of truth even against himself?"[1] "Never," he charges us, "hold back something, or hide from thyself what can be urged against thy thoughts! Vow to thyself! It belongs to the first honesty of thought. Thou must every day conduct thy campaign against thyself. A victory and a fortress won are not merely thy affair, but truth's—and also thy defeat is not merely thy affair!"[2] In much the same spirit he praises the strictness and severity of science. He thinks that one who devotes himself to scientific work does not look for approval of his success, but only for censure of his failures—like the soldier.[3] He points out the less noble motives in scholarly procedure: "One person holds fast to a view, because he imagines that he has come on it himself, another because he has learned it with labor and is proud to have grasped it—both then from vanity."[4]
We hear tones of irony, too. With a humiliating sense of disillusionment, he, as it were, takes it out in extravagances. He admitted in later years that in reaction from youthful enthusiasms one easily goes too far; "one is angry on account of one's youthful self-deception, as if it had been a sort of dishonest blindness, and by way of compensation is for a long time unreasonable and mistrustful toward oneself and on one's guard against all beautiful feelings."[5] He speaks almost like a cynic at times of the part which unreason plays in human affairs,[6] and once quotes, not without malicious pleasure, a parody, which he calls the most serious he ever heard: "In the beginning was unreason, and the unreason was with God, and was God (divine)."[7] Particularly does he let his irony play on idealists: they put their rainbow colors on everything; if they are thrown out of their heaven, they make out of hell an ideal—they are incurable.[8] He is disgusted with his own previous moral arrogance; he wants to have a better knowledge of what he had despised—to be juster to his own time, of which he had said so many hard things.[9] For all this, he shows his identity with his former self in speaking of the power to lift things into the ideal as man's fairest power, though he adds that we should
