206.  In relation to the genius, that is to say, a being who either engenders or produces—­both words understood in their fullest sense—­the man of learning, the scientific average man, has always something of the old maid about him; for, like her, he is not conversant with the two principal functions of man.  To both, of course, to the scholar and to the old maid, one concedes respectability, as if by way of indemnification—­in these cases one emphasizes the respectability—­and yet, in the compulsion of this concession, one has the same admixture of vexation.  Let us examine more closely:  what is the scientific man?  Firstly, a commonplace type of man, with commonplace virtues:  that is to say, a non-ruling, non-authoritative, and non-self-sufficient type of man; he possesses industry, patient adaptableness to rank and file, equability and moderation in capacity and requirement; he has the instinct for people like himself, and for that which they require—­for instance:  the portion of independence and green meadow without which there is no rest from labour, the claim to honour and consideration (which first and foremost presupposes recognition and recognisability), the sunshine of a good name, the perpetual ratification of his value and usefulness, with which the inward distrust which lies at the bottom of the heart of all dependent men and gregarious animals, has again and again to be overcome.  The learned man, as is appropriate, has also maladies and faults of an ignoble kind:  he is full of petty envy, and has a lynx-eye for the weak points in those natures to whose elevations he cannot attain.  He is confiding, yet only as one who lets himself go, but does not Flow; and precisely before the man of the great current he stands all the colder and more reserved—­ his eye is then like a smooth and irresponsive lake, which is no longer moved by rapture or sympathy.  The worst and most dangerous thing of which a scholar is capable results from the instinct of mediocrity of his type, from the Jesuitism of mediocrity, which labours instinctively for the destruction of the exceptional man, and endeavours to break—­or still better, to relax—­every bent bow To relax, of course, with consideration, and naturally with an indulgent hand—­to relax with confiding sympathy that is the real art of Jesuitism, which has always understood how to introduce itself as the religion of sympathy.

207.  However gratefully one may welcome the objective spirit—­and who has not been sick to death of all subjectivity and its confounded IPSISIMOSITY!—­in the end, however, one must learn caution even with regard to one’s gratitude, and put a stop to the exaggeration with which the unselfing and depersonalizing of the spirit has recently been celebrated, as if it were the goal in itself, as if it were salvation and glorification—­as is especially accustomed to happen in the pessimist school, which has also in its turn good reasons for paying the highest honours