prevails? That is to say, for souls, all of vigour, vindictiveness, hostility, malice, suspicion, ready to face every terror and hardened through privation and morality? The enjoyment of cruelty: just as it is deemed a virtue, in such a soul and amid such conditions, to be ingenious and insatiable in cruelty. The community take delight in performing cruel deeds, throwing aside for once the gloom of constant dread and precaution. Cruelty is one of the most ancient festive joys of man-kind. Therefore the gods also are fancied to be pleased and festively disposed when they are offered the spectacle of cruelty. Thus slowly the opinion gains ground that voluntary suffering, self-chosen torture, have a good meaning and value of their own. By degrees in the community custom began to set up a practice in accordance with this opinion: men, henceforth, from all excessive well-being grew more suspicious, and from all conditions of painful suffering more hopeful; they tried to persuade themselves that in prosperity the gods frowned upon them, in adversity they smiled upon them, but by no means with pity. For pity was deemed to be contemptible and unworthy of a powerful, formidable soul. They smiled because they were amused and put into good humour by human sufferings; for a cruel mind enjoys to the utmost the gratifying consciousness of power. Thus the "most moral man" of the community was distinguished by the virtue of frequent suffering, of privation, of a hard mode of life and cruel
