266.  “One can only truly esteem him who does not look out for himself.”—­Goethe to Rath Schlosser.

267.  The Chinese have a proverb which mothers even teach their children:  “SIAO-sin” ("Make thy heart small").  This is the essentially fundamental tendency in latter-day civilizations.  I have no doubt that an ancient Greek, also, would first of all remark the self-dwarfing in us Europeans of today—­in this respect alone we should immediately be “distasteful” to him.

268.  What, after all, is ignobleness?—­Words are vocal symbols for ideas; ideas, however, are more or less definite mental symbols for frequently returning and concurring sensations, for groups of sensations.  It is not sufficient to use the same words in order to understand one another:  we must also employ the same words for the same kind of internal experiences, we must in the end have experiences in common.  On this account the people of one nation understand one another better than those belonging to different nations, even when they use the same language; or rather, when people have lived long together under similar conditions (of climate, soil, danger, requirement, toil) there originates therefrom an entity that “understands itself”—­namely, a nation.  In all souls a like number of frequently recurring experiences have gained the upper hand over those occurring more rarely:  about these matters people understand one another rapidly and always more rapidly—­the history of language is the history of a process of abbreviation; on the basis of this quick comprehension people always unite closer and closer.  The greater the danger, the greater is the need of agreeing quickly and readily about what is necessary; not to misunderstand one another in danger—­that is what cannot at all be dispensed with in intercourse.  Also in all loves and friendships one has the experience that nothing of the kind continues when the discovery has been made that in using the same words, one of the two parties has feelings, thoughts, intuitions, wishes, or fears different from those of the other. (The fear of the “eternal misunderstanding”:  that is the good genius which so often keeps persons of different sexes from too hasty attachments, to which sense and heart prompt them—­and not some Schopenhauerian “genius of the species"!) Whichever groups of sensations within a soul awaken most readily, begin to speak, and give the word of command—­these decide as to the general order of rank of its values, and determine ultimately its list of desirable things.  A man’s estimates of value betray something of the structure of his soul, and wherein it sees its conditions of life, its intrinsic needs.  Supposing now that necessity has from all time drawn together only such men as could express similar requirements and similar experiences by similar symbols, it results on the whole that the easy communicability of need, which implies ultimately