_taking leave_ of the very belief in truth. Has indeed any European, any Christian freethinker, ever yet wandered into this proposition and its labyrinthine consequences? Does he know _from experience_ the Minotauros of this den.--I doubt it--nay, I know otherwise. Nothing is more really alien to these "mono-fanatics," these _so-called_ "free spirits," than freedom and unfettering in that sense; in no respect are they more closely tied, the absolute fanaticism of their belief in truth is unparalleled. I know all this perhaps too much from experience at close quarters--that dignified philosophic abstinence to which a belief like that binds its adherents, that stoicism of the intellect, which eventually vetoes negation as rigidly as it does affirmation, that wish for standing still in front of the actual, the _factum brutum_, that fatalism in "_petits faits_" (ce petit faitalism, as I call it), in which French Science now attempts a kind of moral superiority over German, this renunciation of interpretation generally (that is, of forcing, doctoring, abridging, omitting, suppressing, inventing, falsifying, and all the other _essential_ attributes of interpretation)--all this, considered broadly, expresses the asceticism of virtue, quite as efficiently as does any repudiation of the senses (it is at bottom only a _modus_ of that repudiation.) But what forces it into that unqualified will for truth is the faith _in the ascetic ideal itself_, even though it take the form of its unconscious imperatives,--make no mistake about it, it is the faith, I repeat, in a _metaphysical_ value, an _intrinsic_ value of truth, of a character which is only warranted and guaranteed in this ideal (it stands and falls with that ideal). Judged strictly, there does not exist a science without its "hypotheses," the thought of such a science is inconceivable, illogical: a philosophy, a faith, must always exist first to enable science to gain thereby a direction, a meaning, a limit and method, a _right_ to existence. (He who holds a contrary opinion on the subject--he, for example, who takes it upon himself to establish philosophy "upon a strictly scientific basis"--has first got to "turn up-side-down" not only philosophy but also truth itself--the gravest insult which could possibly be offered to two such respectable females!) Yes, there is no doubt about it--and here I quote my _Joyful Wisdom_, cp. Book V. Aph. 344: "The man who is truthful in that daring and extreme fashion, which is the presupposition of the faith in science, _asserts thereby a different world_ from that of life, nature, and history; and in so far as he asserts the existence of that different world, come, must he not similarly repudiate its counterpart, this world, _our_ world? The belief on which our faith in science is based has remained to this day a metaphysical belief--even we knowers of to-day, we godless foes of metaphysics, we too take our fire from