536.

The Thumbscrew.—It is disgusting to observe with what cruelty every one charges his two or [pg 364] three private virtues to the account of others who may perhaps not possess them, and whom he torments and worries with them. Let us therefore deal humanely with the “sense of honesty,” although we may possess in it a thumbscrew with which we can worry to death all these presumptuous egoists who even yet wish to impose their own beliefs upon the whole world—we have tried this thumbscrew on ourselves!

537.

Mastery.—We have reached mastery when we neither mistake nor hesitate in the achievement.

538.

The Moral Insanity of Genius.—In a certain category of great intellects we may observe a painful and partly horrible spectacle: in their most productive moments their flights aloft and into the far distance appear to be out of harmony with their general constitution and to exceed their power in one way or another, so that each time there remains a deficiency, and also in the long run a defectiveness in the entire machinery, which latter is manifested among those highly intellectual natures by various kinds of moral and intellectual symptoms more regularly than by conditions of bodily distress.

Thus those incomprehensible characteristics of their nature—all their timidity, vanity, hatefulness, envy, their narrow and narrowing disposition—and that too personal and awkward element in natures like those of Rousseau and Schopenhauer, may very [pg 365] well be the consequences of a periodical attack of heart disease; and this in its turn may be the result of a nervous complaint, and this latter the consequence of ——16

So long as genius dwells within us we are full of audacity, yea, almost mad, and heedless of health, life, and honour; we fly through the day as free and swift as an eagle, and in the darkness we feel as confident as an owl.—But let genius once leave us and we are instantly overcome by a feeling of the most profound despondency: we can no longer understand ourselves; we suffer from everything that we experience and do not experience; we feel as if we were in the midst of shelterless rocks with the tempest raging round us, and we are at the same time like pitiful childish souls, afraid of a rustle or a shadow.—Three-fourths of all the evil committed in the world is due to timidity; and this is above all a physiological process.

539.

Do you know what you Want?—Have you never been troubled by the fear that you might not be at all fitted for recognising what is true? by the fear that your senses might be too dull, and even your delicacy of sight far too blunt? If you could only perceive, even once, to what extent your volition dominates your sight! How, for example, you wished yesterday to see more than some one else, while to-day you wish to see it differently! and how from the start you were anxious to see [pg 366] something which would be in conformity with or in opposition to anything that people thought they had observed up to the present. Oh, those shameful cravings! How often you keep your eyes open for what is efficacious, for what is soothing, just because you happen to be tired at the moment! Always full of secret predeterminations of what truth should be like, so that you—you, forsooth!—might accept it! or do you think that to-day, because you are as frozen and dry as a bright winter morning, and because nothing is weighing on your mind, you have better eyesight! Are not ardour and enthusiasm necessary to do justice to the creations of thought?—and this indeed is what is called sight! as if you could treat matters of thought any differently from the manner in which you treat men. In all relations with thought there is the same morality, the same honesty of purpose, the same arrière-pensée, the same slackness, the same faint-heartedness—your whole lovable and hateful self! Your physical exhaustion will lend the things pale colours whilst your feverishness will turn them into monsters! Does not your morning show the things in a different light from the evening? Are you not afraid of finding in the cave of all knowledge your own phantom, the veil in which truth is wrapped up and hidden from your sight? Is it not a dreadful comedy in which you so thoughtlessly wish to take part?

540.

Learning.—Michelangelo considered Raphael's genius as having been acquired by study, and upon [pg 367] his own as a natural gift: learning as opposed to talent; though this is mere pedantry, with all due respect to the great pedant himself. For what is talent but a name for an older piece of learning, experience, exercise, appropriation, and incorporation, perhaps as far back as the times of our ancestors, or even earlier! And again: he who learns forms his own talents, only learning is not such an easy matter and depends not only upon our willingness, but also upon our being able to learn at all.

Jealousy often prevents this in an artist, or that pride which, when it experiences any strange feeling, at once assumes an attitude of defence instead of an attitude of scholarly receptiveness. Raphael, like Goethe, lacked this pride, on which account they were great learners, and not merely the exploiters of those quarries which had been formed by the manifold genealogy of their forefathers. Raphael vanishes before our eyes as a learner in the midst of that assimilation of what his great rival called his “nature”: this noblest of all thieves daily carried off a portion of it; but before he had appropriated all the genius of Michelangelo he died—and the final series of his works, because it is the beginning of a new plan of study, is less perfect and good, for the simple reason that the great student was interrupted by death in the midst of his most difficult task, and took away with him that justifying and final goal which he had in view.