report no.: 030
informant: Nietzsche Channel
source: Nietzsche, Friedrich: Untimely Meditations, §VIII
location: Berlin
date: 1874

People have scornfully called this Hegelian understanding of history the earthly changes of God; but this God for His part was first created by history. However, this God became intelligible and comprehensible inside Hegelian brain cases and has already ascended all the dialectically possible steps of His being right up to that self-revelation. Thus, for Hegel the summit and end point of the world process coincided with his own individual existence in Berlin. In fact, strictly speaking he should have said that everything coming after him should be valued really only as a musical coda of the world historical rondo, or even more truly, as superfluous. He did not say that. Thus, he planted in the generations leavened by him that admiration for the "Power of History", which transforms practically every moment into a naked admiration of success and leads to idolatrous worship of the factual. For this service people nowadays commonly repeat the very mythological and, in addition, the truly German expression "to carry the bill of facts" But the person who has first learned to stoop down and to bow his head before the "Power of History", finally nods his agreement mechanically, in the Chinese fashion, to that power, whether it is a government or public opinion or a numerical majority, and moves his limbs precisely to the beat of strings plucked by some "power" or other.