Page:Selections from the writings of Kierkegaard.djvu/230

 business this well-intentioned kindness won't do at all. Indeed, any serious business enforces a very different mode of behavior which is: either—-or. Either you are able really to do something, and really have something to do here; or else, if that be not the case, then the serious business demands precisely that you take yourself away. And if you will not comprehend that, the fire-marshal proposes to have the police hammer it into your head; which may do you a great deal of good, as it may help to render you a little serious, as is befitting so serious a business as a fire.

But what is true in the case of a fire holds true also in matters of the spirit. Wherever a cause is to be promoted, or an enterprise to be seen through, or an idea to be served —you may be sure that when he who really is the man to do it, the right man, he who, in a higher sense has and ought to have command, he who is in earnest and can make the matter the serious business it really is—you may be sure that when he arrives at the spot, so to say, he will find there a nice company of easy-going, addle-pated twaddlers who, pretending to be engaged in serious business, dabble in wishing to serve this cause, to further that enterprise, to promote that idea—a company of addle-pated fools who will of course consider one's unwillingness to make common cause with them (which unwillingness precisely proves one's seriousness) —will of course consider that a sure proof of the man's lack of seriousness. I say, when the right man arrives he will find this; but I might also look at it in this fashion: the very question as to whether he is the right man is most properly decided by his attitude to that crowd of fools. If he thinks they may help him, and that he will add to his strength by joining them, then he is eo ipso not the right man. The right man will understand at once, as did the fire-marshal, that the crowd must be got out of the way; in fact, that their presence and puttering around is the most dangerous ally the fire could have. Only, that in matters of the spirit it is not as in the case of the conflagration, where the fire-marshal needs but to say to the police: rid me of these people!

Thus in matters of the spirit, and likewise in matters of