_Stoic and Epicurean._--The Epicurean selects the situations, the persons, and even the events which suits his extremely sensitive, intellectual constitution; he renounces the rest--that is to say, by far the greater part of experience--because it would be too strong and too heavy fare for him. The Stoic, on the contrary, accustoms himself to swallow stones and vermin, glass-splinters and scorpions, without feeling any disgust: his stomach is meant to become indifferent in the end to all that the accidents of existence cast into it:--he reminds one of the Arabic sect of the Assaua, with which the French became acquainted in Algiers; and like those insensible persons, he also likes well to have an invited public at the exhibition of his insensibility, the very thing the Epicurean willingly dispenses with:--he has of course his "garden"! Stoicism may be quite advisable for men with whom fate improvises, for those who live in violent times and are dependent on abrupt and changeable individuals. He, however, who _anticipates_ that fate will permit him to spin "a long thread," does well to make his arrangements in Epicurean fashion; all men devoted to intellectual labour have done it hitherto! For it would be a supreme loss to them to forfeit their fine sensibility, and to acquire the hard, stoical hide with hedgehog prickles in exchange. 307. _In Favour of Criticism._--Something now appears to thee as an error which thou formerly lovedst as a truth, or as a probability: thou pushest it from thee and imaginest that thy reason has there gained a victory. But perhaps that error was then, when thou wast still another person--thou art always another person,--just as necessary to thee as all thy present "truths," like a skin, as it were, which concealed and veiled from thee much which thou still mayst not see. Thy new life, and not thy reason, has slain that opinion for thee: _thou dost not require it any longer,_ and now it breaks down of its own accord, and the irrationality crawls out of it as a worm into the light. When we make use of criticism it is not something arbitrary and impersonal,--it is, at least very often, a proof that there are lively, active forces in us, which cast a skin. We deny, and must deny, because something in us _wants_ to live and affirm itself, something which we perhaps do not as yet know, do not as yet see!--So much in favour of criticism. 308.