ideology and gregarious desirability, as their antipodes perhaps?  What wonder that we “free spirits” are not exactly the most communicative spirits? that we do not wish to betray in every respect what a spirit can free itself from, and where perhaps it will then be driven?  And as to the import of the dangerous formula, “Beyond Good and Evil,” with which we at least avoid confusion, we are something else than “libres-penseurs,” “liben pensatori” “free-thinkers,” and whatever these honest advocates of “modern ideas” like to call themselves.  Having been at home, or at least guests, in many realms of the spirit, having escaped again and again from the gloomy, agreeable nooks in which preferences and prejudices, youth, origin, the accident of men and books, or even the weariness of travel seemed to confine us, full of malice against the seductions of dependency which he concealed in honours, money, positions, or exaltation of the senses, grateful even for distress and the vicissitudes of illness, because they always free us from some rule, and its “prejudice,” grateful to the God, devil, sheep, and worm in us, inquisitive to a fault, investigators to the point of cruelty, with unhesitating fingers for the intangible, with teeth and stomachs for the most indigestible, ready for any business that requires sagacity and acute senses, ready for every adventure, owing to an excess of “free will”, with anterior and posterior souls, into the ultimate intentions of which it is difficult to pry, with foregrounds and backgrounds to the end of which no foot may run, hidden ones under the mantles of light, appropriators, although we resemble heirs and spendthrifts, arrangers and collectors from morning till night, misers of our wealth and our full-crammed drawers, economical in learning and forgetting, inventive in scheming, sometimes proud of tables of categories, sometimes pedants, sometimes night-owls of work even in full day, yea, if necessary, even scarecrows—­and it is necessary nowadays, that is to say, inasmuch as we are the born, sworn, jealous friends of solitude, of our own profoundest midnight and midday solitude—­such kind of men are we, we free spirits!  And perhaps ye are also something of the same kind, ye coming ones? ye new philosophers?

CHAPTER III

THE RELIGIOUS MOOD

45.  The human soul and its limits, the range of man’s inner experiences hitherto attained, the heights, depths, and distances of these experiences, the entire history of the soul up to the present time, and its still unexhausted possibilities:  this is the preordained hunting-domain for a born psychologist and lover of a “big hunt”.  But how often must he say despairingly to himself:  “A single individual! alas, only a single individual! and this great forest, this virgin forest!” So he would like to have some hundreds of hunting assistants,