But what is interesting and significant of Nietzsche's whole intellectual standpoint is his inquiry as to how far life is able to make use of history. History, in his view, belongs to him who is fighting a great fight, and who needs examples, teachers and comforters, but cannot find them among his contemporaries. Without history the mountain chain of great men's great moments, which runs through milleniums, could not stand clearly and vividly before me. When one sees, that it only took about a hundred men to bring in the culture of the Renaissance; it may easily be supposed, for example, that a hundred productive minds, trained in a new style, would be enough to make an end of Culture-Philistinism. On the other hand, history may have pernicious effects in the hands of unproductive men. Thus young artists are driven into galleries instead of out into nature, and are sent, with minds still unformed, to centres of art, where they lose courage. And in all its forms history may render men unfit for life; in its _monumental_ form by evoking the illusion that there are such things as fixed, recurring historical conjunctions, so that what has once been possible is now, in entirely altered conditions, possible again; in its _antiquarian_ form by awakening a feeling of piety for ancient, bygone things, which paralyses the man of action, who must always outrage some piety or other; finally in its _critical_ form by giving rise to the depressing feeling that the very errors of the past, which we are striving to overcome, are inherited in our blood and impressed on our childhood, so that we live in a continual inner conflict between an old and a new nature. On this point, as on others already alluded to, Nietzsche's quarrel is ultimately with the broken-winded education of the present day. That _education_ and _historical education_ have in our time almost become synonymous terms, is to him a mournful sign. It has been irretrievably forgotten that culture ought to be what it was with the Greeks: a motive, a prompting to resolution; nowadays culture is commonly described as inwardness, because it is a dead internal lump, which does not stir its possessor. The most "educated" people are walking encyclopædias. When they act, they do so in virtue of a universally approved, miserable convention, or else from simple barbarism. With this reflection, no doubt of general application, is connected a complaint which was bound to be evoked by modern literary Germany in particular; the complaint of the oppressive effect of the greatness of former times, as shown in the latter-day man's conviction that he is a latecomer, an after-birth of a greater age, who may indeed teach himself history, but can never produce it.