"Through valuing alone can value arise; and without valuing, the nut of existence would be hollow. Listen, ye creators!
"Change of values—that is, change of creators.[39]
"Verily a prodigy is this power of praising and blaming. Tell me, ye brethren, who will master it for me? Who will put a yoke on the thousand necks of this animal?"[40]
"All the beauty and sublimity with which we have invested real and imagined things," says Nietzsche, "I will show to be the property and product of man, and this should be his most beautiful apology. Man as a poet, as a thinker, as a god, as love, as power. Oh, the regal liberality with which he has lavished gifts upon things!... Hitherto this has been his greatest disinterestedness, that he admired and worshipped, and knew how to conceal from himself that he it was who had created what he admired."[41]
"Man as a poet, as a thinker, as a god, as love, as power"—this man, following his divine inspiration to subdue the earth and to make it his, became the greatest stimulus to Life itself, the greatest bond between earth and the human soul; and, in shedding the glamour of his personality, like the sun, upon the things he interpreted and valued, he also gilded, by reflection, his fellow creatures.
There is not a thing we call sacred, beautiful, good or precious, that has not been valued for us by this man, and when we, like children, call out for the Truth about the riddles of this world, it is not for the truth of reality which is the object of Christianity and of science for which we crave; but for the simplifications[42] and values of this man-god, who, by the art-form, into which he casts reality, makes us believe that reality is as he says it is.
If this man is lacking, then we succumb to the blackest despair. If he is with us, we voluntarily yield to boundless joy and good cheer. His function is the divine principle on earth; his creation Art "is the highest task and the properly metaphysical activity of this life."[43]
[26] W. P., Vol. II, p. 28; also C.E., p. 288. See also Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke, Vol. V, "Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums," p. 286: "The first origin of religion in general, as of every other kind of knowledge and culture, can be explained only as the teaching of higher natures."
[27] W. P., Vol. II, p. 89: "The Will to Truth at this stage is essentially the art of interpretation."