ABSTRACT
Mediocre spirits demand of science a kind of certainty which it cannot give, a sort of religious satisfaction. Only the real, rare, true scientific minds can endure doubt, which is attached to all our knowledge. I always envy the physicists and mathematicians who can stand on firm ground. I hover, so to speak, in the air. Mental events seem to be immeasurable and probably always w i l l be
• • • Freud once said:
By now we are familiar w i t h this theme, which is as central i n Freud as i t was in Nietzsche. What may seem to be new, however, is the suggestion that the demand for measurement i n psychology may be prompted by the weakness that craves certainty and cannot endure doubt. But this motif, too, had been sounded by Nietzsche in The Gay Science, i n Section 347, wh ich is entit led "Believers and their need to believe":
How much one needs a.faithm in order to flourish, how much that is "firm" . . . that is a measure of the degree of one's strength (or, to put the point more clearly, of one's weakness). . . .
