Max Stirner 1844

The Ego and Its Own

First Published: in German as Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum. Leipzig: Otto Wigand 1845;

First English edition: The Ego and His Own, trans. Steven T. Byington, ed. Benjamin R. Tucker, pref. James L. Walker. New York: Benjamin R. Tucker 1907. This edition was reprinted several times by several publishers in New York and London up to 1931.

All Things are Nothing to Me

I – A Human Life

II – Men of the Old Time and the New

1 – The Ancients

2 – The Moderns

§1 – The Spirit

§2 – The Possessed

§3 – The Hierarchy

3 – The Free

§1 – Political Liberalism

§2 – Social Liberalism

§3 – Humane Liberalism

Postscript

I – Ownness

II – The Owner

1 – My Power

2 – My Intercourse

3 – My Self-Enjoyment

III – The Unique One

TO MY SWEETHEART

MARIE DÄHNHARDT

I've set my cause on nothing

[Ich hab’ mein’ Sach’ auf nichts gestellt]

What is not supposed to be my concern [Sache] ! First and foremost, the good cause [Sache], then God’s cause, the cause of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of humanity, of justice; further, the cause of my people, my prince, my fatherland; finally, even the cause of Mind, and a thousand other causes. Only my cause is never to be my concern. “Shame on the egoist who thinks only of himself!”

Let us look and see, then, how they manage their concerns – they for whose cause we are to labour, devote ourselves, and grow enthusiastic.

You have much profound information to give about God, and have for thousands of years “searched the depths of the Godhead,” and looked into its heart, so that you can doubtless tell us how God himself attends to “God’s cause,” which we are called to serve. And you do not conceal the Lord’s doings, either. Now, what is his cause? Has he, as is demanded of us, made an alien cause, the cause of truth or love, his own? You are shocked by this misunderstanding, and you instruct us that God’s cause is indeed the cause of truth and love, but that this cause cannot be called alien to him, because God is himself truth and love; you are shocked by the assumption that God could be like us poor worms in furthering an alien cause as his own. “Should God take up the cause of truth if he were not himself truth?” He cares only for his cause, but, because he is all in all, therefore all is his cause! But we, we are not all in all, and our cause is altogether little and contemptible; therefore we must “serve a higher cause.” – Now it is clear, God cares only for what is his, busies himself only with himself, thinks only of himself, and has only himself before his eyes; woe to all that is not well pleasing to him. He serves no higher person, and satisfies only himself. His cause is – a purely egoistic cause.

How is it with mankind, whose cause we are to make our own? Is its cause that of another, and does mankind serve a higher cause? No, mankind looks only at itself, mankind will promote the interests of mankind only, mankind is its own cause. That it may develop, it causes nations and individuals to wear themselves out in its service, and, when they have accomplished what mankind needs, it throws them on the dung-heap of history in gratitude. Is not mankind’s cause – a purely egoistic cause?

I have no need to take up each thing that wants to throw its cause on us and show that it is occupied only with itself, not with us, only with its good, not with ours. Look at the rest for yourselves. Do truth, freedom, humanity, justice, desire anything else than that you grow enthusiastic and serve them?

They all have an admirable time of it when they receive zealous homage. Just observe the nation that is defended by devoted patriots. The patriots fall in bloody battle or in the fight with hunger and want; what does the nation care for that? By the manure of their corpses the nation comes to “its bloom"! The individuals have died “for the great cause of the nation,” and the nation sends some words of thanks after them and – has the profit of it. I call that a paying kind of egoism.

But only look at that Sultan who cares so lovingly for his people. Is he not pure unselfishness itself, and does he not hourly sacrifice himself for his people? Oh, yes, for “his people.” Just try it; show yourself not as his, but as your own; for breaking away from his egoism you will take a trip to jail. The Sultan has set his cause on nothing but himself; he is to himself all in all, he is to himself the only one, and tolerates nobody who would dare not to be one of “his people.”

And will you not learn by these brilliant examples that the egoist gets on best? I for my part take a lesson from them, and propose, instead of further unselfishly serving those great egoists, rather to be the egoist myself.

God and mankind have concerned themselves for nothing, for nothing but themselves. Let me then likewise concern myself for myself, who am equally with God the nothing of all others, who am my all, who am the only one [Der Einzige].

If God, if mankind, as you affirm, have substance enough in themselves to be all in all to themselves, then I feel that I shall still less lack that, and that I shall have no complaint to make of my “emptiness.” I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing [das schöpferiche Nichts], the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.

Away, then, with every concern that is not altogether my concern! You think at least the “good cause” must be my concern? What’s good, what’s bad? Why, I myself am my concern, and I am neither good nor bad. Neither has meaning for me. The divine is God’s concern; the human, man’s. My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the true, good, just, free, etc., but solely what is mine [das Meinige] , and it is not a general one, but is – unique [einzig], as I am unique.

Nothing is more to me than myself!

Man is to man the supreme being, says Feuerbach. Man has just been discovered, says Bruno Bauer. Let us take a more careful look at this supreme being and this new discovery.

From the moment when he catches sight of the light of the world a man seeks to find out himself and get hold of himself out of its confusion, in which he, with everything else, is tossed about in motley mixture.

But everything that comes in contact with the child defends itself in turn against his attacks, and asserts its own persistence.

Accordingly, because each thing cares for itself and at the same time comes into constant collision with other things, the combat of self-assertion is unavoidable.

Victory or defeat – between the two alternatives the fate of the combat wavers. The victor becomes the lord, the vanquished one the subject: the former exercises supremacy and “rights of supremacy,” the latter fulfils in awe and deference the “duties of a subject.”

But both remain enemies, and always lie in wait: they watch for each other’s weaknesses – children for those of their parents and parents for those of their children (their fear, for example); either the stick conquers the man, or the man conquers the stick.

In childhood liberation takes the direction of trying to get to the bottom of things, to get at what is “back of” things; therefore we spy out the weak points of everybody, for which, it is well known, children have a sure instinct; therefore we like to smash things, like to rummage through hidden corners, pry after what is covered up or out of the way, and try what we can do with everything. When we once get at what is back of the things, we know we are safe; when we have got at the fact that the rod is too weak against our obduracy, then we no longer fear it, “have outgrown it.”

Behind the rod, mightier than it, stands our – obduracy, our obdurate courage. By degrees we get at what is back of everything that was mysterious and uncanny to us, the mysteriousIy-dreaded might of the rod, the father’s stern look, etc., and back of all we find our ataraxia – our imperturbability, intrepidity, our counter forces, our odds of strength, our invincibility. Before that which formerly inspired in us fear and deference we no longer retreat shyly, but take courage. Back of everything we find our courage, our superiority; back of the sharp command of parents and authorities stands, after all, our courageous choice or our outwitting shrewdness. And the more we feel ourselves, the smaller appears that which before seemed invincible. And what is our trickery, shrewdness, courage, obduracy? What else but – mind ! [Geist]

Through a considerable time we are spared a fight that is so exhausting later – the fight against reason. The fairest part of childhood passes without the necessity of coming to blows with reason. We care nothing at all about it, do not meddle with it, admit no reason. We are not to be persuaded to anything by conviction, and are deaf to good arguments and principles; on the other hand, coaxing, punishment, and the like are hard for us to resist.

This stem life-and-death combat with reason enters later, and begins a new phase; in childhood we scamper about without racking our brains much.

Mind is the name of the first self-discovery, the first undeification of the divine; that is, of the uncanny, the spooks, the “powers above.” Our fresh feeling of youth, this feeling of self, now defers to nothing; the world is discredited, for we are above it, we are mind. Now for the first time we see that hitherto we have not looked at the world intelligently [mit Geist] at all, but only stared at it.

We exercise the beginnings of our strength on natural powers. We defer to parents as a natural power; later we say: Father and mother are to be forsaken, all natural power to be counted as riven. They are vanquished. For the rational, the “intellectual [geistigen] man,” there is no family as a natural power; a renunciation of parents, brothers, etc., makes its appearance. If these are “born again” as intellectual, rational powers, they are no longer at all what they were before.

And not only parents, but men in general, are conquered by the young man; they are no hindrance to him, and are no longer regarded; for now he says: One must obey God rather than men.

From this high stand-point everything “earthly” recedes into contemptible remoteness; for the stand-point is – the heavenly.

The attitude is now altogether reversed; the youth takes up an intellectual position, while the boy, who did not yet feel himself as mind, grew up on mindless learning. The former does not try to get hold of things (for instance, to get into his head the data of history), but of the thoughts that lie hidden in things, and so, therefore, of the spirit of history. On the other hand, the boy understands connections no doubt, but not ideas, the spirit; therefore he strings together whatever can be learned, without proceeding a priori and theoretically, without looking for ideas.

As in childhood one had to overcome the resistance of the laws of the world, so now in everything that he proposes he is met by an objection of the mind, of reason, of his own conscience. “That is unreasonable, unchristian, unpatriotic,” and the like, cries conscience to us, and – frightens us away from it. Not the might of the avenging Eumenides, not Poseidon’s wrath, not God, far as he sees the hidden, not the father’s rod of punishment, do we fear, but – conscience.

We “run after our thoughts” now, and follow their commands just as before we followed parental, human ones. Our course of action is determined by our thoughts (ideas, conceptions, faith) as it is in childhood by the commands of our parents.

For all that, we were already thinking when we were children, only our thoughts were not fleshless, abstract, absolute, that is, NOTHING BUT THOUGHTS, a heaven in themselves, a pure world of thought, logical thoughts.

On the contrary, they had been only thoughts that we had about a thing; we thought of the thing so or so. Thus we may have thought “God made the world that we see there,” but we did not think of (“search”) the “depths of the Godhead itself”; we may have thought “that is the truth about the matter,” but we do not think of Truth itself, nor unite into one sentence “God is truth.” The “depths of the Godhead, who is truth,” we did not touch. Over such purely logical (theological) questions, “What is truth?” Pilate does not stop, though he does not therefore hesitate to ascertain in an individual case “what truth there is in the thing,” whether the thing is true.

Any thought bound to a thing is not yet nothing but a thought, absolute thought.

To bring to light the pure thought, or to be of its party, is the delight of youth; and all the shapes of light in the world of thought, like truth, freedom, humanity, Man, illumine and inspire the youthful soul.

But, when the spirit is recognized as the essential thing, it still makes a difference whether the spirit is poor or rich, and therefore one seeks to become rich in spirit; the spirit wants to spread out so as to found its empire – an empire that is not of this world, the world just conquered. Thus, then, it longs to become all in all to itself; for, although I am spirit, I am not yet perfected spirit, and must first seek the complete spirit.

But with that I, who had just now found myself as spirit, lose myself again at once, bowing before the complete spirit as one not my own but supernal [jenseitig], and feeling my emptiness.

Spirit is the essential point for everything, to be sure; but then is every spirit the “right” spirit? The right and true spirit is the ideal of spirit, the “Holy Spirit.” It is not my or your spirit, but just – an ideal, supernal one, it is “God.” “God is spirit.” And this supernal “Father in heaven gives it to those that pray to him.” [Luke 11:13]

The man is distinguished from the youth by the fact that he takes the world as it is, instead of everywhere fancying it amiss and wanting to improve it, model it after his ideal; in him the view that one must deal with the world according to his interest, not according to his ideals, becomes confirmed.

So long as one knows himself only as spirit, and feels that all the value of his existence consists in being spirit (it becomes easy for the youth to give his life, the “bodily life,” for a nothing, for the silliest point of honour), so long it is only thoughts that one has, ideas that he hopes to be able to realize some day when he has found a sphere of action; thus one has meanwhile only ideals, unexecuted ideas or thoughts.

Not until one has fallen in love with his corporeal self, and takes a pleasure in himself as a living flesh-and-blood person – but it is in mature years, in the man, that we find it so – not until then has one a personal or egoistic [egoistisches] interest, an interest not only of our spirit, for instance, but of total satisfaction, satisfaction of the whole chap, a selfish [eigennütziges] interest. Just compare a man with a youth, and see if he will not appear to you harder, less magnanimous, more selfish. Is he therefore worse? No, you say; he has only become more definite, or, as you also call it, more “practical.” But the main point is this, that he makes himself more the centre than does the youth, who is infatuated about other things, for example, God, fatherland, and so on.

Therefore the man shows a second self-discovery. The youth found himself as spirit and lost himself again in the general spirit, the complete, holy spirit, Man, mankind – in short, all ideals; the man finds himself as embodied spirit.

Boys had only unintellectual interests (those interests devoid of thoughts and ideas), youths only intellectual ones; the man has bodily, personal, egoistic interests.

If the child has not an object that it can occupy itself with, it feels ennui; for it does not yet know how to occupy itself with itself. The youth, on the contrary, throws the object aside, because for him thoughts arose out of the object; he occupies himself with his thoughts, his dreams, occupies himself intellectually, or “his mind is occupied.”

The young man includes everything not intellectual under the contemptuous name of “externalities.” If he nevertheless sticks to the most trivial externalities (such as the customs of students’ clubs and other formalities), it is because, and when, he discovers mind in them, when they are symbols to him.

As I find myself back of things, and that as mind, so I must later find myself also back of thoughts – namely, as their creator and owner [Eigner]. In the time of spirits thoughts grew until they overtopped my head, whose offspring they yet were; they hovered about me and convulsed me like fever-phantasies – an awful power. The thoughts had become corporeal on their own account, were ghosts, such as God, Emperor, Pope, Fatherland, etc. If I destroy their corporeity, then I take them back into mine, and say: “I alone am corporeal.” And now I take the world as what it is to me, as mine, as my property [Eigentum]; I refer all to myself.

If as spirit I had thrust away the world in the deepest contempt, so as owner I thrust spirits or ideas away into their “vanity.” They have no longer any power over me, as no “earthly might” has power over the spirit.

The child was realistic, taken up with the things of this world, until little by little he succeeded in getting at what was back of these very things; the youth was idealistic, inspired by thoughts, until he worked his way up to where he became the man, the egoistic man, who deals with things and thoughts according to his heart’s pleasure, and sets his personal interest above everything. Finally, the old man? When I become one, there will still be time enough to speak of that.

How each of us developed himself, what he strove for, attained, or missed, what objects he formerly pursued and what plans and wishes his heart is now set on, what transformation his views have experienced, what perturbations his principles – in short, how he has today become what yesterday or years ago he was not – this he brings out again from his memory with more or less ease, and he feels with especial vividness what changes have taken place in himself when he has before his eyes the unrolling of another’s life.

Let us therefore look into the activities our forefathers busied themselves with.

Custom having once given the name of “the ancients” to our pre-Christian ancestors, we will not throw it up against them that, in comparison with us experienced people, they ought properly to be called children, but will rather continue to honour them as our good old fathers. But how have they come to be antiquated, and who could displace them through his pretended newness?

We know, of course, the revolutionary innovator and disrespectful heir, who even took away the sanctity of the fathers’ sabbath to hallow his Sunday, and interrupted the course of time to begin at himself with a new chronology; we know him, and know that it is – the Christian. But does he remain forever young, and is he today still the new man, or will he too be superseded, as he has superseded the “ancients"?

The fathers must doubtless have themselves begotten the young one who entombed them. Let us then peep at this act of generation.

“To the ancients the world was a truth,” says Feuerbach, but he forgets to make the important addition, “a truth whose untruth they tried to get back of, and at last really did.” What is meant by those words of Feuerbach will be easily recognized if they are put alongside the Christian thesis of the “vanity and transitoriness of the world.” For, as the Christian can never convince himself of the vanity of the divine word, but believes in its eternal and unshakable truth, which, the more its depths are searched, must all the more brilliantly come to light and triumph, so the ancients on their side lived in the feeling that the world and mundane relations (such as the natural ties of blood) were the truth before which their powerless “I” must bow. The very thing on which the ancients set the highest value is spurned by Christians as the valueless, and what they recognized as truth these brand as idle lies; the high significance of the fatherland disappears, and the Christian must regard himself as “a stranger on earth”; [Hebrews 11:13] the sanctity of funeral rites, from which sprang a work of art like the Antigone of Sophocles, is designated as a paltry thing (“Let the dead bury their dead”); the infrangible truth of family ties is represented as an untruth which one cannot promptly enough get clear of; [Mark 10:29] and so in everything.

If we now see that to the two sides opposite things appear as truth, to one the natural, to the other the intellectual, to one earthly things and relations, to the other heavenly (the heavenly fatherland, “Jerusalem that is above,” etc.), it still remains to be considered how the new time and that undeniable reversal could come out of antiquity. But the ancients themselves worked toward making their truth a lie.

Let us plunge at once into the midst of the most brilliant years of the ancients, into the Periclean century. Then the Sophistic culture was spreading, and Greece made a pastime of what had hitherto been to her a monstrously serious matter.

The fathers had been enslaved by the undisturbed power of existing things too long for the posterity not to have to learn by bitter experience to feel themselves. Therefore the Sophists, with courageous sauciness, pronounce the reassuring words, “Don’t be bluffed!” and diffuse the rationalistic doctrine, “Use your understanding, your wit, your mind, against everything; it is by having a good and well-drilled understanding that one gets through the world best, provides for himself the best lot, the pleasantest life.” Thus they recognize in mind man’s true weapon against the world. This is why they lay such stress on dialectic skill, command of language, the art of disputation, etc. They announce that mind is to be used against everything; but they are still far removed from the holiness of the Spirit, for to them it is a means, a weapon, as trickery and defiance serve children for the same purpose; their mind is the unbribable understanding.

Today we should call that a one-sided culture of the understanding, and add the warning, “Cultivate not only your understanding, but also, and especially, your heart.” Socrates did the same. For, if the heart did not become free from its natural impulses, but remained filled with the most fortuitous contents and, as an uncriticized avidity, altogether in the power of things, nothing but a vessel of the most various appetites – then it was unavoidable that the free understanding must serve the “bad heart” and was ready to justify everything that the wicked heart desired.

Therefore Socrates says that it is not enough for one to use his understanding in all things, but it is a question of what cause one exerts it for. We should now say, one must serve the “good cause.” But serving the good cause is – being moral. Hence Socrates is the founder of ethics.

Certainly the principle of the Sophistic doctrine must lead to the possibility that the blindest and most dependent slave of his desires might yet be an excellent sophist, and, with keen understanding, trim and expound everything in favour of his coarse heart. What could there be for which a “good reason” might not be found, or which might not be defended through thick and thin?

Therefore Socrates says: “You must be ‘pure-hearted’ if your shrewdness is to be valued.” At this point begins the second period of Greek liberation of the mind, the period of purity of heart. For the first was brought to a close by the Sophists in their proclaiming the omnipotence of the understanding. But the heart remained worldly-minded, remained a servant of the world, always affected by worldly wishes. This coarse heart was to be cultivated from now on – the era of culture of the heart. But how is the heart to be cultivated? What the understanding; this one side of the mind, has reached – namely, the capability of playing freely with and over every concern – awaits the heart also; everything worldly must come to grief before it, so that at last family, commonwealth, fatherland, and the like, are given up for the sake of the heart, that is, of blessedness, the heart’s blessedness.

Daily experience confirms the truth that the understanding may have renounced a thing many years before the heart has ceased to beat for it. So the Sophistic understanding too had so far become master over the dominant, ancient powers that they now needed only to be driven out of the heart, in which they dwelt unmolested, to have at last no part at all left in man.

This war is opened by Socrates, and not until the dying day of the old world does it end in peace.

The examination of the heart takes its start with Socrates, and all the contents of the heart are sifted. In their last and extremest struggles the ancients threw all contents out of the heart and let it no longer beat for anything; this was the deed of the Skeptics. The same purgation of the heart was now achieved in the Skeptical age, as the understanding had succeeded in establishing in the Sophistic age.

The Sophistic culture has brought it to pass that one’s understanding no longer stands still before anything, and the Skeptical, that his heart is no longer moved by anything.

So long as man is entangled in the movements of the world and embarrassed by relations to the world – and he is so until the end of antiquity, because his heart still has to struggle for independence from the worldly – so long he is not yet spirit; for spirit is without body, and has no relations to the world and corporeality; for it the world does not exist, nor natural bonds, but only the spiritual, and spiritual bonds. Therefore man must first become so completely unconcerned and reckless, so altogether without relations, as the Skeptical culture presents him – so altogether indifferent to the world that even its falling in ruins would not move him – before he could feel himself as worldless; that is, as spirit. And this is the result of the gigantic work of the ancients: that man knows himself as a being without relations and without a world, as spirit.

Only now, after all worldly care has left him, is he all in all to himself, is he only for himself, is he spirit for the spirit, or, in plainer language, he cares only for the spiritual.

In the Christian wisdom of serpents and innocence of doves, the two sides – understanding and heart – of the ancient liberation of mind are so completed that they appear young and new again, and neither the one nor the other lets itself be bluffed any longer by the worldly and natural.

Thus the ancients mounted to spirit, and strove to become spiritual. But a man who wishes to be active as spirit is drawn to quite other tasks than he was able to set himself formerly: to tasks which really give something to do to the spirit and not to mere sense [Sinn] or acuteness [Scharf-Sinn], which exerts itself only to become master of things. The spirit busies itself solely about the spiritual, and seeks out the “traces of mind” in everything; to the believing spirit “everything comes from God,” and interests him only to the extent that it reveals this origin; to the philosophic spirit everything appears with the stamp of reason, and interests him only so far as he is able to discover in it reason, that is, spiritual content.

Not the spirit, then, which has to do with absolutely nothing unspiritual, with no thing, but only with the essence which exists behind and above things, with thoughts – not that did the ancients exert, for they did not yet have it; no, they had only reached the point of struggling and longing for it, and therefore sharpened [schärfen] it against their too-powerful foe, the world of sense (but what would not have been sensuous for them, since Jehovah or the gods of the heathen were yet far removed from the conception “God is spirit,” since the “heavenly fatherland” had not yet stepped into the place of the sensuous, etc.?) – they sharpened against the world of sense their sense, their acuteness. To this day the Jews, those precocious children of antiquity, have got no farther; and with all the subtlety and strength of their prudence and understanding, which easily becomes master of things and forces them to obey it, they cannot discover spirit, which takes no account whatever of things.

The Christian has spiritual interests, because he allows himself to be a spiritual man; the Jew does not even understand these interests in their purity, because he does not allow himself to assign no value to things. He does not arrive at pure spirituality, a spirituality such as is religiously expressed, for instance, in the faith of Christians, which alone (without works) justifies. Their unspirituality sets Jews forever apart from Christians; for the spiritual man is incomprehensible to the unspiritual, as the unspiritual is contemptible to the spiritual. But the Jews have only “the spirit of this world.”

The ancient acuteness and profundity lies as far from the spirit and the spirituality of the Christian world as earth from heaven.

He who feels himself as free spirit is not oppressed and made anxious by the things of this world, because he does not care for them; if one is still to feel their burden, he must be narrow enough to attach weight to them – as is evidently the case, for instance, when one is still concerned for his “dear life.” He to whom everything centres in knowing and conducting himself as a free spirit gives little heed to how scantily he is supplied meanwhile, and does not reflect at all on how he must make his arrangements to have a thoroughly free or enjoyable life. He is not disturbed by the inconveniences of the life that depends on things, because he lives only spiritually and on spiritual food, while aside from this he only gulps things down like a beast, hardly knowing it, and dies bodily, to be sure, when his fodder gives out, but knows himself immortal as spirit, and closes his eyes with an adoration or a thought. His life is occupation with the spiritual, is – thinking; the rest does not bother him; let him busy himself with the spiritual in any way that he can and chooses – in devotion, in contemplation, or in philosophic cognition – his doing is always thinking; and therefore Descartes, to whom this had at last become quite clear, could lay down the proposition: “I think, that is – I am.” This means, my thinking is my being or my life; only when I live spiritually do I live; only as spirit am I really, or – I am spirit through and through and nothing but spirit. Unlucky Peter Schlemihl, who has lost his shadow, is the portrait of this man become a spirit; for the spirit’s body is shadowless. – Over against this, how different among the ancients! Stoutly and manfully as they might bear themselves against the might of things, they must yet acknowledge the might itself, and got no farther than to protect their life against it as well as possible. Only at a late hour did they recognize that their “true life” was not that which they led in the fight against the things of the world, but the “spiritual life,” “turned away” from these things; and, when they saw this, they became Christians, the moderns, and innovators upon the ancients. But the life turned away from things, the spiritual life, no longer draws any nourishment from nature, but “lives only on thoughts,” and therefore is no longer “life,” but – thinking.

Yet it must not be supposed now that the ancients were without thoughts, just as the most spiritual man is not to be conceived of as if he could be without life. Rather, they had their thoughts about everything, about the world, man, the gods, etc., and showed themselves keenly active in bringing all this to their consciousness. But they did not know thought, even though they thought of all sorts of things and “worried themselves with their thoughts.” Compare with their position the Christian saying, “My thoughts are not your thoughts; as the heaven is higher than the earth, so are my thoughts higher than your thoughts,” and remember what was said above about our child-thoughts.

What is antiquity seeking, then? The true enjoyment of life! You will find that at bottom it is all the same as “the true life.”

The Greek poet Simonides sings: “Health is the noblest good for mortal man, the next to this is beauty, the third riches acquired without guile, the fourth the enjoyment of social pleasures in the company of young friends.” These are all good things of life, pleasures of life. What else was Diogenes of Sinope seeking for than the true enjoyment of life, which he discovered in having the least possible wants? What else Aristippus, who found it in a cheery temper under all circumstances? They are seeking for cheery, unclouded life-courage, for cheeriness; they are seeking to “be of good cheer.”

The Stoics want to realize the wise man, the man with practical philosophy, the man who knows how to live – a wise life, therefore; they find him in contempt for the world, in a life without development, without spreading out, without friendly relations with the world, thus in the isolated life, in life as life, not in life with others; only the Stoic lives, all else is dead for him. The Epicureans, on the contrary, demand a moving life.

The ancients, as they want to be of good cheer, desire good living (the Jews especially a long life, blessed with children and goods), eudaemonia, well-being in the most various forms. Democritus, for example, praises as such the “calm of the soul” in which one “lives smoothly, without fear and without excitement.”

So what he thinks is that with this he gets on best, provides for himself the best lot, and gets through the world best. But as he cannot get rid of the world – and in fact cannot for the very reason that his whole activity is taken up in the effort to get rid of it, that is, in repelling the world (for which it is yet necessary that what can be and is repelled should remain existing, otherwise there would be no longer anything to repel) – he reaches at most an extreme degree of liberation, and is distinguishable only in degree from the less liberated. If he even got as far as the deadening of the earthly sense, which at last admits only the monotonous whisper of the word “Brahm,” he nevertheless would not be essentially distinguishable from the sensual man.

Even the Stoic attitude and manly virtue amounts only to this – that one must maintain and assert himself against the world; and the ethics of the Stoics (their only science, since they could tell nothing about the spirit but how it should behave toward the world, and of nature (physics) only this, that the wise man must assert himself against it) is not a doctrine of the spirit, but only a doctrine of the repelling of the world and of self-assertion against the world. And this consists in “imperturbability and equanimity of life,” and so in the most explicit Roman virtue.

The Romans too (Horace, Cicero, and others) went no further than this practical philosophy.

The comfort (hedone) of the Epicureans is the same practical philosophy the Stoics teach, only trickier, more deceitful. They teach only another behaviour toward the world, exhort us only to take a shrewd attitude toward the world; the world must be deceived, for it is my enemy.

The break with the world is completely carried through by the Skeptics. My entire relation to the world is “worthless and truthless.” Timon says, “The feelings and thoughts which we draw from the world contain no truth.” “What is truth?” cries Pilate. According to Pyrrho’s doctrine the world is neither good nor bad, neither beautiful nor ugly, but these are predicates which I give it. Timon says that “in itself nothing is either good or bad, but man only thinks of it thus or thus”; to face the world only ataraxia (unmovedness) and aphasia (speechlessness – or, in other words, isolated inwardness) are left. There is “no longer any truth to be recognized” in the world; things contradict themselves; thoughts about things are without distinction (good and bad are all the same, so that what one calls good another finds bad); here the recognition of “truth” is at an end, and only the man without power of recognition, the man who finds in the world nothing to recognize, is left, and this man just leaves the truth-vacant world where it is and takes no account of it.

So antiquity gets through with the world of things, the order of the world, the world as a whole; but to the order of the world, or the things of this world, belong not only nature, but all relations in which man sees himself placed by nature, as in the family, the community – in short, the so-called “natural bonds.” With the world of the spirit Christianity then begins. The man who still faces the world armed is the ancient, the – heathen (to which class the Jew, too, as non-Christian, belongs); the man who has come to be led by nothing but his “heart’s pleasure,” the interest he takes, his fellow-feeling, his – spirit, isthe modern, the – Christian.

As the ancients worked toward the conquest of the world and strove to release man from the heavy trammels of connection with other things, at last they came also to the dissolution of the state and giving preference to everything private. Of course community, family, and so forth, as natural relations, are burdensome hindrances which diminish my spiritual freedom.

If any man be in Christ, he is a new [neue] creature; the old is passed away, behold, all is become new.”

As it was said above, “To the ancients the world was a truth,” we must say here, “To the moderns the spirit was a truth”; but here, as there, we must not omit the supplement, “a truth whose untruth they tried to get back of, and at last they really do.”

A course similar to that which antiquity took may be demonstrated in Christianity also, in that the understanding was held a prisoner under the dominion of the Christian dogmas up to the time preparatory to the Reformation, but in the pre-Reformation century asserted itself sophistically and played heretical pranks with all tenets of the faith. And the talk then was, especially in Italy and at the Roman court, “If only the heart remains Christian-minded, the understanding may go right on taking its pleasure.”

Long before the Reformation, people were so thoroughly accustomed to fine-spun “wranglings” that the pope, and most others, looked on Luther’s appearance too as a mere “wrangling of monks” at first. Humanism corresponds to Sophisticism, and, as in the time of the Sophists Greek life stood in its fullest bloom (the Periclean age), so the most brilliant things happened in the time of Humanism, or, as one might perhaps also say, of Machiavellianism (printing, the New World, etc.). At this time the heart was still far from wanting to relieve itself of its Christian contents.

But finally the Reformation, like Socrates, took hold seriously of the heart itself, and since then hearts have kept growing visibly – more unchristian. As with Luther people began to take the matter to heart, the outcome of this step of the Reformation must be that the heart also gets lightened of the heavy burden of Christian faith. The heart, from day to day more unchristian, loses the contents with which it had busied itself, until at last nothing but empty warmheartedness is left it, the quite general love of men, the love of Man, the consciousness of freedom, “self-consciousness.”

Only so is Christianity complete, because it has become bald, withered, and void of contents. There are now no contents whatever against which the heart does not mutiny, unless indeed the heart unconsciously or without “self-consciousness” lets them slip in. The heart criticizes to death with hard-hearted mercilessness everything that wants to make its way in, and is capable (except, as before, unconsciously or taken by surprise) of no friendship, no love. What could there be in men to love, since they are all alike “egoists,” none of them man as such, none are spirit only ?The Christian loves only the spirit; but where could one be found who should be really nothing but spirit?

To have a liking for the corporeal man with hide and hair – why, that would no longer be a “spiritual” warmheartedness, it would be treason against “pure” warmheartedness, the “theoretical regard.” For pure warmheartedness is by no means to be conceived as like that kindliness that gives everybody a friendly hand-shake; on the contrary, pure warmheartedness is warm-hearted toward nobody, it is only a theoretical interest, concern for man as man, not as a person. The person is repulsive to it because of being “egoistic,” because of not being that abstraction, Man. But it is only for the abstraction that one can have a theoretical regard. To pure warm-heartedness or pure theory men exist only to be criticized, scoffed at, and thoroughly despised; to it, no less than to the fanatical cleric, they are only “filth” and other such fine things.

Pushed to this extremity of disinterested warmheartedness, we must finally become conscious that the spirit, which alone the Christian loves, is nothing; in other words, that the spirit is – a lie.

What has here been set down roughly, summarily, and doubtless as yet incomprehensibly, will, it is to be hoped, become clear as we go on.

Let us take up the inheritance left by the ancients, and, as active workmen, do with it as much as – can be done with it! The world lies despised at our feet, far beneath us and our heaven, into which its mighty arms are no longer thrust and its stupefying breath does not come. Seductively as it may pose, it can delude nothing but our sense; it cannot lead astray the spirit – and spirit alone, after all, we really are. Having once got back of things, the spirit has also got above them, and become free from their bonds, emancipated, supernal, free. So speaks “spiritual freedom.”

To the spirit which, after long toil, has got rid of the world, the worldless spirit, nothing is left after the loss of the world and the worldly but – the spirit and the spiritual.

Yet, as it has only moved away from the world and made of itself a being free from the world, without being able really to annihilate the world, this remains to it a stumbling-block that cannot be cleared away, a discredited existence; and, as, on the other hand, it knows and recognizes nothing but the spirit and the spiritual, it must perpetually carry about with it the longing to spiritualize the world, to redeem it from the “black list.” Therefore, like a youth, it goes about with plans for the redemption or improvement of the world.

The ancients, we saw, served the natural, the worldly, the natural order of the world, but they incessantly asked themselves of this service; and, when they had tired themselves to death in ever-renewed attempts at revolt, then, among their last sighs, was born to them the God, the “conqueror of the world.” All their doing had been nothing but wisdom of the world, an effort to get back of the world and above it. And what is the wisdom of the many following centuries? What did the moderns try to get back of? No longer to get back of the world, for the ancients had accomplished that; but back of the God whom the ancients bequeathed to them, back of the God who “is spirit,” back of everything that is the spirit’s, the spiritual. But the activity of the spirit, which “searches even the depths of the Godhead,” is theology. If the ancients have nothing to show but wisdom of the world, the moderns never did nor do make their way further than to theology. We shall see later that even the newest revolts against God are nothing but the extremest efforts of “theology,” that is, theological insurrections.

The realm of spirits is monstrously great, there is an infinite deal of the spiritual; yet let us look and see what the spirit, this bequest of the ancients, properly is.

Out of their birth-pangs it came forth, but they themselves could not utter themselves as spirit; they could give birth to it, it itself must speak. The “born God, the Son of Man,” is the first to utter the word that the spirit, he, God, has to do with nothing earthly and no earthly relationship, but solely ,with the spirit and spiritual relationships.

Is my courage, indestructible under all the world’s blows, my inflexibility and my obduracy, perchance already spirit in the full sense, because the world cannot touch it? Why, then it would not yet be at enmity with the world, and all its action would consist merely in not succumbing to the world! No, so long as it does not busy itself with itself alone, so long as it does not have to do with its world, the spiritual, alone, it is not free spirit, but only the “spirit of this world,” the spirit fettered to it. The spirit is free spirit, that is, really spirit, only in a world of its own; in “this,” the earthly world, it is a stranger. Only through a spiritual world is the spirit really spirit, for “this” world does not understand it and does not know how to keep “the maiden from a foreign land” from departing.

But where is it to get this spiritual world? Where but out of itself? It must reveal itself; and the words that it speaks, ;the revelations in which it unveils itself, these are its world. As a visionary lives and has his world only in the visionary pictures that he himself creates, as a crazy man generates for himself his own dream-world, without which he could not be crazy, so the spirit must create for itself its spirit world, and is not spirit until it creates it.

Thus its creations make it spirit, and by its creatures we know it, the creator; in them it lives, they are its world.

Now, what is the spirit? It is the creator of a spiritual world! Even in you and me people do not recognize spirit until they see that we have appropriated to ourselves something spiritual; though thoughts may have been set before us, we have at least brought them to live in ourselves; for, as long as we were children, the most edifying thoughts might have been laid before us without our wishing, or being able, to reproduce them in ourselves. So the spirit also exists only when it creates something spiritual; it is real only together with the spiritual, its creature.

As, then, we know it by its works, the question is what these works are. But the works or children of the spirit are nothing else but – spirits.

If I had before me Jews, Jews of the true metal, I should have to stop here and leave them standing before this mystery as for almost two thousand years they have remained standing before it, unbelieving and without knowledge. But, as you, my dear reader, are at least not a full-blooded Jew – for such a one will not go astray as far as this – we will still go along a bit of road together, until perhaps you too turn your back on me because I laugh in your face.

If somebody told you you were altogether spirit, you would take hold of your body and not believe him, but answer: “I have a spirit, no doubt, but do not exist only as spirit, but as a man with a body.” You would still distinguish yourself from “your spirit.” “But,” replies he, “it is your destiny, even though now you are yet going about in the fetters of the body, to be one day a ‘blessed spirit,’ and, however you may conceive of the future aspect of your spirit, so much is yet certain, that in death you will put off this body and yet keep yourself, your spirit, for all eternity; accordingly your spirit is the eternal and true in you, the body only a dwelling here below, which you may leave and perhaps exchange for another.”

Now you believe him! For the present, indeed, you are not spirit only; but, when you emigrate from the mortal body, as one day you must, then you will have to help yourself without the body, and therefore it is needful that you be prudent and care in time for your proper self. “What should it profit a man if he gained the whole world and yet suffered damage in his soul?”

But, even granted that doubts, raised in the course of time against the tenets of the Christian faith, have long since robbed you of faith in the immortality of your spirit, you have nevertheless left one tenet undisturbed, and still ingenuously adhere to the one truth, that the spirit is your better part, and that the spiritual has greater claims on you than anything else. Despite all your atheism, in zeal against egoism you concur with the believers in immortality.

But whom do you think of under the name of egoist? A man who, instead of living to an idea, that is, a spiritual thing, and sacrificing to it his personal advantage, serves the latter. A good patriot brings his sacrifice to the altar of the fatherland; but it cannot be disputed that the fatherland is an idea, since for beasts incapable of mind, or children as yet without mind, there is no fatherland and no patriotism. Now, if any one does not approve himself as a good patriot, he betrays his egoism with reference to the fatherland. And so the matter stands in innumerable other cases: he who in human society takes the benefit of a prerogative sins egoistically against the idea of equality; he who exercises dominion is blamed as an egoist against the idea of liberty, and so on.

You despise the egoist because he puts the spiritual in the background as compared with the personal, and has his eyes on himself where you would like to see him act to favour an idea. The distinction between you is that he makes himself the central point, but you the spirit; or that you cut your identity in two and exalt your “proper self,” the spirit, to be ruler of the paltrier remainder, while he will hear nothing of this cutting in two, and pursues spiritual and material interests just as he pleases. You think, to be sure, that you are falling foul of those only who enter into no spiritual interest at all, but in fact you curse at everybody who does not look on the spiritual interest as his “true and highest” interest. You carry your knightly service for this beauty so far that you affirm her to be the only beauty of the world. You live not to yourself, but to your spirit and to what is the spirit’s, that is, ideas.

As the spirit exists only in its creating of the spiritual, let us take a look about us for its first creation. If only it has accomplished this, there follows thenceforth a natural propagation of creations, as according to the myth only the first human beings needed to be created, the rest of the race propagating of itself. The first creation, on the other hand, must come forth “out of nothing” – the spirit has toward its realization nothing but itself, or rather it has not yet even itself, but must create itself; hence its first creation is itself, the spirit. Mystical as this sounds, we yet go through it as an every-day experience. Are you a thinking being before you think? In creating the first thought you create yourself, the thinking one; for you do not think before you think a thought, or have a thought. Is it not your singing that first makes you a singer, your talking that makes you a talker? Now, so too it is the production of the spiritual that first makes you a spirit.

Meantime, as you distinguish yourself from the thinker, singer, and talker, so you no less distinguish yourself from the spirit, and feel very clearly that you are something beside spirit. But, as in the thinking ego hearing and sight easily vanish in the enthusiasm of thought, so you also have been seized by the spirit-enthusiasm, and you now long with all your might to become wholly spirit and to be dissolved in spirit. The spirit is your ideal, the unattained, the other-worldly; spirit is the name of your – god, “God is spirit.”

Against all that is not spirit you are a zealot, and therefore you play the zealot against yourself who cannot get rid of a remainder of the non-spiritual. Instead of saying, “I am more than spirit,” you say with contrition, “I am less than spirit; and spirit, pure spirit, or the spirit that is nothing but spirit, I can only think of, but am not; and, since I am not it, it is another, exists as another, whom I call ‘God’.”

It lies in the nature of the case that the spirit that is to exist as pure spirit must be an otherworldly one, for, since I am not it, it follows that it can only be outside me; since in any case a human being is not fully comprehended in the concept “spirit,” it follows that the pure spirit, the spirit as such, can only be outside of men, beyond the human world – not earthly, but heavenly.

Only from this disunion in which I and the spirit lie; only because “I” and “spirit” are not names for one and the same thing, but different names for completely different things; only because I am not spirit and spirit not I – only from this do we get a quite tautological explanation of the necessity that the spirit dwells in the other world, that is, is God.

But from this it also appears how thoroughly theological is the liberation that Feuerbach ["Das Wesen des Christenthums,” 2., erw. Auflage 1843] is labouring to give us. What he says is that we had only mistaken our own essence, and therefore looked for it in the other world, but that now, when we see that God was only our human essence, we must recognize it again as ours and move it back out of the other world into this. To God, who is spirit, Feuerbach gives the name “Our Essence.” Can we put up with this, that “Our Essence” is brought into opposition to us – that we are split into an essential and an unessential self? Do we not therewith go back into the dreary misery of seeing ourselves banished out of ourselves?

What have we gained, then, when for a variation we have transferred into ourselves the divine outside us? Are we that which is in us? As little as we are that which is outside us. I am as little my heart as I am my sweetheart, this “other self” of mine. Just because we are not the spirit that dwells in us, just for that reason we had to take it and set it outside us; it was not we, did not coincide with us, and therefore we could, not think of it as existing otherwise than outside us, on the other side from us, in the other world.

With the strength of despair Feuerbach clutches at the total substance of Christianity, not to throw it away, no, to drag it to himself, to draw it, the long-yearned-for, ever-distant, out of its heaven with a last effort, and keep it by him forever. Is not that a clutch of the uttermost despair, a clutch for life or death, and is it not at the same time the Christian yearning and hungering for the other world? The hero wants not to go into the other world, but to draw the other world to him, and compel it to become this world! And since then has not all the world, with more or less consciousness, been crying that “this world” is the vital point, and heaven must come down on earth and be experienced even here?

Let us, in brief, set Feuerbach’s theological view and our contradiction over against each other! “The essence of man is man’s supreme being; now by religion, to be sure, the supreme being is called God and regarded as an objective essence, but in truth it is only man’s own essence; and therefore the turning point of the world’s history is that henceforth no longer God, but man, is to appear to man as God.”

To this we reply: The supreme being is indeed the essence of man, but, just because it is his essence and not he himself, it remains quite immaterial whether we see it outside him and view it as “God,” or find it in him and call it “Essence of Man” or “Man.” I am neither God nor Man, neither the supreme essence nor my essence, and therefore it is all one in the main whether I think of the essence as in me or outside me. Indeed, we really do always think of the supreme being as in both kinds of otherworldliness, the inward and outward, at once; for the “Spirit of God” is, according to the Christian view, also “our spirit,” and “dwells in us.” [Romans 8:9, 1 Corinthians 3:16, John 20:22 etc.] It dwells in heaven and dwells in us; we poor things are just its “dwelling,” and, if Feuerbach goes on to destroy its heavenly dwelling and force it to move to us bag and baggage, then we, its earthly apartments, will be badly overcrowded.

But after this digression (which, if we were at all proposing to work by line and level, we should have had to save for later pages in order to avoid repetition) we return to the spirit’s first creation, the spirit itself.

The spirit is something other than myself. But this other, what is it?

Have you ever seen a spirit? “No, not I, but my grandmother.” Now, you see, it’s just so with me too; I myself haven’t seen any, but my grandmother had them running between her feet all sorts of ways, and out of confidence in our grandmothers’ honesty we believe in the existence of spirits.

But had we no grandfathers then, and did they not shrug their shoulders every time our grandmothers told about their ghosts? Yes, those were unbelieving men who have harmed our good religion much, those rationalists! We shall feel that! What else lies at the bottom of this warm faith in ghosts, if not the faith in “the existence of spiritual beings in general,” and is not this latter itself disastrously unsettled if saucy men of the understanding may disturb the former? The Romantics were quite conscious what a blow the very belief in God suffered by the laying aside of the belief in spirits or ghosts, and they tried to help us out of the baleful consequences not only by their reawakened fairy world, but at last, and especially, by the “intrusion of a higher world,” by their somnambulists, visionaries of Prevorst, etc. The good believers and fathers of the church did not suspect that with the belief in ghosts the foundation of religion was withdrawn, and that since then it had been floating in the air. He who no longer believes in any ghost needs only to travel on consistently in his unbelief to see that there is no separate being at all concealed behind things, no ghost or – what is naively reckoned as synonymous even in our use of words – no “spirit.”

“Spirits exist!” Look about in the world, and say for yourself whether a spirit does not gaze upon you out of everything. Out of the lovely little flower there speaks to you the spirit of the Creator, who has shaped it so wonderfully; the stars proclaim the spirit that established their order; from the mountain-tops a spirit of sublimity breathes down; out of the waters a spirit of yearning murmurs up; and – out of men millions of spirits speak. The mountains may sink, the flowers fade, the world of stars fall in ruins, the men die – what matters the wreck of these visible bodies? The spirit, the “invisible spirit,” abides eternally!

Yes, the whole world is haunted! Only is haunted? Indeed, it itself “walks,” it is uncanny through and through, it is the wandering seeming-body [Scheinleib] of a spirit, it is a spook. What else should a ghost be, then, than an apparent body, but real spirit? Well, the world is “empty,” is “naught,” is only glamorous “semblance” [Schein]; its truth is the spirit alone; it is the seeming-body of a spirit.

Look out near or far, a ghostly world surrounds you everywhere; you are always having “apparitions” [Erscheinungen] or visions. Everything that appears to you is only the phantasm of an indwelling spirit, is a ghostly “apparition”; the world is to you only a “world of appearances [Erscheinungswelt],” behind which the spirit walks. You “see spirits.”

Are you perchance thinking of comparing yourself with the ancients, who saw gods everywhere? Gods, my dear modern, are not spirits; gods do not degrade the world to a semblance, and do not spiritualize it.

But to you the whole world is spiritualized, and has become an enigmatical ghost; therefore do not wonder if you likewise find in yourself nothing but a spook. Is not your body haunted by your spirit, and is not the latter alone the true and real, the former only the “transitory, naught” or a “semblance"? Are we not all ghosts, uncanny beings that wait for “deliverance” – namely, “spirits"?

Since the spirit appeared in the world, since “the Word became flesh,” since then the world has been spiritualized, enchanted, a spook.

You have spirit, for you have thoughts. What are your thoughts? “Spiritual entities.” Not things, then? “No, but the spirit of things, the main point in all things, the inmost in them, their – idea.” Consequently what you think is not only your thought? “On the contrary, it is that in the world which is most real, that which is properly to be called true; it is the truth itself; if I only think truly, I think the truth. I may, to be sure, err with regard to the truth, and fail to recognize it; but, if I recognize truly, the object of my cognition is the truth.” So, I suppose, you strive at all times to recognize the truth? “To me the truth is sacred. It may well happen that I find a truth incomplete and replace it with a better, but the truth I cannot abrogate. I believe in the truth, therefore I search in it; nothing transcends it, it is eternal.”

Sacred, eternal is the truth; it is the Sacred, the Eternal. But you, who let yourself be filled and led by this sacred thing, are yourself hallowed. Further, the sacred is not for your senses – and you never as a sensual man discover its trace – but for your faith, or, more definitely still, for your spirit; for it itself, you know, is a spiritual thing, a spirit – is spirit for the spirit.

The sacred is by no means so easily to be set aside as many at present affirm, who no longer take this “unsuitable” word into their mouths. If even in a single respect I am still upbraided as an “egoist,” there is left the thought of something else which I should serve more than myself, and which must be to me more important than everything; in short, somewhat in which I should have to seek my true welfare [Heil], something – “sacred [Heiliges].” However human this sacred thing may look, though it be the Human itself, that does not take away its sacredness, but at most changes it from an unearthly to an earthly sacred thing, from a divine one to a human.

Sacred things exist only for the egoist who does not acknowledge himself, the involuntary egoist [unfreiwilligen Egoisten], for him who is always looking after his own and yet does not count himself as the highest being, who serves only himself and at the same time always thinks he is serving a higher being, who knows nothing higher than himself and yet is infatuated about something higher; in short, for the egoist who would like not to be an egoist, and abases himself (combats his egoism), but at the same time abases himself only for the sake of “being exalted,” and therefore of gratifying his egoism. Because he would like to cease to be an egoist, he looks about in heaven and earth for higher beings to serve and sacrifice himself to; but, however much he shakes and disciplines himself, in the end he does all for his own sake, and the disreputable egoism will not come off him. On this account I call him the involuntary egoist.

His toil and care to get away from himself is nothing but the misunderstood impulse to self-dissolution. If you are bound to your past hour, if you must babble today because you babbled yesterday, if you cannot transform yourself each instant, you feel yourself fettered to slavery and benumbed. Therefore over each minute of your existence a fresh minute of the future beckons to you, and, developing yourself, you get away “from yourself,” that is, from the self that was at that moment. As you are at each instant, you are your own creature, and in this very “creature” you do not wish to lose yourself, the creator. You are yourself a higher being than you are, and surpass yourself. But that you are the one who is higher than you, that is, that you are not only creature, but likewise your creator – just this, as an involuntary egoist, you fail to recognize; and therefore the “higher essence” is to you – an alien essence. Every higher essence, such as truth, mankind, and so on, is an essence over us.

Alienness is a criterion of the “sacred.” In everything sacred there lies something “uncanny,” strange, such as we are not quite familiar and at home in. What is sacred to me is not my own; and if, for instance, the property of others was not sacred to me, I should look on it as mine, which I should take to myself when occasion offered. Or, on the other side, if I regard the face of the Chinese emperor as sacred, it remains strange to my eye, which I close at its appearance.

Why is an incontrovertible mathematical truth, which might even be called eternal according to the common understanding of words, not – sacred? Because it is not revealed, or not the revelation of, a higher being. If by revealed we understand only the so-called religious truths, we go far astray, and entirely fail to recognize the breadth of the concept “higher being.” Atheists keep up their scoffing at the higher being, which was also honoured under the name of the “highest” or être suprême, and trample in the dust one “proof of his existence” after another, without noticing that they themselves, out of need for a higher being, only annihilate the old to make room for a new. Is “Man” perchance not a higher essence than an individual man, and must not the truths, rights, and ideas which result from the concept of him be honoured and – counted sacred, as revelations of this very concept? For, even though we should abrogate again many a truth that seemed to be made manifest by this concept, yet this would only evince a misunderstanding on our part, without in the least degree harming the sacred concept itself or taking their sacredness from those truths that must “rightly” be looked upon as its revelations. Man reaches beyond every individual man, and yet – though he be “his essence” – is not in fact his essence (which rather would be as single as he the individual himself), but a general and “higher,” yes, for atheists “the highest essence.” And, as the divine revelations were not written down by God with his own hand, but made public through “the Lord’s instruments,” so also the new highest essence does not write out its revelations itself, but lets them come to our knowledge through “true men.” Only the new essence betrays, in fact, a more spiritual style of conception than the old God, because the latter was still represented in a sort of embodiedness or form, while the undimmed spirituality of the new is retained, and no special material body is fancied for it. And withal it does not lack corporeity, which even takes on a yet more seductive appearance because it looks more natural and mundane and consists in nothing less than in every bodily man – yes, or outright in “humanity” or “all men.” Thereby the spectralness of the spirit in a seemingbody has once again become really solid and popular.

Sacred, then, is the highest essence and everything in which this highest essence reveals or will reveal itself; but hallowed are they who recognize this highest essence together with its own, together with its revelations. The sacred hallows in turn its reverer, who by his worship becomes himself a saint, as Likewise what he does is saintly, a saintly walk, saintly thoughts and actions, imaginations and aspirations.

It is easily understood that the conflict over what is revered as the highest essence can be significant only so long as even the most embittered opponents concede to each other the main point – that there is a highest essence to which worship or service is due. If one should smile compassionately at the whole struggle over a highest essence, as a Christian might at the war of words between a Shiite and a Sunnite or between a Brahman and a Buddhist, then the hypothesis of a highest essence would be null in his eyes, and the conflict on this basis an idle play. Whether then the one God or the three in one. whether the Lutheran God or the être suprême or not God at all, but “Man,” may represent the highest essence, that makes no difference at all for him who denies the highest essence itself, for in his eyes those servants of a highest essence are one and all – pious people, the most raging atheist not less than the most faith-filled Christian.

In the foremost place of the sacred, then, stands the highest essence and the faith in this essence, our “holy faith.”

The spook

With ghosts we arrive in the spirit-realm, in the realm of essences.

What haunts the universe, and has its occult, “incomprehensible” being there, is precisely the mysterious spook that we call highest essence. And to get to the bottom of this spook, to comprehend it, to discover reality in it (to prove “the existence of God”) – this task men set to themselves for thousands of years; with the horrible impossibility, the endless Danaid-labour, of transforming the spook into a non-spook, the unreal into something real, the spirit into an entire and corporeal person – with this they tormented themselves to death. Behind the existing world they sought the “thing in itself,” the essence; behind the thing they sought the un-thing.

When one looks to the bottom of anything, searches out its essence, one often discovers something quite other than what it seems to be; honeyed speech and a lying heart, pompous words and beggarly thoughts, and so on. By bringing the essence into prominence one degrades the hitherto misapprehended appearance to a bare semblance, a deception. The essence of the world, so attractive and splendid, is for him who looks to the bottom of it – emptiness; emptiness is = world’s essence (world’s doings). Now, he who is religious does not occupy himself with the deceitful semblance, with the empty appearances, but looks upon the essence, and in the essence has – the truth.

The essences which are deduced from some appearances are the evil essences, and conversely from others the good. The essence of human feeling, for instance, is love; the essence of human will is the good; that of one’s thinking, the true, and so on.

What at first passed for existence, such as the world and its like, appears now as bare semblance, and the truly existent is much rather the essence, whose realm is filled with gods, spirits, demons, with good or bad essences. Only this inverted world, the world of essences, truly exists now. The human heart may be loveless, but its essence exists, God, “who is love”; human thought may wander in error, but its essence, truth, exists; “God is truth,” and the like.

To know and acknowledge essences alone and nothing but essences, that is religion; its realm is a realm of essences, spooks, and ghosts.

The longing to make the spook comprehensible, or to realize non-sense, has brought about a corporeal ghost, a ghost or spirit with a real body, an embodied ghost. How the strongest and most talented Christians have tortured themselves to get a conception of this ghostly apparition! But there always remained the contradiction of two natures, the divine and human, the ghostly and sensual; there remained the most wondrous spook, a thing that was not a thing. Never yet was a ghost more soul torturing, and no shaman, who pricks himself to raving fury and nerve-lacerating cramps to conjure a ghost, can endure such soul-torment as Christians suffered from that most incomprehensible ghost.

But through Christ the truth of the matter had at the same time come to light, that the veritable spirit or ghost is – man. The corporeal or embodied spirit is just man; he himself is the ghostly being and at the same time the being’s appearance and existence. Henceforth man no longer, in typical cases, shudders at ghosts outside him, but at himself; he is terrified at himself. In the depth of his breast dwells the spirit of sin; even the faintest thought (and this is itself a spirit, you know) may be a devil, etc. – The ghost has put on a body, God has become man, but now man is himself the gruesome spook which he seeks to get back of, to exorcise, to fathom, to bring to reality and to speech; man is – spirit. What matter if the body wither, if only the spirit is saved? Everything rests on the spirit, and the spirit’s or “soul’s” welfare becomes the exclusive goal. Man has become to himself a ghost, an uncanny spook, to which there is even assigned a distinct seat in the body (dispute over the seat of the soul, whether in the head, etc.).

You are not to me, and I am not to you, a higher essence. Nevertheless a higher essence may be hidden in each of us, and call forth a mutual reverence. To take at once the most general, Man lives in you and me. If I did not see Man in you, what occasion should I have to respect you? To be sure, you are not Man and his true and adequate form, but only a mortal veil of his, from which he can withdraw without himself ceasing; but yet for the present this general and higher essence is housed in you, and you present before me (because an imperishable spirit has in you assumed a perishable body, so that really your form is only an “assumed” one) a spirit that appears, appears in you, without being bound to your body and to this particular mode of appearance – therefore a spook. Hence I do not regard you as a higher essence but only respect that higher essence which ‘"walks” in you; I “respect Man in you.” The ancients did not observe anything of this sort in their slaves, and the higher essence “Man” found as yet little response. To make up for this, they saw in each other ghosts of another sort. The People is a higher essence than an individual, and, like Man or the Spirit of Man, a spirit haunting the individual – the Spirit of the People [Volksgeist]. For this reason they revered this spirit, and only so far as he served this or else a spirit related to it (as in the Spirit of the Family) could the individual appear significant; only for the sake of the higher essence, the People, was consideration allowed to the “member of the people.” As you are hallowed to us by “Man” who haunts you, so at every time men have been hallowed by some higher essence or other, like People, Family, and such. Only for the sake of a higher essence has any one been honoured from of old, only as a ghost has he been regarded in the light of a hallowed, a protected and recognized person. If I cherish you because I hold you dear, because in you my heart finds nourishment, my need satisfaction, then it is not done for the sake of a higher essence, whose hallowed body you are, not on account of my beholding in you a ghost, an appearing spirit, but from egoistic pleasure; you yourself with your essence are valuable to me, for your essence is not a higher one, is not higher and more general than you, is unique [einzig] like you yourself, because it is you.

But it is not only man that “haunts”; so does everything. The higher essence, the spirit, that walks in everything, is at the same time bound to nothing, and only – “appears” in it. Ghosts in every corner!

Here would be the place to pass the haunting spirits in review, if they were not to come before us again further on in order to vanish before egoism. Hence let only a few of them be particularized by way of example, in order to bring us at once to our attitude toward them.

Sacred above all is the “holy Spirit,” sacred the truth, sacred are right, law, a good cause, majesty, marriage, the common good, order, the fatherland, and so on.

Wheels in the Head

Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea [fixe Idee]!

Do not think that I am jesting or speaking figuratively when I regard those persons who cling to the Higher, and (because the vast majority belongs under this head) almost the whole world of men, as veritable fools, fools in a madhouse. What is it, then, that is called a “fixed idea"? An idea that has subjected the man to itself. When you recognize, with regard to such a fixed idea, that it is a folly, you shut its slave up in an asylum. And is the truth of the faith, say, which we are not to doubt; the majesty of the people, which we are not to strike at (he who does is guilty of – lese-majesty); virtue, against which the censor is not to let a word pass, that morality may be kept pure; – are these not “fixed ideas"? Is not all the stupid chatter of most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed idea of morality, legality, Christianity, and so forth, and only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space? Touch the fixed idea of such a fool, and you will at once have to guard your back against the lunatic’s stealthy malice. For these great lunatics are like the little so-called lunatics in this point too – that they assail by stealth him who touches their fixed idea. They first steal his weapon, steal free speech from him, and then they fall upon him with their nails. Every day now lays bare the cowardice and vindictiveness of these maniacs, and the stupid populace hurrahs for their crazy measures. One must read the journals of this period, and must hear the philistines talk, to get the horrible conviction that one is shut up in a house with fools. “Thou shalt not call thy brother a fool; if thou dost ... “ But I do not fear the curse, and I say, my brothers are arch-fools. Whether a poor fool of the insane asylum is possessed by the fancy that he is God the Father, Emperor of Japan, the Holy Spirit, or whatnot, or whether a citizen in comfortable circumstances conceives that it is his mission to be a good Christian, a faithful Protestant, a loyal citizen, a virtuous man – both these are one and the same “fixed idea.” He who has never tried and dared not to be a good Christian, a faithful Protestant, a virtuous man, and the like, is possessed and prepossessed [gefangen und befangen] by faith, virtuousness, etc. Just as the schoolmen philosophized only inside the belief of the church; as Pope Benedict XIV wrote fat books inside the papist superstition, without ever throwing a doubt upon this belief; as authors fill whole folios on the state without calling in question the fixed idea of the state itself; as our newspapers are crammed with politics because they are conjured into the fancy that man was created to be a zoon politicon – so also subjects vegetate in subjection, virtuous people in virtue, liberals in humanity, without ever putting to these fixed ideas of theirs the searching knife of criticism. Undislodgeable, like a madman’s delusion, those thoughts stand on a firm footing, and he who doubts them – lays hands on the sacred! Yes, the “fixed idea,” that is the truly sacred!

Is it perchance only people possessed by the devil that meet us, or do we as often come upon people possessed in the contrary way – possessed by “the good,” by virtue, morality, the law, or some “principle” or other? Possessions of the devil are not the only ones. God works on us, and the devil does; the former “workings of grace,” the latter “workings of the devil.” Possessed [Besessene] people are set [versessen] in their opinions.

If the word “possession” displeases you, then call it prepossession; yes, since the spirit possesses you, and all “inspirations” come from it, call it – inspiration and enthusiasm. I add that complete enthusiasm – for we cannot stop with the sluggish, half-way kind – is called fanaticism.

It is precisely among cultured people that fanaticism is at home; for man is cultured so far as he takes an interest in spiritual things, and interest in spiritual things, when it is alive, is and must be fanaticism; it is a fanatical interest in the sacred (fanum). Observe our liberals, look into the Sächsischen Vaterlandsblätter, hear what Schlosser says: “Holbach’s company constituted a regular plot against the traditional doctrine and the existing system, and its members were as fanatical on behalf of their unbelief as monks and priests, Jesuits and Pietists, Methodists, missionary and Bible societies, commonly are for mechanical worship and orthodoxy.”

Take notice how a “moral man” behaves, who today often thinks he is through with God and throws off Christianity as a bygone thing. If you ask him whether he has ever doubted that the copulation of brother and sister is incest, that monogamy is the truth of marriage, that filial piety is a sacred duty, then a moral shudder will come over him at the conception of one’s being allowed to touch his sister as wife also. And whence this shudder? Because he believes in those moral commandments. This moral faith is deeply rooted in his breast. Much as he rages against the pious Christians, he himself has nevertheless as thoroughly remained a Christian – namely, a moral Christian. In the form of morality Christianity holds him a prisoner, and a prisoner under faith. Monogamy is to be something sacred, and he who may live in bigamy is punished as a criminal; he who commits incest suffers as a criminal. Those who are always crying that religion is not to be regarded in the state, and the Jew is to be a citizen equally with the Christian, show themselves in accord with this. Is not this of incest and monogamy a dogma of faith? Touch it, and you will learn by experience how this moral man is a hero of faith too, not less than Krummacher, not less than Philip II. These fight for the faith of the Church, he for the faith of the state, or the moral laws of the state; for articles of faith, both condemn him who acts otherwise than their faith will allow. The brand of “crime” is stamped upon him, and he may languish in reformatories, in jails. Moral faith is as fanatical as religious faith! They call that “liberty of faith” then, when brother and sister, on account of a relation that they should have settled with their “conscience,” are thrown into prison. “But they set a pernicious example.” Yes, indeed: others might have taken the notion that the state had no business to meddle with their relation, and thereupon “purity of morals” would go to ruin. So then the religious heroes of faith are zealous for the “sacred God,” the moral ones for the “sacred good.”

Those who are zealous for something sacred often look very little like each other. How the strictly orthodox or old-style believers differ from the fighters for “truth, light, and justice,” from the Philalethes, the Friends of Light, the Rationalists, and others. And yet, how utterly unessential is this difference! If one buffets single traditional truths (miracles, unlimited power of princes), then the Rationalists buffet them too, and only the old-style believers wail. But, if one buffets truth itself, he immediately has both, as believers, for opponents. So with moralities; the strict believers are relentless, the clearer heads are more tolerant. But he who attacks morality itself gets both to deal with. “Truth, morality, justice, light, etc.,” are to be and remain “sacred.” What any one finds to censure in Christianity is simply supposed to be “unchristian” according to the view of these rationalists, but Christianity must remain a “fixture,” to buffet it is outrageous, “an outrage.” To be sure, the heretic against pure faith no longer exposes himself to the earlier fury of persecution, but so much the more does it now fall upon the heretic against pure morals.

* * *

Piety has for a century received so many blows, and had to hear its superhuman essence reviled as an “inhuman” one so often, that one cannot feel tempted to draw the sword against it again. And yet it has almost always been only moral opponents that have appeared in the arena, to assail the supreme essence in favour of – another supreme essence. So Proudhon, unabashed, says: “Man is destined to live without religion, but the moral law is eternal and absolute. Who would dare today to attack morality?” Moral people skimmed off the best fat from religion, ate it themselves, and are now having a tough job to get rid of the resulting scrofula. If, therefore, we point out that religion has not by any means been hurt in its inmost part so long as people reproach it only with its superhuman essence, and that it takes its final appeal to the “spirit” alone (for God is spirit), then we have sufficiently indicated its final accord with morality, and can leave its stubborn conflict with the latter Iying behind us. It is a question of a supreme essence with both, and whether this is a superhuman or a human one can make (since it is in any case an essence over me, a super-mine one, so to speak) but little difference to me. In the end the relation to the human essence, or to “Man,” as soon as ever it has shed the snake-skin of the old religion, will yet wear a religious snake-skin again.

So Feuerbach instructs us that, “if one only inverts speculative philosophy, always makes the predicate the subject, and so makes the subject the object and principle, one has the undraped truth, pure and clean.” Herewith, to be sure, we lost the narrow religious stand-point, lost the God, who from this stand-point is subject; but we take in exchange for it the other side of the religious stand-point, the moral stand-point. Thus we no longer say “God is love,” but “Love is divine.” If we further put in place of the predicate “divine” the equivalent “sacred,” then, as far as concerns the sense, all the old comes back-again. According to this, love is to be the good in man, his divineness, that which does him honour, his true humanity (it “makes him Man for the first time,” makes for the first time a man out of him). So then it would be more accurately worded thus: Love is what is human in man, and what is inhuman is the loveless egoist. But precisely all that which Christianity and with it speculative philosophy (i.e., theology) offers as the good, the absolute, is to self-ownership simply not the good (or, what means the same, it is only the good). Consequently, by the transformation of the predicate into the subject, the Christian essence (and it is the predicate that contains the essence, you know) would only be fixed yet more oppressively. God and the divine would entwine themselves all the more inextricably with me. To expel God from his heaven and to rob him of his “transcendence” cannot yet support a claim of complete victory, if therein he is only chased into the human breast and gifted with indelible immanence. Now they say, “The divine is the truly human!”

The same people who oppose Christianity as the basis of the state, who oppose the so-called Christian state, do not tire of repeating that morality is “the fundamental pillar of social life and of the state.” As if the dominion of morality were not a complete dominion of the sacred, a “hierarchy.”

So we may here mention by the way that rationalist movement which, after theologians had long insisted that only faith was capable of grasping religious truths, that only to believers did God reveal himself, and that therefore only the heart, the feelings, the believing imagination [Phantasie] was religious, broke out with the assertion that the “natural understanding,” human reason, was also capable of discerning God. What does that mean but that the reason laid claim to be the same visionary [Phantastin] as the imagination? In this sense Reimarus wrote his “Most Notable Truths of Natural Religion.” It had to come to this – that the whole man with all his faculties was found to be religious; heart and affections, understanding and reason, feeling, knowledge, and will – in short, everything in man – appeared religious. Hegel has shown that even philosophy is religious. And what is not called religion today? The “religion of love,” the “religion of freedom,” “political religion” – in short, every enthusiasm. So it is, too, in fact.

To this day we use the Romance word “religion,” which expresses the concept of a condition of being bound. To be sure, we remain bound, so far as religion takes possession of our inward parts; but is the mind also bound? On the contrary, that is free, is sole lord, is not our mind, but absolute. Therefore the correct affirmative translation of the word religion would be “freedom of mind” ! In whomsoever the mind is free, he is religious in just the same way as he in whom the senses have free course is called a sensual man. The mind binds the former, the desires the latter. Religion, therefore, is boundness or religio with reference to me – I am bound; it is freedom with reference to the mind – the mind is free, or has freedom of mind. Many know from experience how hard it is on us when the desires run away with us, free and unbridled; but that the free mind, splendid intellectuality, enthusiasm for intellectual interests, or however this jewel may in the most various phrase be named, brings us into yet more grievous straits than even the wildest impropriety, people will not perceive; nor can they perceive it without being consciously egoists.

Reimarus, and all who have shown that our reason, our heart, etc., also lead to God, have therewithal shown that we are possessed through and through. To be sure, they vexed the theologians, from whom they took away the prerogative of religious exaltation; but for religion, for freedom of mind, they thereby conquered yet more ground. For, when the mind is no longer limited to feeling or faith, but also, as understanding, reason, and thought in general, belongs to itself the mind – when therefore, it may take part in the spiritual and heavenly truths in the form of understanding, as well as in its other forms – then the whole mind is occupied only with spiritual things, that is, with itself, and is therefore free. Now we are so through-and-through religious that “jurors,” “sworn men,” condemn us to death, and every policeman, as a good Christian, takes us to the lock-up by virtue of an “oath of office.”

Morality could not come into opposition with piety until after the time when in general the boisterous hate of everything that looked like an “order” (decrees, commandments, etc.) spoke out in revolt, and the personal “absolute lord” was scoffed at and persecuted; consequently it could arrive at independence only through liberalism, whose first form acquired significance in the world’s history as “citizenship,” and weakened the specifically religious powers (see “Liberalism” below). For, when morality not merely goes alongside of piety, but stands on feet of its own, then its principle lies no longer in the divine commandments, but in the law of reason, from which the commandments, so far as they are still to remain valid, must first await justification for their validity. In the law of reason man determines himself out of himself, for “Man” is rational, and out of the “essence of Man” those laws follow of necessity. Piety and morality part company in this – that the former makes God the lawgiver, the latter Man.

From a certain stand-point of morality [Sittlichkeit] people reason about as follows: Either man is led by his sensuality [Sinnlichkeit], and is, following it, immoral, or he is led by the good, which, taken up into the will, is called moral sentiment (sentiment and prepossession in favour of the good); then he shows himself moral. From this point of view how, for instance, can Sand’s act against Kotzebue be called immoral? What is commonly understood by unselfish it certainly was, in the same measure as (among other things) St. Crispin’s thieveries in favour of the poor. “He should not have murdered, for it stands written, Thou shalt not murder!” Then to serve the good, the welfare of the people, as Sand at least intended, or the welfare of the poor, like Crispin – is moral; but murder and theft are immoral; the purpose moral, the means immoral. Why? “Because murder, assassination, is something absolutely bad.” When the Guerrillas enticed the enemies of the country into ravines and shot them down unseen from the bushes, do you suppose that was assassination? According to the principle of morality, which commands us to serve the good, you could really ask only whether murder could never in any case be a realization of the good, and would have to endorse that murder which realized the good. You cannot condemn Sand’s deed at all; it was moral, because in the service of the good, because unselfish; it was an act of punishment, which the individual inflicted, an – execution inflicted at the risk of the executioner’s life. What else had his scheme been, after all, but that he wanted to suppress writings by brute force? Are you not acquainted with the same procedure as a “legal” and sanctioned one? And what can be objected against it from your principle of morality? – “But it was an illegal execution.” So the immoral thing in it was the illegality, the disobedience to law? Then you admit that the good is nothing else than – law, morality nothing else than loyalty. And to this externality of “loyalty” your morality must sink, to this righteousness of works in the fulfilment of the law, only that the latter is at once more tyrannical and more revolting than the old-time righteousness of works. For in the latter only the act is needed, but you require the disposition too; one must carry in himself the law, the statute; and he who is most legally disposed is the most moral. Even the last vestige of cheerfulness in Catholic life must perish in this Protestant legality. Here at last the domination of the law is for the first time complete. “Not I live, but the law lives in me.” Thus I have really come so far to be only the “vessel of its glory.” “Every Prussian carries his gendarme in his breast,” says a high Prussian officer.

Why do certain opposition parties fail to flourish? Solely for the reason that they refuse to forsake the path of morality or legality. Hence the measureless hypocrisy of devotion, love, etc., from whose repulsiveness one may daily get the most thorough nausea at this rotten and hypocritical relation of a “lawful opposition.” – In the moral relation of love and fidelity a divided or opposed will cannot have place; the beautiful relation is disturbed if the one wills this and the other the reverse. But now, according to the practice hitherto and the old prejudice of the opposition, the moral relation is to be preserved above all. What is then left to the opposition? Perhaps the will to have a liberty, if the beloved one sees fit to deny it? Not a bit! It may not will to have the freedom, it can only wish for it, “petition” for it, lisp a “Please, please!” What would come of it, if the opposition really willed, willed with the full energy of the will? No, it must renounce will in order to live to love , renounce liberty – for love of morality. It may never “claim as a right” what it is permitted only to. “beg as a favour.” Love, devotion. etc., demand with undeviating definiteness that there be only one will to which the others devote themselves, which they serve, follow, love. Whether this will is regarded as reasonable or as unreasonable, in both cases one acts morally when one follows it, and immorally when one breaks away from it. The will that commands the censorship seems to many unreasonable; but he who in a land of censorship evades the censoring of his book acts immorally, and he who submits it to the censorship acts morally. If some one let his moral judgment go, and set up a secret press, one would have to call him immoral, and imprudent in the bargain if he let himself be caught; but will such a man lay claim to a value in the eyes of the “moral"? Perhaps! – That is, if he fancied he was serving a “higher morality.”

The web of the hypocrisy of today hangs on the frontiers of two domains, between which our time swings back and forth, attaching its fine threads of deception and self-deception. No longer vigorous enough to serve morality without doubt or weakening, not yet reckless enough to live wholly to egoism, it trembles now toward the one and now toward the other in the spider-web of hypocrisy, and, crippled by the curse of halfness, catches only miserable, stupid flies. If one has once dared to make a “free” motion, immediately one waters it again with assurances of love, and – shams resignation; if, on the other side, they have had the face to reject the free motion with moral appeals to confidence, immediately the moral courage also sinks,and they assure one how they hear the free words with special pleasure; they – sham approval. In short, people would like to have the one, but not go without the other; they would like to have a free will, but not for their lives lack the moral will. Just come in contact with a servile loyalist, you Liberals. You will sweeten every word of freedom with a look of the most loyal confidence, and he will clothe his servilism in the most flattering phrases of freedom. Then you go apart, and he, like you, thinks “I know you, fox!” He scents the devil in you as much as you do the dark old Lord God in him.

A Nero is a “bad” man only in the eyes of the “good”; in mine he is nothing but a possessed man, as are the good too. The good see in him an arch-villain, and relegate him to hell. Why did nothing hinder him in his arbitrary course? Why did people put up with so much? Do you suppose the tame Romans, who let all their will be bound by such a tyrant, were a hair the better? In old Rome they would have put him to death instantly, would never have been his slaves. But the contemporary “good” among the Romans opposed to him only moral demands, not their will; they sighed that their emperor did not do homage to morality, like them; they themselves remained “moral subjects,” until at last one found courage to give up “moral, obedient subjection.” And then the same “good Romans” who, as “obedient subjects,” had borne all the ignominy of having no will, hurrahed over the nefarious, immoral act of the rebel. Where then in the “good” was the courage for the revolution, that courage which they now praised, after another had mustered it up? The good could not have this courage, for a revolution, and an insurrection into the bargain, is always something “immoral,” which one can resolve upon only when one ceases to be “good” and becomes either “bad” or – neither of the two. Nero was no viler than his time, in which one could only be one of the two, good or bad. The judgment of his time on him had to be that he was bad, and this in the highest degree: not a milksop, but an arch-scoundrel. All moral people can pronounce only this judgment on him. Rascals such as he was are still living here and there today (see for example the memoirs of Ritter von Lang) in the midst of the moral. It is not convenient to live among them certainly, as one is not sure of his life for a moment; but can you say that it is more convenient to live among the moral? One is just as little sure of his life there, only that one is hanged “in the way of justice,” but least of all is one sure of his honour, and the national cockade disappears in a flash. The hard fist of morality treats the noble nature of egoism altogether without compassion.

“But surely one cannot put a rascal and an honest man on the same level!” Now, no human being does that oftener than you judges of morals; yes, still more than that, you imprison as a criminal an honest man who speaks openly against the existing constitution, against the hallowed institutions, and you entrust portfolios and still more important things to a crafty rascal. So in praxi you have nothing to reproach me with