Herr Settembrini said he was confident Hans Castorp uttered such stuff merely for the sake of being contradicted. The young man would find him ever ready to lend a hand in the intellectual warfare, against attacks like the present. The Engineer had used the expression “fit for life”; had he intended it in a derogatory sense? To him it was synonymous with “worthy of life,” the two conceptions being perfectly harmonious, and suggesting by a natural process of association another equally beautiful, “worthy of love.” One might with truth say that he who was worthy of the one was fully worthy of the other. And both together, loveworthy and life-worthy, made up the true nobility.

Hans Castorp found that charming⁠—most edifying. Herr Settembrini had quite won him over with his plastic theory. Say what you like⁠—and there was a lot to be said for the idea that illness had something solemn and ennobling about it⁠—yet after all, you couldn’t deny that illness was an accentuation of the physical, it did throw man back, so to speak, upon the flesh and to that extent was detrimental to human dignity. It dragged man down to the level of his body. Thus it might be argued that disease was unhuman.