_Pyrrho_: Yes; distrust as it never was yet on earth, distrust of anything and everything. This is the only road to truth. The right eye must not trust the left eye, and for some time light must be called darkness: this is the path that you must tread. Do not imagine that it will lead you to fruit trees and fair pastures. You will find on this road little hard grains—these are truths. For years and years you will have to swallow handfuls of lies, so as not to die of hunger, although you know that they are lies. But those grains will be sown and planted, and perhaps, perhaps some day will come the harvest. No one may _promise_ that day, unless he be a fanatic. _The Elder_: Friend, friend! Your words too are those of a fanatic! _Pyrrho_: You are right! I will be distrustful of all words. _The Elder_: Then you will have to be silent. _Pyrrho_: I shall tell men that I have to be silent, and that they are to mistrust my silence. _The Elder_: So you draw back from your undertaking? _Pyrrho_: On the contrary—you have shown me the door through which I must pass. _The Elder_: I don’t know whether we yet completely understand each other? _Pyrrho_: Probably not. _The Elder_: If only you understand yourself! (Pyrrho turns round and laughs.) _The Elder_: Ah, friend! Silence and laughter—is that now your whole philosophy? _Pyrrho_: There might be a worse. 214. EUROPEAN BOOKS.—In reading Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Fontenelle (especially the _Dialogues des Morts_), Vauvenargues, and Chamfort we are nearer to antiquity than in any group of six authors of other nations. Through these six the spirit of the last centuries before Christ has once more come into being, and they collectively form an important link in the great and still continuous chain of the Renaissance. Their books are raised above all changes of national taste and philosophical nuances from which as a rule every book takes and must take its hue in order to become famous. They contain more real ideas than all the books of German philosophers put together: ideas of the sort that breed ideas——I am at a loss how to define to the end: enough to say that they appear to me writers who wrote neither for children nor for visionaries, neither for virgins nor for Christians, neither for Germans nor for—I am again at a loss how to finish my list. To praise them in plain terms, I may say that had they been written in Greek, they would have been understood by Greeks. How much, on the other hand, would even a Plato have understood of the writings of our best German thinkers—Goethe and Schopenhauer, for instance—to say nothing of the repugnance that he would have felt to their style, particularly to its obscure, exaggerated, and occasionally dry-as-dust elements? And these are defects from which these two among German thinkers suffer least and yet far too much (Goethe as thinker was fonder than he should have been of embracing the cloud, and