Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

On the uses and disadvantages of history for lifeand the frosty smile but even made a cult of it. When the senses of apeople harden in this fashion, when the study of history selVes thelife of the past in such a way that it undermines continuing andespecially higher life, when the historical sense no longer conselVeslife but mummifies it, then the tree gradually dies unnaturally fromthe top downwards to the roots - and in the end the roots themselvesusually perish too. Antiquarian history itself degenerates from themoment it is no longer animated and inspired by the fresh life of thepresent. Its piety withers away, the habit of scholarliness continueswithout it and rotates in egoistic self-satisfaction around its own axis.Then there appears the repulsive spectacle of a blind rage for collecting,a restless raking together of everything that has ever existed. Man isencased in the stench of must and mould; through the antiquarianapproach he succeeds in reducing even a more creative disposition,a nobler desire, to an insatiable thirst for novelty, or rather for antiquityand for all and everything; often he sinks so low that in theend he is content to gobble down any fo od whatever, even the dust ofbibliographical minutiae.But even when this degeneration does not take place, when antiquarianhistory does not lose the fo undation in which alone it mustbe rooted if it is to benefit life, sufficient dangers remain should itgrow too mighty and overpower the other modes of regarding thepast. For it knows only how to preserve life, not how to engender it; italways undeIValues that which is becoming because it has no instinctfor divining it as monumental history, for example, has. Thus ithint.rs any firm resolve to attempt something new, thus it paralyses theman of action who, as one who acts, will and must offend some piety orother. The fact that something has grown old now gives rise to thedemand that it be made immortal; for when one considers all thatsuch an antiquity - an ancient custom of the ancestors, a religiousbelief, an inherited political privilege - has experienced during thecourse of its existence, how great a sum of piety and reverence on thepart of individuals and generations, then it must seem arrogant oreven wicked to replace such an antiquity with a novelty and to setagainst such a numerical accumulation of acts of piety and reverencethe single unit of that which is evolving and has just arrived.Here it becomes clear how necessary it is to mankind to have,beside the monumental and antiquarian modes of regarding thepast, a third mode, the critical: and this, too, in the seIVice oflife. Ifheis to live, man must possess and from time to time employ thestrength to break up and dissolve a part of the past: he does this by75