aimless in his course as in a desert--stands the note of interrogation of an increasingly dangerous curiosity. "Cannot _all_ valuations be reversed? And is good perhaps evil? And God only an invention and artifice of the devil? Is everything, perhaps, radically false? And if we are the deceived, are we not thereby also deceivers? _Must_ we not also be deceivers?"--Such thoughts lead and mislead him more and more, onward and away. Solitude encircles and engirdles him, always more threatening, more throttling, more heart-oppressing, that terrible goddess and _mater sæva cupidinum_--but who knows nowadays what _solitude_ is?... 4. From this morbid solitariness, from the desert of such years of experiment, it is still a long way to the copious, overflowing safety and soundness which does not care to dispense with disease itself as an instrument and angling-hook of knowledge;--to that _mature_ freedom of spirit which is equally self-control and discipline of the heart, and gives access to many and opposed modes of thought;--to that inward comprehensiveness and daintiness of superabundance, which excludes any danger of the spirit's becoming enamoured and lost in its own paths, and lying intoxicated in some corner or other; to that excess of plastic, healing, formative, and restorative powers, which is exactly the sign of _splendid_ health, that excess which gives the free spirit the dangerous prerogative of being entitled to live by _experiments_ and offer itself to adventure; the free spirit's prerogative of mastership! Long years of convalescence may lie in between, years full of many-coloured, painfully-enchanting magical transformations, curbed and led by a tough _will to health,_ which often dares to dress and disguise itself as actual health. There is a middle condition therein, which a man of such a fate never calls to mind later on without emotion; a pale, delicate light and a sunshine-happiness are peculiar to him, a feeling of bird-like freedom, prospect, and haughtiness, a _tertium quid_ in which curiosity and gentle disdain are combined. A "free spirit"--this cool expression does good in every condition, it almost warms. One no longer lives, in the fetters of love and hatred, without Yea, without Nay, voluntarily near, voluntarily distant, preferring to escape, to turn aside, to flutter forth, to fly up and away; one is fastidious like every one who has once seen an immense variety _beneath_ him,--and one has become the opposite of those who trouble themselves about things which do not concern them. In fact, it is nothing but things which now concern the free spirit,--and how many things!--which no longer _trouble_ him! 5.