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THE EGO AND HIS OWN

only to this,--that one must maintain and assert him-
self against the world; and the ethics of the Stoics
(their only science, since they could tell nothing about
the spirit but how it should behave toward the world,
and of nature [physics] only this, that the wise man
must assert himself against it) is not a doctrine of the
spirit, but only a doctrine of the repelling of the world
and of self-assertion against the world. And this con-
sists in " imperturbability and equanimity of life," and
so in the most explicit Roman virtue.

The Romans too (Horace, Cicero, etc.) went no

further than this

practical philosophy.

The comfort (hedone) of the Epicureans is the same

practical philosophy the Stoics teach, only trickier,
more deceitful. They teach only another behavior to-
ward the world, exhort us only to take a shrewd atti-
tude toward the world; the world must be deceived,
for it is my enemy.

The break with the world is completely carried

through by the Skeptics. My entire relation to the
world is " worthless and truthless." Timon says, " The
feelings and thoughts which we draw from the world
contain no truth." " What is truth ? " cries Pilate.
According to Pyrrho's doctrine the world is neither
good nor bad, neither beautiful nor ugly, etc., but
these are predicates which I give it. Timon says that
"in itself nothing is either good or bad, but man only
thinks of it thus or thus " ; to face the world only ata-
raxia (unmovedness) and aphasia (speechlessness--or,
in other words, isolated inwardness) are left. There
is " no longer any truth to be recognized " in the
world; things contradict themselves; thoughts about

MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 29

things are without distinction (good and bad are all
the same, so that what one calls good another finds
bad); here the recognition of " truth " is at an end,
and only the

man without power of recognition,

the

man

who finds in the world nothing to recognize, is

left, and this man just leaves the truth-vacant world
where it is and takes no account of it.

So antiquity gets through with the world of things,

the order of the world, the world as a whole; but to
the order of the world, or the things of this world, be-
long not only nature, but all relations in which man
sees himself placed by nature, e. g. the family, the
community,--in short, the so-called "natural bonds."
With the world of the spirit Christianity then begins.
The man who still faces the world armed is the an-
cient, the--heathen (to which class the Jew, too, as
non-Christian, belongs); the man who has come to be
led by nothing but his " heart's pleasure," the interest
he takes, his fellow-feeling, his--spirit, is the modern,
the--Christian.

As the ancients worked toward the conquest of the

world and strove to release man from the heavy tram-
mels of connection with other things, at last they came
also to the dissolution of the State and giving prefer-
ence to everything private. Of course community,
family, etc., as natural relations, are burdensome hin-
drances which diminish my spiritual freedom.