final vital force was flickering out in brilliant fireworks of wit and depravity. At the commencement, the noble caste was always the barbarian caste: their superiority did not consist first of all in their physical, but in their psychical power — they were more COMPLETE men (which at every point also implies the same as “more complete beasts”).

258. Corruption — as the indication that anarchy threatens to break out among the instincts, and that the foundation of the emotions, called “life,” is convulsed — is something radically different according to the organization in which it manifests itself. When, for instance, an aristocracy like that of France at the beginning of the Revolution, flung away its privileges with sublime disgust and sacrificed itself to an excess of its