All the beauty and sublimity with which we have invested real and
imagined things, I will show to be the property and product of man, and
this should be his most beautiful apology. Man as a poet, as a thinker,
as a god, as love, as power. Oh, the regal liberality with which he
has lavished gifts upon things in order _to impoverish_ himself and
make himself feel wretched! Hitherto, this has been his greatest
disinterestedness, that he admired and worshipped, and knew how to
conceal from himself that _he_ it was who had created what he admired.