If he has properly recognised the predominating element and has hit the exact opposite, the victory is gained with a weight that overthrows all before it. Professional associates, critics, and public stand in front of something new. The novelty-hating majority feels the disturbance in their lazy mental habits as an insult and discomfort, and sets up a yell. The minority of unsatisfied gainsayers, morbid bread-hunters, vain coxcombs, and enthusiasts longing for the glorious Unknown and Unprecedented, passionately take side for the novelty. This serves as an excuse for a conflict of those eternal conservative and radical tendencies, whose battle may be seen throughout the whole history of human development; and the artist who unchains these tempests sees himself honoured as one of the embodiments of contemporary thought, as a power in civilisation. Only quite exceptionally is a cool analyst found to say with smiling tranquillity amidst the bluster of the war of minds: “Dear children, don’t excite yourselves like that; the word ‘new’ is no verdict. To be different does not necessarily mean to be better. An old tendency may contain beauty in itself; a new one may, of course, do so too, but not necessarily. He who grows excited on behalf of the old, simply because it is old, is commonplace. He who grows excited for the sake of something new, merely because it is new, is commonplace with a negative prefix. Only wait a little while. In a short space of time the new will have become old, and you will recognise that there was no grounds for raising a noise about it. The man of the new thing, whom you hail as the bringer of a new salvation, is no better than the ancients; but he is right, for he wishes to be noticed, to inherit from the ancients, and that is wholly justified from his selfish standpoint.” The would-be aristocrats of intelligence—the “intellectuals”—would find a speech like this intolerably homely. It is not in the least “deep.” It is not at all applicable to the mystic inclinations of vaporous brains. It discovers no single unsurmised and astounding relation between phenomena that have nothing in common with each other; but I believe it is literally true.