Consequences: (1) Savages (at first, of course, in conformity with the culture that has reigned hitherto); (2) Sovereign individuals (where powerful barbarous masses and emancipation from all that has been, are crossed). The age of greatest stupidity, brutality, and wretchedness in the masses, and in the highest individuals.
131. An incalculable number of higher individuals now perish: but he who escapes their fate is as strong as the devil. In this respect we are reminded of the conditions which prevailed in the Renaissance.
132. How are Good Europeans such as ourselves distinguished from the patriots? In the first place, we are atheists and immoralists, but we take care to support the religions and the morality which we associate with the gregarious instinct: for by means of them, an order of men is, so to speak, being prepared, which must at some time or other fall into our hands, which must actually crave for our hands. Beyond Good and Evil, certainly; but we insist upon the unconditional and strict preserva tion of herd-morality. We reserve ourselves the right to several kinds of philosophy which it is necessary to learn: under certain circumstances, the pessimistic kind as a hammer; a European Buddhism might perhaps be indispensable. We should probably support the development and the maturation of democratic tendencies; for it conduces to weakness of will: in " Socialism " we recognise a thorn which prevents smug ease. Attitude towards the people. Our prejudices; we pay attention to the results of cross-breeding. Detached, well-to-do, strong: irony concerning the " press " and its culture. Our care: that scientific men should not become journalists. We mistrust any form of culture that tolerates news paper reading or writing. We make our accidental positions (as Goethe and Stendhal did), our experiences, a foreground, and we lay stress upon them, so that we may deceive concerning our backgrounds. We ourselves wait and avoid putting our heart into them. They serve us as refuges,such as a wanderer might require and use but we avoid feeling at home in them. We are ahead of our fellows in that we have had a disciplina voluntatis. All strength is directed to the development of the will, an art which allows us to wear masks, an art of understanding beyond the passions (also " super- European " thought at times). This is our preparation before becoming the law-givers of the future and the lords of the earth; if not we, at least our children. Caution where marriage is concerned.
133. The twentieth century. The Abbe Galiani says somewhere: " La prfooyance est la cause des guerres actuelles de F Europe. Si I on voulait se donner la peine de ne rien prtvoir, tout le monde serait tranquille, et je ne crois pas qu on serait plus mal- heureux parce qu on ne feraitpas la guerre" As I in no way share the unwarlike views of my deceased friend Galiani, I have no fear whatever of saying something beforehand with the view of conjuring in some way the cause of wars. A condition of excessive consciousness, after the worst of earthquakes: with new questions.
134. It is the time of the great noon, of the most appalling enlightenment: my particular kind of Pessimism: the great starting-point. (i) Fundamental contradiction between civil isation and the elevation of man. (2) Moral valuations regarded as a history of lies and the art of calumny in the service of the Will to Power (of the will of the herd, which rises against stronger men). (3) The conditions which determine every elevation in culture (the facilitation of a selection being made at the cost of a crowd) are the con ditions of all growth. (4). The multiformity of the world as a question of strength, which sees all things in the perspective of their growth. The moral Christian values to be regarded as the insurrection and mendacity of slaves (in comparison with the aristrocratic values of the ancient world).
SECOND BOOK. A CRITICISM OF THE HIGHEST VALUES THAT HAVE PREVAILED HITHERTO.
I. CRITICISM OF RELIGION
ALL the beauty and sublimity with which we have invested real and imagined things, I will show to be the property and product of man, and this should be his most beautiful apology. Man as a poet, as a thinker, as a god, as love, as power. Oh, the regal liberality with which he has lavished gifts upon things in order to im poverish himself and make himself feel wretched! Hitherto, this has been his greatest disinterested ness, that he admired and worshipped, and knew how to conceal from himself that he it was who had created what he admired.
I. CONCERNING THE ORIGIN OF RELIGIONS.
135. The origin of religion. Just as the illiterate man of today believes that his wrath is the cause of his being angry, that his mind is the cause of his thinking, that his soul is the cause of his feeling, in short, just as a mass of psychological entities are still unthinkingly postulated as causes; so, in a still more primitive age, the same pheno mena were interpreted by man by means of personal entities. Those conditions of his soul which seemed strange, overwhelming, and raptur ous, he regarded as obsessions and bewitching influences emanating from the power of some personality. (Thus the Christian, the most puerile and backward man of this age, traces hope, peace, and the feeling of deliverance to a psychological inspiration on the part of God: being by nature a sufferer and a creature in need of repose, states of happiness, peace, and resigna tion, perforce seem strange to him, and seem to need some explanation.) Among intelligent, strong, and vigorous races, the epileptic is mostly the cause of a belief in the existence of some foreign power; but all such examples of apparent subjection as, for instance, the bearing of the exalted man, of the poet, of the great criminal, or the passions, love and revenge lead to the invention of supernatural powers. A condition is made concrete by being identified with a personality, and when this condition overtakes anybody, it is ascribed to that personality. In other words: in the psychological concept of God, a certain state of the soul is personified as a cause in order to appear as an effect. The psychological logic is as follows: when the feeling of power suddenly seizes and overwhelms a man, and this takes place in the case of all the great passions, a doubt arises in him concerning his own person: he dare not think himself the cause of this astonishing sensation and thus he posits a stronger person, a Godhead as its cause. In short, the origin of religion lies in the extreme feelings of power, which, being strange, take men by surprise: and just as the sick man, who feels one of his limbs unaccountably heavy, concludes that another man must be sitting on it, so the ingenuous homo religiosus, divides himself up into several people. Religion is an example of the " alteration de la personality? A sort of fear and sensation of terror in one s own presence. . . . But also a feeling of inordinate rapture and exaltation. Among sick people, the sensation of health suffices to awaken a belief in the proximity of God.
136. Rudimentary psychology of the religious man: All changes are effects; all effects are effects of will (the notion of " Nature " and of " natural law," is lacking); all effects presuppose an agent. Rudimentary psychology: one is only a cause oneself, when one knows that one has willed something. Result: States of power impute to man the feeling that he is not the cause of them, that he is not responsible for them: they come without being willed to do so consequently we cannot be their originators: will that is not free (that is to say, the knowledge of a change in our condition which we have not helped to bring about) requires a strong will. Consequence of this rudimentary psychology: Man has never dared to credit himself with his strong and startling moods, he has always con ceived them as " passive," as " imposed upon him from outside ": Religion is the offshoot of a doubt concerning the entity of the person, an alteration of the personality: in so far as every thing great and strong in man was considered superhuman and foreign, man belittled himself, he laid the two sides, the very pitiable and weak side, and the very strong and startling side apart, in two spheres, and called the one " Man " and the other " God." And he has continued to act on these lines; during the period of the moral idiosyncrasy he did not interpret his lofty and sublime moral states as " proceeding from his own will " or as the " work " of the person. Even the Christian himself divides his personality into two parts, the one a mean and weak fiction which he calls man, and the other which he calls God (Deliverer and Saviour). Religion has lowered the concept " man "; its ultimate conclusion is that all goodness, greatness, and truth are superhuman, and are only obtainable by the grace of God
137. One way of raising man out of his self-abase ment, which brought about the decline of the point of view that classed all lofty and strong states of the soul, as strange, was the theory of relation ship. These lofty and strong states of the soul could at least be interpreted as the influence
