This is what has happened. The conventional moderns of our time are the descendants _not_ of Heine and Ibsen, but of the race against which the poets fought. They live unthinkingly in the present, just as their spiritual ancestors lived unthinkingly in the past. But slavery to the past has long ago fallen into the second place among dangers to humanity: it is slavery to the present that is now by far the greatest peril. Not because they broke the tyranny of the past, but because they had an ideal in the future are the great fighters of last century significant. To think of them as iconoclasts is to mistake for their aim the form of their activity: the past lay between them and their object: on that account alone did they destroy it. But the great obstacle now is the domination of the present; and were the demi-gods of last century alive today, they would be fighting precisely against _you,_ my dear moderns, who live so complacently in your provincial present, making of it almost a cult. To be a modern in the true sense, however, is to be a fore-runner; there is in this age, an age of preparation, no other test of the modern. To believe that there are still potentialities in man; to have faith that the "elevation of the type Man" is possible, yes, that the time is ripe to prepare for it; and to write and live in and by that thought: this is to be modern. 94 _Domination of the Present_ To be modern in the accepted, intellectually fashionable sense: what is that? To propagate always the newest theory, whatever it be; to be the least possible distance behind the times, behind the latest second of the times, whether they be good or bad; and, of course, to assume one is "in the circle" and to adopt the tone of the circle: in short, to make ideas a matter of fashion, to choose views as a well-to-do woman chooses dresses--to be intellectually without foundation, principles or taste. How did this convention arise? Perhaps out of lack of leisure: superficiality is bound to engulf a generation who abandon leisure. But to be enslaved to the present in this way is the most _dangerous_ form of superficiality: it is to be ignorant of the very thing that makes Man significant, and with idiotic cheerfulness and unconcern to render his existence meaningless and trivial. In two ways' can Man become sublime; by regarding himself as the heir of a great tradition: by making of himself a fore-runner. Both ways are open to the true modern, and both must be followed by him. For the past and the future are greater than the present: the sense of continuity is necessary for human dignity.