Yet the _culture_, the religiousness, of men has assuredly made them free, but only free from one lord, to lead them to another. I have learned by religion to tame my appetite, I break the world's resistance by the cunning that is put in my hand by _science_; I even serve no man: "I am, no man's lackey." But then it comes, You must obey God more than man. Just so I am indeed free from irrational determination by my impulses, but obedient to the master _Reason_. I have gained "spiritual freedom," "freedom of the spirit." But with that _I_ have then become subject to that very _spirit_. The spirit gives me orders, reason guides me, they are my leaders and commanders. The "rational," the "servants of the spirit," rule. But, if _I_ am not flesh, I am in truth not spirit either. Freedom of the spirit is servitude of me, because I am more than spirit or flesh. Without doubt culture has made me _powerful_. It has given me power over all _motives_, over the impulses of my nature as well as over the exactions and violences of the world. I know, and have gained the force for it by culture, that I need not let myself be coerced by any of my appetites, pleasures, emotions, etc.; I am their--_master_; in like manner I become, through the sciences and arts, the _master_ of the refractory world, whom sea and earth obey, and to whom even the stars must give an account of themselves. The spirit has made me _master_.--But I have no power over the spirit itself. From religion (culture) I do learn the means for the "vanquishing of the world," but not how I am to subdue _God_ too and become master of him; for God "is the spirit." And this same spirit, of which I am unable to become master, may have the most manifold shapes: he may be called God or National Spirit, State, Family, Reason, also--Liberty, Humanity, Man. _I_ receive with thanks what the centuries of culture have acquired for me; I am not willing to throw away and give up anything of it: _I_ have not lived in vain. The experience that I have _power_ over my nature, and need not be the slave of my appetites, shall not be lost to me; the experience that I can subdue the world by culture's means is too dear-bought for me to be able to forget it. But I want still more. People ask, what can man do? what can he accomplish? what goods procure? and put down the highest of everything as a calling. As if everything were possible to _me_! If one sees somebody going to ruin in a mania, a passion, etc. (_e. g._ in the huckster-spirit, in jealousy), the desire is stirred to deliver him out of this possession and to help him to "self-conquest." "We want to make a man of him!" That would be very fine if another possession were not immediately put in the place of the earlier one. But one frees from the love of money him who is a thrall to it, only to deliver him over to piety, humanity, or some principle else, and to transfer him to a _fixed standpoint_ anew.