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The hero-cult and its fanatics.  The fanatic of an ideal which has flesh and blood is usually in the right so long as he denies, and in this he is dreadful: he knows that which he denies as well as he knows himself, for the simple reason that he comes from there, is at home there, and lives in the secret dread of having to go back there  he wants to make it impossible for him to return by the way in which he denies. But as soon as he affirms he half-closes his eyes and begins to idealise (often only so as to hurt those who have stayed at home  ); one might call this something artistic  very well, but there is also something dishonest in it. He who idealises a person sets this person at so great a distance from himself that he can no longer see him clearly  and then he reinterprets what he still sees into the 'beautiful', that is to say the symmetrical, soft-lined, indefinite. Since he henceforth wants also to worship his distant ideal he needs to construct a temple to guard it from the profanum vulgus¹¹⁵. Into this temple he fetches all the revered and consecrated objects he otherwise possesses, so that their magic may rub off on to his ideal and, thus nourished, it shall grow and become ever more divine. At last he has actually succeeded in completing his god  but alas! there is one who knows how this has been brought about, his intellectual conscience  and there is also one who, quite unconsciously, protests at it, namely the deified being himself, who in consequence of the cult, worship and incense surrounding him has now become insupportable and in a horrible fashion betrays himself as being very obviously not a god and all too much a human. Here a fanatic such as we have described is now left with only one recourse: he patiently submits himself and his kind to mistreatment and interprets the whole misery still ad majorem dei gloriam¹¹⁶ by means of a new species of self-deception and noble falsehood: he takes sides against himself and, as the one mishandled and as interpreter, feels as he does so something like a martyrdom  thus he mounts to the peak of his arrogance.  Men of this kind lived about Napoleon, for example: perhaps, indeed, it was precisely he Who implanted into the soul of our century the romantic prostration before 'genius' and the 'hero' which is so contrary to the spirit of the Enlightenment; he of whom a Byron was not ashamed to say he was 'a worm compared with such a being'. (The formula for this kind of prostration was invented by that presumptuous old grumbler and muddle-head Carlyle¹¹⁷, who employed a long life in trying to turn romantic the reasonableness of his Englishmen: in vain!)