still is for the greatest possibilities, and how often in the past the type man has stood in presence of mysterious decisions and new paths:—­he knows still better from his painfulest recollections on what wretched obstacles promising developments of the highest rank have hitherto usually gone to pieces, broken down, sunk, and become contemptible.  The universal degeneracy of mankind to the level of the “man of the future”—­as idealized by the socialistic fools and shallow-pates—­this degeneracy and dwarfing of man to an absolutely gregarious animal (or as they call it, to a man of “free society"), this brutalizing of man into a pigmy with equal rights and claims, is undoubtedly possible!  He who has thought out this possibility to its ultimate conclusion knows another loathing unknown to the rest of mankind—­and perhaps also a new mission!

CHAPTER VI

WE SCHOLARS

204.  At the risk that moralizing may also reveal itself here as that which it has always been—­namely, resolutely MONTRER SES PLAIES, according to Balzac—­I would venture to protest against an improper and injurious alteration of rank, which quite unnoticed, and as if with the best conscience, threatens nowadays to establish itself in the relations of science and philosophy.  I mean to say that one must have the right out of one’s own experience—­experience, as it seems to me, always implies unfortunate experience?—­to treat of such an important question of rank, so as not to speak of colour like the blind, or against science like women and artists ("Ah! this dreadful science!” sigh their instinct and their shame, “it always finds things out!").  The declaration of independence of the scientific man, his emancipation from philosophy, is one of the subtler after-effects of democratic organization and disorganization:  the self-glorification and self-conceitedness of the learned man is now everywhere in full bloom, and in its best springtime—­which does not mean to imply that in this case self-praise smells sweet.  Here also the instinct of the populace cries, “Freedom from all masters!” and after science has, with the happiest results, resisted theology, whose “hand-maid” it had been too long, it now proposes in its wantonness and indiscretion to lay down laws for philosophy, and in its turn to play the “master”—­what am I saying! to play the philosopher on its own account.  My memory—­ the memory of a scientific man, if you please!—­teems with the naivetes of insolence which I have heard about philosophy and philosophers from young naturalists and old physicians (not to mention the most cultured and most conceited of all learned men, the philologists and schoolmasters, who are both the one and the other by profession).  On one occasion it was the specialist and the Jack Horner who instinctively stood on the defensive against all synthetic tasks and capabilities;