About this time it may at last happen, under the sudden illuminations of still disturbed and changing health, that the enigma of that great emancipation begins to reveal itself to the free, and ever freer, spirit,--that enigma which had hitherto lain obscure, questionable, and almost intangible, in his memory. If for a long time he scarcely dared to ask himself, "Why so apart? So alone? denying everything that I revered? denying reverence itself? Why this hatred, this suspicion, this severity towards my own virtues?"--he now dares and asks the questions aloud, and already hears something like an answer to them-- "Thou shouldst become master over thyself and master also of thine own virtues. Formerly _they_ were thy masters; but they are only entitled to be thy tools amongst other tools. Thou shouldst obtain power over thy pro and contra, and learn how to put them forth and withdraw them again in accordance with thy higher purpose. Thou shouldst learn how to take the proper perspective of every valuation--the shifting, distortion, and apparent teleology of the horizons and everything that belongs to perspective; also the amount of stupidity which opposite values involve, and all the intellectual loss with which every pro and every contra has to be paid for. Thou shouldst learn how much _necessary_ injustice there is in every for and against, injustice as inseparable from life, and life itself as _conditioned_ by the perspective and its injustice. Above all thou shouldst see clearly where the injustice is always greatest:--namely, where life has developed most punily, restrictedly, necessitously, and incipiently, and yet cannot help regarding _itself_ as the purpose and standard of things, and for the sake of self-preservation, secretly, basely, and continuously wasting away and calling in question the higher, greater, and richer,--thou shouldst see clearly the problem of gradation of rank, and how power and right and amplitude of perspective grow up together. Thou shouldst----" But enough; the free spirit _knows_ henceforth which "thou shalt" he has obeyed, and also what he _can_ now _do,_ what he only now--_may do_....
Thus doth the free spirit answer himself with regard to the riddle of emancipation, and ends therewith, while he generalises his case, in order thus to decide with regard to his experience. "As it has happened to _me_," he says to himself, "so must it happen to every one in whom a _mission_ seeks to embody itself and to 'come into the world.'" The secret power and necessity of this mission will operate in and upon the destined individuals like an unconscious pregnancy,--long before they have had the mission itself in view and have known its name. Our destiny rules over us, even when we are not yet aware of it; it is the future that makes laws for our to-day. Granted that it is _the problem of the gradations of rank,_ of which we may say that it is _our_ problem, we free spirits; now only in the midday of our life do we first understand what preparations, detours, tests, experiments, and disguises the problem needed, before it _was permitted_ to rise before us, and how we had first to experience the most manifold and opposing conditions of distress and happiness in soul and body, as adventurers and circumnavigators of the inner world called "man," as surveyors of all the "higher" and the "one-above-another," also called "man"--penetrating everywhere, almost without fear, rejecting nothing, losing nothing, tasting everything, cleansing everything from all that is accidental, and, as it were, sifting it out--until at last we could say, we free spirits, "Here--a _new_ problem! Here a long ladder, the rungs of which we ourselves have sat upon and mounted,--which we ourselves at some time have _been_! Here a higher place, a lower place, an under-us, an immeasurably long order, a hierarchy which we _see;_ here--_our_ problem!"