On the doctrine of poisons. – So much has to come together in order for scientific thought to originate, and all these necessary forces have had to be separately invented, practised, cultivated! In their separateness they have, however, very often had a totally different effect from that which they have today when in the realm of scientific thought they mutually limit and keep each other in check: they have worked as poisons, e.g. the doubting drive, the denying drive, the waiting drive, the collecting drive, the dissolving drive. Many hecatombs of human beings had to be sacrificed before these drives learned to grasp their coexistence and feel like functions of one organizing force in one human being! And how far we still are from the time when artistic energies and the practical wisdom of life join with scientific thought so that a higher organic system will develop in relation to which the scholar, the physician, the artist, and the lawmaker, as we now know them, would have to appear as paltry antiquities!