Sexuality, lust of dominion, the pleasure derived from appearance and deception, great and joyful gratitude to Life and its typical conditions--these things are essential to all paganism, and it has a good conscience on its side.--_That which is hostile to Nature_ (already in Greek antiquity) combats paganism in the form of morality and dialectics. 1040. An anti-metaphysical view of the world--yes, but an artistic one. 1049. _Apollo's_ misapprehension: the eternity of beautiful forms, the aristocratic prescription, "_Thus shall it ever be!_" _Dionysus_. Sensuality and cruelty. The perishable nature of existence might be interpreted as the joy of procreative and destructive force, as _unremitting creation._ 1050. The word "_Dionysian_" expresses: a constraint to unity, a soaring above personality, the common-place, society, reality, and above the abyss of the _ephemeral_, the passionately painful sensation of superabundance, in darker, fuller, and more fluctuating conditions; an ecstatic saying of yea to the collective character of existence, as that which remains the same, and equally mighty and blissful throughout all change, the great pantheistic sympathy with pleasure and pain, which declares even the most terrible and most questionable qualities of existence good, and sanctifies them; the eternal will to procreation, to fruitfulness, and to recurrence; the feeling of unity in regard to the necessity of creating and annihilating. The word "_Apollonian_" expresses: the constraint to be absolutely isolated, to the typical "individual," to everything that simplifies, distinguishes, and makes strong, salient, definite, and typical to freedom within the law. The further development of art is just as necessarily bound up with the antagonism of these two natural art-forces, as the further development of mankind is bound up with the antagonism of the sexes. The plenitude of power and restraint, the highest form of self-affirmation in a cool, noble, and reserved kind of beauty: the Apollonianism of the Hellenic will. This antagonism of the Dionysian and of the Apollonian in the Greek soul, is one of the great riddles which made me feel drawn to the essence of Hellenism. At bottom, I troubled about nothing save the solution of the question, why precisely Greek Apollonianism should have been forced to grow out of a Dionysian soil: the Dionysian Greek had need of being Apollonian; that is to say in order to break his will to the titanic, to the complex, to the uncertain, to the horrible by a will to measure, to simplicity, and to submission to rule and concept. Extravagance, wildness, and Asiatic tendencies lie at the root of the Greeks. Their courage consists in their struggle with their Asiatic nature: they were not given beauty, any more than they were given Logic and moral! naturalness: in them these things are victories, they are willed and fought for--they constitute the _triumph_ of the Greeks. 1051.