of “necessity,” or of “psychological non-freedom”; there the effect does not follow the cause, there “law” does not obtain.  It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, reciprocity, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we interpret and intermix this symbol-world, as “being-in-itself,” with things, we act once more as we have always acted—­mythologically.  The “non-free will” is mythology; in real life it is only a question of strong and weak wills.—­It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself, when a thinker, in every “causal-connection” and “psychological necessity,” manifests something of compulsion, indigence, obsequiousness, oppression, and non-freedom; it is suspicious to have such feelings—­the person betrays himself.  And in general, if I have observed correctly, the “non-freedom of the will” is regarded as a problem from two entirely opposite standpoints, but always in a profoundly personal manner:  some will not give up their “responsibility,” their belief in themselves, the personal right to their merits, at any price (the vain races belong to this class); others on the contrary, do not wish to be answerable for anything, or blamed for anything, and owing to an inward self-contempt, seek to get out of the business, no matter how.  The latter, when they write books, are in the habit at present of taking the side of criminals; a sort of socialistic sympathy is their favourite disguise.  And as a matter of fact, the fatalism of the weak-willed embellishes itself surprisingly when it can pose as “la religion de la souffrance humaine”; that is its “good taste.”

22.  Let me be pardoned, as an old philologist who cannot desist from the mischief of putting his finger on bad modes of interpretation, but “Nature’s conformity to law,” of which you physicists talk so proudly, as though—­why, it exists only owing to your interpretation and bad “philology.”  It is no matter of fact, no “text,” but rather just a naively humanitarian adjustment and perversion of meaning, with which you make abundant concessions to the democratic instincts of the modern soul!  “Everywhere equality before the law—­Nature is not different in that respect, nor better than we”:  a fine instance of secret motive, in which the vulgar antagonism to everything privileged and autocratic—­likewise a second and more refined atheism—­is once more disguised.  “Ni dieu, ni maitre”—­that, also, is what you want; and therefore “Cheers for natural law!”—­ is it not so?  But, as has been said, that is interpretation, not text; and somebody might come along, who, with opposite intentions and modes of interpretation, could read out of the same “Nature,” and with regard to the same phenomena, just the tyrannically inconsiderate and relentless enforcement of the claims of power—­an interpreter who should so place the unexceptionalness