deprived a father of his son and had him drawn and

quartered because the latter had manifested a

troublesome, ominous distrust of an entire expedition: the
individual was in this case brushed aside as a pestiferous
insect. He was too low and mean to justify continued
sentiments of compunction in the ruler of the world.
Indeed no cruel man is ever as cruel, in the main, as his
victim thinks. The idea of pain is never the same as the
sensation. The rule is precisely analogous in the case of
the unjust judge, and of the journalist who by means of
devious rhetorical methods, leads public opinion astray.
Cause and effect are in all these instances entwined with
totally different series of feeling and thoughts, whereas it
is unconsciously assumed that principal and victim feel
and think exactly alike, and because of this assumption
the guilt of the one is based upon the pain of the other.

82
The Soul's Skin.—As the bones, flesh, entrails and blood
vessels are enclosed by a skin that renders the aspect of
men endurable, so the impulses and passions of the soul
are enclosed by vanity: it is the skin of the soul.

83
Sleep of Virtue.—If virtue goes to sleep, it will be more
vigorous when it awakes.

84
Subtlety of Shame.—Men are not ashamed of obscene
thoughts, but they are ashamed when they suspect that
obscene thoughts are attributed to them.

85
Naughtiness Is Rare.—Most people are too much
absorbed in themselves to be bad.

86
The Mite in the Balance.—We are praised or blamed, as
the one or the other may be expedient, for displaying to
advantage our power of discernment.

87
Luke 18:14 Improved.—He that humbleth himself
wisheth to be exalted.
 88
Prevention of Suicide.—There is a justice according to
which we may deprive a man of life, but none that permits
us to deprive him of death: this is merely cruelty.

89
Vanity.—We set store by the good opinion of men, first
because it is of use to us and next because we wish to give
them pleasure (children their parents, pupils their teacher,
and well disposed persons all others generally). Only
when the good opinion of men is important to somebody,
apart from personal advantage or the desire to give
pleasure, do we speak of vanity. In this last case, a man
wants to give himself pleasure, but at the expense of his
fellow creatures, inasmuch as he inspires them with a
false opinion of himself or else inspires "good opinion" in
such a way that it is a source of pain to others (by
arousing envy). The individual generally seeks, through
the opinion of others, to attest and fortify the opinion he
has of himself; but the potent influence of authority—an
influence as old as man himself—leads many, also, to
strengthen their own opinion of themselves by means of
authority, that is, to borrow from others the expedient of
relying more upon the judgment of their fellow men than
upon their own.—Interest in oneself, the wish to please
oneself attains, with the vain man, such proportions that
he first misleads others into a false, unduly exalted
estimate of himself and then relies upon the authority of
others for his self estimate; he thus creates the delusion
that he pins his faith to.—It must, however, be admitted
that the vain man does not desire to please others so much
as himself and he will often go so far, on this account, as
to overlook his own interests: for he often inspires his
fellow creatures with malicious envy and renders them ill
disposed in order that he may thus increase his own
delight in himself.

90
Limits of the Love of Mankind.—Every man who has
declared that some other man is an ass or a scoundrel, gets
angry when the other man conclusively shows that the
assertion was erroneous.

91
Weeping Morality.—How much delight morality
occasions! Think of the ocean of pleasing tears that has
flowed from the narration of noble, great-hearted deeds!
—This charm of life would disappear if the belief in
complete irresponsibility gained the upper hand.
 92
Origin of Justice.—Justice (reasonableness) has its
origin among approximate equals in power, as
Thucydides (in the dreadful conferences of the Athenian
and Melian envoys) has rightly conceived. Thus, where
there exists no demonstrable supremacy and a struggle
leads but to mutual, useless damage, the reflection arises
that an understanding would best be arrived at and some
compromise entered into. The reciprocal nature is hence
the first nature of justice. Each party makes the other
content inasmuch as each receives what it prizes more
highly than the other. Each surrenders to the other what
the other wants and receives in return its own desire.
Justice is therefore reprisal and exchange upon the basis
of an approximate equality of power. Thus revenge
pertains originally to the domain of justice as it is a sort of
reciprocity. Equally so, gratitude.—Justice reverts
naturally to the standpoint of self preservation, therefore
to the egoism of this consideration: "why should I injure
myself to no purpose and perhaps never attain my
end?"—So much for the origin of justice. Only because
men, through mental habits, have forgotten the original
motive of so called just and rational acts, and also because
for thousands of years children have been brought to
admire and imitate such acts, have they gradually
assumed the appearance of being unegotistical. Upon this
appearance is founded the high estimate of them, which,
moreover, like all estimates, is continually developing, for
whatever is highly esteemed is striven for, imitated, made
the object of self sacrifice, while the merit of the pain and
emulation thus expended is, by each individual, ascribed
to the thing esteemed.—How slightly moral would the
world appear without forgetfulness! A poet could say that
God had posted forgetfulness as a sentinel at the portal of
the temple of human merit!

93
Concerning the Law of the Weaker.—Whenever any
party, for instance, a besieged city, yields to a stronger
party, under stipulated conditions, the counter stipulation
is that there be a reduction to insignificance, a burning
and destruction of the city and thus a great damage
inflicted upon the stronger party. Thus arises a sort of
equalization principle upon the basis of which a law can
be established. The enemy has an advantage to gain by its
maintenance.—To this extent there is also a law between
slaves and masters, limited only by the extent to which
the slave may be useful to his master. The law goes
originally only so far as the one party may appear to the
other potent, invincible, stable, and the like. To such an
extent, then, the weaker has rights, but very limited ones.
Hence the famous dictum that each has as much law on
his side as his power extends (or more accurately, as his
power is believed to extend).

94
The Three Phases of Morality Hitherto.—It is the first
evidence that the animal has become human when his
conduct ceases to be based upon the immediately
expedient, but upon the permanently useful; when he has,
therefore, grown utilitarian, capable of purpose. Thus is
manifested the first rule of reason. A still higher stage is
attained when he regulates his conduct upon the basis of
honor, by means of which he gains mastery of himself
and surrenders his desires to principles; this lifts him far
above the phase in which he was actuated only by
considerations of personal advantage as he understood it.
He respects and wishes to be respected. This means that
he comprehends utility as a thing dependent upon what
his opinion of others is and their opinion of him. Finally
he regulates his conduct (the highest phase of morality
hitherto attained) by his own standard of men and things.
He himself decides, for himself and for others, what is
honorable and what is useful. He has become a law giver
to opinion, upon the basis of his ever higher developing
conception of the utilitarian and the honorable.
Knowledge makes him capable of placing the highest
utility, (that is, the universal, enduring utility) before
merely personal utility,—of placing ennobling recognition
of the enduring and universal before the merely
temporary: he lives and acts as a collective individuality.

95
Ethic of the Developed Individual.—Hitherto the
altruistic has been looked upon as the distinctive
characteristic of moral conduct, and it is manifest that it
was the consideration of universal utility that prompted
praise and recognition of altruistic conduct. Must not a
radical departure from this point of view be imminent,
now that it is being ever more clearly perceived that in the
most personal considerations the most general welfare is
attained: so that conduct inspired by the most personal
considerations of advantage is just the sort which has its
origin in the present conception of morality (as a
universal utilitarianism)? To contemplate oneself as a
complete personality and bear the welfare of that
personality in mind in all that one does—this is
productive of better results than any sympathetic
susceptibility and conduct in behalf of others. Indeed we
all suffer from such disparagement of our own
personalities, which are at present made to deteriorate
from neglect. Capacity is, in fact, divorced from our
personality in most cases, and sacrificed to the state, to
science, to the needy, as if it were the bad which deserved
to be made a sacrifice. Now, we are willing to labor for
our fellowmen but only to the extent that we find our own
highest advantage in so doing, no more, no less. The
whole matter depends upon what may be understood as
one's advantage: the crude, undeveloped, rough
individualities will be the very ones to estimate it most
inadequately.

96
Usage and Ethic.—To be moral, virtuous, praiseworthy
means to yield obedience to ancient law and hereditary
usage. Whether this obedience be rendered readily or with
difficulty is long immaterial. Enough that it be rendered.
"Good" finally comes to mean him who acts in the
traditional manner, as a result of heredity or natural
disposition, that is to say does what is customary with
scarcely an effort, whatever that may be (for example
revenges injuries when revenge, as with the ancient
Greeks, was part of good morals). He is called good
because he is good "to some purpose," and as
benevolence, sympathy, considerateness, moderation and
the like come, in the general course of conduct, to be
finally recognized as "good to some purpose" (as
utilitarian) the benevolent man, the helpful man, is duly
styled "good". (At first other and more important kinds of
utilitarian qualities stand in the foreground.) Bad is "not
habitual" (unusual), to do things not in accordance with
usage, to oppose the traditional, however rational or the
reverse the traditional may be. To do injury to one's social
group or community (and to one's neighbor as thus
understood) is looked upon, through all the variations of
moral laws, in different ages, as the peculiarly "immoral"
act, so that to-day we associate the word "bad" with
deliberate injury to one's neighbor or community.
"Egoistic" and "non-egoistic" do not constitute the
fundamental opposites that have brought mankind to
make a distinction between moral and immoral, good and
bad; but adherence to traditional custom, and
emancipation from it. How the traditional had its origin is
quite immaterial; in any event it had no reference to good
and bad or any categorical imperative but to the all
important end of maintaining and sustaining the
community, the race, the confederation, the nation. Every
superstitious custom that originated in a misinterpreted
event or casualty entailed some tradition, to adhere to
which is moral. To break loose from it is dangerous, more
prejudicial to the community than to the individual
(because divinity visits the consequences of impiety and
sacrilege upon the community rather than upon the
individual). Now every tradition grows ever more
venerable—the more remote is its origin, the more
confused that origin is. The reverence due to it increases
from generation to generation. The tradition finally
becomes holy and inspires awe. Thus it is that the precept
of piety is a far loftier morality than that inculcated by
altruistic conduct.

97
Delight in the Moral.—A potent species of joy (and
thereby the source of morality) is custom. The customary
is done more easily, better, therefore preferably. A
pleasure is felt in it and experience thus shows that since
this practice has held its own it must be good. A manner
or moral that lives and lets live is thus demonstrated
advantageous, necessary, in contradistinction to all new
and not yet adopted practices. The custom is therefore the
blending of the agreeable and the useful. Moreover it does
not require deliberation. As soon as man can exercise
compulsion, he exercises it to enforce and establish his
customs, for they are to him attested lifewisdom. So, too,
a community of individuals constrains each one of their
number to adopt the same moral or custom. The error
herein is this: Because a certain custom has been
agreeable to the feelings or at least because it proves a
means of maintenance, this custom must be imperative,
for it is regarded as the only thing that can possibly be
consistent with well being. The well being of life seems to
spring from it alone. This conception of the customary as
a condition of existence is carried into the slightest detail
of morality. Inasmuch as insight into true causation is
quite restricted in all inferior peoples, a superstitious
anxiety is felt that everything be done in due routine.
Even when a custom is exceedingly burdensome it is
preserved because of its supposed vital utility. It is not
known that the same degree of satisfaction can be
experienced through some other custom and even higher
degrees of satisfaction, too. But it is fully appreciated that
all customs do become more agreeable with the lapse of
time, no matter how difficult they may have been found in
the beginning, and that even the severest way of life may
be rendered a matter of habit and therefore a pleasure.

98
Pleasure and Social Instinct.—Through his relations
with other men, man derives a new species of delight in
those pleasurable emotions which his own personality
affords him; whereby the domain of pleasurable emotions
is made infinitely more comprehensive. No doubt he has
inherited many of these feelings from the brutes, which
palpably feel delight when they sport with one another, as
mothers with their young. So, too, the sexual relations
must be taken into account: they make every young
woman interesting to every young man from the
standpoint of pleasure, and conversely. The feeling of
pleasure originating in human relationships makes men in
general better. The delight in common, the pleasures
enjoyed together heighten one another. The individual
feels a sense of security. He becomes better natured.
Distrust and malice dissolve. For the man feels the sense
of benefit and observes the same feeling in others. Mutual
manifestations of pleasure inspire mutual sympathy, the
sentiment of homogeneity. The same effect is felt also at
mutual sufferings, in a common danger, in stormy
weather. Upon such a foundation are built the earliest
alliances: the object of which is the mutual protection and
safety from threatening misfortunes, and the welfare of
each individual. And thus the social instinct develops
from pleasure.

99
The Guiltless Nature of So-Called Bad Acts.—All
"bad" acts are inspired by the impulse to self preservation
or, more accurately, by the desire for pleasure and for the
avoidance of pain in the individual. Thus are they
occasioned, but they are not, therefore, bad. "Pain self
prepared" does not exist, except in the brains of the
philosophers, any more than "pleasure self prepared"
(sympathy in the Schopenhauer sense). In the condition
anterior to the state we kill the creature, be it man or ape,
that attempts to pluck the fruit of a tree before we pluck it
ourselves should we happen to be hungry at the time and
making for that tree: as we would do to-day, so far as the
brute is concerned, if we were wandering in savage
regions.—The bad acts which most disturb us at present
do so because of the erroneous supposition that the one
who is guilty of them towards us has a free will in the
matter and that it was within his discretion not to have
done these evil things. This belief in discretionary power
inspires hate, thirst for revenge, malice, the entire
perversion of the mental processes, whereas we would
feel in no way incensed against the brute, as we hold it
irresponsible. To inflict pain not from the instinct of self
preservation but in requital—this is the consequence of
false judgment and is equally a guiltless course of
conduct. The individual can, in that condition which is
anterior to the state, act with fierceness and violence for
the intimidation of another creature, in order to render his
own power more secure as a result of such acts of
intimidation. Thus acts the powerful, the superior, the
original state founder, who subjugates the weaker. He has
the right to do so, as the state nowadays assumes the same
right, or, to be more accurate, there is no right that can
conflict with this. A foundation for all morality can first
be laid only when a stronger individuality or a collective
individuality, for example society, the state, subjects the
single personalities, hence builds upon their unification
and establishes a bond of union. Morality results from
compulsion, it is indeed itself one long compulsion to
which obedience is rendered in order that pain may be
avoided. At first it is but custom, later free obedience and
finally almost instinct. At last it is (like everything
habitual and natural) associated with pleasure—and is
then called virtue.

100
Shame.—Shame exists wherever a "mystery" exists: but
this is a religious notion which in the earlier period of
human civilization had great vogue. Everywhere there
were circumscribed spots to which access was denied on
account of some divine law, except in special
circumstances. At first these spots were quite extensive,
inasmuch as stipulated areas could not be trod by the
uninitiated, who, when near them, felt tremors and
anxieties. This sentiment was frequently transferred to
other relationships, for example to sexual relations,
which, as the privilege and gateway of mature age, must
be withdrawn from the contemplation of youth for its own
advantage: relations which many divinities were busy in
preserving and sanctifying, images of which divinities
were duly placed in marital chambers as guardians. (In
Turkish such an apartment is termed a harem or holy
thing, the same word also designating the vestibule of a
mosque). So, too, Kingship is regarded as a centre from
which power and brilliance stream forth, as a mystery to
the subjects, impregnated with secrecy and shame,
sentiments still quite operative among peoples who in
other respects are without any shame at all. So, too, is the
whole world of inward states, the so-called "soul," even
now, for all non-philosophical persons, a "mystery," and
during countless ages it was looked upon as a something
of divine origin, in direct communion with deity. It is,
therefore, an adytum and occasions shame.

101
Judge Not.—Care must be taken, in the contemplation of
earlier ages, that there be no falling into unjust
scornfulness. The injustice in slavery, the cruelty in the
subjugation of persons and peoples must not be estimated
by our standard. For in that period the instinct of justice
was not so highly developed. Who dare reproach the
Genoese Calvin for burning the physician Servetus at the
stake? It was a proceeding growing out of his convictions.
And the Inquisition, too, had its justification. The only
thing is that the prevailing views were false and led to
those proceedings which seem so cruel to us, simply
because such views have become foreign to us. Besides,
what is the burning alive of one individual compared with
eternal hell pains for everybody else? And yet this idea
then had hold of all the world without in the least
vitiating, with its frightfulness, the other idea of a god.
Even we nowadays are hard and merciless to political
revolutionists, but that is because we are in the habit of
believing the state a necessity, and hence the cruelty of
the proceeding is not so much understood as in the other
cases where the points of view are repudiated. The cruelty
to animals shown by children and Italians is due to the
same misunderstanding. The animal, owing to the
exigencies of the church catechism, is placed too far
below the level of mankind.—Much, too, that is frightful
and inhuman in history, and which is almost incredible, is
rendered less atrocious by the reflection that the one who
commands and the one who executes are different
persons. The former does not witness the performance
and hence it makes no strong impression on him. The
latter obeys a superior and hence feels no responsibility.
Most princes and military chieftains appear, through lack
of true perception, cruel and hard without really being so.
—Egoism is not bad because the idea of the "neighbor"—
the word is of Christian origin and does not correspond to
truth—is very weak in us, and we feel ourselves, in regard
to him, as free from responsibility as if plants and stones
were involved. That another is in suffering must be
learned and it can never be wholly learned.

102
"Man Always Does Right."—We do not blame nature
when she sends a thunder storm and makes us wet: why
then do we term the man who inflicts injury immoral?
Because in the latter case we assume a voluntary, ruling,
free will, and in the former necessity. But this distinction
is a delusion. Moreover, even the intentional infliction of
injury is not, in all circumstances termed immoral. Thus,
we kill a fly intentionally without thinking very much
about it, simply because its buzzing about is disagreeable;
and we punish a criminal and inflict pain upon him in
order to protect ourselves and society. In the first case it is
the individual who, for the sake of preserving himself or
in order to spare himself pain, does injury with design: in
the second case, it is the state. All ethic deems intentional
infliction of injury justified by necessity; that is when it is
a matter of self preservation. But these two points of view
are sufficient to explain all bad acts done by man to men.
It is desired to obtain pleasure or avoid pain. In any sense,
it is a question, always, of self preservation. Socrates and
Plato are right: whatever man does he always does right:
that is, does what seems to him good (advantageous)
according to the degree of advancement his intellect has
attained, which is always the measure of his rational
capacity.

103
The Inoffensive in Badness.—Badness has not for its
object the infliction of pain upon others but simply our
own satisfaction as, for instance, in the case of thirst for
vengeance or of nerve excitation. Every act of teasing
shows what pleasure is caused by the display of our
power over others and what feelings of delight are
experienced in the sense of domination. Is there, then,
anything immoral in feeling pleasure in the pain of
others? Is malicious joy devilish, as Schopenhauer says?
In the realm of nature we feel joy in breaking boughs,
shattering rocks, fighting with wild beasts, simply to attest
our strength thereby. Should not the knowledge that
another suffers on our account here, in this case, make the
same kind of act, (which, by the way, arouses no qualms
of conscience in us) immoral also? But if we had not this
knowledge there would be no pleasure in one's own
superiority or power, for this pleasure is experienced only
in the suffering of another, as in the case of teasing. All
pleasure is, in itself, neither good nor bad. Whence comes
the conviction that one should not cause pain in others in
order to feel pleasure oneself? Simply from the standpoint
of utility, that is, in consideration of the consequences, of
ultimate pain, since the injured party or state will demand
satisfaction and revenge. This consideration alone can
have led to the determination to renounce such pleasure.
—Sympathy has the satisfaction of others in view no
more than, as already stated, badness has the pain of
others in view. For there are at least two (perhaps many
more) elementary ingredients in personal gratification
which enter largely into our self satisfaction: one of them
being the pleasure of the emotion, of which species is
sympathy with tragedy, and another, when the impulse is
to action, being the pleasure of exercising one's power.
Should a sufferer be very dear to us, we divest ourselves
of pain by the performance of acts of sympathy.—With
the exception of some few philosophers, men have placed
sympathy very low in the rank of moral feelings: and
rightly.
 104
Self Defence.—If self defence is in general held a valid
justification, then nearly every manifestation of so called
immoral egoism must be justified, too. Pain is inflicted,
robbery or killing done in order to maintain life or to
protect oneself and ward off harm. A man lies when
cunning and delusion are valid means of self preservation.
To injure intentionally when our safety and our existence
are involved, or the continuance of our well being, is
conceded to be moral. The state itself injures from this
motive when it hangs criminals. In unintentional injury
the immoral, of course, can not be present, as accident
alone is involved. But is there any sort of intentional
injury in which our existence and the maintenance of our
well being be not involved? Is there such a thing as
injuring from absolute badness, for example, in the case
of cruelty? If a man does not know what pain an act
occasions, that act is not one of wickedness. Thus the
child is not bad to the animal, not evil. It disturbs and
rends it as if it were one of its playthings. Does a man
ever fully know how much pain an act may cause
another? As far as our nervous system extends, we shield
ourselves from pain. If it extended further, that is, to our
fellow men, we would never cause anyone else any pain
(except in such cases as we cause it to ourselves, when we
cut ourselves, surgically, to heal our ills, or strive and
trouble ourselves to gain health). We conclude from
analogy that something pains somebody and can in
consequence, through recollection and the power of
imagination, feel pain also. But what a difference there
always is between the tooth ache and the pain (sympathy)
that the spectacle of tooth ache occasions! Therefore
when injury is inflicted from so called badness the degree
of pain thereby experienced is always unknown to us: in
so far, however, as pleasure is felt in the act (a sense of
one's own power, of one's own excitation) the act is
committed to maintain the well being of the individual
and hence comes under the purview of self defence and
lying for self preservation. Without pleasure, there is no
life; the struggle for pleasure is the struggle for life.
Whether the individual shall carry on this struggle in such
a way that he be called good or in such a way that he be
called bad is something that the standard and the capacity
of his own intellect must determine for him.

105
Justice that Rewards.—Whoever has fully understood
the doctrine of absolute irresponsibility can no longer
include the so called rewarding and punishing justice in
the idea of justice, if the latter be taken to mean that to
each be given his due. For he who is punished does not
deserve the punishment. He is used simply as a means to
intimidate others from certain acts. Equally, he who is
rewarded does not merit the reward. He could not act any
differently than he did act. Hence the reward has only the
significance of an encouragement to him and others as a
motive for subsequent acts. The praise is called out only
to him who is running in the race and not to him who has
arrived at the goal. Something that comes to someone as
his own is neither a punishment nor a reward. It is given
to him from utiliarian considerations, without his having
any claim to it in justice. Hence one must say "the wise
man praises not because a good act has been done"
precisely as was once said: "the wise man punishes not
because a bad act has been done but in order that a bad act
may not be done." If punishment and reward ceased, there
would cease with them the most powerful incentives to
certain acts and away from other acts. The purposes of
men demand their continuance [of punishment and
reward] and inasmuch as punishment and reward, blame
and praise operate most potently upon vanity, these same
purposes of men imperatively require the continuance of
vanity.

106
The Water Fall.—At the sight of a water fall we may
opine that in the countless curves, spirations and dashes of
the waves we behold freedom of the will and of the
impulses. But everything is compulsory, everything can
be mathematically calculated. Thus it is, too, with human
acts. We would be able to calculate in advance every
single action if we were all knowing, as well as every
advance in knowledge, every delusion, every bad deed.
The acting individual himself is held fast in the illusion of
volition. If, on a sudden, the entire movement of the
world stopped short, and an all knowing and reasoning
intelligence were there to take advantage of this pause, he
could foretell the future of every being to the remotest
ages and indicate the path that would be taken in the
world's further course. The deception of the acting
individual as regards himself, the assumption of the
freedom of the will, is a part of this computable
mechanism.

107
Non-Responsibility and Non-Guilt.—The absolute
irresponsibility of man for his acts and his nature is the
bitterest drop in the cup of him who has knowledge, if he
be accustomed to behold in responsibility and duty the
patent of nobility of his human nature. All his estimates,
preferences, dislikes are thus made worthless and false.
His deepest sentiment, with which he honored the
sufferer, the hero, sprang from an error. He may no longer
praise, no longer blame, for it is irrational to blame and
praise nature and necessity. Just as he cherishes the
beautiful work of art, but does not praise it (as it is
incapable of doing anything for itself), just as he stands in
the presence of plants, he must stand in the presence of
human conduct, his own included. He may admire
strength, beauty, capacity, therein, but he can discern no
merit. The chemical process and the conflict of the
elements, the ordeal of the invalid who strives for
convalescence, are no more merits than the soul-struggles
and extremities in which one is torn this way and that by
contending motives until one finally decides in favor of
the strongest—as the phrase has it, although, in fact, it is
the strongest motive that decides for us. All these
motives, however, whatever fine names we may give
them, have grown from the same roots in which we
believe the baneful poisons lurk. Between good and bad
actions there is no difference in kind but, at most, in
degree. Good acts are sublimated evil. Bad acts are
degraded, imbruted good. The very longing of the
individual for self gratification (together with the fear of
being deprived of it) obtains satisfaction in all
circumstances, let the individual act as he may, that is, as
he must: be it in deeds of vanity, revenge, pleasure,
utility, badness, cunning, be it in deeds of self sacrifice,
sympathy or knowledge. The degrees of rational capacity
determine the direction in which this longing impels:
every society, every individual has constantly present a
comparative classification of benefits in accordance with
which conduct is determined and others are judged. But
this standard perpetually changes. Many acts are called
bad that are only stupid, because the degree of
intelligence that decided for them was low. Indeed, in a
certain sense, all acts now are stupid, for the highest
degree of human intelligence that has yet been attained
will in time most certainly be surpassed and then, in
retrospection, all our present conduct and opinion will
appear as narrow and petty as we now deem the conduct
and opinion of savage peoples and ages.—To perceive all
these things may occasion profound pain but there is,
nevertheless, a consolation. Such pains are birth pains.
The butterfly insists upon breaking through the cocoon,
he presses through it, tears it to pieces, only to be blinded
and confused by the strange light, by the realm of liberty.
By such men as are capable of this sadness—how few
there are!—will the first attempt be made to see if
humanity may convert itself from a thing of morality to a
thing of wisdom. The sun of a new gospel sheds its first
ray upon the loftiest height in the souls of those few: but
the clouds are massed there, too, thicker than ever, and
not far apart are the brightest sunlight and the deepest
gloom. Everything is necessity—so says the new
knowledge: and this knowledge is itself necessity. All is
guiltlessness, and knowledge is the way to insight into
this guiltlessness. If pleasure, egoism, vanity be necessary
to attest the moral phenomena and their richest blooms,
the instinct for truth and accuracy of knowledge; if
delusion and confusion of the imagination were the only
means whereby mankind could gradually lift itself up to
this degree of self enlightenment and self emancipation—
who would venture to disparage the means? Who would
have the right to feel sad if made aware of the goal to
which those paths lead? Everything in the domain of ethic
is evolved, changeable, tottering; all things flow, it is true
—but all things are also in the stream: to their goal.
Though within us the hereditary habit of erroneous
judgment, love, hate, may be ever dominant, yet under the
influence of awaking knowledge it will ever become
weaker: a new habit, that of understanding, not-loving,
not-hating, looking from above, grows up within us
gradually and in the same soil, and may, perhaps, in
thousands of years be powerful enough to endow mankind
with capacity to develop the wise, guiltless man
(conscious of guiltlessness) as unfailingly as it now
developes the unwise, irrational, guilt-conscious man—
that is to say, the necessary higher step, not the opposite
of it.
 THE RELIGIOUS LIFE.

108
The Double Contest Against Evil.—If an evil afflicts us
we can either so deal with it as to remove its cause or else
so deal with it that its effect upon our feeling is changed:
hence look upon the evil as a benefit of which the uses
will perhaps first become evident in some subsequent
period. Religion and art (and also the metaphysical
philosophy) strive to effect an alteration of the feeling,
partly by an alteration of our judgment respecting the
experience (for example, with the aid of the dictum
"whom God loves, he chastizes") partly by the awakening
of a joy in pain, in emotion especially (whence the art of
tragedy had its origin). The more one is disposed to
interpret away and justify, the less likely he is to look
directly at the causes of evil and eliminate them. An
instant alleviation and narcotizing of pain, as is usual in
the case of tooth ache, is sufficient for him even in the
severest suffering. The more the domination of religions
and of all narcotic arts declines, the more searchingly do
men look to the elimination of evil itself, which is a rather
bad thing for the tragic poets—for there is ever less and
less material for tragedy, since the domain of unsparing,
immutable destiny grows constantly more circumscribed
—and a still worse thing for the priests, for these last have
lived heretofore upon the narcoticizing of human ill.

109
Sorrow is Knowledge.—How willingly would not one
exchange the false assertions of the homines religiosi that
there is a god who commands us to be good, who is the
sentinel and witness of every act, every moment, every
thought, who loves us, who plans our welfare in every
misfortune—how willingly would not one exchange these
for truths as healing, beneficial and grateful as those
delusions! But there are no such truths. Philosophy can at
most set up in opposition to them other metaphysical
plausibilities (fundamental untruths as well). The tragedy
of it all is that, although one cannot believe these dogmas
of religion and metaphysics if one adopts in heart and
head the potent methods of truth, one has yet become,
through human evolution, so tender, susceptible,
sensitive, as to stand in need of the most effective means
of rest and consolation. From this state of things arises the
danger that, through the perception of truth or, more
accurately, seeing through delusion, one may bleed to
death. Byron has put this into deathless verse:
 "Sorrow is knowledge: they who know
the most
Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal
truth,
The tree of knowledge is not that of life."

Against such cares there is no better protective than the

light fancy of Horace, (at any rate during the darkest
hours and sun eclipses of the soul) expressed in the words

"quid aeternis minorem

consiliis animum fatigas?
cur non sub alta vel platano vel hac
pinu jacentes."22

22

Then wherefore should you, who are

mortal, outwear
Your soul with a profitless burden of
care
Say, why should we not, flung at ease
neath this pine,
Or a plane-tree's broad umbrage, quaff
gaily our wine?
(Translation of Sir Theodore
Martin.)

At any rate, light fancy or heavy heartedness of any

degree must be better than a romantic retrogression and
desertion of one's flag, an approach to Christianity in any
form: for with it, in the present state of knowledge, one
can have nothing to do without hopelessly defiling one's
intellectual integrity and surrendering it unconditionally.
These woes may be painful enough, but without pain one
cannot become a leader and guide of humanity: and woe
to him who would be such and lacks this pure integrity of
the intellect!

110
The Truth in Religion.—In the ages of enlightenment
justice was not done to the importance of religion, of this
there can be no doubt. It is also equally certain that in the
ensuing reaction of enlightenment, the demands of justice
were far exceeded inasmuch as religion was treated with
love, even with infatuation and proclaimed as a profound,
indeed the most profound knowledge of the world, which
science had but to divest of its dogmatic garb in order to
possess "truth" in its unmythical form. Religions must
therefore—this was the contention of all foes of
enlightenment—sensu allegorico, with regard for the
comprehension of the masses, give expression to that
ancient truth which is wisdom in itself, inasmuch as all
science of modern times has led up to it instead of away
from it. So that between the most ancient wisdom of man
and all later wisdom there prevails harmony, even
similarity of viewpoint; and the advancement of
knowledge—if one be disposed to concede such a thing—
has to do not with its nature but with its propagation. This
whole conception of religion and science is through and
through erroneous, and none would to-day be hardy
enough to countenance it had not Schopenhauer's rhetoric
taken it under protection, this high sounding rhetoric
which now gains auditors after the lapse of a generation.
Much as may be gained from Schopenhauer's religio-
ethical human and cosmical oracle as regards the
comprehension of Christianity and other religions, it is
nevertheless certain that he erred regarding the value of
religion to knowledge. He himself was in this but a servile
pupil of the scientific teachers of his time who had all
taken romanticism under their protection and renounced
the spirit of enlightenment. Had he been born in our own
time it would have been impossible for him to have
spoken of the sensus allegoricus of religion. He would
instead have done truth the justice to say: never has a
religion, directly or indirectly, either as dogma or as
allegory, contained a truth. For all religions grew out of
dread or necessity, and came into existence through an
error of the reason. They have, perhaps, in times of
danger from science, incorporated some philosophical
doctrine or other into their systems in order to make it
possible to continue one's existence within them. But this
is but a theological work of art dating from the time in
which a religion began to doubt of itself. These
theological feats of art, which are most common in
Christianity as the religion of a learned age, impregnated
with philosophy, have led to this superstition of the sensus
allegoricus, as has, even more, the habit of the
philosophers (namely those half-natures, the poetical
philosophers and the philosophising artists) of dealing
with their own feelings as if they constituted the
fundamental nature of humanity and hence of giving their
own religious feelings a predominant influence over the
structure of their systems. As the philosophers mostly
philosophised under the influence of hereditary religious
habits, or at least under the traditional influence of this
"metaphysical necessity," they naturally arrived at
conclusions closely resembling the Judaic or Christian or
Indian religious tenets—resembling, in the way that
children are apt to look like their mothers: only in this
case the fathers were not certain as to the maternity, as
easily happens—but in the innocence of their admiration,
they fabled regarding the family likeness of all religion
and science. In reality, there exists between religion and
true science neither relationship nor friendship, not even
enmity: they dwell in different spheres. Every philosophy
that lets the religious comet gleam through the darkness
of its last outposts renders everything within it that
purports to be science, suspicious. It is all probably
religion, although it may assume the guise of science.—
Moreover, though all the peoples agree concerning certain
religious things, for example, the existence of a god
(which, by the way, as regards this point, is not the case)
this fact would constitute an argument against the thing
agreed upon, for example the very existence of a god. The
consensus gentium and especially hominum can probably
amount only to an absurdity. Against it there is no
consensus omnium sapientium whatever, on any point,
with the exception of which Goethe's verse speaks:

"All greatest sages to all latest ages

Will smile, wink and slily agree
'Tis folly to wait till a fool's empty pate
Has learned to be knowing and free.
So children of wisdom must look upon
fools
As creatures who're never the better
for schools."

Stated without rhyme or metre and adapted to our case:

the consensus sapientium is to the effect that the
consensus gentium amounts to an absurdity.

111
Origin of Religious Worship.—Let us transport
ourselves back to the times in which religious life
flourished most vigorously and we will find a
fundamental conviction prevalent which we no longer
share and which has resulted in the closing of the door to
religious life once for all so far as we are concerned: this
conviction has to do with nature and intercourse with her.
In those times nothing is yet known of nature's laws.
Neither for earth nor for heaven is there a must. A season,
sunshine, rain can come or stay away as it pleases. There
is wanting, in particular, all idea of natural causation. If a
man rows, it is not the oar that moves the boat, but rowing
is a magical ceremony whereby a demon is constrained to
move the boat. All illness, death itself, is a consequence
of magical influences. In sickness and death nothing
natural is conceived. The whole idea of "natural course" is
wanting. The idea dawns first upon the ancient Greeks,
that is to say in a very late period of humanity, in the
conception of a Moira [fate] ruling over the gods. If any
person shoots off a bow, there is always an irrational
strength and agency in the act. If the wells suddenly run
dry, the first thought is of subterranean demons and their
pranks. It must have been the dart of a god beneath whose
invisible influence a human being suddenly collapses. In
India, the carpenter (according to Lubbock) is in the habit
of making devout offerings to his hammer and hatchet. A
Brahmin treats the plume with which he writes, a soldier
the weapon that he takes into the field, a mason his
trowel, a laborer his plow, in the same way. All nature is,
in the opinion of religious people, a sum total of the
doings of conscious and willing beings, an immense mass
of complex volitions. In regard to all that takes place
outside of us no conclusion is permissible that anything
will result thus and so, must result thus and so, that we are
comparatively calculable and certain in our experiences,
that man is the rule, nature the ruleless. This view forms
the fundamental conviction that dominates crude,
religion-producing, early civilizations. We contemporary
men feel exactly the opposite: the richer man now feels
himself inwardly, the more polyphone the music and the
sounding of his soul, the more powerfully does the
uniformity of nature impress him. We all, with Goethe,
recognize in nature the great means of repose for the soul.
We listen to the pendulum stroke of this great clock with
longing for rest, for absolute calm and quiescence, as if
we could drink in the uniformity of nature and thereby
arrive first at an enjoyment of oneself. Formerly it was the
reverse: if we carry ourselves back to the periods of crude
civilization, or if we contemplate contemporary savages,
we will find them most strongly influenced by rule, by
tradition. The individual is almost automatically bound to
rule and tradition and moves with the uniformity of a
pendulum. To him nature—the uncomprehended, fearful,
mysterious nature—must seem the domain of freedom, of
volition, of higher power, indeed as an ultra-human
degree of destiny, as god. Every individual in such
periods and circumstances feels that his existence, his
happiness, the existence and happiness of the family, the
state, the success or failure of every undertaking, must
depend upon these dispositions of nature. Certain natural
events must occur at the proper time and certain others
must not occur. How can influence be exercised over this
fearful unknown, how can this domain of freedom be
brought under subjection? thus he asks himself, thus he
worries: Is there no means to render these powers of
nature as subject to rule and tradition as you are yourself?
—The cogitation of the superstitious and magic-deluded
man is upon the theme of imposing a law upon nature:
and to put it briefly, religious worship is the result of such
cogitation. The problem which is present to every man is
closely connected with this one: how can the weaker party
dictate laws to the stronger, control its acts in reference to
the weaker? At first the most harmless form of influence
is recollected, that influence which is acquired when the
partiality of anyone has been won. Through beseeching
and prayer, through abject humiliation, through
obligations to regular gifts and propitiations, through
flattering homages, it is possible, therefore, to impose
some guidance upon the forces of nature, to the extent
that their partiality be won: love binds and is bound. Then
agreements can be entered into by means of which certain
courses of conduct are mutually concluded, vows are
made and authorities prescribed. But far more potent is
that species of power exercised by means of magic and
incantation. As a man is able to injure a powerful enemy
by means of the magician and render him helpless with
fear, as the love potion operates at a distance, so can the
mighty forces of nature, in the opinion of weaker
mankind, be controlled by similar means. The principal
means of effecting incantations is to acquire control of
something belonging to the party to be influenced, hair,
finger nails, food from his table, even his picture or his
name. With such apparatus it is possible to act by means
of magic, for the basic principle is that to everything
spiritual corresponds something corporeal. With the aid of
this corporeal element the spirit may be bound, injured or
destroyed. The corporeal affords the handle by which the
spiritual can be laid hold of. In the same way that man
influences mankind does he influences some spirit of
nature, for this latter has also its corporeal element that
can be grasped. The tree, and on the same basis, the seed
from which it grew: this puzzling sequence seems to
demonstrate that in both forms the same spirit is
embodied, now large, now small. A stone that suddenly
rolls, is the body in which the spirit works. Does a huge
boulder lie in a lonely moor? It is impossible to think of
mortal power having placed it there. The stone must have
moved itself there. That is to say some spirit must
dominate it. Everything that has a body is subject to
magic, including, therefore, the spirits of nature. If a god
is directly connected with his portrait, a direct influence
(by refraining from devout offerings, by whippings,
chainings and the like) can be brought to bear upon him.
The lower classes in China tie cords around the picture of
their god in order to defy his departing favor, when he has
left them in the lurch, and tear the picture to pieces, drag
it through the streets into dung heaps and gutters, crying:
"You dog of a spirit, we housed you in a beautiful temple,
we gilded you prettily, we fed you well, we brought you
offerings, and yet how ungrateful you are!" Similar
displays of resentment have been made against pictures of
the mother of god and pictures of saints in Catholic
countries during the present century when such pictures
would not do their duty during times of pestilence and
drought.
Through all these magical relationships to nature
countless ceremonies are occasioned, and finally, when
their complexity and confusion grow too great, pains are
taken to systematize them, to arrange them so that the
favorable course of nature's progress, namely the great
yearly circle of the seasons, may be brought about by a
corresponding course of the ceremonial progress. The aim
of religious worship is to influence nature to human
advantage, and hence to instil a subjection to law into her
that originally she has not, whereas at present man desires
to find out the subjection to law of nature in order to
guide himself thereby. In brief, the system of religious
worship rests upon the idea of magic between man and
man, and the magician is older than the priest. But it rests
equally upon other and higher ideas. It brings into
prominence the sympathetic relation of man to man, the
existence of benevolence, gratitude, prayer, of truces
between enemies, of loans upon security, of arrangements
for the protection of property. Man, even in very inferior
degrees of civilization, does not stand in the presence of
nature as a helpless slave, he is not willy-nilly the
absolute servant of nature. In the Greek development of
religion, especially in the relationship to the Olympian
gods, it becomes possible to entertain the idea of an
existence side by side of two castes, a higher, more
powerful, and a lower, less powerful: but both are bound
together in some way, on account of their origin and are
one species. They need not be ashamed of one another.
This is the element of distinction in Greek religion.

112
At the Contemplation of Certain Ancient Sacrificial
Proceedings.—How many sentiments are lost to us is
manifest in the union of the farcical, even of the obscene,
with the religious feeling. The feeling that this mixture is
possible is becoming extinct. We realize the mixture only
historically, in the mysteries of Demeter and Dionysos
and in the Christian Easter festivals and religious
mysteries. But we still perceive the sublime in connection
with the ridiculous, and the like, the emotional with the
absurd. Perhaps a later age will be unable to understand
even these combinations.
 113
Christianity as Antiquity.—When on a Sunday morning
we hear the old bells ringing, we ask ourselves: Is it
possible? All this for a Jew crucified two thousand years
ago who said he was God's son? The proof of such an
assertion is lacking.—Certainly, the Christian religion
constitutes in our time a protruding bit of antiquity from
very remote ages and that its assertions are still generally
believed—although men have become so keen in the
scrutiny of claims—constitutes the oldest relic of this
inheritance. A god who begets children by a mortal
woman; a sage who demands that no more work be done,
that no more justice be administered but that the signs of
the approaching end of the world be heeded; a system of
justice that accepts an innocent as a vicarious sacrifice in
the place of the guilty; a person who bids his disciples
drink his blood; prayers for miracles; sins against a god
expiated upon a god; fear of a hereafter to which death is
the portal; the figure of the cross as a symbol in an age
that no longer knows the purpose and the ignominy of the
cross—how ghostly all these things flit before us out of
the grave of their primitive antiquity! Is one to believe
that such things can still be believed?

114
The Un-Greek in Christianity.—The Greeks did not
look upon the Homeric gods above them as lords nor
upon themselves beneath as servants, after the fashion of
the Jews. They saw but the counterpart as in a mirror of
the most perfect specimens of their own caste, hence an
ideal, but no contradiction of their own nature. There was
a feeling of mutual relationship, resulting in a mutual
interest, a sort of alliance. Man thinks well of himself
when he gives himself such gods and places himself in a
relationship akin to that of the lower nobility with the
higher; whereas the Italian races have a decidedly vulgar
religion, involving perpetual anxiety because of bad and
mischievous powers and soul disturbers. Wherever the
Olympian gods receded into the background, there even
Greek life became gloomier and more perturbed.—
Christianity, on the other hand, oppressed and degraded
humanity completely and sank it into deepest mire: into
the feeling of utter abasement it suddenly flashed the
gleam of divine compassion, so that the amazed and
grace-dazzled stupefied one gave a cry of delight and for
a moment believed that the whole of heaven was within
him. Upon this unhealthy excess of feeling, upon the
accompanying corruption of heart and head, Christianity
attains all its psychological effects. It wants to annihilate,
debase, stupefy, amaze, bedazzle. There is but one thing
that it does not want: measure, standard (das Maas) and
therefore is it in the worst sense barbarous, asiatic, vulgar,
un-Greek.
 115
Being Religious to Some Purpose.—There are certain
insipid, traffic-virtuous people to whom religion is pinned
like the hem of some garb of a higher humanity. These
people do well to remain religious: it adorns them. All
who are not versed in some professional weapon—
including tongue and pen as weapons—are servile: to all
such the Christian religion is very useful, for then their
servility assumes the aspect of Christian virtue and is
amazingly adorned.—People whose daily lives are empty
and colorless are readily religious. This is comprehensible
and pardonable, but they have no right to demand that
others, whose daily lives are not empty and colorless,
should be religious also.

116
The Everyday Christian.—If Christianity, with its
allegations of an avenging God, universal sinfulness,
choice of grace, and the danger of eternal damnation,
were true, it would be an indication of weakness of mind
and character not to be a priest or an apostle or a hermit,
and toil for one's own salvation. It would be irrational to
lose sight of one's eternal well being in comparison with
temporary advantage: Assuming these dogmas to be
generally believed, the every day Christian is a pitiable
figure, a man who really cannot count as far as three, and
who, for the rest, just because of his intellectual
incapacity, does not deserve to be as hard punished as
Christianity promises he shall be.

117
Concerning the Cleverness of Christianity.—It is a
master stroke of Christianity to so emphasize the
unworthiness, sinfulness and degradation of men in
general that contempt of one's fellow creatures becomes
impossible. "He may sin as much as he pleases, he is not
by nature different from me. It is I who in every way am
unworthy and contemptible." So says the Christian to
himself. But even this feeling has lost its keenest sting for
the Christian does not believe in his individual
degradation. He is bad in his general human capacity and
he soothes himself a little with the assertion that we are all
alike.

118
Personal Change.—As soon as a religion rules, it has for
its opponents those who were its first disciples.

119
Fate of Christianity.—Christianity arose to lighten the
heart, but now it must first make the heart heavy in order
to be able to lighten it afterwards. Christianity will
consequently go down.

120
The Testimony of Pleasure.—The agreeable opinion is
accepted as true. This is the testimony of pleasure (or as
the church says, the evidence of strength) of which all
religions are so proud, although they should all be
ashamed of it. If a belief did not make blessed it would
not be believed. How little it would be worth, then!

121
Dangerous Play.—Whoever gives religious feeling
room, must then also let it grow. He can do nothing else.
Then his being gradually changes. The religious element
brings with it affinities and kinships. The whole circle of
his judgment and feeling is clouded and draped in
religious shadows. Feeling cannot stand still. One should
be on one's guard.

122
The Blind Pupil.—As long as one knows very well the
strength and the weakness of one's dogma, one's art, one's
religion, its strength is still low. The pupil and apostle
who has no eye for the weaknesses of a dogma, a religion
and so on, dazzled by the aspect of the master and by his
own reverence for him, has, on that very account,
generally more power than the master. Without blind
pupils the influence of a man and his work has never
become great. To give victory to knowledge, often
amounts to no more than so allying it with stupidity that
the brute force of the latter forces triumph for the former.

123
The Breaking off of Churches.—There is not sufficient
religion in the world merely to put an end to the number
of religions.

124
Sinlessness of Men.—If one have understood how "Sin
came into the world," namely through errors of the
reason, through which men in their intercourse with one
another and even individual men looked upon themselves
as much blacker and wickeder than was really the case,
one's whole feeling is much lightened and man and the
world appear together in such a halo of harmlessness that
a sentiment of well being is instilled into one's whole
nature. Man in the midst of nature is as a child left to its
own devices. This child indeed dreams a heavy, anxious
dream. But when it opens its eyes it finds itself always in
paradise.

125
Irreligiousness of Artists.—Homer is so much at home
among his gods and is as a poet so good natured to them
that he must have been profoundly irreligious. That which
was brought to him by the popular faith—a mean, crude
and partially repulsive superstition—he dealt with as
freely as the Sculptor with his clay, therefore with the
same freedom that Æschylus and Aristophanes evinced
and with which in later times the great artists of the
renaissance, and also Shakespeare and Goethe, drew their
pictures.

126
Art and Strength of False Interpretation.—All the
visions, fears, exhaustions and delights of the saint are
well known symptoms of sickness, which in him, owing
to deep rooted religious and psychological delusions, are
explained quite differently, that is not as symptoms of
sickness.—So, too, perhaps, the demon of Socrates was
nothing but a malady of the ear that he explained, in view
of his predominant moral theory, in a manner different
from what would be thought rational to-day. Nor is the
case different with the frenzy and the frenzied speeches of
the prophets and of the priests of the oracles. It is always
the degree of wisdom, imagination, capacity and morality
in the heart and mind of the interpreters that got so much
out of them. It is among the greatest feats of the men who
are called geniuses and saints that they made interpreters
for themselves who, fortunately for mankind, did not
understand them.

127
Reverence for Madness.—Because it was perceived that
an excitement of some kind often made the head clearer
and occasioned fortunate inspirations, it was concluded
that the utmost excitement would occasion the most
fortunate inspirations. Hence the frenzied being was
revered as a sage and an oracle giver. A false conclusion
lies at the bottom of all this.

128
Promises of Wisdom.—Modern science has as its object
as little pain as possible, as long a life as possible—hence
a sort of eternal blessedness, but of a very limited kind in
comparison with the promises of religion.

129
Forbidden Generosity.—There is not enough of love and
goodness in the world to throw any of it away on
conceited people.

130
Survival of Religious Training in the Disposition.—
The Catholic Church, and before it all ancient education,
controlled the whole domain of means through which man
was put into certain unordinary moods and withdrawn
from the cold calculation of personal advantage and from
calm, rational reflection. A church vibrating with deep
tones; gloomy, regular, restraining exhortations from a
priestly band, who involuntarily communicate their own
tension to their congregation and lead them to listen
almost with anxiety as if some miracle were in course of
preparation; the awesome pile of architecture which, as
the house of a god, rears itself vastly into the vague and in
all its shadowy nooks inspires fear of its nerve-exciting
power—who would care to reduce men to the level of
these things if the ideas upon which they rest became
extinct? But the results of all these things are nevertheless
not thrown away: the inner world of exalted, emotional,
prophetic, profoundly repentant, hope-blessed moods has
become inborn in man largely through cultivation. What
still exists in his soul was formerly, as he germinated,
grew and bloomed, thoroughly disciplined.

131
Religious After-Pains.—Though one believe oneself
absolutely weaned away from religion, the process has yet
not been so thorough as to make impossible a feeling of
joy at the presence of religious feelings and dispositions
without intelligible content, as, for example, in music; and
if a philosophy alleges to us the validity of metaphysical
hopes, through the peace of soul therein attainable, and
also speaks of "the whole true gospel in the look of
Raphael's Madonna," we greet such declarations and
innuendoes with a welcome smile. The philosopher has
here a matter easy of demonstration. He responds with
that which he is glad to give, namely a heart that is glad to
accept. Hence it is observable how the less reflective free
spirits collide only with dogmas but yield readily to the
magic of religious feelings; it is a source of pain to them
to let the latter go simply on account of the former.—
Scientific philosophy must be very much on its guard lest
on account of this necessity—an evolved and hence, also,
a transitory necessity—delusions are smuggled in. Even
logicians speak of "presentiments" of truth in ethics and in
art (for example of the presentiment that the essence of
things is unity) a thing which, nevertheless, ought to be
prohibited. Between carefully deduced truths and such
"foreboded" things there lies the abysmal distinction that
the former are products of the intellect and the latter of the
necessity. Hunger is no evidence that there is food at hand
to appease it. Hunger merely craves food. "Presentiment"
does not denote that the existence of a thing is known in
any way whatever. It denotes merely that it is deemed
possible to the extent that it is desired or feared. The
"presentiment" is not one step forward in the domain of
certainty.—It is involuntarily believed that the religious
tinted sections of a philosophy are better attested than the
others, but the case is at bottom just the opposite: there is
simply the inner wish that it may be so, that the thing
which beautifies may also be true. This wish leads us to
accept bad grounds as good.

132
Of the Christian Need of Salvation.—Careful
consideration must render it possible to propound some
explanation of that process in the soul of a Christian
which is termed need of salvation, and to propound an
explanation, too, free from mythology: hence one purely
psychological. Heretofore psychological explanations of
religious conditions and processes have really been in
disrepute, inasmuch as a theology calling itself free gave
vent to its unprofitable nature in this domain; for its
principal aim, so far as may be judged from the spirit of
its creator, Schleier-macher, was the preservation of the
Christian religion and the maintenance of the Christian
theology. It appeared that in the psychological analysis of
religious "facts" a new anchorage and above all a new
calling were to be gained. Undisturbed by such
predecessors, we venture the following exposition of the
phenomena alluded to. Man is conscious of certain acts
which are very firmly implanted in the general course of
conduct: indeed he discovers in himself a predisposition
to such acts that seems to him to be as unalterable as his
very being. How gladly he would essay some other kind
of acts which in the general estimate of conduct are rated
the best and highest, how gladly he would welcome the
consciousness of well doing which ought to follow
unselfish motive! Unfortunately, however, it goes no
further than this longing: the discontent consequent upon
being unable to satisfy it is added to all other kinds of
discontent which result from his life destiny in particular
or which may be due to so called bad acts; so that a deep
depression ensues accompanied by a desire for some
physician to remove it and all its causes.—This condition
would not be found so bitter if the individual but
compared himself freely with other men: for then he
would have no reason to be discontented with himself in
particular as he is merely bearing his share of the general
burden of human discontent and incompleteness. But he
compares himself with a being who alone must be capable
of the conduct that is called unegoistic and of an enduring
consciousness of unselfish motive, with God. It is because
he gazes into this clear mirror, that his own self seems so
extraordinarily distracted and so troubled. Thereupon the
thought of that being, in so far as it flits before his fancy
as retributive justice, occasions him anxiety. In every
conceivable small and great experience he believes he
sees the anger of the being, his threats, the very
implements and manacles of his judge and prison. What
succors him in this danger, which, in the prospect of an
eternal duration of punishment, transcends in hideousness
all the horrors that can be presented to the imagination?

133
Before we consider this condition in its further effects, we
would admit to ourselves that man is betrayed into this
condition not through his "fault" and "sin" but through a
series of delusions of the reason; that it was the fault of
the mirror if his own self appeared to him in the highest
degree dark and hateful, and that that mirror was his own
work, the very imperfect work of human imagination and
judgment. In the first place a being capable of absolutely
unegoistic conduct is as fabulous as the phoenix. Such a
being is not even thinkable for the very reason that the
whole notion of "unegoistic conduct," when closely
examined, vanishes into air. Never yet has a man done
anything solely for others and entirely without reference
to a personal motive; indeed how could he possibly do
anything that had no reference to himself, that is without
inward compulsion (which must always have its basis in a
personal need)? How could the ego act without ego?—A
god, who, on the other hand, is all love, as he is usually
represented, would not be capable of a solitary unegoistic
act: whence one is reminded of a reflection of
Lichtenberg's which is, in truth, taken from a lower
sphere: "We cannot possibly feel for others, as the
expression goes; we feel only for ourselves. The assertion
sounds hard, but it is not, if rightly understood. A man
loves neither his father nor his mother nor his wife nor his
child, but simply the feelings which they inspire." Or, as
La Rochefoucauld says: "If you think you love your
mistress for the mere love of her, you are very much
mistaken." Why acts of love are more highly prized than
others, namely not on account of their nature, but on
account of their utility, has already been explained in the
section on the origin of moral feelings. But if a man
should wish to be all love like the god aforesaid, and want
to do all things for others and nothing for himself, the
procedure would be fundamentally impossible because he
must do a great deal for himself before there would be any
possibility of doing anything for the love of others. It is
also essential that others be sufficiently egoistic to accept
always and at all times this self sacrifice and living for
others, so that the men of love and self sacrifice have an
interest in the survival of unloving and selfish egoists,
while the highest morality, in order to maintain itself must
formally enforce the existence of immorality (wherein it
would be really destroying itself.)—Further: the idea of a
god perturbs and discourages as long as it is accepted but
as to how it originated can no longer, in the present state
of comparative ethnological science, be a matter of doubt,
and with the insight into the origin of this belief all faith
collapses. What happens to the Christian who compares
his nature with that of God is exactly what happened to
Don Quixote, who depreciated his own prowess because
his head was filled with the wondrous deeds of the heroes
of chivalrous romance. The standard of measurement
which both employ belongs to the domain of fable.—But
if the idea of God collapses, so too, does the feeling of
"sin" as a violation of divine rescript, as a stain upon a
god-like creation. There still apparently remains that
discouragement which is closely allied with fear of the
punishment of worldly justice or of the contempt of one's
fellow men. The keenest thorn in the sentiment of sin is
dulled when it is perceived that one's acts have
contravened human tradition, human rules and human
laws without having thereby endangered the "eternal
salvation of the soul" and its relations with deity. If finally
men attain to the conviction of the absolute necessity of
all acts and of their utter irresponsibility and then absorb
it into their flesh and blood, every relic of conscience
pangs will disappear.

134
If now, as stated, the Christian, through certain delusive
feelings, is betrayed into self contempt, that is by a false
and unscientific view of his acts and feelings, he must,
nevertheless, perceive with the utmost amazement that
this state of self contempt, of conscience pangs, of despair
in particular, does not last, that there are hours during
which all these things are wafted away from the soul and
he feels himself once more free and courageous. The truth
is that joy in his own being, the fulness of his own powers
in connection with the inevitable decline of his profound
excitation with the lapse of time, bore off the palm of
victory. The man loves himself once more, he feels it—
but this very new love, this new self esteem seems to him
incredible. He can see in it only the wholly unmerited
stream of the light of grace shed down upon him. If he
formerly saw in every event merely warnings, threats,
punishments and every kind of indication of divine anger,
he now reads into his experiences the grace of god. The
latter circumstance seems to him full of love, the former
as a helpful pointing of the way, and his entirely joyful
frame of mind now seems to him to be an absolute proof
of the goodness of God. As formerly in his states of
discouragement he interpreted his conduct falsely so now
he does the same with his experiences. His state of
consolation is now regarded as the effect produced by
some external power. The love with which, at bottom, he
loves himself, seems to be the divine love. That which he
calls grace and the preliminary of salvation is in reality
self-grace, self-salvation.

135
Therefore a certain false psychology, a certain kind of
imaginativeness in the interpretation of motives and
experiences is the essential preliminary to being a
Christian and to experiencing the need of salvation. Upon
gaining an insight into this wandering of the reason and
the imagination, one ceases to be a Christian.

136
Of Christian Asceticism and Sanctity.—Much as some
thinkers have exerted themselves to impart an air of the
miraculous to those singular phenomena known as
asceticism and sanctity, to question which or to account
for which upon a rational basis would be wickedness and
sacrilege, the temptation to this wickedness is none the
less great. A powerful impulse of nature has in every age
led to protest against such phenomena. At any rate
science, inasmuch as it is the imitation of nature, permits
the casting of doubts upon the inexplicable character and
the supernal degree of such phenomena. It is true that
heretofore science has not succeeded in its attempts at
explanation. The phenomena remain unexplained still, to
the great satisfaction of those who revere moral miracles.
For, speaking generally, the unexplained must rank as the
inexplicable, the inexplicable as the non-natural,
supernatural, miraculous—so runs the demand in the
souls of all the religious and all the metaphysicians (even
the artists if they happen to be thinkers), whereas the
scientific man sees in this demand the "evil principle."—
The universal, first, apparent truth that is encountered in
the contemplation of sanctity and asceticism is that their
nature is complicated; for nearly always, within the
physical world as well as in the moral, the apparently
miraculous may be traced successfully to the complex, the
obscure, the multi-conditioned. Let us venture then to
isolate a few impulses in the soul of the saint and the
ascetic, to consider them separately and then view them as
a synthetic development.
 137
There is an obstinacy against oneself, certain sublimated
forms of which are included in asceticism. Certain kinds
of men are under such a strong necessity of exercising
their power and dominating impulses that, if other objects
are lacking or if they have not succeeded with other
objects they will actually tyrannize over some portions of
their own nature or over sections and stages of their own
personality. Thus do many thinkers bring themselves to
views which are far from likely to increase or improve
their fame. Many deliberately bring down the contempt of
others upon themselves although they could easily have
retained consideration by silence. Others contradict earlier
opinions and do not shrink from the ordeal of being
deemed inconsistent. On the contrary they strive for this
and act like eager riders who enjoy horseback exercise
most when the horse is skittish. Thus will men in
dangerous paths ascend to the highest steeps in order to
laugh to scorn their own fear and their own trembling
limbs. Thus will the philosopher embrace the dogmas of
asceticism, humility, sanctity, in the light of which his
own image appears in its most hideous aspect. This
crushing of self, this mockery of one's own nature, this
spernere se sperni out of which religions have made so
much is in reality but a very high development of vanity.
The whole ethic of the sermon on the mount belongs in
this category: man has a true delight in mastering himself
through exaggerated pretensions or excessive expedients
and later deifying this tyrannically exacting something
within him. In every scheme of ascetic ethics, man prays
to one part of himself as if it were god and hence it is
necessary for him to treat the rest of himself as devil.

138
Man is Not at All Hours Equally Moral; this is
established. If one's morality be judged according to one's
capacity for great, self sacrificing resolutions and
abnegations (which when continual, and made a habit are
known as sanctity) one is, in affection, or disposition, the
most moral: while higher excitement supplies wholly new
impulses which, were one calm and cool as ordinarily,
one would not deem oneself even capable of. How comes
this? Apparently from the propinquity of all great and
lofty emotional states. If a man is brought to an
extraordinary pitch of feeling he can resolve upon a
fearful revenge or upon a fearful renunciation of his thirst
for vengeance indifferently. He craves, under the
influences of powerful emotion, the great, the powerful,
the immense, and if he chances to perceive that the
sacrifice of himself will afford him as much satisfaction
as the sacrifice of another, or will afford him more, he
will choose self sacrifice. What concerns him particularly
is simply the unloading of his emotion. Hence he readily,
to relieve his tension, grasps the darts of the enemy and
buries them in his own breast. That in self abnegation and
not in revenge the element of greatness consisted must
have been brought home to mankind only after long
habituation. A god who sacrifices himself would be the
most powerful and most effective symbol of this sort of
greatness. As the conquest of the most hardly conquered
enemy, the sudden mastering of a passion—thus does
such abnegation appear: hence it passes for the summit of
morality. In reality all that is involved is the exchange of
one idea for another whilst the temperament remained at a
like altitude, a like tidal state. Men when coming out of
the spell, or resting from such passionate excitation, no
longer understand the morality of such instants, but the
admiration of all who participated in the occasion sustains
them. Pride is their support if the passion and the
comprehension of their act weaken. Therefore, at bottom
even such acts of self-abnegation are not moral inasmuch
as they are not done with a strict regard for others. Rather
do others afford the high strung temperament an
opportunity to lighten itself through such abnegation.

139
Even the Ascetic Seeks to Make Life Easier, and
generally by means of absolute subjection to another will
or to an all inclusive rule and ritual, pretty much as the
Brahmin leaves absolutely nothing to his own volition but
is guided in every moment of his life by some holy
injunction or other. This subjection is a potent means of
acquiring dominion over oneself. One is occupied, hence
time does not bang heavy and there is no incitement of the
personal will and of the individual passion. The deed once
done there is no feeling of responsibility nor the sting of
regret. One has given up one's own will once for all and
this is easier than to give it up occasionally, as it is also
easier wholly to renounce a desire than to yield to it in
measured degree. When we consider the present relation
of man to the state we perceive unconditional obedience is
easier than conditional. The holy person also makes his
lot easier through the complete surrender of his life
personality and it is all delusion to admire such a
phenomenon as the loftiest heroism of morality. It is
always more difficult to assert one's personality without
shrinking and without hesitation than to give it up
altogether in the manner indicated, and it requires
moreover more intellect and thought.

140
After having discovered in many of the less
comprehensible actions mere manifestations of pleasure
in emotion for its own sake, I fancy I can detect in the self
contempt which characterises holy persons, and also in
their acts of self torture (through hunger and scourgings,
distortions and chaining of the limbs, acts of madness)
simply a means whereby such natures may resist the
general exhaustion of their will to live (their nerves).
They employ the most painful expedients to escape if
only for a time from the heaviness and weariness in which
they are steeped by their great mental indolence and their
subjection to a will other than their own.

141
The Most Usual Means by which the ascetic and the
sanctified individual seeks to make life more endurable
comprises certain combats of an inner nature involving
alternations of victory and prostration. For this purpose an
enemy is necessary and he is found in the so called "inner
enemy." That is, the holy individual makes use of his
tendency to vanity, domineering and pride, and of his
mental longings in order to contemplate his life as a sort
of continuous battle and himself as a battlefield, in which
good and evil spirits wage war with varying fortune. It is
an established fact that the imagination is restrained
through the regularity and adequacy of sexual intercourse
while on the other hand abstention from or great
irregularity in sexual intercourse will cause the
imagination to run riot. The imaginations of many of the
Christian saints were obscene to a degree; and because of
the theory that sexual desires were in reality demons that
raged within them, the saints did not feel wholly
responsible for them. It is to this conviction that we are
indebted for the highly instructive sincerity of their
evidence against themselves. It was to their interest that
this contest should always be kept up in some fashion
because by means of this contest, as already stated, their
empty lives gained distraction. In order that the contest
might seem sufficiently great to inspire sympathy and
admiration in the unsanctified, it was essential that sexual
capacity be ever more and more damned and denounced.
Indeed the danger of eternal damnation was so closely
allied to this capacity that for whole generations
Christians showed their children with actual conscience
pangs. What evil may not have been done to humanity
through this! And yet here the truth is just upside down:
an exceedingly unseemly attitude for the truth.
Christianity, it is true, had said that every man is
conceived and born in sin, and in the intolerable and
excessive Christianity of Calderon this thought is again
perverted and entangled into the most distorted paradox
extant in the well known lines
 The greatest sin of man
Is the sin of being born.

In all pessimistic religions the act of procreation is looked

upon as evil in itself. This is far from being the general
human opinion. It is not even the opinion of all
pessimists. Empedocles, for example, knows nothing of
anything shameful, devilish and sinful in it. He sees rather
in the great field of bliss of unholiness simply a healthful
and hopeful phenomenon, Aphrodite. She is to him an
evidence that strife does not always rage but that some
time a gentle demon is to wield the sceptre. The Christian
pessimists of practice, had, as stated, a direct interest in
the prevalence of an opposite belief. They needed in the
loneliness and the spiritual wilderness of their lives an
ever living enemy, and a universally known enemy
through whose conquest they might appear to the
unsanctified as utterly incomprehensible and half
unnatural beings. When this enemy at last, as a result of
their mode of life and their shattered health, took flight
forever, they were able immediately to people their inner
selves with new demons. The rise and fall of the balance
of cheerfulness and despair maintained their addled brains
in a totally new fluctuation of longing and peace of soul.
And in that period psychology served not only to cast
suspicion on everything human but to wound and scourge
it, to crucify it. Man wanted to find himself as base and
evil as possible. Man sought to become anxious about the
state of his soul, he wished to be doubtful of his own
capacity. Everything natural with which man connects the
idea of badness and sinfulness (as, for instance, is still
customary in regard to the erotic) injures and degrades the
imagination, occasions a shamed aspect, leads man to war
upon himself and makes him uncertain, distrustful of
himself. Even his dreams acquire a tincture of the unclean
conscience. And yet this suffering because of the natural
element in certain things is wholly superfluous. It is
simply the result of opinions regarding the things. It is
easy to understand why men become worse than they are
if they are brought to look upon the unavoidably natural
as bad and later to feel it as of evil origin. It is the master
stroke of religions and metaphysics that wish to make
man out bad and sinful by nature, to render nature
suspicious in his eyes and to so make himself evil, for he
learns to feel himself evil when he cannot divest himself
of nature. He gradually comes to look upon himself, after
a long life lived naturally, so oppressed by a weight of sin
that supernatural powers become necessary to relieve him
of the burden; and with this notion comes the so called
need of salvation, which is the result not of a real but of
an imaginary sinfulness. Go through the separate moral
expositions in the vouchers of christianity and it will
always be found that the demands are excessive in order
that it may be impossible for man to satisfy them. The
object is not that he may become moral but that he may
feel as sinful as possible. If this feeling had not been
rendered agreeable to man—why should he have
improvised such an ideal and clung to it so long? As in
the ancient world an incalculable strength of intellect and
capacity for feeling was squandered in order to increase
the joy of living through feastful systems of worship, so
in the era of christianity an equally incalculable quantity
of intellectual capacity has been sacrificed in another
endeavor: that man should in every way feel himself
sinful and thereby be moved, inspired, inspirited. To
move, to inspire, to inspirit at any cost—is not this the
freedom cry of an exhausted, over-ripe, over cultivated
age? The circle of all the natural sensations had been gone
through a hundred times: the soul had grown weary. Then
the saints and the ascetics found a new order of ecstacies.
They set themselves before the eyes of all not alone as
models for imitation to many, but as fearful and yet
delightful spectacles on the boundary line between this
world and the next world, where in that period everyone
thought he saw at one time rays of heavenly light, at
another fearful, threatening tongues of flame. The eye of
the saint, directed upon the fearful significance of the
shortness of earthly life, upon the imminence of the last
judgment, upon eternal life hereafter; this glowering eye
in an emaciated body caused men, in the old time world,
to tremble to the depths of their being. To look, to look
away and shudder, to feel anew the fascination of the
spectacle, to yield to it, sate oneself upon it until the soul
trembled with ardor and fever—that was the last pleasure
left to classical antiquity when its sensibilities had been
blunted by the arena and the gladiatorial show.

142
To Sum Up All That Has Been Said: that condition of
soul at which the saint or expectant saint is rejoiced is a
combination of elements which we are all familiar with,
except that under other influences than those of mere
religious ideation they customarily arouse the censure of
men in the same way that when combined with religion
itself and regarded as the supreme attainment of sanctity,
they are object of admiration and even of prayer—at least
in more simple times. Very soon the saint turns upon
himself that severity that is so closely allied to the instinct
of domination at any price and which inspire even in the
most solitary individual the sense of power. Soon his
swollen sensitiveness of feeling breaks forth from the
longing to restrain his passions within it and is
transformed into a longing to master them as if they were
wild steeds, the master impulse being ever that of a proud
spirit; next he craves a complete cessation of all
perturbing, fascinating feelings, a waking sleep, an
enduring repose in the lap of a dull, animal, plant-like
indolence. Next he seeks the battle and extinguishes it
within himself because weariness and boredom confront
him. He binds his self-deification with self-contempt. He
delights in the wild tumult of his desires and the sharp
pain of sin, in the very idea of being lost. He is able to
play his very passions, for instance the desire to
domineer, a trick so that he goes to the other extreme of
abject humiliation and subjection, so that his overwrought
soul is without any restraint through this antithesis. And,
finally, when indulgence in visions, in talks with the dead
or with divine beings overcomes him, this is really but a
form of gratification that he craves, perhaps a form of
gratification in which all other gratifications are blended.
Novalis, one of the authorities in matters of sanctity,
because of his experience and instinct, betrays the whole
secret with the utmost simplicity when he says: "It is
remarkable that the close connection of gratification,
religion and cruelty has not long ago made men aware of
their inner relationship and common tendency."

143
Not What the Saint is but what he was in the eyes of
the non-sanctified gives him his historical importance.
Because there existed a delusion respecting the saint, his
soul states being falsely viewed and his personality being
sundered as much as possible from humanity as a
something incomparable and supernatural, because of
these things he attained the extraordinary with which he
swayed the imaginations of whole nations and whole
ages. Even he knew himself not for even he regarded his
dispositions, passions and actions in accordance with a
system of interpretation as artificial and exaggerated as
the pneumatic interpretation of the bible. The distorted
and diseased in his own nature with its blending of
spiritual poverty, defective knowledge, ruined health,
overwrought nerves, remained as hidden from his view as
from the view of his beholders. He was neither a
particularly good man nor a particularly bad man but he
stood for something that was far above the human
standard in wisdom and goodness. Faith in him sustained
faith in the divine and miraculous, in a religious
significance of all existence, in an impending day of
judgment. In the last rays of the setting sun of the ancient
world, which fell upon the christian peoples, the shadowy
form of the saint attained enormous proportions—to such
enormous proportions, indeed, that down even to our own
age, which no longer believes in god, there are thinkers
who believe in the saints.

144
It stands to reason that this sketch of the saint, made upon
the model of the whole species, can be confronted with
many opposing sketches that would create a more
agreeable impression. There are certain exceptions among
the species who distinguish themselves either by especial
gentleness or especial humanity, and perhaps by the
strength of their own personality. Others are in the highest
degree fascinating because certain of their delusions shed
a particular glow over their whole being, as is the case
with the founder of christianity who took himself for the
only begotten son of God and hence felt himself sinless;
so that through his imagination—that should not be too
harshly judged since the whole of antiquity swarmed with
sons of god—he attained the same goal, the sense of
complete sinlessness, complete irresponsibility, that can
now be attained by every individual through science.—In
the same manner I have viewed the saints of India who
occupy an intermediate station between the christian
saints and the Greek philosophers and hence are not to be
regarded as a pure type. Knowledge and science—as far
as they existed—and superiority to the rest of mankind by
logical discipline and training of the intellectual powers
were insisted upon by the Buddhists as essential to
sanctity, just as they were denounced by the christian
world as the indications of sinfulness.
 Friedrich Nietzsche

Human

All-Too-Human

A Book For Free Spirits

Part II
Translated By

Paul V. Cohn, B.A.

New York

The MacMillan Company

1913
 Contents

Translator's Introduction.
Preface.
Part I. Miscellaneous Maxims And Opinions.
Part II. The Wanderer And His Shadow.
Footnotes
 Translator's Introduction.

The publication of Human, all-too-Human extends over

the period 1878-1880. Of the two divisions which
constitute the Second Part, “Miscellaneous Maxims and
Opinions” appeared in 1879, and “The Wanderer and his
Shadow” in 1880, Nietzsche being then in his thirty-sixth
year. The Preface was added in 1886. The whole book
forms Nietzsche's first lengthy contribution to literature.
His previous works comprise only the philological
treatises, The Birth of Tragedy, and the essays on Strauss,
Schopenhauer, and Wagner in Thoughts out of Season.

With the volumes of Human, all-too-Human Nietzsche

appears for the first time in his true colours as
philosopher. His purely scholarly publications, his essays
in literary and musical criticism—especially the essay on
Richard Wagner at Bayreuth—had, of course,
foreshadowed his work as a thinker.
These efforts, however, had been mere fragments, from
which hardly any one could observe that a new
philosophical star had arisen on the horizon. But by 1878
the period of transition had definitely set in. Outwardly,
the new departure is marked by Nietzsche's resignation in
that year of his professorship [pg viii] at Bâle—a
resignation due partly to ill-health, and partly to his
conviction that his was a voice that should speak not
merely to students of philology, but to all mankind.

Nietzsche himself characterises Human, all-too-Human as

“the monument of a crisis.” He might as fitly have called
it the first-fruits of a new harvest. Now, for the first time,
he practises the form which he was to make so peculiarly
his own. We are told—and we may well believe—that the
book came as a surprise even to his most intimate friends.
Wagner had already seen how matters stood at the
publication of the first part, and the gulf between the two
probably widened on the appearance of the Second Part.

Several aphorisms are here, varying in length as in

subject, and ranging over the whole human province—the
emotions and aspirations, the religions and cultures and
philosophies, the arts and literatures and politics of
mankind. Equally varied is the range of style, the incisive
epigram and the passage of pure poetry jostling each other
on the same page. In this curious power of alternating
between cynicism and lyricism, Nietzsche appears as the
prose counterpart of Heine.

One or two of the aphorisms are of peculiar interest to

English readers. The essay (as it may almost be called) on
Sterne (p. 60, No. 113) does ample justice, if not more
than justice, to that wayward genius. The allusion to
Milton (p. 77, No. 150) will come as somewhat of a shock
to English readers, especially to those who hold that in
Milton Art triumphed over Puritanism. It [pg ix] should
be remembered, however, that Nietzsche's view coincides
with Goethe's. The dictum that Shakespeare's gold is to be
valued for its quantity rather than its quality (p. 81, No.
162) also betrays a certain exclusiveness—a legacy from
that eighteenth-century France which appealed so strongly
to Nietzsche on its intellectual side. To Nietzsche, as to
Voltaire, Shakespeare is after all “the great barbarian.”

The title of the book may be explained from a phrase in

Thus Spake Zarathustra: “Verily, even the greatest I
found—all-too-human.” The keynote of these volumes is
indeed disillusion and destruction. Nor is this to be
wondered at, for all men must sweep away the rubbish
before they can build. Hence we find here little of the
constructive philosophy of Nietzsche—so far as he had a
constructive philosophy. The Superman appears but
faintly, the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence not at all. For
this very reason, Human, all-too-Human is perhaps the
best starting-point for the study of Nietzsche. The
difficulties in style and thought of the later work—
difficulties that at times become well-nigh insuperable in
Thus Spake Zarathustra—are here practically absent. The
book may, in fact, almost be described as “popular,”
bearing the same relation to Nietzsche's later productions
as Wagner's Tannhäuser and Lohengrin bear to the Ring.

The translator's thanks are due to Mr. Thomas Common

for his careful revision of the manuscript and many
valuable suggestions.

P. V. C.

Preface.

1.
One should only speak where one cannot remain silent,
and only speak of what one has conquered—the rest is all
chatter, “literature,” bad breeding. My writings speak only
of my conquests, “I” am in them, with all that is hostile to
me, ego ipsissimus, or, if a more haughty expression be
permitted, ego ipsissimum. It may be guessed that I have
many below me.... But first I always needed time,
convalescence, distance, separation, before I felt the
stirrings of a desire to flay, despoil, lay bare, “represent”
(or whatever one likes to call it) for the additional
knowledge of the world, something that I had lived
through and outlived, something done or suffered. Hence
all my writings,—with one exception, important, it is true,
—must be ante-dated—they always tell of a “behind-me.”
Some even, like the first three Thoughts out of Season,
must be thrown back before the period of creation and
experience of a previously published book (The Birth of
Tragedy in the case cited, as any one with subtle powers
of observation and comparison could not fail to perceive).
That wrathful outburst against the Germanism, smugness,
and raggedness of speech of old David Strauss, the
contents of the first Thought out of Season, gave a vent to
feelings that had inspired me long before, as a student, in
the midst of German culture and cultured Philistinism (I
claim the paternity of the now much used and misused
phrase “cultured Philistinism”). What I said against the
“historical disease” I said as one who had slowly and
laboriously recovered from that disease, and who was not
at all disposed to renounce “history” in the future because
he had suffered from her in the past. When in the third
Thought out of Season I gave expression to my reverence
for my first and only teacher, the great Arthur
Schopenhauer—I should now give it a far more personal
and emphatic voice—I was for my part already in the
throes of moral scepticism and dissolution, that is, as
much concerned with the criticism as with the study of all
pessimism down to the present day. I already did not
believe in “a blessed thing,” as the people say, not even in
Schopenhauer. It was at this very period that an
unpublished essay of mine, “On Truth and Falsehood in
an Extra-Moral Sense,” came into being. Even my
ceremonial oration in honour of Richard Wagner, on the
occasion of his triumphal celebration at Bayreuth in 1876
—Bayreuth signifies the greatest triumph that an artist has
ever won—a work that bears the strongest stamp of
“individuality,” was in the background an act of homage
and gratitude to a bit of the past in me, to the fairest but
most perilous calm of my sea-voyage ... and as a matter of
fact a severance and a farewell. (Was Richard Wagner
mistaken on this point? I do not think so. So long as we
still love, we do not paint such pictures, we do not yet
“examine,” we do not place ourselves so far away as is
essential for one who “examines.” “Examining needs at
least a secret antagonism, that of an opposite point of
view,” it is said on page 46 of the above-named work
itself, with an insidious, melancholy application that was
perhaps understood by few.) The composure that gave me
the power to speak after many intervening years of
solitude and abstinence, first came with the book, Human,
All-too Human, to which this second preface and
apologia1 is dedicated. As a book for “free spirits” it
shows some trace of that almost cheerful and inquisitive
coldness of the psychologist, who has behind him many
painful things that he keeps under him, and moreover
establishes them for himself and fixes them firmly as with
a needle-point. Is it to be wondered at that at such sharp,
ticklish work blood flows now and again, that indeed the
psychologist has blood on his fingers and not only on his
fingers?

2.

The Miscellaneous Maxims and Opinions were in the first

place, like The Wanderer and His Shadow, published
separately as continuations and appendices to the above-
mentioned human, all-too human Book for Free Spirits:
and at the same time, as a continuation and confirmation
of an intellectual cure, consisting in a course of anti-
romantic self-treatment, such as my instinct, which had
always remained healthy, had itself discovered and
prescribed against a temporary attack of the most
dangerous form of romantics. After a convalescence of
six years I may well be permitted to collect these same
writings and publish them as a second volume of Human,
All-too Human. Perhaps, if surveyed together, they will
more clearly and effectively teach their lesson—a lesson
of health that may be recommended as a disciplina
voluntatis to the more intellectual natures of the rising
generation. Here speaks a pessimist who has often leaped
out of his skin but has always returned into it, thus, a
pessimist with goodwill towards pessimism—at all events
a romanticist no longer. And has not a pessimist, who
possesses this serpentine knack of changing his skin, the
right to read a lecture to our pessimists of to-day, who are
one and all still in the toils of romanticism? Or at least to
show them how it is—done?

3.
It was then, in fact, high time to bid farewell, and I soon
received proof. Richard Wagner, who seemed all-
conquering, but was in reality only a decayed and
despairing romantic, suddenly collapsed, helpless and
broken, before the Christian Cross.... Was there not a
single German with eyes in his head and sympathy in his
heart for this appalling spectacle? Was I the only one
whom he caused—suffering? In any case, the unexpected
event illumined for me in one lightning flash the place
that I had abandoned, and also the horror that is felt by
every one who is unconscious of a great danger until he
has passed through it. As I went forward alone, I
shuddered, and not long afterwards I was ill, or rather
more than ill—weary: weary from my ceaseless
disappointment about all that remained to make us
modern men enthusiastic, at the thought of the power,
work, hope, youth, love, flung to all the winds: weary
from disgust at the effeminacy and undisciplined
rhapsody of this romanticism, at the whole tissue of
idealistic lies and softening of conscience, which here
again had won the day over one of the bravest of men:
last, and not least, weary from the bitterness of an
inexorable suspicion—that after this disappointment I was
doomed to mistrust more thoroughly, to despise more
thoroughly, to be alone more thoroughly than ever before.
My task—whither had it flown? Did it not look now as if
my task were retreating from me and as if I should for a
long future period have no more right to it? What was I to
do to endure this most terrible privation?—I began by
entirely forbidding myself all romantic music, that
ambiguous, pompous, stifling art, which robs the mind of
its sternness and its joyousness and provides a fertile soil
for every kind of vague yearning and spongy sensuality.
“Cave musicam” is even to-day my advice to all who are
enough of men to cling to purity in matters of the
intellect. Such music enervates, softens, feminises, its
“eternal feminine” draws us—down!2 My first suspicion,
my most immediate precaution, was directed against
romantic music. If I hoped for anything at all from music,
it was in the expectation of the coming of a musician
bold, subtle, malignant, southern, healthy enough to take
an immortal revenge upon that other music.

4.

Lonely now and miserably self-distrustful, I took sides,

not without resentment, against myself and for everything
that hurt me and was hard to me. Thus I once more found
the way to that courageous pessimism that is the antithesis
of all romantic fraud, and, as it seems to me to-day, the
way to “myself,” to my task. That hidden masterful
Something, for which we long have no name until at last
it shows itself as our task—that tyrant in us exacts a
terrible price for every attempt that we make to escape
him or give him the slip, for every premature act of self-
constraint, for every reconciliation with those to whom
we do not belong, for every activity, however reputable,
which turns us aside from our main purpose, yes, even for
every virtue that would fain protect us from the cruelty of
our most individual responsibility. “Disease” is always
the answer when we wish to have doubts of our rights to
our own task, when we begin to make it easier for
ourselves in any way. How strange and how terrible! It is
our very alleviations for which we have to make the
severest atonement! And if we want to return to health,
we have no choice left—we must load ourselves more
heavily than we were ever laden before.

5.
It was then that I learnt the hermitical habit of speech
acquired only by the most silent and suffering. I spoke
without witnesses, or rather indifferent to the presence of
witnesses, so as not to suffer from silence, I spoke of
various things that did not concern me in a style that gave
the impression that they did. Then, too, I learnt the art of
showing myself cheerful, objective, inquisitive in the
presence of all that is healthy and evil—is this, in an
invalid, as it seems to me, his “good taste”? Nevertheless,
a more subtle eye and sympathy will not miss what
perhaps gives a charm to these writings—the fact that
here speaks one who has suffered and abstained in such a
way as if he had never suffered or abstained. Here
equipoise, composure, even gratitude towards life shall be
maintained, here rules a stern, proud, ever vigilant, ever
susceptible will, which has undertaken the task of
defending life against pain and snapping off all
conclusions that are wont to grow like poisonous fungi
from pain, disappointment, satiety, isolation and other
morasses. Perhaps this gives our pessimists a hint to self-
examination? For it was then that I hit upon the aphorism,
“a sufferer has as yet no right to pessimism,” and that I
engaged in a tedious, patient campaign against the
unscientific first principles of all romantic pessimism,
which seeks to magnify and interpret individual, personal
experiences into “general judgments,” universal
condemnations—it was then, in short, that I sighted a new
world. Optimism for the sake of restitution, in order at
some time to have the right to become a pessimist—do
you understand that? Just as a physician transfers his
patient to totally strange surroundings, in order to displace
him from his entire “past,” his troubles, friends, letters,
duties, stupid mistakes and painful memories, and teaches
him to stretch out hands and senses towards new
nourishment, a new sun, a new future: so I, as physician
and invalid in one, forced myself into an utterly different
and untried zone of the soul, and particularly into an
absorbing journey to a strange land, a strange atmosphere,
into a curiosity for all that was strange. A long process of
roaming, seeking, changing followed, a distaste for fixity
of any kind—a dislike for clumsy affirmation and
negation: and at the same time a dietary and discipline
which aimed at making it as easy as possible for the soul
to fly high, and above all constantly to fly away. In fact a
minimum of life, an unfettering from all coarser forms of
sensuality, an independence in the midst of all marks of
outward disfavour, together with the pride in being able to
live in the midst of all this disfavour: a little cynicism
perhaps, a little of the “tub of Diogenes,” a good deal of
whimsical happiness, whimsical gaiety, much calm, light,
subtle folly, hidden enthusiasm—all this produced in the
end a great spiritual strengthening, a growing joy and
exuberance of health. Life itself rewards us for our
tenacious will to life, for such a long war as I waged
against the pessimistic weariness of life, even for every
observant glance of our gratitude, glances that do not miss
the smallest, most delicate, most fugitive gifts.... In the
end we receive Life's great gifts, perhaps the greatest it
can bestow—we regain our task.

6.

Should my experience—the history of an illness and a

convalescence, for it resulted in a convalescence—be only
my personal experience? and merely just my “Human,
All-too-human”? To-day I would fain believe the reverse,
for I am becoming more and more confident that my
books of travel were not penned for my sole benefit, as
appeared for a time to be the case. May I, after six years
of growing assurance, send them once more on a journey
for an experiment?—May I commend them particularly to
the ears and hearts of those who are afflicted with some
sort of a “past,” and have enough intellect left to suffer
even intellectually from their past? But above all would I
commend them to you whose burden is heaviest, you
choice spirits, most encompassed with perils, most
intellectual, most courageous, who must be the
conscience of the modern soul and as such be versed in its
science:3 in whom is concentrated all of disease, poison or
danger that can exist to-day: whose lot decrees that you
must be more sick than any individual because you are
not “mere individuals”: whose consolation it is to know
and, ah! to walk the path to a new health, a health of to-
morrow and the day after: you men of destiny,
triumphant, conquerors of time, the healthiest and the
strongest, you good Europeans!

7.

To express finally in a single formula my opposition to

the romantic pessimism of the abstinent, the unfortunate,
the conquered: there is a will to the tragic and to
pessimism, which is a sign as much of the severity as of
the strength of the intellect (taste, emotion, conscience).
With this will in our hearts we do not fear, but we
investigate ourselves the terrible and the problematical
elements characteristic of all existence. Behind such a will
stand courage and pride and the desire for a really great
enemy. That was my pessimistic outlook from the first—a
new outlook, methinks, an outlook that even at this day is
new and strange? To this moment I hold to it firmly and
(if it will be believed) not only for myself but
occasionally against myself.... You would prefer to have
that proved first? Well, what else does all this long
preface—prove?

SILS-MARIA, UPPER ENGADINE,

September, 1886.
 Part I. Miscellaneous Maxims
And Opinions.

1.

TO THE DISILLUSIONED IN PHILOSOPHY.—If you hitherto

believed in the highest value of life and now find
yourselves disillusioned, must you immediately get rid of
life at the lowest possible price?
 2.

OVERNICE.—One can even become overnice as regards the

clearness of concepts. How disgusted one is then at
having truck with the half-clear, the hazy, the aspiring, the
doubting! How ridiculous and yet not mirth-provoking is
their eternal fluttering and straining without ever being
able to fly or to grasp!

3.

THE WOOERS OF REALITY.—He who realises at last how

long and how thoroughly he has been befooled, embraces
out of spite even the ugliest reality. So that in the long run
of the world's history the best men have always been
wooers of reality, for the best have always been longest
and most thoroughly deceived.
 4.

ADVANCE OF FREETHINKING.—The difference between past

and present freethinking cannot better be characterised
than by that aphorism for the recognition and expression
of which all the fearlessness of the eighteenth century was
needed, and which even then, if measured by our modern
view, sinks into an unconscious naïveté. I mean Voltaire's
aphorism, “croyez-moi, mon ami, l'erreur aussi a son
mérite.”

5.

A HEREDITARY SIN OF PHILOSOPHERS.—Philosophers have at

all times appropriated and corrupted the maxims of
censors of men (moralists), by taking them over without
qualification and trying to prove as necessary what the
moralists only meant as a rough indication or as a truth
suited to their fellow-countrymen or fellow-townsmen for
a single decade. Moreover, the philosophers thought that
they were thereby raising themselves above the moralists!
Thus it will be found that the celebrated teachings of
Schopenhauer as to the supremacy of the will over the
intellect, of the immutability of character, the negativity
of pleasure—all errors, in the sense in which he
understands them—rest upon principles of popular
wisdom enunciated by the moralists. Take the very word
“will,” which Schopenhauer twisted so as to become a
common denotation of several human conditions and with
which he filled a gap in the language (to his own great
advantage, in so far as he was a moralist, for he became
free to speak of the will as Pascal had spoken of it). In the
hands of its creator, Schopenhauer's “will,” through the
philosophic craze for generalisation, already turned out to
be a bane to knowledge. For this will was made into a
poetic metaphor, when it was held that all things in nature
possess will. Finally, that it might be applied to all kinds
of disordered mysticism, the word was misused by a
fraudulent convention. So now all our fashionable
philosophers repeat it and seem to be perfectly certain that
all things have a will and are in fact One Will. According
to the description generally given of this All-One-Will,
this is much as if one should positively try to have the
stupid Devil for one's God.
 6.

AGAINST VISIONARIES.—The visionary denies the truth to

himself, the liar only to others.

7.

ENMITY TO LIGHT.—If we make it clear to any one that,

strictly, he can never speak of truth, but only of
probability and of its degrees, we generally discover, from
the undisguised joy of our pupil, how greatly men prefer
the uncertainty of their intellectual horizon, and how in
their heart of hearts they hate truth because of its
definiteness.—Is this due to a secret fear felt by all that
the light of truth may at some time be turned too brightly
upon themselves? To their wish to be of some
consequence, and accordingly their concealment from the
world of what they are? Or is it to be traced to their horror
of the all-too brilliant light, to which their crepuscular,
easily dazzled, bat-like souls are not accustomed, so that
hate it they must?

8.

CHRISTIAN SCEPTICISM.—Pilate, with his question, “What is

Truth?” is now gleefully brought on the scene as an
advocate of Christ, in order to cast suspicion on all that is
known or knowable as being mere appearance, and to
erect the Cross on the appalling background of the
Impossibility of Knowledge.

9.
“NATURAL LAW,” A PHRASE OF SUPERSTITION.—When you
talk so delightedly of Nature acting according to law, you
must either assume that all things in Nature follow their
law from a voluntary obedience imposed by themselves—
in which case you admire the morality of Nature: or you
are enchanted with the idea of a creative mechanician,
who has made a most cunning watch with human beings
as accessory ornaments.—Necessity, through the
expression, “conformity to law,” then becomes more
human and a coign of refuge in the last instance for
mythological reveries.

10.

FALLEN FORFEIT TO HISTORY.—All misty philosophers and

obscurers of the world, in other words all metaphysicians
of coarse or refined texture are seized with eyeache,
earache, and toothache when they begin to suspect that
there is truth in the saying: “All philosophy has from now
fallen forfeit to history.” In view of their aches and pains
we may pardon them for throwing stones and filth at him
who talks like this, but this teaching may itself thereby
become dirty and disreputable for a time and lose in
effect.

11.

THE PESSIMIST OF THE INTELLECT.—He whose intellect is

really free will think freely about the intellect itself, and
will not shut his eyes to certain terrible aspects of its
source and tendency. For this reason others will perhaps
designate him the bitterest opponent of free thought and
give him that dreadful, abusive name of “pessimist of the
intellect”: accustomed as they are to typify a man not by
his strong point, his pre-eminent virtue, but by the quality
that is most foreign to his nature.

12.
THE METAPHYSICIANS' KNAPSACK.—To all who talk so
boastfully of the scientific basis of their metaphysics it is
best to make no reply. It is enough to tug at the bundle
that they rather shyly keep hidden behind their backs. If
one succeeds in lifting it, the results of that “scientific
basis” come to light, to their great confusion: a dear little
“God,” a genteel immortality, perhaps a little spiritualism,
and in any case a complicated mass of poor-sinners'-
misery and pharisee-arrogance.

13.

OCCASIONAL HARMFULNESS OF KNOWLEDGE.—The utility

involved in the unchecked investigation of knowledge is
so constantly proved in a hundred different ways that one
must remember to include in the bargain the subtler and
rarer damage which individuals must suffer on that
account. The chemist cannot avoid occasionally being
poisoned or burnt at his experiments. What applies to the
chemist, is true of the whole of our culture. This, it may
be added, clearly shows that knowledge should provide
itself with healing balsam against burns and should
always have antidotes ready against poisons.

14.

THE CRAVING OF THE PHILISTINE.—The Philistine thinks that

his most urgent need is a purple patch or turban of
metaphysics, nor will he let it slip. Yet he would look less
ridiculous without this adornment.

15.

ENTHUSIASTS.—With all that enthusiasts say in favour of

their gospel or their master they are defending themselves,
however much they comport themselves as the judges and
not the accused: because they are involuntarily reminded
almost at every moment that they are exceptions and have
to assert their legitimacy.

16.

THE GOOD SEDUCES TO LIFE.—All good things, even all

good books that are written against life, are strong means
of attraction to life.

17.

THE HAPPINESS OF THE HISTORIAN.—“When we hear the