My profound indifference to myself: I refuse to derive any advantage from my knowledge, nor do I wish to escape any disadvantages which it may entail.--I include among these disadvantages that which is called the _perversion_ of character; this prospect is beside the point: I use my character, but I try neither to understand it nor to change it--the personal calculation of virtue has not entered my head once. It strikes me that one closes the doors of knowledge as soon as one becomes interested in one's own personal case--or even in the "Salvation of one's soul"!... One should not take one's morality too seriously, nor should one forfeit a modest right to the opposite of morality.... A sort of _heritage of morality_ is perhaps presupposed here: one feels that one can be lavish with it and fling a great deal of it out of the window without materially reducing one's means. One is never tempted to admire "beautiful souls," one always knows one's self to be their superior. The monsters of virtue should be met with inner scorn; _déniaiser la vertu_--Oh, the joy of it! One should revolve round one's self, have no desire to be "better" or "anything else" at all than one is. One should be too interested to omit throwing the tentacles or meshes of every morality out to things. 426. Concerning the psychology of _philosophers._ They should be psychologists--this was possible only from the nineteenth century onwards--and no longer little Jack Homers, who see three or four feet in front of them, and are almost satisfied to burrow inside themselves. We psychologists of the future are not very intent on self-contemplation: we regard it almost as a sign of degeneration when an instrument endeavours "to know itself":[10] we are instruments of knowledge and we would fain possess all the precision and ingenuousness of an instrument--consequently we may not analyse or "know" ourselves. The first sign of a great psychologist's self-preservative instinct: he never goes in search of himself, he has no eye, no interest, no inquisitiveness where he himself is concerned.... The great egoism of our dominating will insists on our completely shutting our eyes to ourselves, and on our appearing "impersonal," "disinterested"!--Oh to what a ridiculous degree we are the reverse of this! We are no Pascals, we are not particularly interested in the "Salvation of the soul," in our own happiness, and in our own virtue.--We have neither enough time nor enough curiosity to be so concerned with ourselves. Regarded more deeply, the case is again different, we thoroughly mistrust all men who thus contemplate their own navels: because introspection seems to us a degenerate form of the psychologist's genius, as a note of interrogation affixed to the psychologist's instinct: just as a painter's eye is degenerate which is actuated by the _will_ to see for the sake of seeing.