of the scholar, therefore, are generally in quite another direction—­in the family, perhaps, or in money-making, or in politics; it is, in fact, almost indifferent at what point of research his little machine is placed, and whether the hopeful young worker becomes a good philologist, a mushroom specialist, or a chemist; he is not characterised by becoming this or that.  In the philosopher, on the contrary, there is absolutely nothing impersonal; and above all, his morality furnishes a decided and decisive testimony as to who he is,—­that is to say, in what order the deepest impulses of his nature stand to each other.

7.  How malicious philosophers can be!  I know of nothing more stinging than the joke Epicurus took the liberty of making on Plato and the Platonists; he called them Dionysiokolakes.  In its original sense, and on the face of it, the word signifies “Flatterers of Dionysius”—­consequently, tyrants’ accessories and lick-spittles; besides this, however, it is as much as to say, “They are all actors, there is nothing genuine about them” (for Dionysiokolax was a popular name for an actor).  And the latter is really the malignant reproach that Epicurus cast upon Plato:  he was annoyed by the grandiose manner, the mise en scene style of which Plato and his scholars were masters—­of which Epicurus was not a master!  He, the old school-teacher of Samos, who sat concealed in his little garden at Athens, and wrote three hundred books, perhaps out of rage and ambitious envy of Plato, who knows!  Greece took a hundred years to find out who the garden-god Epicurus really was.  Did she ever find out?

8.  There is a point in every philosophy at which the “conviction” of the philosopher appears on the scene; or, to put it in the words of an ancient mystery: 

Adventavit asinus, Pulcher et fortissimus.

9.  You desire to live “according to Nature”?  Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words!  Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain:  imagine to yourselves indifference as a power—­how could you live in accordance with such indifference?  To live—­is not that just endeavouring to be otherwise than this Nature?  Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different?  And granted that your imperative, “living according to Nature,” means actually the same as “living according to life”—­how could you do differently?  Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be?  In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you:  while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders!  In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature,