Lastly: Let us be gentle towards a being of seventy years of age; he has not been able to indulge his fancy in picturing his own "eternal tediousness"–he lacked leisure.
212
Whererin we know ourselves.–Whenever an animal sees another it will draw a parallel between itself and the other; the same habit prevails among people of barbarous ages. Hence all men come to know themselves almost exclusively with regard to their defensive and offensive faculties.
213
Men whose lives have been blighted.–Some are made of such stuff that society is justified in making something or other out of them: they will always fire well and not have to complain of a blighted life. Others are of so peculiar a nature–it need not be a particularly noble, but only a rarer one–that they cannot but fare ill, with the only exception that they are able to live according to their sole purpose: in all other cases society is the loser. For everything that the individual considers a failure, a blighted life, his whole burden of peevishness, paralysis, sickness, irritability, covetousness, is laid at the door of society–and this a bad, sultry air and in the most favourable case a thundercloud gathers round it.
