On top of which “light-seeking youth” had to stand by while Naphta neatly wrung the neck of all these arguments, one after the other. He derided the humanist’s reluctance to shed blood, and his reverence for human life. He said that the latter was characteristic of our intensely bourgeois age, our policy of mollycoddle. Even so, its inconsistency was apparent. For let an idea arise that went beyond considerations of personal safety and well-being⁠—and such ideas were the only ones worthy of human beings, and thus in a higher sense were the normal field of human activity⁠—and the individual would, even under average emotional stress, be sacrificed without scruple to the higher claim. Nay, more: the individual, of his own free will, would expose himself without a thought. The philanthropy of his honoured opponent would eliminate from life all its stern and mortal traits; it would castrate life, as would the determinism of its so-called science. But determinism would never succeed in doing away with the conception of guilt. It could only add to its authority and its awfulness.

Oh, so he demanded that the unhappy victim of social maladjustment be convinced of his own sinfulness, and tread in full conviction the path to the scaffold?