29.  It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong.  And whoever attempts it, even with the best right, but without being obliged to do so, proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure.  He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life in itself already brings with it; not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience.  Supposing such a one comes to grief, it is so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it, nor sympathize with it.  And he cannot any longer go back!  He cannot even go back again to the sympathy of men!

30.  Our deepest insights must—­and should—­appear as follies, and under certain circumstances as crimes, when they come unauthorizedly to the ears of those who are not disposed and predestined for them.  The exoteric and the esoteric, as they were formerly distinguished by philosophers—­among the Indians, as among the Greeks, Persians, and Mussulmans, in short, wherever people believed in gradations of rank and not in equality and equal rights—­are not so much in contradistinction to one another in respect to the exoteric class, standing without, and viewing, estimating, measuring, and judging from the outside, and not from the inside; the more essential distinction is that the class in question views things from below upwards—­while the esoteric class views things from above downwards.  There are heights of the soul from which tragedy itself no longer appears to operate tragically; and if all the woe in the world were taken together, who would dare to decide whether the sight of it would necessarily seduce and constrain to sympathy, and thus to a doubling of the woe? . . .  That which serves the higher class of men for nourishment or refreshment, must be almost poison to an entirely different and lower order of human beings.  The virtues of the common man would perhaps mean vice and weakness in a philosopher; it might be possible for a highly developed man, supposing him to degenerate and go to ruin, to acquire qualities thereby alone, for the sake of which he would have to be honoured as a saint in the lower world into which he had sunk.  There are books which have an inverse value for the soul and the health according as the inferior soul and the lower vitality, or the higher and more powerful, make use of them.  In the former case they are dangerous, disturbing, unsettling books, in the latter case they are herald-calls which summon the bravest to their bravery.  Books for the general reader are always ill-smelling books, the odour of paltry people clings to them.  Where the populace eat and drink, and even where they reverence, it is accustomed to stink.  One should not go into churches if one wishes to breathe pure air.