722 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



a decadent and a fool. "From time to time," exclaims Nietzsche, 

 "grant me but one look upon something that is complete, something 

 that is finished, something perfect, mighty, triumphant, something in 

 which there is still something to fear. Upon a man who justifies 

 mankind, upon a complementary and redeeming accident of man, for 

 whose sake we can hold fast to our belief in mankind." That nature 

 can produce a single man of this type is a consolation to Nietzsche, is 

 enough to fill him with admiration and joy. He would agree with 

 old Heraclitus : " To me one man is ten thousand if he be the best." 



Traditional morality is repudiated by Nietzsche because and in 

 so far as it contradicts the principle of life. For the same reason he 

 rejects religion, particularly the Christian religion. The leading re- 

 ligions, he thinks, cause the race to deteriorate, they preserve too much 

 of what ought to perish. Christianit}', especially, is a crime against 

 life. It falsifies, negates and depreciates reality. It preaches 

 asceticism, the denial of life, pessimism, pity, effeminacy, contempt 

 for the world, peace, non-resistance, opposition to struggle, equality 

 and original sin. It is hostile to nature and the natural healthy in- 

 stincts, calling them sinful; it glorifies the weak and sick and would 

 have them rule over the strong; it tries to make the unequal equal; 

 it destroys man's pleasure in himself and in the world; it is the 

 religion of the decadent, of the played out, of the unnerved. In 

 short, it condemns and negates this life, and points us in its stead 

 to fictions of another world: to God, an immortal soul, a future life 

 and a free will. It has nothing but imaginary causes (God, soul, ego, 

 spirit, free will) ; nothing but imaginary effects (sin, redemption, 

 grace, punishment, forgiveness of sins) ; an intercourse between 

 imaginary beings (God, spirits, souls) ; an imaginary natural science 

 (anthropocentric: complete absence of natural causes) ; an imaginary 

 psychology (repentance, pangs of conscience, temptation of the devil, 

 the proximity of God) ; an imaginary teleology (the kingdom of God, 

 the last judgment, eternal life). This entire world of fictions has its 

 root in Christianity's hatred of the natural (the reality), it is the ex- 

 pression of a profound contempt for reality. But that explains every- 

 thing. Who alone has reason to lie himself out of reality? He who 

 suffers from it. But to suffer from reality is to be a failure of reality. 

 The surplus of the pain-feelings over the pleasure-feelings is the cause 

 of that fictitious morality and religion — such a surplus, however, 

 represents the formula of decadence. Christianity is the insurrection 

 of the failures; it is the religion of the lower classes, women, slaves 

 and plebeians. " Every philosophy that places peace above war, every 

 ethics that gives the notion of happiness a negative form, every meta- 

 physics that makes a state of equilibrium and final rest the goal of 

 development, every esthetic, ethical or religious yearning for a better 



