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Or, perchance, does the whole of modern history show in its demeanour greater confidence in life, greater confidence in its ideals? Its loftiest pretension is now to be a mirror ; it repudiates all teleology; it will have no more “proving”; it disdains to play the judge, and thereby shows its good taste⁠—it asserts as little as it denies, it fixes, it “describes.” All this is to a high degree ascetic, but at the same time it is to a much greater degree nihilistic ; make no mistake about this! You see in the historian a gloomy, hard, but determined gaze⁠—an eye that looks out as an isolated North Pole explorer looks out (perhaps so as not to look within, so as not to look back?)⁠—there is snow⁠—here is life silenced, the last crows which caw here are called “whither?” “Vanity,” “Nada”⁠—here nothing more flourishes and grows, at the most the metapolitics of St. Petersburg and the “pity” of Tolstoy. But as for that other school of historians, a perhaps still more “modern” school, a voluptuous and lascivious school which ogles life and the ascetic ideal with equal fervour, which uses the word “artist” as a glove, and has nowadays established a “corner” for itself, in all the praise given to contemplation; oh, what a thirst do these sweet intellectuals excite even for ascetics and winter landscapes! Nay! The devil take these “contemplative” folk! How much liefer would I wander with those historical Nihilists through the gloomiest, grey, cold mist!⁠—nay, I shall not mind listening (supposing I have to choose) to one who is completely unhistorical and anti-historical (a man, like Dühring for instance, over whose periods a hitherto shy and unavowed species of “beautiful souls” has grown intoxicated in contemporary Germany, the species anarchistica within the educated proletariate). The “contemplative” are a hundred times worse⁠—I never knew anything which produced such intense nausea as one of those “objective” chairs , one of those scented mannikins-about-town of history, a thing half-priest, half-satyr (Renan parfum ), which betrays by the high, shrill