Page 52 - beyond-good-and-evil

38. 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?

39. 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,

1