Ravaisson, 'and especially beauty in the most divine and perfect form,
contains the secret of the world.'[15] And Bergson's _Creative
Evolution_ embodied a conception of life and of the world profoundly
congenial to the artistic and poetic temper of his time. For he
restated, it has been well said, the two great surviving formulas of the
nineteenth century, evolution and the will to live, in terms precisely
suited to the temper of the age just dawning. The will to live became a
formula of hope and progress; evolution became a formula of vital
impulse, of creative purpose, not of mechanical 'struggle for
existence'.

The idea that aesthetic experience gives a profounder clue than logical
thought to the inner meaning of things was as old as Plato. It was one
of the crowning thoughts of Kant; it deeply coloured the metaphysics of
Schelling. And Nietzsche developed it with brilliant audacity when in
his _Birth of Tragedy_ (1872) he contrasted scornfully with the laboured
and ineffectual constructions of the theoretic man, even of Socrates the
founder of philosophy, the radiant vision of the artist, the lucid
clarity of Apollo. 'His book gave the lie to a thousand years of orderly
development', wrote the great Hellenist Wilamowitz, Nietzsche's old
schoolfellow, indignant at his rejection of the labours of scholastic
reason. But it affirmed energetically the passion of his own time for
immediate and first-hand experience.

And it did more. Beside and above Apollo, Nietzsche put Dionysus; beside
vision and above it, _rage_. Of the union of these two Tragedy was born.
And Nietzsche's glorification of this elemental creative force also
responded to a wider movement in philosophy, here chiefly German. His
Dionysiac rage is directly derived from that will in which Schopenhauer
saw the master faculty of man and the hidden secret of the universe; and