Freedom teaches only: Get yourselves rid, relieve yourselves, of everything burdensome; it does not teach you who you yourselves are. Rid, rid! so rings its rallying-cry, and you, eagerly following its call, get rid even of yourselves, "deny yourselves." But ownness calls you back to yourselves, it says "Come to yourself!" Under the ægis of freedom you get rid of many kinds of things, but something new pinches you again: "you are rid of the Evil One; evil is left."[109] As _own_ you are _really rid of everything_, and what clings to you _you have accepted_; it is your choice and your pleasure. The _own_ man is the _freeborn_, the man free to begin with; the free man, on the contrary, is only the _eleutheromaniac_, the dreamer and enthusiast. The former is _originally free_, because he recognizes nothing but himself; he does not need to free himself first, because at the start he rejects everything outside himself, because he prizes nothing more than himself, rates nothing higher, because, in short, he starts from himself and "comes to himself." Constrained by childish respect, he is nevertheless already working at "freeing" himself from this constraint. Ownness works in the little egoist, and procures him the desired--freedom. Thousands of years of civilization have obscured to you what you are, have made you believe you are not egoists but are _called_ to be idealists ("good men"). Shake that off! Do not seek for freedom, which does precisely deprive you of yourselves, in "self-denial"; but seek for _yourselves_, become egoists, become each of you an _almighty ego_. Or, more clearly: Just recognize yourselves again, just recognize what you really are, and let go your hypocritical endeavors, your foolish mania to be something else than you are. Hypocritical I call them because you have yet remained egoists all these thousands of years, but sleeping, self-deceiving, crazy egoists, you Heautontimorumenoses, you self-tormentors. Never yet has a religion been able to dispense with "promises," whether they referred us to the other world or to this ("long life," etc.); for man is _mercenary_ and does nothing "gratis." But how about that "doing the good for the good's sake without prospect of reward? As if here too the pay was not contained in the satisfaction that it is to afford. Even religion, therefore, is founded on our egoism and--exploits it; calculated for our _desires_, it stifles many others for the sake of one. This then gives the phenomenon of _cheated_ egoism, where I satisfy, not myself, but one of my desires, _e. g._ the impulse toward blessedness. Religion promises me the--"supreme good"; to gain this I no longer regard any other of my desires, and do not slake them.--All your doings are _unconfessed_, secret, covert, and concealed egoism. But because they are egoism that you are unwilling to confess to yourselves, that you keep secret from yourselves, hence not manifest