world, for some 'hereafter' or other, is radically, perhaps nothing but a symptom of degeneracy."
His own religious feeling Nietzsche expressed in what he called amor fati, the love of fate. "My formula for the greatness of a man," he says, "is amor fati: that he desire to have nothing except what he has, not in the future nor in the past nor for all eternity. Not only to submit to necessity, least of all not to hide it from himself—for idealism is falsehood, mendacity in the presence of necessity—but to love it." "Verily through many souls have I passed and through hundreds of cradles and pains of labor. Many a farewell have I spoken; I know the heart-breaking last hours. But my creative will, my fate wills it so. Or to put it more honestly: such a fate is just what my will desires. Will is a deliverer, that is the true doctrine of will and freedom." "A new pride my I has taught me and that I teach men: no longer to hide my head in the sand of heavenly things, but to carry it freely, a head of earth, which realizes the purpose of the earth. A new will I teach men: to desire this path which man has blindly trod, and to call it good and no longer to steal away from this path like the sick and dying."
Nietzsche's estimate of the intellect, of knowledge, of philosophy and science, of truth, is based on the same fundamental thought. The will for power, the desire for life is what counts. Instinct, desire, will, are better than knowledge or intelligence as such, or conscious intelligence rather. The mind or intellect is merely an instrument in the hands of instinct, of the will for life and power. "Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage—and his name is self. He dwells in your body, he is your body." Your intellect or mind is the 'little reason' it is the tool of your body—the creating body created the mind as a hand of its will—your body and its instincts is the 'big reason.' "I am wholly body and nothing else; and soul is but a word for something belonging to the body." "There is more reason in your body than in your wisest wisdom." Mind or knowledge has value only in so far as it makes for life, in so far as it helps you. Now truth does not always help you, it is sometimes harmful; illusion sometimes helps you. If illusion helps us, we want illusion. Nietzsche even goes so far in his opposition to the popular view as to say that illusion is as necessary as truth. "The falseness of a judgment," he says, "is no objection against a judgment. The question is how far it preserves and promotes life, preserves the species, perhaps even develops the species, and we are inclined to assert on principle that the falsest judgments are the most indispensable ones for us, that without assuming logical fictions man could not live, that to give up false judgments would be to give up life, to negate life."
It is a prejudice of the philosopher that truth is more valuable
