en through all the vanity, through all the
noise which is natural to these preachers (as to all preachers), he will
hear a hoarse, groaning, genuine note of SELF-CONTEMPT. It belongs
to the overshadowing and uglifying of Europe, which has been on
the increase for a century (the first symptoms of which are already
specified documentarily in a thoughtful letter of Galiani to Madame
d'Epinay)--IF IT IS NOT REALLY THE CAUSE THEREOF! The man of
"modern ideas," the conceited ape, is excessively dissatisfied with
himself--this is perfectly certain. He suffers, and his vanity wants him
only "to suffer with his fellows."

223. The hybrid European--a tolerably ugly plebeian, taken all in
all--absolutely requires a costume: he needs history as a storeroom
of costumes. To be sure, he notices that none of the costumes fit him
properly--he changes and changes. Let us look at the nineteenth century
with respect to these hasty preferences and changes in its masquerades
of style, and also with respect to its moments of desperation on account
of "nothing suiting" us. It is in vain to get ourselves up as romantic,
or classical, or Christian, or Florentine, or barocco, or "national,"
in moribus et artibus: it does not "clothe us"! But the "spirit,"
especially the "historical spirit," profits even by this desperation:
once and again a new sample of the past or of the foreign is tested,
put on, taken off, packed up, and above all studied--we are the first
studious age in puncto of "costumes," I mean as concerns morals,
articles of belief, artistic tastes, and religions; we are prepared as
no other age has ever been for a carnival in the grand style, for the
most spiritual festival--laughter and arrogance, for the transcendental
height of supreme folly and Aristophanic ridicule of the world. Perhaps
we are still discovering the domain of our invention just here, the
domain where even we can still be original, probably as parodists of
the world's history and as God's Merry-Andrews,--perhaps, though nothing
else of the present have a future, our laughter itself may have a
future!

224. The historical sense (or the capacity for divining quickly
the order of rank of the valuations according to which a people, a
community, or an individual has lived, the "divining instinct" for the
relationships of these valuations, for the relation of the authority
of the valuations to the authority of the operating forces),--this
historical sense, which we Eur