This assumption is contradicted by two fundamental traits of the criminal nature—recklessness of consequences and cruelty. The recklessness of the criminal nature leads him rather to yield to momentary impulses than to pursue a deliberate purposive plan. The cruel individual, not only as criminal, but also as savage, as despot, as violent leader of a mob, takes a positive pleasure in others’ suffering. Nothing, for example, is commoner in the school and the barrack than such a phenomenon as this. To a certain degree, indeed, we find it in the average man, in the normal philistine and the pedant, perhaps, more than all, although only in a low degree of intensity. Many criminal natures undoubtedly possess this tendency to a very high degree, and take a positive delight in the thought of being able to inflict pain and fear on others. But herein they merely exhibit, after their _own_ fashion, a general tendency of human nature to find pleasure in the possession and exercise of power, and thus to feel superior to others, and to manifest this superiority by means of the infliction of pain. In this sphere of cruelty there is certainly no more than a quantitative difference between the criminal nature and the normal philistine, and least of all will one who is really familiar with the erotic life of mankind, which is the principal sphere of the mutual infliction of suffering, maintain that in its association with cruelty there is anything that can be termed pathological. Unquestionably, many crimes are committed because the injury inflicted upon another is in some way profitable to the criminal. This, indeed, is little more than a matter of business. But just as many crimes are committed because the injury of another is painful to that other, and because the criminal—the usurer, for example—actually experiences pleasure in having given rise to others’ pain. The profound psychologist, Friedrich Nietzsche, has detected the roots of this phenomenon in average human nature. He speaks of the “horrible beautiful” of crime—of the happiness of one who has completely freed himself from the lower instincts of compassion and from the evil beast “conscience.”