Page:The birth of tragedy, or Hellenism and pessimism (Nietzsche).djvu/232

194 'eternal recurrence,' that is, of the unconditioned and infinitely repeated cycle of all things this doctrine of Zarathustra s might after all have been already taught by Heraclitus. At any rate the portico,^ which inherited well-nigh all its fundamental conceptions from Heraclitus, shows traces thereof.&quot; &quot; In this book speaks a prodigious hope. In fine, I see no reason whatever for taking back my hope of a Dionysian future for music. Let us cast a glance a century ahead, let us suppose my assault upon two millenniums of anti-nature and man-vilification succeeds ! That new party of life which will take in hand the greatest of all tasks, the upbreeding of mankind to something higher, add thereto the relentless annihilation of all things degenerating and parasitic, will again make possible on earth that too-much of life, from which there also must needs grow again the Dionysian state. I promise a tragic age : the highest art in the yea-saying to life, tragedy, will be born anew, when mankind have behind them the consciousness of the hardest but most necessary wars, without suffering therefrom. A psychologist might still add that what I heard in my younger years in Wagnerian music had in general naught to do with Wagner ; that when I described Wagnerian music I described what / had heard, that I had instinctively to translate and transfigure all into the new spirit which I bore within myself. . . .&quot; OTOO,