_To the Realists._--Ye sober beings, who feel yourselves armed against passion and fantasy, and would gladly make a pride and an ornament out of your emptiness, ye call yourselves realists, and give to understand that the world is actually constituted as it appears to you; before you alone reality stands unveiled, and ye yourselves would perhaps be the best part of it,--oh, ye dear images of Sais! But are not ye also in your unveiled condition still extremely passionate and dusky beings compared with the fish, and still all too like an enamoured artist?[1]--and what is "reality" to an enamoured artist! Ye still carry about with you the valuations of things which had their origin in the passions and infatuations of earlier centuries! There is still a secret and ineffaceable drunkenness embodied in your sobriety! Your love of "reality," for example--oh, that is an old, primitive "love"! In every feeling, in every sense-impression, there is a portion of this old love: and similarly also some kind of fantasy, prejudice, irrationality, ignorance, fear, and whatever else has become mingled and woven into it. There is that mountain! There is that cloud! What is "real" in them? Remove the phantasm and the whole human _element_ therefrom, ye sober ones! Yes, if ye could do _that!_ If ye could forget your origin, your past, your preparatory schooling,--your whole history as man and beast! There is no "reality" for us--nor for you either, ye sober ones,--we are far from being so alien to one another as ye suppose; and perhaps our good-will to get beyond drunkenness is just as respectable as your belief that ye are altogether _incapable_ of drunkenness. [1] Schiller's poem, "The Veiled Image of Sais," is again referred to here.--TR. 58. _Only as Creators!_--It has caused me the greatest trouble, and for ever causes me the greatest trouble, to perceive that unspeakably more depends upon _what things are called,_ than on what they are. The reputation, the name and appearance, the importance, the usual measure and weight of things--each being in origin most frequently an error and arbitrariness thrown over the things like a garment, and quite alien to their essence and even to their exterior--have gradually, by the belief therein and its continuous growth from generation to generation, grown as it were on-and-into things and become their very body; the appearance at the very beginning becomes almost always the essence in the end, and _operates_ as the essence! What a fool he would be who would think it enough to refer here to this origin and this nebulous veil of illusion, in order to _annihilate_ that which virtually passes for the world--namely, so-called "reality"! It is only as creators that we can annihilate!--But let us not forget this: it suffices to create new names and valuations and probabilities, in order in the long run to create new "things." 59.