A problem of idealism is the way that the cleavage lines of the mass of phenomena, lines that admittedly keep changing but only within strict limits, express a nature that seems foreign to anything mental, to anything resembling meaning. But of course this observation is always made at the first point in time at which it appears to be true. That is to say that it was always yesterday that the understanding of the world was distorted by imagination, enchantment and projection, and only now that we step out for the first time, bareheaded, beneath the naked sky of an other planet. Why shouldn't this progressive disenchantment, which goes just as deeply as it needs to, not be another self-inflicted trial of the spirit? Fine, but more difficult to reconcile is the sheer mass of humankind and its misfortunes and misapprehensions. What possible motive could a world spirit have for interesting itself in such a proliferation of shabby stuff, in endlessly repeating so many banal and incomplete realisations? But that is just how it looks from here, only one more instance of the same fatuity except for the startling fact of its irreducible presence. What is inexhaustible in the meaning is never the content, it is that very particular irreducibility.