The Portable Nietzsche by Friedrich Nietzsche Page A

existence sought to transform itself into piety toward everything that has ever existed, only to make heart and spirit full once again and to leave no room for future goals and innovations. The cult of feeling was erected in place of the cult of reason; and the German musicians, as the artists of the invisible, the enthusiastic, the fabulous, and the pining, helped to build the new temple with more success than all the artists of words and thoughts. Even if we admit that a vast amount of good was spoken and investigated in detail and that many things are now judged more fairly than ever before, we must still say of this development as a whole: it was no slight universal danger, under the semblance of full and final knowledge of the past, to subordinate knowledge to feeling altogether and—to speak with Kant, who thus determined his own task—“to open the way again for faith by showing knowledge its limits.”
    Let us breathe free air again: the hour of this danger has passed. And strangely, those very spirits which were so eloquently conjured up by the Germans have in the long run become most harmful to the intentions of the conjurers. History, the understanding of origin and development, sympathy with the past, the renewed passion of feeling and knowledge, after they all seemed for a time helpful apprentices of this obscurantist, enthusiastic, and atavistic spirit, changed their nature one fine day and now soar with the broadest wings past their old conjurers and upward, as new and stronger geniuses of that very Enlightenment against which they were conjured up. This Enlightenment we must now advance further—unconcerned with the fact that there has been a “great revolution” against it, and then a “great reaction” again; indeed that both still exist: all this is mere play of the waves compared to that truly great tide in which we drift and want to drift.
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    Promoting health . We have scarcely begun to reflect on the physiology of the criminal, and yet we are already confronted with the indisputable realization that there is no essential difference between criminals and the insane—presupposing that one believes that the customary way of moral thinking is the way of thinking of spiritual health. No faith, however, is still as firmly believed as this, and so we should not shrink from drawing its consequences by treating the criminal as an insane person: above all, not with haughty mercy but with the physician’s good sense and good will. A change of air, different company, temporary disappearance, perhaps being alone and having a new occupation, are what he needs. Good! Perhaps he himself considers it to his advantage to live in custody for a while to find protection against himself and a burdensome tyrannical urge. Cood! One should present him quite clearly with the possibility and the means of a cure (the extirpation, reshaping, and sublimation of that drive); also, in a bad case, with the improbability of a cure; and one should offer the incurable criminal, who has become a horror to himself, the opportunity to commit suicide. Reserving this as the most extreme means of relief, one should not neglect anything to give back to the criminal, above all, confidence and a free mind; one should wipe pangs of conscience from his soul as some uncleanliness and give him pointers as to how he might balance and outbid the harm be may have done to one person by a good turn to another, or perhaps to society as a whole. All this with the utmost consideration. And above all, anonymity or a new name and frequent change of place, so that the irreproachability of his reputation and his future life be endangered as little as possible.
    Today, to be sure, he who has been harmed always wants his revenge, quite apart from the question of how this harm might be undone again, and he turns to the courts for its sake; for the present this maintains our abominable penal codes, with their