—Let us look one another in the face. We are Hyperboreans—we know well enough how much out of the way we live. “Neither by land nor by water wilt thou find the way to the Hyperboreans:” Pindar already knew that of us. Beyond the north, beyond ice, beyond death—our life, our happiness . . . We have discovered happiness, we know the way, we have found the exit from entire millenniums of labyrinth. Who has found it besides?—Modern man perhaps?—“I do not know out or in; I am whatever does not know out or in”—sighs modern man . . . We were ill from that modernism,—from lazy peace, from cowardly compromise, from the whole virtuous uncleanness of modern yea and nay. That tolerance and largeur of heart which “forgives” all because it “understands” all, is Sirocco to us. Better to live in the ice than among modern virtues and other south-winds! . . . We were brave enough, we spared neither ourselves nor others; but we did not know for a long time where to direct our bravery. We became gloomy, were called fatalists. Our fate—that was the fulness, the tension, the damming up of our forces. We thirsted for lightning and for achievement, we were furthest removed from the happiness of weaklings, from “resignation” . . . A tempest was in our atmosphere; nature which we embody was darkened, —for we had no path. The formula of our happiness: a yea, a nay, a straight line, a goal . . .

What is good?—All that increases the feeling of power, will to power, power itself, in man.

The problem which I here put is not what is to replace mankind in the chain of beings (man is an end), but what type of man we are to cultivate, we are to will, as the more valuable, the more worthy of life, the more certain of the future.

Mankind does not manifest a development to the better, the stronger, or the higher, in the manner in which it is at present believed. “Progress” is merely a modern idea, i.e. a false idea. The European of the present is, in worth, far below the European of the Renaissance; onward development is by no means, by any necessity, elevating, enhancing, strengthening.

We must not embellish or deck out Christianity: it has waged a deadly war against this higher type of man, it has put in ban all fundamental instincts of this type, it has distilled evil, the evil one, out of these instincts: —strong man as the typical reprobate, as “out-cast man.” Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the ill-constituted, it has made an ideal out of the antagonism to the preservative instincts of strong life; it has ruined the reason even of the intellectually strongest natures, in that it taught men to regard the highest values of intellectuality as sinful, as misleading, as temptations. The most lamentable example: the ruin of Pascal, who believed in the ruin of his intellect by original sin, while it had only been ruined by his Christianity!—

It is a painful and thrilling spectacle that has presented itself to me: I have drawn back the curtain from the depravity of man. This word in my mouth is, at all events, guarded against one suspicion: that it involves a moral accusation of man. It is—I should like to underline it once more—meant in the sense of freedom from any moralic acid and this to the extent that that depravity is felt by me most strongly just there, where one hitherto most consciously aspired to “virtue” and “Divinity.” I understand depravity, one makes it out already, in the sense of décadence: my assertion is that all values in which mankind now comprise their highest desirability are décadence-values.

Christianity is called the religion of sympathy.—Sympathy stands in antithesis to the tonic passions which elevate the energy of the feeling of life: it operates depressively. One loses force by sympathising. The loss of force, which suffering has already brought upon life, is still further increased and multiplied by sympathy. Suffering itself becomes contagious through sympathy; under certain circumstances a total loss of life and vital energy may be brought about by sympathy, such as stands in an absurd proportion to the extent of the cause (the case of the death of the Nazarene). That is the first point of view; there is however one still more important. Supposing one measures sympathy according to the value of the reaction which, as a rule, it brings about, its mortally dangerous character appears in a much clearer light still. Sympathy thwarts, on the whole, in general, the law of development, which is the law of selection. It preserves what is ripe for extinction, it resists in favour of life’s disinherited and condemned ones, it gives to life itself a gloomy and questionable aspect by the abundance of the ill-constituted of all kinds whom it maintains in life. One has dared to call sympathy a virtue (in every superior morality it is regarded as a weakness); one has gone further, one has made it the virtue, the basis and source of all virtues,—only, to be sure (which one must always keep in sight) from the point of view of a philosophy which was nihilistic, which inscribed the negation of life on its escutcheon! Schopenhauer was right in maintaining that life was negatived by sympathy, was made worthier of negation,—sympathy is the practice of nihilism. Once more repeated: this depressive and contagious instinct thwarts those instincts which strive for the maintenance and elevation of the value of life: it is, both as the multiplier of misery and as the conservator of all misery, a principal tool for the advancement of décadence,—sympathy persuades to nothingness! . . . One does not say “nothingness:” one says instead, “the other world;” or “God;” or “true life;” or Nirvana; salvation, blessedness . . . This innocent rhetoric, out of the domain of religio-moral idiosyncrasy, appears forthwith much less innocent, when one un-dertands what tendency here wraps around itself the mantle of sublime expressions; the tendency hostile to life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: therefore sympathy became to him a virtue . . . Aristotle, as is known, saw in sympathy a sickly and dangerous condition, which one did well now and then to get at by a purgative: he understood tragedy as a purgative. From the instinct of life, one should in fact seek an expedient to put a puncture in such a morbid and dangerous accumulation of sympathy as the case of Schopenhauer manifests (and alas also, our entire literary and artistic décadence from St. Petersburg to Paris, from Tolstoi to Wagner), that that bubble might burst . . . Nothing amidst our unsound modernism is unsounder than Christian sympathy. To be a physician here, to be pitiless here, to apply the knife here—that belongs to us, that is our mode of charity; thereby we are philosophers, we Hyperboreans!——

It is necessary to say whom we regard as our antithesis:—theologians, and everything that has theological blood in its veins—our entire philosophy . . . One must have seen the fatality close at hand, or, better still, one must have experienced it in one’s self, one must have been almost ruined by it, to regard it no longer as a jocular affair (the freethinking of Messrs. our naturalists and physiologists is in my eyes a joke—they lack passionateness in these matters, the suffering from them). That poisoning extends far wider than one supposes; I discovered the theological instinct of haughtiness everywhere where people at present regard themselves as “idealists,”—where, in virtue of a higher origin, they assume the right to cast looks superior and strange at actuality . . . The idealist, precisely like the priest, has all the great concepts in his hand (and not in his hand only), he plays them with a benevolent contempt against the “understanding,” the “senses,” “honours,” “good living,” and “science;” he sees such under him, as injurious and seductive forces, over which “spirit” soars in pure being-by-itself!—as if submissiveness, chastity, poverty, in a word holiness had not hitherto done unutterably more injury to life than any frightful things or vices . . . Pure spirit is pure lie . . . As long as the priest still passes for a higher species of human being,—this denier, calumniator, and poisoner of life by profession,—there is no answer to the question. What is truth? Truth has been already reversed when the conscious advocate of nothingness and denial passes for the representative of truth . . .

I make war against this theological instinct: I have found traces of it everywhere. Whoever has theological blood in his veins is from the very beginning ambiguous and disloyal with respect to everything. The pathos which develops therefrom calls itself belief: the closing of the eye once for all with respect to one’s self, so as not to suffer from the sight—of incurable falsity. A person makes for himself a morality, a virtue, a sanctity out of this erroneous perspective towards all things, he unites the good conscience to the false mode of seeing,—he demands that no other mode of perspective be any longer of value, after he has made his own sacrosanct with the names of “God,” “salvation,” and “eternity.” I have digged out the theologist-instinct everywhere; it is the most diffused, the most peculiarly subterranean form of falsity that exists on earth. What a theologian feels as true, must needs be false: one has therein almost a criterion of truth. It is his most fundamental self-preservative instinct which forbids reality to be held in honour, or even to find expression on any point. As far as theologist-influence extends, the judgment of value is turned right about, the concepts of “true” and “false” are necessarily reversed: what is most injurious to life is here called “true,” what raises, elevates, affirms, justifies, and makes it triumph is called “false” . . . If it happens that, through the “conscience” of princes (or of the people), theologians stretch out their hand for power, let us not doubt what always takes place at bottom: the will to the end, nihilistic will seeks power . . .

Among Germans it is immediately understood when I say that philosophy is spoiled by theological blood. The Protestant clergyman is the grandfather of German philosophy, Protestantism itself is its peccatum originale. Definition of Protestantism: the half-sided paralysis of Christianity—and reason . . . One has only to utter the words “College of Tübingen” to comprehend what German philosophy is at bottom—insidious divinity . . . The Swabians are the best liars in Germany, they lie innocently . . . Whence the exaltation all over the German learned world (three-fourths of which is composed of the sons of clergymen and teachers) on the appearance of Kant,—whence the German conviction, which even still finds its echo, that with Kant a change for the better commenced? The theologist-instinct in German scholars made out what was now once more possible . . . a back-door path to the old ideal now stood open, the concept of a “true world,” the concept of morality as essence of the world (these two most virulent errors that exist!) were again, thanks to a wily-shrewd scepticism, if not demonstrable, at least no longer refutable . . . Reason, the prerogative of reason does not reach so far . . . A “seemingness” had been made out of reality; a world, completely fabricated by a lie, the world of “what is,” had been made reality . . . The success of Kant is merely a theologist success: Kant, like Luther and like Leibniz, was an additional drag on not-too-sound German uprightness:——

A word yet against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be our contrivance, our most personal self-defence and necessity: in every other sense it is merely a danger. What does not condition our life injures it: a virtue merely out of a sentiment of respect for the concept of “virtue,” as Kant would have it, is injurious. “Virtue,” “duty,” “the good in itself,” the good with the character of impersonalness and universal validity—chimeras, in which the decline, the final debilitating of life, Königs-bergian Chinaism, express themselves. The very reverse is commanded by the most fundamental laws of maintenance and growth: that everyone devise his own virtue, his own categorical imperative for himself. A people perishes when it confounds its duty with the general concept of duty. Nothing ruins more profoundly, or more intrinsically than every “impersonal” duty, every sacrifice before the Moloch of abstraction.—I wonder that Kant’s categorical imperative has not been felt as dangerous to life! . . . The theologist-instinct alone took it under protection! An action to which the instinct of life impels has in its pleasure the proof that it is a right action: and that nihilist, with Christian-dogmatic intestines, understood pleasure as an objection . . . What destroys faster than to work, think, or feel without internal necessity, without a profoundly personal choice, without pleasure? as an automaton of “duty”? It is precisely the recipe for décadence, even for idiocy . . . Kant became an idiot.—And that was the contemporary of Goethe! And this calamity of a cobweb-spinner passed for the German philosopher,—passes for it still! . . . I take care not to say what I think of the Germans . . . Has not Kant seen in the French Revolution the transition from the inorganic form of the state into the organic? Did he not ask himself if there was an event which could not be explained otherwise than by a moral faculty in mankind, so that “the tendency of mankind to goodness” was proved by it once for all? Kant’s answer: “That is revolution.” The erring instinct in each and everything, antinaturalness as an instinct, German décadence as a philosophy—that is Kant!—

I put a few sceptics apart, the decent type in the history of philosophy: the remainder are ignorant of the first requirements of intellectual uprightness. All of them do just like little women, all those great enthusiasts and prodigies,—they regard “fine feelings” as arguments, the “expanded bosom” as the bellows of Divinity, conviction as a criterion of truth. In the end Kant attempted, with “German” innocence, to make scientific this form of corruption, this lack of intellectual conscience, under the concept of “practical reason:” he devised a reason expressly for the occasions in which one has not to trouble one’s self about reason, namely, when morality, when the sublime requirement “thou shalt” becomes audible. If one considers that, almost among all nations, the philosopher is only the further development of the priestly type, this inheritance of the priest, the spurious, self-imposed coinage, no longer surprises one. When one has holy tasks, for example, to improve, to save, or to redeem men, when one carries Divinity in one’s breast, when one is the mouth-piece of other-world imperatives,—with such a mission one is already outside of all merely reasonable valuations, one’s self is already consecrated by such a task, it is already the type of a higher order! . . . What does the priest care for science! He stands too high for it!—And the priest has hitherto ruled!—He has determined the concepts of “true” and “untrue!” . . .

Let us not underestimate this: we ourselves, we free spirits, are already a “Transvaluation of all Values,” an incarnate declaration of war against and triumph over all old concepts of “true” and “untrue.” The most precious discernments into things are the latest discovered: the most precious discernments, however, are the methods. All methods, all presuppositions of our present-day science, have for millenniums been held in the most profound contempt: by reason of them a person was excluded from intercourse with “honest” men,—he passed for an “enemy of God,” a despiser of truth, a “possessed” person. As a scientific man, a person was a Chandala . . . We have had the entire pathos of mankind against us,—their concept of that which truth ought to be, which the service of truth ought to be: every “thou shalt” has been hitherto directed against us. Our objects, our practices, our quiet, prudent, mistrustful mode—all appeared to mankind as absolutely unworthy and contemptible.—In the end one might, with some reasonableness, ask one’s self if it was not really an æsthetic taste which kept mankind in such long blindness: they ...