‘Science’ as prejudice. — It follows from the laws that govern rank-ordering that scholars, insofar as they belong to the intellectual middle class, are not even allowed to catch sight of the truly great problems and question marks; moreover, their courage and eyes simply don’t reach that far — and above all, the need that makes them scholars, their inner expectations and wish that things might be such and such, their fear and hope, too soon find rest and satisfaction. What makes, for instance, the pedantic Englishman Herbert Spencer rave in his own way and makes him draw a line of hope, a horizon which defines what is desirable; that definitive reconciliation of ‘egoism and altruism’ about which he spins fables — this almost nauseates the likes of us: a human race that adopts as its ultimate perspective such a Spencerian perspective would strike us as deserving of contempt, of annihilation! But that he had to view as his highest hope what to others counts and should count only as a disgusting possibility is a question mark that Spencer would have been unable to foresee. So, too, it is with the faith with which so many materialistic natural scientists rest content: the faith in a world that is supposed to have its equivalent and measure in human thought, in human valuations — a ‘world of truth’ that can be grasped entirely with the help of our four-cornered little human reason — What? Do we really want to demote existence in this way to an exercise in arithmetic and an indoor diversion for mathematicians? Above all, one shouldn’t want to strip it of its ambiguous character: that, gentlemen, is what good taste demands — above all, the taste of reverence for everything that lies beyond your horizon! That the only rightful interpretation of the world should be one to which you have a right; one by which one can do research and go on scientifically in your sense of the term (you really mean mechanistically?) — one that permits counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, grasping, and nothing else — that is a crudity and naivety, assuming it is not a mental illness, an idiocy. Would it not be quite probable, conversely, that precisely the most superficial and external aspect of existence — what is most apparent; its skin and its sensualization — would be grasped first and might even be the only thing that let itself be grasped? Thus, a ‘scientific’ interpretation of the world, as you understand it, might still be one of the stupidest of all possible interpretations of the world, i.e. one of those most lacking in significance. This to the ear and conscience of Mr. Mechanic, who nowadays likes to pass as a philosopher and insists that mechanics is the doctrine of the first and final laws on which existence may be built, as on a ground floor. But an essentially mechanistic world would be an essentially meaningless world! Suppose one judged the value of a piece of music according to how much of it could be counted, calculated, and expressed in formulas — how absurd such a ‘scientific’ evaluation of music would be! What would one have comprehended, understood, recognized? Nothing, really nothing of what is ‘music’ in it!