against themselves; they had to fight down every kind of suspicion and antagonism against “the philosophic element in themselves.” Being men of a terrible age, they did this with terrible means: cruelty to themselves, ingenious self-mortification⁠—this was the chief method of these ambitious hermits and intellectual revolutionaries, who were obliged to force down the gods and the traditions of their own soul, so as to enable themselves to believe in their own revolution. I remember the famous story of the King Vicvamitra, who, as the result of a thousand years of self-martyrdom, reached such a consciousness of power and such a confidence in himself that he undertook to build a new heaven : the sinister symbol of the oldest and newest history of philosophy in the whole world. Everyone who has ever built anywhere a “ new heaven ” first found the power thereto in his own hell .⁠ ⁠… Let us compress the facts into a short formula. The philosophic spirit had, in order to be