In other words, we suffer and perish so that poets may not lack material, and this is the dispensation of those very Gods of Homer who seem much concerned about the joyousness of generations to come, but very little about us men of the present. To think that such ideas should ever have entered the head of a Greek! 190. SUPPLEMENTARY JUSTIFICATION OF EXISTENCE.—Many ideas have come into the world as errors and fancies but have turned out truths, because men have afterwards given them a genuine basis to rest upon. 191. PRO AND CON NECESSARY.—He who has not realised that every great man must not only be encouraged but also, for the sake of the common welfare, opposed, is certainly still a great child—or himself a great man. 192. INJUSTICE OF GENIUS.—Genius is most unjust towards geniuses, if they be contemporary. Either it thinks it has no need of them and considers them superfluous (for it can do without them), or their influence crosses the path of its electric current, in which case it even calls them pernicious. 193. THE SADDEST DESTINY OF A PROPHET.—He has worked twenty years to convince his contemporaries, and succeeds at last, but in the meantime his adversaries have also succeeded—he is no longer convinced of himself. 194. THREE THINKERS LIKE ONE SPIDER.—In every philosophical school three thinkers follow one another in this relation: the first produces from himself sap and seed, the second draws it out in threads and spins a cunning web, the third waits in this web for the victims who are caught in it—and tries to live upon this philosophy. 195. FROM ASSOCIATION WITH AUTHORS.—It is as bad a habit to go about with an author grasping him by the nose as grasping him by the horn (and every author has his horn). 196. A TEAM OF TWO.—Vagueness of thought and outbursts of sentimentality are as often wedded to the reckless desire to have one’s own way by hook or by crook, to make oneself alone of any consequence, as a genuinely helpful, gracious, and kindly spirit is wedded to the impulse towards clearness and purity of thought and towards emotional moderation and self-restraint. 197. BINDING AND SEPARATING FORCES.—Surely it is in the heads of men that there arises the force that binds them—an understanding of their common interest or the reverse; and in their hearts the force that separates them—a blind choosing and groping in love and hate, a devotion to one at the expense of all, and a consequent contempt for the common utility. 198. MARKSMEN AND THINKERS.—There are curious marksmen who miss their mark, but leave the shooting-gallery with secret pride in the fact that their bullet at any rate flew very far (beyond the mark, it is true), or that it did not hit the mark but hit something else. There are thinkers of the same stamp. 199.