to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be Nature “according to the Stoa,” and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism!  With all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature falsely, that is to say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise—­ and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the Bedlamite hope that because you are able to tyrannize over yourselves—­Stoicism is self-tyranny—­Nature will also allow herself to be tyrannized over:  is not the Stoic a part of Nature? . . .  But this is an old and everlasting story:  what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself.  It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to “creation of the world,” the will to the causa prima.

10.  The eagerness and subtlety, I should even say craftiness, with which the problem of “the real and the apparent world” is dealt with at present throughout Europe, furnishes food for thought and attention; and he who hears only a “Will to Truth” in the background, and nothing else, cannot certainly boast of the sharpest ears.  In rare and isolated cases, it may really have happened that such a Will to Truth—­a certain extravagant and adventurous pluck, a metaphysician’s ambition of the forlorn hope—­has participated therein:  that which in the end always prefers a handful of “certainty” to a whole cartload of beautiful possibilities; there may even be puritanical fanatics of conscience, who prefer to put their last trust in a sure nothing, rather than in an uncertain something.  But that is Nihilism, and the sign of a despairing, mortally wearied soul, notwithstanding the courageous bearing such a virtue may display.  It seems, however, to be otherwise with stronger and livelier thinkers who are still eager for life.  In that they side against appearance, and speak superciliously of “perspective,” in that they rank the credibility of their own bodies about as low as the credibility of the ocular evidence that “the earth stands still,” and thus, apparently, allowing with complacency their securest possession to escape (for what does one at present believe in more firmly than in one’s body?),—­who knows if they are not really trying to win back something which was formerly an even securer possession, something of the old domain of the faith of former times, perhaps the “immortal soul,” perhaps “the old God,” in short, ideas by which they could live better, that is to say, more vigorously and more joyously, than by “modern ideas”?  There is distrust of these modern ideas in this mode of looking at things, a disbelief in all that has been constructed yesterday and today; there is