We become intimate, too, with that solitary thinker, the Pastor of Zschopau, M. Valentin Weigel, when we read the opening words of his little book _Know Thyself_, written in 1578: “We read in the wise men of old the useful saying, ‘Know Thyself,’ which, though it be right well used about worldly manners, as thus: ‘regard well thyself, what thou art, seek in thine own bosom, judge thyself and lay no blame on others,’ a saying, I repeat, which, though thus used of human life and manners, may well and appropriately be applied by us to the natural and supernatural knowing of the whole man; so indeed, that man shall not only consider himself and thereby remember how he should bear himself before people, but that he shall also know his own nature, inner and outer, in spirit and in Nature; whence he cometh and whereof he is made, to what end he is ordained.” So, from points of view peculiar to himself, Valentin Weigel attained to insight which in his mind summed itself up in this oracle of Apollo. A similar path to insight and a like relation to the saying “Know Thyself” may be ascribed to a series of deep-natured thinkers, beginning with Master Eckhart (1250-1327), and ending with Angelus Silesius (1624-1677), among whom may be found also Valentin Weigel himself. All these thinkers have in common a strong sense of the fact that in man’s knowing of himself there rises a sun which illuminates something very different from the mere accidental, separated personality of the beholder. What Spinoza became conscious of in the ethereal heights of pure thought,--_viz._, that “the human soul possesses an adequate knowledge of the Eternal and Infinite Being of God,”--that same consciousness lived in them as immediate feeling; and self-knowledge was to them the path leading to this Eternal and Infinite Being. It was clear to them that self-knowledge in its true form enriched man with a new sense, which unlocked for him a world standing in relation to the world accessible to him without this new sense as does the world of one possessing physical sight to that of a blind man. It would be difficult to find a better description of the import of this new sense than the one given by J. G. Fichte in his Berlin Lectures (1813):