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THIRD BOOK
167

culture which deserves to be named after its teachers, the Sophists, and which, unfortunately, from that hour of its baptism, at once begins to grow pale and incomprehensible to us, for now we suspect that it must have been a most immoral culture which was opposed by Plato and all the Socratic schools. The truth in this is so twisted and entangled that we feel reluctant to rake it up Let therefore the old error (error veritate simplicior) run its old course.

169

Hellenism foreign to us.—Compared with Greek art, all art, Oriental or modern, Asiatic or European, is remarkable for its imposing effects and the revelling in monumental grandeur as the expression of the sublime; whereas Paestum, Pompeii, Athens, and the whole of Grecian architecture astonish us by the modest structures whereby the Greeks were able and love to express the sublime. Again, low simple did the people in Greece appear to their own conceptions! How far superior to them are we ve in the knowledge of man! But how labyrinthian appear our souls and conceptions of the soul in comparison to theirs ! If we wished for and ventured upon any architecture corresponding to the constitution of our own souls (we are too cowardly for that), the maze would have to be only pattern. That music alone, which is so peculiar to us, and really expresses ns, discloses the truth. (For in music men