We readers will, with Victor, take leave of the Chamberlain, who, with his half upright eyebrows,--they incline to each other at the bridge of the nose in the form of the mathematical sign of the root,[146]--parts from us with true, obliging courteousness. I know, when we are gone, he will let us find justice, and will make too much out of us; for he never calumniates either from malice or from levity, and whom he calumniates, him he has a serious intention to destroy, because he would rather make one unhappy than paint him black.--When I saw him bend down so to us, I executed in thought a half-satire upon him, whereof the true and serious purport may be this: that men are actually created for the purpose of making themselves as crooked as the _spiritus asper_[147] is. I do not exactly build much upon this, that geometers have written: If the Gods assumed a form, it must be the most perfect, that of a circle; I might, to be sure, draw this conclusion from that, that a crooked back is at least an approximation to the divine form, because it is an arc of a circle,--but I do not care to; for the physical is child's play on this subject, and only of consequence in so far as it partly indicates the crooking and creeping of the soul, and partly (e. g. by the narrowing of the chest) promotes it. Even at court they would dispense with the external bending, if they could be sure that the inner and nobler crook of the disposition were there, without the sign; for as, according to Kant, the subjection and casting down of our self-conceit is a requirement of the purer and the Christian morality: accordingly one who has absolutely no moral excellences must with his self-consciousness thereof stoop still lower than to lowliness, which even the virtuous has; he must sink to that which I call a noble crawling. I confess I do not despise the practice which the little rules of breeding insure herein, and which besides undertakes to be nothing but virtue in trifles, the rules, namely, that one shall bow when one contradicts,--when one praises,--when one receives an insult,--when one offers one,--when one bows another down,--when one would just precisely play the Devil. But it is well that such a virtue of crooking has its own places of exercise, and does not depend on chance. At court a man with straight body and spirit would be cast out as dead, in the court sense, like a crab with a straight tail, which only a dead one carries. If formerly hermits chose lowly cells, in order not to stand upright, a man of the world does not need this; lofty banquet-halls, temples of pleasure, dancing-halls, press him down so much the lower, the higher they are themselves.--It were bad, if this so important virtue of bending downward presupposed a special strength of mind or body, which no one, indeed, can bestow on himself; but exactly the reverse is the case; it will have only weakness, which with horses is not so, for they can no longer let down