No More Learning

It never comes to
have an influence, but only a criticism: and the
criticism itself has no influence, but only breeds
another criticism. And so we come to consider


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46 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
the fact of many critics as a mark of influence, that
of few or none as a mark of failure. Actually
everything remains in the old condition, even in
the presence of such " influence ": men talk a little
while of a new thing, and then of some other new
thing, 'and in the meantime they do what they
have always done. The historical training of our
^critics prevents their having an influence in the
true sense, an influence on life and action. They
/put their blotting paper on the blackest writing,
and their thick brushes over the gracefullest de-
signs; these they call "corrections ";—and that is
, all. Their critical pens never cease to fly, for they
have lost power over them; they are driven by
their pens instead of driving them. The weakness
of modern personality comes out well in the
measureless overflow of criticism, in the want of
self-mastery, and in what the Romans called
impotentia.
VI.
But leaving these weaklings, let us turn rather to
a point of strength for which the modern man is
famous. Let us ask the painful question whether
he has the right in virtue of his historical
"objectivity" to call himself strong and just in a
higher degree than the man of another age. Is
it true that this objectivity has its source in a
heightened sense of the need for justice? Or, being
really an effect of quite other causes, does it only
have the appearance of coming from justice, and
really lead to an unhealthy prejudice in favour


## p. 47 (#77) ##############################################

THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 47
of the modern man? Socrates thought it near
madness to imagine one possessed a virtue with-
out really possessing it. Such imagination has
certainly more danger in it than the contrary
madness of a positive vice. For of this there is
still a cure; but the other makes a man or a time
daily worse, and therefore more unjust.
No one has a higher claim to our reverence than
the man with the feeling and the strength for
justice. For the highest and rarest virtues unite
and are lost in it, as an unfathomable sea absorbs
the streams that flow from every side. The hand
of the just man, who is called to sit in judgment,
trembles no more when it holds the scales: he
piles the weights inexorably against his own side,
his eyes areThot dimmed as the balance rises and
falls, and" his voice is neither hard nor broken when
he pronounces the sentence. Were he a cold
demon of knowledge, he would cast round him the
icy atmosphere of an awful, superhuman majesty,
that we should fear, not reverence. But he is a
man, and has tried to rise from a careless doubt to
a strong certainty, from a gentle tolerance to the
imperative "thou must"; from the rare virtue of
magnanimity to the rarest, of justice. He has
come to be like that demon without being more
than a poor mortal at the outset; above all, he has
to atone to himself for his humanity and tragically
shatter his own nature on the rock of an impossible
virtue. —All this places him on a lonely height as
the most reverend example of the human race.
For truth is his aim, not in the form of cold
ineffectual knowledge, but the truth of the judge


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48 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
who punishes according to law; not as the selfish
possession of an individual, but the sacred authority
that removes the boundary stones from all selfish
possessions; truth, In a word, as the tribunal of
the world, and- not as the chance prey of a single
hunter" "The search for truth is often thoughtlessly
praised: but it only has anything great in it if
the seeker have the sincere unconditional will for
justice. Its roots are in justice alone: but a whole
crowd of different motives may combine in the
search for it, that have nothing to do with truth at
all; curiosity, for example, or dread of ennui, envy,
vanity, or amusement. Thus the world seems to
be full of men who "serve truth": and yet the
virtue of justice is seldom present, more seldom
known, and almost always mortally hated. On
the other hand a throng of sham virtues has
entered in at all times with pomp and honour.
Few in truth serve truth, as only few have the
pure will for justice; and very few even of these
have the strength to be just. The will alone is not
enough: the impulse to justice without the power
of judgment has been the cause of the greatest
suffering to men. And thus the common good could
require nothing better than for the seed of this
power to be strewn as widely as possible, that the
fanatic may be distinguished from the true judge,
and the blind desire from the conscious power.
But there are no means of planting a power of
judgment: and so when one speaks to men of
truth and justice, they will be ever troubled by the
doubt whether it be the fanatic or the judge who is
speaking to them. And they must be pardoned


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THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. 49
for always treating the "servants of truth" with
special kindness, who possess neither the will nor
the power to judge and have set before them the
task of finding " pure knowledge without reference
to consequences," knowledge, in plain terms, that
comes to nothing. There are very many truths
which are unimportant; problems that require no
struggle to solve, to say nothing of sacrifice. And
in this safe realm of indifference a man may very
successfully become a " cold demon of knowledge. "
And yet—if we find whole regiments of learned
inquirers being turned to such demons in some age
specially favourable to them, it is always unfortun-
ately possible that the age is lacking in a great
and strong sense of justice, the noblest spring of
the so-called impulse to truth.
Consider the historical virtuoso of the present
time: is he the justest man of his age? True, he
has developed in himself such a delicacy and sensi-
tiveness that "nothing human is alien to him. "
Times and persons most widely separated come
together in the concords of his lyre. He has
become a passive instrument, whose tones find an
echo in similar instruments: until the whole atmo-
sphere of a time is filled with such echoes, all
buzzing in one soft chord. Yet I think one only
hears the overtones of the original historical note:
its rough powerful quality can be no longer guessed
from these thin and shrill vibrations. The original
note sang of action, need, and terror; the overtone
lulls us into a soft dilettante sleep. It is as though
the heroic symphony had been arranged for two
flutes for the use of dreaming opium-smokers. We
VOL. II. D


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50 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
can now judge how these virtuosi stand towards the
claim of the modern man to a higher and purer con-
ception of justice. This virtue has never a pleasing
quality; it never charms; it is harsh and strident.
Generosity stands very low on the ladder of the
virtues in comparison; and generosity is the mark
of a few rare historians! Most of them only get as
far as tolerance, in other words they leave what
cannot be explained away, they correct it and
touch it up condescendingly, on the tacit assump-
tion that the novice will count it as justice if the
past be narrated without harshness or open ex-
pressions of hatred. But only superior strength can
really judge; weakness must tolerate, if it do not
pretend to be strength and turn justice to a play-
actress. There is still a dreadful class of historians
remaining—clever, stern and honest, but narrow-
minded: who have the " good will" to be just with
a pathetic belief in their actual judgments, which
are all false; for the same reason, almost, as the
verdicts of the usual juries are false. How difficult
it is to find a real historical talent, if we exclude
all the disguised egoists, and the partisans who
pretend to take up an impartial attitude for the
sake of their own unholy game! And we also
exclude the thoughtless folk who write history in
the naive faith that justice resides in the popular
view of their time, and that to write in the spirit of
the time is to be just; a faith that is found in all
religions, and which, in religion, serves very well.
The measurement of the opinions and deeds of the
past by the universal opinions of the present is
called "objectivity" by these simple people: they


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THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. S1
find the canon of all truth here: their work is to
adapt the past to the present triviality. And they
call all historical writing "subjective " that does not
regard these popular opinions as canonical.
Might not an illusion lurk in the highest inter-
pretation of the word objectivity? We understand
by it a certain standpoint in the historian, who sees
the procession of motive and consequence too clearly
for it to have an effect on his own personality. We
think of the aesthetic phenomenon of the detach-
ment from all personal concern with which the
painter sees the picture and forgets himself, in a
stormy landscape, amid thunder and lightning, or
on a rough sea: and we require the same artistic
vision and absorption in his object from the historian.
But it is only a superstition to say that the picture
given to such a man by the object really shows the
truth of things. Unless it be that objects are
expected in such moments to paint or photograph
themselves by their own activity on a purely passive
medium!
But this would be a myth, and a bad one at that.
One forgets that this moment is actually the power-
ful and spontaneous moment of creation in the
artist, of "composition" in its highest form, of
which the result will be an artistically, but not an
historically, true picture. To think objectively, in
this sense, of history is the work of the dramatist:
to think one thing with another, and weave the
elements into a single whole; with the presumption
that the unity of plan must be put into the objects
if it be not already there. So man veils and sub-
s
dues the past, and expresses his impulse to art—


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52 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
but not his impulse to truth or justice. Objectivity
and justice have nothing to do with each other.
There could be a kind of historical writing that
had no drop of common fact in it and yet could
claim to be called in the highest degree objective.
Grillparzer goes so far as to say that "history is
nothing but the manner in which the spirit of man
apprehends facts that are obscure to him, links
things together whose connection heaven only
knows, replaces the unintelligible by something
intelligible, puts his own ideas of causation into
the external world, which can perhaps be explained
only from within: and assumes the existence of
chance, where thousands of small causes may be
really at work. Each man has his own individual
needs, and so millions of tendencies are running
together, straight or crooked, parallel or across,
forward or backward, helping or hindering each
other. They have all the appearance of chance,
and make it impossible, quite apart from all natural
influences, to establish any universal lines on which
past events must have run. " But as a result of this
so-called " objective " way of looking at things, such
a "must" ought to be made clear. It is a 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


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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
\
\


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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


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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,


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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


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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,


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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


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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


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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 *'~


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76 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.