To produce the higher race! that is “the meaning of the earth,” the meaning that Schopenhauer had missed, that only one coming after Darwin could have seized; a meaning that does not mask the cruelty of life, yet takes from it its tragedy--the tragedy of senseless casual pain. But now that we have found the goal, we may also define the worth of life and its duties. In deducing these we meet the most astonishing “Umwerthung aller Werthe,” the complete inversion of those notions of worth which we dwellers in Christendom have inherited. “I sit,” says Zarathustra, “with old shattered tables of the law around me--and with new tables, too, half made out.” We approach an understanding of Nietzsche’s meaning when he wrote that God and man dies of pity. For if with him we make whatever promotes progress toward the superman our good, whatever retards it our evil, then must it not be that a pity which spares the weak for pity’s sake is the very vice, the moral disease, which makes for decadence? Is not pity the anodyne of those who despair of life, and is not hope in the future necessarily cruel? Before we who are of necessity touched with modernity react against a doctrine so little in accord with our profession of self-sacrifice, it would be well to ask ourselves how seriously we take this our profession. Is the quality of mercy indeed never strained for us? For example, are we citizens of a young and prosperous country eager to throw open its doors to the unhappy dregs of outworn lands and exhausted civilizations? For this would be the charitable thing to do. How many are prepared to encourage the mentally unsound or physically diseased to propagate? Yet pity must deny itself something if it would condemn misfortune to wed loneliness. To be sure one expects at this point to hear of “the deeper pity”; to be told that such deeper pity must let some perish in their misery that more may not be made wretched. Even so, we have passed from the doctrine of the supremacy of charity to the theory of “the greatest happiness to the greatest number.” Already we must occasionally cry with Nietzsche, “Be hard!” and must at moments understand his phrase, “The will not-to-help may be higher than the sympathy that springs to aid.”