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THE EGO AND HIS OWN

innate negroidity ; this was followed in the second by
Mongoloidity (Chineseness), which must likewise be
terribly made an end of. Negroidity represents
antiquity, the time of dependence on things (on cocks'
eating, birds' flight, on sneezing, on thunder and
lightning, on the rustling of sacred trees, etc.) ; Mon-
goloidity the time of dependence on thoughts, the
Christian time. Reserved for the future are the words
" I am owner of the world of things, and I am owner
of the world of mind."

In the negroid age fall the campaigns of Sesostris

and the importance of Egypt and of northern Africa
in general. To the Mongoloid age belong the in-
vasions of the Huns and Mongols, up to the Russians.

The value of me cannot possibly be rated high so

long as the hard diamond of the not-me bears so
enormous a price as was the case both with God and
with the world. The not-me is still too stony and
indomitable to be consumed and absorbed by me;
rather, men only creep about with extraordinary bustle
on this immovable entity, i. e. on this substance, like
parasitic animals on a body from whose juices they
draw nourishment, yet without consuming it. It is
the bustle of vermin, the assiduity of Mongolians.
Among the Chinese, we know, everything remains as
it used to be, and nothing " essential " or " substan-
tial" suffers a change; all the more actively do they
work away at that which remains, which bears the
name of the " old," " ancestors," etc.

Accordingly, in our Mongolian age all change has

been only reformatory or ameliorative, not destructive
or consuming and annihilating. The substance, the

MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 87

object, remains. All our assiduity was only the
activity of ants and the hopping of fleas, jugglers'
tricks on the immovable tight-rope of the objective,
corvée-service under the lordship of the unchangeable
or " eternal." The Chinese are doubtless the most
positive nation, because totally buried in precepts; but
neither has the Christian age come out from the posi-
tive, i. e. from " limited freedom," freedom " within
certain limits." In the most advanced stage of civili-
zation this activity earns the name of scientific activ-
ity, of working on a motionless presupposition, a
hypothesis that is not to be upset.

In its first and most unintelligible form morality

shows itself as habit. To act according to the habit
and usage (morem) of one's country--is to be moral
there. Therefore pure moral action, clear, unadulter-
ated morality, is most straightforwardly practised in
China; they keep to the old habit and usage, and hate
each innovation as a crime worthy of death. For
innovation is the deadly enemy of habit, of the old, of
permanence. In fact, too, it admits of no doubt that
through habit man secures himself against the ob-
trusiveness of things, of the world, and founds a world
of his own in which alone he is and feels at home, i. e.
builds himself a heaven. Why, heaven has no other
meaning than that it is man's proper home, in which
nothing alien regulates and rules him any longer, no
influence of the earthly any longer makes him himself
alien ; in short, in which the dross of the earthly is
thrown off, and the combat against the world has
found an end,--in which, therefore, nothing is any
longer denied him. Heaven is the end of abnegation,