e devil also compels you to speak popularly!

38. As happened finally in all the enlightenment of modern times with
the French Revolution (that terrible farce, quite superfluous when
judged close at hand, into which, however, the noble and visionary
spectators of all Europe have interpreted from a distance their own
indignation and enthusiasm so long and passionately, UNTIL THE TEXT HAS
DISAPPEARED UNDER THE INTERPRETATION), so a noble posterity might once
more misunderstand the whole of the past, and perhaps only thereby make
ITS aspect endurable.--Or rather, has not this already happened? Have
not we ourselves been--that "noble posterity"? And, in so far as we now
comprehend this, is it not--thereby already past?

39. Nobody will very readily regard a doctrine as true merely because
it makes people happy or virtuous--excepting, perhaps, the amiable
"Idealists," who are enthusiastic about the good, true, and beautiful,
and let all kinds of motley, coarse, and good-natured desirabilities
swim about promiscuously in their pond. Happiness and virtue are no
arguments. It is willingly forgotten, however, even on the part of
thoughtful minds, that to make unhappy and to make bad are just as
little counter-arguments. A thing could be TRUE, although it were in
the highest degree injurious and dangerous; indeed, the fundamental
constitution of existence might be such that one succumbed by a full
knowledge of it--so that the strength of a mind might be measured by
the amount of "truth" it could endure--or to speak more plainly, by the
extent to which it REQUIRED truth attenuated, veiled, sweetened, damped,
and falsified. But there is no doubt that for the discovery of certain
PORTIONS of truth the wicked and unfortunate are more favourably
situated and have a greater likelihood of success; not to speak of the
wicked who are happy--a species about whom moralists are silent. Perhaps
severity and craft are more favourable conditions for the development of
strong, independent spirits and philosophers than the gentle, refined,
yielding good-nature, and habit of taking things easily, which are
prized, and rightly prized in a learned man. Presupposing always,
to begin with, that the term "philosopher" be not confined to the
philosopher who writes books, or even introduces HIS philosophy into
books!--Stendhal furnishes a last feature of the portrait of the
free-spirited philosopher, which for the sake of German taste I will
not omit to