_Our Astonishment--_There is a profound and fundamental satisfaction in the fact that science ascertains things that _hold their ground,_ and again furnish the basis for new researches:--it could certainly be otherwise. Indeed, we are so much convinced of all the uncertainty and caprice of our judgments, and of the everlasting change of all human laws and conceptions, that we are really astonished _how persistently_ the results of science hold their ground! In earlier times people knew nothing of this changeability of all human things; the custom of morality maintained the belief that the whole inner life of man was bound to iron necessity by eternal fetters:--perhaps people then felt a similar voluptuousness of astonishment when they listened to tales and fairy stories. The wonderful did so much good to those men, who might well get tired sometimes of the regular and the eternal. To leave the ground for once! To soar! To stray! To be mad!--that belonged to the paradise and the revelry of earlier times; while our felicity is like that of the shipwrecked man who has gone ashore, and places himself with both feet on the old, firm ground--in astonishment that it does not rock. 47. _The Suppression of the Passions._--When one continually prohibits the expression of the passions as something to be left to the "vulgar," to coarser, bourgeois, and peasant natures--that is, when one does not want to suppress the passions themselves, but only their language and demeanour, one nevertheless realises _therewith_ just what one does not want: the suppression of the passions themselves, or at least their weakening and alteration,--as the court of Louis XIV. (to cite the most instructive instance), and all that was dependent on it, experienced. The generation _that followed,_ trained in suppressing their expression, no longer possessed the passions themselves, but had a pleasant, superficial, playful disposition in their place,--a generation which was so permeated with the incapacity to be ill-mannered, that even an injury was not taken and retaliated, except with courteous words. Perhaps our own time furnishes the most remarkable counterpart to this period: I see everywhere (in life, in the theatre, and not least in all that is written) satisfaction at all the _coarser_ outbursts and gestures of passion; a certain convention of passionateness is now desired,--only not the passion itself! Nevertheless _it_ will thereby be at last reached, and our posterity will have a _genuine savagery,_ and not merely a formal savagery and unmannerliness. 48.