Am I perchance to have no lively interest in the person of another, are _his_ joy and _his_ weal not to lie at my heart, is the enjoyment that I furnish him not to be more to me than other enjoyments of my own? On the contrary, I can with joy sacrifice to him numberless enjoyments, I can deny myself numberless things for the enhancement of _his_ pleasure, and I can hazard for him what without him was the dearest to me, my life, my welfare, my freedom. Why, it constitutes my pleasure and my happiness to refresh myself with his happiness and his pleasure. But _myself, my own self_, I do not sacrifice to him, but remain an egoist and--enjoy him. If I sacrifice to him everything that but for my love to him I should keep, that is very simple, and even more usual in life than it seems to be; but it proves nothing further than that this one passion is more powerful in me than all the rest. Christianity too teaches us to sacrifice all other passions to this. But, if to one passion I sacrifice others, I do not on that account go so far as to sacrifice _myself_, nor sacrifice anything of that whereby I truly am myself; I do not sacrifice my peculiar value, my _ownness_. Where this bad case occurs, love cuts no better figure than any other passion that I obey blindly. The ambitious man, who is carried away by ambition and remains deaf to every warning that a calm moment begets in him, has let this passion grow up into a despot against whom he abandons all power of dissolution: he has given up himself, because he cannot _dissolve_ himself, and consequently cannot absolve himself from the passion: he is possessed. I love men too,--not merely individuals, but every one. But I love them with the consciousness of egoism; I love them because love makes _me_ happy, I love because loving is natural to me, because it pleases me. I know no "commandment of love." I have a _fellow-feeling_ with every feeling being, and their torment torments, their refreshment refreshes me too; I can kill them, not torture them. _Per contra_, the high-souled, virtuous Philistine prince Rudolph in "The Mysteries of Paris," because the wicked provoke his "indignation," plans their torture. That fellow-feeling proves only that the feeling of those who feel is mine too, my property; in opposition to which the pitiless dealing of the "righteous" man (_e. g._ against notary Ferrand) is like the unfeelingness of that robber who cut off or stretched his prisoners' legs to the measure of his bedstead: Rudolph's bedstead, which he cuts men to fit, is the concept of the "good." The feeling for right, virtue, etc., makes people hard-hearted and intolerant. Rudolph does not feel like the notary, but the reverse; he feels that "it serves the rascal right"; that is no fellow-feeling. You love man, therefore you torture the individual man, the egoist; your philanthropy (love of men) is the tormenting of men.