courage, hope, you will be beside yourselves and beyond all doubts; when you decree “he who is not beside himself as we are cannot in the least know what and where truth is," How you long to find all sharers of your belief in this state—which is that of intellectual viciousness —and to light your flames by their conflagration! Oh, for your martyrdom, your triumph of the canonised lie! Must you needs inflict such grief upon yourselves? Must you?
544
How philosophy is pursued in on days.—I know quite well that our philosophising youths, women and artists, expect from philosophy the very contrary of that which the Greeks derived from it. What does he who hears not the constant exultation resounding in every speech and rejoinder of a Platonic dialogue, the exultation over the new invention of rational thinking, know about Plato, about ancient philosophy? At that time the souls became filled with enthusiasm while pursuing the severe and sober sport of ideas, generalisation, refutation, contraction—with that enthusiasm which, perhaps, also the old, great, severe, and sober contrapuntists in music have known. At that time there still lingered on the tongues of Greece that other, older and formerly omnipotent taste wherefrom the new taste detached itself so magically that the “divine art” of dialectics was praised by faltering voices as though In a frenzy of love. But that old-world system was
