instincts (philosophically prepared: the unconscious has the greater value) after the appearance of the enfeeblement of will power and of the will to an end and to the means thereto.
75. A capable artisan or scholar cuts a good figure if he have his pride in his art, and looks pleasantly and contentedly upon life. On the other hand, there is no sight more wretched than that of a cobbler or a schoolmaster who, with the air of a martyr, gives one to understand that he was really born for something better. There is nothing better than what is good! and that is: to have a certain kind of capacity and to use it. This is virtu in the Italian style of the Renaissance. Nowadays, when the state has a nonsensically oversized belly, in all fields and branches of work there are "representatives" over and above the real workman: for instance, in addition to the scholars, there are the journalists; in addition to the suffering masses, there is a crowd of jabbering and bragging ne'er-do-wells who "represent" that suffering not to speak of the professional politicians who, though quite satisfied with their lot, stand up in parliament and, with strong lungs, "represent" grievances. Our modern life is extremely expensive thanks to the host of middlemen that infest it; whereas in the city of antiquity, and in many a city of Spain and Italy today, where there is an echo of the ancient spirit, the man himself comes forward and will have nothing to do with a representative or an intermediary in the modern style except perhaps to kick him hence!
76. The pre-eminence of the merchant and the middleman, even in the most intellectual spheres: the journalist, the " representative," the historian (as an intermediary between the past and the pre sent), the exotic and cosmopolitan, the middleman between natural science and philosophy, the semi- theologians.
77. The men I have regarded with the most loathing, heretofore, are the parasites of intellect: they are to be found everywhere, already, in our modern Europe, and as a matter of fact their conscience is as light as it possibly can be. They may be a little turbid, and savor somewhat of Pessimism, but in the main they are voracious, dirty, dirtying, stealthy, insinuating, light-fingered gentry, scabby and as innocent as all small sinners and microbes are. They live at the expense of those who have intellect and who distribute it liberally: they know that it is peculiar to the rich mind to live in a disinterested fashion, without taking too much petty thought for the morrow, and to distribute its wealth prodigally. For intellect is a bad domestic economist, and pays no heed whatever to the fact that everything lives on it and devours it.
78. MODERN MUMMERY. The motleyness of modern men and its charm. Essentially a mask and a sign of boredom. The journalist. The political man (in the "national swindle"). Mummery in the arts: The lack of honesty in preparing and schooling oneself for them (Fromentin); The Romanticists (their lack of philosophy and science and their excess in literature); The novelists (Walter Scott, but also the monsters of the Nibelung with their inordinately nervous music); The lyricists. "Scientifically." Virtuosos (Jews). The popular ideals are overcome, but not yet in the presence of the people: The saint, the sage, the prophet.
79. The want of discipline in the modern spirit concealed beneath all kinds of moral finery. The show-words are: Toleration (for the " incapacity of saying yes or no "); la largeur de sympathie ( = a third of indifference, a third of curiosity, and a third of morbid susceptibility); "objectivity" (the lack of personality and of will, and the in ability to "love"); "freedom" in regard to the rule (Romanticism); "truth" as opposed to false hood and lying (Naturalism); the "scientific spirit" (the "human document": or, in plain English, the serial story which means "addition" instead of "composition"); "passion" in the place of disorder and intemperance; "depth" in the place of confusion and the pell-mell of symbols.
80. Concerning the criticism of big words. I am full of mistrust and malice towards what is called "ideal": this is my pessimism, that I have recognized to what extent "sublime sentiments" are a source of evil, that is to say, a belittling and depreciating of man. Every time "progress" is expected to result from an ideal, disappointment invariably follows; the triumph of an ideal has always been a retrograde movement. Christianity, revolution, the abolition of slavery, equal rights, philanthropy, love of peace, justice, truth: all these big words are only valuable in a struggle, as banners: not as realities, but as showy words, for something quite different (yea, even quite opposed to what they mean!).
81. The kind of man is known who has fallen in love with the sentence " tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner" It is the weak and, above all, the disillusioned: if there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to contemn! It is the philosophy of disappointment, which here swathes itself so humanly in pity, and gazes out so sweetly. They are Romanticists, whose faith has gone to pot: now they at least wish to look on and see how everything vanishes and fades. They call it I art pour I art, " objectivity," etc.
82. The main symptoms of Pessimism: Dinners at Magny s; Russian Pessimism (Tolstoy, Dostoiew- 69 sky); aesthetic Pessimism, fart pour I art, " de scription " (the romantic and the anti-romantic Pessimism); Pessimism in the theory of know ledge (Schopenhauer: phenomenalism); anarchical Pessimism; the " religion of pity," Buddhistic preparation; the Pessimism of culture (exoticness, cosmopolitanism); moral Pessimism, myself.
83. " Without the Christian Faith," said Pascal, " you would yourselves be like nature and history, un monstre et un chaos" We fulfilled this prophecy: once the weak and optimistic eighteenth century had embellished and rationalised man. Schopenhauer and Pascal. In one essential point, Schopenhauer is the first who takes up Pascals movement again: un monstre et un chaos, conse quently something that must be negatived . . . history, nature, and man himself! " Our inability to know the truth is the result of our corruption, of our moral decay" says Pascal. And Schopenhauer says essentially the same. " The more profound the corruption of reason is, the more necessary is the doctrine of salvation " or, putting it into Schopenhauerian phraseology, negation.
84. Schopenhauer as an epigone (state of affairs before the Revolution): Pity, sensuality, art, weakness of will, Catholicism of the most intel lectual desires that is, at bottom, the good old eighteenth century. 70 Schopenhauer s fundamental misunderstanding of the will (just as though passion, instinct, and desire were the essential factors of will) is typical: the depreciation of the will to the extent of mis taking it altogether. Likewise the hatred of willing: the attempt at seeing something superior yea, even superiority itself, and that which really matters, in non-willing, in the " subject-being without aim or intention." Great symptom of fatigue or of the weakness of will: for this, in reality, is what treats the passions as master, and directs them as to the way and to the measure. . . .
85. The undignified attempt has been made to regard Wagner and Schopenhauer as types of the mentally unsound: an infinitely more essential understanding of the matter would have been gained if the exact decadent type which each of them represents had been scientifically and accurately defined.
86. In my opinion, Henrik Ibsen has become very German. With all his robust idealism and " Will to Truth," he never dared to ring himself free from moral-illusionism which says " freedom," and will not admit, even to itself, what freedom is: the second stage in the metamorphosis of the " Will to Power" in him who lacks it. In the first stage, one demands justice at the hands of those who havepower. In the second one speaks of "freedom," 71 that is to say, one wishes to " shake oneself free " from those who have power. In the third stage, one speaks of " equal rights " that is to say, so long as one is not a predominant personality one wishes to prevent one s competitors from growing in power.
87. The Decline of Protestantism: theoretically and historically understood as a half-measure. Un deniable predominance of Catholicism today: Protestant feeling is so dead that the strongest anti- Protestant movements (Wagner s Parsifal, for instance) are no longer regarded as such. The whole of the more elevated intellectuality in France is Catholic in instinct; Bismarck recognized that there was no longer any such thing as Protestantism.
88. Protestantism, that spiritually unclean and tiresome form of decadence, in which Christianity has known how to survive in the mediocre North, is something incomplete and complexly valuable for knowledge, in so far as it was able to bring experiences of different
