Thus Spoke Zarathustra

preach, — he also did not solve the purely scientific task of grounding his Christian morality, i.e., of tracing it back to acceptable psychological and historical foundations. To make a higher destiny of future humanity dependent on his life did not occur to him, any more than it did to the other atheists of the past. Most of these other atheists even harmed the reputation of atheism, — the reputation of that way of thinking upon which alone a just knowledge of nature, pure of gross errors, could be built. | If Schopenhauer's life has an ancient character, if he sacrifices himself to his philosophy, if he lives stoically, independently, in strict self-discipline: we see, on the other hand, many other atheists in degeneration. Their moral skeleton is not strong enough to defy the storms of skepticism or even to be steeled by them. If they venture into hopes and utopias, these turn out according to their own image, and if their desolation has finally reached the point where nothing of human greatness dawns on them anymore, where the old Prometheus spark is extinguished in them, then they decree in naive shamelessness: the majesty of man is over with altogether! . . There can, indeed must, no longer be great people — opined J. W. Draper through his American spectacles. With atheism, the paradise of philistinism and comfort opens up — taught Strauss, to the satisfaction of the German luxury-people, and Bebel, more amateurishly, to the satisfaction of lesser people. ---

✓ There are no words to express Nietzsche's horror at this rapid decline. The sight of it actually made him sick. "What? Man is becoming ever smaller! The man is becoming effeminate! All strive for the happiness and well-being of the lazy and unworthy, — instead of for the highest tension of strength and self-conquest! Suffering (and therefore also its opposite: joy) is to be diminished, if possible abolished! — in short: the realm of the sluggish and sober, the realm of the tame and lame, of flatness and barrenness, the land of Cockaigne original: Schlaraffenland, a legendary land of idleness and luxury of the frivolous and the too-many, the realm of impotence is to come!"

Nietzsche describes this contemptible ideal on pages 15—17 of Zarathustra. The mass, which no longer has any feeling of its own depravity, is even less capable of seeing a human ideal above itself, of which the eye of the truly great is not...