to worship where we no longer believe.[1] Nowhere perhaps more than in the religious field does feeling run riot today, nowhere does epicureanism, soft hedonism, more flourish—Nietzsche put it from him. He had the will to be clean with himself, hard with himself—he despised feeling's "soft luxurious flow," if I may borrow Newman's phrase, when the issue was one of truth. He regarded "libertinism of the intellect" as, along with vice, crime, celibacy, pessimism, anarchism, a consequence of decadence.[2] e Sometimes his dread of being taken in seems almost morbid. For instance, in referring to the feelings connected with doing for others, not for ourselves, he says that there is "far too much charm and sweetness in these feelings not to make it necessary to be doubly mistrustful and to ask, 'are they not perhaps seductions?' That they please—please him who has them and him who enjoys their fruits, also the mere onlooker—this still is no argument for them, but just a reason for being circumspect."[3] Pleasure, comfort, the wishes of the heart no test of truth—such is his ever-recurring point of view. Indeed, instead of there being any pre-established harmony between the true and the agreeable, he thinks that the experience of stricter, deeper minds is rather to the contrary.[4] Sometimes his impulse to the true and real is a torment to him, he is böse towards it and declares that not truth, but appearance, falsehood, is divine;[5] and yet the impulse masters him. Posterity, he says, speaks of a man rising higher and higher, but it knows nothing of the martyrdom of the ascent; "a great man is pushed, pressed, crowded, martyred up into his height."[6] He views the philosopher's task as something hard, unwilled, unrefusable; and so far as he is alone, it is not because he wills it, but because he is something that does not find its like.[7] "A philosophy that does not promise to make one happier and more virtuous, that rather lets it be understood that one taking service under it will probably go to ruin—that is, will be solitary in his time, will be burned and scalded, will have to know
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NIETZSCHE THE THINKER
