Part Three
The Religious Nature
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The human soul and its boundaries, the range of human inner experiences so far attained, the heights, depths, and extent of these experiences, the whole history of the soul up to this point and its still undrained possibilities: for a born psychologist and lover of the "great hunt" that is the predestined hunting ground. But how often must such a man say to himself in despair: "I'm just one man! Alas, only one man! And this is a huge wood, a primordial forest!" And so he wishes he could have few hundred helpers in the hunt and finely trained tracking dogs which he could drive into the history of the human soul in order to corner his wild animal there. A vain hope. He experiences over and over again, thoroughly and bitterly, how difficult it is to find helpers and hounds for all things which appeal to his curiosity. The problem he has in sending scholars out into new and dangerous hunting grounds, where courage, intelligence, and refinement are necessary in every sense, is that that's precisely the place where scholars are no longer useful, where the "great hunt" but also the great danger begins:- right there they lose their eyes and noses for hunting. In order to ascertain and to establish, for example, what sort of history the problem of knowledge and conscience in the soul of the homines religiosi [religious men] has had up to now, the individual would himself perhaps have to be as profound, as wounded, and as monstrous as the intellectual conscience of Pascal was:- and then it would still be necessary to have that expansive heaven of bright, malicious spirituality capable of surveying this teeming mass of dangerous and painful experiences from above, of ordering it, and of forcing it into formulas.1 But who would perform this service for me? And who would have time to wait for such servants?- It's clear they arise too rarely. In all ages they are so unlikely! In the end, a person must do everything himself in order to know a few things himself: that means that one has much to do!- But at all events a curiosity of the sort I have remains the most pleasant of all burdens.- Forgive me. I wanted to say this: the love of the truth has its reward in heaven and even on earth.-
