What knowing means. – Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere!24 says Spinoza as simply and sublimely as is his wont. Yet in the final analysis, what is this intelligere other than the way we become sensible of the other three? A result of the different and conflicting impulses to laugh, lament, and curse? Before knowledge is possible, each of these impulses must first have presented its one-sided view of the thing or event; then comes the fight between these one-sided views, and occasionally out of it a mean, an appeasement, a concession to all three sides, a kind of justice and contract; for in virtue of justice and a contract all these impulses can assert and maintain themselves in existence and each can finally feel it is in the right vis-à-vis all the others. Since only the ultimate reconciliation scenes and final accounts of this long process rise to consciousness, we suppose that intelligere must be something conciliatory, just, and good, something essentially opposed to the instincts, when in fact it is only a certain behaviour of the drives towards one another. For the longest time, conscious thought was considered thought itself; only now does the truth dawn on us that by far the greatest part of our mind’s activity proceeds unconscious and unfelt; but I think these drives which here fight each other know very well how to make themselves felt by and how to hurt each other. This may well be the source of that great and sudden exhaustion that afflicts all thinkers (it is the exhaustion of the battlefield). Indeed, there may be many hidden instances for heroism in our warring depths, but certainly nothing divine, eternally resting in itself, as Spinoza supposed. Conscious thought, especially that of the philosopher, is the least vigorous and therefore also the relatively mildest and calmest type of thought; and thus precisely philosophers are most easily led astray about the nature of knowledge.