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THE EGO AND HIS OWN

threw all contents out of the heart and let it no
longer beat for anything; this was the deed of the
Skeptics. The same purgation of the heart was now
achieved in the Skeptical age, as the understanding
had succeeded in establishing in the Sophistic age.

The Sophistic culture has brought it to pass that

one's understanding no longer stands still before any-
thing, and the Skeptical, that his heart is no longer
moved by anything.

So long as man is entangled in the movements of

the world and embarrassed by relations to the world,--
and he is so till the end of antiquity, because his
heart still has to struggle for independence from the
worldly,--so long he is not yet spirit; for spirit is
without body, and has no relations to the world and
corporality; for it the world does not exist, nor
natural bonds, but only the spiritual, and spiritual
bonds. Therefore man must first become so com-
pletely unconcerned and reckless, so altogether without
relations, as the Skeptical culture presents him,--so
altogether indifferent to the world that even its falling
in ruins would not move him,--before he could feel
himself as worldless, i. e. as spirit. And this is the
result of the gigantic work of the ancients: that man
knows himself as a being without relations and without
a world, as spirit.

Only now, after all worldly care has left him, is he

all in all to himself, is he only for himself, i e. he is
spirit for the spirit, or, in plainer language, he cares
only for the spiritual.

In the Christian wisdom of serpents and innocence

of doves the two sides--understanding and heart--of

MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 23

the ancient liberation of mind are so completed that
they appear young and new again, and neither the
one nor the other lets itself be bluffed any longer by
the worldly and natural.

Thus the ancients mounted to spirit, and strove to

become spiritual. But a man who wishes to be active
as spirit is drawn to quite other tasks than he was able
to set himself formerly: to tasks which really give
something to do to the spirit and not to mere sense
or acuteness,* which exerts itself only to become
master of things. The spirit busies itself solely about
the spiritual, and seeks out the " traces of mind " in
everything; to the believing spirit " everything comes
from God," and interests him only to the extent that
it reveals this origin; to the philosophic spirit every-
thing appears with the stamp of reason, and interests
him only so far as he is able to discover in it reason,
i. e. spiritual content.

Not the spirit, then, which has to do with absolutely

nothing unspiritual, with no thing, but only with the
essence which exists behind and above things, with
thoughts,--not that did the ancients exert, for they
did not yet have it; no, they had only reached the
point of struggling and longing for it, and therefore
sharpened it against their too-powerful foe, the world
of sense (but what would not have been sensuous for
them, since Jehovah or the gods of the heathen were
yet far removed from the conception " God is spirit,''
since the " heavenly fatherland " had not yet stepped
into the place of the sensuous, etc.?)--they sharpened

* Italicized in the original for the sake of its etymology, Scharfsinn--
" sharp sense " Compare next paragraph.