In order firmly to establish the difference between the Ruler and Democratic styles I ought, perhaps, to have entered with more thoroughness than I have done into the meditative nature of the one, and the empirical nature of the other. This, apart from a few very unmistakable hints, I have unfortunately been unable to do. I found it quite impossible to include all the detail bearing upon the main thesis, in this first treatise; and, though I have resolved to discuss these important matters very soon, in the form of supplementary essays, I can but acknowledge here that I recognize their omission as a blemish. The wide field covered by this book, and the small form in which I was compelled to cast it, have thus led to many questions remaining inadequately answered and to many statements being left insufficiently substantiated. In the end I found it quite impossible to avail myself even of a third of the material I had collected for its production, and I should therefore be grateful if it could be regarded more in the light of a preliminary survey of the ground to be built upon, rather than as a finished building taking its foundation in Nietzsche's philosophy of Art. With regard to all my utterances on Egypt, I should like the reader kindly to bear only this in mind: that my choice of Egyptian art, as the best example of Ruler Art we possess, is neither arbitrary nor capricious; but, because it is neither arbitrary nor capricious, it does not follow that I regard a return to the types of Egypt as the only possible salvation of the graphic arts. This would be sheer Romanticism and sentimentality. "A thousand paths are there which have never yet been trodden; a thousand salubrities and hidden islands of life. Unexhausted and undiscovered is still man and man's world" (_Z._, I, XXII.). It is rather the spirit which led to this Egyptian Art, which I regard as so necessary to all great achievements, either in legislation, art, or religion; and whether this spirit happens to be found on the banks of the Nile, in the Vatican, or in Mexico. I point to it merely as something which we ought to prize and cherish, and which we now possess only in an extremely diluted and decadent form. It is the spirit which will establish order at all costs, whose manner of exploiting higher men is to look upon the world through their transfiguring vision, and which believes that it is better for mankind to attain to a high level, even in ones, twos, or threes, than that the bulk of humanity should begin to doubt that man can attain to a high level at all. This spirit might produce any number of types; it is not necessary, therefore, that the Egyptian type should be regarded as precisely the one to be desired. I do but call your attention to these granite and diorite sculptures, because behind them I feel the presence and the power of that attitude towards life which the ancient Pharaohs held and reverenced, and which I find reflected in Nietzsche's Art values.