NOT TO BE A SOLDIER OF CULTURE WITHOUT NECESSITY.—At last people are learning what it costs us so dear not to know in our youth—that we must first do superior actions and secondly seek the superior wherever and under whatever names it is to be found; that we must at once go out of the way of all badness and mediocrity _without fighting it_; and that even doubt as to the excellence of a thing (such as quickly arises in one of practised taste) should rank as an argument against it and a reason for completely avoiding it. We must not shrink from the danger of occasionally making a mistake and confounding the less accessible good with the bad and imperfect. Only he who can do nothing better should attack the world’s evils as the soldier of culture. But those who should support culture and spread its teachings ruin themselves if they go about armed, and by precautions, night-watches, and bad dreams turn the peace of their domestic and artistic life into sinister unrest. 184. HOW NATURAL HISTORY SHOULD BE EXPOUNDED.—Natural history, like the history of the war and victory of moral and intellectual forces in the campaign against anxiety, self-delusion, laziness, superstition, folly, should be so expounded that every reader or listener may be continually aroused to strive after mental and physical health and soundness, after the feeling of joy, and be awakened to the desire to be the heir and continuator of mankind, to an ever nobler adventurous impulse. Hitherto natural history has not found its true language, because the inventive and eloquent artists—who are needed for this purpose—never rid themselves of a secret mistrust of it, and above all never wish to learn from it a thorough lesson. Nevertheless it must be conceded to the English that their scientific manuals for the lower strata of the people have made admirable strides towards that ideal. But then such books are written by their foremost men of learning, full, complete, and inspiring natures, and not, as among us, by mediocre investigators. 185. GENIUS IN HUMANITY.—If genius, according to Schopenhauer’s observation, lies in the coherent and vivid recollection of our own experience, a striving towards genius in humanity collectively might be deduced from the striving towards knowledge of the whole historic past—which is beginning to mark off the modern age more and more as compared with earlier ages and has for the first time broken down the barriers between nature and spirit, men and animals, morality and physics. A perfectly conceived history would be cosmic self-consciousness. 186.