It is easily understood that the conflict over what is revered as the highest essence can be significant only so long as even the most embittered opponents concede to each other the main point,--that there is a highest essence to which worship or service is due. If one should smile compassionately at the whole struggle over a highest essence, as a Christian might at the war of words between a Shiite and a Sunnite or between a Brahman and a Buddhist, then the hypothesis of a highest essence would be null in his eyes, and the conflict on this basis an idle play. Whether then the one God or the three in one, whether the Lutheran God or the _être suprême_ or not God at all, but "Man," may represent the highest essence, that makes no difference at all for him who denies the highest essence itself, for in his eyes those servants of a highest essence are one and all--pious people, the most raging atheist not less than the most faith-filled Christian. In the foremost place of the sacred,[26] then, stands the highest essence and the faith in this essence, our "holy[27] faith." THE SPOOK With ghosts we arrive in the spirit-realm, in the realm of _essences_. What haunts the universe, and has its occult, "incomprehensible" being there, is precisely the mysterious spook that we call highest essence. And to get to the bottom of this _spook_, to _comprehend_ it, to discover _reality_ in it (to prove "the existence of God")--this task men set to themselves for thousands of years; with the horrible impossibility, the endless Danaid-labor, of transforming the spook into a non-spook, the unreal into something real, the _spirit_ into an entire and _corporeal_ person,--with this they tormented themselves to death. Behind the existing world they sought the "thing in itself," the essence; behind the _thing_ they sought the _un-thing_. When one looks to the _bottom_ of anything, _i. e._ searches out its _essence_, one often discovers something quite other than what it _seems_ to be; honeyed speech and a lying heart, pompous words and beggarly thoughts, etc. By bringing the essence into prominence one degrades the hitherto misapprehended appearance to a bare _semblance_, a deception. The essence of the world, so attractive and splendid, is for him who looks to the bottom of it--emptiness; emptiness is == world's essence (world's doings). Now, he who is religious does not occupy himself with the deceitful semblance, with the empty appearances, but looks upon the essence, and in the essence has--the truth. The essences which are deduced from some appearances are the evil essences, and conversely from others the good. The essence of human feeling, _e. g._, is love; the essence of human will is the good; that of one's thinking, the true; etc.