accidents less and a few accidents more, and there might have been a Platonizing of Southern Europe—though as things turned out, Plato has come to be known as a fantast and utopian (harder names perhaps having been used in ancient Athens).[1]
Naturally along with the larger outlook is a fresh appreciation of poetry. He thinks that poets might do more than paint an Arcady, nor should it be necessary for them to employ their imagination in falsifying reality; it is their high mission to open to us the realm of the possible. Starting with suggestions from the course of evolution in the past, they might with bold fantasy anticipate what will or may be—picture virtues such as have never been on earth, and higher races of men. "All our poetry is so restricted, earthly (kleinbürgerlich-erdenhaft)." He waits for seers who will tell us of the possible, astronomers of the ideal who will reveal to us purple-glowing constellations and whole milky ways of the beautiful. First after the death of religion [in the old sense] can invention in the realm of the Divine again luxuriate—and perhaps just because we can no longer flee to God, the sea within ourselves may rise higher.[2] He knows the charm, too, of poets who but imperfectly express the vision of their souls, who give us foretastes of the vision rather than the vision itself:[3] it is the charm of suggestiveness—a very different charm and a much wholesomer one than that upon which George Eliot dilates in "A Minor Prophet," where imperfection becomes almost dear for its own sake.
To sum up: if science, knowledge of the actual whatever becomes of ideals, may be taken as the characteristic note of the second period, science and the ideal are the note of the third. Close observation of reality and an unblanched face before it continue, but there is a fresh sense that the actual is only a part of the totality of things. Science is simply a negative test—we must not have ideals which are inconsistent with it.[4] Accordingly Nietzsche is happy again—but with an ennobled, purified
