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However gratefully one may welcome the objective spirit⁠—and who has not been sick to death of all subjectivity and its confounded ipsissimosity !⁠—in the end, however, one must learn caution even with regard to one’s gratitude, and put a stop to the exaggeration with which the unselfing and depersonalizing of the spirit has recently been celebrated, as if it were the goal in itself, as if it were salvation and glorification⁠—as is especially accustomed to happen in the pessimist school, which has also in its turn good reasons for paying the highest honours to “disinterested knowledge.” The objective man, who no longer curses and scolds like the pessimist, the ideal man of learning in whom the scientific instinct blossoms forth fully after a thousand complete and partial failures, is assuredly one of the most costly instruments that exist, but his place is in the hand of one who is more powerful. He is only an instrument, we may say, he is a mirror ⁠—he is no “purpose in himself.” The objective man is in truth a mirror accustomed to prostration before everything that wants to be known, with such desires only as knowing or “reflecting” implies⁠—he waits until something comes, and then expands himself sensitively, so that even the light footsteps and gliding-past of spiritual beings may not be lost on his surface and film. Whatever “personality” he still possesses seems to him accidental, arbitrary, or still oftener, disturbing, so much has he come to regard himself as the passage and reflection of outside forms and events. He calls up the recollection of “himself” with an effort, and not infrequently wrongly, he readily confounds himself with other persons, he makes mistakes with regard to his own needs, and here only is he unrefined and negligent. Perhaps he is troubled about the health, or the pettiness and confined atmosphere of wife and friend, or the lack of companions and society⁠—indeed, he sets himself to reflect on his suffering, but in vain! His thoughts already rove away to the more general case, and tomorrow he knows as little as he