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24
THE EGO AND HIS OWN
against the world of sense their
sense,
their acuteness.
To this day the Jews, those precocious children of an-
tiquity, have got no farther; and with all the subtlety
and strength of their prudence and understanding,
which easily becomes master of things and forces them
to obey it, they cannot discover
spirit,
which
takes no
account whatever of things.
The Christian has spiritual interests, because he al-
lows himself to be a spiritual man; the Jew does not
even understand these interests in their purity, because
he does not allow himself to assign no value to things.
He does not arrive at pure spirituality, a spirituality
such as is religiously expressed, e. g., in the faith of
Christians, which alone (i. e. without works) justifies.
Their unspirituality sets Jews forever apart from
Christians; for the spiritual man is incomprehensible
to the unspiritual, as the unspiritual is contemptible to
the spiritual. But the Jews have only " the spirit of
this world."
The ancient acuteness and profundity lies as far
from the spirit and the spirituality of the Christian
world as earth from heaven.
He who feels himself as free spirit is not oppressed
and made anxious by the things of this world, because
he does not care for them; if one is still to feel their
burden, he must be narrow enough to attach weight to
them,--as is evidently the case, for instance, when one
is still concerned for his " dear life." He to whom
everything centres in knowing and conducting himself
as a free spirit gives little heed to how scantily he is
supplied meanwhile, and does not reflect at all on how
he must make his arrangements to have a thoroughly
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 25
free or enjoyable life. He is not disturbed by the in-
conveniences of the life that depends on things, because
he lives only spiritually and on spiritual food, while
aside from this he only gulps things down like a
beast, hardly knowing it, and dies bodily, to be sure,
when his fodder gives out, but knows himself immor-
tal as spirit, and closes his eyes with an adoration or a
thought. His life is occupation with the spiritual, is
--thinking; the rest does not bother him; let him
busy himself with the spiritual in any way that he can
and chooses,--in devotion, in contemplation, or in
philosophic cognition,--his doing is always thinking;
and therefore Descartes, to whom this had at last be-
come quite clear, could lay down the proposition: " I
think, that is--I am." This means, my thinking is
my being or my life; only when I live spiritually do I
live; only as spirit am I really, or--I am spirit
through and through and nothing but spirit. Un-
lucky Peter Schlemihl, who has lost his shadow, is the
portrait of this man become a spirit; for the spirit's
body is shadowless.--Over against this, how different
among the ancients! Stoutly and manfully as they
might bear themselves against the might of things,
they must yet acknowledge the might itself, and got no
farther than to protect their life against it as well as
possible. Only at a late hour did they recognize that
their " true life " was not that which they led in the
fight against the things of the world, but the " spiritual
life," "turned away" from these things; and, when
they saw this, they became--Christians, i. e. the
moderns, and innovators upon the ancients. But the
life turned away from things, the spiritual life, no