to compare himself with other, older thinkers, he did so in order to measure his weakness against their strength and to grow colder and bolder towards himself: now he only does so in order to intoxicate himself in the comparison with his own delusion. Formerly he confidently thought of future thinkers—nay, he delighted in seeing himself one day wiped out in their brighter light : now he feels mortified by the fact that he cannot be the last; he tries to find out means to impose upon mankind, in addition to the inheritance which he will bestow on them, also a limitation of sovereign thinking ; he dreads and reviles the pride and love of freedom of individual intellects: after him nobody else shall make his intellect rule absolutely, he wishes himself to continue for ever as the bulwark on which the surge of ideas may break—these are his secret, perhaps not always even his secret wishes. But the hard fret underlying such wishes is that he himself has halted before his doctrine and has put up his boundary-stone, his “So far and no further.” In canonising himself he has drawn up his own certificate of death: henceforth his intellect may not develop any further, his race is run, the watch-hand drops. When a great thinker endeavours to make himself a lasting institution for posterity, we may readily surmise that he has passed the climax of his power and is very tired, very near the setting of his sun.
