294.  The Olympian vice.—­Despite the philosopher who, as a genuine Englishman, tried to bring laughter into bad repute in all thinking minds—­“Laughing is a bad infirmity of human nature, which every thinking mind will strive to overcome” (Hobbes),—­I would even allow myself to rank philosophers according to the quality of their laughing—­up to those who are capable of golden laughter.  And supposing that Gods also philosophize, which I am strongly inclined to believe, owing to many reasons—­I have no doubt that they also know how to laugh thereby in an overman-like and new fashion—­and at the expense of all serious things!  Gods are fond of ridicule:  it seems that they cannot refrain from laughter even in holy matters.

295.  The genius of the heart, as that great mysterious one possesses it, the tempter-god and born rat-catcher of consciences, whose voice can descend into the nether-world of every soul, who neither speaks a word nor casts a glance in which there may not be some motive or touch of allurement, to whose perfection it pertains that he knows how to appear,—­not as he is, but in a guise which acts as an additional constraint on his followers to press ever closer to him, to follow him more cordially and thoroughly;—­the genius of the heart, which imposes silence and attention on everything loud and self-conceited, which smoothes rough souls and makes them taste a new longing—­to lie placid as a mirror, that the deep heavens may be reflected in them;—­the genius of the heart, which teaches the clumsy and too hasty hand to hesitate, and to grasp more delicately; which scents the hidden and forgotten treasure, the drop of goodness and sweet spirituality under thick dark ice, and is a divining-rod for every grain of gold, long buried and imprisoned in mud and sand; the genius of the heart, from contact with which every one goes away richer; not favoured or surprised, not as though gratified and oppressed by the good things of others; but richer in himself, newer than before, broken up, blown upon, and sounded by a thawing wind; more uncertain, perhaps, more delicate, more fragile, more bruised, but full of hopes which as yet lack names, full of a new will and current, full of a new ill-will and counter-current . . . but what am I doing, my friends?  Of whom am I talking to you?  Have I forgotten myself so far that I have not even told you his name?  Unless it be that you have already divined of your own accord who this questionable God and spirit is, that wishes to be praised in such a manner?  For, as it happens to every one who from childhood onward has always been on his legs, and in foreign lands, I have also encountered on my path many strange and dangerous spirits; above all, however, and again and again, the one of whom I have just spoken:  in fact, no less a personage than the God Dionysus, the great equivocator and tempter, to whom, as you know, I once offered in all secrecy and reverence my first-fruits—­the