once and again a new sample of the past or of the foreign is tested, put on, taken off, packed up, and above all studied—­we are the first studious age in puncto of “costumes,” I mean as concerns morals, articles of belief, artistic tastes, and religions; we are prepared as no other age has ever been for a carnival in the grand style, for the most spiritual festival—­laughter and arrogance, for the transcendental height of supreme folly and Aristophanic ridicule of the world.  Perhaps we are still discovering the domain of our invention just here, the domain where even we can still be original, probably as parodists of the world’s history and as God’s Merry-Andrews,—­perhaps, though nothing else of the present have a future, our laughter itself may have a future!

224.  The historical sense (or the capacity for divining quickly the order of rank of the valuations according to which a people, a community, or an individual has lived, the “divining instinct” for the relationships of these valuations, for the relation of the authority of the valuations to the authority of the operating forces),—­this historical sense, which we Europeans claim as our specialty, has come to us in the train of the enchanting and mad semi-barbarity into which Europe has been plunged by the democratic mingling of classes and races—­it is only the nineteenth century that has recognized this faculty as its sixth sense.  Owing to this mingling, the past of every form and mode of life, and of cultures which were formerly closely contiguous and superimposed on one another, flows forth into us “modern souls”; our instincts now run back in all directions, we ourselves are a kind of chaos:  in the end, as we have said, the spirit perceives its advantage therein.  By means of our semi-barbarity in body and in desire, we have secret access everywhere, such as a noble age never had; we have access above all to the labyrinth of imperfect civilizations, and to every form of semi-barbarity that has at any time existed on earth; and in so far as the most considerable part of human civilization hitherto has just been semi-barbarity, the “historical sense” implies almost the sense and instinct for everything, the taste and tongue for everything:  whereby it immediately proves itself to be an ignoble sense.  For instance, we enjoy Homer once more:  it is perhaps our happiest acquisition that we know how to appreciate Homer, whom men of distinguished culture (as the French of the seventeenth century, like Saint-Evremond, who reproached him for his esprit VASTE, and even Voltaire, the last echo of the century) cannot and could not so easily appropriate—­whom they scarcely permitted themselves to enjoy.  The very decided Yea and Nay of their palate, their promptly ready disgust, their hesitating reluctance with regard to everything strange, their horror of the bad taste even of lively curiosity, and in general the averseness of every distinguished and self-sufficing culture to avow a new desire, a dissatisfaction with