more so since old age, like nuto the evening, is fond of vesting itself with a new and charming morality, and knows how to put the day to shame by evening skies, twilight, a peaceful or longing silence. The reverence which we feel towards an old man, especially if he is an old sage, easily blinds us as to his intellectual decline, and it is always necessary to draw forth from their hiding-place the characteristics of such a decline and fatigue, that is the psychological phenomenon which lurks behind the moral advantages and prejudices, lest we might become the fools of piety and destroyers of knowledge. For not infrequently the old man indulges in the delusion of a great moral renovation and regeneration, and, starting from this point of view, expresses his opinions on the work and course of his life, just as if only then he had grown clairvoyant ; and yet it is not wisdom, but weariness, which prompts this agreeable sensation and these positive judgments. As its most dangerous characteristic we may mention the belief in genius, which usually asserts itself in great and semi-great men of genius only at this period of life: the belief in an exceptional position and in exceptional rights. The thinker who is infested with this belief, deems it henceforth permissible to take things more easily and in his capacity of genius to decree rather than prove: yet probably the craving of the weary intellect after alleviation is the strongest source of that belief, it precedes the latter in time though it may seem otherwise. Moreover at this period people, in accordance with the love
