Some quotes from The Disinherited Mind

[Lia]

In his Reflections on World History, contemplating the power and the success of evil (and power he regarded as for ever predominantly evil, and Napoleon he called a personified absurdity), he dismisses comfort which the Hegelian assumption of a historical master-plan for the world may give. 'Every successful wickedness,' he says, 'is, to say the least of it, a scandal,' and he adds: 'The only lesson to be derived from the successful misdeeds of the strong is to hold life here and now in no higher esteem than it deserves.' And once, concluding one of his lectures about Greek art with some reflections on the sadness expressed in the faces of the marble images of Greek gods, he made the Vatican Hermes say: 'You are astonished that I am so sad, I, one of the Olympians living in perpetual bliss and immortal joy? Indeed, we possessed everything: glory, heavenly beauty, eternal youth, everlasting pleasure, and yet we were not happy. . . . We lived only for ourselves and inflicted suffering on all others. . . . We were not good, and hence we had to perish.' This is not the language of a rhapsodist of beauty. It rather sounds like an echo of the voice of Jacob Burckhardt senior, Vicar of the Minster of Basle.