Because fruitfulness, the power of production in all its forms, is the divine part of man, it is impossible for anyone without it to attain “holiness and communion with God” in the meaning of the religion of life, or, in other words, full humanity. Even in its limited form, that of creating a family, it is the unerring means of extending the ego beyond its own limits, the simplest condition for humanisation. It can transform the egoist into a generous man, merely by giving him something to live for. For this reason love has taken the place of religion with innumerable people, because it has the same power of making them good and great, but a hundredfold greater power of making them happy. Therefore all great and beautiful resignation—flowing with sweetness and benevolence—is like a vineyard, made upon the slope of a crater. But therefore also it is true of all who have quenched the warmth of fruitfulness in themselves, that they have committed the one unpardonable sin, that against the holy spirit of life. These women have received their condemnation in Lessing’s fable of Hera, who sent Iris to earth to seek out three virtuous, perfectly chaste maidens, unsoiled by any dreams of love. And Iris certainly found them, but did not bring them back to Olympus; for Hades had already made Hermes fetch them for the infernal regions—there to replace the superannuated Furies. Because the means of life must never eclipse the meaning of life—which is to live with one’s whole being, and thus to be able to impart an ever greater fulness of life—it is immoral to live solely either for sanctity or for work, fatherland or humanity, or even love, for man is to live by all these. His exclusion from one of these means of full humanity can never be compensated by his participation in any of the others, just as little as one of his senses can be replaced by another, even though the latter be perfected under the necessity of serving in the place of the lost one. And the resignation which prematurely contents itself with part of the rights of its human nature instead of aspiring to the whole, such resignation is a falling to sleep in the snow. It is undeniably a calmer state than that of keeping one’s soul on the stretch for new experiences; for in that case one must also be prepared for new wounds; and he who keeps his suffering awake can be sure of more pain than he who puts it to sleep with an opiate. But no criterion is meaner than that of suffering or not suffering. The question is only what a man suffers from, and what he becomes—for himself and others—or does not become as the result of his pain. Life holds in one hand the golden crown of happiness, in the other the iron crown of suffering. To her favoured ones she hands them both. But only he is an outcast whose temples have felt the weight of neither.