Let us not underestimate this: _we ourselves_, we free spirits, are already a "Transvaluation of all Values," an incarnate declaration of war against and triumph over all old concepts of "true" and "untrue." The most precious discernments into things are the latest discovered: the most precious discernments, however, are the _methods_. _All_ methods, _all_ presuppositions of our present-day science, have for millenniums been held in the most profound contempt: by reason of them a person was excluded from intercourse with "honest" men--he passed for an "enemy of God," a despiser of truth, a "possessed" person. As a scientific man, a person was a Chandala.... We have had the entire pathos of mankind against us--their concept of that which truth _ought_ to be, which the service of truth _ought_ to be: every "thou shalt" has been hitherto directed _against_ us. Our objects, our practices, our quiet, prudent, mistrustful mode--all appeared to mankind as absolutely unworthy and contemptible.--In the end one might, with some reasonableness, ask one's self if it was not really an esthetic taste which kept mankind in such long blindness: they wanted a _picturesque_ effect from truth, they wanted in like manner the knowing ones to operate strongly on their senses. Our _modesty_ was longest against the taste of mankind.... Oh how they made that out, these turkey-cocks of God----. * * * The Christian concept of God--God as God of the sick, God as cobweb-spinner, God as spirit--is one of the most corrupt concepts of God ever arrived at on earth; it represents perhaps the gauge of low water in the descending development of the God-type. God degenerated to the _contradiction of life_, instead of being its transfiguration and its eternal _yea_! In God, hostility announced to life, to nature, to the will to life! God as the formula for every calumny of "this world," for every lie of "another world!" In God nothingness deified, the will to nothingness declared holy! * * * That the strong races of Northern Europe have not thrust from themselves the Christian God, is verily no honor to their religious talent, not to speak of their taste. They ought to have got the better of such a sickly and decrepit product of _décadence_. There lies a curse upon them, because they have not got the better of it: they have incorporated sickness, old age and contradiction into all their instincts--they have _created_ no God since! Two millenniums almost, and not a single new God! But still continuing, and as if persisting by right, as an _ultimatum_ and _maximum_ of the God-shaping force, of the _creator spiritus_ in man, this pitiable God of Christian monotono-theism! This hybrid image of ruin, derived from nullity, concept and contradiction in which all _décadence_ instincts, all cowardices and lassitudes of soul have their sanction! * * *