It is necessary, therefore, that the sense of beauty, of virtue, and of strong and regulated passions should be restored. How can a philosopher employ himself in this task? Alas! the experience of antiquity teaches and discourages us. The philosopher is a hybrid being, half logician, half artist, a poet, an apostle, who constructs his dreams and his commandments in a logical manner. Men listen willingly enough to poets and apostles, they do not listen to philosophers, they are not moved by their analyses and their deductions. Consider that long line of genius, the philosophers of tragic Greece. What did they realise? Their lives were given in vain to their race. Empedocles alone moved the mob, but he was as much a magician as philosopher; he invented myths and poems; he was eloquent, he was magnificent; it was the legend, and not the thought of Empedocles, that was effective. Pythagoras founded a sect, a philosopher cannot hope for more: his labour grouped together a few friends, a few disciples, who passed over the human masses like a ripple on the ocean; not one of the great philosophers has swayed the people, writes Nietzsche. Where they have failed, who will succeed? It is impossible to found a popular culture on philosophy. What is then the destiny of these singular souls? Is their force, which is at times immense, lost? Will the philosopher always be a paradoxical being, and useless to men? Friedrich Nietzsche was troubled; it was the utility of his own life that he questioned. He would never be a musician, that he knew at last; never a poet, he had ceased to hope for it. He had not the faculty of conceiving the uniformities, of animating a drama, of creating a soul. One evening he confessed this to Overbeck with such sadness that his friend was moved. He was therefore a philosopher, moreover, a very ignorant one, an amateur of philosophy, an imperfect lyrical artist; and he questioned himself: Since I have for weapons only my thoughts, the thoughts of a philosopher, what can I do? He answered: I can help. Socrates did not create the truths that error kept prisoners in the souls of his interlocutors, he only aspired to the title of accoucheur. Such is the task of a philosopher. He is an inefficient creator, but a very efficient critic. He is obliged to analyse the forces which are operative around him, in science, in religion, and in art; he is obliged to give the directions, to fix the values and the limits. Such shall be my task. I will study the souls of my contemporaries, and I shall have every authority to say to them: Neither science nor religion can save you; seek refuge in art, the power of modern times, and in the artist who is Richard Wagner. "The philosopher of the future," he wrote, "he must be the supreme judge of an æsthetic culture, a censor of every digression."