PLEASURE IN NONSENSE.--How can we take pleasure in nonsense? But wherever there is laughter in the world this is the case: it may even be said that almost everywhere where there is happiness, there is found pleasure in nonsense. The transformation of experience into its opposite, of the suitable into the unsuitable, the obligatory into the optional (but in such a manner that this process produces no injury and is only imagined in jest), is a pleasure; for it temporarily liberates us from the yoke of the obligatory, suitable and experienced, in which we usually find our pitiless masters; we play and laugh when the expected (which generally causes fear and expectancy) happens without bringing any injury. It is the pleasure felt by slaves in the Saturnalian feasts.
THE ENNOBLING OF REALITY.--Through the fact that in the aphrodisiac impulse men discerned a godhead and with adoring gratitude felt it working within themselves, this emotion has in the course of time become imbued with higher conceptions, and has thereby been materially ennobled. Thus certain nations, by virtue of this art of idealisation, have created great aids to culture out of diseases,--the Greeks, for instance, who in earlier centuries suffered from great nervous epidemics (like epilepsy and St. Vitus' Dance), and developed out of them the splendid type of the Bacchante. The Greeks, however, enjoyed an astonishingly high degree of health--their secret was, to revere even disease as a god, if it only possessed _power_.
Music.--Music by and for itself is not so portentous for our inward nature, so deeply moving, that it ought to be looked upon as the _direct_ language of the feelings; but its ancient union with poetry has infused so much symbolism into rhythmical movement, into loudness and softness of tone, that we now _imagine_ it speaks directly _to_ and comes _from_ the inward nature. Dramatic music is only possible when the art of harmony has acquired an immense range of symbolical means, through song, opera, and a hundred attempts at description by sound. "Absolute music" is either form _per se,_ in 'the rude condition of music, when playing in time and with various degrees of strength gives pleasure, or the symbolism of form which speaks to the understanding even without poetry, after the two arts were joined finally together after long development and the musical form had been woven about with threads of meaning and feeling. People who are backward in musical development can appreciate a piece of harmony merely as execution, whilst those who are advanced will comprehend it symbolically. No music is deep and full of meaning in itself, it does not speak of "will," of the "thing-in-itself"; that could be imagined by the intellect only in an age which had conquered for musical symbolism the entire range of inner life. It was the intellect itself that first _gave_ this meaning to sound, just as it also gave meaning to the relation between lines and masses in architecture, but which in itself is quite foreign to mechanical laws.