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50
THE EGO AND HIS OWN
represent the highest essence, that makes no difference
at all for him who denies the highest essence itself, for
in his eyes those servants of a highest essence are one
and all--pious people, the most raging atheist not less
than the most faith-filled Christian.
In the foremost place of the sacred,* then, stands
the highest essence and the faith in this essence, our
"holy faith."
The Spook
With ghosts we arrive in the spirit-realm, in the
realm of essences
What haunts the universe, and has its occult, " in-
comprehensible " being there, is precisely the myste-
rious spook that we call highest essence. And to get
to the bottom of this spook, to comprehend it, to dis-
cover reality in it (to prove " the existence of God ")
--this task men set to themselves for thousands of
years, with the horrible impossibility, the endless
Danaid-labor, of transforming the spook into a non-
spook, the unreal into something real, the spirit into
an entire and corporeal person,--with this they tor-
mented themselves to death. Behind the existing
world they sought the " thing in itself," the essence;
behind the thing they sought the un-thing.
When one looks to the bottom of anything, i. e.
searches out its essence, one often discovers something
quite other than what it seems to be; honeyed speech
and a lying heart, pompous words and beggarly
thoughts, etc. By bringing the essence into promi-
* [heilig] [heilig]
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW
51
nence one degrades the hitherto misapprehended ap-
pearance to a bare semblance, a deception. The
essence of the world, so attractive and splendid, is for
him who looks to the bottom of it--emptiness; empti-
ness is = world's essence (world's doings). Now, he
who is religious does not occupy himself with the de-
ceitful semblance, with the empty appearances, but
looks upon the essence, and in the essence has--the
truth.
The essences which are deduced from some appear-
ances are the evil essences, and conversely from others
the good. The essence of human feeling, e. g , is
love; the essence of human will is the good; that of
one's thinking, the true; etc.
What at first passed for existence, such as the world
and its like, appears now as bare semblance, and the
truly existent is much rather the essence, whose realm
is filled with gods, spirits, demons, i. e. with good or
bad essences. Only this inverted world, the world of
essences, truly exists now. The human heart may be
loveless, but its essence exists, God, " who is love " ;
human thought may wander in error, but its essence,
truth, exists; "God is truth,"--etc.
To know and acknowledge essences alone and
nothing but essences, that is religion; its realm is a
realm of essences, spooks, and ghosts.
The longing to make the spook comprehensible, or
to realize non-sense, has brought about a corporeal
ghost, a ghost or spirit with a real body, an embodied
ghost. How the strongest and most talented Chris-
tians have tortured themselves to get a conception of
this ghostly apparition ! But there always remained