* This piece, which has been reworked and considerably expanded, was written for and
*This piece, which has been reworked and considerably expanded, was written for and intended to accompany the dedication to “that single individual” that is found in Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits. Copenhagen, Spring 1847.
*Yet it is perhaps most appropriate to mention once and for all something that is self-evident and something I certainly have never denied—namely, that with regard to all temporal, earthly, worldly goals, the crowd can have its validity, even its validity as the decisive factor, that is, as the authority. But I am not speaking about such matters, no more than I occupy myself with such things. I am speaking about the ethical, the ethical-religious, about the truth, and I say that from the ethical-religious point of view the crowd is untruth if it is supposed to be valid as the authority for what truth is.
**Yet it is perhaps most appropriate to mention, although it seems to me almost superfluous, that it naturally could not occur to me to object, for example, to the preaching or the proclaiming of the truth, if it were to an assembly of hundreds of thousands. No, but even if it is an assembly of only ten people—and if a vote is to be taken, that is, if the assembly is supposed to be the authority, if the crowd is to determine the issue—then untruth is there.
*Therefore the reader will recall that here by “crowd,” “the crowd,” is understood a purely formal conceptual qualification and not what is usually understood by “the crowd” when it presumably is also a qualification, inasmuch as human egotism irreligiously divides humankind into “the crowd” and the elite etc. Good Lord, how would the religious mentality ever dream up such an inhuman inequality! No, “crowd” is number, the numerical; a number of aristocrats, millionaires, important dignitaries, etc.—as soon as the numerical is operative, it is “crowd,” “the crowd.”