Human, All Too Human Volume Ii Part 16

183.

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

184.

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

185.

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

186.

THE CULT OF CULTURE.-On great minds is bestowed the terrifying all-too-human of their natures, their blindnesses, deformities, and extravagances, so that their more powerful, easily all-too-powerful influence may be continually held within bounds through the distrust aroused by such qualities. For the sum-total of all that humanity needs for its continued existence is so comprehensive, and demands powers so diverse and so numerous, that for every one-sided predilection, whether in science or politics or art or commerce, to which such natures would persuade us, mankind as a whole has to pay a heavy price. It has always been a great disaster to culture when human beings are worshipped. In this sense we may understand the precept of Mosaic law which forbids us to have any other G.o.ds but G.o.d.-Side by side with the cult of genius and violence we must always place, as its complement and remedy, the cult of culture.

This cult can find an intelligent appreciation even for the material, the inferior, the mean, the misunderstood, the weak, the imperfect, the one-sided, the incomplete, the untrue, the apparent, even the wicked and horrible, and can grant them the concession that _all this is necessary_.

For the continued harmony of all things human, attained by amazing toil and strokes of luck, and just as much the work of Cyclopes and ants as of geniuses, shall never be lost. How, indeed, could we dispense with that deep, universal, and often uncanny ba.s.s, without which, after all, melody cannot be melody?

187.

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

188.

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

189.

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

"So the decree of the G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds of Homer who seem much concerned about the joyousness of generations to come, but very little about us men of the present. To think that such ideas should ever have entered the head of a Greek!

190.

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

191.

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

192.

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

193.

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

194.

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