Virtues like races--perhaps I should say _with_ races--have their ascendancy and their decline. The quality of pity is not greatly admired of strong young peoples. The virtues of triumphant pagandom were made of sterner stuff: one hears much of temperance, of courage, of wisdom, of justice; little indeed of compassion. It is with Christianity that faith, hope, and charity are introduced into our culture, and throughout Christendom the greatest of these remains charity. Thus it is that Nietzsche always refers to these virtues as the “modern idea,” and since modernity is to his mind desperately sick, he seeks the cause of its disease in its “fixed idea.” Now in imagining that charity or pity might well be a symptom of weakness, Nietzsche does not stand alone even among modern thinkers. Spinoza for one is inclined to be critical of the excellence of pity. Why pity one’s neighbor more than oneself? And Why pity oneself at all? Is not such self-pity a form of repining? But the cure for repining is understanding--the understanding that all things are of God. One might as well regret that the area of one’s field is not greater than the product of its base and side, as that the length of one’s days does not exceed three-score years and ten. And Kant again is no sympathetic witness to the virtue of pity. “There is but one thing good,” he has said, “and that is a good will”--the will, namely, to obey the command of duty. If one have this one cannot need pity; if one have it not one cannot deserve pity. But Spinoza and Kant are in this, as in other respects, exceptions to the soft mood of modern sentiment. With Schopenhauer, the very embodiment of modernity, we have seen pity once more set on high as the unselfish virtue. It is the self-less man that becomes the holy man; it is the holy man that becomes the sage, denying the world with its pitiless Will-to-live. Now it is against this very philosophy of Schopenhauer, against this conception of the beauty and wisdom of self-surrender that Nietzsche reacts. If to Spinoza pity is a folly, if to Kant it is a superfluity, to Nietzsche it is a vice--more than a vice, a disease, that deep sickness of modernity which spells decadence. Schopenhauer, and all that older wisdom which Schopenhauer loved, of Jesus and of Buddha, these were Nietzsche’s great denials, these were the false physicians of the soul that had made the soul sick in making it sad.