This indisputable happiness of aristocratic culture, based as it is on the feeling of superiority, is now beginning to rise to ever higher levels; for now, thanks to the free spirits, it is henceforth permissible and not dishonourable for people who have been born and reared in aristocratic circles to enter the domain of knowledge, where they may secure more intellectual consecrations and learn chivalric services even higher than those of former times, and where they may look up to that ideal of victorious wisdom which as yet no age has been able to set before itself with so good a conscience as the period which is about to dawn. Lastly, what is to be the occupation of the nobility in the future if it becomes more evident from day to day that it is less and less indecorus to take any part in politics? 202. THE CARE OF THE HEALTH.—We have scarcely begun to devote any attention to the physiology of criminals, and yet we have already reached the inevitable conclusion that between criminals and madmen there is no really essential difference: _if we suppose that the current moral fashion of thinking is a healthy way of thinking_. No belief, however, is nowadays more firmly believed in than this one, so we should not therefore shrink from drawing the inevitable conclusion and treating the criminal like a lunatic—above all, not with haughty pitifulness, but with medical skill and good will. He may perhaps be in need of a change of air, a change of society, or temporary absence: perhaps of solitude and new occupations—very well! He may perhaps feel that it would be to his advantage to live under surveillance for a short time in order thus to obtain protection from himself and from a troublesome tyrannical impulse—very well! We should make clear to him the possibility and the means of curing him (the extermination, transformation, and sublimation of these impulses), and also, in the worst cases, the improbability of a cure; and we should offer to the incurable criminal, who has become a useless burden to himself, the opportunity of committing suicide. While holding this in reserve as an extreme measure of relief, we should neglect nothing which would tend above all to restore to the criminal his good courage and freedom of spirit; we should free his soul from all remorse, as if it were something unclean, and show him how he may atone for a wrong which he may have done some one by benefiting some one else, perhaps the community at large, in such way that he might even do more than balance his previous offence.