Supposing that truth is a woman, what then?
Is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been dominists, have failed to understand women?
That the terrible seriousness and clumsy impotunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to truth
have been unskilled in unseemly methods for winning a woman?
Certainly she has never allowed herself to be one.
In that present, every kind of dogma stands with sad and discouraged mean, if indeed it stands at all.
For there are scoffers who maintain that it has fallen,
that all dogma lies on the ground, nay more than it is at its last gasp.
But to speak seriously, there are good grounds for hoping that all dogmatizing and philosophy,
whatever solemn, whatever conclusive and decided airs it has assumed,
may have been only a noble pluralism and tyrannism, and probably the times at hand
when it will be once and again understood what has actually sufficed
for the basis of such imposing and absolute philosophical edifices as the dogmatists have hitherto read.
Perhaps some popular superstition of immemorial time, such as the soul-superstition,
which, in the form of subject and ego-superstition, has not yet ceased to mischief.
Perhaps some play upon words, a deception as part of grammar,
or an audacious generalization of very restricted, very personal, very human, all-too-human facts.
The philosophy of the dogmatists, it is to be hoped, was only a promise for thousands of years afterwards.
This was astrology in still earlier times, in the service of which probably more labor,
gold, acuteness and patience have been spent than on any actual science hitherto.
We owe to it, and to its subterrestrial pretensions in Asia and Egypt, a grand style of architecture.
It seems that in order to inscribe themselves upon the heart of humanity with everlasting claims,
all great things have us to wonder about the earth as enormous and awe-inspiring caricatures.
Dogmatic philosophy has been a caricature of this kind.
For instance, the Dantidoctrine in Asia and Platonism in Europe.
Let us not be ungrateful to it, although it most certainly be confessed that the worst,
the most tiresome and the most dangerous of heresies the two has been a dogmatist era.
Namely, Plato's invention of the pure spirit and the good in itself.
But now, when it has been surmounted, when you are afraid of this nightmare,
can I again draw breath freely and at least enjoy a healthy sleep?
We whose duty is wakeful, wakefulness itself, are the heirs of all the strength
which the struggle against this era has fostered.
It's mounted to the very inversion of truth, the denial of the perspective,
the fundamental condition of life, to speak of spirit and the good as Plato spoke.
Indeed, one might ask as a physician, how did such a malady attack that,
for honest product of antiquity, Plato, a wicked Socrates really corrupted him?
Was Socrates, after all, a corruptor of youths and deserved his hemlock?
But the struggle against Plato, all to speak plain and for the people,
the struggle against the ecclesiastical oppression of the millennium,
the struggle against the ecclesiastical oppression of millenniums of Christianity,
for Christianity is Platonism for the people,
produced in Europe a magnificent tension of soul, such as had not existed anywhere previously.
With such a tensely straight bow, one can now aim at the furthest goals.
As a matter of fact, the European feels that this tension is a state of distress,
and wise attempts have been made in grand style to unbend the bow,
once by means of Jesuitism, and the second time by means of German,
the second time by means of democratic alignment,
which, with the aid of liberty of the press and newspaper reading,
might in fact bring it about that the spirit would not so easily find itself in distress.
The Germans invented gunpowder, all created to them,
but they again made things square, they invented printing.
But we, who are neither Jesuits, nor Democrats, nor even sufficiently Germans,
we good Europeans, and free, very free spirits,
who have at steel all the distress of spirit, and all the tension of the bow,
and perhaps also the arrow, duty, and I know the goal to aim at.
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