USE OF WORDS AND REALITY.—There exists a simulated contempt for all the things that mankind actually holds most important, for all everyday matters. For instance, we say “we only eat to live”—an abominable _lie_, like that which speaks of the procreation of children as the real purpose of all sexual pleasure. Conversely, the reverence for “the most important things” is hardly ever quite genuine. The priests and metaphysicians have indeed accustomed us to a hypocritically exaggerated _use of words_ regarding these matters, but they have not altered the feeling that these most important things are not so important as those despised “everyday matters.” A fatal consequence of this twofold hypocrisy is that we never make these everyday matters (such as eating, housing, clothes, and intercourse) the object of a constant unprejudiced and _universal_ reflection and revision, but, as such a process appears degrading, we divert from them our serious intellectual and artistic side. Hence in such matters habit and frivolity win an easy victory over the thoughtless, especially over inexperienced youth. On the other hand, our continual transgressions of the simplest laws of body and mind reduce us all, young and old, to a disgraceful state of dependence and servitude—I mean to that fundamentally superfluous dependence upon physicians, teachers and clergymen, whose dead-weight still lies heavy upon the whole of society. 6. EARTHLY INFIRMITIES AND THEIR MAIN CAUSE.—If we look about us, we are always coming across men who have eaten eggs all their lives without observing that the oblong-shaped taste the best; who do not know that a thunder-storm is beneficial to the stomach; that perfumes are most fragrant in cold, clear air; that our sense of taste varies in different parts of our mouths; that every meal at which we talk well or listen well does harm to the digestion. If we are not satisfied with these examples of defective powers of observation, we shall concede all the more readily that the everyday matters are very imperfectly seen and rarely observed by the majority. Is this a matter of indifference?—Let us remember, after all, that from this defect are derived _nearly all the bodily and spiritual infirmities_ of the individual. Ignorance of what is good and bad for us, in the arrangement of our mode of life, the division of our day, the selection of our friends and the time we devote to them, in business and leisure, commanding and obeying, our feeling for nature and for art, our eating, sleeping, and meditation; ignorance and lack of keen perceptions _in the smallest and most ordinary details_—this it is that makes the world “a vale of tears” for so many. Let us not say that here as everywhere the fault lies with human _unreason_. Of reason there is enough and to spare, but it is _wrongly directed_ and _artificially diverted_ from these little intimate things. Priests and teachers, and the sublime