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Perhaps people don't readily understand what I've said here about a "basic will of the spirit." So permit me to offer an explanation. - The something which commands, which people call "the spirit," wishes to be master in and around itself and to feel that it's the master. It possesses the will from multiplicity to simplicity, a will which ties up, tames, desires to dominate, and truly does rule. Its needs and capabilities are in this respect the same as those which physiologists indicate belong to everything which lives, grows, and reproduces itself. The power of the spirit to appropriate other things for itself is revealed in its strong inclination to assimilate the new with the old, to simplify what is diverse, to ignore or push away what is totally contradictory, just as it arbitrarily and strongly emphasizes, brings out, and falsifies for its own purposes certain characteristics and lines in what is foreign, in every piece of the "outside world." Its intention in so doing is the assimilation of new "experiences," the organization of new things in an old series - and also for growth, or, to put the matter even more clearly, for the feeling of growth, for the feeling of increased power. An apparently contradictory spiritual drive serves this same will, a suddenly erupting decision in favour of ignorance, an arbitrary shutting out, a slamming of its window, an inner cry of No to this or that thing, a refusal to let something in, a kind of defensive condition against much that can be known, a satisfaction with the darkness, with the sealed-off horizon, an affirmation and endorsement of ignorance: and all this is necessary in proportion to the degree of its appropriating power, its "power of digestion," to speak metaphorically - and "the spirit" is in fact most like a stomach. With this also belongs the occasional will in the spirit to allow itself to be deceived, perhaps with a high-spirited premonition that something or other is not the case, that we simply allow something or other to be valid, a joy in all uncertainty and ambiguity, an exulting enjoyment of the self in the capricious narrowness and secrecy of some corner, in what is all too-near-at-hand, in the foreground, in what is magnified or made smaller, in what has been shifted around or made more beautiful, a self-delight in the arbitrariness of all these expressions of power. Finally with these belongs that not unobjectionable willingness of the spirit to deceive other spirits and to play act in front of them, that constant urge and pressure of a creative, formative, changeable force: here the spirit enjoys its capacity for adopting multiple masks and shiftiness; it also enjoys the feeling of its security in this activity - precisely through its protean art is the spirit, in fact, best defended and hidden! - Working against this will to appearances, to simplification, to masks, to cloaks, in short, to the surface - for every surface is a cloak - is that sublime tendency of the person looking for knowledge who grasps and wants to grasp things thoroughly in their profundity and multiplicity, as a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste, which every bold thinker will recognize in himself, provided that he, as is appropriate, has hardened and sharpened his eye for himself long enough and has grown accustomed to strict discipline and to stern language. He'll say, "There's something cruel in my spiritual inclination" - let the virtuous and charming try to persuade him that's not so! In fact, it would sound better if, instead of cruelty, people talked of or whispered about or credited us free, very free spirits as having "excessive honesty" - and that's perhaps one day how it will really ring out - our posthumous reputation? In the meantime - for there is plenty of time until then - we ourselves may well be the least inclined to dress ourselves up in the finery of those kinds of moralistic word sequins and fringes: our entire work so far spoils for us this very taste and its merry opulence. These are the beautiful, sparkling, jingling, festive words: honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, sacrifice for knowledge, heroism of the truthful - there is something in them that makes the pride swell up in a man. But we hermits and marmots, we persuaded ourselves long ago, with all the secrecy of a hermit's conscience, that this worthy verbal pomp also belongs with the old lying finery, rubbish, and gold dust of unconscious human vanity, and that underneath such flattering colours and repainted surfaces we must once again recognize the terrifying basic text of homo natura [natural man]. In fact, to translate men back into nature, to master the many vain and effusive interpretations and connoted meanings which so far have been scribbled and painted over that eternal basic text of homo natura, to bring it about that in future man stands before man in the same way he, grown hard in the discipline of science, already stands these days before the rest of nature, with the fearless eyes of Oedipus and the blocked ears of Odysseus, deaf to the tempting sirens among the old metaphysical bird-catchers, who for far too long have been piping at him, "You are more! You are higher! You are of a different origin!" - that may be a peculiar and mad task, but it is a task - who will deny that? Why did we choose it, this mad task? Or, to put the question differently, "Why knowledge at all?"- Everyone will ask us about that. And we, pressured like this, we, who have already asked ourselves that very question a hundred times, we have found and find no better answer . . .