And not only parents, but _men in general_, are conquered by the young man; they are no hindrance to him, and are no longer regarded; for now he says: One must obey God rather than men.
From this high standpoint everything "_earthly_" recedes into contemptible remoteness; for the standby point is--the _heavenly_.
The attitude is now altogether reversed; the youth takes up an _intellectual_ position, while the boy, who did not yet feel himself as mind, grew up in mindless learning. The former does not try to get hold of _things_ (_e. g._ to get into his head the _data_ of history), but of the _thoughts_ that lie hidden in things, and so, _e. g._, of the _spirit_ of history. On the other hand, the boy understands _connections_ no doubt, but not ideas, the spirit; therefore he strings together whatever can be learned, without proceeding _a priori_ and theoretically, _i. e._ without looking for ideas.
As in childhood one had to overcome the resistance of the _laws of the world_, so now in everything that he proposes he is met by an objection of the mind, of reason, of his _own conscience_. "That is unreasonable, unchristian, unpatriotic," and the like, cries conscience to us, and--frightens us away from it. Not the might of the avenging Eumenides, not Poseidon's wrath, not God, far as he sees the hidden, not the father's rod of punishment, do we fear, but--_conscience_.
We "run after our thoughts" now, and follow their commands just as before we followed parental, human ones. Our course of action is determined by our thoughts (ideas, conceptions, _faith_) as it is in childhood by the commands of our parents.
For all that, we were already thinking when we were children, only our thoughts were not fleshless, abstract, _absolute, i. e._ NOTHING BUT THOUGHTS, a heaven in themselves, a pure world of thought, _logical_ thoughts.
On the contrary, they had been only thoughts that we had about a _thing_; we thought of the thing so or so. Thus we may have thought "God made the world that we see there," but we did not think of ("search") the "depths of the Godhead itself"; we may have thought "that is the truth about the matter," but we did not think of Truth itself, nor unite into one sentence "God is truth." The "depths of the Godhead, who is truth," we did not touch. Over such purely logical, _i. e._ theological questions, "What is truth?" Pilate does not stop, though he does not therefore hesitate to ascertain in an individual case "what truth there is in the thing," _i. e._ whether the _thing_ is true.