Verily, I divine you well, my disciples: ye strive like me for the bestowing virtue. What would ye have in common with cats and wolves?
It is your thirst to become sacrifices and gifts yourselves: and therefore have ye thirst to accumulate all riches in your soul.
Insatiably striveth your soul for treasures and jewels, because your virtue is insatiable in desiring to bestow.
Ye constrain all things to flow towards you and into you, so that they shall flow back again out of your fountain as the gifts of your love.
Verily, an appropiator of all values must such bestowing love become; but healthy and holy, call I this selfishness.-
Another selfishness is there, an all-too-poor and hungry kind, which would always steal- the selfishness of the sick, the sickly selfishness.
With the eye of the thief it looketh upon all that is lustrous; with the craving of hunger it measureth him who hath abundance; and ever does it prowl round the tables of bestowers.
Sickness speaketh in such craving, and invisible degeneration; of a sickly body, speaketh the larcenous craving of this selfishness.
Tell me, my brother, what do we think bad, and worst of all? Is it not degeneration?- And we always suspect degeneration when the bestowing soul is lacking.
Upward goes our course from genera on to super-genera. But a horror to us is the degenerating sense, which saith: "All for myself."
Upward soareth our sense: thus is it a simile of our body, a simile of an elevation. Such similes of elevations are the names of the virtues.
Thus goeth the body through history, a becomer and fighter.
