The presence of a thought is like the presence of a woman we love. We
fancy we shall never forget the thought nor become indifferent to the
dear one. But out of sight, out of mind! The finest thought runs the
risk of being irrevocably forgotten if we do not write it down, and
the darling of being deserted if we do not marry her.

There are plenty of thoughts which are valuable to the man who thinks
them; but only few of them which have enough strength to produce
repercussive or reflect action--I mean, to win the reader's sympathy
after they have been put on paper.

But still it must not be forgotten that a true value attaches only
to what a man has thought in the first instance _for his own case_.
Thinkers may be classed according as they think chiefly for their own
case or for that of others. The former are the genuine independent
thinkers; they really think and are really independent; they are the
true _philosophers_; they alone are in earnest. The pleasure and the
happiness of their existence consists in thinking. The others are the
_sophists_; they want to seem that which they are not, and seek their
happiness in what they hope to get from the world. They are in earnest
about nothing else. To which of these two classes a man belongs may be
seen by his whole style and manner. Lichtenberg is an example for the
former class; Herder, there can be no doubt, belongs to the second.

When one considers how vast and how close to us is _the problem of
existence_--this equivocal, tortured, fleeting, dream-like existence
of ours--so vast and so close that a man no sooner discovers it than
it overshadows and obscures all other problems and aims; and when
one sees how all men, with few and rare exceptions, have no clear
consciousness of the problem, nay, seem to be quite unaware of its