For verily they have not been deficient in faithful reticence; rather do they excel in this quality wherever they scent merit. And, after all, it is no doubt the cleverest artifice; for what no one knows, is as though it did not exist. Whether the _merces_ will remain quite so _tuta_, seems rather doubtful--unless we are to take _merces_ in a _bad_ sense; and for this the support of many a classical authority might certainly be found. These gentlemen had seen quite rightly that the only means to be used against my writings, was to secrete them from the public by maintaining profound silence concerning them, while they kept up a loud noise at the birth of every misshapen offspring of professorial philosophy; as the voice of the new-born Zeus was drowned in days of yore by the clashing of the cymbals of the Corybantes. But this expedient is now used up; the secret is out--the public has discovered me. The rage of our professors of philosophy at this is great, but powerless; for their only effective resource, so long successfully employed, being exhausted, no snarling can avail any longer against my influence, and in vain do they now take this, or that, or the other attitude. They have certainly succeeded, so far as the generation which was properly speaking contemporaneous with my philosophy, went to the grave in ignorance of it. But this was a mere postponement, and Time has kept its word, as it always does. Now there are two reasons why these gentlemen "in the philosophical trade"--as they call themselves with incredible _naïveté_--hate my philosophy. The first of them is, that my writings spoil the taste of the public for tissues of empty phrases, for accumulations of unmeaning words piled one upon another, for hollow, superficial, brain-racking twaddle, for Christian dogmatics under the disguise of the most wearisome Metaphysics, for systematized Philistinism of the flattest kind made to represent Ethics and even accompanied by instructions for card-playing and dancing--in short, they unfit my readers for the whole method of philosophising _à la vieille femme_, which has scared so many for ever from the pursuit of philosophy.