Nietzsche worked a great deal during these last months of 1872. His studies on the tragic philosophies of the Greeks were well advanced; he left them over. Those wise men had restored his serenity, and he profited by the help which they had given him to contemplate once more the problems of his century. The problems--this is hardly a correct expression, for he knew of only one. He questioned himself how a culture should be founded, that is to say, a harmony of traditions, of rules, of beliefs, by submission to which a man may become nobler. Actual modern societies have for their end the production of certain comforts; how should different societies be substituted which would not only satisfy men, but benefit them? Let us know our wretchedness; we are stripped of culture. Our thoughts and our acts are not ruled by the authority of any style; the idea even of such an authority is lost to us. We have perfected in an extraordinary manner the discipline of knowledge, and we seem to have forgotten that others exist. We succeed in describing the phenomena of life, in translating the Universe into an abstract language, and we scarcely perceive that, in writing and translating thus, we lose the reality of the Universe of Life. Science exercises on us a "barbarising action," wrote Nietzsche. He analysed this action. "The essential point of all science has become merely accessory, or else it is entirely absent. "The study of languages--without the discipline of style and rhetoric. "Indian studies--without philosophy. "Classical antiquity--without a suspicion of how closely everything in it is bound up with practical efforts. "The sciences of nature--without that beneficent and serene atmosphere which Goethe found in them. "History--without enthusiasm. "In short, all the sciences without their practical uses, that is to say, studied otherwise than as really cultivated men would study them. Science as a means of livelihood."