knowledge. But he only wishes to lower its price he wants to buy it.
343
Moral pretence.—You refuse to be dissatisfied with yourselves or to suffer through yourselves—and this you call your moral tendency. Very well! another may perhaps call it your cowardice. But one thing is certain you will never manage to get through the world (and you are your own world) and you will for ever be in yourselves a casualty and a clod on the clod. Do you imagine that we, who hold different views, expose ourselves for mere folly's sake to the journey through our own deserts, marshes, and ice-regions, and voluntarily choose pain and the surfeit of ourselves, after the fashion of the Stylites?
344
Subtlety in mistake.—If, as they say, Homer has been able to sleep at times, he was wiser than all artists of restless ambition. We have to allow the admirers time to recover their breath by periodically converting them into critics; for nobody can abide an uninterrupted brilliant and untiring productiveness; and instead of doing good, such a master would turn into a task-master whom we hate whilst he precedes us.
345
Our happiness is no argument either pro or con.—
