_My impossible people_--Seneca, or the toreador of virtue.--Rousseau, or the return to nature, _in impuris naturalibus._--Schiller, or the Moral Trumpeter of Säckingen.--Dante, or the hyæna that writes poetry in tombs.--Kant, or _cant_ as an intelligible character.--Victor Hugo, or the lighthouse on the sea of nonsense.--Liszt, or the school of racing--after women.--George Sand, or _lactea ubertas,_ in plain English: the cow with plenty beautiful milk.--Michelet, or enthusiasm in its shirt sleeves.--Carlyle, or Pessimism after undigested meals.--John Stuart Mill, or offensive lucidity.--The brothers Goncourt, or the two Ajaxes fighting with Homer. Music by Offenbach.--Zola, or the love of stinking. 60 For art to be possible at all--that is to say, in order that an æsthetic mode of action and of observation may exist, a certain preliminary physiological state is indispensable: ecstasy. This state of ecstasy must first have intensified the susceptibility of the whole machine: otherwise, no art is possible. All kinds of ecstasy, however differently produced, have this power to create art, and above all the state dependent upon sexual excitement--this most venerable and primitive form of ecstasy. The same applies to that ecstasy which is the outcome of all great desires, all strong passions; the ecstasy of the feast, of the arena, of the act of bravery, of victory, of all extreme action; the ecstasy of cruelty; the ecstasy of destruction; the ecstasy following upon certain meteorological influences, as for instance that of springtime, or upon the use of narcotics; and finally the ecstasy of will, that ecstasy which results from accumulated and surging will-power. 68-68 What is the meaning of the antithetical concepts _Apollonian_ and _Dionysian_ which I have introduced into the vocabulary of Æsthetic, as representing two distinct modes of ecstasy?--Apollonian ecstasy acts above all as a force stimulating the eye, so that it acquires the power of vision. The painter, the sculptor, the epic poet are essentially visionaries. In the Dionysian state, on the other hand, the whole system of passions is stimulated and intensified, so that it discharges itself by all the means of expression at once, and vents all its power of representation, of imitation, of transfiguration, of transformation, together with every kind of mimicry and histrionic display at the same time. 67-68 As to the famous "struggle for existence," it seems to me, for the present, to be more of an assumption than a fact. It does occur, but as an exception. The general condition of life is not one of want or famine, but rather of riches, of lavish luxuriance, and even of absurd prodigality,--where there is a struggle, it is a struggle for power. 71 The most intellectual men, provided they are also the most courageous, experience the most excruciating tragedies: but on that very account they honour life, because it confronts them with its more formidable antagonism. 73