
that one could keep them from this indulgence, either they would strive
less eagerly for leisure, and the invidious sight of the rich would be
less common (a great gain for the stability of society), or they would
have leisure, but would learn to reflect on what can be learnt and
unlearnt: on their work, for instance, their associations, the pleasure
they could bestow. All the world, with the exception of the artist, would
in both cases reap the advantage.—Certainly, there are many vigorous,
sensible readers who could take objection to this. Still, it must be said
on behalf of the coarse and malignant that the author himself is concerned
with this protest, and that there is in his book much to be read that is
not actually written down therein.




176.


THE MOUTHPIECE OF THE GODS.—The poet expresses the universal higher
opinions of the nation, he is its mouthpiece and flute; but by virtue of
metre and all other artistic means he so expresses them that the nation
regards them as something quite new and wonderful, and believes in all
seriousness that he is the mouthpiece of the Gods. Yes, under the clouds
of creation the poet himself forgets whence he derives all his
intellectual wisdom—from father and mother, from teachers and books of all
kinds, from the street and particularly from the priest. He is deceived by
his own art, and really believes, in a naïve period, that a God is
speaking through him, that he is creating in a state of religious
inspiration. As a matter of fact, he is only saying what he has learnt, a
medley of popular wisdom and popular foolishness. Hence, so far as a poet
is really _vox populi_ he is held to be _vox dei_.




177.


WHAT ALL ART WANTS TO DO AND CANNOT.—The last and hardest task of the
artist is the presentment of what remains the same, reposes in itself, is
lofty and simple and free from the bizarre. Hence the noblest forms of
moral perfection are rejected as inartistic by weaker artists, because the
sight of these fruits is too painful for their ambition. The fruit gleams
at them from the topmost branches of art, but they lack the ladder, the
courage, the grip to venture so high. In himself a Phidias is quite
possible as a poet, but, if modern strength be taken into consideration,
almost solely in the sense that to God nothing is impossible. The desire
for a poetical Claude Lorrain is already an immodesty at present, however
earnestly one man’s heart may yearn for such a consummation.—The
presentment of the highest man, the most simple and at the same time the
most complete, has hitherto been beyond the scope of all artists. Perhaps,
however, the Greeks, in the ideal of Athene, saw farther than any men did
before or after their time.




178.


ART AND RESTORATION.—The retrograde movements in history, the so-called
periods of restoration, which try to revive intellectual and social
conditions that existed before those immediately preceding,—and seem
really to succeed in giving them a brief resurrection,—have the charm of
sentimental recollection, ardent longing for what is almost lost, hasty
embracing of a transitory happiness. It is on account of this strange
trend towards seriousness that in such transient and almost dreamy periods
art and poetry find a natural soil, just as the tenderest and rarest
plants grow on mountain-slopes of steep declivity.—Thus many a good artist
is unwittingly impelled to a “restoration” way of thinking in politics and
society, for which, on his own account, he prepares a quiet little corner
and garden. Here he collects about himself the human remains of the
historical epoch that appeals to him, and plays his lyre to many who are
dead, half-dead, and weary to death, perhaps with the above-mentioned
result of a brief resurrection.




179.


HAPPINESS OF THE AGE.—In two respects our age is to be accounted happy.
With respect to the _past_, we enjoy all cultures and their productions,
and nurture ourselves on the noblest blood of all periods. We stand
sufficiently near to the magic of the forces from whose womb these periods
are born to be able in passing to submit to their spell with pleasure and
terror; whereas earlier cultures could only enjoy themselves, and never
looked beyond themselves, but were rather overarched by a bell of broader
or narrower dome, through which indeed light streamed down to them, but
which their gaze could not pierce. With respect to the _future_, there
opens out to us for the first time a mighty, comprehensive vista of human
and economic purposes engirdling the whole inhabited globe. At the same
time, we feel conscious of a power ourselves to take this new task in hand
without presumption, without requiring supernatural aids. Yes, whatever
the result of our enterprise, however much we may have overestimated our
strength, at any rate we need render account to no one but ourselves, and
mankind can henceforth begin to do with itself what it will.—There are, it
is true, peculiar human bees, who only know how to suck the bitterest and
worst elements from the chalice of every flower. It is true that all
flowers contain something that is not honey, but these bees may be allowed
to feel in their own way about the happiness of our time, and continue to
build up their hive of discomfort.




180.


A VISION.—Hours of instruction and meditation for adults, even the most
mature, and such institutions visited without compulsion but in accordance
with the moral injunction of the whole community; the churches as the
meeting-places most worthy and rich in memories for the purpose; at the
same time daily festivals in honour of the reason that is attained and
attainable by man; a newer and fuller budding and blooming of the ideal of
the teacher, in which the clergyman, the artist and the physician, the man
of science and the sage are blended, and their individual virtues should
come to the fore as a collective virtue in their teaching itself, in their
discourses, in their method—this is my ever-recurring vision, of which I
firmly believe that it has raised a corner of the veil of the future.




181.


EDUCATION A DISTORTION.—The extraordinary haphazardness of the whole
system of education, which leads every adult to say nowadays that his sole
educator was chance, and the weathercock-nature of educational methods and
aims, may be explained as follows. The oldest and the newest
culture-powers, as in a turbulent mass-meeting, would rather be heard than
understood, and wish to prove at all costs by their outcries and
clamourings that they still exist or already exist. The poor teachers and
educators are first dazed by this senseless noise, then become silent and
finally apathetic, allowing anything to be done to them just as they in
their turn allow anything to be done to their pupils. They are not trained
themselves, so how are they to train others? They are themselves no
straight-growing, vigorous, succulent trees, and he who wishes to attach
himself to them must wind and bend himself and finally become distorted
and deformed as they.




182.


PHILOSOPHERS AND ARTISTS OF THE AGE.—Rhapsody and frigidity, burning
desires and waning of the heart’s glow—this wretched medley is to be found
in the picture of the highest European society of the present day. There
the artist thinks that he is achieving a great deal when through his art
he lights the torch of the heart as well as the torch of desire. The
philosopher has the same notion, when in the chilliness of his heart,
which he has in common with his age, he cools hot desires in himself and
his following by his world-denying judgments.




183.


NOT TO BE A SOLDIER OF CULTURE WITHOUT NECESSITY.—At last people are
learning what it costs us so dear not to know in our youth—that we must
first do superior actions and secondly seek the superior wherever and
under whatever names it is to be found; that we must at once go out of the
way of all badness and mediocrity _without fighting it_; and that even
doubt as to the excellence of a thing (such as quickly arises in one of
practised taste) should rank as an argument against it and a reason for
completely avoiding it. We must not shrink from the danger of occasionally
making a mistake and confounding the less accessible good with the bad and
imperfect. Only he who can do nothing better should attack the world’s
evils as the soldier of culture. But those who should support culture and
spread its teachings ruin themselves if they go about armed, and by
precautions, night-watches, and bad dreams turn the peace of their
domestic and artistic life into sinister unrest.




184.


HOW NATURAL HISTORY SHOULD BE EXPOUNDED.—Natural history, like the history
of the war and victory of moral and intellectual forces in the campaign
against anxiety, self-delusion, laziness, superstition, folly, should be
so expounded that every reader or listener may be continually aroused to
strive after mental and physical health and soundness, after the feeling
of joy, and be awakened to the desire to be the heir and continuator of
mankind, to an ever nobler adventurous impulse. Hitherto natural history
has not found its true language, because the inventive and eloquent
artists—who are needed for this purpose—never rid themselves of a secret
mistrust of it, and above all never wish to learn from it a thorough
lesson. Nevertheless it must be conceded to the English that their
scientific manuals for the lower strata of the people have made admirable
strides towards that ideal. But then such books are written by their
foremost men of learning, full, complete, and inspiring natures, and not,
as among us, by mediocre investigators.




185.


GENIUS IN HUMANITY.—If genius, according to Schopenhauer’s observation,
lies in the coherent and vivid recollection of our own experience, a
striving towards genius in humanity collectively might be deduced from the
striving towards knowledge of the whole historic past—which is beginning
to mark off the modern age more and more as compared with earlier ages and
has for the first time broken down the barriers between nature and spirit,
men and animals, morality and physics. A perfectly conceived history would
be cosmic self-consciousness.




186.


THE CULT OF CULTURE.—On great minds is bestowed the terrifying
all-too-human of their natures, their blindnesses, deformities, and
extravagances, so that their more powerful, easily all-too-powerful
influence may be continually held within bounds through the distrust
aroused by such qualities. For the sum-total of all that humanity needs
for its continued existence is so comprehensive, and demands powers so
diverse and so numerous, that for every one-sided predilection, whether in
science or politics or art or commerce, to which such natures would
persuade us, mankind as a whole has to pay a heavy price. It has always
been a great disaster to culture when human beings are worshipped. In this
sense we may understand the precept of Mosaic law which forbids us to have
any other gods but God.—Side by side with the cult of genius and violence
we must always place, as its complement and remedy, the cult of culture.
This cult can find an intelligent appreciation even for the material, the
inferior, the mean, the misunderstood, the weak, the imperfect, the
one-sided, the incomplete, the untrue, the apparent, even the wicked and
horrible, and can grant them the concession that _all this is necessary_.
For the continued harmony of all things human, attained by amazing toil
and strokes of luck, and just as much the work of Cyclopes and ants as of
geniuses, shall never be lost. How, indeed, could we dispense with that
deep, universal, and often uncanny bass, without which, after all, melody
cannot be melody?




187.


THE ANTIQUE WORLD AND PLEASURE.—The man of the antique world understood
better how to rejoice, we understand better how to grieve less. They
continually found new motives for feeling happy, for celebrating
festivals, being inventive with all their wealth of shrewdness and
reflection. We, on the other hand, concentrate our intellect rather on the
solving of problems which have in view painlessness and the removal of
sources of discomfort. With regard to suffering existence, the ancients
sought to forget or in some way to convert the sensation into a pleasant
one, thus trying to supply palliatives. We attack the causes of suffering,
and on the whole prefer to use prophylactics.—Perhaps we are only building
upon a foundation whereon a later age will once more set up the temple of
joy.




188.


THE MUSES AS LIARS.—“We know how to tell many lies,” so sang the Muses
once, when they revealed themselves to Hesiod.—The conception of the
artist as deceiver, once grasped, leads to important discoveries.




189.


HOW PARADOXICAL HOMER CAN BE.—Is there anything more desperate, more
horrible, more incredible, shining over human destiny like a winter sun,
than that idea of Homer’s:

“So the decree of the Gods willed it, and doomed man to perish, that it
might be a matter for song even to distant generations”?

In other words, we suffer and perish so that poets may not lack material,
and this is the dispensation of those very Gods of Homer who seem much
concerned about the joyousness of generations to come, but very little
about us men of the present. To think that such ideas should ever have
entered the head of a Greek!




190.


SUPPLEMENTARY JUSTIFICATION OF EXISTENCE.—Many ideas have come into the
world as errors and fancies but have turned out truths, because men have
afterwards given them a genuine basis to rest upon.




191.


PRO AND CON NECESSARY.—He who has not realised that every great man must
not only be encouraged but also, for the sake of the common welfare,
opposed, is certainly still a great child—or himself a great man.




192.


INJUSTICE OF GENIUS.—Genius is most unjust towards geniuses, if they be
contemporary. Either it thinks it has no need of them and considers them
superfluous (for it can do without them), or their influence crosses the
path of its electric current, in which case it even calls them pernicious.




193.


THE SADDEST DESTINY OF A PROPHET.—He has worked twenty years to convince
his contemporaries, and succeeds at last, but in the meantime his
adversaries have also succeeded—he is no longer convinced of himself.




194.


THREE THINKERS LIKE ONE SPIDER.—In every philosophical school three
thinkers follow one another in this relation: the first produces from
himself sap and seed, the second draws it out in threads and spins a
cunning web, the third waits in this web for the victims who are caught in
it—and tries to live upon this philosophy.




195.


FROM ASSOCIATION WITH AUTHORS.—It is as bad a habit to go about with an
author grasping him by the nose as grasping him by the horn (and every
author has his horn).




196.


A TEAM OF TWO.—Vagueness of thought and outbursts of sentimentality are as
often wedded to the reckless desire to have one’s own way by hook or by
crook, to make oneself alone of any consequence, as a genuinely helpful,
gracious, and kindly spirit is wedded to the impulse towards clearness and
purity of thought and towards emotional moderation and self-restraint.




197.


BINDING AND SEPARATING FORCES.—Surely it is in the heads of men that there
arises the force that binds them—an understanding of their common interest
or the reverse; and in their hearts the force that separates them—a blind
choosing and groping in love and hate, a devotion to one at the expense of
all, and a consequent contempt for the common utility.




198.


MARKSMEN AND THINKERS.—There are curious marksmen who miss their mark, but
leave the shooting-gallery with secret pride in the fact that their bullet
at any rate flew very far (beyond the mark, it is true), or that it did
not hit the mark but hit something else. There are thinkers of the same
stamp.




199.


ATTACK FROM TWO SIDES.—We act as enemies towards an intellectual tendency
or movement when we are superior to it and disapprove of its aim, or when
its aim is too high and unrecognisable to our eye—in other words, when it
is superior to us. So the same party may be attacked from two sides, from
above and from below. Not infrequently the assailants, from common hatred,
form an alliance which is more repulsive than all that they hate.




200.


ORIGINAL.—Original minds are distinguished not by being the first to see a
new thing, but by seeing the old, well-known thing, which is seen and
overlooked by every one, as something new. The first discoverer is usually
that quite ordinary and unintellectual visionary—chance.




201.


ERROR OF PHILOSOPHERS.—The philosopher believes that the value of his
philosophy lies in the whole, in the structure. Posterity finds it in the
stone with which he built and with which, from that time forth, men will
build oftener and better—in other words, in the fact that the structure
may be destroyed and yet have value as material.




202.


WIT.—Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.




203.


THE MOMENT BEFORE SOLUTION.—In science it occurs every day and every hour
that a man, immediately before the solution, remains stuck, being
convinced that his efforts have been entirely in vain—like one who, in
untying a noose, hesitates at the moment when it is nearest to coming
loose, because at that very moment it looks most like a knot.




204.


AMONG THE VISIONARIES.—The thoughtful man, and he who is sure of his
intelligence, may profitably consort with visionaries for a decade and
abandon himself in their torrid zone to a moderate insanity. He will thus
have travelled a good part of the road towards that cosmopolitanism of the
intellect which can say without presumption, “Nothing intellectual is
alien to me.”




205.


KEEN AIR.—The best and healthiest element in science as amid the mountains
is the keen air that plays about it.—Intellectual molly-coddles (such as
artists) dread and abuse science on account of this atmosphere.




206.


WHY SAVANTS ARE NOBLER THAN ARTISTS.—Science requires nobler natures than
does poetry; natures that are more simple, less ambitious, more
restrained, calmer, that think less of posthumous fame and can bury
themselves in studies which, in the eye of the many, scarcely seem worthy
of such a sacrifice of personality. There is another loss of which they
are conscious. The nature of their occupation, its continual exaction of
the greatest sobriety, weakens their will; the fire is not kept up so
vigorously as on the hearths of poetic minds. As such, they often lose
their strength and prime earlier than artists do—and, as has been said,
they are aware of their danger. Under all circumstances they seem less
gifted because they shine less, and thus they will always be rated below
their value.




207.


HOW FAR PIETY OBSCURES.—In later centuries the great man is credited with
all the great qualities and virtues of his century. Thus all that is best
is continually obscured by piety, which treats the picture as a sacred
one, to be surrounded with all manner of votive offerings. In the end the
picture is completely veiled and covered by the offerings, and thenceforth
is more an object of faith than of contemplation.




208.


STANDING ON ONE’S HEAD.—If we make truth stand on its head, we generally
fail to notice that our own head, too, is not in its right position.




209.


ORIGIN AND UTILITY OF FASHION.—The obvious satisfaction of the individual
with his own form excites imitation and gradually creates the form of the
many—that is, fashion. The many desire, and indeed attain, that same
comforting satisfaction with their own form. Consider how many reasons
every man has for anxiety and shy self-concealment, and how, on this
account, three-fourths of his energy and goodwill is crippled and may
become unproductive! So we must be very grateful to fashion for
unfettering that three-fourths and communicating self-confidence and the
power of cheerful compromise to those who feel themselves bound to each
other by its law. Even foolish laws give freedom and calm of the spirit,
so long as many persons have submitted to their sway.




210.


LOOSENERS OF TONGUES.—The value of many men and books rests solely on
their faculty for compelling all to speak out the most hidden and intimate
things. They are looseners of tongues and crowbars to open the most
stubborn teeth. Many events and misdeeds which are apparently only sent as
a curse to mankind possess this value and utility.




211.


INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM OF DOMICILE.(12)—Who of us could dare to call himself
a “free spirit” if he could not render homage after his fashion, by taking
on his own shoulders a portion of that burden of public dislike and abuse,
to men to whom this name is attached as a reproach? We might as well call
ourselves in all seriousness “spirits free of domicile” (_Freizügig_) (and
without that arrogant or high-spirited defiance) because we feel the
impulse to freedom (_Zug zur Freiheit_) as the strongest instinct of our
minds and, in contrast to fixed and limited minds, practically see our
ideal in an intellectual nomadism—to use a modest and almost depreciatory
expression.




212.


YES, THE FAVOUR OF THE MUSES!—What Homer says on this point goes right to
our heart, so true, so terrible is it:

“The Muse loved him with all her heart and gave him good and evil, for she
took away his eyes and vouchsafed him sweet song.”

This is an endless text for thinking men: she gives good and evil, that is
_her_ manner of loving with all her heart and soul! And each man will
interpret specially for himself why we poets and thinkers have to give up
our eyes in her service.(13)




213.


AGAINST THE CULTIVATION OF MUSIC.—The artistic training of the eye from
childhood upwards by means of drawing, painting, landscape-sketching,
figures, scenes, involves an estimable gain in life, making the eyesight
keen, calm, and enduring in the observation of men and circumstances. No
similar secondary advantage arises from the artistic cultivation of the
ear, whence public schools will generally do well to give the art of the
eye a preference over that of the ear.




214.


THE DISCOVERERS OF TRIVIALITIES.—Subtle minds, from which nothing is
farther than trivialities, often discover a triviality after taking all
manner of circuitous routes and mountain paths, and, to the astonishment
of the non-subtle, rejoice exceedingly.




215.


MORALS OF SAVANTS.—A regular and rapid advance in the sciences is only
possible when the individual is compelled to be not so distrustful as to
test every calculation and assertion of others, in fields which are remote
from his own. A necessary condition, however, is that every man should
have competitors in his own sphere, who are extremely distrustful and keep
a sharp eye upon him. From this juxtaposition of “not too distrustful” and
“extremely distrustful” arises sincerity in the republic of learning.




216.


REASONS FOR STERILITY.—There are highly gifted minds which are always
sterile only because, from temperamental weakness, they are too impatient
to wait for their pregnancy.




217.


THE PERVERTED WORLD OF TEARS.—The manifold discomforts which the demands
of higher culture cause to man finally pervert his nature to such an
extent that he usually keeps himself stoical and unbending. Thus he has
tears in reserve only for rare occasions of happiness, so that many must
weep even at the enjoyment of painlessness—only when happy does his heart
still beat.




218.


THE GREEKS AS INTERPRETERS.—When we speak of the Greeks we unwittingly
speak of to-day and yesterday; their universally known history is a blank
mirror, always reflecting something that is not in the mirror itself. We
enjoy the freedom of speaking about them in order to have the right of
being silent about others—so that these Greeks themselves may whisper
something in the ear of the reflective reader. Thus the Greeks facilitate
to modern men the communication of much that is debatable and hard to
communicate.




219.


OF THE ACQUIRED CHARACTER OF THE GREEKS.—We are easily led astray by the
renowned Greek clearness, transparency, simplicity, and order, by their
crystal-like naturalness and crystal-like art, into believing that all
these gifts were bestowed on the Greeks—for instance, that they could not
but write well, as Lichtenberg expressed it on one occasion. Yet no
statement could be more hasty and more untenable. The history of prose
from Gorgias to Demosthenes shows a course of toiling and wrestling
towards light from the obscure, overloaded, and tasteless, reminding one
of the labour of heroes who had to construct the first roads through
forest and bog. The dialogue of tragedy was the real achievement of the
dramatist, owing to its uncommon clearness and precision, whereas the
national tendency was to riot in symbolism and innuendo, a tendency
expressly fostered by the great choral lyric. Similarly it was the
achievement of Homer to liberate the Greeks from Asiatic pomp and gloom,
and to have attained the clearness of architecture in details great and
small. Nor was it by any means thought easy to say anything in a pure and
illuminating style. How else should we account for the great admiration
for the epigram of Simonides, which shows itself so simple, with no gilded
points or arabesques of wit, but says all that it has to say plainly and
with the calm of the sun, not with the straining after effect of the
lightning. Since the struggle towards light from an almost native twilight
is Greek, a thrill of jubilation runs through the people when they hear a
laconic sentence, the language of elegy or the maxims of the Seven Wise
Men. Hence they were so fond of giving precepts in verse, a practice that
we find objectionable. This was the true Apolline task of the Hellenic
spirit, with the aim of rising superior to the perils of metre and the
obscurity which is otherwise characteristic of poetry. Simplicity,
flexibility, and sobriety were wrestled for and not given by nature to
this people. The danger of a relapse into Asianism constantly hovered over
the Greeks, and really overtook them from time to time like a murky,
overflowing tide of mystical impulses, primitive savagery and darkness. We
see them plunge in; we see Europe, as it were, flooded, washed away—for
Europe was very small then; but they always emerge once more to the light,
good swimmers and divers that they are, those fellow-countrymen of
Odysseus.




220.


THE PAGAN CHARACTERISTIC.—Perhaps there is nothing more astonishing to the
observer of the Greek world than to discover that the Greeks from time to
time held festivals, as it were, for all their passions and evil
tendencies alike, and in fact even established a kind of series of
festivals, by order of the State, for their “all-too-human.” This is the
pagan characteristic of their world, which Christianity has never
understood and never can understand, and has always combated and
despised.—They accepted this all-too-human as unavoidable, and preferred,
instead of railing at it, to give it a kind of secondary right by grafting
it on to the usages of society and religion. All in man that has power
they called divine, and wrote it on the walls of their heaven. They do not
deny this natural instinct that expresses itself in evil characteristics,
but regulate and limit it to definite cults and days, so as to turn those
turbulent streams into as harmless a course as possible, after devising
sufficient precautionary measures. That is the root of all the moral
broad-mindedness of antiquity. To the wicked, the dubious, the backward,
the animal element, as to the barbaric, pre-Hellenic and Asiatic, which
still lived in the depths of Greek nature, they allowed a moderate
outflow, and did not strive to destroy it utterly. The whole system was
under the domain of the State, which was built up not on individuals or
castes, but on common human qualities. In the structure of the State the
Greeks show that wonderful sense for typical facts which later on enabled
them to become investigators of Nature, historians, geographers, and
philosophers. It was not a limited moral law of priests or castes, which
had to decide about the constitution of the State and State worship, but
the most comprehensive view of the reality of all that is human. Whence do
the Greeks derive this freedom, this sense of reality? Perhaps from Homer
and the poets who preceded him. For just those poets whose nature is
generally not the most wise or just possess, in compensation, that delight
in reality and activity of every kind, and prefer not to deny even evil.
It suffices for them if evil moderates itself, does not kill or inwardly
poison everything—in other words, they have similar ideas to those of the
founders of Greek constitutions, and were their teachers and forerunners.




221.


EXCEPTIONAL GREEKS.—In Greece, deep, thorough, serious minds were the
exception. The national instinct tended rather to regard the serious and
thorough as a kind of grimace. To borrow forms from a foreign source, not
to create but to transform into the fairest shapes—that is Greek. To
imitate, not for utility but for artistic illusion, ever and anon to gain
the mastery over forced seriousness, to arrange, beautify, simplify—that
is the continual task from Homer to the Sophists of the third and fourth
centuries of our era, who are all outward show, pompous speech,
declamatory gestures, and address themselves to shallow souls that care
only for appearance, sound, and effect. And now let us estimate the
greatness of those exceptional Greeks, who created science! Whoever tells
of them, tells the most heroic story of the human mind!




222.


SIMPLICITY NOT THE FIRST NOR THE LAST THING IN POINT OF TIME.—In the
history of religious ideas many errors about development and false
gradations are made in matters which in reality are not consecutive
outgrowths but contemporary yet separate phenomena. In particular,
simplicity has still far too much the reputation of being the oldest, the
initial thing. Much that is human arises by subtraction and division, and
not merely by doubling, addition, and unification.—For instance, men still
believe in a gradual development of the idea of God from those unwieldy
stones and blocks of wood up to the highest forms of anthropomorphism. Yet
the fact is that so long as divinity was attributed to and felt in trees,
logs of wood, stones, and beasts, people shrank from humanising their
forms as from an act of godlessness. First of all, poets, apart from all
considerations of cult and the ban of religious shame, have had to make
the inner imagination of man accustomed and compliant to this notion.
Wherever more pious periods and phases of thought gained the upper hand,
this liberating influence of poets fell into the background, and sanctity
remained, after as before, on the side of the monstrous, uncanny, quite
peculiarly inhuman. And then, much of what the inner imagination ventures
to picture to itself would exert a painful influence if externally and
corporeally represented. The inner eye is far bolder and more shameless
than the outer (whence the well-known difficulty and, to some extent,
impossibility, of working epic material into dramatic form). The religious
imagination for a long time entirely refuses to believe in the identity of
God with an image: the image is meant to fix the _numen_ of the Deity,
actually and specifically, although in a mysterious and not altogether
intelligible way. The oldest image of the Gods is meant to shelter and at
the same time to hide(14) the God—to indicate him but not to expose him to
view. No Greek really looked upon his Apollo as a pointed pillar of wood,
his Eros as a lump of stone. These were symbols, which were intended to
inspire dread of the manifestation of the God. It was the same with those
blocks of wood out of which individual limbs, generally in excessive
number, were fashioned with the scantiest of carving—as, for instance, a
Laconian Apollo with four hands and four ears. In the incomplete,
symbolical, or excessive lies a terrible sanctity, which is meant to
prevent us from thinking of anything human or similar to humanity. It is
not an embryonic stage of art in which such things are made—as if they
were not _able_ to speak more plainly and portray more sensibly in the age
when such images were honoured! Rather, men are afraid of just one
thing—direct speaking out. Just as the cella hides and conceals in a
mysterious twilight, yet not completely, the holy of holies, the real
_numen_ of the Deity; just as, again, the peripteric temple hides the
cella, protecting it from indiscreet eyes as with a screen and a veil, yet
not completely—so it is with the image of the Deity, and at the same time
the concealment of the Deity.—Only when outside the cult, in the profane
world of athletic contest, the joy in the victor had risen so high that
the ripples thus started reacted upon the lake of religious emotion, was
the statue of the victor set up before the temple. Then the pious pilgrim
had to accustom his eye and his soul, whether he would or no, to the
inevitable sight of human beauty and super-strength, so that the worship
of men and Gods melted into each other from physical and spiritual
contact. Then too for the first time the fear of really humanising the
figures of the Gods is lost, and the mighty arena for great plastic art is
opened—even now with the limitation that wherever there is to be adoration
the primitive form and ugliness are carefully preserved and copied. But
the Hellene, as he dedicates and makes offerings, may now with religious
sanction indulge in his delight in making God become a man.




223.


WHITHER WE MUST TRAVEL.—Immediate self-observation is not enough, by a
long way, to enable us to learn to know ourselves. We need history, for
the past continues to flow through us in a hundred channels. We ourselves
are, after all, nothing but our own sensation at every moment of this
continued flow. Even here, when we wish to step down into the stream of
our apparently most peculiar and personal development, Heraclitus’
aphorism, “You cannot step twice into the same river,” holds good.—This is
a piece of wisdom which has, indeed, gradually become trite, but
nevertheless has remained as strong and true as it ever was. It is the
same with the saying that, in order to understand history, we must
scrutinise the living remains of historical periods; that we must travel,
as old Herodotus travelled, to other nations, especially to those
so-called savage or half-savage races in regions where man has doffed or
not yet donned European garb. For they are ancient and firmly established
steps of culture on which we can stand. There is, however, a more subtle
art and aim in travelling, which does not always necessitate our passing
from place to place and going thousands of miles away. Very probably the
last three centuries, in all their colourings and refractions of culture,
survive even in our vicinity, only they have to be discovered. In some
families, or even in individuals, the strata are still superimposed on
each other, beautifully and perceptibly; in other places there are
dispersions and displacements of the structure which are harder to
understand. Certainly in remote districts, in less known mountain valleys,
circumscribed communities have been able more easily to maintain an
admirable pattern of a far older sentiment, a pattern that must here be
investigated. On the other hand, it is improbable that such discoveries
will be made in Berlin, where man comes into the world washed-out and
sapless. He who after long practice of this art of travel has become a
hundred-eyed Argus will accompany his Io—I mean his ego—everywhere, and in
Egypt and Greece, Byzantium and Rome, France and Germany, in the age of
wandering or settled races, in Renaissance or Reformation, at home and
abroad, in sea, forest, plant, and mountain, will again light upon the
travel-adventure of this ever-growing, ever-altered ego.—Thus
self-knowledge becomes universal knowledge as regards the entire past,
and, by another chain of observation, which can only be indicated here,
self-direction and self-training in the freest and most far-seeing spirits
might become universal direction as regards all future humanity.




224.


BALM AND POISON.—We cannot ponder too deeply on this fact: Christianity is
the religion of antiquity grown old; it presupposes degenerate old
culture-stocks, and on them it had, and still has, power to work like
balm. There are periods when ears and eyes are full of slime, so that they
can no longer hear the voice of reason and philosophy or see the wisdom
that walks in bodily shape, whether it bears the name of Epictetus or of
Epicurus. Then, perhaps, the erection of the martyr’s cross and the
“trumpet of the last judgment” may have the effect of still inspiring such
races to end their lives decently. If we think of Juvenal’s Rome, of that
poisonous toad with the eyes of Venus, we understand what it means to make
the sign of the Cross before the world, we honour the silent Christian
community and are grateful for its having stifled the Greco-Roman Empire.
If, indeed, most men were then born in spiritual slavery, with the
sensuality of old men, what a pleasure to meet beings who were more soul
than body, and who seemed to realise the Greek idea of the shades of the
under-world—shy, scurrying, chirping, kindly creatures, with a reversion
on the “better life,” and therefore so unassuming, so secretly scornful,
so proudly patient!—This Christianity, as the evening chime of the _good_
antiquity, with cracked, weary and yet melodious bell, is balm in the ears
even to one who only now traverses those centuries historically. What must
it have been to those men themselves!—To young and fresh barbarian
nations, on the other hand, Christianity is a poison. For to implant the
teaching of sinfulness and damnation in the heroic, childlike, and animal
soul of the old Germans is nothing but poisoning. An enormous chemical
fermentation and decomposition, a medley of sentiments and judgments, a
rank growth of adventurous legend, and hence in the long run a fundamental
weakening of such barbarian peoples, was the inevitable result. True,
without this weakening what should we have left of Greek culture, of the
whole cultured past of the human race? For the barbarians untouched by
Christianity knew very well how to make a clean sweep of old cultures, as
was only too clearly shown by the heathen conquerors of Romanised Britain.
Thus Christianity, against its will, was compelled to aid in making “the
antique world” immortal.—There remains, however, a counter-question and
the possibility of a counter-reckoning. Without this weakening through the
poisoning referred to, would any of those fresh stocks—the Germans, for
instance—have been in a position gradually to find by themselves a higher,
a peculiar, a new culture, of which the most distant conception would
therefore have been lost to humanity?—In this, as in every case, we do not
know, Christianly speaking, whether God owes the devil or the devil God
more thanks for everything having turned out as it has.




225.


FAITH MAKES HOLY AND CONDEMNS.—A Christian who happened upon forbidden
paths of thought might well ask himself on some occasion whether it is
really necessary that there should be a God, side by side with a
representative Lamb, if faith in the existence of these beings suffices to
produce the same influences? If they do exist after all, are they not
superfluous beings? For all that is given by the Christian religion to the
human soul, all that is beneficent, consoling, and edifying, just as much
as all that depresses and crushes, emanates from that faith and not from
the objects of that faith. It is here as in another well-known case—there
were indeed no witches, but the terrible effects of the belief in witches
were the same as if they really had existed. For all occasions where the
Christian awaits the immediate intervention of a God, though in vain (for
there is no God), his religion is inventive enough to find subterfuges and
reasons for tranquillity. In so far Christianity is an ingenious
religion.—Faith, indeed, has up to the present not been able to move real
mountains, although I do not know who assumed that it could. But it can
put mountains where there are none.




226.


THE TRAGI-COMEDY OF REGENSBURG.—Here and there we see with terrible
clearness the harlequinade of Fortune, how she fastens the rope, on which
she wills that succeeding centuries should dance, on to a few days, one
place, the condition and opinions of one brain. Thus the fate of modern
German history lies in the days of that disputation at Regensburg: the
peaceful settlement of ecclesiastical and moral affairs, without religious
wars or a counter-reformation, and also the unity of the German nation,
seemed assured: the deep, gentle spirit of Contarini hovered for one
moment over the theological squabble, victorious, as representative of the
riper Italian piety, reflecting the morning glory of intellectual freedom.
But Luther’s hard head, full of suspicions and strange misgivings, showed
resistance. Because justification by grace appeared to him _his_ greatest
motto and discovery, he did not believe the phrase in the mouth of
Italians; whereas, in point of fact, as is well known, they had invented
it much earlier and spread it throughout Italy in deep silence. In this
apparent agreement Luther saw the tricks of the devil, and hindered the
work of peace as well as he could, thereby advancing to a great extent the
aims of the Empire’s foes.—And now, in order to have a still stronger idea
of the dreadful farcicality of it all, let us add that none of the
principles about which men then disputed in Regensburg—neither that of
original sin, nor that of redemption by proxy, nor that of justification
by faith—is in any way true or even has any connection with truth: that
they are now all recognised as incapable of being discussed. Yet on this
account the world was set on fire—that is to say, by opinions which
correspond to no things or realities; whereas as regards purely
philological questions—as, for instance, that of the sacramental words in
the Eucharist—discussion at any rate is permitted, because in this case
the truth can be said. But “where nothing is, even truth has lost her
right.”(15)—Lastly, it only remains to be said that it is true these
principles give rise to sources of power so mighty that without them all
the mills of the modern world could not be driven with such force. And it
is primarily a matter of force, only secondarily of truth (and perhaps not
even secondarily)—is it not so, my dear up-to-date friends?




227.


GOETHE’S ERRORS.—Goethe is a signal exception among great artists in that
he did not live within the limited confines of his real capacity, as if
that must be the essential, the distinctive, the unconditional, and the
last thing in him and for all the world. Twice he intended to possess
something higher than he really possessed—and went astray in the second
half of his life, where he seems quite convinced that he is one of the
great scientific discoverers and illuminators. So too in the first half of
his life he demanded of himself something higher than the poetic art
seemed to him—and here already he made a mistake. That nature wished to
make him a plastic artist,—_this_ was his inwardly glowing and scorching
secret, which finally drove him to Italy, that he might give vent to his
mania in this direction and make to it every possible sacrifice. At last,
shrewd as he was, and honestly averse to any mental perversion in himself,
he discovered that a tricksy elf of desire had attracted him to the belief
in this calling, and that he must free himself of the greatest passion of
his heart and bid it farewell. The painful conviction, tearing and gnawing
at his vitals, that it was necessary to bid farewell, finds full
expression in the character of Tasso. Over Tasso, that Werther
intensified, hovers the premonition of something worse than death, as when
one says: “Now it is over, after this farewell: how shall I go on living
without going mad?” These two fundamental errors of his life gave Goethe,
in face of a purely literary attitude towards poetry (the only attitude
then known to the world), such an unembarrassed and apparently almost
arbitrary position. Not to speak of the period when Schiller (poor
Schiller, who had no time himself and left no time to others) drove away
his shy dread of poetry, his fear of all literary life and craftsmanship,
Goethe appears like a Greek who now and then visits his beloved, doubting
whether she be not a Goddess to whom he can give no proper name. In all
his poetry one notices the inspiring neighbourhood of plastic art and
Nature. The features of these figures that floated before him—and perhaps
he always thought he was on the track of the metamorphoses of one
Goddess—became, without his will or knowledge, the features of all the
children of his art. Without the extravagances of error he would not have
been Goethe—that is, the only German artist in writing who has not yet
become out of date—just because he desired as little to be a writer as a
German by vocation.




228.


TRAVELLERS AND THEIR GRADES.—Among travellers we may distinguish five
grades. The first and lowest grade is of those who travel and are
seen—they become really travelled and are, as it were, blind. Next come
those who really see the world. The third class experience the results of
their seeing. The fourth weave their experience into their life and carry
it with them henceforth. Lastly, there are some men of the highest
strength who, as soon as they have returned home, must finally and
necessarily work out in their lives and productions all the things seen
that they have experienced and incorporated in themselves.—Like these five
species of travellers, all mankind goes through the whole pilgrimage of
life, the lowest as purely passive, the highest as those who act and live
out their lives without keeping back any residue of inner experiences.




229.


IN CLIMBING HIGHER.—So soon as we climb higher than those who hitherto
admired us, we appear to them as sunken and fallen. For they imagined that
under all circumstances they were on the heights in our company (maybe
also through our agency).




230.


MEASURE AND MODERATION.—Of two quite lofty things, measure and moderation,
it is best never to speak. A few know their force and significance, from
the mysterious paths of inner experiences and conversions: they honour in
them something quite godlike, and are afraid to speak aloud. All the rest
hardly listen when they are spoken about, and think the subjects under
discussion are tedium and mediocrity. We must perhaps except those who
have once heard a warning note from that realm but have stopped their ears
against the sound. The recollection of it makes them angry and
exasperated.




231.


HUMANITY OF FRIENDSHIP AND COMRADESHIP.—“If thou wilt take the left hand,
then I will go to the right,”(16) that feeling is the hall-mark of
humanity in intimate intercourse, and without that feeling every
friendship, every band of apostles or disciples, sooner or later becomes a
fraud.




232.


THE PROFOUND.—Men of profound thought appear to themselves in intercourse
with others like comedians, for in order to be understood they must always
simulate superficiality.




233.


FOR THE SCORNERS OF “HERD-HUMANITY.”—He who regards human beings as a
herd, and flies from them as fast as he can, will certainly be caught up
by them and gored upon their horns.




234.


THE MAIN TRANSGRESSION AGAINST THE VAIN.—In society, he who gives another
an opportunity of favourably setting forth his knowledge, sentiments, and
experience sets himself above him. Unless he is felt by the other to be a
superior being without limitation, he is guilty of an attack upon his
vanity, while what he aimed at was the gratification of the other man’s
vanity.




235.


DISAPPOINTMENT.—When a long life of action distinguished by speeches and
writings gives publicity to a man’s personality, personal intercourse with
him is generally disappointing on two grounds. Firstly, one expects too
much from a brief period of intercourse (namely, all that the thousand and
one opportunities of life can alone bring out). Secondly, no recognised
person gives himself the trouble to woo recognition in individual cases.
He is too careless, and we are at too high a tension.




236.


TWO SOURCES OF KINDNESS.—To treat all men with equal good-humour, and to
be kind without distinction of persons, may arise as much from a profound
contempt for mankind as from an ingrained love of humanity.




237.


THE WANDERER IN THE MOUNTAINS TO HIMSELF.—There are certain signs that you
have gone farther and higher. There is a freer, wider prospect before you,
the air blows cooler yet milder in your face (you have unlearned the folly
of confounding mildness with warmth), your gait is more firm and vigorous,
courage and discretion have waxed together. On all these grounds your
journey may now be more lonely and in any case more perilous than
heretofore, if indeed not to the extent believed by those who from the
misty valley see you, the roamer, striding on the mountains.




238.


WITH THE EXCEPTION OF OUR NEIGHBOUR.—I admit that my head is set wrong on
my neck only, for every other man, as is well known, knows better than I
what I should do or leave alone. The only one who cannot help me is
myself, poor beggar! Are we not all like statues on which false heads have
been placed? Eh, dear neighbour?—Ah no; you, just you, are the exception!




239.


CAUTION.—We must either not go about at all with people who are lacking in
the reverence for personalities, or inexorably fetter them beforehand with
the manacles of convention.




240.


THE WISH TO APPEAR VAIN.—In conversation with strangers or little-known
acquaintances, to express only selected thoughts, to speak of one’s famous
acquaintances, and important experiences and travels, is a sign that one
is not proud, or at least would not like to appear proud. Vanity is the
polite mask of pride.




241.


GOOD FRIENDSHIP.—A good friendship arises when the one man deeply respects
the other, more even than himself; loves him also, though not so much as
himself; and finally, to facilitate intercourse, knows how to add the
delicate bloom and veneer of intimacy, but at the same time wisely
refrains from a true, real intimacy, from the confounding of _meum_ and
_tuum_.




242.


FRIENDS AS GHOSTS.—If we change ourselves vitally, our friends, who have
not changed, become ghosts of our own past: their voice sounds shadowy and
dreadful to us, as if we heard our own voice speaking, but younger,
harder, less mellow.




243.


ONE EYE AND TWO GLANCES.—The same people whose eyes naturally plead for
favours and indulgences are accustomed, from their frequent humiliations
and cravings for revenge, to assume a shameless glance as well.




244.


THE HAZE OF DISTANCE.—A child throughout life—that sounds very touching,
but is only the verdict from the distance. Seen and known close at hand,
he is always called “puerile throughout life.”




245.


ADVANTAGE AND DISADVANTAGE IN THE SAME MISUNDERSTANDING.—The mute
perplexity of the subtle brain is usually understood by the non-subtle as
a silent superiority, and is much dreaded whereas the perception of
perplexity would produce good will.




246.


THE SAGE GIVING HIMSELF OUT TO BE A FOOL.—The philanthropy of the sage
sometimes makes him decide to pretend to be excited, enraged, or
delighted, so that he may not hurt his surroundings by the coldness and
rationality of his true nature.




247.


FORCING ONESELF TO ATTENTION.—So soon as we note that any one in
intercourse and conversation with us has to force himself to attention, we
have adequate evidence that he loves us not, or loves us no longer.




248.


THE WAY TO A CHRISTIAN VIRTUE.—Learning from one’s enemies is the best way
to love them, for it inspires us with a grateful mood towards them.




249.


STRATAGEM OF THE IMPORTUNATE.—The importunate man gives us gold coins as
change for our convention coins, and thereby tries to force us afterwards
to treat our convention as an oversight and him as an exception.




250.


REASON FOR DISLIKE.—We become hostile to many an artist or writer, not
because we notice in the end that he has duped us, but because he did not
find more subtle means necessary to entrap us.




251.


IN PARTING.—Not by the way one soul approaches another, but by the way it
separates, do I recognise its relationship and homogeneity with the other.




252.


SILENTIUM.—We must not speak about our friends, or we renounce the
sentiment of friendship.




253.


IMPOLITENESS.—Impoliteness is often the sign of a clumsy modesty, which
when taken by surprise loses its head and would fain hide the fact by
means of rudeness.




254.


HONESTY’S MISCALCULATION.—Our newest acquaintances are sometimes the first
to learn what we have hitherto kept dark. We have the foolish notion that
our proof of confidence is the strongest fetter wherewith to hold them
fast. But _they_ do not know enough about us to feel so strongly the
sacrifice involved in our speaking out, and betray our secrets to others
without any idea of betrayal. Hereby we possibly lose our old friends.




255.


IN THE ANTE-CHAMBER OF FAVOUR.—All men whom we let stand long in the
ante-chamber of our favour get into a state of fermentation or become
bitter.




256.


WARNING TO THE DESPISED.—When we have sunk unmistakably in the estimation
of mankind we should cling tooth and nail to modesty in intercourse, or we
shall betray to others that we have sunk in our own estimation as well.
Cynicism in intercourse is a sign that a man, when alone, treats himself
too as a dog.




257.


IGNORANCE OFTEN ENNOBLES.—With regard to the respect of those who pay
respect, it is an advantage ostensibly not to understand certain things.
Ignorance, too, confers privileges.




258.


THE OPPONENT OF GRACE.—The impatient and arrogant man does not care for
grace, feeling it to be a corporeal, visible reproach against himself. For
grace is heartfelt toleration in movement and gesture.




259.


ON SEEING AGAIN.—When old friends see each other again after a long
separation, it often happens that they affect an interest in matters to
which they have long since become indifferent. Sometimes both remark this,
but dare not raise the veil—from a mournful doubt. Hence arise
conversations as in the realm of the dead.




260.


MAKING FRIENDS ONLY WITH THE INDUSTRIOUS.—The man of leisure is dangerous
to his friends, for, having nothing to do, he talks of what his friends
are doing or not doing, interferes, and finally makes himself a nuisance.
The clever man will only make friends with the industrious.




261.


ONE WEAPON TWICE AS MUCH AS TWO.—It is an unequal combat when one man
defends his cause with head and heart, the other with head alone. The
first has sun and wind against him, as it were, and his two weapons
interfere with each other: he loses the prize—in the eyes of truth. True,
the victory of the second, with his one weapon, is seldom a victory after
the hearts of all the other spectators, and makes him unpopular.




262.


DEPTH AND TROUBLED WATERS.—The public easily confounds him who fishes in
troubled waters with him who pumps up from the depths.




263.


DEMONSTRATING ONE’S VANITY TO FRIEND AND FOE.—Many a man, from vanity,
maltreats even his friends, when in the presence of witnesses to whom he
wishes to make his own preponderance clear. Others exaggerate the merits
of their enemies, in order to point proudly to the fact that they are
worthy of such foes.




264.


COOLING OFF.—The over-heating of the heart is generally allied with
illness of the head and judgment. He who is concerned for a time with the
health of his head must know what he has to cool, careless of the future
of his heart. For if we are capable at all of giving warmth, we are sure
to become warm again and then have our summer.




265.


MINGLED FEELINGS.—Towards science women and self-seeking artists entertain
a feeling that is composed of envy and sentimentality.




266.


WHERE DANGER IS GREATEST.—We seldom break our leg so long as life
continues a toilsome upward climb. The danger comes when we begin to take
things easily and choose the convenient paths.




267.


NOT TOO EARLY.—We must beware of becoming sharp too early, or we shall
also become thin too early.




268.


JOY IN REFRACTORINESS.—The good teacher knows cases where he is proud that
his pupil remains true to himself in opposition to him—at times when the
youth must not understand the man or would be harmed by understanding him.




269.


THE EXPERIMENT OF HONESTY.—Young men, who wish to be more honest than they
have been, seek as victim some one acknowledged to be honest, attacking
him first with an attempt to reach his height by abuse—with the underlying
notion that this first experiment at any rate is void of danger. For just
such a one has no right to chastise the impudence of the honest man.




270.


THE ETERNAL CHILD.—We think, short-sighted that we are, that fairy-tales
and games belong to childhood. As if at any age we should care to live
without fairy-tales and games! Our words and sentiments are indeed
different, but the essential fact remains the same, as is proved by the
child himself looking on games as his work and fairy-tales as his truth.
The shortness of life ought to preserve us from a pedantic distinction
between the different ages—as if every age brought something new—and a
poet ought one day to portray a man of two hundred, who really lives
without fairy-tales and games.




271.


EVERY PHILOSOPHY IS THE PHILOSOPHY OF A PERIOD OF LIFE.—The period of life
in which a philosopher finds his teaching is manifested by his teaching;
he cannot avoid that, however elevated above time and hour he may feel
himself. Thus, Schopenhauer’s philosophy remains a mirror of his hot and
melancholy youth—it is no mode of thought for older men. Plato’s
philosophy reminds one of the middle thirties, when a warm and a cold
current generally rush together, so that spray and delicate clouds and,
under favourable circumstances and glimpses of sunshine, enchanting
rainbow-pictures result.




272.


OF THE INTELLECT OF WOMEN.—The intellectual strength of a woman is best
proved by the fact that she offers her own intellect as a sacrifice out of
love for a man and his intellect, and that nevertheless in the new domain,
which was previously foreign to her nature, a second intellect at once
arises as an aftergrowth, to which the man’s mind impels her.




273.


RAISING AND LOWERING IN THE SEXUAL DOMAIN.—The storm of desire will
sometimes carry a man up to a height where all desire is silenced, where
he really loves and lives in a better state of being rather than in a
better state of choice. On the other hand, a good woman, from true love,
often climbs down to desire, and lowers herself in her own eyes. The
latter action in particular is one of the most pathetic sensations which
the idea of a good marriage can involve.




274.


MAN PROMISES, WOMAN FULFILS.—By woman Nature shows how far she has
hitherto achieved her task of fashioning humanity, by man she shows what
she has had to overcome and what she still proposes to do for
humanity.—The most perfect woman of every age is the holiday-task of the
Creator on every seventh day of culture, the recreation of the artist from
his work.




275.


TRANSPLANTING.—If we have spent our intellect in order to gain mastery
over the intemperance of the passions, the sad result often follows that
we transfer the intemperance to the intellect, and from that time forth
are extravagant in thought and desire of knowledge.




276.


LAUGHTER AS TREACHERY.—How and when a woman laughs is a sign of her
culture, but in the ring of laughter her nature reveals itself, and in
highly cultured women perhaps even the last insoluble residue of their
nature. Hence the psychologist will say with Horace, though from different
reasons: “Ridete puellae.”




277.


FROM THE YOUTHFUL SOUL.—Youths varyingly show devotion and impudence
towards the same person, because at bottom they only despise or admire
themselves in that other person, and between the two feelings but stagger
to and fro in themselves, so long as they have not found in experience the
measure of their will and ability.




278.


FOR THE AMELIORATION OF THE WORLD.—If we forbade the discontented, the
sullen, and the atrabilious to propagate, we might transform the world
into a garden of happiness.—This aphorism belongs to a practical
philosophy for the female sex.




279.


NOT TO DISTRUST YOUR EMOTIONS.—The feminine phrase “Do not distrust your
emotions” does not mean much more than “Eat what tastes good to you.” This
may also, especially for moderate natures, be a good everyday rule. But
other natures must live according to another maxim: “You must eat not only
with your mouth but also with your brain, in order that the greediness of
your mouth may not prove your undoing.”




280.


A CRUEL FANCY OF LOVE.—Every great love involves the cruel thought of
killing the object of love, so that it may be removed once for all from
the mischievous play of change. For love is more afraid of change than of
destruction.




281.


DOORS.—In everything that is learnt or experienced, the child, just like
the man, sees doors; but for the former they are places to go _to_, for
the latter to go _through_.




282.


SYMPATHETIC WOMEN.—The sympathy of women, which is talkative, takes the
sick-bed to market.




283.


EARLY MERIT.—He who acquires merit early in life tends to forget all
reverence for age and old people, and accordingly, greatly to his
disadvantage, excludes himself from the society of the mature, those who
confer maturity. Thus in spite of his early merit he remains green,
importunate, and boyish longer than others.




284.


SOULS ALL OF A PIECE.—Women and artists think that where we do not
contradict them we cannot. Reverence on ten counts and silent disapproval
on ten others appears to them an impossible combination, because their
souls are all of a piece.




285.


YOUNG TALENTS.—With respect to young talents we must strictly follow
Goethe’s maxim, that we should often avoid harming error in order to avoid
harming truth. Their condition is like the diseases of pregnancy, and
involves strange appetites. These appetites should be satisfied and
humoured as far as possible, for the sake of the fruit they may be
expected to produce. It is true that, as nurse of these remarkable
invalids, one must learn the difficult art of voluntary self-abasement.




286.


DISGUST WITH TRUTH.—Women are so constituted that all truth (in relation
to men, love, children, society, aim of life) disgusts them—and that they
try to be revenged on every one who opens their eyes.




287.


THE SOURCE OF GREAT LOVE.—Whence arises the sudden passion of a man for a
woman, a passion so deep, so vital? Least of all from sensuality only: but
when a man finds weakness, need of help, and high spirits united in the
same creature, he suffers a sort of overflowing of soul, and is touched
and offended at the same moment. At this point arises the source of great
love.




288.


CLEANLINESS.—In the child, the sense for cleanliness should be fanned into
a passion, and then later on he will raise himself, in ever new phases, to
almost every virtue, and will finally appear, in compensation for all
talent, as a shining cloud of purity, temperance, gentleness, and
character, happy in himself and spreading happiness around.




289.


OF VAIN OLD MEN.—Profundity of thought belongs to youth, clarity of
thought to old age. When, in spite of this, old men sometimes speak and
write in the manner of the profound, they do so from vanity, imagining
that they thereby assume the charm of juvenility, enthusiasm, growth,
apprehensiveness, hopefulness.




290.


ENJOYMENT OF NOVELTY.—Men use a new lesson or experience later on as a
ploughshare or perhaps also as a weapon, women at once make it into an
ornament.




291.


HOW BOTH SEXES BEHAVE WHEN IN THE RIGHT.—If it is conceded to a woman that
she is right, she cannot deny herself the triumph of setting her heel on
the neck of the vanquished; she must taste her victory to the full. On the
other hand, man towards man in such a case is ashamed of being right. But
then man is accustomed to victory; with woman it is an exception.




292.


ABNEGATION IN THE WILL TO BEAUTY.—In order to become beautiful, a woman
must not desire to be considered pretty. That is to say, in ninety-nine
out of a hundred cases where she could please she must scorn and put aside
all thoughts of pleasing. Only then can she ever reap the delight of him
whose soul’s portal is wide enough to admit the great.




293.


UNINTELLIGIBLE, UNENDURABLE.—A youth cannot understand that an old man has
also had his delights, his dawns of feeling, his changings and soarings of
thought. It offends him to think that such things have existed before. But
it makes him very bitter to hear that, to become fruitful, he must lose
those buds and dispense with their fragrance.




294.


THE PARTY WITH THE AIR OF MARTYRDOM.—Every party that can assume an air of
martyrdom wins good-natured souls over to its side and thereby itself
acquires an air of good nature—greatly to its advantage.




295.


ASSERTIONS SURER THAN ARGUMENTS.—An assertion has, with the majority of
men at any rate, more effect than an argument, for arguments provoke
mistrust. Hence demagogues seek to strengthen the arguments of their party
by assertions.




296.


THE BEST CONCEALERS.—All regularly successful men are profoundly cunning
in making their faults and weaknesses look like manifestations of
strength. This proves that they must know their defects uncommonly well.




297.


FROM TIME TO TIME.—He sat in the city gateway and said to one who passed
through that this was the city gate. The latter replied that this was
true, but that one must not be too much in the right if one expected to be
thanked for it. “Oh,” answered the other, “I don’t want thanks, but from
time to time it is very pleasant not merely to be in the right but to
remain in the right.”




298.


VIRTUE WAS NOT INVENTED BY THE GERMANS.—Goethe’s nobleness and freedom
from envy, Beethoven’s fine hermitical resignation, Mozart’s cheerfulness
and grace of heart, Handel’s unbending manliness and freedom under the
law, Bach’s confident and luminous inner life, such as does not even need
to renounce glamour and success—are these qualities peculiarly German?—If
they are not, they at least prove to what goal Germans should strive and
to what they can attain.




299.


_PIA FRAUS_ OR SOMETHING ELSE.—I hope I am mistaken, but I think that in
Germany of to-day a twofold sort of hypocrisy is set up as the duty of the
moment for every one. From imperial-political misgivings Germanism is
demanded, and from social apprehensions Christianity—but both only in
words and gestures, and particularly in ability to keep silent. It is the
veneer that nowadays costs so much and is paid for so highly; and for the
benefit of the spectators the face of the nation assumes German and
Christian wrinkles.




300.


HOW FAR EVEN IN THE GOOD THE HALF MAY BE MORE THAN THE WHOLE.—In all
things that are constructed to last and demand the service of many hands,
much that is less good must be made a rule, although the organiser knows
what is better and harder very well. He will calculate that there will
never be a lack of persons who _can_ correspond to the rule, and he knows
that the middling good is the rule.—The youth seldom sees this point, and
as an innovator thinks how marvellously he is in the right and how strange
is the blindness of others.




301.


THE PARTISAN.—The true partisan learns nothing more, he only experiences
and judges. It is significant that Solon, who was never a partisan but
pursued his aims above and apart from parties or even against them, was
the father of that simple phrase wherein lies the secret of the health and
vitality of Athens: “I grow old, but I am always learning.”




302.


WHAT IS GERMAN ACCORDING TO GOETHE.—They are really intolerable people of
whom one cannot even accept the good, who have freedom of disposition but
do not remark that they are lacking in freedom of taste and spirit. Yet
just this, according to Goethe’s well-weighed judgment, is German.—His
voice and his example indicate that the German should be more than a
German if he wishes to be useful or even endurable to other nations—and
which direction his striving should take, in order that he may rise above
and beyond himself.




303.


WHEN IT IS NECESSARY TO REMAIN STATIONARY.—When the masses begin to rage,
and reason is under a cloud, it is a good thing, if the health of one’s
soul is not quite assured, to go under a doorway and look out to see what
the weather is like.




304.


THE REVOLUTION-SPIRIT AND THE POSSESSION-SPIRIT.—The only remedy against
Socialism that still lies in your power is to avoid provoking Socialism—in
other words, to live in moderation and contentment, to prevent as far as
possible all lavish display, and to aid the State as far as possible in
its taxing of all superfluities and luxuries. You do not like this remedy?
Then, you rich bourgeois who call yourselves “Liberals,” confess that it
is your own inclination that you find so terrible and menacing in
Socialists, but allow to prevail in yourselves as unavoidable, as if with
you it were something different. As you are constituted, if you had not
your fortune and the cares of maintaining it, this bent of yours would
make Socialists of you. Possession alone differentiates you from them. If
you wish to conquer the assailants of your prosperity, you must first
conquer yourselves.—And if that prosperity only meant well-being, it would
not be so external and provocative of envy; it would be more generous,
more benevolent, more compensatory, more helpful. But the spurious,
histrionic element in your pleasures, which lie more in the feeling of
contrast (because others have them not, and feel envious) than in feelings
of realised and heightened power—your houses, dresses, carriages, shops,
the demands of your palates and your tables, your noisy operatic and
musical enthusiasm; lastly your women, formed and fashioned but of base
metal, gilded but without the ring of gold, chosen by you for show and
considering themselves meant for show—these are the things that spread the
poison of that national disease, which seizes the masses ever more and
more as a Socialistic heart-itch, but has its origin and breeding-place in
you. Who shall now arrest this epidemic?




305.


PARTY TACTICS.—When a party observes that a previous member has changed
from an unqualified to a qualified adherent, it endures it so ill that it
irritates and mortifies him in every possible way with the object of
forcing him to a decisive break and making him an opponent. For the party
suspects that the intention of finding a relative value in its faith, a
value which admits of pro and con, of weighing and discarding, is more
dangerous than downright opposition.




306.


FOR THE STRENGTHENING OF PARTIES.—Whoever wishes to strengthen a party
internally should give it an opportunity of being forcibly treated with
obvious injustice. The party thus acquires a capital of good conscience,
which hitherto it perh

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/37841