Sacred things exist only for the egoist who does not acknowledge himself, the _involuntary egoist_, for him who is always looking after his own and yet does not count himself as the highest being, who serves only himself and at the same time always thinks he is serving a higher being, who knows nothing higher than himself and yet is infatuated about something higher; in short, for the egoist who would like not to be an egoist, and abases himself (_i. e._ combats his egoism), but at the same time abases himself only for the sake of "being exalted," and therefore of gratifying his egoism. Because he would like to cease to be an egoist, he looks about in heaven and earth for higher beings to serve and sacrifice himself to; but, however much he shakes and disciplines himself, in the end he does all for his own sake, and the disreputable egoism will not come off him. On this account I call him the involuntary egoist. His toil and care to get away from himself is nothing but the misunderstood impulse to self-dissolution. If you are bound to your past hour, if you must babble to-day because you babbled yesterday,[21] if you can not transform yourself each instant, you feel yourself fettered in slavery and benumbed. Therefore over each minute of your existence a fresh minute of the future beckons to you, and, developing yourself, you get away "from yourself,"--_i. e._ from the self that was at that moment. As you are at each instant, you are your own creature, and in this very "creature" you do not wish to lose yourself, the creator. You are yourself a higher being than you are, and surpass yourself. But that _you_ are the one who is higher than you,--_i. e._ that you are not only creature, but likewise your creator,--just this, as an involuntary egoist, you fail to recognize; and therefore the "higher essence" is to you--an alien[22] essence. Every higher essence, such as truth, mankind, etc., is an essence _over_ us. Alienness is a criterion of the "sacred." In everything sacred there lies something "uncanny," _i. e._ strange,[23] such as we are not quite familiar and at home in. What is sacred to me is _not my own_; and if, _e. g._ the property of others was not sacred to me, I should look on it as _mine_, which I should take to myself when occasion offered. Or, on the other side, if I regard the face of the Chinese emperor as sacred, it remains strange to my eye, which I close at its appearance.