the conception of “greatness” to be noble, to wish to be apart, to be capable of being different, to stand alone, to have to live by personal initiative, and the philosopher will betray something of his own ideal when he asserts “He shall be the greatest who can be the most solitary, the most concealed, the most divergent, the man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, and of super-abundance of will; precisely this shall be called greatness:  as diversified as can be entire, as ample as can be full.”  And to ask once more the question:  Is greatness possible—­ nowadays?

213.  It is difficult to learn what a philosopher is, because it cannot be taught:  one must “know” it by experience—­or one should have the pride not to know it.  The fact that at present people all talk of things of which they cannot have any experience, is true more especially and unfortunately as concerns the philosopher and philosophical matters:—­the very few know them, are permitted to know them, and all popular ideas about them are false.  Thus, for instance, the truly philosophical combination of a bold, exuberant spirituality which runs at presto pace, and a dialectic rigour and necessity which makes no false step, is unknown to most thinkers and scholars from their own experience, and therefore, should any one speak of it in their presence, it is incredible to them.  They conceive of every necessity as troublesome, as a painful compulsory obedience and state of constraint; thinking itself is regarded by them as something slow and hesitating, almost as a trouble, and often enough as “worthy of the Sweat of the noble”—­but not at all as something easy and divine, closely related to dancing and exuberance!  “To think” and to take a matter “seriously,” “arduously”—­that is one and the same thing to them; such only has been their “experience.”—­ Artists have here perhaps a finer intuition; they who know only too well that precisely when they no longer do anything “arbitrarily,” and everything of necessity, their feeling of freedom, of subtlety, of power, of creatively fixing, disposing, and shaping, reaches its climax—­in short, that necessity and “freedom of will” are then the same thing with them.  There is, in fine, a gradation of rank in psychical states, to which the gradation of rank in the problems corresponds; and the highest problems repel ruthlessly every one who ventures too near them, without being predestined for their solution by the loftiness and power of his spirituality.  Of what use is it for nimble, everyday intellects, or clumsy, honest mechanics and empiricists to press, in their plebeian ambition, close to such problems, and as it were into this “holy of holies”—­as so often happens nowadays!  But coarse feet must never tread upon such carpets:  this is provided for in the primary law of things; the doors remain closed to those intruders, though they may dash and break their heads thereon.  People have always