There are born destiny-men and causality-men. A whole world separates the purely living man--peasant and warrior, statesman and general, man of the world and man of business, everyone who wills to prosper, to rule, to fight, and to dare, the organizer or entrepreneur, the adventurer or bravo or gambler--from the man who is destined either by the power of his mind or the defect of his blood to be an “intellectual”--the saint, priest, savant, idealist, or ideologue. Being and waking-being, pulse and tension, motives and ideas, cyclic organs and touch-organs--there has rarely been a man of any significance in whom the one side or the other has not markedly predominated. All that motives and urges, the eye for men and situations, the belief in his star which every born man of action possesses and which is something wholly different from belief in the correctness of a standpoint, the voices of the blood that speak in moments of decision, and the immovably quiet conviction that justifies any aim and any means--all these are denied to the critical, meditative man. Even the footfall of the fact-man sounds different from, sounds more planted than, that of the thinker, in whom the pure microcosmic can acquire no firm relation with earth. Destiny has made the man so or so--subtle and fact-shy, or active and contemptuous of thought. But the man of the active category is a whole man, whereas in the contemplative a single organ can operate without (and even against) the body. All the worse, then, when this organ tries to master actuality as well as its own world, for then we get all those ethico-politico-social reform-projects which demonstrate, unanswerably, how things ought to be and how to set about making them so--theories that without exception rest upon the hypothesis that all men are as rich in ideas and as poor in motives as the author is (or thinks he is). Such theories, even when they have taken the field armed with the full authority of a religion or the prestige of a famous name, have not in one single instance effected the slightest alteration in life. They have merely caused us to _think_ otherwise than before about life. And this, precisely, is the doom of the “late” ages of a Culture, the ages of much writing and much reading--that they should perpetually confuse the opposition of life and thought with the opposition between thought-about-life and thought-about-thought. All world-improvers, priests, and philosophers are unanimous in holding that life is a fit object for the nicest meditation, but the life of the world goes its own way and cares not in the least what is said about it. And even when a community succeeds in living “according to rule,” all that it achieves is, at best, a note on itself in some future history of the world--if there is space left after the proper and only important subject-matter has been dealt with.