Page:Dawn of the Day.pdf/393

Rh thumb-screw wherewith to worry to death all the presumptuous egotists, who even now wish to thrust their faith upon the whole world :—we have experienced it in ourselves. —We have attained mastery, when we neither mistake nor hesitate in the achievement. —In a certain class of intellects we observe a painful, partially horrible spectacle ; their most productive hours, their soaring aloft and into the far distance, seem out of harmony with their general constitution, and somehow or other to exceed their power, so that each time there remains a deficiency, and in the long run the faultiness of the machinery which manifests itself with intensely intellectual natures such as those of which we are speaking, in various moral and intellectual symptoms more usually than in bodily distress. Thus that inconceivably timid, vain, odious, envious, tight-laced and tight-lacing nature which suddenly springs forth in them, that too personal and strained element in characters like Rousseau and Schopenhauer may well be the outcome of a periodical heart-disease ; and this, in its turn, the consequence of a nervous complaint which again may ultimately be the outcome of—. As long as genius dwells within us, we are bold, nay, frantic and heedless of life,