The chosen people. – The Jews, who feel they are the chosen people of all peoples precisely because they are the moral genius of all peoples (owing to their ability more profoundly to despise the human being in themselves than any other people) – the Jews take a pleasure in their divine monarch and the holy which is similar to that which the French nobility took in Louis XIV. This nobility had surrendered all its power and sovereignty and had become contemptible: in order not to feel this, in order to be able to forget this, there was a need for a royal splendour, a royal authority and plenitude of power without equal to which only the nobility had access. In rising to the height of the court by virtue of this privilege and seeing from there everything as beneath oneself, as contemptible, one got over an irritable conscience. Thus one deliberately built the tower of royal power ever higher into the clouds and staked on it the ultimate building stones of one’s own power.