* It is psychologically worthy of note and perhaps also deserves to be perpetuated that a
*It is psychologically worthy of note and perhaps also deserves to be perpetuated that a person whose name I will grant a place here in order to carry him along with me, that Herr P. L. Møller66 quite correctly regarded “The Seducer’s Diary” as central to the whole authorship. This reminds me so vividly of the epigraph for Stages on Life’s Way, the very work that he, with “The Diary of a Seducer” as his point of view, fell upon or fell over—which epigraph I therefore [XIII 578] once reminded him of in a little rebuff to him,67 but which perhaps may fittingly be repeated here again since it appropriately and epigrammatically preserves the memory of Herr P. L. Møller’s esthetic and critical profit from my authorship: Solche Werke sind Spiegel: wenn ein Affe hineinguckt, kann kein Apostel heraussehen. [Such works are mirrors: when an ape looks in, no apostle can look out.]
*The dedication, inasmuch as it goes back in time even further, was: Even if I never managed to become a Christian, I would before God employ all my time and all my diligence at least to get it made clear what Christianity is and where the confusion in Christendom has its basis, a task for which I had basically prepared myself from my earliest youth. Humanly speaking, that was certainly a noble resolve. But Christianity is too great a power to want as a matter of course to use a person’s noble resolve (which was no doubt almost the expression of the relation to my father); therefore it or Governance took the liberty of arranging the rest of my life in such a way that there could be no misunderstanding—which indeed there never was from the beginning—as to whether it was I who needed Christianity or Christianity that needed me.
*That I myself have a more detailed purely personal interpretation of my own person is naturally quite as it should be.