Even philosophy, Nietzsche complains, with a side-glance at the German universities, has been more and more transformed into the history of philosophy, a teaching of what everybody has thought about everything; "a sort of harmless gossip between academic grey-beards and academic sucklings." It is boasted as a point of honour that freedom of thought exists in various countries. In reality it is only a poor sort of freedom. One may think in a hundred ways, but one may only act in one way--and that is the way that is called "culture" and is in reality "only a form, and what is more a bad form, a uniform." Nietzsche attacks the view which regards the historically cultured person as the justest of all. We honour the historian who aims at pure knowledge, from which nothing follows. But there are many trivial truths, and it is a misfortune that whole battalions of inquirers should fling themselves upon them, even if these narrow minds belong to honest men. The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he does not take these opinions for models. That man is thought best fitted to depict a period of the past, who is not in the least affected by that period. But only he who has a share in building up the future can grasp what the past has been, and only when transformed into a work of art can history arouse or even sustain instincts. As historical education is now conducted, the mass of impressions communicated is so great as to produce numbness, a feeling of being born old of an old stock--although less than thirty human lives, reckoned at seventy years each, divide us from the beginning of our era. And with this is connected the immense superstition of the value and significance of universal history. Schiller's phrase is everlastingly repeated: "The history of the world is the tribunal of the world," as though there could be any other historical tribunal than thought; and the Hegelian view of history as the ever-clearer self-revelation of the godhead has obstinately held its own, only that it has gradually passed into sheer admiration of success, an approval of any and every fact, be it never so brutal. But greatness has nothing to do with results or with success. Demosthenes, who spoke in vain, is greater than Philip, who was always victorious. Everything in our day is thought to be in order, if only it be an accomplished fact; even when a man of genius dies in the fulness of his powers, proofs are forthcoming that he died at the right time. And the fragment of history we possess is entitled "the world process"; men cudgel their brains, like Eduard von Hartmann, in trying to find out its origin and final goal--which seems to be a waste of time. Why you exist, says Nietzsche with Sören Kierkegaard, nobody in the world can tell you in advance; but since you do exist, try to give your existence a meaning by setting up for yourself as lofty and noble a goal as you can.