Neither is he a model man; he does not go in advance of any one, nor after, either; he places himself generally too far off to have any reason for espousing the cause of either good or evil.  If he has been so long confounded with the philosopher, with the Caesarian trainer and dictator of civilization, he has had far too much honour, and what is more essential in him has been overlooked—­he is an instrument, something of a slave, though certainly the sublimest sort of slave, but nothing in himself—­PRESQUE rien!  The objective man is an instrument, a costly, easily injured, easily tarnished measuring instrument and mirroring apparatus, which is to be taken care of and respected; but he is no goal, not outgoing nor upgoing, no complementary man in whom the rest of existence justifies itself, no termination—­ and still less a commencement, an engendering, or primary cause, nothing hardy, powerful, self-centred, that wants to be master; but rather only a soft, inflated, delicate, movable potter’s-form, that must wait for some kind of content and frame to “shape” itself thereto—­for the most part a man without frame and content, a “selfless” man.  Consequently, also, nothing for women, in PARENTHESI.

208.  When a philosopher nowadays makes known that he is not a skeptic—­I hope that has been gathered from the foregoing description of the objective spirit?—­people all hear it impatiently; they regard him on that account with some apprehension, they would like to ask so many, many questions . . . indeed among timid hearers, of whom there are now so many, he is henceforth said to be dangerous.  With his repudiation of skepticism, it seems to them as if they heard some evil-threatening sound in the distance, as if a new kind of explosive were being tried somewhere, a dynamite of the spirit, perhaps a newly discovered Russian NIHILINE, a pessimism bonae voluntatis, that not only denies, means denial, but—­dreadful thought!  Practises denial.  Against this kind of “good-will”—­a will to the veritable, actual negation of life—­there is, as is generally acknowledged nowadays, no better soporific and sedative than skepticism, the mild, pleasing, lulling poppy of skepticism; and Hamlet himself is now prescribed by the doctors of the day as an antidote to the “spirit,” and its underground noises.  “Are not our ears already full of bad sounds?” say the skeptics, as lovers of repose, and almost as a kind of safety police; “this subterranean Nay is terrible!  Be still, ye pessimistic moles!” The skeptic, in effect, that delicate creature, is far too easily frightened; his conscience is schooled so as to start at every Nay, and even at that sharp, decided Yea, and feels something like a bite thereby.  Yea! and Nay!—­they seem to him opposed to morality; he loves, on the contrary, to make a festival to his virtue by a noble aloofness, while perhaps he says with Montaigne:  “What do I know?” Or with Socrates: