ugliness, seem just as allowable as they are in nature--because of his bursting plenitude of creative and rejuvenating powers, which are able to convert every desert into a luxurious land of plenty. Conversely, it is the greatest sufferer and pauper in vitality, who is most in need of mildness, peace and goodness--that which to-day is called humaneness--in thought as well as in action, and possibly of a God whose speciality is to be a God of the sick, a Saviour, and also of logic or the abstract intelligibility of existence even for idiots (--the typical "free-spirits," like the idealists, and "beautiful souls," are _décadents_--); in short, of a warm, danger-tight, and narrow confinement, between optimistic horizons which would allow of stultification.... And thus very gradually, I began to understand Epicurus, the opposite of a Dionysian Greek; and also the Christian who in fact is only a kind of Epicurean, and who, with his belief that "faith saves," carries the principle of Hedonism _as far as possible_--far beyond all intellectual honesty.... If I am ahead of all other psychologists in anything, it is in this fact that my eyes are more keen for tracing those most difficult and most captious of all deductions, in which the largest number of mistakes have been made,--the deduction which makes one infer something concerning the author from his work, something concerning the doer from his deed, something concerning the idealist from the need which produced this ideal, and something concerning the imperious _craving_ which stands at the back of all thinking and valuing.--In regard to all artists of what kind soever, I shall now avail myself of this radical distinction: does the creative power in this case arise from a loathing of life, or from an excessive _plenitude_ of life? In Goethe, for instance, an overflow of vitality was creative, in Flaubert--hate: Flaubert, a new edition of Pascal, but as an artist with this instinctive belief at heart: "_Flaubert est toujours haïssable, l'homme n'est rien, l'œuvre est tout...._" He tortured himself when he wrote, just as Pascal tortured himself when he thought--the feelings of both were inclined to be "non-egoistic." ... "Disinterestedness"--the principle of decadence, the will to nonentity in art as well as in morality. WHERE WAGNER IS AT HOME.