Do you believe you have your thoughts for yourselves and need answer to no one for them, or, as you do also say, you have to give an account of them to God only? No, your great and small thoughts belong to me, and I handle them at my pleasure. The thought is my _own_ only when I have no misgiving about bringing it in danger of death every moment, when I do not have to fear its loss as a _loss for me_, a loss of me. The thought is my own only when I can indeed subjugate it, but it never can subjugate me, never fanaticizes me, makes me the tool of its realization. So freedom of thought exists when I can have all possible thoughts; but the thoughts become property only by not being able to become masters. In the time of freedom of thought, thoughts (ideas) _rule_; but, if I attain to property in thought, they stand as my creatures. If the hierarchy had not so penetrated men to the innermost as to take from them all courage to pursue free thoughts, _i. e._ thoughts perhaps displeasing to God, one would have to consider freedom of thought just as empty a word as, say, a freedom of digestion. According to the professionals' opinion, the thought is _given_ to me; according to the freethinkers', _I seek_ the thought. There the _truth_ is already found and extant, only I must--receive it from its Giver by grace; here the truth is to be sought and is my goal, lying in the future, toward which I have to run. In both cases the truth (the true thought) lies outside me, and I aspire to _get_ it, be it by presentation (grace), be it by earning (merit of my own). Therefore, (1) The truth is a _privilege_, (2) No, the way to it is _patent_ to all, and neither the Bible nor the holy fathers nor the church nor any one else is in possession of the truth; but one can come into possession of it by--speculating. Both, one sees, are _propertyless_ in relation to the truth: they have it either as a _fief_ (for the "holy father," _e. g._, is not a unique person; as unique he is this Sixtus, Clement, etc., but he does not have the truth as Sixtus, Clement, etc., but as "holy father," _i. e._ as a spirit) or as an _ideal_. As a fief, it is only for a few (the privileged); as an ideal, for _all_ (the patentees). Freedom of thought, then, has the meaning that we do indeed all walk in the dark and in the paths of error, but every one can on this path approach _the truth_ and is accordingly on the right path ("All roads lead to Rome, to the world's end, etc."). Hence freedom of thought means this much, that the true thought is not my _own_; for, if it were this, how should people want to shut me off from it?