270.  The intellectual haughtiness and loathing of every man who has suffered deeply—­it almost determines the order of rank how deeply men can suffer—­the chilling certainty, with which he is thoroughly imbued and coloured, that by virtue of his suffering he knows more than the shrewdest and wisest can ever know, that he has been familiar with, and “at home” in, many distant, dreadful worlds of which “You know nothing"!—­this silent intellectual haughtiness of the sufferer, this pride of the elect of knowledge, of the “initiated,” of the almost sacrificed, finds all forms of disguise necessary to protect itself from contact with officious and sympathizing hands, and in general from all that is not its equal in suffering.  Profound suffering makes noble:  it separates.—­One of the most refined forms of disguise is Epicurism, along with a certain ostentatious boldness of taste, which takes suffering lightly, and puts itself on the defensive against all that is sorrowful and profound.  They are “gay men” who make use of gaiety, because they are misunderstood on account of it—­they wish to be misunderstood.  There are “scientific minds” who make use of science, because it gives a gay appearance, and because scientificness leads to the conclusion that a person is superficial—­they wish to mislead to a false conclusion.  There are free insolent minds which would fain conceal and deny that they are broken, proud, incurable hearts (the cynicism of Hamlet—­the case of Galiani); and occasionally folly itself is the mask of an unfortunate over-assured knowledge.—­From which it follows that it is the part of a more refined humanity to have reverence “for the mask,” and not to make use of psychology and curiosity in the wrong place.

271.  That which separates two men most profoundly is a different sense and grade of purity.  What does it matter about all their honesty and reciprocal usefulness, what does it matter about all their mutual good-will:  the fact still remains—­they “cannot smell each other!” The highest instinct for purity places him who is affected with it in the most extraordinary and dangerous isolation, as a saint:  for it is just holiness—­the highest spiritualization of the instinct in question.  Any kind of cognizance of an indescribable excess in the joy of the bath, any kind of ardour or thirst which perpetually impels the soul out of night into the morning, and out of gloom, out of “affliction” into clearness, brightness, depth, and refinement:—­just as much as such a tendency distinguishes—­it is a noble tendency—­it also separates.—­The pity of the saint is pity for the filth of the human, all-too-human.  And there are grades and heights where pity itself is regarded by him as impurity, as filth.

272.  Signs of nobility:  never to think of lowering our duties to the rank of duties for everybody; to be unwilling to renounce or to share our responsibilities; to count our prerogatives, and the exercise of them, among our duties.