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December 13, 1894
People would develop at a much faster pace through self-education than through the assistance of teachers or just books. The whole of nature and life is a school. Books are the histories of mankind's trials. People will learn by scrutinizing these. Teachers, however, want to homogenize people into a certain mold. The natural sciences belittle men much. They tell us: you are too trivial, your world is too miniscule, go through life with your heads hanging, be judged by the rags on your backs, dreams, reveries are empty, foolish things - live and die.
The maiden and the youth grow and become beautiful in order to surrender, to yield to one another, to be absorbed with one another, to be destined for one another.
The hero shall be a smiling and weeping lion, an eagle, a tiger.
The more nature evolves, the more delicate it becomes. The tall mountains, the bottomless seas of the ancient world have become delicate, small and beautiful, and so have its monstrous beasts, trees. Its monkeys and monkey-like homosapiens have become delicate, beautiful, petite Madonnas, apollos. Nature then, in accordance with its laws, is rendering its creatures delicate, and because this process is occurring gradually, in conformity to law - cause and effect, chronological order, continually - creatures are adapting gradually to these conditions and are not incurring loss, are not being rooted out totally from the earth. However, there is never the need for civilization to artificially render people delicate. The methods of this process, as is known, cause great harm and channel mankind toward the depletion of its own genus (Chinese feet, corsettes, narrowed heads and eyebrows, sharpened and fragmented teeth, pierced noses, lips). In my opinion, the hero who is always fighting against the forces and laws of nature, on this occasion, too, will fight against nature's law of rendering delicate. He will try, in as much as he can, to remain hard and coarse in order that in the struggle for survival, he may not be hamstrung and disabled. ANPASSUNG wastes away by itself during this struggle.
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