The purpose of man is a thousand times more important than the purpose of art. The one determines the other. And as a proof of how intimately the two are connected, see how much doubt there is as to the purpose of art, precisely at a moment when men also, owing to the terrible civil war which is raging among their values, are beginning to doubt the real purpose of human existence. It would be useless to indulge in a detailed criticism of individual artists. To all those who have followed my arguments closely, no such clumsy holding up of particular modern artists to ridicule will seem necessary. In some of your minds these men are idols still, and it pleases only the envious and the unsuccessful to see niche-statues stoned. The great artist, as I have shown you, is the synthetic and superhuman spirit that apotheosizes the type of a people and thereby stimulates them to a higher mode of life. But where should we go to-day, if we wished to look for a type or for a desirable code of values which that type would exemplify? We know that we can go nowhere; for such things do not exist. They are utterly and hopelessly extinct. Our first duty, then, is not to mend the arts--you cannot mend a cripple. But it is rather to mend the parents who bring forth this cripple--to mend Life itself, and above all Man. "Away from God and Gods did my will allure me," says Zarathustra; "what would there be to create if there were Gods! "But to man doth it ever drive me anew, my burning will; thus doth it drive the hammer unto the stone. "Alas, ye fellow-men, within the stone slumbereth an image for me, the image of all my visions! Alas that it should perforce slumber in ugliest stone! "Now rageth my hammer, ruthlessly against its prison. From the stone fly the fragments: what's that to me? "I shall end the work: for a shadow came unto me--the stillest and lightest of all things once came unto me. "The beauty of the Superman came unto me as a shadow. Alas my brethren, what are the gods to me now!"[31] [28] Dresden Royal Picture Gallery. [29] _History of Painting_ (Eng. Trans.), Vol. II, pp. 572, 576. [30] Muther, _History of Painting_ (English Translation), Vol. II, p. 481. [31] _Z._, II, XXIV. Lecture III[1] Nietzsche's Art Principles in the History of Art Part I Christianity and the Renaissance "For if ye live after the flesh ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live."--Romans viii. 13. I shall now endeavour to show you when and where Nietzsche's Art doctrine, or part of it, has raised its head in the past, and to touch lightly upon the conditions which led to its observance.