_What one should Learn from Artists._--What means have we for making things beautiful, attractive, and desirable, when they are not so?--and I suppose they are never so in themselves! We have here something to learn from physicians, when, for example, they dilute what is bitter, or put wine and sugar into their mixing-bowl; but we have still more to learn from artists, who in fact, are continually concerned in devising such inventions and artifices. To withdraw from things until one no longer sees much of them, until one has even to see things into them, _in order to see them at all_--or to view them from the side, and as in a frame--or to place them so that they partly disguise themselves and only permit of perspective views--or to look at them through coloured glasses, or in the light of the sunset--or to furnish them with a surface or skin which is not fully transparent: we should learn all this from artists, and moreover be wiser than they. For this fine power of theirs usually ceases with them where art ceases and life begins; _we,_ however, want to be the poets of our lives, and first of all in the smallest and most commonplace matters. 300. _Prelude to Science._--Do you believe then that the sciences would have arisen and grown up if the sorcerers, alchemists, astrologers and witches had not been their forerunners; those who, with their promisings and foreshadowings, had first to create a thirst, a hunger, and a taste for _hidden and forbidden_ powers? Yea, that infinitely more had to be _promised_ than could ever be fulfilled, in order that something might be fulfilled in the domain of knowledge? Perhaps the whole of _religion,_ also, may appear to some distant age as an exercise and a prelude, in like manner as the prelude and preparation of science here exhibit themselves, though _not_ at all practised and regarded as such. Perhaps religion may have been the peculiar means for enabling individual men to enjoy but once the entire self-satisfaction of a God and all his self-redeeming power. Indeed!--one may ask--would man have learned at all to get on the tracks of hunger and thirst for _himself,_ and to extract satiety and fullness out of _himself,_ without that religious schooling and preliminary history? Had Prometheus first to _fancy_ that he had _stolen_ the light, and that he did penance for the theft,--in order finally to discover that he had created the light, _in that he had longed for the light,_ and that not only man, but also _God,_ had been the work of _his_ hands and the clay in his hands? All mere creations of the creator?--just as the illusion, the theft, the Caucasus, the vulture, and the whole tragic Prometheia of all thinkers? 301.