Granted that such an incarnate will for contradiction and unnaturalness is induced to _philosophise_; on what will it vent its pet caprice? On that which has been felt with the greatest certainty to be true, to be real; it will look for _error_ in those very places where the life instinct fixes truth with the greatest positiveness. It will, for instance, after the example of the ascetics of the Vedanta Philosophy, reduce matter to an illusion, and similarly treat pain, multiplicity, the whole logical contrast of "_Subject_" and "_Object_"--errors, nothing but errors! To renounce the belief in one's own ego, to deny to one's self one's own "reality"--what a triumph! and here already we have a much higher kind of triumph, which is not merely a triumph over the senses, over the palpable, but an infliction of violence and cruelty on _reason_; and this ecstasy culminates in the ascetic self-contempt, the ascetic scorn of one's own reason making this decree: _there is_ a domain of truth and of life, but reason is specially _excluded_ therefrom.. .. By the bye, even in the Kantian idea of "the intellegible character of things" there remains a trace of that schism, so dear to the heart of the ascetic, that schism which likes to turn reason against reason; in fact, "intelligible character" means in Kant a kind of quality in things of which the intellect comprehends this much, that for it, the intellect, it is _absolutely incomprehensible_. After all, let us, in our character of knowers, not be ungrateful towards such determined reversals of the ordinary perspectives and values, with which the mind had for too long raged against itself with an apparently futile sacrilege! In the same way the very seeing of another vista, the very _wishing_ to see another vista, is no little training and preparation of the intellect for its eternal "_Objectivity_"--objectivity being understood not as "contemplation without interest" (for that is inconceivable and non-sensical), but as the ability to have the pros and cons _in one's power_ and to switch them on and off, so as to get to know how to utilise, for the advancement of knowledge, the _difference_ in the perspective and in the emotional interpretations. But let us, forsooth, my philosophic colleagues, henceforward guard ourselves more carefully against this mythology of dangerous ancient ideas, which has set up a "pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge"; let us guard ourselves from the tentacles of such contradictory ideas as "pure reason," "absolute spirituality," "knowledge-in-itself":--in these theories an eye that cannot be thought of is required to think, an eye which ex hypothesi has no direction at all, an eye in which the active and interpreting functions are cramped, are absent; those functions, I say, by means of which "abstract" seeing first became seeing something; in these theories consequently the absurd and the non-sensical is always demanded of the eye. There is only a seeing