Dawn of the Day/Book 1
FIRST BOOK
1
Posthumous rationality.—All things endowed with long life are, in the course of time, so thoroughly saturated with reason that their origin from irrationality thereby becomes improbable. Does not nearly every exact record of an origin strike our feelings as paradoxical and presumptuous ? Does not in fact every true historian constantly contradict?
2
Prejudice of the learned—It is a right proposition of the learned that at all times people believed they knew what is good and evil, laudable and reprehensible. But it is a prejudice of the learned to pretend that our knowledge in these matters excelled that of any previous age.
3
There is a time for everything.—When man assigned a gender to all things, he did not think that he was playing, but fancied that lie had gained a deep insight. But at a late period, and even then only partially, he was led to admit the enormous extent of that mistake. In the same way man has connected all things in existence with morals, and dressed up the world in a garb of ethical significance. The day will come when all this will be as utterly valueless as is already in our days the belief in the masculinity or femininity of the sun.
4
A word against the fancied inharmoniousness of the spheres.—We must rid the world of much false grandeur, this being nowise consonant with that justice to which all things around us may lay claim. For that purpose we must abstain from picturing the world to ourselves more inharmonious than it is.
5
Be thankful.—The most important outcome of human efforts in the past is, that we need no more live in constant dread of wild beasts, barbarians, gods and our own dreams.
6
The juggler and his counterpart.—The wonderful in science is opposite to the wonderful in the juggler's art. For lie tries to persuade us to believe in a very simple causality were, in fact, a very complex causality is at work. Science, on the contrary, compels us to abandon our belief in simple causalities in the very instances in which everything seems so clear and intelligible, and we are mere dupes of outward appearance. The “simplest" things are extremely complex, -- a fact which will never cease to be a subject of wonder to us.
7
A new conception of space.—Is it the things real or the things imaginary which have more highly contributed to human happiness? One thing is certain, namely, that the gulf between the highest pitch of happiness and the lowest depth of misery has been created only by menus of the things imaginary. Consequently this conception of space is being reduced further and further before the influence of science: just as through science we have been and are still being taught to look upon the earth as small, nay, upon the solar system as a mere point.
8
Transfiguration.—Helpless sufferers, confused dreamers, supernaturally entranced-these are the three divisions in Raphael's classification of mankind. We take a different view of the world--and even Raphael would now have to abandon his former opinion: he would behold a new transfiguration.
9
Conception of a morality of custom.—Compared with the mode of life which prevailed among mankind for whole thousands of years, we people of the present day are living in very immoral times. The authority of custom is marvellously enfeebled, and so highly refined and sublimated in the notion of morality, that we might just as well describe it as volatilised. This we, the late-born, find it difficult to gain a fundamental insight into the origin of morality: and even when we have succeeded in discovering it, we shall be afraid of translating our thoughts into words, because these would sound course. Or, because they would appear as a slur upon morality. Thus, for instance, the principal law: "Morality is nothing else but (and, above all, nothing more than) obedience to customs, of whatever kind these may be." And customs are the conventional way of acting and valuing. There is morality in matters in which no observance exists. The circle of morality ever shrinks, in proportion as life is less regulated by observance. The free man is immoral because he is determined in everything to depend upon himself and not upon observance. In every primitive state of mankind the word "evil" signifies as much as “individual," "free," "arbitrary," "unwonted," "unforeseen," "incalculable”. If measured by the standard of such conditions, anything done--not because it is ordered by observance but from other motives (as, for instance, for one's own advantage), nay, from the very motives which formerly had established observance is called immoral, and is felt to be so by the doer himself. For it was not done out of obedience to observance. What is observance? A higher authority, which is obeyed, not because it prescribes what is useful to us, but simply because it prescribes. By what does this feeling we have towards observance differ from the general sentiment of fear? It is the awe inspired by a superior intellect which lays down prescriptions, by an inconceivable, undefined power, by something more than personal--there is superstition in this fear. Originally, the fields of education and hygienics, matrimony, the healing art, agriculture, war, speech and silence, the intercourse of mortals both among themselves and with the gods, formed so many (departments of morality, which demanded that we should obey, irrespective of our individuality. At the outset everything was custom, and lie who wanted to rise above it hail to make him- self a legislator and medicine-man, a kind of semi-god, that is to say, he had to set up customs-a fearful and most hazardous thing to do. Who is the most moral man? On the one hand, he who lost frequently fulfils the law: who, like the Brahmin, carries the conscious-ness of it with him everywhere and into each minute particle of time, being ever ingenious in finding opportunities of fulfilling the law. On the other land, he who fulfils it even in the most trying cases. The most moral man is he who brings the greatest sacrifices to morality. But which are the greatest sacrifices ? According to the answer which may be given to this question, several divers kinds of morals evolve. Yet the most important distinction is that which separates the morality of the most frequent from that of the rarest fulfilment. We must not deceive ourselves as regards the motive of that moral law which exacts the hardest fulfilment as a test of morality. Self-denial is exacted, not because of its useful consequences for the individual, but in order that custom or observance, despite all individual counter tendencies and advantages, may appear to rule supreme. The individual must sacrifice himself-such is the commandment of the morality of custom. Those moralists who, following in the footsteps of Socrates, urge home to the individual the morality of self-control and abstinence as an advantage to himself an as a key to the secret of his own personal happiness, are exceptions ;-and if they do not appear to us as such, it is so because of our laving been educated under their influence. They all steer a new course, amid the loud condemnation of the representatives of a morality of custom--they detach themselves from the community, as immoral people, and are evil in tile deepest sense of the word. Thus to a virtuous Roman of the older type, every Christian whose fore- most goal was his own salvation" must have appeared evil. Wherever there is a community and, consequently, a morality of custom, the sentiment predominates that the punishment for every offence against custom falls, above all, on the community. I am referring to that supernatural punishment, the visitations and limits of which are so difficult to comprehend and form the subject of so much anxious investigation and superstitions four. The community is able to insist on each one of its members making amends to other individuals or the community for the immediate injury which may have followed in the train of his action. It may also wreak a kind of vengeance on the individual for causing the clouds and storm of divine wrath, as supposed effects of his action, to gather over the heads of the community. But it feels every offence of the individual chiefly as its own, and bears the punishment of the one as its own:- “Custom," they wail in their utmost hearts, "has grown lax, if such actions as these are possible." Every individual action, every individual mode of thinking, causes a horror. It is incalculable how much suffering just the rarer, choicer, and more original minds must have undergone in the course of history owing to their ever being looked upon, nay, their looking upon themselves as the evil and dangerous. Originality of every kind has acquired a bad conscience under the supreme rule of the morality of custom ; and up to this very moment the heaven of the best, for the same reason, appears gloomier than it needs to be be.
10
Counter-movement of the senses of morality and causality.—In the same proportion as the sense of causality increases, the area of the province of morality decreases; for it is certain that, by grasping and learning to think the inevitable effects as apart from chance anal all incidental contingencies (post hoc), we, each time, destroy a numberless host of fantastical causalities which heretofore, the work of reality being much smaller than that of our imagination,—had passed current as foundations of customs; each time also a portion of our anxiousness and constraint is swept out of the world, and each time a portion of our reverence for the authority of customs vanishes: whereby morality in general suffers. He who, on the contrary, wishes to strengthen it, must know how to prevent results from becoming subject to control.
11
Popular morals and popular medicine.—The morals which prevail in a community are constantly being influenced by everybody: the majority never weary of heaping up examples for the alleged relation between cause and sequence, guilt and punishment, bearing it out as well founded and increasing its credit. Others form new observations on actions and sequences, drawing inferences and establishing rules: a small minority occasionally make objections and suffer faith, in these matters, to grow weak. But all go to work in the same rough and unscientific manner; be it a question of instances, observations or objections, of proof, confirmation, enunciation or confutation of a law,—the material and form employed are both utterly worthless, just as worthless as material and form of popular medicine. Popular medicine and popular morals are closely conceivable one with the other, and should not be so differently estimated, as is still love: both are most dangerous pseudo-sciences.
12
Sequence an accessory.—Formerly, the effect of an action was believed to be, not so much a consequence, as a voluntary accessory,—namely from the land of God. Is a greater confusion conceivable? For action and effect one had to make separate efforts with entirely different means and different stratagems!
13
The new education of mankind.—All ye who are helpful and well intentioned, lend ye a helping hand in this one endeavour of removing from the world that idea of punishment which has overspread the whole world! No weal more noxious than this! Not only has that idea been applied to the consequences of our actions,—and low terrible and irrational it is to mistake cause and effect for cause and punishment!—but worse than this, by means of this infamous interpretation of the punitive idea, they have robbed the pure accidentality of events of its innocence. Nay, they have gone so far in their folly as to ask us to feel our very existence as a punishment. Surely the eduction of mankind, thus far, must have been in the hands of fantastic gaolers and hangmen.
14
Bearing of insanity on the history of morality.—If despite that terrible pressure of the morality of customs," under which all human communities for many centuries-previous to and during our era and, generally speaking, up to the present day, have groaned (for we are living in the small world of exceptions and, so to speak, in an evil zone),—if, I say, despite all this, now and deviating ideas, valuations, and tendencies again and again have come to the front; this has been accomplished in the companionship of a horrible escort : in nearly every instance it is insanity which has cleared the way for a new idea and broken the charm of a venerable custom and superstition. Do you understand why this had to be effected by insanity? Why by something in voice and gesture as horrid and incalculable as the demonic caprice of weather and sea, and, for this reason, inspiring similar dread and submissiveness? Why lay something, bearing the marks of utter involuntariness as visibly as the convulsions and froth of the epileptic, which seemed to stamp the insane as the mask and speaking-trumpet of a deity? Why by something that filled the very bearer of the new idea with an awe and horror of himself, an, suppressing all remorse, urged him on to make himself its prophet and its martyr? While we hear it constantly asserted even in our days that, instead of a grain of salt, a grain of insanity had been given to genius, men of previous periods were more inclined to believe that, wherever madness appeared, a grain of genius and wisdom—something divine as they whispered into each other's ears—was to be found. Nay more: they expressed themselves distinctly enough: " From insanity Greece has derived its greatest benefits," thus said Plato, as the mouthpiece of the whole ancient humanity. Let us go a step further : There was nothing left for those superior intellects—who felt an irresistible desire to break down the barriers of some morality or other, and to make new laws—but to grow mad or feign to be so, if, indeed, they were not really mad. This rule applies to innovators in all departments, not only in those of priestly and political ordinances. Even the reformer of the poetic metre had to establish his authority by means of madness. Thus the poets retained a certain conventional licence of madness, even in times of a gentler mould—of which licence Solon, for instance, availed himself, when he incited the Athenians to reconquer Salamis. "How does one bring about madness, if one is not and dare not feign to be mad?" Almost all great intellects of the older civilisation lave yielded to this dreadful chain of reasoning. A Secret science of artifices and dietetic tricks, together with the consciousness of the innocence nay, sanctity of such meditations and designs, became traditional. The methods, by means of which one may become a medicine-man Red Indian, a saint among medieval Christians, an Angekok among Greenlanders and a Pajec among Brazilians, are essentially the same: absurd fasting, continual sexual abstinence. retirement into a wilderness, ascending a mountain or a pillar, or sitting on an aged willow which looks upon a lake," and thinking absolutely nothing but what may prompt some ecstasy or mental derangement. Who has the courage to look into the wilderness of the most bitter and superfluous mental agonies in which probably the most productive minds of all ages have suffered untold misery? Who would listen to the sighs. of these solitary and troubled minds: "Oh, ye powers in heaven above, grant me madness! Madness, that I may at last have faith in my own self! Send delirious fits and convulsions, sudden lights and darknesses; terrible frost and heat, such as no mortal ever suffered; frighten we will rumblings and haunting spectres, make me howl and whine and crawl like a beast: in order to be filled with a belief in my own self. Doubt is devouring me; I have slain the law, and the law haunts me, even so as a dead body does a living being. If I am not above the law, I am the most depraved of all men. The spirit, which dwells within me, whence comes it, unless it comes from you? Grant me a proof that I am yours; nothing but mad-ness will prove it to me." Only too often this fervour did its work too well; during the same period in which Christianity proved most prolific in saints and anchorites, believing that thereby it was proving itself, Jerusalem had large lunatic asylums for lost saints who had yielded up their last grain of salt.
15
The most ancient means of solace.—First stage: In any indisposition or misfortune man sees something for which he must make somebody else suffer. In so doing he becomes conscious of his latent power, and thereby feels comforted. Second stage: Man looks upon every indisposition and misfortune as a punishment, that is as the atonement of guilt and the means of escaping from the evil influence of some real or imaginary wrong. As soon as he discovers this advantage, which may accrue from misfortune, he thinks it no longer neccessary to make another person suffer for it. He renounces this kind of satisfaction, because he has now another.
16
First rule of civilisation.—Uncivilised tribes observe a certain kind of customs, the purpose of which seems to be custom in general. These are pedantic and, on the whole, most superfluous rules. (Take the Kamtshadales for instance, forbidding the snow to be scraped off the shoes with a knife; a coal to be stuck on a knife; an iron to be put into the fire—and enacting that every one trespassing in these matters shall suffer capital punishment.) Yet they bring home to them the continual presence of the custom and the perpetual necessity of adhering to it: they do so in support of that that great rule which is the commencement of civilisation: any custom is better than no custom.
17
Good and evil nature.—At first men grafted their own personalities on nature, seeing everywhere them-selves and their kin—namely their own evil and capricious minds—hidden, as it were, among the clouds, thunder-storms, wild beasts, trees and herbs: it was at this stage that they invented "evil nature." After that there came a time, the time of Roussean, when they fancied their personalities to have outgrown nature: being so weary of each other's company, that they insisted upon having a hiding-place, where man and his misery could not enter: then they invented "good nature."
18
The morals of voluntary suffering.—Which is the highest enjoyment for people living in the state of war of that small community, whose existence is ever in jeopardy, and in which the most stringent morality prevails? That is to say, for souls, all of vigour, vindictiveness, hostility, malice, suspicion, ready to face every terror and hardened through privation and morality? The enjoyment of cruelty: just as it is deemed a virtue, in such a soul and amid such conditions, to be ingenious and insatiable in cruelty. The community take delight in performing cruel deeds, throwing aside for once the gloom of constant dread and precaution. Cruelty is one of the most ancient festive joys of man-kind. Therefore the gods also are fancied to be pleased and festively disposed when they are offered the spectacle of cruelty. Thus slowly the opinion gains ground that voluntary suffering, self-chosen torture, have a good meaning and value of their own. By degrees in the community custom began to set up a practice in accordance with this opinion: men, henceforth, from all excessive well-being grew more suspicious, and from all conditions of painful suffering more hopeful; they tried to persuade themselves that in prosperity the gods frowned upon them, in adversity they smiled upon them, but by no means with pity. For pity was deemed to be contemptible and unworthy of a powerful, formidable soul. They smiled because they were amused and put into good humour by human sufferings; for a cruel mind enjoys to the utmost the gratifying consciousness of power. Thus the "most moral man" of the community was distinguished by the virtue of frequent suffering, of privation, of a hard mode of life and cruel castigations; not—to repeat it again and again—as a means of discipline and self-command or a longing for individiual happiness. It is a virtue, which should put the community into good odour with the evil gods, and steam up to them from their altars as an uninterupted propitiatory offering. All those intellectual leaders of nations, who were able to stir up the stagnant and prolific swamps of their customs, needed voluntary torture in addition to insanity to gain belief—especially and above all, as is always the case, belief in them-selves! The farther their intellect advanced on the new path, and consequently felt tormented by remorse and fears, the more savagely they rage against their own flesh, their own appetites and their own health, just as if they wished to compensate the divine being in case he should happen to be irritated by neglect of or opposition to old-established usages, or the intro-duction of new aims. Let us not to readily believe that we have now entirely freed ourselves from such a logic of sentiment! Let the most heroic souls examine themselves on this point. Every step, however small, in the province of free thought anl of an individually moulded life, had, at all times, to be taken at the cost of intellectual and corporal tortures; not only the advance-ment, nay, first of all the mere stepping about, the move-ments and clanges had to find their victims, innumerable martyrs throughout the many thousands of long years,in which paths have been benten and foundation stones been laid. These thousands of years we certainly do not recall to our minds in speaking, after the usual manner, of the world's history, this ridiculously small portion of human existence; and even in this very world's history," which, in truth, is nought but much noise about the latest news, there is truly no subject more important than the old, old tragedy of martyrs who tried to stir up the moral swamp. Nothing has been more clearly bought than that little portion of human reason and sense of liberty which now constitutes our pride. But it is this very pride which renders it almost impossible to us to feel in sympathy with those enormous periods of the "morality of custom," which precedence the "world's history" as the true and decisive part of history which has shaped the character of mankind when suffering, cruelty, hypocrisy, vengeance, and the denial of reason passed as virtues; whilst well-being, desire for knowledge, peace and compassion were considered as dangers, the being pitied was looked upon as an insult, labour as a disgrace, madness as godliness, and every change as the immoral and fatal. You think that all this has changed and that mankind has thus changed its character? Oh, ye observers of men, live deeper down into your souls !
19
Morality and obscurantism.—Custom represents the experiences of people of former ages in matters considered useful or detrimental; but the sense for custom (morality) has no reference to these experiences as such, but rather to the age, the sanctity and indiscutable authority of custom. Hence this sentiment is opposed to our gaining new experiences and amending customs: i.e., morality is opposed to the formation of new and better morals: it renders people stupid.
20
Free-doers and free-thinkers.—Free-doers are at a disadvantage as compared with free-thinkers, because mankind suffer more manifestly from the consequences of actions than of ideas. Yet if we consider that both eagerly seek satisfaction, and that the very contemplation and utterance of forbidden things afford this satisfaction to free-thinkers, in regard to motives there is no difference; as regards consequences, however, the case—unless we judge like the world generally, from mere outside appearances will go very much against the free-thinker. We have to make good a great deal of the contumely which has fallen on all those who, by their actions, have broken through the conventionality of some custom—such people generally have been called criminals. Everybody who overthrew the existing moral law has hitherto, at least in the beginning, been considered a wicked man; but when afterwards, as some-times happened, the old law could not be re-established and had to be abandoned, the epithet was gradually changed History almost exclusively treats of such wicked men who, in the course of time, have been declared good men.
21
Fulfilment of the law.—In case the observance of a moral precept should yield a different result from what had been promised and expected, and if, contrary to expectation, the moral man be stricken down by misfortune and misery, instead of attaining the promised happiness, there will always remain the explanation of the conscientious and timid: that some hitch has occurred in the fulfilment of the law. As a last resource much suffering and oppressed human kind will even decree: “It is impossible for us thoroughly to carry out the precepts; we are altogether a weak and sinful race, and, in our inmost conscience, incapable of morality: consequently we may lay no claim whatever to happiness and success. Moral precepts and promises have been given for beings better than we are."
22
Works and faith.—Protestant teachers go on spreading that fundamental error: that faith is the only thing essential, and that faith must necessarily be followed by works. This is by no means true, but sounds so plausible that even prior to Luther's time it lad misled such intellects as those of Socrates and Plato; though it is inconsistent with the evidence of all our daily life's every experience. The most positive knowlege or faith camot give us either the strength or the skill required for action, it can not supply the practice of that subtle soul multifarious mechanism, which must have gone before in order that a change may be effected from an idea into action. First and foremost let us have the works, that is, practice, practice, practice! The requisite faith will come in due time―be sure of that!
23
What we are most subtle in.—By fancying for many thousands of years, evenu things (nature, tools, property of every kind) to have both life and soul and a capacity for working harm and checking human purposes, the sense of impotence among mankind has been much greater and much more frequent than it ought to have been, for one had to secure the things in the same way as men and beasts, by dint of force, coercion, flattery, treatics, sacrifices—and herein lies the origin of the great majority of superstitious customs, that is, of an important and perhaps preponderant, yet wasted and useless constituent of all activity hitlerto displayed by mankind. But because the sense of impotence and fear has been so strong, and for a long time been subject to almost constaut stimulation, the sense of power has become so subtle that, in this respect, man can rival with the most delicate balance. It has become his strongest sense; the means which one has discovered for creating this scuse are almost equivalent to the history of culture.
24
The proof for a prescription.—Generally speaking, the merit or demerit of a prescription, as, for instance, that for baking bread, is proved through the anticipated result being verified or not, provided it be conscientiously carried out. It is different when we come to moral prescriptions, for here we cannot either foretell or interpret or define the results. These, indeed, rest on hypotheses of a very slight scientific value, which in reality it is equally impossible either to prove or disprove from the results; but formerly, when all science was in its primitive crude condition, and people, on the slightest pretence, were ready to take a thing for granted formerly the merit and demerit of a moral prescription was decided in the same way as is now that of any other rule: by reference to the result. If among the natives of Russian-America the principle obtains, You shall not throw a bone into the fire or give it to the dogs, it is proved as follows: "If you do, you will have no luck in luting." Yet in some sense or other one nearly always has "no luck in hunting"; it is not easy to refute the merit of a prescription in this manner, especially if a community and not an individual is looked upon as the one who suffers punishment; much more, an occurrence will always take place which seems to prove the rule.
25
Custom and beauty.—To do justice to custom we must own that the organs of attack and defence—of body and mind—of every one who, with all his heart and from the very beginning, entirely conforms to custom, are apt to degenerate that is, he grows more and more beautiful. For by the exercise of those organs and the corresponding dispositions ugliness is both pre-served and increased. For this reason the old baboon is uglier than the young one, and the young female baboon comes nearest in appearance to a human being, and is thus the best looking. Hence you may draw your own conclusions as to the origin of feminine beauty.
26
Animals and morality.—The finesses required in polite society, such as careful avoidance of everything ridiculous, incommon, presumptuous, the suppressing of virtues and our most cager desires, the immediate resignation, self-adaptation, self-depreciation—all these are, roughly speaking, to be found as social custom even in the lowest animal world—and only in this low depth are we able to discover the after-purpose of these uniable pre-cautions: one wishes to escape from one's pursuers and to be aided in the search after one's prey. For this purpose purpose animals learn to control themselves and to dlissemble in such a way that may, for instance, adapt their colour to that of their surroundings (by means of the so-called chromatic function "), and feign to be dead or assume the shapes and colours of other animals, or of sand, leaves, lichen or fungi (the English savants call this "mimicry"). Thus, the individual ensconces himself behind the universality of the idea "man," or seeks shelter in society, or attaches himself to princes, classes, parties, opinions of the day or his surroundings: and we may easily find the animal equivalent to all those nice ways of feigning to be happy, grateful, powerful, Even the sense of truth, which is really the sense of security, man has in common with the animal: we do not want to be either deceived or mis-guided by ourselves, we listen with suspicion to the whisperings of our own passions, we conquer ourselves and remain on the watch against ourselves; in all these things the animal is as proficient as man himself; in the animal, also, self-control springs from the sense of reality (from prudence). It likewise observes the effects which it produces on the perceptive powers of other animals; it learns to look back from them upon itself, to regard itself objectively; it has its measure of self-cognition. The animal judges the movements of its foes and friends, learns their peculiarities by rote, it suits it own measures to theirs; it once for all re-nounces the contest with individuals of certain species, and also guesses, from their manner of approach, whether certain aims bave peaceful and agreeable intentious. The beginnings of justice as also of prudence, modera-tion, valour—in short, all on so-called Socratic virtues are animalism; an outcome of these propensities, which teach us to look for food and to flee from our enemies. If we consider that even the most perfect in has only raised and refined himself with regard to his dict and the conception of all that is hostile to him, it may not be out of place to denote the whole of our moral phenomena as animalism.
27
The value of the belief in superhuman passions.—The institution of matrimony persistently keeps up the belief, that love, though a passion, yet as such is capable of duration, nay, that the lasting, lifelong love may he constituted a general rule. Through this tenacity of a noble belief and despite the fact that, very frequently and early always, it has been refuted, being thus but a pious fraud, love has acquired a higher and nobler rank. All institutions which concede to a passion the belief in its own duration and a responsi-bility for this duration, in contradiction to the nature of passion, have raised it to a higher level : and he who is actually seized with such a passion, does not, as formerly, think himself degraded or endangered by it, but raised in the estimation both of himself and his equals. Think of such institutions and customs which out of the ardent devotion of the moment, have created perpetual fidelity; out of the promptings of anger, perpetual vengeance; out of despair, perpetual moun-ing: out of a hasty, once uttered expression, perpetual obligation. The fruit of such transformation has been in each case a great deal of hypocrisy and mendacity, but also, at the expense of these drawbacks, a new superhuman conception, which elevates mankind.
28
Mood as an argument.—What is the cause of a cheerful readiness for action? This is a question which has greatly preoccupied mankind. The most ancient and still familiar answer is: God is the cause; by it He intimates to us that He approves of our purpose. When, in times past, people consulted the oracles about some design or other, they did so for the purpose of returning home, fortified by that cheerful readiness; and, in the case of several possible actions presenting themselves to the mind, any doubt arising was always met by: "I shall do that which will cause the aforesaid sensation." Hence they did not decide upon the most rational plan, but upon some design which instilled courage and hope into the soul, while dwelling upon it. The right mood was put as an argument into the scales and weighed down reasonableness: because mood was interpreted in a superstitious way as the influence of a God who promises success and, by means of this influence, causes His reason to weak as the highest rationality. Now consider the consequences of such a prejudice, when shrewd men, full of the lust of power, availed—and avail—themselves of it. Produce the right mood and you may dispense with all arguments and overcome all counter-Arguments.
29
The actors of virtue and sin.—Among those ancients who became renowned for their virtue, there were, as it seems, an exceeding great number who acted to themselves: the Greeks especially, being born actors, quite unconsciously, we may presume, pursued and approved this art. Besides, everybody was emulating somebody or everybody else's with his own: why then should they not have used all possible skill in dis-playing their virtue above all before themselves, if only for the sake of practice. Of what use would be a virtue which one could not exhibit or which knew not how to exhibit itself! Christianity closed the career of these actors of virtue: in their stead it invented the museous trumpeting about and parading of sin; it introduced to mankind a menaciously concocted sinfulness (even in our days good Christians consider this the "right thing").
30
Refined cruelty as virtue.—This kind of morality entirely rests on our craving after distinction—so do not think too highly of it! What kind of craving is it, and what is its innermost meaning? We wish our sight to cause grief to our neighbour, and to excite his envy, the sense of impotence and of his degradation : we want to make him taste the bitterness of his fate by dripping on his toungue a drop of our honey, and by keenly and maliciously looking into his eyes while bestowing on him this supposed favour. This person has become humble and is now perfect in his humility —look for those whom, for a long time, he has been wanting to torment therewith. You will easily find them. Another shows pity to animals and is admired for so doing—but there are certain people on whom he thus trauts to vent his cruelty. Behold that great artist: the anticipated delight in the envy of his outstripped rivals would not let his powers lie dormant until he became a great man—how many bitter moments of other men's souls has he received in payment for his aggrandisement! Flow reproachfully the chaste man looks at other women who live a different life! What vindictive delight lurks in these eyes! The theme is short, the variations on it might casily be multiplied without becoming tedious—for it is still a very paradoxical and almost painful proposition that the morality of distinction in its foundation is the delight in refined cruelty. In its foundation, I say—which means, in every first genera-tion. For when once the habit of some distinguishing action has been transmitted, the fundamental thought is not transmitted along with it only feelings, not thoughts, are hereditary): and provided it be not again reproduced by education, already the second generation ceases to feel any delight in cruelty along with it: but only delight in the habit as such. This delight, we may add, is the first grade of "goodness."
31
The pride of intellectuality.—Human pride which revolts against the theory of our descent from animals and puts a great gulf between nature and man—this pride is based upon a prejudice concerning the essence of the intellectual : yet this prejudice is comparatively young. In the great prehistoric period mankind every-where presupposed the intellectual and would not think of claiming it as their prerogative. Because, on the contrary, they had made the intellectual a property in company with all cravings, wickedness, inclinations, and therefore common, they were ashamed of being descended from other animals or trees (the noble families indeed consideral themselves honoured by such fables), and saw in the intellectual that which joins is to, not that which servers us from, Thus they schooled themselves in modesty—again in consequence of a prejudlice.
32
The brake.—To suffer morally and then to be told that this kind of suffering is based on an error seems revolting to our feelings. Yes, there is the one supreme consolation that by our suffering we attest a "deeper world of truth," deeper than all the world outside, and we by far prefer to suffer and to feel ourselves above reality (through the conscionsness that, by this means, we come nearer to that "deeper world of truth"), to being free from suffering and thus without this sense of superiority. Hence it is pride and the accustomed mode of gratifying it which opposes the new compre-hension of morality. What force should we employ to do away with this brake? Greater pride? A new pride?
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Moral feelings and moral conscriptions.—Moral feelings are evidently transmitted in such wise that children, observing in adults strong inclinations and aversions to certain actions, are led, as born apes, to initate these inclinatious and versions ; in after-life, when they find themselves imbued with these artificially acquired and well-exercised emotions, they consider a posthumous "Why," in confirmation of the fact that these inclina-tious and aversions are legitimate—a mere matter of propriety, Yet these confirmations love nothing whatever to do with either the origin or the degree of the feeling: one simply accomodates oneself to the rule that, as a rationual being, one must give reasons for one's pros and cons, and, what is more, reasons both adducible and acceptable. In this respect the history of moral feelings is a totally different one from that of moral conceptions. The former are powerful previous to the action; the latter especially after the action, considering the obligation which one feels under to pronounce upon them.
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Feelings as descended from judgments.—"Trust to your feeling."—But feelings are nothing final, original ; feelings are built up on judgments and valuations which are transmitted to us in the form of feelings (inclinations, inversious). The inspiration which originates in feeling is the grandchild of judgment—and often an erroneous one—and certainly not of one's own. To trust to one's feeling—means to obey one's grandfather and grand-mother and their ancestors in a higher degree than the gods that dwell within us, namely our reason and experience.
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A foolish piety with hidden pupose.— Are the inventor's of ancient civilisation, the earliest makers of tools and measuring lines, of vehicles, ships and houses, are the first observers of the celestial order and the multiplication tables, indeed, something quite different from an incomparably higher than the inventors and observers of our own age? Are these first steps, in the department of (discoveries, really of a value uneqalled by our travels and circumnavigations of the globe? Such is the voice of prejudice, such the argument for the disregard of the modern mind. And yet it is quite evident that chance, in the days of yore, was the greatest of all discoverers and observers, and the benevolent prompter of those ingenious ancients, and that, for the most insignificant invention which is now made, a greater intelligence, discipline, and scientific imagination are required than the sun and total existing in previous ages amounted to.
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Erroneous conclusions from usefulness. When we have proved the highest usefulness of a thing, we have for all that not taken a single step towards the explana-tion of its origin: that is, we call never make the necessity of existence intelligible by means of usefulness. But up to our days, and even in the department of the most exact sciences, the contrary judgment has hitherto prevailed. Have we not, even in astronomy, spread it about that the (alleged) usefulness in the arrangement of the satellites which, by other means, compensates for the light diminished through the greater distances from the sun, lest the inhabitants of the celestial bodies might be deficiently provided with light, is the final object of their arrangement and the explanation of their genesis? Here we shall be reminded of the conclusions of Columbus: The earth has been created for man, hence, if there are countries, they must be inhabited. Is it likely that the sun should shine on nothing, and that the nocturnal vigils of the stars should he wasted upon pathless seas and peopled countries?"
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‘’Cravings transformed by moral judgments.’’—The same craving, under the influence of the reproach which custom has cast upon this craving, develops into the painful sensation of cowardice or the pleasant sensation of humility, provided a custom, like that of Christianity, has adopted it and approved of it. That is, either a good or a bad conscience attaches itself to it. In itself, it has, like every other craving, neither this nor any moral character and name at all, nor even a definite companion sensation of pleasure or displeasure: it does not acquire all this as its second nature until it enters into relation with cravings which previous times have stamped as good or evil, or until it has been noted down as a property of beings whom the people morally weighed and valued before. Thus the sentiment of the ancient Greeks respecting envy totally differed from ours.Hesiod mentions it among the effects of kind andbeneficent Eris, and it gave no offence to attribute even to the gods some sort of envy. This we can easily understand in a state of things in which emulation formed the mainspring of all actions: but emulation was estimated and valued as a good thing. The Greeks also differed from is in the valuation of hope: they represented it as blind and cunning. Hesiod, in one of Iris fables, made the strongest possible allusion to it, which is, indeed, so strange that none of the modern commentators have understood it—for it runs counter to the modern mind, which, proceeding from Christianity, has learnt to believe in hope as a virtue. With the Greeks, on the contrary, to whom the approach to the knowledge of the future appeared but partially closed: and upon whom, in numberless cases, it was impressed as a religious duty to inquire into the future--where we content ourselves with hope—hope, thanks to the oracles and soothsayers, necessarily became degraded and degenerated into something evil and dangerous. The Jews differed from is in their notions of wrath and pronounced it holy. Accordingly they have seen in their midst the gloomy majesty of man, with which it showed itself associated, at an elevation such as no European could imagine. They moulded their wrathful, holy Jehovah after their wrathful, holy prophets.Compared with these, the great avengers amongEuropeans are, so to speak, only second-hand creatures.
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‘’The prejudice of the pure intellect’’--Wherever the doctrine of pure intellectuality prevailed, it has destroyed the nervous force by means of its extravagances, it preached that the body should be despised, neglected, tormented, and that man himself, on account of his cravings, should be tortured and despised. It produced gloomy, strained, depressed souls--which, moreover, professed to know the reason of their wretchedness in the means of possibly relieving it. "It must centre in the body which still thrives too well." Thus they argued, while, in fact, the body by its sufferings again and again protested against this constant mockery. At last a general, chronic over-nervousness fell to the lot of those virtuous representatives of the pure intellect. They experience pleasure in the form only of ecstasy and other indications of insanity, and their system reached its acme when it mistook ecstasy for the highest goal of life at the standard by which all earthly things shall be judged.
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Speculation on observancy, Countless precepts of custom, cursorily evolved from some solitary strange very speedily became incomprehensible.Their purpose could not be calculated with greater accuracy than the punishment which was to follow a transgression. Doubts were entertained even on the sequence of ceremonies; but while being considered and reconsidered, the object of such speculations grew in importance, and, indeed, the very absurdity of an observance at last changed into the holiest of holinesses. Do not make light of the clergy put forth by mankind in this matter throughout thousands of years; and, least of all, of the effects of this speculation on observances.We have here reached the vast training-ground of the intellect,—not only is the woof of religious begun and continued within its boundaries, but it is the venerable though awful auntie-world of science, whence the poet, the thinker, the phıysician, the lawyer arose. The dread of the incomprehensible—which, in an ambiguous manner, demanded ceremonies from us—gradually made roomfor the charm of mysteriousness, and where man could not explore he learnt to create.
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‘’Valuation of the life contemplative.’’—Let us, us pursuers of the life contemplative, remember the varied evil and misfortunes which the many after-effects of contemplation have inflicted upon the pursuers of the “life active," and consider the counter-demands which the“life active” makes, if we, in its very face, too vaingloriously boast of our good actions. First of all we have the so-called religious natures, which form the majority among the lovers of contemplation, and therefore represent their commonest species; these have at all times made it their aim to make life difficult and, if possible, intolerable to practical people: to darken the heavens, blot out the sun, suspect joy, depreciate hope, paralyse the active hand, all this they have understood just as they had their comforts, alms, charity and benedictions for times and feelings of wretchedness. Secondly, we have the artists, who, though somewhat scarcer than religious people, still form a pretty numerous branch of the representatives of the “life contemplative." These, in most cases, are individually unbearable, capricious, jealous, violent, quarrelsome : thus presenting a counterbalancing effect to the cheering and exalting effects of their works. Thirdly, we may mention philosophers in whom religions and artistic powers dwell together, but in combination with a third element of dialectics and the love of demonstration; these have been the authors of misfortune after the manner of both religious people and artists, and, in addition to this, they have wearied many people with their love for dialectics; their number, how ever, has always been very small. Fourthly, the thinkers and scientific workers; they rarely strove after effects, but silently threw up their mole-hills. This they have caused little annoyance and discomfort, anil very often, as objects of derision and mockery, involuntarily made life lighter to the pursuers of the “life active." Last of all, science became of great advantage to all : if, for the sake of this advantage, many of those who werepredestined for the “life active," now carve out their way to science in the sweat of their brows and notwithout brain-racking and imprecations, it is not the fault of the host of thinkers and workers of science; it is “self-wrought pain."
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‘’Origin of the “life contemplative."—In barbarousages when pessimist opinions rule man and the world, the individual, in the consciousness of his full power, is ever intent upon acting in conformity with these opinions and upon translating the idea into action by means of committing, robbery, ambuscade, maltreatment and murder; including the feebler imitations of the same, such as alone are permitted within the community. But whenhis power declines, when he feels tired, ill, melancholy or over-satiated, and, in consequence, temporarily void of wishes and desires, he is a comparatively better, that is, a less dangerous man, and his pessimist notions find vent only in words and thoughts, respecting, for instance, the merit of his companions, his wife, his life or his gods, his judgments will be evil judgments. In such a state of mind he turns thinker and prophet, or goes on adding to his superstition, and devises new observances, or he derides his enemies: but whatever he may devise, all the products of his intellect are bound to reflect his state of mind, such as the increase of fear and weariness, the decrease of his valuation of action and enjoyment; the intrinsic value of these products must correspond to the intrinsic value of these poetic, thoughtful, priestly moods; evil judgment must rule supreme therein. In later years, they called poets, thinkers, priests or medicine-men all those who uninterruptedly acted in the same way as formerly individuals used to act in that state; that is, who judged maliciously and lived a sad, deedless life: they would have liked to disregard such people and turn them out of the community, because they were not active enough ; but in so doing there was one risk,—these men had traced out superstition and divine power, and undoubtedly had certain unknown means of power at their disposal. This is the estimate in which the most ancient race of contemplation was held,—being disregarded in exactly the same proportion as they were not dreaded. In suchguise, with such an ambiguous aspect, an evil heart an often a troubled head, contemplation made its first appearance on earth, being both weak and terrible, both secretly abhorred and openly worshipped with a superstitious superstitious awe. Here, as in all things. we may say: Pudenda origo! (How humble the origin!)
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‘’How many forces nowadays make up a thinker!’’—To alienate oneself from sensual contemplation, to raise oneself to abstract ideas,—this, formerly, was felt as an exaltation: we cannot now quite enter into thesefeelings. The revelling in the most shadowy similes and images, the sport with those invisible, inaudible, imperceptible beings, was felt as a life in another, a higher world, springing up from the utter contempt of this perceptible, seductive and wicked world of ours.“These abstract ideas no longer mislead, but they may lead us,"—thus they spoke and took their upward flight.Not the contents of such intellectual sports, but the sports themselves were considered “the higher things"in the ante-period of science. Hence Plato's admiration of dialectics and his enthusiastic belief in their necessary co-relation to the good and spiritualised man. Not only knowledge, but also the means of gaining knowledge, the conditions and operations which precede knowledge in man, have been singly and gradually discovered. And every time when it appeared as if the newly-discovered operation or the recently experienced condition were not means of perfect knowledge, but the very contents, purpose and sum total of all that is worth knowing.The thinker requires imagination, inspiration, abstraction superstition, spirituality, invention, presentiment, induction, dialectics, delduction, criticism, collection of materials, an objective mode of thinking, contemplativeness, a com- prehensive view, and, last not least, fairness and affection towards all that exists,—but these were, all and each, in the history of the " life contemplative," once con- sidered as purposes and final purposes, and bestowed on their inventors that perfect happiness which fills the human soul at the flash of a final purpose.
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Origin and importance.—Why does this thought enter and re-enter my mind, and flash upon me in ever- varying brilliancy?—that, in lines of yore, explorers, in their search after the origin of things, ever expected to find a something which might be of invaluable import- ance to every action and judgment, nay, that they always presumed the welfare of mankind to depend on the insight into the origin of things—whereas now, the farther we trace the origin the less we feel concerned about our interests; nay, all our valuations and interested- ness in things begin to lose their meaning the further we retrocede in our knowledge and the nearer we approach the things themselves. The insignificance of the origin increases in proportion to our insight into the origin ; whereas the things nearest to, around, and within our- selves gradually begin to display colours and beauty, puzzles and riches of greater importance than the older humanity ever dreamt of. Formerly thinkers used to move furiously about like captured beasts, intently watching the bars of their cages, at leaping up against thein in order to break them: happy he who fancied that he could spy through a gap something of the outside, of the world to come and of the far away.
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A tragic outcome of knowledge.—Among the means of exaltation, human sacrifices at all times have most effectually raised an elevated man. Perhaps the one mighty thought the "thought of a self-sacrificing humanity"—might still be made to prevail over every other effort, so as to carry the victory over the most victorious. But to whom should the sacrifice be offered?We might already now swear that, if ever the constellation of such a thought were to rise above the horizon, the knowledge of truth will be left as the sole mighty purpose with which such a sacrifice—because no sacrifie is too great for it—would be commensurate. Menwhile the problem, to what extent humanity, as a whole.could devise steps for the promotion of knuowledge has never been proposed, much less what craving of knowledge could urge hunanity so as to offer itself and to die with the light of an anticipating wisdom in the eye.Perhaps, when once an alliance for the purposes of knowledge will have been effected with the inhabitants of other stars, when, for some thousands of years, an intercommunication of scientific results will have taken place from star to star, the enthusiasm of knowledge may rise to such a springtide.
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Doubt of doubt.—"What a splendid pillow doubt offers to a well-constructed head." This saying of Montaigne always incensed Pascal, for nobody ever so much yearned for a good pillow as he did. What really was amiss?
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Words block our way.—Wherever primitive man put up a word, lie believed that he had made a discovery.How utterly mistaken he really was! He had touched a problem, and while supposing that lie had solvel it, he had created an obstacle to its solution. Now, with every new knowledge we stumble over flint-like and petrified words, and, in so doing, break a leg sooner than a word.
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"Knor thyself" is the essence of all science.—-Man will never know himself before he has gained a final knowledge of all things. For the things are only the limitations of man.
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The new fundamental feeling: our ultimate transitoriness.—Formerly people tried to arrive at the consciousness consciousness of man's grandeur by pointing to his divine descent. This has now become a forbidden course, for the ape stands at his door, together with other horrid animals, showing their teeth knowingly, as if to say, No further! Hence we now try in the opposite direction : the way whither mankind proceeds shall serve as a proof for their grandeur and their kinship with God. Alas, even this is in vain! At the other end of this road stands the funeral urn of the last man and grave-digger (with the inscription, ‘’"Nihil humani a me alienum puto”’’).However highly mankind may be developed perhaps, in the end, it will be on : lower seale that it was in the beginning—a transition to a higher order is no more attainable than the ant and earwig, at the end of their “earthly career," can aspire to a kinship with God and eternity. The becoming takes the “having been"in tow—why should any little star, and again any little species thereon, form an exception to this eternalpanorama? Avaunt such sentimental ideas !
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‘’Such as we still are."—”Let us be indulgent to the great one-eyed," said Stuart Mill, as if it werenecessary to ask for forbearance where we are accustomed to believe and almost worship. I say, "Let us be indulgent to the two-eyed, both great and small for such as we are, we shall never advance a step beyond forbearance."
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‘’Where are the new physicians of the soul!’’—Themeans of comfort alone have given life that melancholy, fundamental character, in which we now believe; the worst disease of mankind having originated in the struggle with their diseases, and the apparent remedies having, in the long run, provinced worse conditions than those which they were intended to remove. People, in their ignorance, often deemed the instantaneous, narcotising and intoxicating means, the so-called comforts, to lie the real healing powers; nay, they did not even notice that often they had to atone for the instantaneous relief by a general and serious aggravation of the complaint, that the patients had to suffer from the after-effects of the intoxication, from the craving created by it, and then again from a depressing, universal feeling of restlessness, nervous shaking, and ill-health. Those whose malady had reached a certain pitch never recovered—the physicians of the soul, those universally accredited and worshipped. took good care of that. It has been asserted of Schopenhaner, and justly so, that he at least was in earnest about the sufferings of mankind : where is he who at last will deal in right earnest with the counter-remedies against these sufferings, and will publicly expose the ineffable quackery with which mankind, up to our own times, have been wont, under the most dazzling names, to treat the infirmities of their souls?
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‘’Abuse of the conscientious.’’—The conscientious, and not the unscrupulous ones, have been the greatest sufferers from the weariness of lenten sermons and brimstone theology, especially if they happened to be of an imaginative mind. Thus a gloom has been castover the lives of the very people who needed cheerfulness and pleasant images—not only for the sake of their recovery and the relief from themselves, but in order that humanity might rejoice in them and absorb, a small ray of their beauty. Oh, how inch super-fluous cruelty and torment have proceeded from those religions which have invented sin, and from those people who, by means of it, wish to reach the highest summit of their power.
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‘’The apostute of the independent mind.’’—Is there anybody who has a serious aversion to pious people firmly rooted in their faith? Do we not, on the contrary, look upon them with silent admiration and pleasure, deeply regretting that these excellent folk do not share our feelings? But whence comes that unfounded, deep, and sudden grudge against any one who, having once possessed a thorough independence of mind, turned “believer" in the end? In thinking of him we seem to behold some disgusting sight, which we ought speedily to blot out from our memories. Should we not turn our backs on even the most venerable man if we suspected him in this respect ? Not on account of any moral verdict, but of a sudden disgust and horror? Whence this acuteness of sentiment? Perhaps someone will give us to understand that, in reality, we are not quite sure of our own selves. That, betimes, we surrounded ourselves with the thorny hedges of the most pointed contempt, lest, at the critical moment, when age makes us work and forgetful, we might be inclined to climb across our own contempt?Frankly, this conjecture is an erroneous one, and he who forms it knows nothing of what agitates anddetermines the independent thinker: how little do his changes of opinion appear to him contemptible in themselves! How highly, on the contrary, does he honour in the faculty of changing his opinion, a rare and high distinction, especially if it extends far into old age.His ambition (and not his pusillanimity) reaches up even to the forbidden fruits of the ‘’speruere se sperui’’ (contempt for his despisers) and the ‘’speruere se ipsum’’ (contempt for self): not to mention theadditional anxieties of a rain and easy-going man.Besides he esteems the doctrine of the innocence of all opinions to be as safe as the doctrine of the innocence of all actions : how could he pose as judge and executioner before the apostate from intellectual freedom? His sight would more probably repel him, as the sight of any one who has somedisease repels the physician. The physical disgust of the spongy, mollified, rank, suppurating, for a moment conquers reason and the desire to assist. Hence our readiness is overcome by the notion of the gigantic dishonesty which must have prevailed in the apostate from free thought: by the notion of a universal degeneration which has affected even the framework of Character.
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‘’Other fears, other guarantees.’’—Christianity had attached to life an altogether new and unbounded riskiness, thereby creating new guarantees, enjoyments, recreations, and valuations of all things. Our century denies this riskiness, and does so on conscientious grounds: and yet it clings to the old habits of Christian guarantees, Christian enjoyment, recreation, valuation.It even introduces them into its noblest arts and philosophy. How feeble and worn, low imperfect and clumsy, how arbitrarily fanatic, and—above all—how vague must all this appear, now that the horrible contrast, the ever-present anxiety of the Christian with regard to his eternal welfare, has been removed!
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‘’Christianity and the passions.’’—There is a great popular protest against philosophy traceable in Christianity: the good sense of the ancient sages had weaned mankind from the passions, Christianity wants to reestablish them. For this purpose it dispossesses virtue, such as it has been understood by the philosophersnamely, as the victory of reason over passion —of all moral value; it brushes aside rationality and calls upon the passions to manifest themselves in their full strength and glory: as love unto God, fear of God, fanatic belief in God, implicit trust in God.
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‘’Error as comfort.’’—Despite all that has been said to the contrary, it was the object of Christianity to free mankind from the yoke of moral coercions bypointing out, so it imagined, a more direct road to perfection: just as some philosophers imagined that they could get rid of the wearisome and tedious dialectics and the collection of severely tested facts. by referring to a "royal road to truth." It was an error, in both instances, yet a great comfort to people either wearied or despairing in the wilderness.
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The sacrifier which is needful.—These carnest, able, righteous people of profound sentiment, who, in their hearts, are still Christians, should, if only is an experiment and out of deference to themselves, try, for some length of time, to live without Christianity; for the sake of their faith they should for once sojourn in the wilderness, if only to acquire the right of giving their opinion as to whether Christianity be needful.For the present they stay in their narrow cell, and thence revile the world outside the cell: my, they grow angry and bitter, if it is hinted to them that beyond this very cell lies the whole, great world; that Christianity, after all, is but a little nook. Forsooth, your evidence will be of no value until you have lived for years without Christianity, with an honest, inward yearning to abide outside Christianity—until you have strayed far, far from it. No importance will be attached to your return unless judgment, based on a severe comparison, not a mere home-longing, drives yon back.Future generations will deal, in this way, with all the valuations of the past: one must voluntarily live then over again, and their opposites as well, so as to gain in the end the right of sifting them,
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Hatred against one's neighbour.—Let us suppose that we could reproduce in ourselves what another feels himself to be--which Schopenhauer calls pity, and which is more correctly described as altruism—we should have to hate him, if, like Pascal, he thinks himself hateful. This is probably the same feeling which Pascal and ancient Christianity entertained towards humanity, which, under Nero, was “convicted” of the ‘’odium generis humani’’ (hate of the human race), as Tacitus has it.
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‘’Despairing souls.’’—Christianity, with the hunter's instinct, spies out all those who, somehow or other, may be led to despair—of which only a small section of mankind are capable. It is constantly pursuing them and way-laying them. Pascal tried whether it was not possible, by means of the subtlest knowledge, to drive everybody into despair; the attempt failed, to his second despair.
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‘’Brahminism and Christianity.’’—There are certain precepts for the consciousness of power ; first for those who can rule themselves and feel consequently already quite at ease in the consciousness of power; secondly for those who lack this very consciousness. Brahminism ministers to the former class of people, Christianity to the latter.
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‘’Capability of vision.’’—Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages it was considered the real and distinguishing characteristic of highest humanity to be capable of vision, that is to say, of a profound mental derangement.In truth, the medieval maxims of all loftier natures (of the religious) aim at making man capable of vision.No wonder that this overrating of half-mad, fantastic, fanatical people, so-called me of genius, is continuing its course in our days. “They have seen things which others do not see," certainly; yet this very circumstauce should fill us with caution, not with faith!
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‘’Price of the believer’’—He who attaches so great an importance to being believed in, as to vouchsafe heaven for this belief, nay, everybody, be he even a malefactor on the cross, must have suffered of a terrible doubt an experienced every form of crucifixion : else he would not buy his faithful followers so dearly.
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‘’The first Christian’’—Everybody still believes in the literary activity of the “Holy Ghost," or is subject to the lingering influence of this belief: when we open the Bible, we do so for our own edification, or to find an intimation of comfort in our own personal troubles, whether great or small; in short, we read ourselves both into it and out of it. Who—save a few learned people—knows that it records among other things the history of one of the most ambitious and obtrusive souls, of a wind both superstitious and cunning—the history of St. Paul, the apostle? But for this remarkable story, for the aberrations and passions of such a mind, of such a soul, Christianity would not exist, we should hardly have heard of a small Jewish sect, whose teacher died on the cross. Of course, had we understood this very story at the proper time, had we read, really recall, the writings of Paul with free and independent minds, without giving any thought to our personal troubles, not as the revelations of the "Holy Ghost"—suchreaders did not exist for more than a thousandyears—Christianity long since would have ceased to exist: so thoroughly do these pages of the Jewish Pascal expose the origin of Christianity, just as the pages of the French Pascal expose its fate and that by which it will ultimately perish. The fact that the vessel of Christianity has thrown a good deal of the Jewish ballast overboard, that it went and was able to go anong the heathens—all this is bound up with the history of this one man, a man greatly tormented, greatly to be pitied and very disagreeable, both to others and to himself.He suffered of a fixed idea, or, to speak more plainly, of a fixed question ever-present, never resting: what is the significance of the Jewish law, and, in particular, of the fulfilment of this law? In his youth he had wished personally to satisfy it, being filled with an eager desire for this highest of all distinctions which the Jews could imagine—the people who have raised the imagination of moral loftiness to a higher level than any other nation, and who alone have succeeded in creating a holy God, and the idea of sin as an offence against this holiness. Paul had become both the fanatic defender and guard-of-honour of this God and His law, and was for ever struggling with and lying in wait for the transgressors and doubters of the same law, being hardhearted and malicious towards them, and included in favour of extreme punishments. And now he experienced in himself that, hot-headed, sensual, melancholy, and malicious as he was in his hatred, he could not himself fulfil the law, nay—and this seemed to him the strangest thing of all his extravagant ambition was constantly being stimulated to break it, and he could not help yielding to this stimulus. Is it really "fleshliness” which, again and again, made him a trespasser? Orrather, as he afterwards suspected, the law itself, which continually proved impossible of fulfilment and with an irresistible spell entices men into transgression? But at that time he had not yet hit upon this expedient.Many things weighed on his conscience; he hints at enmity, murder, witchcraft, image-worship, debauchery, inebriety, and love of drunken revelry; and however much he tried to case his conscience, and especially his ambition, by an extreme fanaticism of law-worship and law-defence, there were moments which he said to himself: "All is in ruin; the anguish of theunfulfilled law cannot be vanquished." Similar feelings may have taken hold of Luther when, in his monastic cell, he wished to become the perfect man of theecclesiastical ideal; ad just as Luther one day begun to hate the ecclesiastical ideal, the pope and the saints and all the clergy, with a true, deadly hatred which he durst not admit to himself—so it happened to Paul.The law was the cross to which he felt nailed. How he hated it! what a grudge he bore it! how he searched for means to destroy it—not to fulfil it any longer himself! And at last a resenting thought, together with a vision, as was natural with an epileptic like him, flashed upon him: to him, the fierce zealot of the law, who, at heart, was wearied to death by it, there appeared on a lonely path that Christ, with the radiance of God on his countenance, and Paul heard the words:“Why pursuest thou Me?” What really happened is this: his mind all at once had become enlightened. “It is unreasonable," so he said to himself, "to persecute this very Christ. Here is the way out, here perfect revenge, here and nowhere else have I and hold I the destroyer of the law." The sufferer from the most anguished pride felt suddenly restored, his moral despair was blown away, for the morals vere blown away,destroyed that is, fulfilled, yonder on the cross! Up to that time he had looked upon that shameful death as the chief argument against the "messiahship” proclaimed by the followers of the now doctrine: but how if it was necessary for removing the law? The vast consequences of this idea, of the solution of this mystery, whirled before his eyes: all at once he became the happiest of men. The fate of the Jews, nay, of all mankind, seemed to him to be bound up with this idea, with this momentary flash of enlightenment: he held the thought of thoughts, the key of keys, the light of lights; history, henceforth, would circle round him. For, from that time forth, he was to be the teacher of the destruction of the law. To be lead to evil meant to be deal to the law also; to be in the flesh meant to be in the law also. To be one with Christ meantto live become with Him the destroyer of the law: to have died with Him meant to be dead to the law also.Even if it were still possible to sin, yet it is no longer possible to sin against the law, "I am outside its pale.""If now I were once more to accept the law and to submit to it, I should make Christ the helpmate of sin: for the law was there so that sins might be committed, it constantly brought sin to the surface, as a sharp juice does with a disease. God would never have resolved upon the death of Christ if a fulfilment of the law had been possible without it; now not only all guilt has been atoned for, but guilt itself was destroyed : now the law was dead, now the fleshiness wherein it dwelt was dead, or, at least lying, or, as it were, continually decaying. To be a short while longer in the midstof this decay is the Christian's fate, before he, one with Christ, will rise with Christ, take part in the Divine glory, and become a " son of oil" like Christ.Then the paroxysm of Paul was at its height, and so was the obtrusiveness of his soul; with the thought of the oneness all shame, all subjection, all barriers were taken from it, and the unruly will of ambition revealed itself is an anticipatory revelling in Divine glories.This was the first Christian, the inventor of Christianity.Before him there were but a few Jewish sectarians.
69
‘’Inimitable.’’—There is a great difference and distance between jealousy and friendship, between self-contempt and pride in the former moved the Greek, in thelatter the Christian.
70
‘’What a rude intellect is good for.’’—The Christian Church is a encyclopedia of prehistoric cults and views of the most diversified origin, and consequently most fitted for missionary work. Formerly, as well as now, whereever she made or makes her appearance, she found and finds something similar to herself to which she may adapt herself and gradually impute her own spirit. Not her Christian character, but the universally pagan side of her observances is the reason for the spread of this world-religion! her ideas, which are rooted in the Jewish as well as the Hellenic mind, knew, from the very first, how to raise themselves above the exclusiveness and niceties of nations and races, as above prejudices. How ever much we may admire this faculty of making themost divergent matters coalesce, we must, all the same, not overlook the contemptible side of this faculty—the astonishing coarseness and narrowness of her intellect during the time of the formation of the Church, which allowed her to rest content with any diet, and to digest opposites like pebbles.
71
‘’The Christian revenge on Rome.’’—Nothing perhaps is so tiresome as the sight of an ever-successful conqueror; throughout fully two centuries the world had become accustomed to seeing Rome subdue one nation after another, the circle was closed, all future seemed at an end, everything was organised with a view to aperpetual state of affairs; nay. when the empire put up buildings, it was done with a secret aspiration to "imperishable strength." We, who know but the "mela-choly of ruins," can barely understand that altogether different melancholy of the perpetual building operations, from which men tried to escape the best way they could, as for instance by the light-heartedness of Horace.Others looked for other means of comfort against the weariness which bordered on despair, against the slowly killing consсiousness that all progress of thought and every impulse of the heart were henceforth withont hope that everywhere there at the huge spiderpitilessly drinking all blood wherever it might still he welling forth. This century-old speechless hatred of the wearied spectators against Rome, as far as Rome's rule extended, at last found vent in Christianity, which welded Rome, the “world" and "sin" into one idea.They took their revenge by announcing the sudden destruction of the world to be near at hand; by reestablishing a future—Rome had indeed known how to make everything its own pre- and present history—a future in comparison to which Rome no longer appeared as the most important object : they took their revenge by dreaming of the last judgment—and the crucified Jews, as the symbol of salvation, was the bitterest satire on the splendid Roman prætors in the province, for now they appeared as the symbols of misrule and of a "world" fit for destruction.
72
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For truth.—The truth of Christianity was testified by the virtuous life of the Christians, their fortitude in suffering, their firm belief, and, above all, its spread and increase despite all calamities—so you reason even in our days. So much more the pity! Learn at least that all this argues neither in favour of nor against truth, that truth needs a different proof from truthfulness, and that the latter is by no means a argument in favour of the former.
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‘’Christian reservation.’’—Should not this have been the most usual reservation of the first-century Christian: "It is better to persuade ourselves of our guilt than of our innocence; for we never know how sopowerful a judge may feel disposed—but we mustfear that he may expect to find none but consciencestricken ones. Considering his great power be will more easily pardon a guilty man than admit that somebody was right in his presence." So did the poor people in the province feel in the presence of the Roman praetor: "He is too proud to admit our innocouce." Is it not possible that this very sensation should again have influenced the Christian conception of the highest judge?
75
‘’Neither European nor aristocratic.’’—There is something something Oriental and feminine in Christianity which is revealed in the thought "Whom the Lord loveth Hechasteneth"; for the women in the East look uponchastisements and their strict seclusion from the world as tokens of their husband's love, and complain when these tokens cease.
76
‘’Evil thoughts make evil minds.’’—The passions become evil and vicious when viewed with evil and vicious eyes. Thus Christianity has succeeded in changing Eros and Aphrodite-noble and idealistic powers—into goblins and phantoms, by means of the pangs which every sexual impulse was made to cause in the consciences of the believers. Is it not terrible that we wish to make necessary and periodical feelings a source of inward misery, and, in so doing, endeavour to make this inward misery in every human beingsomething necessary and periodical?This misery, moreover, is kept secret and consequently is more deeply rooted: for not all have the courage of Shakespeare, to admit their Christian gloom regarding this subject as clearly as he has done in his :”Sonnets."Is it then absolutely necessary that something which we have to combat and to keep in bounds or, according to circumstances, altogether to banished from our minds, should always be called evil? Is it not in the nature of vulgar souls always to call an enemy evil? And should we call Eros an enemy? The sexual feelings have that in common with those of pity and worship that one being gratifies another by his own enjoyment—we do not too often meet with such a benevolent arrangement in nature. And we actually revile it and spoil it by an evil conscience! We associate the procreation of man with an evil conscience ! The final outcome of this diabolisation of Eros is a farce: gradually Eros, the "devil," became more interesting to mankind than all the angels and saints taken together, thanks to the mysterious mummery of the Church in all things erotic: she has brought it about that, even in our own time, the love story has become the one real interest that binds all classes together—with all exaggeration which the ancients could not comprehend and which will be succeeded by peals of laughter in years to come. All our poetry and thoughts, from the highest to the lowest, are marked, and more than marked, by the extravagant importance with which the love story there appears as the main story : on this account posterity may perhaps come to the conclusion that the whole inheritance of Christian culture is stamped by narrowness and Madness.
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‘’On mental agonics.’’—In our days everybody loudly cries out at any torture someborly might inflict on another's body: the indignation against a man who is capable of doing such a thing at once bursts forth; nay, we even tremble at the mere conception of atorture inflicted on either a human being or an animal, and suffer untold misery when hearing of a positively proved fact of this kind. But we are still far from feeling as universally and as distinctly with regard to the mental agonies and the atrocity of their infliction.Christianity has practised them on a gigantic scale and still goes on preaching this kind of torture, nay, it quite innocently laments of apostasy and lukewarmness if it meets a state free from such agonies—all this to the effect that even now mankind looks on the spiritual death by fire, the spiritual torture and instrument of torture with the same anxious patience and indecision with which it formerly faced the cruelties inflicted on the bodies of man or beast. Hell, indeed, has not remained a mere word: and a new kind of pity accompanies the newly created real anxieties, a terrible and ponderous pity, unknown to former ages, with people "irrevocably doomed to hell," as expressed by the stony knight to Don Juan, and which, in the Christian era, has often made stones weep. Plutarch gives a gloomy picture of the state of mind of & superstitious person in paganism : this picture pales when looked at side by side with that of the mediæval Christian, whoguesses that nothing can save him from “eternaltorment." Horrible omens appear to him: perhaps a stork, holding a snake in its beak and hesitating to swallow it. Or native suddenly blanches, or fiery colours shoot across the ground. Or the shades of deceased relatives approach him, their faces bearing the traces of fearful sufferings. Or the dark walls of the sleeper's room suddenly become illuminated, and on them, in a yellow mist, he sees instruments of torture and a confused mass of snakes and devils. Surely, Christianity has turned our globe into a dreadful abode, by everywhere raising the crucifix and thus denoting the earth as the place “where the righteous are tortured to death." And when the eloquence of somegreat penitentiary preacher for once disclosed all the secret suffering of the individual, the agonics of the "closet"; when, for instance, a Whitefield preached, “like a dying ran to the dying," now bitterly crying, now loudly and passionately stamping his feet, amid the most piercing and surprising sounds and without any fear of turning the whole force of his attack upon one single individual present and excluding him in an awful manner from the community—then, each time,the earth scored really to be transformed into the "field of misery." Then one could see large, assembled crowds behave as in a fit of madness; many in convulsions of fear, others lying there unconscious, motionless; others again violently trembling or, for hours, rending the air with their piercing cries. Everywhere loud panting, as of people who, half suffocated, were gasping for breath. “And indeed," so says an eyewitnesses eyewitness of such a sermon, “nearly all sounds that could be heard were those of people who died in bitterest agony." Let us never forget that it was Christianity which turned the death-bed into a “bed of agonies,"and that, by the scenes which since then have been enacted thereon, and the terrible sounds which here, for the first time, appeared possible, the senses and the blood of countless witnesses and of their posterity were poisoned for a lifetime. Imagine a harmless man who cannot forget having heard words like these : "Oh eternity! Oh, would I had no soul! Oh, would I had never been born! I am doomed, doomed, lost for ever! Six days ago you might have helped me.But it is all over now; I am now the devil's own; I will go down to hell with him. Break, break, poor hearts of stone! Will you not break? What morecan be done to hearts of stone? I am doomed that ye may be saved! There he is! Yea, there he is, Come, kind devil! Come !"
78
‘’Justice inflicting punishment.’’—Misfortune and guilt —these two have been put on one balance by Christianity, so that, whenever the misfortune which follows upon guilt is a great one, even now the magnitude of the offence itself is quite involuntarily referred back to it.But this is not the antique way of thinking, and therefore Greek tragedy—wherein misfortune and guilt are so abundantly and yet so differently discussed is one of the great liberators of the mind, in it measure which the ancients themselves could not realise. They had continued so unsophisticated as not to establish an "adequate relation” between guilt and misfortune. The guilt of their tragic heroes is, indeed, the small stone over which the latter stumble, and on whose account they occasionally break an arm or knock out an eye. The antique mode of thinking merely adds: “Surely he ought to have gone his way more deliberately and less overwhelmingly." But it was reserved for Christianity to say: "Here is a great misfortune, and a great, equally great, offence must be concealed behind it, though we do not clearly see it. If, oh wretched man, you do not feel so, you are obdurate, , and will have to endure even worse things." Besides, antiquity still know misfortune, pure and simple; only Christianity turned everything into punishment, welldeserved punishment; moreover, it makes the sufferer's imagination likewise a suffering one, so that, in all his distress, he feels morally forlorn and cast out. Poor humanity! The Greeks bad a special word for theindignation felt at another's misfortune; this sensation was inadmissible among Christian nations and has but little developed itself; hence they lack a name for this more manly brother of pity.
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A suggestoin.—If, according to Pascal and Christianity, our "ego' be always hateful, how could we then allow and suppose others—whether God or man—to love it? It would be contrary to all propriety to allow ourselves to be beloved, while knowing quite well that we deserve nothing but hatred not to speak of other repellant feelings. But this is the very kingdom of grace. Then your love of your neighbour is to you a grace? Your pity a grace? Well, if this be possible to you, then go a step further; love yourselves for the sake of grace, then yon will no longer stand in need of your God, and the whole drama of the fall and redemption of mankind will be enacted in your own selves.
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The compassionate Christian.—The reverse of Christian sympathy with the sufferings of a fellow-creature is the deep suspicion of all this fellow-creature's joy, of his joy in everything that he wishes and is capable of.
81
Humanity of the saint.—A saint had fallen among believers, and could no longer bear their constant hatred against sin. At last he said, God has created all things with the exception of sin: no wonder that He is not well disposed towards it. But man has created sin—should he then disown this, his only child, merely because it is displeasing to God, its grandfather? Is this humane? Honour to whom honour is due—but heart and duty ought first to plead in favour of the child, and only in the second place in honour of the grandfather.
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‘’The spiritual onslaught.’’—“You must settle this with yourself, for your life is at stake." With these words Luther suddenly bursts upon us aud fancies that we feel the knife at our throats. But we repel him with the words of one higher and more considerate than himself."It rests with us to form no opinion whatever on this thing or that, and so to save trouble to our souls. For the things themselves cannot, in their nature, force is to give an opinion."
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‘’Poor humanity!’’—One drop of blood too many or too few in the brain can make our life unspeakably miserable and hard, so that we may have to suffer more from this one drop than Prometheus did from his vulture. But things are at their worst when we do not even know that this drop is the cause of our sufferings. But "the devil"! Or "sin"!
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‘’The philology of Christianity’’—How little Christianity cultivates the love for honesty and fairness may be pretty well judged from the character of the writings of its literary men. They put forward their conjectures as boldly as dogmas, and are not often honestly at a loss regarding the interpretation of a scriptural text. Again and again they say, "I am right, for it is written-"am then follows an explanation so impudent and arbitrary that any philologist who may hear it would halt with angry laughter, asking himself over and over again: Is it possible? Is this honest? Is it even decent ? Only those who never or always frequent the church undervalue all the dishonesty which, in this respect, is still being practised in Protestant pulpits; how clumsily the preacher avails himself of the avantage that here he is safe from interruption; how the Bible is being twisted and squeezed, and how the art of false reading is, in due form, imparted to the people. But, after all, what can we expect from the after-effects of a religion which, during the centuries of its foundation, enacted that stupendous philological face about the Old Testament.I am speaking of the attempt which was made to snatch the Old Testament from the Jews, under the pretext that it contained nothing but Christian doctrines and belonged to the Christians as the true people of Israel, whereas the Jews had only usurped it. Aud then they indulged in a fury of interpretation and substitution, which could not possibly have been associated with a safe conscience.However strongly Jewish divines protested, itpretended that the Old Testament everywhere alluded to Christ and only Christ, especially to His cross, and wherever a piece of wood, a rod, a ladder, a twig, a tree, willow, a staff is mentioned, it signified a prophecy about the wood of the cross; even the setting up of the unicorn and the brazen serpent, even Moses stretching out his arms in prayer, even the spits on which the Easter-lamb was roasted—all were allusions and, so to speak, preludes to the cross. Did anybody who put forward these things ever believe them? Remember that the Church did not shrink from enriching the text or Septuaginta (as, for instance, in Psalm xcvi., v. 10), in order afterwards to avail herself of the surreptitious passages in the direction of Christian prophecies. Well, they were engaged in a combat, and thought of their foes more than of their honesty.
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‘’Subtlety in deficiency.’’—Do not mock at the mythology of the Greeks because it is so unlike your profound metaphysics. You ought to admire a people who, at this very point, checked their quick understanding, and, for a long time, had sufficient tact to avoid the danger of scholasticism and hair-splitting superstition.
86
‘’The Christian interpreters of the body.’’—Whatever may be caused by the stomach, the intestines, the pulse of the heart, the nerves, the bile, the seed—all those illhumours, debilities, over-excitements, and the whole contingency of the machine which is so little known to us, a Christian like Pascal accepted as a moral and religious phenomenon, adding the interrogatory whether God or the devil, whether good or evil, salvation or condemnation, rested therein. Oh the unfortunate interpreter! How he had to twist and worry his system !How he lied to twist and worry himself, in order to carry his point!
87
‘’The moral miracle.’’—Christianity, in the moralprovince, knows nothing but the miracle—the suddenchange of all valuations, the sudden laying aside of all habits, the sudden irresistible affection for new objects It describes this phenomenon as the opera-tion of God, and, calling it the act of regeneration, gives it a unique, incomparable value; everything which is generally called morality and has no reference to that miracle thereby becomes indifferent to the Christian ; nay, perhaps its a sensation of pleasure or pride, even an object of fear. The canon of virtue of the fulfilled law is established in the New Testament, but in such a way as to become the canon of the impossible virtue; these people who do not lose all moral aspirations in the face of such a canon are to learn to feel themselves further and further removed from their goal; they are to despair of virtue and, at Iast, throw themselves on the bosom of the merciful.A Christian's moral endeavour could still be made valuable, but only on condition that it ever remained an unsuccessful, dull, melancholy effort; thus it could still serve to bring about that ecstatic moment when he experience the"triumph of grace" and the moral miracle. But this striving after morality is not necessary, for that miracle frequently happens to the sinner at the very moment when he, as it were, is weltering in the pool of sin; nay, the leap from deepest and utter sinfulness into its reverse seems to be even easier and, as a perceptible proof of the miracle, even more desirable. But what may be thepsychological meaning of such a sudden, irrational, and irresistible revulsion, such a change from utter misery into utmost happiness? (is it perhaps a disguisedepilepsy?)—this should certainly be taken into consideration by the physicians of the mind, who frequently have such miracles (for instance, the mania of homicide and suicide) under observation. The comparatively "more pleasant effect" in the case of the Christian does not make an essential difference.
88
‘’Luther, the great benefactor.’’—The most important outcome of Luther's efforts lies in the distrust which he has aroused against the saints and the whole Christian "life contemplative": only since his time an unchristian "life contemplative" has once more become practicable in Europe, and has put it limit to the content for worldly and lay activity. Luther, though shut up in a monastery, remained an honest miner's son, and there, for want of other depths and “profundities," descended into his own heart, boring terrible, dark passages—and at last recognised the truth that it was impossible for him to lead a contemplative, saintly life, and that his inborn activity would ruin him, body and soul. Hewasted but too much time in attempting to find his way to holiness by means of castigations—at last he made up his mind, saying to himself: "There is no real life contemplative. We have allowed ourselves to be duped.The saints were not worth more than the rest of us.” This was, indeed, a boorish way of carrying one's point, but for the Germans of that time it was the right and only way: how they felt edified when recalling in their Lutheran catechise, “With the exception of the ten commandments there is no work which could please God —the vaunted spiritual works of the saints are selfinvented."
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‘’Doubt, a sin.’’—Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and proclaimed even doubt to be a sin.Without reasoning, by a sheer miracle, we are to be cast into faith, and thenceforth to float therein as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: a mere sideglance at a continent, the more thought that we may perhaps exist for other purposes than floating, the least impulse of our amphibious nature—is sin! Now mind, that thereby the foundation of belief and all meditation on its origin even are excluded as sinful. All that is wanted are blind impulses and an eternal song over the waters, in which reason has been drowned.
90
‘’Selfishness against selfishness.’’—How many still end by saying: "Life would be unbearable if there wasno God” (or, as idealists express it: "Life would be unbearable if the ethic import of its basis were wanting") —hence, there must be a God (or an ethic import of existence). In reality it only comes to this, that he, who has been accustomed to these conceptions, does not wish for a life without them that these conceptions may be necessary for him and his preservation—but is it not a presumption to decree that everything which is necessary for my preservation must really exist! As if my preservation was something necessary! How, if others felt just the reverse? If they disliked living under the very conditions of those two articles of faith, and, with them, did not think life worth living! This is how matters stand at present.
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‘’The honesty of God.’’—A God who is omniscient and omnipotent, and who does not even provide that His intentions be understood by His creatures—could that be a God of goodness? He who, for thousands of years, has allowed the countless doubts and scruples to continue continue, as if they were necessary for the salvation of mankind, and who, nevertheless, holds out prospects of terrible consequences to follow a violation of truth?Would he not be a cruel God, if He had the truth and yet could quickly look down upon mankind,miserably worrying itself for the sake of truth?But perhaps He yet is a God of goodness—and Hewas only unable to express Himself more distinctly, Perhaps He was wanting in intelligence? Or in eloquence? So much the worse! For, in that case, He may perhaps have mistaken that which He calls His truth, and Himself is not quite a stranger to the “poor, duped devil." Must he not suffer intense agonics on secing His creatures, for the sake of the knowledge of Himself, suffer so much and even more pain through all eternity, without being able to advise and help them, except as a deaf-and-dumb, who makes all sorts of ambiguous signs when the most terrible danger hangs over his child or his dog? A believer whothus argues and thus feels oppressed, ought really to be forgiven for being more inclined to pity with the suffering God than with his “neighbour's"; for they are no longer his neighbours if that most isolated, most primeval being be also the greatest sufferer and more than any in need of comfort. All religions bear traces of the fact that they owe their origin to an early immature intellectuality of men—they all make very light of the obligation to speak the truth: they know nothing of a duty of God to be truthful and clear in his communications to mankind. Noboily has beenmore eloquent than Pascal as regards the “hidden God" and the reasons of his thus hiding Himself; which proves that he, Pascal, could never compose his mind on this lead: but his voice sounds as confident as if he had, some time or other, sat behind the curtain. He scented immorality in the "’’deus absconditus,’’" and felt both ashamed and afraid of admitting this to himself: hence, like one who is afraid, he spoke as loudly as he could.
92
‘’At the death-bed of Christianity.’’—The really active people are now, at heart, dead to Christianity, and the more moderate and more thoughtful among the intellectual middle-classes only retain a made-up, that is, an oddly simplified Christianity. God who, in his love, ordains everything, as it will finally be best for us : a God who both gives and takes from its our virtue and happiness, so that, on the whole, everything happens as is right and meet, and there is no reason left why we should take life sadly or rail at it; in short, resignation and modesty deified—that is the best and most lifelike residuum of Christianity still extant. Yet we ought to remember that thus Christianity has glided into a mild moralism it is not so much “God, freedom, and immortality," which have remained, but good-will and honest feeling, and the belief that, in the whole universe also, good-will and honest feeling will prevail : it is the ‘’euthanasy’’ of Christianity.
93
‘’That is truth?’’—Who would not agree with the conclusion which the faithful like to draw: "Science cannot be true, for it denies God. Hence it does not come from God; hence it is not true—for God is truth." Not the conclusion, but the premise is at fault : how, if God were not the truth, and if this could be proved?If He were the vanity, the Iust for power, the impatience, the terror, the enraptured and terrified delusion of men?
94
‘’Remedy for the ill-humoured.’’—Paul already was of opinion that a sacrifice was wanted to remove the profound displeasure of God about sin: ever since his time Christians have never ceased to wreak on some victim or other their displeasure with their own selves—be it the world,” or “history," or reason," or the joy of peaceful rest of other people—something good must die for their sin (though only in effigy!)
95
‘’The historic refutation as the final one.’’—Formerly attempts were made to prove that there was no God— to-day we are shown how the belief that there was at God could arise, and whereby this belief has gained its weight and importance: thereby the counter-proof that there is no God becomes superfluous. When,formerly, the adduced “Evidences of the existence of God" had been refuted, there always remained a doubt whether no evidences better than those that had just been refuted could be found: at that time the atheists were not yet proficient in making "’’tabula rasa.’’"
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‘’"In hoc signo vinces.’’—However for Europe maybe advanced in other respects, in religious matters it has not yet obtained the liberal ‘’naivéte’’ of the ancient Brahmins, a fact indicating that, in India, four thousand years ago, people were wont to think more deeply and the delight in thinking was more universally transmitted than it is now among us. For those Brah-mins believed, first of all, that the priests were more powerful than the gods, and secondly, that the power of the priests rested in the observances: whence their poets never wearied of praising the observances (prayers, ceremonies, sacrifices, songs, metres) as the real donors of all good things. The propositions are true, though much poetic fancy and superstition may have sunk in.One step further, and they flung the gods aside.Europe also will have to do so ere long. One step further, and they no longer wanted the priests and mediators—and Buddha, the teacher of the religion of self-redemption, rose. How far Europe is still removed from this stage of culture! When, finally, all obser-vances and customs, on which the power of the gods is based, when priests and redeemers will have been destroyed, when morals, in the old sense, will be dead: then will come—well, what will come then ? But let us not guess, and rather take care that Europe may retrieve that which several thousand years ago, in India, among the nation of thinkers, was done in accordance with the precept of thinking. There are now among the different nations of Europe from ten to twenty millions of people who no longer believe in God." Is it too much to ask that they should give a sign to each other? As soon as they thus will recognise each other, they will also make themselves know—and will, at once, become a power in Europe, and, fortunately, a power between the nations; between the classes; between rich and poor; between superiors and in-feriors; between the most restless and the most quiet and quieting people.