At this point I can no longer evade a direct answer to the question, kow one becomes wkat one is. And here I touch upon the master stroke of the art of self-preservation-selfiskness. If we assume that one's life-task-the determination and the fate of one's life-task-appreciably surpasses the average measure, nothing would be more dangerous than to come face to face with one's self by the side of this life-task. The fact that one becomes what one is, presupposes that one has not the remotest suspicion ,of what one is. From this standpoint a unique meaning and value is given to even the blunders of one's life, the temporary deviations and aberrations, the hesitations, the timidities, the earnestness wasted upon tasks remote from the central one. In these matters there is opportunity for great wisdom, perhaps even the highest wisdom; in circumstances, where nosce teipsum would be the passport to ruin, the forgetting of one's self, the misunderstanding, the belittling, the narrowing and the mediocratizing of one's self, amount to reason itself. In moral terms: to love one's neighbor and to live,for others and for other thin-s may be the means of protection for the maintenance of the most rigorous egoism. This is the exceptional case in which I, contrary to my custom and conviction, take the side of the "selfless" tendencies, for here they are engaged in the service of selfishness and self-discipline. The whole surface of consciousness-for consciousness is a surface-must be kept free of any of the great imperatives. Beware even of every striking word, of every striking gesture! They all lead to the dangerous possibility that the instinct may "understand itself" too soon. Meanwhile the organizing "idea," destined to mastery, continues to grow in the depths-it begins to command, it leads you slowly back from your deviations and aberrations, it makes ready individual qualities and capacities, which will some day make themselves felt as indispensable to the whole of your task-gradually it cultivates all the serviceable faculties before it ever whispers a word concerning the dominant task, the "goal," the "purpose," and the "meaning." Viewed from this angle, my life is simply amazing. For the task of transvaluing values, more abilities were necessary perhaps than could ever be found combined in one individual; and above all, opposed abilities which must yet not be mutually inimical and destructive. An order of rank among capacities; distance; the art of separating without creating hostility; to confuse nothing; to reconcile nothing; to be tremendously various and yet to be the reverse of chaos-all this was the first condition, the long secret work and artistry of my instinct. Its superior guardianship manifested itself so powerfully that at no time did I have any intimation of what was growing within me-until suddenly all my capacities were ripe, and one day burst forth in full perfection. I can recall no instance of my ever having exerted myself, there is no evidence of struggle in my life; I am the reverse of a heroic nature. To "will" something, to "strive" after something, to have a "purpose" or a "desire" in my mind - I know none of these things from experience. At this very moment I look out upon my future-a broad future!-as upon a calm sea: no longing disturbs its serenity. I have not the slightest wish that anything should be, different than it is: I myself do not wish to be different. I have always been this way. I have never had a desire. A man who, after his forty-fourth year, can say that he has never troubled himself about honors, women, or money!not that they were lacking to me. . . . It was in this way, for example, that one day I became a University Professor-such an idea had never even entered my head, for I was hardly twenty-four. In the same way, two years before, I had one day become a philologist, in the sense that my first philological work,' my start in every way, was requested by my master, Ritschl, for publication in his Rheinisckes Museum. (Ritschl-I say it in all reverence-was the only genial scholar I have ever known. He possessed that engaging depravity which distinguishes us Thuringians, and which can make even a German sympathetic-even to arrive at truth we prefer roundabout ways. These words should not be taken as a deprecation in any sense of my Thuringian co-dweller, the intelligent Leopold von Ranke.
