Sterile scholars and love of the children's land

This is a poetical epitome of some of the scathing criticism of scholars which appears in the first of the “Thoughts out of Season”—the polemical pamphlet (written in 1873) against David Strauss and his school. He reproaches his former colleagues with being sterile and shows them that their sterility is the result of their not believing in anything. “He who had to create, had always his presaging dreams and astral premonitions—and believed in believing!” (See Note on Chapter LXXVII.) In the last two verses he reveals the nature of his altruism. How far it differs from that of Christianity we have already read in the discourse “Neighbour-Love”, but here he tells us definitely the nature of his love to mankind; he explains why he was compelled to assail the Christian values of pity and excessive love of the neighbour, not only because they are slave-values and therefore tend to promote degeneration (see Note B.), but because he could only love his children’s land, the undiscovered land in a remote sea; because he would fain retrieve the errors of his fathers in his children.