to which a man could stretch his responsibility. Nowadays the taste and virtue of the age weaken and attenuate the will, nothing is so adapted to the spirit of the age as weakness of will: consequently, in the ideal of the philosopher, strength of will, sternness, and capacity for prolonged resolution, must specially be included in the conception of “greatness,” with as good a right as the opposite doctrine, with its ideal of a silly, renouncing, humble, selfless humanity, was suited to an opposite age⁠—such as the sixteenth century, which suffered from its accumulated energy of will, and from the wildest torrents and floods of selfishness. In the time of Socrates, among men only of worn-out instincts, old conservative Athenians who let themselves go⁠—“for the sake of happiness,” as they said, for the sake of pleasure, as their conduct indicated⁠—and who had continually on their lips the old pompous words to which they had long forfeited the right by the life they led, irony