No More Learning

175-
Continued Existence of Art. —Why, really,
does a creative art nowadays continue to exist? Be-
cause the majority who have hours of leisure (and
such an art is for them only) think that they cannot


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 93
fill up their time without music, theatres and picture-
galleries, novels and poetry. Granted that one
could keep them from this indulgence, either they
would strive less eagerly for leisure, and the in-
vidious sight of the rich would be less common (a
great gain for the stability of society), or they would
have leisure, but would learn to reflect on what can
be learnt and unlearnt: on their work, for instance,
their associations, the pleasure they could bestow.
All the world, with the exception of the artist, would
in both cases reap the advantage. —Certainly, there
are many vigorous, sensible readers who could take
objection to this. Still, it must be said on behalf of
the coarse and malignant that the author himself is
concerned with this protest, and that there is in his
book much to be read that is not actually written
down therein.
176.
The Mouthpiece of the Gods. —The poet
expresses the universal higher opinions of the
nation, he is its mouthpiece and flute; but by
virtue of metre and all other artistic means he so
expresses them that the nation regards them as
something quite new and wonderful, and believes
in all seriousness that he is the mouthpiece of the
Gods. Yes, under the clouds of creation the poet
himself forgets whence he derives all his intellectual
wisdom—from father and mother, from teachers and
books of all kinds, from the street and particularly
from the priest. He is deceived by his own art,
and really believes, in a naive period, that a God
is speaking through him, that he is creating in a


## p. 94 (#114) #############################################

94 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
state of religious inspiration. As a matter of fact,
he is only saying what he has learnt, a medley of
popular wisdom and popular foolishness. Hence,
so far as a poet is really vox populi he is held to be
vox del.
177.
What all Art wants to Do and Cannot. —
The last and hardest task of the artist is the pre-
sentment of what remains the same, reposes in
itself, is lofty and simple and free from the bizarre.
Hence the noblest forms of moral perfection are
rejected as inartistic by weaker artists, because the
sight of these fruits is too painful for their ambition.
The fruit gleams at them from the topmost branches
of art, but they lack the ladder, the courage, the
grip to venture so high. In himself a Phidias is
quite possible as a poet, but, if modern strength be
taken into consideration, almost solely in the sense
that to God nothing is impossible. The desire for
a poetical Claude Lorrain is already an immodesty
at present, however earnestly one man's heart may
yearn for such a consummation. —The presentment
of the highest man, the most simple and at the same
time the most complete, has hitherto been beyond
the scope of all artists. Perhaps, however, the
Greeks, in the ideal of Athene, saw farther than
any men did before or after their time.
178.
Art and Restoration. —The retrograde move-
ments in history, the so-called periods of restora-
tion, which try to revive intellectual and social


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 95
conditions that existed before those immediately
preceding,—and seem really to succeed in giving
them a brief resurrection, — have the charm of
sentimental recollection, ardent longing for what is
almost lost, hasty embracing of a transitory happi-
ness. It is on account of this strange trend towards
seriousness that in such transient and almost dreamy
periods art and poetry find a natural soil, just as the
tenderest and rarest plants grow on mountain-slopes
of steep declivity. —Thus many a good artist is un-
wittingly impelled to a "restoration" way of thinking
in politics and society, for which, on his own account,
he prepares a quiet little corner and garden. Here
he collects about himself the human remains of the
historical epoch that appeals to him, and plays his lyre
to many who are dead, half-dead, and weary to death,
perhaps with the above-mentioned result of a brief
resurrection.
179-
Happiness of the Age. —In two respects our
age is to be accounted happy. With respect to the
past, we enjoy all cultures and their productions, and
nurture ourselves on the noblest blood of all periods.
We stand sufficiently near to the magic of the
forces from whose womb these periods are born to
be able in passing to submit to their spell with
pleasure and terror; whereas earlier cultures could
only enjoy themselves, and never looked beyond
themselves, but were rather overarched by a bell of
broader or narrower dome, through which indeed
light streamed down to them, but which their gaze
could not pierce. With respect to the future,


## p. 96 (#116) #############################################

g6 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
there opens out to us for the first time a mighty,
comprehensive vista of human and economic pur-
poses engirdling the whole inhabited globe. At
the same time, we feel conscious of a power our-
selves to take this new task in hand without presump-
tion, without requiring supernatural aids. Yes,
whatever the result of our enterprise, however much
we may have overestimated our strength, at any
rate we need render account to no one but our-
selves, and mankind can henceforth begin to do
with itself what it will. —There are, it is true,
peculiar human bees, who only know how to suck
H the bitterest and worst elements from the chalice
of every flower. It is true that all flowers contain
something that is not honey, but these bees may
be allowed to feel in their own way about the
happiness of our time, and continue to build up
their hive of discomfort.
180.
A VISION. —Hours of instruction and meditation
for adults, even the most mature, and such institu-
tions visited without compulsion but in accordance
with the moral injunction of the whole community;
the churches as the meeting-places most worthy and
rich in memories for the purpose; at the same time
daily festivals in honour of the reason that is at-
tained and attainable by man; a newer and fuller
budding and blooming of the ideal of the teacher,
in which the clergyman, the artist and the physician,
the man of science and the sage are blended, and
their individual virtues should come to the fore as


## p. 97 (#117) #############################################

MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 97
a collective virtue in their teaching itself, in their
discourses, in their method—this is my ever-re-
curring vision, of which I firmly believe that it has
raised a corner of the veil of the future.
181.
Education a Distortion. —The extraordinary
haphazardness of the whole system of education,
which leads every adult to saynowadays that his sole
educator was chance, and the weathercock-nature
of educational methods and aims, may be explained
as follows. The oldest and the newest culture-
powers, as in a turbulent mass-meeting, would rather
be heard than understood, and wish to prove at all
costs by their outcries and clamourings that they
still exist or already exist. The poor teachers and
educators are first dazed by this senseless noise,
then become silent and finally apathetic, allowing
anything to be done to them just as they in their
turn allow anything to be done to their pupils.
They are not trained themselves, so how are they
to train others? They are themselves no straight-
growing, vigorous, succulent trees, and he who
wishes to attach himself to them must wind and
bend himself and finally become distorted and de-
formed as they.
182.
PHILOSOPHERS AND ARTISTS OF THE AgE. —
Rhapsody and frigidity, burning desires and wan-
ing of the heart's glow—this wretched medley is to
be found in the picture of the highest European
society of the present day. There the artist thinks
vol. 11. g


## p. 98 (#118) #############################################

98 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
that he is achieving a great deal when through his
art he lights the torch of the heart as well as the
torch of desire. The philosopher has the same
notion, when in the chilliness of his heart, which he
has in common with his age, he cools hot desires in
himself and his following by his world-denying judg-
ments.
183.
Not to be a Soldier of Culture without
Necessity. —At last people are learning what it
costs us so dear not to know in our youth—that
we must first do superior actions and secondly
seek the superior wherever and under whatever
names it is to be found ; that we must at once go out
of the way of all badness and mediocrity without
fighting it; and that even doubt as to the excellence
of a thing (such as quickly arises in one of practised
taste) should rank as an argument against it and a
reason for completely avoiding it. We must not
shrink from the danger of occasionally making a
mistake and confounding the less accessible good
with the bad and imperfect. Only he who can do
nothing better should attack the world's evils as
the soldier of culture. But those who should support
culture and spread its teachings ruin themselves
if they go about armed, and by precautions, night-
watches, and bad dreams turn the peace of their
domestic and artistic life into sinister unrest.
184.
How Natural History should be Ex-
pounded. —Natural history, like the history of the


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 99
war and victory of moral and intellectual forces
in the campaign against anxiety, self-delusion, lazi-
ness, superstition, folly, should be so expounded
that every reader or listener may be continually
aroused to strive after mental and physical health
and soundness, after the feeling of joy, and be
awakened to the desire to be the heir and continu-
ator of mankind, to an ever nobler adventurous im-
pulse. Hitherto natural history has not found its
true language, because the inventive and eloquent
artists—who are needed for this purpose—never
rid themselves of a secret mistrust of it, and above
all never wish to learn from it a thorough lesson.
Nevertheless it must be conceded to the English
that their scientific manuals for the lower strata
of the people have made admirable strides towards
that ideal. But then such books are written by
their foremost men of learning, full, complete, and
inspiring natures, and not, as among us, by mediocre
investigators.
185.
Genius in Humanity. —If genius, according to J
Schopenhauer's observation, lies in the coherent
and vivid recollection of our own experience, a
striving towards genius in humanity collectively
might be deduced from the striving towards know-
ledge of the whole historic past—which is begin-
ning to mark off the modern age more and more
as compared with earlier ages and has for the first
time broken down the barriers between nature and
spirit, men and animals, morality and physics. A
perfectly conceived history would be cosmic self-
consciousness.


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IOO HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
186.
The Cult of Culture. —On great minds is
bestowed the terrifying all-too-human of their
natures, their blindnesses, deformities, and extra-
vagances, so that their more powerful, easily all-
too-powerful influence may be continually held
within bounds through the distrust aroused by such
qualities. For the sum-total of all that human-
ity needs for its continued existence is so com-
prehensive, and demands powers so diverse and so
numerous, that for every one-sided predilection,
whether in science or politics or art or commerce, to
which such natures would persuade us, mankind as
a whole has to pay a heavy price. It has always
been a great disaster to culture when human beings
are worshipped. In this sense we may understand
the precept of Mosaic law which forbids us to have
any other gods but God. —Side by side with the
cult of genius and violence we must always place,
as its complement and remedy, the cult of culture.
This cult can find an intelligent appreciation
even for the material, the inferior, the mean, the
misunderstood, the weak, the imperfect, the one-
sided, the incomplete, the untrue, the apparent, even
the wicked and horrible, and can grant them the
concession that all this is necessary. For the
continued harmony of all things human, attained
by amazing toil and strokes of luck, and just as
much the work of Cyclopes and ants as of geniuses,
shall never be lost. How, indeed, could we dis-
pense with that deep, universal, and often uncanny


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. IOI
bass, without which, after all, melody cannot be
melody?
187.
The Antique World and Pleasure. —The
man of the antique world understood better how to
rejoice, we understand better how to grieve less.
They continually found new motives for feeling
happy, for celebrating festivals, being inventive with
all their wealth of shrewdness and reflection. We,
on the other hand, concentrate our intellect rather
on the solving of problems which have in view
painlessness and the removal of sources of dis-
comfort. With regard to suffering existence, the
ancients sought to forget or in some way to convert
the sensation into a pleasant one, thus trying to
supply palliatives. We attack the causes of suffering,
and on the whole prefer to use prophylactics. —
Perhaps we are only building upon a foundation
whereon a later age will once more set up the temple
of joy.
188.
The Muses as Liars. —" We know how to tell
many lies," so sang the Muses once, when they
revealed themselves to Hesiod. —The conception of
the artist as deceiver, once grasped, leads to im-
portant discoveries.
189.
How Paradoxical Homer can be. —Is there
anything more desperate, more horrible, more in-
credible, shining over human destiny like a winter
sun, than that idea of Homer's:


## p. 102 (#122) ############################################

102 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
,
"So the decree of the Gods willed it, and doomed
man to perish, that it might be a matter for song
even to distant generations "?
In other words, we suffer and perish so that poets
may not lack material, and this is the dispensation
of those very Gods of Homer who seem much con-
cerned about the joyousness of generations to come,
but very little about us men of the present. To
think that such ideas should ever have entered the
head of a Greek!
190.
Supplementary Justification of Exist-
ence. —Many ideas have come into the world as
errors and fancies but have turned out truths, be-
cause men have afterwards given them a genuine
basis to rest upon.
191.
Pro and Con Necessary. —He who has not
realised that every great man must not only be en-
couraged but also, for the sake of the common
welfare, opposed, is certainly still a great child—or
himself a great man.
192.
Injustice of Genius. —Genius is most unjust
towards geniuses, if they be contemporary. Either
it thinks it has no need of them and considers them
superfluous (for it can do without them), or their
influence crosses the path of its electric current, in
which case it even calls them pernicious.


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 103
193-
The Saddest Destiny of a Prophet. —He
has worked twenty years to convince his con-
temporaries, and succeeds at last, but in the mean-
time his adversaries have also succeeded—he is no
longer convinced of himself.
194.
Three Thinkers like one Spider. —In every
philosophical school three thinkers follow one an-
other in this relation: the first produces from
himself sap and seed, the second draws it out in
threads and spins a cunning web, the third waits in
this web for the victims who are caught in it—and
tries to live upon this philosophy.
195.
From Association with Authors. —It is as
bad a habit to go about with an author grasping
him by the nose as grasping him by the horn (and
every author has his horn).
196.
A Team of Two. —Vagueness of thought and
outbursts of sentimentality are as often wedded to
the reckless desire to have one's own way by hook
or by crook, to make oneself alone of any conse-
quence, as a genuinely helpful, gracious, and kindly
spirit is wedded to the impulse towards clearness
J


## p. 104 (#124) ############################################

104 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
and purity of thought and towards emotional mod-
eration and self-restraint.
197.
Binding and Separating Forces. —Surely it
is in the heads of men that there arises the force
that binds them—an understanding of their common
interest or the reverse; and in their hearts the force
that separates them—a blind choosing and groping
in love and hate, a devotion to one at the expense
of all, and a consequent contempt for the common
utility.
198.
Marksmen and Thinkers. —There are curious
marksmen who miss their mark, but leave the
shooting-gallery with secret pride in the fact that
their bullet at any rate flew very far (beyond the
mark, it is true), or that it did not hit the mark but
hit something else. There are thinkers of the same
stamp.
199.
Attack from Two Sides. —We act as enemies
towards an intellectual tendency or movement when
we are superior to it and disapprove of its aim, or
when its aim is too high and unrecognisable to our
eye—in other words, when it is superior to us. So
the same party may be attacked from two sides,
from above and from below. Not infrequently the
assailants, from common hatred, form an alliance
which is more repulsive than all that they hate.


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 105
200.
Original. —Original minds are distinguished not
by being the first to see a new thing, but by seeing
the old, well-known thing, which is seen and over-
looked by every one, as something new. The first
discoverer is usually that quite ordinary and un-
intellectual visionary—chance.
201.
Error of Philosophers. —The philosopher
believes that the value of his philosophy lies in the
whole, in the structure. Posterity finds it in the
stone with which he built and with which, from that
time forth, men will build oftener and better—in
other words, in the fact that the structure may be
destroyed and yet have value as material.
202. \
Wit. —Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.
203.
The Moment before Solution. —In science it
occurs every day and every hour that a man, im-
mediately before the solution, remains stuck, being
convinced that his efforts have been entirely in vain
—like one who, in untying a noose, hesitates at the
moment when it is nearest to coming loose, because
at that very moment it looks most like a knot.
204.
Among the Visionaries. — The thoughtful
man, and he who is sure of his intelligence, may


## p. 106 (#126) ############################################

106
HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
profitably consort with visionaries for a decade and
abandon himself in their torrid zone to a moderate
insanity. He will thus have travelled a good part
of the road towards that cosmopolitanism of the in-
tellect which can say without presumption, “Noth-
ing intellectual is alien to me. ”
205.
KEEN AIR. —The best and healthiest element in
science as amid the mountains is the keen air that
plays about it. -Intellectual molly-coddles (such as
artists) dread and abuse science on account of this
atmosphere.
206.
Why SAVANTS ARE NOBLER THAN ARTISTS.
-Science requires nobler natures than does poetry;
natures that are more simple, less ambitious, more
restrained, calmer, that think less of posthumous
fame and can bury themselves in studies which, in
the eye of the many, scarcely seem worthy of such
a sacrifice of personality. There is another loss of
which they are conscious. The nature of their occu-
pation, its continual exaction of the greatest sobriety,
weakens their will; the fire is not kept up so vigor-
ously as on the hearths of poetic minds. As such,
they often lose their strength and prime earlier than
artists do—and, as has been said, they are aware of
their danger. Under all circumstances they seem
less gifted because they shine less, and thus they
will always be rated below their value.


## p. 107 (#127) ############################################

MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 107
207.
How FAR PIETY OBSCURES. —In later centuries
the great man is credited with all the great qualities
and virtues of his century. Thus all that is best
is continually obscured by piety, which treats the
picture as a sacred one, to be surrounded with all
manner of votive offerings. In the end the picture
is completely veiled and covered by the offerings,
and thenceforth is more an object of faith than of
contemplation.
208.
STANDING ON ONE'S HEAD. -If we make truth
stand on its head, we generally fail to notice that
our own head, too, is not in its right position.
209.
ORIGIN AND UTILITY OF FASHION.
—The obvi-
ous satisfaction of the individual with his own form
excites imitation and gradually creates the form of
the many—that is, fashion. The many desire, and
indeed attain, that same comforting satisfaction with
their own form. Consider how many reasons every
man has for anxiety and shy self-concealment, and
how, on this account, three-fourths of his energy
and goodwill is crippled and may become unpro-
ductive! So we must be very grateful to fashion for
unfettering that three-fourths and communicating
self-confidence and the power of cheerful compro-
mise to those who feel themselves bound to each
other by its law. Even foolish laws give freedom


## p. 108 (#128) ############################################

108 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
and calm of the spirit, so long as many persons have
submitted to their sway.
210.
Looseners of Tongues. —The value of many
men and books rests solely on their faculty for com-
pelling all to speak out the most hidden and in-
timate things. They are looseners of tongues and
crowbars to open the most stubborn teeth. Many
events and misdeeds which are apparently only sent
as a curse to mankind possess this value and utility.
211.
Intellectual Freedom of Domicile. *—Who
of us could dare to call himself a "free spirit" if he
could not Vender homage after his fashion, by taking
on his own shoulders a portion of that burden of
public dislike and abuse, to men to whom this name
is attached as a reproach? We might as well call
ourselves in all seriousness " spirits free of domicile"
{Freiziigig) (and without that arrogant or high-
spirited defiance) because we feel the impulse to
freedom {Zug zur Freiheit) as the strongest instinct
of our minds and, in contrast to fixed and limited
minds, practically see our ideal in an intellectual
nomadism—to use a modest and almost deprecia-
tory expression.
* The original word, Freiziigig, means, in the modern Ger-
man Empire, possessing the free right of migration, without
pecuniary burdens or other restrictions, from one German
state to another. The play on words in Zug zur Freiheit
(" impulse to freedom ") is untranslateable. —Tr.


## p. 109 (#129) ############################################

MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 109
212.
Yes, the Favour of the Muses! —What
Homer says on this point goes right to our heart, so
true, so terrible is it:
"The Muse loved him with all her heart and gave
him good and evil, for she took away his eyes and
vouchsafed him sweet song. "
This is an endless text for thinking men: she
gives good and evil, that is her manner of loving
with all her heart and soul! And each man will
interpret specially for himself why we poets and
thinkers have to give up our eyes in her service. *
213.
Against the Cultivation of Music—The
artistic training of the eye from childhood upwards
by means of drawing, painting, landscape-sketching,
figures, scenes, involves an estimable gain in life,
making the eyesight keen, calm, and enduring in
the observation of men and circumstances. No
similar secondary advantage arises from the artistic
cultivation of the ear, whence public schools will
generally do well to give the art of the eye a pre-
ference over that of the ear.
214.
The Discoverers of Trivialities. —Subtle
minds, from which nothing is farther than trivialities,
often discover a triviality after taking all manner of
* Nietzsche seems to allude to his own case, for he ulti-
mately contracted a myopia which bordered on blindness.
—Tr.


## p. 110 (#130) ############################################

IIO HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
circuitous routes and mountain paths, and, to the
astonishment of the non-subtle, rejoice exceedingly.
215-
Morals of Savants. —A regular and rapid
advance in the sciences is only possible when the
individual is compelled to be not so distrustful as
to test every calculation and assertion of others, in
fields which are remote from his own. A necessary
condition, however, is that every man should have
competitors in his own sphere, who are extremely
distrustful and keep a sharp eye upon him. From
this juxtaposition of " not too distrustful" and " ex-
tremely distrustful" arises sincerity in the republic
of learning.
216.
Reasons for Sterility. —There are highly
gifted minds which are always sterile only because,
from temperamental weakness, they are too impa-
tient to wait for their pregnancy.
217
The Perverted World of Tears. — The
manifold discomforts which the demands of higher
culture cause to man finally pervert his nature to
such an extent that he usually keeps himself stoical
and unbending. Thus he has tears in reserve only
for rare occasions of happiness, so that many must
weep even at the enjoyment of painlessness—only
when happy does his heart still beat.


## p. 111 (#131) ############################################

MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. Ill
218.
The Greeks as Interpreters. —When we
speak of the Greeks we unwittingly speak of to-day
and yesterday; their universally known history is
a blank mirror, always reflecting something that is
not in the mirror itself. We enjoy the freedom of
speaking about them in order to have the right
of being silent about others—so that these Greeks
themselves may whisper something in the ear of
the reflective reader. Thus the Greeks facilitate to
modern men the communication of much that is
debatable and hard to communicate.
219.
Of the Acquired Character of the Greeks.
—We are easily led astray by the renowned Greek
clearness,transparency,simplicity,and order,by their
crystal-like naturalness and crystal-like art, into be-
lieving that all these gifts were bestowed on the
Greeks—for instance, that they could not but write
well, as Lichtenberg expressed it on one occasion.
Yet no statement could be more hasty and more
untenable. The history of prose from Gorgias to
Demosthenes shows a course of toiling and wrest-
ling towards light from the obscure, overloaded,
and tasteless, reminding one of the labour of heroes
who had to construct the first roads through forest
and bog. The dialogue of tragedy was the real
achievement of the dramatist, owing to its uncom-
mon clearness and precision, whereas the national
tendency was to riot in symbolism and innuendo,
a tendency expressly fostered by the great choral


## p. 112 (#132) ############################################

112 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
lyric. Similarly it was the achievement of Homer
to liberate the Greeks from Asiatic pomp and
gloom, and to have attained the clearness of archi-
tecture in details great and small. Nor was it by any
means thought easy to say anything in a pure and
illuminating style. How else should we account for
the great admiration for the epigram of Simonides,
which shows itself so simple, with no gilded points
or arabesques of wit, but says all that it has to say
plainly and with the calm of the sun, not with the
straining after effect of the lightning. Since the
struggle towards light from an almost native twilight
is Greek, a thrill of jubilation runs through the people
when they hear a laconic sentence, the language of
elegy or the maxims of the Seven Wise Men. Hence
they were so fond of giving precepts in verse, a prac-
tice that we find objectionable. This was the true
Apolline task of the Hellenic spirit, with the aim
of rising superior to the perils of metre and the
obscurity which is otherwise characteristic of poetry.
Simplicity, flexibility, and sobriety were wrestled
for and not given by nature to this people. The
danger of a relapse into Asianism constantly hovered
over the Greeks, and really overtook them from time
to time like a murky, overflowing tide of mystical
impulses, primitive savagery and darkness. We
see them plunge in; we see Europe, as it were,
flooded, washed away—for Europe was very small
then; but they always emerge once more to the
light, good swimmers and divers that they are, those
fellow-countrymen of Odysseus.


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 113
220.
The Pagan Characteristic. —Perhaps there
is nothing more astonishing to the observer of the
Greek world than to discover that the Greeks from
time to time held festivals, as it were, for all their
passions and evil tendencies alike, and in fact even
established a kind of series of festivals, by order of
the State, for their "all-too-human. " This is the
pagan characteristic of their world, which Christianity-
has never understood and never can understand, and
has always combated and despised. —They accepted
this all-too-human as unavoidable, and preferred,
instead of railing at it, to give it a kind of secondary
right by grafting it on to the usages of society and
religion. All in man that has power they called
divine, and wrote it on the walls of their heaven.
They do not deny this natural instinct that expresses
itself in evil characteristics, but regulate and limit
it to definite cults and days, so as to turn those tur-
bulent streams into as harmless a course as possible,
after devising sufficient precautionary measures.
That is the root of all the moral broad-mindedness
of antiquity. To the wicked, the dubious, the back-
ward, the animal element, as to the barbaric, pre-
Hellenic and Asiatic, which still lived in the depths
of Greek nature, they allowed a moderate outflow,
and did not strive to destroy it utterly. The whole
system was under the domain of the State, which
was built up not on individuals or castes, but on
common human qualities. In the structure of the
State the Greeks show thatwonderful sense for typi-
cal facts which later on enabled them to become in-
vestigators of Nature, historians, geographers, and
vol. 11. H


## p. 114 (#134) ############################################

114 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
philosophers. It was not a limited moral law of
priests or castes, which had to decide about the
constitution of the State and State worship, but the
most comprehensive view of the reality of all that is
human. Whence do the Greeks derive this freedom,
this sense of reality? Perhaps from Homer and the
poets who preceded him. For just those poets whose
nature is generally not the most wise or just possess,
in compensation, that delight in reality and activity
of every kind, and prefer not to deny even evil. It
suffices for them if evil moderates itself, does not
kill or inwardly poison everything—in other words,
they have similar ideas to those of the founders of
Greek constitutions, and were their teachers and
forerunners.
221.
Exceptional Greeks. —In Greece, deep, thor-
ough, serious minds were the exception. The na-
tional instinct tended rather to regard the serious
and thorough as a kind of grimace. To borrow
forms from a foreign source, not to create but to
transform into the fairest shapes—that is Greek.
To imitate, not for utility but for artistic illusion,
ever and anon to gain the mastery over forced
seriousness, to arrange, beautify, simplify—that is
the continual task from Homer to the Sophists of
the third and fourth centuries of our era, who are all
outward show, pompous speech, declamatory ges-
tures, and address themselves to shallow souls that
care only for appearance, sound, and effect. And
now let us estimate the greatness of those exceptional
Greeks, who created science! Whoever tells of them,
tells the most heroic story of the human mind!


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 115
222.
Simplicity not the First nor the Last
Thing in Point of Time. —In the history of
religious ideas many errors about development
and false gradations are made in matters which
in reality are not consecutive outgrowths but con-
temporary yet separate phenomena. In particular,
simplicity has still far too much the reputation of
being the oldest, the initial thing. Much that is
human arises by subtraction and division, and not
merely by doubling, addition, and unification. —For
instance, men still believe in a gradual development
of the idea of God from those unwieldy stones and
blocks of wood up to the highest forms of anthropo-
morphism. Yet the fact is that so long as divinity
was attributed to and felt in trees, logs of wood,
stones, and beasts, people shrank from humanising
their forms as from an act of godlessness. First
of all, poets, apart from all considerations of cult
and the ban of religious shame, have had to make
the inner imagination of man accustomed and com-
pliant to this notion. Wherever more pious periods
and phases of thought gained the upper hand, this
liberating influence of poets fell into the back-
ground, and sanctity remained, after as before, on
the side of the monstrous, uncanny, quite peculiarly
inhuman. And then, much of what the inner im-
agination ventures to picture to itself would exert a
painful influence if externally and corporeally re-
presented. The inner eye is far bolder and more
shameless than the outer (whence the well-known
difficulty and, to some extent, impossibility, of


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Il6 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
working epic material into dramatic form). The
religious imagination for a long time entirely refuses
to believe in the identity of God with an image:
the image is meant to fix the numen of the Deity,
actually and specifically, although in a mysterious
and not altogether intelligible way. The oldest
image of the Gods is meant to shelter and at the
same time to hide* the God—to indicate him but not
to expose him to view. No Greek really looked upon
his Apollo as a pointed pillar of wood, his Eros as
a lump of stone. These were symbols, which were
intended to inspire dread of the manifestation of the
God. It was the same with those blocks of wood
out of which individual limbs, generally in excessive
number, were fashioned with the scantiest of carv-
ing—as, for instance, a Laconian Apollo with four
hands and four ears. In the incomplete, symbolical,
or excessive lies a terrible sanctity, which is meant
to prevent us from thinking of anything human or
similar to humanity. It is not an embryonic stage
of art in which such things are made—as if they
were not able to speak more plainly and portray
more sensibly in the age when such images were
honoured! Rather, men are afraid of just one thing
—direct speaking out. Just as the cella hides and
conceals in a mysterious twilight, yet not completely,
the holy of holies, the real numen of the Deity; just
as, again, the peripteric temple hides the cella, pro-
tecting it from indiscreet eyes as with a screen and
a veil, yet not completely—so it is with the image of
the Deity, and at the same time the concealment of
* The play on bergen (shelter) and verbergen (hide) is un-
translateable. —Tr.


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 117
the Deity. —Only when outside the cult, in the pro-
fane world of athletic contest, the joy in the victor
had risen so high that the ripples thus started
reacted upon the lake of religious emotion, was
the statue of the victor set up before the temple.
Then the pious pilgrim had to accustom his eye
and his soul, whether he would or no, to the inevit-
able sight of human beauty and super-strength, so
that the worship of men and Gods melted into each
other from physical and spiritual contact. Then too
for the first time the fear of really humanising the
figures of the Gods is lost, and the mighty arena for
great plastic art is opened—even now with the limi-
tation that wherever there is to be adoration the
primitive form and ugliness are carefully preserved
and copied. But the Hellene, as he dedicates and
makes offerings, may now with religious sanction
indulge in his delight in making God become a man.
223.
Whither We must Travel. —Immediate self-
observation is not enough, by a long way, to enable
us to learn to know ourselves. We need history, for
the past continues to flow through us in a hundred
channels. We ourselves are, after all, nothing but
our own sensation at every moment of this continued j
flow. Even here, when we wish to step down into
the stream of our apparently most peculiar and per-
sonal development, Heraclitus' aphorism, "You can-
not step twice into the same river," holds good. —
This is a piece of wisdom which has, indeed, gradu-
ally become trite, but nevertheless has remained as
^


## p. 118 (#138) ############################################

Il8 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
strong and true as it ever was. It is the same with
the saying that, in order to understand history, we
must scrutinise the living remains of historical
periods; that we must travel, as old Herodotus tra-
velled, to other nations, especially to those so-called
savage or half-savage races in regions where man
has doffed or not yet donned European garb. For
they are ancient and firmly established steps of
culture on which we can stand. There is, however,
a more subtle art and aim in travelling, which does
not always necessitate our passing from place to
place and going thousands of miles away. Very
probably the last three centuries, in all their colour-
ings and refractions of culture, survive even in our
vicinity, only they have to be discovered. In some
families, or even in individuals, the strata are still
superimposed on each other, beautifully and per-
ceptibly; in other places there are dispersions and
displacements of the structure which are harder to
understand. Certainly in remote districts, in less
known mountain valleys, circumscribed communi-
ties have been able more easily to maintain an ad-
mirable pattern of a far older sentiment, a pattern
that must here be investigated. On the other hand,
it is improbable that such discoveries will be made
in Berlin, where man comes into the world washed-
out and sapless. He who after long practice of this
art of travel has become a hundred-eyed Argus will
accompany his Io—I mean his ego—everywhere, and
in Egypt and Greece, Byzantium and Rome, France
and Germany, in the age of wandering or settled
races, in Renaissance or Reformation, at home and
abroad, in sea, forest, plant, and mountain, will again


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 119
light upon the travel-adventure of this ever-growing,
ever-altered ego. —Thus self-knowledge becomes
universal knowledge as regards the entire past, and,
by another chain of observation, which can only be
indicated here, self-direction and self-training in the
freest and most far-seeing spirits might become uni-
versal direction as regards all future humanity.
o
224.
Balm and Poison. —We cannot ponder too
deeply on this fact: Christianity is the religion of
antiquity grown old; it presupposes degenerate old
culture-stocks, and on them it had, and still has, power
to work like balm. There are periods when ears and
eyes are full of slime, so that they can no longer
hear the voice of reason and philosophy or see the
wisdom that walks in bodily shape, whether it bears
the name of Epictetus or of Epicurus. Then, per-
haps, the erection of the martyr's cross and the
"trumpet of the last judgment" may have the effect
of still inspiring such races to end their lives de-
cently. If we think of Juvenal's Rome, of that
poisonous toad with the eyes of Venus, we under-
stand what it means to make the sign of the Cross
before the world, we honour the silent Christian com-
munity and are grateful for its having stifled the
Greco-Roman Empire. If, indeed, most men were
then born in spiritual slavery, with the sensuality of
old men, what a pleasure to meet beings who were
more soul than body, and who seemed to realise the
Greek idea of the shades of the under-world—shy,
scurrying, chirping, kindly creatures, with a rever-


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120 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
sion on the "better life," and therefore so unassum-
ing, so secretly scornful, so proudly patient! —This
Christianity, as the evening chime of the good an-
tiquity, with cracked, weary and yet melodious bell,
is balm in the ears even to one who only now tra-
verses those centuries historically. What must it
have been to those men themselves! —To young and
fresh barbarian nations, on the other hand, Christi-
anity is a poison. For to implant the teaching of
sinfulness and damnation in the heroic, childlike,
and animal soul of the old Germans is nothing but
poisoning. An enormous chemical fermentation and
decomposition, a medley of sentiments and judg-
ments, a rank growth of adventurous legend, and
hence in the long run a fundamental weakening of
such barbarian peoples, was the inevitable result.
True, without this weakening what should we have
left of Greek culture, of the whole cultured past of
the human race? For the barbarians untouched by
Christianity knew very well how to make a clean
sweep of old cultures, as was only too clearly shown
by the heathen conquerors of Romanised Britain.
Thus Christianity, against its will, was compelled to
aid in making "the antique world " immortal. —There
remains, however, a counter-question and the possi-
bility of a counter-reckoning. Without this weaken-
ing through the poisoning referred to, would any of
those fresh stocks—the Germans, for instance—have
been in a position gradually to find by themselves a
higher, a peculiar, a new culture, of which the most
distant conception would therefore have been lost
to humanity? —In this, as in every case, we do not
know, Christianly speaking, whether God owes the


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 121
devil or the devil God more thanks for everything
having turned out as it has.
225.
Faith makes Holy and Condemns. — A
Christian who happened upon forbidden paths of
thought might well ask himself on some occasion
whether it is really necessary that there should be a
God, side by side with a representative Lamb, if
faith in the existence of these beings suffices to pro-
duce the same influences? If they do exist after
all, are they not superfluous beings? For all that
is given by the Christian religion to the human soul,
all that is beneficent, consoling, and edifying, just as
much as all that depresses and crushes, emanates
from that faith and not from the objects of that
faith. It is here as in another well-known case—
there were indeed no witches, but the terrible effects
of the belief in witches were the same as if they
really had existed. For all occasions where the
Christian awaits the immediate intervention of a
God, though in vain (for there is no God), his religion
is inventive enough to find subterfuges and reasons
for tranquillity. In so far Christianity is an ingenious
religion. —Faith, indeed, has up to the present not
been able to move real mountains, although I do
not know who assumed that it could. But it can
put mountains where there are none.
226.
The Tragi-Comedy of Regensburg. —Here
and there we see with terrible clearness the harle-
quinade of Fortune, how she fastens the rope, on


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122 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
which she wills that succeeding centuries should
dance, on to a few days, one place, the condition
and opinions of one brain. Thus the fate of modern
German history lies in the days of that disputation
at Regensburg: the peaceful settlement of ecclesi-
astical and moral affairs, without religious wars or a
counter-reformation, and also the unity of the Ger-
man nation, seemed assured: the deep, gentle spirit of
Contarini hovered for one moment over the theologi-
cal squabble, victorious, as representative of the riper
Italian piety, reflecting the morning glory of intel-
lectual freedom. But Luther's hard head, full of
suspicions and strange misgivings, showed resist-
ance. Because justification by grace appeared to
him his greatest motto and discovery, he did not
believe the phrase in the mouth of Italians; where-
as, in point of fact, as is well known, they had
invented it much earlier and spread it throughout
Italy in deep silence. In this apparent agreement
Luther saw the tricks of the devil, and hindered the
work of peace as well as he could, thereby advan-
cing to a great extent the aims of the Empire's foes.
—And now, in order to have a still stronger idea of
the dreadful farcicality of it all, let us add that none
of the principles about which men then disputed in
Regensburg—neither that of original sin, nor that of
redemption by proxy, nor that of justification by
faith—is in any way true or even has any connection
with truth: that they are now all recognised as in-
capable of being discussed. Yet on this account
the world was set on fire—that is to say, by opinions
which correspond to no things or realities; whereas
as regards purely philological questions—as, for in-
v


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 121
devil or the devil God more thanks for everything
having turned out as it has.
225.
FAITH MAKES HOLY AND CONDEMNS. - A
Christian who happened upon forbidden paths of
thought might well ask himself on some occasion
whether it is really necessary that there should be a
God, side by side with a representative Lamb, if
faith in the existence of these beings suffices to pro-
duce the same influences ? If they do exist after
all, are they not superfluous beings?