particular kind of intellectual composition. _The world of incident is the world of once-actual facts that longingly or anxiously we live forward to (entgegenleben) as Future, that raise or depress us as the living Present, and that we contemplate with joy or with grief as Past. The world of causes and effects is the world of the constantly-possible, of the timeless truths which we know by dissection and distinction._ The latter only are scientifically attainable—they are indeed _identical_ with science. He who is blind to this other, to the world as _Divina Commedia_ or drama for a god, can only find a senseless turmoil of incidents,[157] and here we use the word in its most trivial sense. So it has been with Kant and most other systematists of thought. But the professional and inartistic sort of historical research too, with its collecting and arranging of mere data, amounts for all its ingenuity to little more than the giving of a _cachet_ to the banal-incidental. Only the insight that can penetrate into the metaphysical is capable of experiencing in data _symbols_ of that which happened, and so of elevating an Incident into a Destiny. And he who is to himself a Destiny (like Napoleon) does not need this insight, since between himself as a fact and the other facts there is a harmony of metaphysical rhythm which gives his decisions their dreamlike certainty.[158] It is this insight that constitutes the singularity and the power of Shakespeare. Hitherto, neither our research nor our speculation has hit upon this in him—that he is _the Dramatist of the Incidental_. And yet this Incidental is the very heart of Western tragedy, which is a true copy of the Western history idea and with it gives the clue to that which we understand in the world—so misconstrued by Kant—“Time.” It is incidental that the political situation of “Hamlet,” the murder of the King and the succession question impinge upon just that character that Hamlet is. Or, take Othello—it is incidental that the man at whom Iago, the commonplace rogue that one could pick up in any street, aims his blow is one whose person possesses just this wholly special physiognomy. And Lear! Could anything be more incidental (and therefore more “natural”) than the conjunction of this commanding dignity with these fateful passions and the inheritance of them by the daughters? No one has even to-day realized all the significance of the fact that Shakespeare took his stories as he found them and _in the very finding of them_ filled them with the force of inward necessity, and never more sublimely so than in the case of the Roman dramas. For the _will_ to understand him has squandered itself in desperate efforts to bring in a moral causality, a “therefore,” a connexion of “guilt” and “expiation.” But all this is neither correct nor incorrect—these are words that belong to the World-as-Nature and imply that something causal is being judged—but _superficial_, shallow, that is, in contrast to the poet’s