the “beasts of prey.” They who are from the outset botched, oppressed, broken, those are they, the weakest are they, who most undermine the life beneath the feet of man, who instil the most dangerous venom and scepticism into our trust in life, in man, in ourselves. Where shall we escape from it, from that covert look (from which we carry away a deep sadness), from that averted look of him who is misborn from the beginning, that look which betrays what such a man says to himself⁠—that look which is a groan? “Would that I were something else,” so groans this look, “but there is no hope. I am what I am: how could I get away from myself? And, verily⁠— I am sick of myself! ” On such a soil of self-contempt, a veritable swamp soil, grows that weed, that poisonous growth, and all so tiny, so hidden, so ignoble, so sugary. Here teem the worms of revenge and vindictiveness; here the air reeks of things secret and unmentionable; here is ever spun the net of the most malignant conspiracy⁠—the conspiracy of the sufferers against the sound and the victorious; here is the sight of the victorious hated