would be identical with a history of civilisation, from the first antics of barbarism up to the caricature of over-refinement and morbid idealism. The striving after distinction entails to the neighbour—to mention only a few rungs of this long ladder torture, blows, terror, anxious surprise, wonder, envy, admiration, elevation. joy, mirth, laughter, derision, mockery, sneers, scourging, and self-infliction of torture,—hero, at the top of the ladder, we find the ascetic and martyr, who feels supreme satisfaction, himself obtaining, as the result of his craving for distinction, the very thing which the barbarian, his antitype on the first rung of the ladder, makes others suffer, by whom and before whom he wishes to prove his excellency. The triumph of the asectic over himself, his inward glance, which beholds man split up into a sufferer and a spectator and never searches the outside world but to gather from it, so to speak, wood for his own stake; this final tragedy of the craving for distinction, which exhibits only one person who consumes himself, that is the conclusion worthy of the beginning: in both cases an unspeakable happiness at the sight of torture. Indeed, happiness, conceived as the most vivid sensation of power, perhaps nowhere on earth has reached a higher pitch than in the souls of superstitious ascetics. This finds expression in the Brahmin story of King Vievamitra, who derived such strength from thousand years' exercises of penance, that he ventured to construct a new heaven. I believe
