between instinct and reflection; second, by the antagonism between egoistic instincts and altruistic instincts. This double antagonism between instinct and conscious purpose, between egoism and altruism, is a necessary incident of self-knowledge and a condition of progress: to know one’s self is to be aware more or less uneasily of a manifold, and succession of inconsistent desires of which the moving equilibrium constitutes life itself; self-knowledge, and knowledge in general, is the equivalent of temptation. Life is in some sort always sin, for one cannot eat, one cannot even breathe without some measure of affirmation of low and egoistic instincts. Moreover asceticism logically leads nowhere, to negation of life; the most thorough-going ascetics are the Yoghis of India, who attain the point of living without air or food and of going down alive into the tomb.[64] And in believing himself thus to have realized absolute renunciation, what the ascetic actually realized is complete and perfect egoism, for the last drops of vegetative life which flow in his veins circulate for him alone and not a shiver of his heart is directed beyond himself; by impoverishing and annihilating his life, he has suppressed the generosity that fulness of life produced; in his endeavour to kill sin he has slaughtered charity. The real moral and religious ideal does not consist in denying one’s self everything in order to deny one’s self what is sinful. There is nothing absolutely evil in us, except excess; when we apply the knife to our hearts, we should have but one aim, the one which the gardener has in view in pruning trees, to increase our real power. Our manifold desires should all be satisfied at one time or another; we should take example from the mother who forces herself to eat that she may watch to the end at the bedside of her dying child. Whoever purposes to live for others besides himself, will find no time to sulk; for whoever possesses a heart sufficiently great no function in life is impure. Every moral rule should be a reconciliation between egoism and altruism, original sin and ideal sanctity; and to accomplish this reconciliation it suffices to show that each of our manifold and mutually exclusive desires, if carried to the extreme, contradicts itself; that our desires need each other, that when nature endeavours to rise above herself she inevitably falls headlong. To govern one’s self means to reconcile all parties. Ormuzd and Ahriman, spirit and nature, are not so hostile to each other as seems to be believed, and either of them indeed is powerless without the other. They are two gods whose origin is the same, they are immortal, and for immortals some means of accommodation must be found. Complete and unremunerated sacrifice never can be adopted as a rule of life; never can be more than a sublime conception, a spark in some individual existence, consuming the fuel it feeds upon and then disappearing and leaving behind, face to face, the