is good for him, and draws the line between society that is a benefit and society that is a nuisance.  To subordinate the soul fundamentally to society or the individual to the state is sheer barbarism:  the Greeks, sometimes invoked to support this form of idolatry, were never guilty of it; on the contrary, their lawgivers were always reforming and planning the state so that the soul might be perfect in it.  Discipline is a help to the spirit:  but even social relations, when like love, friendship, or sport they are spontaneous and good in themselves, retire as far as possible from the pressure of the world, and build their paradise apart, simple, and hidden in the wilderness; while all the ultimate hopes and assurances of the spirit escape altogether into the silent society of nature, of truth, of essence, far from those fatuous worldly conventions which hardly make up for their tyranny by their instability:  for the prevalent moral fashion is always growing old, and human nature is always becoming young again.  World-worship is the expedient of those who, having lost the soul that is in them, look for it in things external, where there is no soul:  and by a curious recoil, it is also the expedient of those who seek their lost soul in actual consciousness, where it also is not:  for sensations and ideas are not the soul but only passing and partial products of its profound animal life.  Moral consciousness in particular would never have arisen and would be gratuitous, save for the ferocious bias of a natural living creature, defending itself against its thousand enemies.

Nor would knowledge in its turn be knowledge if it were merely intuition of essence, such as the sensualist, the poet, or the dialectician may rest in.  If the imagery of logic or passion ever comes to convey knowledge, it does so by virtue of a concomitant physical adjustment to external things; for the nerve of real or transcendent knowledge is the notice which one part of the world may take of another part; and it is this momentous cognisance, no matter what intangible feelings may supply terms for its prosody, that enlarges the mind to some practical purpose and informs it about the world.  Consciousness then ceases to be passive sense or idle ideation and becomes belief and intelligence.  Then the essences which form the “content of consciousness” may be vivified and trippingly run over, like the syllables of a familiar word, in the active recognition of things and people and of all the ominous or pliable forces of nature.  For essences, being eternal and non-existent in themselves, cannot come to consciousness by their own initiative, but only as occasion and the subtle movements of the soul may evoke their forms; so that the fact that they are given to consciousness has a natural status and setting in the material world, and is part of the same natural event as the movement of the soul and body which supports that consciousness.