Masquerade

This is an excerpt from Nietzsche's On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History For Life

...the individual becomes timid and unsure and can no longer believe in itself. It sinks into itself, into the inner life. That means here only into the piled up mass of scholarly data which does not work towards the outside, instruction which does not become living. If we look for a moment out to the exterior, then we notice how the expulsion of instinct by history has converted people almost into nothing but abstractis [abstraction] and shadows. A man no longer gambles his identity on that instinct. Instead he masks himself as educated man, as scholar, as poet, as politician.