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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