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230. Perhaps what I have said here about a "fundamental will of the
spirit" may not be understood without further details; I may be allowed
a word of explanation.--That imperious something which is popularly
called "the spirit," wishes to be master internally and externally,
and to feel itself master; it has the will of a multiplicity for a
simplicity, a binding, taming, imperious, and essentially ruling will.
Its requirements and capacities here, are the same as those assigned by
physiologists to everything that lives, grows, and multiplies. The power
of the spirit to appropriate foreign elements reveals itself in a strong
tendency to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold,
to overlook or repudiate the absolutely contradictory; just as it
arbitrarily re-underlines, makes prominent, and falsifies for itself
certain traits and lines in the foreign elements, in every portion of
the "outside world." Its object thereby is the incorporation of new
"experiences," the assortment of new things in the old arrangements--in
short, growth; or more properly, the FEELING of growth, the feeling of
increased power--is its object. This same will has at its service an
apparently opposed impulse of the spirit, a suddenly adopted preference
of ignorance, of arbitrary shutting out, a closing of windows, an inner
denial of this or that, a prohibition to approach, a sort of defensive
attitude against much that is knowable, a contentment with obscurity,
with the shutting-in horizon, an acceptance and approval of ignorance:
as that which is all necessary according to the degree of its
appropriating power, its "digestive power," to speak figuratively (and
in fact "the spirit" resembles a stomach more than anything else). Here
also belong an occasional propensity of the spirit to let itself be
deceived (perhaps with a waggish suspicion that it is NOT so and so,
but is only allowed to pass as such), a delight in uncertainty and
ambiguity, an exulting enjoyment of arbitrary, out-of-the-way narrowness
and mystery, of the too-near, of the foreground, of the magnified,
the diminished, the misshapen, the beautified--an enjoyment of the
arbitrariness of all these manifestations of power. Finally, in this
connection, there is the not unscrupulous readiness of the spirit to
deceive other spirits and dissemble before them--the constant pressing
and straining of a creating, shaping, changeable power: the spirit
enjoys therein its craftiness and its variety of disguises, it enjoys
also its feeling of security therein--it is precisely by its Protean
arts that it is best protected and concealed!--COUNTER TO this
propensity for appearance, for simplification, for a disguise, for a
cloak, in short, for an outside--for every outside is a cloak--there
operates the sublime tendency of the man of knowledge, which takes, and
INSISTS on taking things profoundly, variously, and thoroughly; as a
kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste, which every
courageous thinker will acknowledge in himself, provided, as it ought
to be, that he has sharpened and hardened his eye sufficiently long for
introspection, and is accustomed to severe discipline and even severe
words. He will say: "There is something cruel in the tendency of my
spirit": let the virtuous and amiable try to convince him that it is not
so! In fact, it would sound nicer, if, instead of our cruelty, perhaps
our "extravagant honesty" were talked about, whispered about, and
glorified--we free, VERY free spirits--and some day perhaps SUCH will
actually be our--posthumous glory! Meanwhile--for there is plenty of
time until then--we should be least inclined to deck ourselves out in
such florid and fringed moral verbiage; our whole former work has
just made us sick of this taste and its sprightly exuberance. They are
beautiful, glistening, jingling, festive words: honesty, love of truth,
love of wisdom, sacrifice for knowledge, heroism of the truthful--there
is something in them that makes one's heart swell with pride. But we
anchorites and marmots have long ago persuaded ourselves in all the
secrecy of an anchorite's conscience, that this worthy parade of
verbiage also belongs to the old false adornment, frippery, and
gold-dust of unconscious human vanity, and that even under such
flattering colour and repainting, the terrible original text HOMO NATURA
must again be recognized. In effect, to translate man back again into
nature; to master the many vain and visionary interpretations and
subordinate meanings which have hitherto been scratched and daubed over
the eternal original text, HOMO NATURA; to bring it about that man shall
henceforth stand before man as he now, hardened by the discipline
of science, stands before the OTHER forms of nature, with fearless
Oedipus-eyes, and stopped Ulysses-ears, deaf to the enticements of old
metaphysical bird-catchers, who have piped to him far too long: "Thou
art more! thou art higher! thou hast a different origin!"--this may be
a strange and foolish task, but that it is a TASK, who can deny! Why did
we choose it, this foolish task? Or, to put the question differently:
"Why knowledge at all?" Every one will ask us about this. And thus
pressed, we, who have asked ourselves the question a hundred times, have
not found and cannot find any better answer....

231. Learning alters us, it does what all nourishment does that does not
merely "conserve"--as the physiologist knows. But at the bottom of our
souls, quite "down below," there is certainly something unteachable,
a granite of spiritual fate, of predetermined decision and answer to
predetermined, chosen questions. In each cardinal problem there speaks
an unchangeable "I am this"; a thinker cannot learn anew about man and
woman, for instance, but can only learn fully--he can only follow to the
end what is "fixed" about them in himself. Occasionally we find certain
solutions of problems which make strong beliefs for us; perhaps they
are henceforth called "convictions." Later on--one sees in them only
footsteps to self-knowledge, guide-posts to the problem which we
ourselves ARE--or more correctly to the great stupidity which we embody,
our spiritual fate, the UNTEACHABLE in us, quite "down below."--In view
of this liberal compliment which I have just paid myself, permission
will perhaps be more readily allowed me to utter some truths about
"woman as she is," provided that it is known at the outset how literally
they are merely--MY truths.