“I know that I know nothing.”  Or:  “Here I do not trust myself, no door is open to me.”  Or:  “Even if the door were open, why should I enter immediately?” Or:  “What is the use of any hasty hypotheses?  It might quite well be in good taste to make no hypotheses at all.  Are you absolutely obliged to straighten at once what is crooked? to stuff every hole with some kind of oakum?  Is there not time enough for that?  Has not the time leisure?  Oh, ye demons, can ye not at all wait?  The uncertain also has its charms, the Sphinx, too, is a Circe, and Circe, too, was a philosopher.”—­Thus does a skeptic console himself; and in truth he needs some consolation.  For skepticism is the most spiritual expression of a certain many-sided physiological temperament, which in ordinary language is called nervous debility and sickliness; it arises whenever races or classes which have been long separated, decisively and suddenly blend with one another.  In the new generation, which has inherited as it were different standards and valuations in its blood, everything is disquiet, derangement, doubt, and tentativeness; the best powers operate restrictively, the very virtues prevent each other growing and becoming strong, equilibrium, ballast, and perpendicular stability are lacking in body and soul.  That, however, which is most diseased and degenerated in such nondescripts is the will; they are no longer familiar with independence of decision, or the courageous feeling of pleasure in willing—­they are doubtful of the “freedom of the will” even in their dreams Our present-day Europe, the scene of a senseless, precipitate attempt at a radical blending of classes, and consequently of races, is therefore skeptical in all its heights and depths, sometimes exhibiting the mobile skepticism which springs impatiently and wantonly from branch to branch, sometimes with gloomy aspect, like a cloud over-charged with interrogative signs—­and often sick unto death of its will!  Paralysis of will, where do we not find this cripple sitting nowadays!  And yet how bedecked oftentimes’ How seductively ornamented!  There are the finest gala dresses and disguises for this disease, and that, for instance, most of what places itself nowadays in the show-cases as “objectiveness,” “the scientific spirit,” “L’ART pour L’ART,” and “pure voluntary knowledge,” is only decked-out skepticism and paralysis of will—­I am ready to answer for this diagnosis of the European disease—­The disease of the will is diffused unequally over Europe, it is worst and most varied where civilization has longest prevailed, it decreases according as “the barbarian” still—­or again—­asserts his claims under the loose drapery of Western culture It is therefore in the France of today, as can be readily disclosed and comprehended, that the will is most infirm, and France, which has always had a masterly aptitude for converting even the portentous crises of its spirit into something charming and seductive, now manifests emphatically