450
The allurement of knowledge.—A peep through the gates of science acts on passionate characters as the charm of charms; they will probably become dreamers, or, at best, poets, so eager is their craving for the felicity of discernment. Does it not enter into your thoughts,— this note of sweet allurement wherewith science has announced its joyful message in a hundred words, and in the hundred and first and noblest: “Avaunt, delusion! Then the ‘woe me’ will also vanish ! and with ‘ woe me’ the woe itself be gone” (Marcus Aurelius).
451
Who is in need of a court-jester.—Those who are very beautiful, very good, and very powerful, hardly ever learn the full and bare truth about anything,—for in their presence we quite involuntarily tell an untruth, because we feel their influence, and, according to this influence, convey the truth, which we could convey as such, in the form of an adaptation (by falsifying shades wild degrees of realities, omitting or adding particulars, and keeping back that which does not admit of any adaptation). If, despite all this, people of that desperation absolutely wish to learn the truth, they will have to keep their court-jester,—a being with the madman’s privilege of being unable to adapt himself.
