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- As happened finally in all the enlightenment of mod-
ern times with the French Revolution (that terrible farce,
quite superfluous when judged close at hand, into which,
however, the noble and visionary spectators of all Europe
have interpreted from a distance their own indignation and
enthusiasm so long and passionately, UNTIL THE TEXT
HAS DISAPPEARED UNDER THE INTERPRETATION),
so a noble posterity might once more misunderstand the
whole of the past, and perhaps only thereby make ITS as-
pect endurable.—Or rather, has not this already happened?
Have not we ourselves been—that ‘noble posterity’? And, in
so far as we now comprehend this, is it not—thereby already
past? - Nobody will very readily regard a doctrine as true merely
because it makes people happy or virtuous—excepting, per-
haps, the amiable ‘Idealists,’ who are enthusiastic about the
good, true, and beautiful, and let all kinds of motley, coarse,
and good-natured desirabilities swim about promiscuously
in their pond. Happiness and virtue are no arguments. It is
willingly forgotten, however, even on the part of thought-
ful minds, that to make unhappy and to make bad are
just as little counter- arguments. A thing could be TRUE,
although it were in the highest degree injurious and dan-
gerous; indeed, the fundamental constitution of existence
might be such that one succumbed by a full knowledge of
it—so that the strength of a mind might be measured by the
amount of ‘truth’ it could endure—or to speak more plain-
ly, by the extent to which it REQUIRED truth attenuated,