If it is true (as Yeats wrote of Nietzsche) that "the night has no stars, nothing but bats and owls and the insane moon", then what will happen to us? What is in store for us? Perhaps a terrible vision, and yet, if we want to quote Nietzsche himself, perhaps "the most hopeful of spectacles".

Horror—or hope. After so many centuries, and particularly at the end of the twentieth century, humanity can indeed be disillusioned with its own opt