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Of future virtues.  How comes it that the more comprehensible the world has grown the more solemnities of every kind have decreased? Is it that fear was so much the basic element of that reverence which overcame us in the presence of everything unknown and mysterious and taught us to fall down before the incomprehensible and plead for mercy? And has the world not lost some of its charm for us because we have grown less fearful? With this diminution of our fearfulness has our own dignity and solemnity, our own fearsomeness, not also diminished? Perhaps we have less respect for the world and for ourselves since we have come to think of it and of ourselves more courageously? Perhaps there will come a time when this courage in thinking will have grown so great that, as the supreme form of arrogance, it will feel itself above man and things  when the sage will, as the most courageous man, also be the man who sees himself and existence farthest beneath him?  This species of courage, which is not far from being an extravagant generosity, has hitherto been lacking in mankind.  Oh if the poets would only be again what they were once supposed to have been: seers who tell us something of the possible! Now that actuality and the past are and have to be taken more and more out of their hands  for the age of harmless false-coinage is at an end! If only they would let us feel in advance something of the virtues of the future! Or of virtues that will never exist on earth, though they could exist somewhere in the universe  of purple-glowing galaxies and whole Milky Ways of beauty! Astronomers of the ideal, where are you?