_"Science" as Prejudice_.--It follows from the laws of class distinction that the learned, in so far as they belong to the intellectual middle-class, are debarred from getting even a sight of the really _great_ problems and notes of interrogation. Besides, their courage, and similarly their outlook, does not reach so far,--and above all, their need, which makes them investigators, their innate anticipation and desire that things should be constituted _in such and such a way_, their fears and hopes are too soon quieted and set at rest. For example, that which makes the pedantic Englishman, Herbert Spencer, so enthusiastic in his way, and impels him to draw a line of hope, a horizon of desirability, the final reconciliation of "egoism and altruism" of which he dreams,--that almost causes nausea to people like us:--a humanity with such Spencerian perspectives as ultimate perspectives would seem to us deserving of contempt, of extermination! But the _fact_ that something has to be taken by him as his highest hope, which is regarded, and may well be regarded, by others merely as a distasteful possibility, is a note of interrogation which Spencer could not have foreseen.... It is just the same with the belief with which at present so many materialistic natural-scientists are content, the belief in a world which is supposed to have its equivalent and measure in human thinking and human valuations, a "world of truth" at which we might be able ultimately to arrive with the help of our insignificant, four-cornered human reason! What? do we actually wish to have existence debased in that fashion to a ready-reckoner exercise and calculation for stay-at-home mathematicians? We should not, above all, seek to divest existence of its _ambiguous_ character: _good_ taste forbids it, gentlemen, the taste of reverence for everything that goes beyond your horizon! That a world-interpretation is alone right by which _you_ maintain your position, by which investigation and work can go on scientifically in _your_ sense (you really mean _mechanically?_), an interpretation which acknowledges numbering, calculating, weighing, seeing and handling, and nothing more--such an idea is a piece of grossness and naïvety, provided it is not lunacy and idiocy. Would the reverse not be quite probable, that the most superficial and external characters of existence--its most apparent quality, its outside, its embodiment--should let themselves be apprehended first? perhaps alone allow themselves to be apprehended? A "scientific" interpretation of the world as you understand it might consequently still be one of the _stupidest,_ that is to say, the most destitute of significance, of all possible world-interpretations--I say this in confidence to my friends the Mechanicians, who to-day like to hobnob with philosophers, and absolutely believe that mechanics is the teaching of the first and last laws upon which, as upon a ground-floor, all existence must be built.