We artists. – When we love a woman, we easily come to hate nature because of all the repulsive natural functions to which every woman is subject; we prefer not to think about it at all, but when our soul for once brushes against these matters, it shrugs impatiently and, as just said, casts a contemptuous look at nature: we feel insulted; nature seems to intrude on our property and with the most profane hands at that. In cases like this one refuses to hear anything about physiology and decrees secretly to oneself, ‘I will hear nothing of the idea that the human being is anything other than soul and form!’ ‘The human being under the skin’ is an abomination and unthinkable to all lovers, a blasphemy against God and love. Now, the way lovers still feel about nature and naturalness is how every worshipper of God and his ‘holy omnipotence’ formerly felt: in everything that was said about nature by astronomers, geologists, physiologists, and doctors, he saw an intrusion on his choicest property and thus an attack – and a shameless one at that! Even the ‘law of nature’ sounded to him like a slander against God; he would basically much rather have seen all of mechanics traced back to moral acts of will and choice – but since no one could do him that service, he concealed nature and mechanics from himself as best he could and lived in a dream. Oh, these people of former times knew how to dream, and didn’t even need to fall asleep first! – and we men of today also still know it all too well, despite all our good will towards waking and the day! We need only to love, to hate, to desire, simply to feel – at once the spirit and power of the dream comes over us, and we climb with open eyes, impervious to all danger, up the most dangerous paths, onto the roofs and towers of fantasy, and without any vertigo, as though born to climb – we sleepwalkers of the day! We artists! We who conceal naturalness! We who are moon- and God-struck! We untiring wanderers, silent as death, on heights that we see not as heights but as our plains, as our safety.