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most thinkers and scholars from their own experience, and
therefore, should any one speak of it in their presence, it is
incredible to them. They conceive of every necessity as trou-
blesome, as a painful compulsory obedience and state of
constraint; thinking itself is regarded by them as something
slow and hesitating, almost as a trouble, and often enough
as ‘worthy of the SWEAT of the noble’—but not at all as
something easy and divine, closely related to dancing and
exuberance! ‘To think’ and to take a matter ‘seriously,’ ‘ar-
duously’—that is one and the same thing to them; such only
has been their ‘experience.’— Artists have here perhaps a
finer intuition; they who know only too well that precisely
when they no longer do anything ‘arbitrarily,’ and every-
thing of necessity, their feeling of freedom, of subtlety, of
power, of creatively fixing, disposing, and shaping, reaches
its climax—in short, that necessity and ‘freedom of will’ are
then the same thing with them. There is, in fine, a grada-
tion of rank in psychical states, to which the gradation of
rank in the problems corresponds; and the highest prob-
lems repel ruthlessly every one who ventures too near them,
without being predestined for their solution by the loftiness
and power of his spirituality. Of what use is it for nimble,
everyday intellects, or clumsy, honest mechanics and em-
piricists to press, in their plebeian ambition, close to such
problems, and as it were into this ‘holy of holies’—as so of-
ten happens nowadays! But coarse feet must never tread
upon such carpets: this is provided for in the primary law of
things; the doors remain closed to those intruders, though
they may dash and break their heads thereon. People have