How act? Here was a sluggish people, not easily aroused, lacking in sensitiveness, a people stunted by democracy, a people in revolt against every noble aspiration: by what artifice could one sustain among them the imperilled ideal, the love of heroism and of the sublime? Nietzsche formed a project which was so audacious and so advanced that he meditated long upon it without confiding in any one. Richard Wagner was then working to establish that theatre of Bayreuth in which he hoped to realise his epic creation in complete freedom. Nietzsche dared to imagine a different institution, but one of the same order; a kind of seminary where the young philosophers, his friends, Rohde, Gersdorff, Deussen, Overbeck, Romundt should meet, live together and, free from duties, liberated from administrative tutelage, meditate, under the guidance of certain masters, on the problems of the hour. A double home of art and of thought would thus maintain at the heart of Germany, above the crowd and apart from the State, the traditions of the spiritual life. "Cloisters will become necessary," he had written to Erwin Rohde in July; six months' experience brought back this idea. "Here assuredly is the strangest thing which this time of war and victory has raised up; _a modern anchoritism_--an impossibility of living in accord with the State." Friedrich Nietzsche let himself be drawn away by this dream, the unreality of which he failed to recognise. He was imagining a reunion of solitaries, similar to the Port Royal des Champs. He knew that such a society did not accord with the manners and tastes of his times, but he judged it to be necessary and believed that he had strength enough to establish or impose it. A profound instinct inspired and directed him. That old college of Pforta had been monachal in its origins, in its buildings and in its very walls, in the lasting gravity and ordered rule of life. Thus he had, as a child, received the impress of what was almost the life of a religious. He kept the memory of it, and the nostalgia. During his years at the University he had constantly sought to isolate himself from the world by surrounding himself with friends. He studied Greece, and the antique wisdom nourished his soul: he loved Pythagoras and Plato, the one the founder, the other the poet, of the finest brotherhood that man had ever conceived, the close and sovereign aristocracy of sages armed, of meditative knights. Thus did Christian humanity and Pagan humanity, united by a remote harmony, concur with his thoughts and his aspirations.