Indeed, to our vision, it is clear enough that a soul such as this, which is only at home in a world which, however full of ideas, is not the world of common experience, and which consequently only feels its grasp slipping from the stable and paramount centres of activity and aims of this our actual world, ay, and although it be with heart and soul held in and associated with that world, yet regards all that is moral there simply as something which contradicts its absolute destination--we can only say that such a soul, both in its self-inflicted sufferings and its renunciations, is from the rational point of view simply mad, so mad that we can neither feel any profound compassion for it, nor propose any means of liberation. What is lamentably lacking to a mode of life of this kind is an object of real substance and valid significance; what it proposes to secure is an aim wholly personal, an object sought for by the individual for himself alone, for the salvation of his own soul, for his own blessedness. Few are likely to concern themselves very deeply whether an individual, at any rate one of this type, is or ever will be happy[238]. (_b_) _The inward Penance and Conversion_ The kind of representation, in the same general class of cases which we shall now contrast with the one above examined, turns aside from the extremity of merely bodily suffering, as it is also from a further point of view more indifferent to the purely negative impulse directed against what is essentially just and right in the actual conditions of the world; the material of such representations consequently, both in respect to its content and its form, opens up a ground which is more conformable with ideal art. And this ground is the conversion of the _inner_ life of the soul, which only here seeks to express itself in its _spiritual_ pain, and its change of heart. Here, therefore, we find in the first place that we have no more of those ever repeated horrors and barbarities of pain inflicted on man's poor body: and, secondly, that which we have referred to as the barbarian religiosity of the soul no longer holds fast to its antagonism as against the purely ethical aspects of humanity in order to trample under iron foot in the abstraction of its purely conceptive satisfaction[239], and in the pain of an absolute renunciation that other kind of sensuous enjoyment; for the most part its attention is now solely directed against what is in fact sinful, criminal, and evil in human Nature. We find here a lofty assurance that faith, this spiritual impulse towards God, is capable of converting the past action, even though it be a sin or a crime, into something alien to the man who perpetrated it, washing it away in fact. This withdrawal out of evil, that wholly negative condition, which is realized in the individual by the subjective volition and spirit at once scorning and confounding itself under its former state of evil--this return to the positive which