14.

We have unlearned. We have become more modest in all respects. We no longer derive man from "spirit" or "divinity"; we have placed him back among the animals. He counts as the strongest animal because he is the most cunning: a consequence of this is his spirituality. On the other hand, we defend ourselves against a vanity that would like to make itself heard here again: as if man had been the grand hidden purpose of animal evolution. He is by no means the crown of creation; every being stands beside him at the same level of perfection. And by asserting this, we are asserting too much: man is, relatively speaking, the most botched animal, the most sickly, the one that has strayed most dangerously from its instincts—though, with all that, also the most interesting!

As for the animals, it was Descartes who first, with admirable boldness, dared the thought of understanding the animal as a machina machine: our entire physiology struggles to prove this proposition. Logically, we also do not set man apart, as Descartes still did: whatever is understood of man today goes exactly as far as he is understood mechanically. Formerly, one gave man "free will" as a gift from a higher order: today we have taken the will away from him, in the sense that it can no longer be understood as a capacity. The old word "will" serves only to denote a resultant, a kind of individual reaction that necessarily follows a multitude of stimuli, some contradictory and some harmonious: the will no longer "acts," no longer "moves."

Formerly, one saw in human consciousness, in the "spirit," the proof of his higher origin, his divinity; to perfect man, one advised him to withdraw his senses into himself, like a turtle, to cease intercourse with the earthly, to cast off the mortal coil: then the essential part of him remained, the "pure spirit." We have reconsidered this as well: becoming conscious, the "spirit," counts for us as a symptom of a relative imperfection of the organism, as a trial, a groping, a blunder, as an exertion in which an unnecessarily large amount of nervous energy is consumed. We deny that anything can be made perfect as long as it is still being made conscious. The "pure spirit" is pure stupidity: if we discount the nervous system and the senses, the "mortal coil," we miscalculate—nothing more!

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