of the ascetic and, with it, of the sympathising God, giving pain to others in order thereby to pain oneself and, thereby, again to triumph over oneself and one's sympathetics and to revel in the sensation of supreme power? Forgive me this extravagance in meditating on everything that may have been possible on this earth, through the spiritual extravagance of the thirst for power.
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On the sufferer's knowledge.—The condition of invalids who have been long and terribly tormented by their sufferings and whose reason, throughout, has not grown dim, is not without its value in the search after knowledge—quite irrespective of the intellectual benefits which every deep solitude, every sudden and justified freedom from all duties and habits entails. One who severely suffers looks forth from his condition upon the things without with terrible indifference: all those small mendacious spells wherein things usually float when the eye of the healthy looks upon them, have vanished from his view : nay, his own self, stripped of plumage and colour, lies pure before him. Suppose that, up to then, he had lived in some dangerous realm of fancy: this extreme sobering down by pain is the means—and perhaps the only means—of extricating him therefrom. (Possibly this is what befel the founder of Christianity on the cross : for the bitterest of all words, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me!" if understood in
