power,” to speak figuratively (and in fact “the spirit” resembles a stomach more than anything else).  Here also belong an occasional propensity of the spirit to let itself be deceived (perhaps with a waggish suspicion that it is not so and so, but is only allowed to pass as such), a delight in uncertainty and ambiguity, an exulting enjoyment of arbitrary, out-of-the-way narrowness and mystery, of the too-near, of the foreground, of the magnified, the diminished, the misshapen, the beautified—­an enjoyment of the arbitrariness of all these manifestations of power.  Finally, in this connection, there is the not unscrupulous readiness of the spirit to deceive other spirits and dissemble before them—­ the constant pressing and straining of a creating, shaping, changeable power:  the spirit enjoys therein its craftiness and its variety of disguises, it enjoys also its feeling of security therein—­it is precisely by its Protean arts that it is best protected and concealed!—­Counter to this propensity for appearance, for simplification, for a disguise, for a cloak, in short, for an outside—­for every outside is a cloak—­there operates the sublime tendency of the man of knowledge, which takes, and insists on taking things profoundly, variously, and thoroughly; as a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste, which every courageous thinker will acknowledge in himself, provided, as it ought to be, that he has sharpened and hardened his eye sufficiently long for introspection, and is accustomed to severe discipline and even severe words.  He will say:  “There is something cruel in the tendency of my spirit”:  let the virtuous and amiable try to convince him that it is not so!  In fact, it would sound nicer, if, instead of our cruelty, perhaps our “extravagant honesty” were talked about, whispered about, and glorified—­we free, very free spirits—­and some day perhaps such will actually be our—­posthumous glory!  Meanwhile—­ for there is plenty of time until then—­we should be least inclined to deck ourselves out in such florid and fringed moral verbiage; our whole former work has just made us sick of this taste and its sprightly exuberance.  They are beautiful, glistening, jingling, festive words:  honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, sacrifice for knowledge, heroism of the truthful—­ there is something in them that makes one’s heart swell with pride.  But we anchorites and marmots have long ago persuaded ourselves in all the secrecy of an anchorite’s conscience, that this worthy parade of verbiage also belongs to the old false adornment, frippery, and gold-dust of unconscious human vanity, and that even under such flattering colour and repainting, the terrible original text homo natura must again be recognized.  In effect, to translate man back again into nature; to master the many vain and visionary interpretations and subordinate meanings which have hitherto been scratched and daubed over