No More Learning

There could be a kind of historical writing that
had no drop of common fact in it and yet could
claim to be called in the highest degree objective.
Grillparzer goes so far as to say that "history is
nothing but the manner in which the spirit of man
apprehends facts that are obscure to him, links
things together whose connection heaven only
knows, replaces the unintelligible by something
intelligible, puts his own ideas of causation into
the external world, which can perhaps be explained
only from within: and assumes the existence of
chance, where thousands of small causes may be
really at work. Each man has his own individual
needs, and so millions of tendencies are running
together, straight or crooked, parallel or across,
forward or backward, helping or hindering each
other. They have all the appearance of chance,
and make it impossible, quite apart from all natural
influences, to establish any universal lines on which
past events must have run. " But as a result of this
so-called " objective " way of looking at things, such
a "must" ought to be made clear. It is a pre-
sumption that takes a curious form if adopted
by the historian as a dogma. Schiller is quite
clear about its truly subjective nature when he
says of the historian, "one event after the other
begins to draw away from blind chance and lawless
freedom, and take its place as the member of an
harmonious whole—which is of course only apparent
in its presentation! ' But what is one to think of the
innocent statement, wavering between tautology and


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THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 53
nonsense, of a famous historical virtuoso? "It seems
that all human actions and impulses are subordinate
to the process of the material world, that works un-
noticed, powerfully and irresistibly. " In such a
sentence one no longer finds obscure wisdom in the
form of obvious folly; as in the saying of Goethe's
gardener, "Nature may be forced but not com-
pelled," or in the notice on the side-show at a fair,
in Swift: "The largest elephant in the world, except
himself, to be seen here. " For what opposition is
there between human action and the process of the
world? It seems to me that such historians cease
to be instructive as soon as they begin to generalise;
their weakness is shown by their obscurity. In other
sciences the generalisations are the most important
things, as they contain the laws. But if such
generalisations as these are to stand as laws, the
historian's labour is lost; for the residue of truth,
after the obscure and insoluble part is removed,
is nothing but the commonest knowledge. The
smallest range of experience will teach it. But
to worry whole peoples for the purpose, and spend
many hard years of work on it, is like crowding one
scientific experiment on another long after the law
can be deduced from the results already obtained:
and this absurd excess of experiment has been the
bane of all natural science since Zollner. If the
value of a drama lay merely in its final scene, the
drama itself would be a very long, crooked and
laborious road to the goal: and I hope history will
not find its whole significance in general proposi-
tions, and regard them as its blossom and fruit.
On the contrary, its real value lies in inventing


## p. 54 (#84) ##############################################

54 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
ingenious variations on a probably commonplace
theme, in raising the popular melody to a universal
symbol and showing what a world of depth, power
and beauty exists in it.
But this requires above all a great artistic faculty,
a creative vision from a height, the loving study of
the data of experience, the free elaborating of a
given type,—objectivity in fact, though this time as
a positive quality. Objectivity is so often merely
a phrase. Instead of the quiet gaze of the artist
that is lit by an inward flame, we have an affecta-
tion of tranquillity; just as a cold detachment may
mask a lack of moral feeling. In some cases a
triviality of thought, the everyday wisdom that is
too dull not to seem calm and disinterested, comes
to represent the artistic condition in which the sub-
jective side has quite sunk out of sight. Everything
is favoured that does not rouse emotion, and the
driest phrase is the correct one. They go so far
as to accept a man who is not affected at all by
some particular moment in the past as the right
man to describe it. This is the usual relation of
the Greeks and the classical scholars. They have
nothing to do with each other—and this is called
"objectivity "! The intentional air of detachment
that is assumed for effect, the sober art of the super-
ficial motive-hunter is most exasperating when the
highest and rarest things are in question; and it
is the vanity of the historian that drives him to
this attitude of indifference. He goes to justify the
axiom that a man's vanity corresponds to his lack
of wit. No, be honest at any rate! Do not pretend
to the artist's strength, that is the real objectivity;


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THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 55
do not try to be just, if you are not born to that
dread vocation. As if it were the task of every
time to be just to everything before it! Ages and
generations have never the right to be the judges
of all previous ages and generations: only to the
rarest men in them can that difficult mission fall.
Who compels you to judge? If it is your wish—
you must prove first that you are capable of justice.
As judges, you must stand higher than that which
is to be judged: as it is, you have only come later.
The guests that come last to the table should rightly
take the last places: and will you take the first?
Then do some great and mighty deed: the place
may be prepared for you then, even though you do
come last.
You can only explain the past by what is highest
in the present. Only by straining the noblest
qualities you have to their highest power will you
find out what is greatest in the past, most worth
knowing and preserving. Like by like! otherwise
you will draw the past to your own level. Do not
believe any history that does not spring from the
mind of a rare spirit. You will know the quality
of the spirit, by its being forced to say something
universal, or to repeat something that is known
already; the fine historian must have the power
of coining the known into a thing never heard
before and proclaiming the universal so simply and
profoundly that the simple is lost in the profound,
and the profound in the simple. No one can be a
great historian and artist, and a shallowpate at the
same time. But one must not despise the workers
who sift and cast together the material because they


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56 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
can never become great historians. They must,
still less, be confounded with them, for they are the
necessary bricklayers and apprentices in the service
of the master: just as the French used to speak, more
naively than a German would, of the "historiens
de M. Thiers. " These workmen should gradually
become extremely learned, but never, for that
reason, turn to be masters. Great learning and great
shallowness go together very well under one hat
Thus, history is to be written by the man of
experience and character. He who has not lived
through something greater and nobler than others,
will not be able to explain anything great and
noble in the past. The language of the past is
always oracular: you will only understand it as
builders of the future who know the present. We
can only explain the extraordinarily wide influence
of Delphi by the fact that the Delphic priests had
an exact knowledge of the past: and, similarly,
only he who is building up the future has a right
to judge the past. If you set a great aim before
your eyes, you control at the same time the itch
for analysis that makes the present into a desert
for you, and all rest, all peaceful growth and ripen-
ing, impossible. Hedge yourselves with a great,
all-embracing hope, and strive on. Make of your-
selves a mirror where the future may see itself, and
forget the superstition that you are Epigoni. You
have enough to ponder and find out, in pondering
the life of the future: but do not ask history to
show you the means and the instrument to it. If
you live yourselves back into the history of great
men, you will find in it the high command to come
\
\


## p. 57 (#87) ##############################################

THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 57
to maturity and leave that blighting system of
cultivation offered by your time: which sees its
own profit in not allowing you to become ripe, that
it may use and dominate you while you are yet
unripe. And if you want biographies, do not look
for those with the legend "Mr. So-and-so and his
times," but for one whose title-page might be in-
scribed "a fighter against his time. " Feast your
souls on Plutarch, and dare to believe in yourselves
when you believe in his heroes. A hundred such
men—educated against the fashion of to-day,
made familiar with the heroic, and come to
maturity—are enough to give an eternal quietus
to the noisy sham education of this time.
VII.
The unrestrained historical sense, pushed to its
logical extreme, uproots the future, because it
destroys illusions and robs existing things of the
only atmosphere in which they can live. Historical
justice, even if practised conscientiously, with a
pure heart, is therefore a dreadful virtue, because
it always undermines and ruins the living thing:
its judgment always means annihilation. If there
be no constructive impulse behind the historical
one, if the clearance of rubbish be not merely to
leave the ground free for the hopeful living future
to build its house, if justice alone be supreme, the
creative instinct is sapped and discouraged. A
religion, for example, that has to be turned into
a matter of historical knowledge by the power of j
-"


## p. 58 (#88) ##############################################

58 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
pure justice, and to be scientifically studied
throughout, is destroyed at the end of it all. For
the historical audit brings so much to light which
is false and absurd, violent and inhuman, that the
condition of pious illusion falls to pieces. And a
'' «^ »' thing can only live through a piousHlusion. For
man is creative only through love and in the
shadow of love's illusions, only through the uncon-
ditional belief in perfection and righteousness.
Everything that forces a man to be no longer un-
conditioned in his love, cuts at the root of his
strength: he must wither, and be dishonoured.
Art . has the opposite effect to history: and only
perhaps if history suffer transformation into a pure
work of art, can it preserve instincts or arouse
them. Such history would be quite against the
analytical and inartistic tendencies of our time, and
even be considered false. But the history that
merely destroys without any impulse to construct,
will in the long-run make its instruments tired of
life; for such men destroy illusions, and "he who
destroys illusions in himself and others is punished
by the ultimate tyrant, Nature. " For a time a man
can take up history like any other study, and it
will be perfectly harmless. Recent theology seems
to have entered quite innocently into partnership
with history, and scarcely sees even now that it has
unwittingly bound itself to the Voltairean icrasez!
No one need expect from that any new and power-
ful constructive impulse: they might as well have
let the so-called Protestant Union serve as the
cradle of a new religion, and the jurist Holtzendorf,
the editor of the far more dubiously named Pro-
^


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THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 59
testant Bible, be its John the Baptist. This state
of innocence may be continued for some time by
the Hegelian philosophy,—still seething in some
of the older heads,—by which men can distinguish
the "idea of Christianity" from its various imperfect
"manifestations "; and persuade themselves that it
is the "self-movement of the Idea" that is ever
particularising itself in purer and purer forms, and
at last becomes the purest, most transparent, in
fact scarcely visible form in the brain of the present
theologus liberalis vulgaris. But to listen to this
pure Christianity speaking its mind about the
earlier impure Christianity, the uninitiated hearer
would often get the impression that the talk was
not of Christianity at all but of . . . —what are we
to think? if we find Christianity described by the
"greatest theologians of the century" as the re-
ligion that claims to " find itself in all real religions
and some other barely possible religions," and
if the "true church" is to be a thing "which
may become a liquid mass with no fixed outline,
with no fixed place for its different parts, but every-
thing to be peacefully welded together"—what, I
ask again, are we to think?
Christianity has been denaturalised by historical
treatment—which in its most complete form means
"just" treatment—until it has been resolved into
pure knowledge and destroyed in the process.
This can be studied in everything that has life.
For it ceases to have life if it be perfectly dissected,
and lives in pain and anguish as soon as the
historical dissection begins. There are some who
believe in the saving power of German music to


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60 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
j
revolutionise the German nature. They angrily
exclaim against the special injustice done to our
culture, when such men as Mozart and Beethoven
are beginning to be spattered with the learned mud
of the biographers and forced to answer a thousand
searching questions on the rack of historical
criticism. Is it not premature death, or at least
mutilation, for anything whose living influence is
not yet exhausted, when men turn their curious
eyes to the little minutiae of life and art, and look
for problems of knowledge where one ought to
learn to live, and forget problems? Set a couple
of these modern biographers to consider the origins
of Christianity or the Lutheran reformation: their
sober, practical investigations would be quite
sufficient to make all spiritual "action at a dis-
tance" impossible: just as the smallest animal
can prevent the growth of the mightiest oak by
simply eating up the acorn. All living things need
an atmosphere, a mysterious mist, around them.
If that veil be taken away and a religion, an art,
or a genius condemned to revolve like astar with-
out an atmosphere, we must not be surprised if it
becomes hard and unfruitful, and soon withers. It
is so with all great things "that never prosper
without some illusion," as Hans Sachs says in the
Meistersinger.
Every people, every man even, who would
become ripe, needs such a veil of illusion, such a
protecting cloud. But now men hate to become
ripe, for they honour history above life. They cry
in triumph that "science is now beginning to rule
life. " Possibly it might; but a life thus ruled is


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THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 61
not of much value. It is not such true life, and
promises much less for the future than the life that
used to be guided not by science, but by instincts
and powerful illusions. But this is not to be the
age of ripe, alert and harmonious personalities, but
of work that may be of most use to the common-
wealth. Men are to be fashioned to the needs of
the time, that they may soon take their place in
the machine. They must work in the factory of
the "common good " before they are ripe, or rather
to prevent them becoming ripe; for this would
be a luxury that would draw away a deal of power
from the " labour market. " Some birds are blinded
that they may sing better; I do not think men
sing to-day better than their grandfathers, though
•I am sure they are blinded early. But light, too
clear, too sudden and dazzling, is the infamous
means used to blind them. The young man is
kicked through all the centuries: boys who know
nothing of war, diplomacy, or commerce are con-
sidered fit to be introduced to political history.
We moderns also run through art galleries and
hear concerts in the same way as the young man
runs through history. We can feel that one thing
sounds differently from another, and pronounce on
the different" effects. " And the power of gradually
losing all feelings of strangeness or astonishment,
and finally being pleased at anything, is called the
historical sense, or historical culture. The crowd
of influences streaming on the young soul is so
great, the clods of barbarism and violence flung at
him so strange and overwhelming, that an assumed
stupidity is his only refuge. Where there is a


## p. 62 (#92) ##############################################

62 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
subtler and stronger self-consciousness we find
another emotion too—disgust. The young man
has become homeless: he doubts all ideas, all
moralities. He knows "it was different in every
age, and what you are does not matter. " In a
heavy apathy he lets opinion on opinion pass by
him, and understands the meaning of Holderlin's
words when he read the work of Diogenes Laertius
on the lives and doctrines of the Greek philo-
sophers: "I have seen here too what has often
occurred to me, that the change and waste in
men's thoughts and systems is far more tragic
than the fates that overtake what men are accus-
tomed to call the only realities. " No, such study
of history bewilders and overwhelms. It is not
necessary for youth, as the ancients show, but even
in the highest degree dangerous, as the moderns
show. Consider the historical student, the heir of
ennui, that appears even in his boyhood. He has
the "methods" for original work, the "correct
ideas" and the airs of the master at his fingers'
ends. A little isolated period of the past is marked
out for sacrifice. He cleverly applies his method,
and produces something, or rather, in prouder
phrase, "creates" something. He becomes a
"servant of truth" and a ruler in the great domain
of history. If he was what they call ripe as a
boy, he is now over-ripe. You only need shake
him and wisdom will rattle down into your lap;
but the wisdom is rotten, and every apple has its
worm. Believe me, if men work in the factory of
science and have to make themselves useful before
they are really ripe, science is ruined as much as


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THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY.
63
the slaves who have been employed too soon. I
am sorry to use the common jargon about slave-
owners and taskmasters in respect of such con-
ditions, that might be thought free from any
economic taint: but the words "factory, labour-
market, auction-sale, practical use," and all the
auxiliaries of egoism, come involuntarily to the lips
in describing the younger generation of savants.
Successful mediocrity tends to become still more
mediocre, science still more “useful. ” Our modern
savants are only wise on one subject, in all the
rest they are, to say the least, different from those
of the old stamp. In spite of that they demand
honour and profit for themselves, as if the state
and public opinion were bound to take the new
coinage for the same value as the old. The carters
have made a trade-compact among themselves,
and settled that genius is superfluous, for every
carrier is being re-stamped as one. And probably
a later age will see that their edifices are only
carted together and not built. To those who have
ever on their lips the modern cry of battle and
sacrifice—“Division of labour! fall into line ! ” we
may say roundly: "If you try to further the
progress of science as quickly as possible, you will
end by destroying it as quickly as possible; just
as the hen is worn out which you force to lay too
many eggs. ” The progress of science has been
amazingly rapid in the last decade; but consider
the savants, those exhausted hens. They are
certainly not “harmonious” natures: they can
merely cackle more than before, because they lay
eggs oftener : but the eggs are always smaller,


## p. 63 (#94) ##############################################

62
THOUGIITS OUT OF SEASON.
subtler and stronger self-consciousness we find
another emotion too-disgust. The young man
has become homeless: he doubts all ideas, all
moralities. He knows “it was different in every
age, and what you are does not matter. ” In a
heavy apathy he lets opinion on opinion pass by
him, and understands the meaning of Hölderlin's
words when he read the work of Diogenes Laertius
on the lives and doctrines of the Greek philo-
sophers: “I have seen here too what has often
occurred to me, that the change and waste in
men's thoughts and systems is far more tragic
than the fates that overtake what men are accus-
tomed to call the only realities. ” No, such study
of history bewilders and overwhelms. It is not
necessary for youth, as the ancients show, but even
in the highest degree dangerous, as the moderns
show. Consider the historical student, the heir of
ennui, that appears even in his boyhood. He has
the “methods” for original work, the “correct
ideas” and the airs of the master at his fingers'
ends. A little isolated period of the past is marked
out for sacrifice. He cleverly applies his method,
and produces something, or rather, in prouder
phrase, “creates” something. He becomes a
“servant of truth” and a ruler in the great domain
of history. If he was what they call ripe as a
boy, he is now over-ripe. You only need shake
him and wisdom will rattle down into your lap;
but the wisdom is rotten, and every apple has its
worm. Believe me, if men work in the factory of
science and have to make themselves useful before
they are really ripe, science is ruined as much as


## p. 63 (#95) ##############################################

THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 63
the slaves who have been employed too soon. I
am sorry to use the common jargon about slave-
owners and taskmasters in respect of such con-
ditions, that might be thought free from any
economic taint: but the words "factory, labour-
market, auction-sale, practical use," and all the
auxiliaries of egoism, come involuntarily to the lips
in describing the younger generation of savants.
Successful mediocrity tends to become still more
mediocre, science still more "useful. " Our modern
savants are only wise on one subject, in all the
rest they are, to say the least, different from those
of the old stamp. In spite of that they demand
honour and profit for themselves, as if the state
and public opinion were bound to take the new
coinage for the same value as the old. The carters
have made a trade-compact among themselves,
and settled that genius is superfluous, for every
carrier is being re-stamped as one. And probably
a later age will see that their edifices are only
carted together and not built. To those who have
ever on their lips the modern cry of battle and
sacrifice—" Division of labour! fall into line! " we
may say roundly: "If you try to further the
progress of science as quickly as possible, you will
end by destroying it as quickly as possible; just
as the hen is worn out which you force to lay too
many eggs. " The progress of science has been
amazingly rapid in the last decade; but consider
the savants, those exhausted hens. They are
certainly not "harmonious" natures: they can
merely cackle more than before, because they lay
eggs oftener: but the eggs are always smaller,


## p. 64 (#96) ##############################################

64 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
though their books are bigger. The natural result
of it all is the favourite "popularising" of science
(or rather its feminising and infantising), the
villainous habit of cutting the cloth of science to
fit the figure of the "general public. " Goethe saw
the abuse in this, and demanded that science
should only influence the outer world by way of
a nobler ideal of action. The older generation
of savants had good reason for thinking this abuse
an oppressive burden: the modern savants have an
equally good reason for welcoming it, because,
leaving their little corner of knowledge out of
account, they are part of the "general public"
themselves, and its needs are theirs. They only
require to take themselves less seriously to be able
to open their little kingdom successfully to popular
curiosity. This easy-going behaviour is called " the
modest condescension of the savant to the people ";
whereas in reality he has only "descended" to
himself, so far as he is not a savant but a plebeian.
Rise to the conception of a people, you learned
men; you can never have one noble or high
enough. If you thought much of the people, you
would have compassion towards them, and shrink
from offering your historical aquafortis as a refresh-
ing drink. But you really think very little of them,
for you dare not take any reasonable pains for their
future; and you act like practical pessimists, men
who feel the coming catastrophe and become in-
different and careless of their own and others'
existence. "If only the earth last for us: and if
it do not last, it is no matter. " Thus they come
,-k. to live an ironical existence.


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THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 6$
VIII.
It may seem a paradox, though it is none, that I
should attribute a kind of "ironical self-conscious-
ness" to an age that is generally so honestly, and
clamorously, vain of its historical training; and
should see a suspicion hovering near it that there
is really nothing to be proud of, and a fear lest
the time for rejoicing at historical knowledge
may soon have gone by.
Goethe has shown a
similar riddle in man's nature, in his remarkable
study of Newton: he finds a "troubled feeling of
his own error" at the base—or rather on the height
—of his being, just as if he was conscious at times
of having a deeper insight into things, that vanished
the moment after. This gave him a certain ironical
view of his own nature. And one finds that the
greater and more developed "historical men" are
conscious of all the superstition and absurdity in
the belief that a people's education need-] be so
extremely historical as it is; the mightiest nations,
mightiest in action and influence, have lived other-
wise, and their youth has been trained otherwise.
The knowledge gives a sceptical turn to their
minds. "The absurdity and superstition," these
sceptics say, "suit men like ourselves, who come
as the latest withered shoots of a gladder and
mightier stock, and fulfil Hesiod's prophecy, that
men will one day be born gray-headed, and that
Zeus will destroy that generation as soon as the
sign be visible. " Historical culture is really a kind
of inherited grayness, and those who have borne
VOL. II. E


## p. 66 (#98) ##############################################

66
THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
,v
>
. •
)«
*-*'
V
its mark from childhood must believe instinctively
in the old age of mankind. To old age belongs
the old man's business of looking back and casting
up his accounts, of seeking consolation in the
memories of the past,—in historical culture. But
the human race is tough and persistent, and will
not admit that the lapse of a thousand years, or
a hundred thousand, entitles any one to sum up its
progress from the past to the future; that is, it
will not be observed as a whole at all by that
infinitesimal atom, the individual man. What is
there in a couple of thousand years—the period of
thirty-four consecutive human lives of sixty years
each—to make us speak of youth at the beginning,
and " the old age of mankind " at the end of them?
Does not this paralysing belief in a fast-fading
humanity cover the misunderstanding of a theo-
logical idea, inherited from the Middle Ages, that
the end of the world is approaching and we are
waiting anxiously for the judgment? Does not
the increasing demand for historical judgment give
us that idea in a new dress? as if our time were
the latest possible time, and commanded to hold
that universal judgment of the past, which the
Christian never expected from a man, but from
"the Son of Man. " The memento mori, spoken
to humanity as well as the individual, was a sting
that never ceased to pain, the crown of mediaeval
knowledge and consciousness.
The opposite message of a later time, memento
vivere, is spoken rather timidly, without the full
power of the lungs; and there is something almost
dishonest about it. For mankind still keeps to


## p. 67 (#99) ##############################################

THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 6j
its memento mori, and shows it by the universal
need for history; science may flap its wings as it
will, it has never been able to gain the free air.
A deep feeling of hopelessness has remained, and
taken the historical colouring that has now darkened
and depressed all higher education. A religion
that, of all the hours of man's life, thinks the last
the most important, that has prophesied the end
of earthly life and condemned all creatures to live
in the fifth act of a tragedy, may call forth the
subtlest and noblest powers of man, but it is an
enemy to all new planting, to all bold attempts or
free aspirations. It opposes all flight into the
unknown, because it has no life or hope there
itself. It only lets the new bud press forth on
sufferance, to blight it in its own good time: "it
might lead life astray and give it a false value. "
What the Florentines did under the influence of
Savonarola's exhortations, when they made the
famous holocaust of pictures, manuscripts, masks
and mirrors, Christianity would like to do with
every culture that allured to further effort and
bore that memento vivere on its standard. And
if it cannot take the direct way—the way of main
force—it gains its end all the same by allying
itself with historical culture, though generally
without its connivance; and speaking through its
mouth, turns away every fresh birth with a shrug
of its shoulders, and makes us feel all the more
that we are late-comers and Epigoni, that we are,
in a word, born with gray hair. The deep and
serious contemplation of the unworthiness of all
v
past action, of the world ripe for judgment, has


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68 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
been whittled down to the sceptical consciousness
that it is anyhow a good thing to know all that has
happened, as it is too late to do anything better.
The historical sense makes its servants passive
and retrospective. Only in moments of forgetful-
ness, when that sense is dormant, does the man
who is sick of the historical fever ever act; though
he only analyses his deed again after it is over
(which prevents it from having any further con-
sequences), and finally puts it on the dissecting
table for the purposes of history. In this sense
we are still living in the Middle Ages, and history
is still a disguised theology; just as the reverence
with which the unlearned layman looks on the
learned class is inherited through the clergy.
What men gave formerly to the Church they give
now, though in smaller measure, to science. But
the fact of giving at all is the work of the Church,
[ not of the modern spirit, which among its other
i good qualities has something of the miser in it,
and is a bad hand at the excellent virtue of
liberality.
These words may not be very acceptable, any
more than my derivation of the excess of history
from the mediaeval memento mori and the
hopelessness that Christianity bears in its heart
towards all future ages of earthly existence. But
you should always try to replace my hesitating
explanations by a better one. For the origin of
historical culture, and of its absolutely radical
antagonism to the spirit of a new time and a
"modern consciousness," must itself be known
by a historical process. History must solve the


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THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 69
problem of history, science must turn its sting
against itself This threefold "must" is the im-
perative of the "new spirit," if it is really to con-
tain something new, powerful, vital and original.
Or is it true that we Germans—to leave the
Romance nations out of account—must always be
mere "followers" in all the higher reaches of
culture, because that is all we can be? The words
of Wilhelm Wackernagel are well worth pondering:
"We Germans are a nation of' followers,' and with
all our higher science and even our faith, are
merely the successors of the ancient world. Even
those who are opposed to it are continually
breathing the immortal spirit of classical culture
with that of Christianity: and if any one could
separate these two elements from the living air
surrounding the soul of man, there would not be
much remaining for a spiritual life to exist on. "
Even if we would rest content with our vocation to
follow antiquity, even if we decided to take it in an
earnest and strenuous spirit and to show our high
prerogative in our earnestness,—we should yet be
compelled to ask whether it were our eternal
destiny to be pupils of a fading antiquity. We
might be allowed at some time to put our aim
higher and further above us. And after con-
gratulating ourselves on having brought that
secondary spirit of Alexandrian culture in us to
such marvellous productiveness — through our
"universal history"—we might go on to place
before us, as our noblest prize, the still higher task
of striving beyond and above this Alexandrian
world; and bravely find our prototypes in the


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70 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
ancient Greek world, where all was great, natural
and human. But it is just there that we find the
reality of a true unhistorical culture—and in spite
of that, or perhaps because of it, an unspeakably
rich and vital culture. Were we Germans nothing
but followers, we could not be anything greater or
prouder than the lineal inheritors and followers of
such a culture.
This however must be added. The thought of
being Epigoni, that is often a torture, can yet
create a spring of hope for the future, to the indi-
vidual as well as the people: so far, that is, as we
can regard ourselves as the heirs and followers of
the marvellous classical power, and see therein both
our honour and our spur. But not as the late and
bitter fruit of a powerful stock, giving that stock a
further spell of cold life, as antiquaries and grave-
diggers. Such late-comers live truly an ironical
existence. Annihilation follows their halting walk
on tiptoe through life. They shudder before it in
the midst of their rejoicing over the past. They
are living memories, and their own memories have
no meaning; for there are none to inherit them.
And thus they are wrapped in the melancholy
thought that their life is an injustice, which no
future life can set right again.
Suppose that these antiquaries, these late
arrivals, were to change their painful ironic
modesty for a certain shamelessness. Suppose we
heard them saying, aloud," The race is at its zenith,
for it has manifested itself consciously for the first
time. " We should have a comedy, in which the
dark meaning of a certain very celebrated


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THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY.
71
philosophy would unroll itself for the benefit of
German culture. I believe there has been no
dangerous turning-point in the progress of German
culture in this century that has not been made
more dangerous by the enormous and still living
influence of this Hegelian philosophy. The belief
that one is a late-comer in the world is, anyhow,
harmful and degrading: but it must appear
frightful and devastating when it raises our late-
comer to godhead, by a neat turn of the wheel, as'
the true meaning and object of all past creation,
and his conscious misery is set up as the perfection
of the world's history. Such a point of view has
accustomed the Germans to talk of a "world-
process," and justify their own time as its necessary
result. And it has put history in the place of the
other spiritual powers, art and religion, as the one
sovereign; inasmuch as it is the "Idea realising
itself," the " Dialectic of the spirit of the nations,"
and the "tribunal of the world. "
History understood in this Hegelian way has
been cgntemptuously called Qod! s_,sojourn upon
earth,—though the God was first created by the
history. He, at any rate, became transparent and
intelligible inside Hegelian skulls, and has risen
through all the dialectically possible steps in his
being up to the manifestation of the Self: so that
for Hegel the highest and final stage of the world-
process came together in his own Berlin existence.
He ought to have said that everything after him
was merely to be regarded as the musical coda of
the great historical rondo,—or rather, as simply
(x IcFilHtt)
superfluous. He has not said it; and thus he has


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72 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
implanted in a generation leavened throughout by
him the worship of the "power of history," that
practically turns every moment into a sheer gaping
at success, into an idolatry of the actual: for which
we have now discovered the characteristic phrase
"to adapt ourselves to circumstances. " But the
man who has once learnt to crook the knee and
bow the head before the power of history, nods
"yes" at last, like a Chinese doll, to every power,
whether it be a government or a public opinion or
a numerical majority; and his limbs move correctly
as the power pulls the string. If each success
have come by a "rational necessity," and every
event show the victory of logic or the "Idea,"
then—down on your knees quickly, and let every
step in the ladder of success have its reverence!
There are no more living mythologies, you say?
Religions are at their last gasp? Look at the
religion of the power_jpfJu§tory, and the priesis_of
the mythology of Ideas, with their scarred knees!
Do not all the virtues follow in the train of the new
faith? And shall we riot call it unselfishness,
-^ when the historical man lets himself be turned into
V W»«Ui, an "objective" mirror of all that is? Is it not
magnanimity to renounce all power in heaven and
earth in order to adore the mere fact of power?
Is it not justice, always to hold the balance of forces
in your hands and observe which is the stronger
and heavier? And what a school of politeness is
such a contemplation of the past! To take every-
thing objectively, to be angry at nothing, to love
nothing, to understand everything—makes one

gentle and pliable. Even if a man brought up in


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THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 73
this school will show himself openly offended, one
is just as pleased, knowing it is only meant in the
artistic sense of ira et studium, though it is really
sine ira et studio.
What old-fashioned thoughts I have on such a
combination of virtue and mythology! But they
must out, however one may laugh at them. I
would even say that history always teaches—"it
was once," and morality—" it ought not to be, or
have been. " So history becomes a compendium of
actual immorality. But how wrong would one be
to regard history as the judge of this actual im-
morality! Morality is offended by the fact that
a Raphael had to die at thirty-six; such a being
ought not to die. If you came to the help of
history, as the apologists of the actual, you would
say: "he had spoken everything that was in him
to speak, a longer life would only have enabled
him to create a similar beauty, and not a new
beauty," and so on. Thus you become an advo-
cates diaboli by setting up the success, the fact,
as your idol: whereas the fact is always dull, at all
times more like a calf than a god. Your apologies
for history are helped by ignorance: for it is only
because you do not know what a natura naturans
like Raphael is, that you are not on fire when
you think it existed once and can never exist
again. Some one has lately tried to tell us that
Goethe had out-lived himself with his eighty-two
years: and yet I would gladly take two of Goethe's
"outlived " years in exchange for whole cartloads
of fresh modern lifetimes, to have another set of
such conversations as those with Eckermann, and


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74 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
be preserved from all the "modern" talk of these
esquires of the moment. How few living men
have a right to live, as against those mighty dead!
That the many live and those few live no longer,
is simply a brutal truth, that is, a piece of unalter-
able folly, a blank wall of " it was once so " against
the moral judgment "it ought not to have been. "
Yes, against the moral judgment! For you may
speak of what virtue you will, of justice, courage,
magnanimity, of wisdom and human compassion,
—you will find the virtuous man will always rise
against the blind force of facts, the tyranny of the
actual, and submit himself to laws that are not the
fickle laws of history. He ever swims against the
waves of history, either by fighting his passions, as
the nearest brute facts of his existence, or by
training himself to honesty amid the glittering
nets spun round him by falsehood. Were history
nothing more than the "all-embracing system of
passion and error," man would have to read it as
Goethe wished Werther to be read;—just as if it
called to him, "Be a man and follow me not! "
But fortunately history also keeps alive for us the
memory of the great "fighters against history,"
that is, against the blind power of the actual; it
puts itself in the pillory just by glorifying the true
historical nature in men who troubled themselves
very little about the " thus it is," in order that they
might follow a "thus it must be" with greater joy
and greater pride. Not to drag their generation to
the grave, but to found a new one—that is the
motive that ever drives them onward; and even if
they are born late, there is a way of living by


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THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 75
which they can forget it—and future generations
will know them only as the first-comers.
IX.
Is perhaps our time such a " first-comer "? Its
historical sense is so strong, and has such universal
and boundless expression, that future times will
commend it, if only for this, as a first-comer—
if there be any future time, in the sense of future
culture. But here comes a grave doubt. CloseJto_
the modern man's pride there stands his irony
about himself, his consciousness that he must live
in a historical, or twilit, atmosphere, the fear that
he can retain none of his youthful hopes and powers.
Here and there one goes further into cynicism, and
justifies the course of history, nay, the whole
evolution of the world, as simply leading up to the
modern man, according to the cynical canon:—
"what you see now had to come, man had to be
thus and not otherwise, no one can stand against
this necessity. " He who cannot rest in a state of
irony flies for refuge to the cynicism. The last
decade makes him a present of one of its most
beautiful inventions, a full and well-rounded phrase
for this cynicism: he calls his way of living thought-
lessly and after the fashion of his time," the full
surrender of his personality to the world-process. "
The personality and the world-process! The world-
process and the personality of the earthworm! If
only one did not eternally hear the word "world,
world, world," that hyperbole of all hyperboles *'~


## p. 76 (#108) #############################################

76 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
when we should only speak, in a decent manner,
of "man, man, man "! Heirs of the Greeks and
Romans, of Christianity? All that seems nothing
to the cynics. But "heirs of the world-process ";
the final target of the world-process; the meaning
and solution of all riddles of the universe, the ripest
fruit on the tree of knowledge ! —that is what I call
a right noble thought: by this token are the first-
lings of every time to be known, although they
may have arrived last. The historical imagination
has never flown so far, even in a dream; for now
the history of man is merely the continuation of
that of animals and plants: the universal historian
finds traces of himself even in the utter depths of
the sea, in the living slime. He stands astounded
in face of the enormous way that man has run,
and his gaze quivers before the mightier wonder,
the modern man who can see all this way! He
stands proudly on the pyramid of the world-process:
and while he lays the final stone of his knowledge,
he seems to cry aloud to listening Nature: "We
are at the top, we are the top, we are the comple-
tion of Nature! "
O thou too proud European of the nineteenth
century, art thou not mad? Thy knowledge does
not complete Nature, it only kills thine own nature!
Measure the height of what thou knowest by the
depths of thy power to do. Thou climbest the
sunbeams of knowledge up towards heaven—but
also down to Chaos. Thy manner of going is
fatal to thee; the ground slips from under thy feet
into the unknown; thy life has no other stay, but
inly spider's webs that every new stroke of thy


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THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. yj
knowledge tears asunder. —But not another serious
word about this, for there is a lighter side to it all.
The moralist, the artist, the saint and the states-
man, may well be troubled, when they see that all
foundations are breaking up in mad unconscious
ruin, and resolving themselves into the ever flowing
stream of becoming; that all creation is being
tirelessly spun into webs of history by the modern
man, the great spider in the mesh of the world-net.
We ourselves may be glad for once in a way that
we see it all in the shining magic mirror of a
philosophical parodist, in whose brain the time has
come to an ironical consciousness of itself, to a point
even of wickedness, in Goethe's phrase. Hegel
once said, "when the spirit makes a fresh start,
we philosophers are at hand. " Our time did make
a fresh start—into irony, and lo! Edward von
Hartmann was at hand, with his famous Philosophy
of the Unconscious—or, more plainly, his philo-
sophy of unconscious irony. We have seldom read
a more jovial production, a greater philosophical
joke than Hartmann's book. Any one whom it does
not fully enlighten about "becoming," who is not
swept and garnished throughout by it, is ready
to become a monument of the past himself. The
beginning and end of the world-process, from the
first throb of consciousness to its final leap into
nothingness, with the task of our generation settled
for it;—all drawn from that clever fount of inspira-
tion, the Unconscious, and glittering in Apocalyptic
light, imitating an honest seriousness to the life,
as if it were a serious philosophy and not a huge
joke,—such a system shows its creator to be one


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78 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
of the first philosophical parodists of all time.
Let us then sacrifice on his altar, and offer the
inventor of a true universal medicine a lock of
hair, in Schleiermacher's phrase. For what
medicine would be more salutary to combat the
excess of historical culture than Hartmann's
parody of the world's history?
If we wished to express in the fewest words
what Hartmann really has to tell us from his
mephitic tripod of unconscious irony, it would be
something like this: our time could only remain
as it is, if men should become thoroughly sick of
this existence. And I fervently believe he is right.
The frightful petrifaction of the time, the restless
rattle of the ghostly bones, held naively up to us
by David Strauss as the most beautiful fact of all—
is justified by Hartmann not only from the past,
ex causis efficientibus, but also from the future,
ex causa finali. The rogue let light stream over
our time from the last day, and saw that it
was very good,—for him, that is, who wishes
to feel the indigestibility of life at its full
strength, and for whom the last day cannot
come quickly enough. True, Hartmann calls the
old age of life that mankind is approaching the
"old age of man ": but that is the blessed state,
according to him, where there is only a successful
mediocrity; where art is the "evening's amuse-
ment of the Berlin financier," and "the time has
no more need for geniuses, either because it would
be casting pearls before swine, or because the time
has advanced beyond the stage where the geniuses
are found, to one more important," to that stage


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THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 79
of social evolution, in fact, in which every worker
"leads a comfortable existence, with hours of work
that leave him sufficient leisure to cultivate his
intellect. " Rogue of rogues, you say well what is
the aspiration of present-day mankind: but you
know too what a spectre of disgust will arise at the
end of this old age of mankind, as the result of the
intellectual culture of stolid mediocrity. It is very
pitiful to see, but it will be still more pitiful yet.
"Antichrist is visibly extending his arms :" yet it
must be so, for after all we are on the right road—
of disgust at all existence. "Forward then, boldly,
with the world-process, as workers in the vineyard
of the Lord, for it is the process alone that can
lead to redemption! "
The vineyard of the Lord! The process! To
redemption! Who does not see and hear in this
how historical culture, that only knows the word
"becoming," parodies itself on purpose and says
the most irresponsible things about itself through
its grotesque mask? For what does the rogue
mean by this cry to the workers in the vineyard?
By what "work" are they to strive boldly forward?
Or, to ask another question:—what further has the
historically educated fanatic of the world-process
to do,—swimming and drowning as he is in the
sea of becoming,—that he may at last gather in
that vintage of disgust, the precious grape of the
vineyard? He has nothing to do but to live on
as he has lived, love what he has loved, hate what
he has hated, and read the newspapers he has
always read. The only sin is for him to live other-
■
wise than he has lived. We are told how he has


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80 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
lived, with monumental clearness, by that famous
page with its large typed sentences, on which the
whole rabble of our modern cultured folk have
thrown themselves in blind ecstasy, because they
believe they read their own justification there,
haloed with an Apocalyptic light. For the uncon-
scious parodist has demanded of every one of them,
"the full surrender of his personality to the world-
process, for the sake of his end, the redemption of
the world ": or still more clearly,—" the assertion of
the will to live is proclaimed to be the first step on
the right road: for it is only in the full surrender
to life and its sorrow, and not in the cowardice of
personal renunciation and retreat, that anything
can be done for the world-process. . . . The striving
for the denial of the individual will is as foolish as it
is useless, more foolish even than suicide. . . .
The thoughtful reader will understand without
further explanation how a practical philosophy can
be erected on these principles, and that such a
philosophy cannot endure any disunion, but only
the fullest reconciliation with life. "
The thoughtful reader will understand! Then
one really could misunderstand Hartmann! And
what a splendid joke it is, that he should be mis-
understood! Why should the Germans of to-day be
particularly subtle? A valiant Englishman looks
in vain for "delicacy of perception" and dares to
say that " in the German mind there does seem to
be something splay, something blunt-edged, un-
handy and infelicitous. " Could the great German
parodist contradict this? According to him, we are
approaching "that ideal condition in which the


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THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 81
human race makes its history with full conscious-
ness ": but we are obviously far from the perhaps
more ideal condition, in which mankind can read
Hartmann's book with full consciousness. If we
once reach it, the word "world-process" will never
pass any man's lips again without a smile. For he
will remember the time when people listened to the
mock gospel of Hartmann, sucked it in, attacked it,
reverenced it, extended it and canonised it with all
the honesty of that "German mind," with "the un-
canny seriousness of an owl," as Goethe has it. But
the world must go forward, the ideal condition
cannot be won by dreaming, it must be fought and
wrestled for, and the way to redemption lies only
through joyousness, the way to redemption from
that dull, owlish seriousness. The time will come
when we shall wisely keep away from all construc-
tions of the world-process, or even of the history of
man; a time when we shall no more look at masses
but at individuals, who form a sort of bridge over
the wan stream of becoming. They may not per-
haps continue a process, but they live out of time,
as contemporaries: and thanks to history that per-
mits such a company, they live as the Republic of
geniuses of which Schopenhauer speaks. One giant
calls to the other across the waste spaces of time,
and the high spirit-talk goes on, undisturbed by
the wanton noisy dwarfs who creep among them.
The task of history is to be the mediator between
these, and even to give the motive and power to
produce the great man. The aim of mankind can
lie ultimately only in its highest examples.