The human horizon.—Philosophers may be conceived as men who make the greatest efforts to discover to what extent man can elevate himself—this holds good more particularly of Plato: how far man's power can extend. But they do this as individuals; perhaps the instinct of Cæsars and of all founders of states, etc., was greater, for it preoccupied itself with the question how far man could be urged forward in development under "favourable circumstances." What they did not sufficiently understand, however, was the nature of favourable circumstances. The great question: "Where has the plant 'man' grown most magnificently heretofore? In order to answer this, a comparative study of history is necessary.
974.
Every fact and every work exercises a fresh persuasion over every age and every new species of man. History always enunciates new truths.
975.
To remain objective, severe, firm, and hard while making a thought prevail is perhaps the best forte of artists; but if for this purpose any one have to work upon human material (as teachers, statesmen, have to do, etc.), then the repose, the coldness, and the hardness soon vanish. In natures like Cæsar and Napoleon we are able to divine something of the nature of "disinterestedness" in their work on their marble, whatever be the number of men that are sacrificed in the process. In this direction the future of higher men lies: to bear the greatest responsibilities and not to go to rack and ruin through them.—Hitherto the deceptions of inspiration have almost always been necessary for a man not to lose faith in his own hand, and in his right to his task.
976.
The reason why philosophers are mostly failures. Because among the conditions which determine them there are qualities which generally ruin other men:—
(1) A philosopher must have an enormous multiplicity of qualities; he must be a sort of abbreviation of man and have all man's high and base desires: the danger of the contrast within him, and of the possibility of his loathing himself;
(2) He must be inquisitive in an extraordinary number of ways: the danger of versatility;
(3) He must be just and honest in the highest sense, but profound both in love and hate (and in injustice);