We shall see that Nietzsche did not hesitate to accept this conclusion, and that if for a moment he declared: "No one knoweth yet what is good and what is evil!" the next minute he was asking himself this searching question: "Is _our_ morality--that is to say, the particular table of values which is gradually modifying us--compatible with an ideal worthy of man's inheritance and past?" If Nietzsche has been called dangerous, pernicious and immoral, it is because people have deliberately overlooked this last question of his. No thinker who states and honestly sets out to answer this question, as Nietzsche did, deserves to be slandered, as he has been slandered, by prejudiced and interested people intent on misunderstanding only in order that they may fling mud more freely. Nietzsche cast his critical eye very seriously around him, and the sight of the modern world led him to ask these admittedly pertinent questions: "Is that which we have for centuries held for good and evil, really good and evil? Does our table of ethical principles seem to be favouring the multiplication of a desirable type?" In answering these two inquiries, Nietzsche unfortunately stormed the most formidable strongholds of modern society--Christianity and Democracy; and perhaps this accounts for the fact that his fight was so uneven and so hopeless. The strength of modern Europe, if indeed there be any strength in her, lies precisely on the side of Christianity and Democracy, the grandmother and the mother of what is called "progress," "modernity"; and in assailing these, Nietzsche must have known that he was engaging in a hand-to-hand struggle with stony-hearted adversaries unaccustomed to giving quarter and unscrupulous in their methods. Nietzsche clearly saw that if all moral codes are but weapons protecting and helping to universalise distinct species of men, then the Christian religion with its ethical principles could be no exception to the rule. It must have been created at some time and in some place by one who had the interests of a certain type of man at heart, and who desired to make that type paramount. Now if that were really so, the next question that occurred to Nietzsche's mercilessly logical mind was this: "Is the Christian religion, with its morality, tending to preserve and multiply a _desirable_ type of man?" To this last question Nietzsche replies most emphatically "_No!_" But, before going into the reasons of this flat negative, let us first pause to consider the age and the circumstances in which our author wrote and thought.