A kind of atavism. – I prefer to understand the rare human beings of an age as suddenly appearing, late ghosts of past cultures and their powers: as atavisms of a people and its mores – that way one can really understand something about them! They now seem strange, rare, extraordinary; and whoever feels these powers in himself must nurse, defend, honor, and cultivate them against another world that resists them: and so he becomes either a great human being or a mad and eccentric one, unless he perishes too soon. Formerly, these same qualities were common and therefore considered ordinary: they weren’t distinguishing. They were perhaps demanded, presupposed; it was impossible to become great through them, if only because there was also no danger of becoming mad and lonely through them. It is principally in the generations and castes that conserve a people that we find such recrudescences of old instincts, while such atavism is highly improbable where races, habits, and valuations change too rapidly. For tempo is as significant a power in the development of peoples as in music: in our case, what is absolutely necessary is an andante of development, as the tempo of a passionate and slow spirit – and that is after all what the spirit of conservative generations is like.