ng, shaping, changeable power: the spirit
enjoys therein its craftiness and its variety of disguises, it enjoys
also its feeling of security therein--it is precisely by its Protean
arts that it is best protected and concealed!--COUNTER TO this
propensity for appearance, for simplification, for a disguise, for a
cloak, in short, for an outside--for every outside is a cloak--there
operates the sublime tendency of the man of knowledge, which takes, and
INSISTS on taking things profoundly, variously, and thoroughly; as a
kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste, which every
courageous thinker will acknowledge in himself, provided, as it ought
to be, that he has sharpened and hardened his eye sufficiently long for
introspection, and is accustomed to severe discipline and even severe
words. He will say: "There is something cruel in the tendency of my
spirit": let the virtuous and amiable try to convince him that it is not
so! In fact, it would sound nicer, if, instead of our cruelty, perhaps
our "extravagant honesty" were talked about, whispered about, and
glorified--we free, VERY free spirits--and some day perhaps SUCH will
actually be our--posthumous glory! Meanwhile--for there is plenty of
time until then--we should be least inclined to deck ourselves out in
such florid and fringed moral verbiage; our whole former work has
just made us sick of this taste and its sprightly exuberance. They are
beautiful, glistening, jingling, festive words: honesty, love of truth,
love of wisdom, sacrifice for knowledge, heroism of the truthful--there
is something in them that makes one's heart swell with pride. But we
anchorites and marmots have long ago persuaded ourselves in all the
secrecy of an anchorite's conscience, that this worthy parade of
verbiage also belongs to the old false adornment, frippery, and
gold-dust of unconscious human vanity, and that even under such
flattering colour and repainting, the terrible original text HOMO NATURA
must again be recognized. In effect, to translate man back again into
nature; to master the many vain and visionary interpretations and
subordinate meanings which have hitherto been scratched and daubed over
the eternal original text, HOMO NATURA; to bring it about that man shall
henceforth stand before man as he now, hardened by the discipline
of science, stands before the OTHER forms of nature, with fearless
Oedipus-eyes, and stopped Ulysses-ears, deaf to the enticements of old
met