Page:Complete works of Nietzsche vol 10.djvu/16

4 THE JOYFUL WISDOM

like a traveller who resolves to awake at a given hour, and then quietly yields himself to sleep : we surrender ourselves temporarily, body and soul, to the sickness, supposing we become ill — we shut, as it were, our eyes on ourselves. And as the traveller knows that something does not sleep, that something counts the hours and will awake him, we also know that the critical moment will find us awake — that then something will spring forward and surprise the spirit in the very act, I mean in weakness, or reversion, or submission, or obduracy, or obscurity, or whatever the morbid conditions are called, which in times of good health have the pride of the spirit opposed to them (for it is as in the old rhyme: " The spirit proud, peacock and horse are the three proudest things of earthly source"). After such self-questioning and self-testing, one learns to look with a sharper eye at all that has hitherto been philosophised ; one divines better than before the arbitrary by-ways, side-streets, resting-places, and sunny places of thought, to which suffering thinkers, precisely as sufferers, are led and misled : one knows now in what direction the sickly body and its requirements unconsciously press, push, and allure the spirit — towards the sun, stillness, gentle- ness, patience, medicine, refreshment in any sense whatever. Every philosophy which puts peace higher than war, every ethic with a negative grasp of the idea of happiness, every metaphysic and physic that knows a finale, an ultimate condition of any kind whatever, every predominating, aesthetic or religious longing for an aside, a beyond, an out- side, an above — all these permit one to ask whether