CHAPTER II

THE FREE SPIRIT

24.  O sancta simplicitiatas!  In what strange simplification and falsification man lives!  One can never cease wondering when once one has got eyes for beholding this marvel!  How we have made everything around us clear and free and easy and simple! how we have been able to give our senses a passport to everything superficial, our thoughts a godlike desire for wanton pranks and wrong inferences!—­how from the beginning, we have contrived to retain our ignorance in order to enjoy an almost inconceivable freedom, thoughtlessness, imprudence, heartiness, and gaiety—­in order to enjoy life!  And only on this solidified, granite-like foundation of ignorance could knowledge rear itself hitherto, the will to knowledge on the foundation of a far more powerful will, the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue!  Not as its opposite, but—­as its refinement!  It is to be hoped, indeed, that language, here as elsewhere, will not get over its awkwardness, and that it will continue to talk of opposites where there are only degrees and many refinements of gradation; it is equally to be hoped that the incarnated Tartuffery of morals, which now belongs to our unconquerable “flesh and blood,” will turn the words round in the mouths of us discerning ones.  Here and there we understand it, and laugh at the way in which precisely the best knowledge seeks most to retain us in this simplified, thoroughly artificial, suitably imagined, and suitably falsified world:  at the way in which, whether it will or not, it loves error, because, as living itself, it loves life!

25.  After such a cheerful commencement, a serious word would fain be heard; it appeals to the most serious minds.  Take care, ye philosophers and friends of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom!  Of suffering “for the truth’s sake”! even in your own defense!  It spoils all the innocence and fine neutrality of your conscience; it makes you headstrong against objections and red rags; it stupefies, animalizes, and brutalizes, when in the struggle with danger, slander, suspicion, expulsion, and even worse consequences of enmity, ye have at last to play your last card as protectors of truth upon earth—­as though “the Truth” were such an innocent and incompetent creature as to require protectors! and you of all people, ye knights of the sorrowful countenance, Messrs Loafers and Cobweb-spinners of the spirit!  Finally, ye know sufficiently well that it cannot be of any consequence if ye just carry your point; ye know that hitherto no philosopher has carried his point, and that there might be a more laudable truthfulness in every little interrogative mark which you place after your special words and favourite doctrines (and occasionally after yourselves) than in all the solemn pantomime and trumping games before accusers and law-courts!  Rather go out of the way!  Flee into concealment!