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Origin of the vita contemplativa.  In rude ages, where pessimistic judgments as to the nature of man and world prevail, the individual in the feeling of possessing all his powers is always intent upon acting in accordance with these judgments and thus translating idea into action through hunting, robbing, attacking, mistreatment and murder, including the paler reflections of these actions such as are alone tolerated within the community. But if his powers decline, if he feels weary or ill or melancholy or satiated and as a consequence for the time being devoid of desires and wishes, he is then a relatively better, that is to say less harmful man, and his pessimistic ideas discharge themselves only in words and thoughts, for example about the value of his comrades or his wife or his life or his gods  his judgments will be unfavourable judgments. In this condition he becomes thinker and prophet, or he expands imaginatively on his superstition and devises new usages, or he mocks his enemies  but whatever he may think about, all the products of his thinking are bound to reflect the condition he is in, which is one in which fear and weariness are on the increase and his valuation of action and active enjoyment on the decrease; the content of these products of his thinking must correspond to the content of these poetical, thoughtful, priestly moods; unfavourable judgment is bound to predominate. Later on, all those who continually acted as the single individual had formerly acted while in this condition, and who thus judged unfavourably and whose lives were melancholy and poor in deeds, came to be called poets or thinkers or priests or medicine-men  because they were so inactive one would have liked to have despised such men and ejected them from the community; but there was some danger attached to that  they were versed in superstition and on the scent of divine forces, one never doubted that they commanded unknown sources of power. This is the estimation under which the oldest race of contemplative natures lived  despised to just the extent they were not dreaded! In this muffled shape, in this ambiguous guise, with an evil heart and often an anguished head, did contemplation first appear on earth, at once weak and fearsome, secretly despised and publicly loaded with superstitious reference! Here, as always, it is a case of pudenda origo!²⁰