The Use and Abuse of History by Friedrich Nietzsche

Is perhaps our time such a "first-comer"? Its historical sense is so strong, and has such universal and boundless expression, that future times will commend it, if only for this, as a first-comer -- if there be any future time, in the sense of future culture. But here comes a grave doubt. Close to the modern man's pride there stands his irony about himself, his consciousness that he must live in a historical, or twilit, atmosphere, the fear that he can retain none of his youthful hopes and powers. Here and there one goes further into cynicism, and justifies the course of history, nay, the whole evolution of the world, as simply leading up to the modern man, according to the cynical canon: -- "what you see now had to come, man had to be thus and not otherwise, no one can stand against this necessity. " He who cannot rest in a state of irony flies for refuge to the cynicism.

The last decade makes him a present of one of its most beautiful inventions, a full and well-rounded phrase for this cynicism: he calls his way of living thoughtlessly and after the fashion of his time, "the full surrender of his personality to the world-process. " The personality and the world-process! .