 The realist will want to make the person he loves happy, while the idealist will “seek to ennoble what he loves” (NA XX, 397/E 255). In politics, the realist will aim at prosperity and the idealist at freedom. Schiller then suggests but does not explain that both realism and idealism can, in the political sphere, be either “true” or “false”. If realism is kept true, its effects are modest but beneficial; the effects of true idealism “are, by contrast, uncertain and often dangerous”. While false realism is only somewhat pernicious, false idealism is nothing less than “terrifying”; it will lead, Schiller says in a clear reference to the French Revolution, “to an infinite fall into a bottomless depth and can only end in complete annihilation” (NA XX, 503/E 259–60).