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The tyrants of the spirit.  The march of science is now no longer crossed by the accidental fact that men live for about seventy years, as was for all too long the case. Formerly, a man wanted to reach the far end of knowledge during this period of time and the methods of acquiring knowledge were evaluated in accordance with this universal longing. The small single questions and experiments were counted contemptible: one wanted the shortest route; one believed that, because everything in the world seemed to be accommodated to man, the knowability of things was also accommodated to a human timespan. To solve everything at a stroke, with a single word  that was the secret desire: the task was thought of in the image of the Gordian knot or in that of the egg of Columbus; one did not doubt that in the domain of knowledge too it was possible to reach one's goal in the manner of Alexander¹⁵⁰ or Columbus and to settle all questions with a single answer. 'There is a riddle to be solved': thus did the goal of life appear to the eye of the philosopher; the first thing to do was to find the riddle and to compress the problem of the world into the simplest riddle-form. The boundless ambition and exultation of being the 'unriddler of the world' constituted the thinker's dreams: nothing seemed worth-while if it was not the means of bringing everything to a conclusion for him! Philosophy was thus a kind of supreme struggle to possess the tyrannical rule of the spirit  that some such very fortunate, subtle, inventive, bold and mighty man was in reserve  one only!  was doubted by none, and several, most recently Schopenhauer, fancied themselves to be that one.  From this it follows that by and large the sciences have hitherto been kept back by the moral narrowness of their disciples and that henceforth they must be carried on with a higher and more magnanimous basic feeling. 'What do I matter!'  stands over the door of the thinker of the future.