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FIFTH BOOK
309

scientific methods. We have to deal with the things experimentally, being by turns angry with and kind to them and alternately showing them justice, passion and coldness. The one speaks to the things in his capacity of policeman, the other in that of a confessor, a third as an inquisitive traveller. They will forsee anything from them by either sympathy or violence; the one is urged on and led to insight by the reverence of their secrets, another again by indiscretion aud tricks in the explanation of secrets. We investigators, like all conquerors, discoverers, navigators, adventurers, have bold, moral principles, and are liable to being in the main considered evil.

433

To see with new eyes.—Suppose that the term “beauty in art” always implied the imitation of all that is happy—and this I consider the truth—correspond- ing to the idea which an age, a people, a great self- constitutive individual form of him who is happy: what then does the so-called realism of the present artists disclose with regard to the happiness of our age? It is doubtless its style of beauty which we, in our days, understand and enjoy best of all We are consequently led to believe that our present, peculiar happiness is based on the real, on most acute senses and the true conception of the real; hence not on reality, but on the knowledge of reality. The influence of science hus