Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 1glorifier of cruelty, in that he compels his spirit to perceive
AGAINST its own inclination, and often enough against
the wishes of his heart:—he forces it to say Nay, where he
would like to affirm, love, and adore; indeed, every instance
of taking a thing profoundly and fundamentally, is a viola-
tion, an intentional injuring of the fundamental will of the
spirit, which instinctively aims at appearance and superfi-
ciality,—even in every desire for knowledge there is a drop
of cruelty.
- Perhaps what I have said here about a ‘fundamental
will of the spirit’ may not be understood without further
details; I may be allowed a word of explanation.—That im-
perious something which is popularly called ‘the spirit,’
wishes to be master internally and externally, and to feel it-
self master; it has the will of a multiplicity for a simplicity, a
binding, taming, imperious, and essentially ruling will. Its
requirements and capacities here, are the same as those as-
signed by physiologists to everything that lives, grows, and
multiplies. The power of the spirit to appropriate foreign el-
ements reveals itself in a strong tendency to assimilate the
new to the old, to simplify the manifold, to overlook or re-
pudiate the absolutely contradictory; just as it arbitrarily
re-underlines, makes prominent, and falsifies for itself cer-
tain traits and lines in the foreign elements, in every portion
of the ‘outside world.’ Its object thereby is the incorporation
of new ‘experiences,’ the assortment of new things in the
old arrangements—in short, growth; or more properly, the
FEELING of growth, the feeling of increased power—is its