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The presence of a thought is like the presence of our beloved.  We imagine we shall never forget this thought, and that this loved one could never be indifferent to us.  But out of sight out of mind!  The finest thought runs the risk of being irrevocably forgotten if it is not written down, and the dear one of being forsaken if we do not marry her.

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There are many thoughts which are valuable to the man who thinks them; but out of them only a few which possess strength to produce either repercussion or reflex action, that is, to win the reader’s sympathy after they have been written down.  It is what a man has thought out directly for himself that alone has true value.  Thinkers may be classed as follows:  those who, in the first place, think for themselves, and those who think directly for others.  The former thinkers are the genuine, they think for themselves in both senses of the word; they are the true philosophers; they alone are in earnest.  Moreover, the enjoyment and happiness of their existence consist in thinking.  The others are the sophists; they wish to seem, and seek their happiness in what they hope to get from other people; their earnestness consists in this.  To which of these two classes a man belongs is soon seen by his whole method and manner.  Lichtenberg is an example of the first class, while Herder obviously belongs to the second.

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When one considers how great and how close to us the problem of existence is,—­this equivocal, tormented, fleeting, dream-like existence—­so great and so close that as soon as one perceives it, it overshadows and conceals all other problems and aims;—­and when one sees how all men—­with a few and rare exceptions—­are not clearly conscious of the problem, nay, do not even seem to see it, but trouble themselves about everything else rather than this, and live on taking thought only for the present day and the scarcely longer span of their own personal future, while they either expressly give the problem up or are ready to agree with it, by the aid of some system of popular metaphysics, and are satisfied with this;—­when one, I say, reflects upon this, so may one be of the opinion that man is a thinking being only in a very remote sense, and not feel any special surprise at any trait of thoughtlessness or folly; but know, rather, that the intellectual outlook of the normal man indeed surpasses that of the brute,—­whose whole existence resembles a continual present without any consciousness of the future or the past—­but, however, not to such an extent as one is wont to suppose.