To the realists. – You sober people who feel armed against passion and phantastical conceptions and would like to make your emptiness a matter of pride and an ornament – you call yourself realists and insinuate that the world really is the way it appears to you: before you alone reality stands unveiled, and you yourselves are perhaps the best part of it – oh, you beloved images of Sais!1 But aren’t you too in your unveiled condition still most passionate and dark creatures, compared to fish, and still all too similar to an artist in love? And what is ‘reality’ to an artist in love! You still carry around the valuations of things that originate in the passions and loves of former centuries! Your sobriety still contains a secret and inextirpable drunkenness! Your love of ‘reality’, for example – oh, that is an old, ancient ‘love’! In every experience, in every sense impression there is a piece of this old love; and some fantasy, some prejudice, some irrationality, some ignorance, some fear, and whatever else, has worked on and contributed to it. That mountain over there! That cloud over there! What is ‘real’ about that? Subtract just once the phantasm and the whole human contribution from it, you sober ones! Yes, if you could do that! If you could forget your background, your past, your nursery school – all of your humanity and animality! There is no ‘reality’ for us – and not for you either, you sober ones – we are not nearly as strange to one another as you think, and perhaps our good will to transcend drunkenness is just as respectable as your belief that you are altogether incapable of drunkenness.