Scarily, the more I return to Nietzsche the more I identify with him. Not just the kernel of his thought but even his prose style has some kind of parallel. Scary this because he is hardly the model for how one would like to be.

His words here echo down the decades mirroring my thoughts on how psychologically developed people would in the future have no use for art or religion as we currently know it.

   “The energies that condition art, for example, could very well die out; pleasure in lying, in vagueness, in symbolism, in intoxication, in ecstasy, could come into disrepute. Indeed, once life is structured in a perfect state, then the present will no longer offer any theme for poetry whatsoever, and only backward people would still demand poetic unreality. They would then look back longingly to the times of the imperfect state, the half-barbaric society, to our times.”

Similar are his remarks on over-stimulated nervous systems which he attributes mainly to the offerings of philosophers, artists, and religion generally. Mention of 'a new Renaissance' resonates with any hope for the eventual triumph of emotional intelligence.

   “The sum of feelings, knowledge, experiences, that is, the whole burden of culture, has grown so great that the general danger is an overstimulation of nervous and mental powers. It is true that we can now approach health in all kinds of ways, but in the main we still need a decrease of emotional tension, of the oppressive cultural burden, a decrease that, even if it must be bought with serious losses, does give us room for the great hope of a new Renaissance. We owe to Christianity, to the philosophers, poets, and musicians, a superabundance of deeply agitated feelings; to keep these from engulfing us, we must conjure up the spirit of science, which makes us somewhat colder and more skeptical, on the whole, and cools down particularly the hot flow of belief in ultimate truths, which Christianity, especially, has made so wild.”