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Victory over strength.  If we consider all that has hitherto been revered as 'superhuman mind', as 'genius', we come to the sad conclusion that the intellectuality of mankind must on the whole have been something very low and paltry: it has hitherto required so little mind to feel at once considerably superior to it! Oh, the cheap fame of the 'genius'! How quickly his throne is established, how quickly worship of him becomes a practice! We are still on our knees before strength   after the ancient custom of slaves  and yet when the degree of worthiness to be revered is fixed, only the degree of rationality in strength is decisive: we must assess to what extent precisely strength has been overcome by something higher, in the service of which it now stands as means and instrument! But for such an assessment there are still far too few eyes, indeed the assessment of the genius is still usually regarded as a sacrilege. And so perhaps the most beautiful still appears only in the dark, and sinks, scarcely born, into eternal night  I mean the spectacle of that strength which employs genius not for works but for itself as a work; that is, for its own constraint, for the purification of its imagination, for the imposition of order and choice upon the influx of tasks and impressions. The great human being is still, in precisely the greatest thing that demands reverence, invisible like a too distant star: his victory over strength remains without eyes to see it and consequently without song and singer. The order of rank of greatness for all past mankind has not yet been determined.