grey colours of distress, owing to disgust, satiety, sympathy,
gloominess, and solitariness, is assuredly not a man of elevated tastes;
supposing, however, that he does not voluntarily take all this burden
and disgust upon himself, that he persistently avoids it, and remains,
as I said, quietly and proudly hidden in his citadel, one thing is then
certain: he was not made, he was not predestined for knowledge. For as
such, he would one day have to say to himself: "The devil take my good
taste! but 'the rule' is more interesting than the exception--than
myself, the exception!" And he would go DOWN, and above all, he would
go "inside." The long and serious study of the AVERAGE man--and
consequently much disguise, self-overcoming, familiarity, and bad
intercourse (all intercourse is bad intercourse except with one's
equals):--that constitutes a necessary part of the life-history of every
philosopher; perhaps the most disagreeable, odious, and disappointing
part. If he is fortunate, however, as a favourite child of knowledge
should be, he will meet with suitable auxiliaries who will shorten and
lighten his task; I mean so-called cynics, those who simply recognize
the animal, the commonplace and "the rule" in themselves, and at the
same time have so much spirituality and ticklishness as to make them
talk of themselves and their like BEFORE WITNESSES--sometimes they
wallow, even in books, as on their own dung-hill. Cynicism is the only
form in which base souls approach what is called honesty; and the
higher man must open his ears to all the coarser or finer cynicism, and
congratulate himself when the clown becomes shameless right before
him, or the scientific satyr speaks out. There are even cases where
enchantment mixes with the disgust--namely, where by a freak of nature,
genius is bound to some such indiscreet billy-goat and ape, as in the
case of the Abbe Galiani, the profoundest, acutest, and perhaps also
filthiest man of his century--he was far profounder than Voltaire, and
consequently also, a good deal more silent. It happens more frequently,
as has been hinted, that a scientific head is placed on an ape's body, a
fine exceptional understanding in a base soul, an occurrence by no means
rare, especially among doctors and moral physiologists. And whenever
anyone speaks without bitterness, or rather quite innocently, of man
as a belly with two requirements, and a head with one; whenever any one
sees, seeks, and WANTS to se