As you produce innumerable things by your activity, yes, shape the earth's surface anew and set up works of men everywhere, so too you may still ascertain numberless truths by your thinking, and we will gladly take delight in them. Nevertheless, as I do not please to hand myself over to serve your newly discovered machines mechanically, but only help to set them running for my benefit, so too I will only use your truths, without letting myself be used for their demands. All truths _beneath_ me are to my liking; a truth _above_ me, a truth that I should have to _direct_ myself by, I am not acquainted with. For me there is no truth, for nothing is more than I! Not even my essence, not even the essence of man, is more than I! than I, this "drop in the bucket," this "insignificant man!" You believe that you have done the utmost when you boldly assert that, because every time has its own truth, there is no "absolute truth." Why, with this you nevertheless still leave to each time its truth, and you quite genuinely create an "absolute truth," a truth that no time lacks, because every time, however its truth may be, still has a "truth." Is it meant only that people have been thinking in every time, and so have had thoughts or truths, and that in the subsequent time these were other than they were in the earlier? No, the word is to be that every time had its "truth of faith"; and in fact none has yet appeared in which a "higher truth" has not been recognized, a truth that people believed they must subject themselves to as "highness and majesty." Every truth of a time is its fixed idea, and, if people later found another truth, this always happened only because they sought for another; they only reformed the folly and put a modern dress on it. For they did want--who would dare doubt their justification for this?--they wanted to be "inspired by an idea." They wanted to be dominated,--possessed, by a _thought_! The most modern ruler of this kind is "our essence," or "man." For all free criticism a thought was the criterion; for own criticism I am, I the unspeakable, and so not the merely thought-of; for what is merely thought of is always speakable, because word and thought coincide. That is true which is mine, untrue that whose own I am; true, _e. g._, the union; untrue, the State and society. "Free and true" criticism takes care for the consistent dominion of a thought, an idea, a spirit; "own" criticism, for nothing but my _self-enjoyment_. But in this the latter is in fact--and we will not spare it this "ignominy"!--like the bestial criticism of instinct. I, like the criticising beast, am concerned only for _myself_, not "for the cause." _I_ am the criterion of truth, but I am not an idea, but more than idea, _i. e._ unutterable. _My_ criticism is not a "free" criticism, not free from me, and not "servile," not in the service of an idea, but an _own_ criticism.