B1208 <=> B1210 [BTG XLVIII From the Author, p. 1209]

To possess the right to the name of “man,” one must be one.

And to be such, one must first of all, with an indefatigable persistence and an unquenchable impulse of desire, issuing from all the separate independent parts constituting one’s entire common presence, that is to say, with a desire issuing simultaneously from thought, feeling, and organic instinct, work on an all-round knowledge of oneself – at the same time struggling unceasingly with one’s subjective weaknesses – and then afterwards, taking one’s stand upon the results thus obtained by one’s consciousness alone, concerning the defects in one’s established subjectivity as well as the elucidated means for the possibility of combatting them, strive for their eradication without mercy towards oneself.

Speaking frankly, and wholly without partiality, contemporary man as we know him is nothing more nor less than merely a clockwork mechanism, though of a very complex construction.

About his mechanicality, a man must without fail think deeply from every aspect and with an entire absence of partiality and well understand it, in order fully to appreciate what significance that mechanicality and all its involved consequences and results may have both for his own further life as well as for the justification of the sense and aim of his arising and existence.

For one who desires to study human mechanicality in general and to make it clear to himself, the very best object of study is he himself with his own mechanicality; and to study this practically and to understand it sensibly, with all one’s being, and not “psychopathically,” that is, with only one part of one’s entire presence, is possible only as a result of correctly conducted self-observation.