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106
THE EGO AND HIS OWN
happens to be a very good-for-nothing sense. The
impudent lads will no longer let anything be whined
and chattered into them by you, and will have no
sympathy for all the follies for which you have been
raving and driveling since the memory of man began;
they will abolish the law of inheritance, i. e. they will
not be willing to inherit your stupidities as you in-
herited them from your fathers; they destroy inherited
sin.* If you command them, " Bend before the Most
High," they will answer : " If he wants to bend us,
let him come himself and do it; we, at least, will not
bend of our own accord." And, if you threaten them
with his wrath and his punishment, they will take it
like being threatened with the bogie-man. If you are
no longer successful in making them afraid of ghosts,
then the dominion of ghosts is at an end, and nurses'
tales find no--faith.
And is it not precisely the liberals again that press
for good education and improvement of the educa-
tional system ? For how could their liberalism, their
" liberty within the bounds of law," come about with-
out discipline ? Even if they do not exactly educate
to the fear of God, yet they demand the fear of Man
all the more strictly, and awaken " enthusiasm for
the truly human calling" by discipline.
A long time passed away, in which people were
satisfied with the fancy that they had the truth, with-
out thinking seriously whether perhaps they them-
selves must be true to possess the truth. This time
* [Called in English theology " original sin."]
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 107
was the Middle Ages. With the common conscious-
ness--i. e. the consciousness which deals with things,
that consciousness which has receptivity only for
things, or for what is sensuous and sense-moving--
they thought to grasp what did not deal with things
and was not perceptible by the senses. As one does
indeed also exert his eye to see the remote, or labori-
ously exercise his hand till its fingers have become
dexterous enough to press the keys correctly, so they
chastened themselves in the most manifold ways, in
order to become capable of receiving the supersensual
wholly into themselves. But what they chastened
was, after all, only the sensual man, the common con-
sciousness, so-called finite or objective thought. Yet
as this thought, this understanding, which Luther de-
cries under the name of reason, is incapable of com-
prehending the divine, its chastening contributed just
as much to the understanding of the truth as if one
exercised the feet year in and year out in dancing, and
hoped that in this way they would finally learn to
play the flute. Luther, with whom the so-called Mid-
dle Ages end, was the first who understood that the
man himself must become other than he was if he
wanted to comprehend truth,--must become as true as
truth itself. Only he who already has truth in his
belief, only he who believes in it, can become a par-
taker of it; i. e., only the believer finds it accessible
and sounds its depths. Only that organ of man which
is able to blow can attain the further capacity of flute-
playing, and only that man can become a partaker of
truth who has the right organ for it. He who is
capable of thinking only what is sensuous, objective,