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The Jews, again, took a different view of anger from that held by us, and sanctified it: hence they have placed the sombre majesty of the wrathful man at an elevation so high that a European cannot conceive it. They moulded their wrathful and holy Jehovah after the images of their wrathful and holy prophets. Compared with them, all the Europeans who have exhibited the greatest wrath are, so to speak, only secondhand creatures.
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THE PREJUDICE CONCERNING PURE SPIRIT.Wherever the doctrine of pure spirituality has prevailed, its excesses have resulted in the destruction of the tone of the nerves: it taught that the body should be despised, neglected, or tormented, and that, on account of his impulses, man himself should be tortured and regarded with contempt. It gave rise to gloomy, strained, and downcast soulswho, besides, thought they knew the reason of their misery and how it might possibly be relieved! It must be in the body! For it still thrives too well!such was their conclusion, whilst the fact was that the body, through its agonies, protested time after time against this neverending mockery. Finally, a universal and chronic hypernervousness seized upon those virtuous representatives of the pure spirit: they learned to recognise joy only in the shape of ecstasies and other preliminary symptoms of insanityand their system reached its climax when it came to look upon ecstasy as the highest aim of life, and as the standard by which all earthly things must be condemned.
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MEDITATIONS UPON OBSERVANCES.Numerous moral precepts, carelessly drawn from a single event, quickly became incomprehensible; it was as difficult a matter to deduce their intentions with any degree of certainty as it was to recognise the punishment which was to follow the breaking of the rule. Doubts were even held regarding the order of the ceremonies; but, while people guessed at random about such matters, the object of their investigations increased in importance, it was precisely the greatest absurdity of an observance that developed into a holy of holies. Let us not think too little of the energy wasted by man in this regard throughout thousands of years, and least of all of the effects of such meditations upon observances! Here we find ourselves on the wide trainingground of the intellectnot only do religions develop and continue to increase within its boundaries: but here also is the venerable, though dreadful, primeval world of science; here grow up the poet, the thinker, the physician, the lawgiver. The dread of the unintelligible, which, in an ambiguous fashion, demanded ceremonies from us, gradually assumed the charm of the intricate, and where man could not unravel he learnt to create.
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TO DETERMINE THE VALUE OF THE VITA CONTEMPLATIVA.Let us not forget, as men leading a contemplative life, what kind of evil and misfortunes have overtaken the men of the vita activa as the result of contemplationin short, what sort of contraaccount the vita activa has to offer us, if we exhibit too much boastfulness before it with respect to our good deeds. It would show us, in the first place, those socalled religious natures, who predominate among the lovers of contemplation and consequently represent their commonest type. They have at all times acted in such a manner as to render life difficult to practical men, and tried to make them disgusted with it, if possible: to darken the sky, to obliterate the sun, to cast suspicion upon joy, to depreciate hope, to paralyse the active handall this they knew how to do, just as, for miserable times and feelings, they had their consolations, alms, blessings, and benedictions. In the second place, it can show us the artists, a species of men leading the vita contemplativa, rarer than the religious element, but still often to be met with. As beings, these people are usually intolerable, capricious, jealous, violent, quarrelsome: this, however, must be deduced from the joyous and exalting effects of their works.
Thirdly, we have the philosophers, men who unite religious and artistic qualities, combined, however, with a third element, namely, dialectics and the love of controversy. They are the authors of evil in the same sense as the religious men and artists, in addition to which they have wearied many of their fellowmen with their passion for dialectics, though their number has always been very small. Fourthly, the thinkers and scientific workers. They but rarely strove after effects, and contented themselves with silently sticking to their own groove. Thus they brought about little envy and discomfort, and often, as objects of mockery and derision, they served, without wishing to do so, to make life easier for the men of the vita activa. Lastly, science ended by becoming of much advantage to all; and if, on account of this utility, many of the men who were destined for the vita activa are now slowly making their way along the road to science in the sweat of their brow, and not without brainracking and maledictions, this is not the fault of the crowd of thinkers and scientific workers: it is selfwrought pain.[3]