of the wilderness, something of the murmuring tones and timid vigilance
of solitude; in his strongest words, even in his cry itself, there
sounds a new and more dangerous kind of silence, of concealment. He who
has sat day and night, from year's end to year's end, alone with his
soul in familiar discord and discourse, he who has become a cave-bear,
or a treasure-seeker, or a treasure-guardian and dragon in his cave--it
may be a labyrinth, but can also be a gold-mine--his ideas themselves
eventually acquire a twilight-colour of their own, and an odour, as much
of the depth as of the mould, something uncommunicative and repulsive,
which blows chilly upon every passer-by. The recluse does not believe
that a philosopher--supposing that a philosopher has always in the first
place been a recluse--ever expressed his actual and ultimate opinions in
books: are not books written precisely to hide what is in us?--indeed,
he will doubt whether a philosopher CAN have "ultimate and actual"
opinions at all; whether behind every cave in him there is not, and must
necessarily be, a still deeper cave: an ampler, stranger, richer
world beyond the surface, an abyss behind every bottom, beneath every
"foundation." Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy--this is a
recluse's verdict: "There is something arbitrary in the fact that the
PHILOSOPHER came to a stand here, took a retrospect, and looked around;
that he HERE laid his spade aside and did not dig any deeper--there
is also something suspicious in it." Every philosophy also CONCEALS a
philosophy; every opinion is also a LURKING-PLACE, every word is also a
MASK.