"The consciousness and conviction of our little moral worth, compared with what the law requires of us, is moral humility. The contrary consciousness and conviction, namely, the persuading ourselves, for want of this comparison, that we are of very great worth, may be called the pride of virtue.--To reject all claim to any moral worth whatsoever, in the hope of acquiring thereby a hidden worth, is a false moral humility and an abasement of the mind. To undervalue one's own moral worth for the purpose of obtaining thereby the favor of another (through hypocrisy or flattery, namely), is also a false humility, and, moreover, an abasement of one's personality. True humility should of necessity be the result of an exact and sincere comparison of one's self with the moral law (with its sanctity and severity). This duty relative to the human dignity in our personality may be more or less clearly stated in the following precepts: Be no man's slave; let not your rights be trampled under foot; contract no debts for which you cannot give full security; accept no gifts which you can do without; be neither a parasite, nor a flatterer, nor a beggar; complaints and lamentations, even a single cry wrung from us by bodily pain, are things unworthy of us (still more unworthy if the pain is deserved). Therefore is a criminal's death ennobled by the firmness with which he meets it. Can he who makes himself a worm complain if he be crushed?"[136] =164. True and false pride.=--We should, however, not confound a true and noble _pride_, without which man is but a thing and a slave, with a passion which looks like it, but which is but its phantom; I mean _false pride_. True pride is the just feeling man has of his moral dignity, and which interdicts him to humble the human personality in others, or to allow it to be humbled in himself. False pride is the exaggerated feeling we entertain in regard to our own advantages and superiority over other men. True pride is related to what there is sacred and divine in us; false pride, on the contrary, feeds and grows fat on the trifling and petty concerns of our mere individuality. There is in man, the stoics said, an inner god: the human essence, namely, of which the individual is but the depository, and which he ought to keep sacred and holy as a divine host. This respect for the human personality, religious morality calls holiness; worldly morality calls it honor; it is one and the same principle under different forms; it is the idea of something sacred in us which we must neither stain nor debase. True pride rests then on what there is common among all men, on what makes them equals. False pride, on the contrary, regards chiefly our peculiarities, and what we call more especially our own. True pride asks for nothing more than to be free from oppression; false pride wants to oppress others. True pride is noble; false pride, brutal and insolent. Of course it has its degrees according to the nature