With all their noisy agitator-babble, however, they effect nothing with me; these trumpeters of reality are bad musicians, their voices do not come from the deeps with sufficient audibility, they are not the mouthpiece for the abyss of scientific knowledge--for to-day scientific knowledge is an abyss--the word "science," in such trumpeter-mouths, is a prostitution, an abuse, an impertinence. The truth is just the opposite from what is maintained in the ascetic theory. Science has to-day absolutely no belief in itself, let alone in an ideal superior to itself, and wherever science still consists of passion, love, ardour, suffering, it is not the opposition to that ascetic ideal, but rather the _incarnation of its latest and noblest form_. Does that ring strange? There are enough brave and decent working people, even among the learned men of to-day, who like their little corner, and who, just because they are pleased so to do, become at times indecently loud with their demand, that people to-day should be quite content, especially in science--for in science there is so much useful work to do. I do not deny it--there is nothing I should like less than to spoil the delight of these honest workers in their handiwork; for I rejoice in their work. But the fact of science requiring hard work, the fact of its having contented workers, is absolutely no proof of science as a whole having to-day one end, one will, one ideal, one passion for a great faith; the contrary, as I have said, is the case. When science is not the latest manifestation of the ascetic ideal--but these are cases of such rarity, selectness, and exquisiteness, as to preclude the general judgment being affected thereby--science is a _hiding-place_ for every kind of cowardice, disbelief, remorse, _despectio sui_, bad conscience--it is the very _anxiety_ that springs from having no ideal, the suffering from the _lack_ of a great love, the discontent with an enforced moderation. Oh, what does all science not cover to-day? How much, at any rate, does it not try to cover? The diligence of our best scholars, their senseless industry, their burning the candle of their brain at both ends--their very mastery in their handiwork--how often is the real meaning of all that to prevent themselves continuing to see a certain thing? Science as a self-anæsthetic: _do you know that_? You wound them--every one who consorts with scholars experiences this--you wound them sometimes to the quick through just a harmless word; when you think you are paying them a compliment you embitter them beyond all bounds, simply because you didn't have the _finesse_ to infer the real kind of customers you had to tackle, the _sufferer_ kind (who won't own up even to themselves what they really are), the dazed and unconscious kind who have only one fear--_coming to consciousness_. 24.