Thus doth the free spirit answer himself with regard to the riddle of emancipation, and ends therewith, while he generalises his case, in order thus to decide with regard to his experience. "As it has happened to _me_," he says to himself, "so must it happen to every one in whom a _mission_ seeks to embody itself and to 'come into the world.'" The secret power and necessity of this mission will operate in and upon the destined individuals like an unconscious pregnancy,--long before they have had the mission itself in view and have known its name. Our destiny rules over us, even when we are not yet aware of it; it is the future that makes laws for our to-day. Granted that it is _the problem of the gradations of rank,_ of which we may say that it is _our_ problem, we free spirits; now only in the midday of our life do we first understand what preparations, detours, tests, experiments, and disguises the problem needed, before it _was permitted_ to rise before us, and how we had first to experience the most manifold and opposing conditions of distress and happiness in soul and body, as adventurers and circumnavigators of the inner world called "man," as surveyors of all the "higher" and the "one-above-another," also called "man"--penetrating everywhere, almost without fear, rejecting nothing, losing nothing, tasting everything, cleansing everything from all that is accidental, and, as it were, sifting it out--until at last we could say, we free spirits, "Here--a _new_ problem! Here a long ladder, the rungs of which we ourselves have sat upon and mounted,--which we ourselves at some time have _been_! Here a higher place, a lower place, an under-us, an immeasurably long order, a hierarchy which we _see;_ here--_our_ problem!" 8.