had their origin in the instinct to look on pain as the most powerful expedient of mnemonics. The poorer the memory was, the more fearful the practices; the severity of penal codes in particular gives a measure of how difficult is was to get a victory over forgetfulness, and to keep present to slaves of passion and the moment a few primitive requirements of social life. Nietzsche refers in this connection to the Germans and their penal laws: "We Germans certainly do not consider ourselves a particularly cruel and hard-hearted people, still less as particularly light-headed or living merely for the day; but let one look into our old criminal codes, if one wants to get an inside view of the trouble that had to be taken to train up a 'people of thinkers.'" He instances stoning (according to legend a millstone fell on the head of an insolvent debtor), breaking on a wheel (the most characteristic invention and specialty of German genius in the realm of punishment), impaling, "quartering," seething the criminal in oil or wine (still done in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), flaying, cutting flesh from the breast, also smearing the evil-doer with honey and exposing him to flies under a burning sun. It was by the help of processes like these, or pictures of them, that men retained in their minds five or six "I will nots," in respect to which promise had been given in order to live under the benefits of society—and were brought at last "to reason"! "Ah, reason, earnestness, rule over the passions (Affecte), the whole gloomy thing we call reflection, all these privileges and ornaments of man—how deeply have they made themselves paid for, how much blood and horror are at the basis of all 'good things'"!
Measures of this character belong to the rudimentary, formative stages of society everywhere. It is by the steady pressure of social codes that man gets a "memory of the will," and is turned into an anywise regular, reckonable being. And the end justifies the means here, whatever of hardness, tyranny, stupidity, or idiocy attached to them. The Kamachatkans required that snow should never be scraped off with a knife, that a coal should never be pierced with a knife, that iron should never be put into the fire—death being the penalty for non-compliance. The rules seem absurd, but they were rules, and kept the perpetual nearness of social authority, the uninterrupted
