Personal providence. – There is a certain high point in life; once we have reached it we are, for all our freedom, once more in the greatest danger of spiritual unfreedom; and no matter how much we have confronted the beautiful chaos of existence and denied it all providential reason and goodness, we still have to pass our hardest test. For it is only now that the thought of a personal providence confronts us with the most penetrating force and the best advocate, appearance, speaks for it – now that we so palpably see how everything that befalls us continually turns out for the best. Every day and every hour life seems to want nothing else than to prove this proposition again and again; be it what it may – bad or good weather, the loss of a friend, a sickness, slander, the absence of a letter, the spraining of an ankle, a glance into a shop, a counterargument, the opening of a book, a dream, fraud – it shows itself immediately or very soon to be something that ‘was not allowed to be lacking’ – it is full of deep meaning and use precisely for us! Is there any more dangerous seduction than to renounce one’s faith in the gods of Epicurus,3 those carefree and unknown ones, and to believe instead in some petty deity who is full of worries and personally knows every little hair on our heads and finds nothing nauseating in the most miserable small service? Well – I mean in spite of it all! – we should leave the gods alone as well as the genies at our service and be content with the assumption that our own practical and theoretical skill in interpreting and arranging events has now reached its apex. Nor should we think too highly of this dexterity of our wisdom when at times the wonderful harmony created by the playing of our instrument surprises us all too much – a harmony that sounds too good for us to dare to give credit to ourselves. Indeed, now and then someone plays with us – good old chance; occasionally chance guides our hand, and the wisest providence could not invent music more beautiful than what our foolish hand then produces.