ascendancy, owing to the impression which this display makes on the plebeian, and owing to the very sight of this impression, is nevertheless constantly increasing. This indisputable advantage of aristocratic culture, which is based on the consciousness of ascendancy, is now beginning to rise to an ever higher level, it being permissible and no longer disgraceful for people of noble extraction and education to enter the order of knowledge and there to obtain intellectual ordinations, to learn chivalrous services higher than those of previous times and to look up to that ideal of victorious wisdom which never as yet any age has been able to set up with a safe conscience except that age which is just now dawning upon us. Last, not least, what shall henceforth be the occupation of nobility, if it daily grows more evident that it is becoming less and less respectable to dabble in politics?
202
Hygienics.—No sooner had we begun to give proper attention to the physiology of criminals than we already arrived at the unavoidable conclusion that there is no essential difference between criminals and lunatics, provided we believe the usual moral mode of thinking to be that of a healthy intellect. No belief is now so confidently entertained as this one; let us therefore not shrink from drawing our conclusions and treating the criminal like a lunatic: above all, not with arrogant
