d in view has nothing whatever to do with culture. This
latter only takes its beginning in a sphere that lies far above the
world of necessity, indigence, and struggle for existence. The
question now is to what extent a man values his ego in comparison with
other egos, how much of his strength he uses up in the endeavour to
earn his living. Many a one, by stoically confining his needs within a
narrow compass, will shortly and easily reach the sphere in which he
may forget, and, as it were, shake off his ego, so that he can enjoy
perpetual youth in a solar system of timeless and impersonal things.
Another widens the scope and needs of his ego as much as possible, and
builds the mausoleum of this ego in vast proportions, as if he were
prepared to fight and conquer that terrible adversary, Time. In this
instinct also we may see a longing for immortality: wealth and power,
wisdom, presence of mind, eloquence, a flourishing outward aspect, a
renowned name--all these are merely turned into the means by which an
insatiable, personal will to live craves for new life, with which,
again, it hankers after an eternity that is at last seen to be
illusory.

"But even in this highest form of the ego, in the enhanced needs of
such a distended and, as it were, collective individual, true culture
is never touched upon; and if, for example, art is sought after, only
its disseminating and stimulating actions come into prominence, _i.e._
those which least give rise to pure and noble art, and most of all to
low and degraded forms of it. For in all his efforts, however great
and exceptional they seem to the onlooker, he never succeeds in
freeing himself from his own hankering and restless personality: that
illuminated, ethereal sphere where one may contemplate without the
obstruction of one's own personality continually recedes from him--and
thus, let him learn, travel, and collect as he may, he must always
live an exiled life at a remote distance from a higher life and from
true culture. For true culture would scorn to contaminate itself with
the needy and covetous individual; it well knows how to give the slip
to the man who would fain employ it as a means of attaining to
egoistic ends; and if any one cherishes the belief that he has firmly
secured it as a means of livelihood, and that he can procure the
necessities of life by its sedulous cultivation, then it suddenly
steals away with noiseless steps and an air of derisive mockery.[6]

"