Great Throughts Treasury

""Does not the spirit thirst for freedom?" - Alas, not my spirit alone, my body too thirsts for it hourly! When before the odorous castle-kitchen my nose tells my palate of the savory dishes that are being prepared therein, it feels a fearful pining at its dry bread; when my eyes tell the hardened back about soft down on which one may lie more delightfully than on its compressed straw, a suppressed rage seizes it; when - but let us not follow the pains further. - And you call that a longing for freedom? What do you want to become free from, then? From your hardtack and your straw bed? Then throw them away! - But that seems not to serve you: you want rather to have the freedom to enjoy delicious foods and downy beds. Are men to give you this "freedom" - are they to permit it to you? You do not hope that from their philanthropy, because you know they all think like you: each is the nearest to himself! How, therefore, do you mean to come to the enjoyment of those foods and beds? Evidently not otherwise than in making them your property! If you think it over rightly, you do not want the freedom to have all these fine things, for with this freedom you still do not have them; you want really to have them, to call them yours and possess them as your property. Of what use is a freedom to you, indeed, if it brings in nothing? And, if you became free from everything, you would no longer have anything; for freedom is empty of substance. Whoso knows not how to make use of it, for him it has no value, this useless permission; but how I make use of it depends on my personality [Eigenheit]. I have no objection to freedom, but I wish more than freedom for you: you should not merely be rid of what you do not want; you should not only be a "freeman," you should be an "owner [Eigner]" too."

""Freedom" awakens your rage against everything that is not you; "egoism" calls you to joy over yourselves, to self-enjoyment."

""God is love! All times and all races recognize in this word the central point of Christianity." God, who is love, is an officious God: he cannot leave the world in peace, but wants to make it blest. "God became man to make men divine.'' He has his hand in the game everywhere, and nothing happens without it; everywhere he has his "best purposes," his "incomprehensible plans and decrees." Reason, which he himself is, is to be forwarded and realized in the whole world. His fatherly care deprives us of all independence. We can do nothing sensible without its being said, God did that, and can bring upon ourselves no misfortune without hearing, God ordained that; we have nothing that we have not from him, he "gave" everything. But, as God does, so does Man. God wants perforce to make the world blest, and Man wants to make it happy, to make all men happy. Hence every "man" wants to awaken in all men the reason which he supposes his own self to have: everything is to be rational throughout. God torments himself with the devil, and the philosopher does it with unreason and the accidental. God lets no being go its own gait, and Man likewise wants to make us walk only in human manner."

""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!"

"?There are intellectual vagabonds, to whom the hereditary dwelling-place of their fathers seems too cramped and oppressive for them to be willing to satisfy themselves with the limited space any more: instead of keeping within the limits of a temperate style of thinking, and taking as inviolable truth what furnishes comfort and tranquility to thousands, they overlap all bounds of the traditional and run wild with their imprudent criticism and untamed mania for doubt, these extravagating vagabonds.?"

""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.""

"A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race of free men is necessarily a race of egoists."

"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."

"As a universal principle, in the "human society" which the humane liberal promises, nothing "special" which one or another has is to find recognition, nothing which bears the character of "private" is to have value. In this way the circle of liberalism, which has its good principle in man and human liberty, its bad in the, egoist and everything private, its God in the former, its devil in the latter, rounds itself off completely; and, if the special or private person lost his value in the state (no personal prerogative), if in the "laborers' or ragamuffins' society" special (private) property is no longer recognized, so in "human society" everything special or private will be left out of account; and, when "pure criticism" shall have accomplished its arduous task, then it will be known just what we must look upon as private, and what, "penetrated with a sense of our nothingness," we must - let stand. Because state and Society do not suffice for humane liberalism, it negates both, and at the same time retains them. So at one time the cry is that the task of the day is "not a political, but a social, one," and then again the "free state" is promised for the future. In truth, "human society" is both - the most general state and the most general society. Only against the limited state is it asserted that it makes too much stir about spiritual private interests (people's religious belief), and against limited society that it makes too much of material private interests. Both are to leave private interests to private people, and, as human society, concern themselves solely about general human interests."

"As long as faith sufficed for man's honor and dignity, no labor, however harassing, could be objected to if it only did not hinder a man in his faith. Now, on the contrary, when everyone is to cultivate himself into man, condemning a man to machine-like labor amounts to the same thing as slavery. If a factory worker must tire himself to death twelve hours and more, he is cut off from becoming man. Every labor is to have the intent that the man be satisfied. Therefore he must become a master in it too, be able to perform it as a totality. He who in a pin factory only puts on the heads, only draws the wire, works, as it were, mechanically, like a machine; he remains half-trained, does not become a master: his labor cannot satisfy him, it can only fatigue him. His labor is nothing by itself, has no object in itself, is nothing complete in itself; he labors only into another's hands, and is used (exploited) by this other. For this laborer in another's service there is no enjoyment of a cultivated mind, at most, crude amusements: culture, you see, is barred against him."

"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."

"Before the sacred, people lose all sense of power and all confidence; they occupy a powerless and humble attitude toward it. And yet nothing is sacred of itself, but by my declaring it sacred, by my declaration, my judgment, my bending the knee; in short, by my - conscience. Sacred is everything which for the egoist is to be unapproachable, not to be touched, outside his power - above him; sacred, in a word, is every matter of conscience, for "this is a matter of conscience to me" means simply, "I hold this sacred.""

"Because our time is struggling toward the word with which it may express its spirit, many names come to the fore and all make claim to being the right one... Without our assistance, time will not bring the right word to light; we must all work together on it. If, however, so much depends on us, we may reasonably ask what they have made of us and what they propose to make of us; we ask about the education through which they seek to make us creators of that word. Do they conscientiously cultivate our predisposition to become creators or do they treat us only as creatures whose nature simply permits training? ... Therefore we are concerned above all with what they make of us in the time of our plasticity; the school question is a life question."

"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! 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."

"Before the supreme ruler, the sole commander, we had all become equal, equal persons, that is, nullities. Before the supreme proprietor we all become equal - ragamuffins. For the present, one is still in another's estimation a "ragamuffin," a "have-nothing"; but then this estimation ceases. We are all ragamuffins together, and as the aggregate of Communistic society we might call ourselves a "ragamuffin crew." When the proletarian shall really have founded his intended "society" in which the interval between rich and poor is to be removed, then he will be a ragamuffin, for then he will feel that it amounts to something to be a ragamuffin, and might lift "Ragamuffin" to be an honorable form of address, just as the Revolution did with the word "Citizen." Ragamuffin is his ideal; we are all to become ragamuffins. This is the second robbery of the "personal" in the interest of "humanity." Neither command nor property is left to the individual; the state took the former, society the latter."

"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]"

"But let the individual man lay claim to ever so many rights because Man or the concept man ?entitles? him to them, because his being man does it: what do I care for his right and his claim? If he has his right only from Man and does not have it from me, then for me he has no right. His life, for example, counts to me only for what it is worth to me. I respect neither a so-called right of property (or his claim to tangible goods) nor yet his right to the ?sanctuary of his inner nature? (or his right to have the spiritual goods and divinities, his gods, remain un-aggrieved). His goods, the sensuous as well as the spiritual, are mine, and I dispose of them as proprietor, in the measure of my ? might."

"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.""

"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 favor 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."

"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."

"For what reason then do the realists show themselves so unfriendly toward philosophy? Because they misunderstand their own calling and with all their might want to remain restricted instead of becoming unrestricted! Why do they hate abstractions? Because they themselves are abstract since they abstract from the perfection of themselves, from the elevation of redeeming truth!"

"Freedom teaches only: Get yourselves rid, relieve yourselves, of everything burdensome; it does not teach you who you yourselves are. Rid, rid! so call, get rid even of yourselves, "deny yourselves." But own-ness calls you back to yourselves, it says "Come to yourself!" Under the aegis of freedom you get rid of many kinds of things, but something new pinches you again: "you are rid of the Evil One; evil is left." As own you are really rid of everything, and what clings to what you have accepted; it is your choice and your pleasure. The own man is the free-born, the man free to begin with; the free man, on the contrary, is only the eleuthero-maniac, the dreamer and enthusiast. The former is originally free, because he recognizes nothing but himself; he does not need to free himself first, because at the start he rejects everything outside himself, because he prizes nothing more than himself, rates nothing higher, because, in short, he starts from himself and "comes to himself." Constrained by childish respect, he is nevertheless already working at "freeing" himself from this constraint. Own-ness works in the little egoist, and procures him the desired - freedom."

"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 honor 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"?"

"Freedom of thinking has in fact become complete hereby, freedom of mind celebrates its triumph: for the individual, "egoistic" thoughts have lost their dogmatic truculence. There is nothing left but the - dogma of free thinking or of criticism. Against everything that belongs to the world of thought, criticism is in the right, that is, in might: it is the victor. Criticism, and criticism alone, is "up to date." From the stand-point of thought there is no power capable of being an overmatch for criticism's, and it is a pleasure to see how easily and sportively this dragon swallows all other serpents of thought. Each serpent twists, to be sure, but criticism crushes it in all its "turns.""

"Feuerbach? recognizes... even love, in itself the truest, most inward sentiment, becomes an obscure, illusory one through religiousness, since religious love loves man only for God?s sake, therefore loves man only apparently, but in truth God only.? Is this different with moral love? Does it love the man, this man for this man?s sake, or for morality?s sake, for Man?s sake, and so?for homo homini Deus?for God?s sake?"

"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."

"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 sch”pferiche Nichts], the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything."

"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."

"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."

"Hitherto men have always striven to find out a fellowship in which their inequalities in other respects should become "nonessential"; they strove for equalization, consequently for equality, and wanted to come all under one hat, which means nothing less than that they were seeking for one lord, one tie, one faith ("`Tis in one God we all believe"). There cannot be for men anything more fellowly or more equal than Man himself, and in this fellowship the love-craving has found its contentment: it did not rest until it had brought on this last equalization, levelled all inequality, laid man on the breast of man. But under this very fellowship decay and ruin become most glaring."

"I say: liberate yourself as far as you can, and you have done your part; for it is not given to everyone to break through all limits, or, more expressively, not to everyone is that a limit which is a limit for the rest. Consequently, do not tire yourself with toiling at the limits of others; enough if you tear down yours. [...] He who overturns one of his limits may have shown others the way and the means; the overturning of their limits remains their affair."

"I secure my freedom with regard to the world in the degree that I make the world my own, "gain it and take possession of it" for myself, by whatever might, by that of persuasion, of petition, of categorical demand, yes, even by hypocrisy, cheating, etc.; for the means that I use for it are determined by what I am. If I am weak, I have only weak means, like the aforesaid, which yet are good enough for a considerable part of the world. Besides, cheating, hypocrisy, lying, look worse than they are. Who has not cheated the police, the law? Who has not quickly taken on an air of honorable loyalty before the sheriff's officer who meets him, in order to conceal an illegality that may have been committed? He who has not done it has simply let violence be done to him; he was a weakling from - conscience. I know that my freedom is diminished even by my not being able to carry out my will on another object, be this other something without will, like a rock, or something with will, like a government, an individual; I deny my ownness when - in presence of another - I give myself up, give way, desist, submit; therefore by loyalty, submission. For it is one thing when I give up my previous course because it does not lead to the goal, and therefore turn out of a wrong road; it is another when I yield myself a prisoner. I get around a rock that stands in my way, until I have powder enough to blast it; I get around the laws of a people, until I have gathered strength to overthrow them. Because I cannot grasp the moon, is it therefore to be "sacred" to me, an Astarte? If I only could grasp you, I surely would, and, if I only find a means to get up to you, you shall not frighten me! You inapprehensible one, you shall remain inapprehensible to me only until I have acquired the might for apprehension and call you my own; I do not give myself up before you, but only bide my time. Even if for the present I put up with my inability to touch you, I yet remember it against you."

"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."

"I am owner of my might, and I am so when I know myself as unique. In the unique one the owner himself returns into his creative nothing, of which he is born. Every higher essence above me, be it God, be it man, weakens the feeling of my uniqueness, and pales only before the sun of this consciousness. If I concern myself for myself, the unique one, then my concern rests on its transitory, mortal creator, who consumes himself, and I may say: All things are nothing to me."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"If it is right for me, it is right. It is"

"In crime the egoist has hitherto asserted himself and mocked at the sacred; the break with the sacred, or rather of the sacred, may become general. A revolution never returns, but an immense, reckless, shameless, conscienceless, proud?crime, doesn't it rumble in the distant thunder, and don't you see how the sky grows ominously silent and gloomy?"

"In short, the property question cannot be solved so amicably as the Socialists, yes, even the Communists, dream. It is solved only by the war of all against all. The poor become free and proprietors only when they - rise. Bestow ever so much on them, they will still always want more; for they want nothing less than that at last - nothing more be bestowed."

"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."

"In spiritual goods we are (in distinction from the sensuous) injured in a spiritual way, and the sin against them consists in a direct desecration, while against the sensuous a purloining [Entwendung] or alienation [Entfremdung] takes place; the goods themselves are robbed of value and of consecration, not merely taken away; the sacred is immediately compromised. With the word "irreverence" or "flippancy" is designated everything that can be committed as crime against spiritual goods, against everything that is sacred for us; and scoffing, reviling, contempt, doubt, and the like, are only different shades of criminal flippancy."

"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?"

"Men have somewhat of their own, and I am to recognize this own and hold it sacred. Their own consists partly in outward, partly in inward possessions. The former are things, the latter spiritualities, thoughts, convictions, noble feelings. But I am always to respect only rightful or human possessions: the wrongful and unhuman I need not spare, for only Man's own is men's real own. An inward possession of this sort is, for example, religion; because religion is free, that is, is Man's, I must not strike at it. Just so honor is an inward possession; it is free and must not be struck at my me. (Action for insult, caricatures, etc.) Religion and honor are "spiritual property." In tangible property the person stands foremost: my person is my first property. Hence freedom of the person; but only the rightful or human person is free, the other is locked up. Your life is your property; but it is sacred for men only if it is not that of an inhuman monster."

"Man has not really vanquished Shamanism and its spooks till he possesses the strength to lay aside not only the belief in ghosts or in spirits, but also the belief in the spirit."

"Love is a far-reaching religious demand, which is not, as might be supposed, limited to love to God and man, but stands foremost in every regard. Whatever we do, think, will, the ground of it is always to be love. Thus we may indeed judge, but only "with love." The Bible may assuredly be criticized, and that very thoroughly, but the critic must before all things love it and see in it the sacred book. Is this anything else than to say he must not criticize it to death, he must leave it standing, and that as a sacred thing that cannot be upset? - In our criticism on men too, love must remain the unchanged key-note. Certainly judgments that hatred inspires are not at all our own judgments, but judgments of the hatred that rules us, "rancorous judgments." But are judgments that love inspires in us any more our own ? They are judgments of the love that rules us, they are "loving, lenient" judgments, they are not our own, and accordingly not real judgments at all. He who burns with love for justice cries out, fiat justitia, pereat mundus! He can doubtless ask and investigate what justice properly is or demands, and in what it consists, but not whether it is anything."

"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."

"Might is a fine thing, and useful for many purposes; for "one goes further with a handful of might than with a bagful of right.""

"Liberty of the press can bring about only a responsible press; the irresponsible proceeds solely from property in the press."

"Just as the schoolmen philosophized only inside the belief of the church? 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, etc., 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!"