The Religious Mood

The human soul and its limits, the range of man’s inner experiences hitherto attained, the heights, depths, and distances of these experiences, the entire history of the soul UP TO THE PRESENT TIME, and its still unexhausted possibilities: this is the preordained huntingdomain for a born psychologist and lover of a ‘big hunt". But how often must he say despairingly to himself: ‘A single individual! alas, only a single individual! and this great forest, this virgin forest!’ So he would like to have some hundreds of hunting assistants, and fine trained hounds, that he could send into the history of the human soul, to drive HIS game together. In vain: again and again he experiences, profoundly and bitterly, how difficult it is to find assistants and dogs for all the things that directly
excite his curiosity.
The evil of sending scholars into new and dangerous hunting- domains, where courage, sagacity, and subtlety in every sense are required, is that they are no longer serviceable just when the ‘BIG hunt,’ and also the great danger commences,—it is precisely then that they lose their keen eye and nose. In order, for instance, to divine and determine what sort of history the problem of KNOWLEDGE AND CONSCIENCE has hither to had in the souls of homines religiosi, a person would perhaps himself have to possess as profound, as bruised, as immense an experience as the intellectual conscience of Pascal; and then he would still require that wide-spread heaven of clear, wicked spirituality, which, from above, would be able to oversee, arrange, and effectively formulize this mass of dangerous and painful experiences.—But who could do me this service!
And who would have time to wait for such servants!—they evidently appear too rarely, they are so improbable at all times! Eventually one must do everything ONESELF in order to know something; which means that one has MUCH to do!—But a curiosity like mine is once for all the most agreeable of vices— pardon me! I mean to say that the love of truth has its reward in heaven, and already upon earth.