Because THOU once saidest, O Zarathustra: ‘Spirit is life which itself cutteth into life’;—that led and allured me to thy doctrine. And verily, with mine own blood have I increased mine own knowledge!”
He claims mastery of one small world, the brain of the leech, and is proud of it. He casts everything else aside, hates the hazy and visionary, and wants to be severe and honest where he knows and blind where he does not.
- Scholars, poets and the knowersHe confines his knowledge to the leech's brain and accepts black ignorance beside it, out of intellectual honesty.
- Self-overcomingHe cites Zarathustra's saying that spirit is life cutting into life, and pays for knowledge with his own blood.
What the critics said
Ludovici reads the conscientious in spirit as the honest scientific specialist, like Darwin, who masters a hand's breadth of knowledge and is rigorous and blind beyond it, a higher man whom Zarathustra respects.