The ‘humanity’ of the future. – When I view this age with the eyes of a distant age, I can find nothing odder in present-day man than his peculiar virtue and disease called ‘the sense for history’. This is the beginning of something completely new and strange in history: if one gave this seed a few centuries and more, it might ultimately become a wonderful growth with an equally wonderful smell that could make our old earth more agreeable to inhabit. We present-day humans are just beginning to form the chain of a very powerful future feeling, link by link – we hardly know what we are doing. It seems to us almost as if we are dealing not with a new feeling but with a decrease in all old feelings: the sense for history is still something so poor and cold, and many are struck by it as by a frost and made even poorer and colder by it. To others it appears as the sign of old age creeping up, and they see our planet as a melancholy sick man who chronicles his youth in order to forget his present condition. Indeed, that is one colour of this new feeling: he who is able to feel the history of man altogether as his own history feels in a monstrous generalization all the grief of the invalid thinking of health, of the old man thinking of the dreams of his youth, of the lover robbed of his beloved, of the martyr whose ideal is perishing, of the hero on the eve after a battle that decided nothing but brought him wounds and the loss of a friend. But to bear and to be able to bear this monstrous sum of all kinds of grief and still be the hero who, on the second day of battle, greets dawn and his fortune as a person whose horizon stretches millennia before and behind him, as the dutiful heir to all the nobility of past spirit, as the most aristocratic of old nobles and at the same time the first of a new nobility the likes of which no age has ever seen or dreamt: to take this upon one’s soul – the oldest, the newest, losses, hopes, conquests, victories of humanity. To finally take all this in one soul and compress it into one feeling – this would surely have to produce a happiness unknown to humanity so far: a divine happiness full of power and love, full of tears and laughter, a happiness which, like the sun in the evening, continually draws on its inexhaustible riches, giving them away and pouring them into the sea, a happiness which, like the evening sun, feels richest when even the poorest fisherman is rowing with a golden oar! This divine feeling would then be called – humanity!