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come to a halt before the boundless and infinite,—when a
super-abundance of refined delight has been enjoyed by a
sudden checking and petrifying, by standing firmly and
planting oneself fixedly on still trembling ground. PRO-
PORTIONATENESS is strange to us, let us confess it to
ourselves; our itching is really the itching for the infinite,
the immeasurable. Like the rider on his forward panting
horse, we let the reins fall before the infinite, we modern
men, we semi- barbarians—and are only in OUR highest
bliss when we—ARE IN MOST DANGER.
- Whether it be hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, or
eudaemonism, all those modes of thinking which measure
the worth of things according to PLEASURE and PAIN,
that is, according to accompanying circumstances and sec-
ondary considerations, are plausible modes of thought and
naivetes, which every one conscious of CREATIVE pow-
ers and an artist’s conscience will look down upon with
scorn, though not without sympathy. Sympathy for you!—
to be sure, that is not sympathy as you understand it: it is
not sympathy for social ‘distress,’ for ‘society’ with its sick
and misfortuned, for the hereditarily vicious and defective
who lie on the ground around us; still less is it sympathy
for the grumbling, vexed, revolutionary slave-classes who
strive after power—they call it ‘freedom.’ OUR sympathy
is a loftier and further-sighted sympathy:—we see how
MAN dwarfs himself, how YOU dwarf him! and there are
moments when we view YOUR sympathy with an inde-
scribable anguish, when we resist it,—when we regard your