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'Pure spirit' a prejudice.  Wherever the teaching of pure spirituality has ruled, it has destroyed nervous energy with its excesses: it has taught deprecation, neglect or tormenting of the body and men to torment and deprecate themselves on account of the drives which fill them; it has produced gloomy, tense and oppressed souls  which believed, moreover, they knew the cause of their feeling of wretchedness and were perhaps able to abolish it! 'It must reside in the body! the body is still flourishing too well!'  thus they concluded, while in fact the body was, by means of the pains it registered, raising protest after protest against the mockery to which: it was constantly being subjected. A general chronic over-excitability was finally the lot of these virtuous pure-spirits: the only pleasure they could still recognise was in the form of ecstasy and other precursors of madness  and their system attained its summit when it came to take ecstasy for the higher goal of life and the standard by which all earthly things stood condemned.