great for this world, and enjoying a merely transitory existence in it. is yet the “proud sufferer" is the loftiest type of mankind.
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Colour-blindness of thinkers.—In what different light the Greeks must have viewed Nature, being, as we can- not help admitting, absolutely colour-blind with regard to blue and green, mistaking the former for a deeper brown, the latter for yellow: so, for instance, they used one and the same word for the hues of dark hair, of the corn-flower, and of the Southern sea: and again, one and the same expression for the colours of the greenest herbs and the human skin, of honey and yellow resins; whence, as has been proved, their greatest artists re- produced their world only in black, white, red, and yellow—how different and how much more akin to man kind must Nature have appeared to them, since in their eyes the hues of man were predominant also in Nature, anul the latter was, as it were, floating in the colour- ocean of humanity! (Blue and green more than anything else dishumanise nature.) This deficiency accounts for the playful facility which distinguishes the Greeks in seeing in all natural processes gods and demi-gods; that is, beings of human form. But this only by way of a parable to pave the way for another supposition. Every thinker pictures his world and all things in fewer colours than really exist, and is blind to individual
