_Saintly Cruelty.--_A man holding a newly born child in his hands came to a saint. "What should I do with this child," he asked, "it is wretched, deformed, and has not even enough of life to die" "Kill it," cried the saint with a dreadful voice, "kill it, and then hold it in thy arms for three days and three nights to brand it on thy memory:--thus wilt thou never again beget a child when it is not the time for thee to beget."--When the man had heard this he went away disappointed; and many found fault with the saint because he had advised cruelty; for he had advised to kill the child. "But is it not more cruel to let it live?" asked the saint.
_The Unsuccessful--_Those poor women always fail of success who become agitated and uncertain, and talk too much in presence of him whom they love; for men are most successfully seduced by a certain subtle and phlegmatic tenderness.
_The Third Sex._--"A small man is a paradox, but still a man,--but a small woman seems to me to be of another sex in comparison with well-grown ones"--said an old dancing-master. A small woman is never beautiful--said old Aristotle.
_The greatest Danger._--Had there not at all times been a larger number of men who regarded the cultivation of their mind--their "rationality"--as their pride, their obligation, their virtue, and were injured or shamed by all play of fancy and extravagance of thinking--as lovers of "sound common sense":--mankind would long ago have perished! Incipient _insanity_ has hovered, and hovers continually over mankind as its greatest danger: it is precisely the breaking out of inclination in feeling, seeing, and hearing; the enjoyment of the unruliness of the mind; the delight in human unreason. It is not truth and certainty that is the antithesis of the world of the insane, but the universality and all-obligatoriness of a belief, in short, non-voluntariness in forming opinions. And the greatest labour of human beings hitherto has been to agree with one another regarding a number of things, and to impose upon themselves a _law of agreement_--indifferent whether these things are true or false. This is the discipline of the mind which has preserved mankind;--but the counter-impulses are still so powerful that one can really speak of the future of mankind with little confidence. The ideas of things still continually shift and move, and will perhaps alter more than ever in the future; it is continually the most select spirits themselves who strive against universal obligatoriness--the investigators of _truth_ above all! The accepted belief, as the belief of all the world, continually engenders a disgust and a new longing in the more ingenious minds; and already the slow _tempo_ which it demands for all intellectual processes (the imitation of the tortoise, which is here recognised as the rule) makes the artists and poets runaways:--it is in these impatient spirits that a downright delight in delirium breaks out, because delirium has such a joyful _tempo!_ Virtuous intellects, therefore, are needed--ah! I want to use the least ambiguous word,--_virtuous stupidity_ is needed, imperturbable conductors of the _slow_ spirits are needed, in order that the faithful of the great collective belief may remain with one another and dance their dance further: it is a necessity of the first importance that here enjoins and demands. _We others are the exceptions and the danger,_--we eternally need protection--Well, there can actually be something said in favour of the exceptions _provided that they never want to become the rule._