But now those people go on and ask: For whose sake do you care about God's and the other commandments? You surely do not suppose that this is done merely out of complaisance toward God? No, you are doing it--_for your sake_ again.--Here too, therefore, _you_ are the main thing, and each must say to himself, _I_ am everything to myself and I do everything _on my account_. If it ever became clear to you that God, the commandments, etc., only harm you, that they reduce and ruin _you_, to a certainty you would throw them from you just as the Christians once condemned Apollo or Minerva or heathen morality. They did indeed put in the place of these Christ and afterward Mary, as well as a Christian morality; but they did this for the sake of _their_ souls' welfare too, therefore out of egoism or ownness. And it was by this egoism, this ownness, that they got _rid_ of the old world of gods and became _free_ from it. Ownness _created_ a new _freedom_; for ownness is the creator of everything, as genius (a definite ownness), which is always originality, has for a long time already been looked upon as the creator of new productions that have a place in the history of the world. If your efforts are ever to make "freedom" the issue, then exhaust freedom's demands. Who is it that is to become free? You, I, we. Free from what? From everything that is not you, not I, not we. I, therefore, am the kernel that is to be delivered from all wrappings and--freed from all cramping shells. What is left when I have been freed from everything that is not I? Only I; nothing but I. But freedom has nothing to offer to this I himself. As to what is now to happen further after I have become free, freedom is silent,--as our governments, when the prisoner's time is up, merely let him go, thrusting him out into abandonment. Now why, if freedom is striven after for love of the I after all,--why not choose the I himself as beginning, middle, and end? Am I not worth more than freedom? Is it not I that make myself free, am not I the first? Even unfree, even laid in a thousand fetters, I yet am; and I am not, like freedom, extant only in the future and in hopes, but even as the most abject of slaves I am--present. Think that over well, and decide whether you will place on your banner the dream of "freedom" or the resolution of "egoism," of "ownness." "Freedom" awakens your _rage_ against everything that is not you; "egoism" calls you to _joy_ over yourselves, to self-enjoyment; "freedom" is and remains a _longing_, a romantic plaint, a Christian hope for unearthliness and futurity; "ownness" is a reality, which _of itself_ removes just so much unfreedom as by barring your own way hinders you. What does not disturb you, you will not want to renounce; and, if it begins to disturb you, why, you know that "you must obey _yourselves_ rather than men!"