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have no more important task than to teach rigorous thinking, cautious judgment, and consistent inference; therefore they should leave alone whatever is not suitable for these operations: religion, for example. After all, they can be sure that later on man’s fogginess, habit, and need will slacken the bow of an all-too-taut thinking. But as far as the influence of the schools reaches, they should enforce what is essential and distinctive in man: “reason and science, man’s very highest power”—so Goethe, at least, judges.
    The great scientist von Baer sees the superiority of Europeans over Asiatics in their trained ability to give reasons for what they believe—something of which the latter are wholly incapable. Europe has gone through the school of consistent, critical thinking; Asia still does not know how to distinguish between truth and poetry, and is not conscious of whether its convictions are derived from personal observation and methodical thinking or from fantasies.
    Europe was made Europe by reason in the schools; in the Middle Ages Europe was on the way to becoming a piece and an appendix of Asia again—by losing the scientific sense that it owed to the Greeks.
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    The art of drawing inferences . The greatest progress men have made lies in their learning how to draw correct inferences. That is by no means something natural, as Schopenhauer assumes when he says: “Of inference, all are capable; of judgment, only a few.” It has been learned only late, and it still has not gained dominance. False inferences are the rule in earlier times; and the mythology of all peoples, their magic and their superstition, their religious cults, their laws, are inexhaustible mines of proof for this proposition.
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    Higher culture is necessarily misunderstood . He who has but two strings on his instrument—like the scholars who, in addition to the urge for knowledge, have only the religious urge, instilled by education—does not understand those who can play on more strings. It is of the essence of the higher, multi-stringed culture that it is always misinterpreted by the lower culture—as happens, for example, when art is considered a disguised form of religion. Indeed, people who are only religious understand even science as a search of the religious feeling, just as deaf-mutes do not know what music is, if it is not visible movement.
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    The most dangerous party member . In every party there is one member who, by his all-too-devout pronouncement of the party principles, provokes the others to apostasy.
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    Why one contradicts . One often contradicts an opinion when it is really only the tone in which it has been presented that is unsympathetic.
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    The experience of Socrates. When one has become a master in some field one has usually, for that very reason, remained a complete amateur in most other things; but one judges just the other way around, as Socrates had already found out. This is what makes association with masters disagreeable. 8
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    From the mother . Everyone carries in himself an image of woman derived from the mother; by this he is determined to revere women generally, or to hold them in low esteem, or to be generally indifferent to them.
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    Friendship with women . Women can form a friendship with a man very well; but to preserve it—to that end a slight physical antipathy must probably help.
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    Marriage as a long conversation . When marrying, one should ask oneself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this woman into your old age? Everything .else in marriage is transitory, but the most time during the association belongs to conversation.
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    Girls’ dreams. Inexperienced girls flatter themselves with the notion that it is within their power to make a man happy; later they learn that it means holding a man in low esteem to assume that