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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.