All this man’s energy is in his brain; he oozes ideas at every pore. He crowds into a sentence the material of a chapter; and every aphorism is a mountain-peak. He dares to say that which others dare only to think: and we call him witty because truth tabooed is the soul of wit. Every page bears the imprint of the passion and the pain that gave it birth. “I am not a man,” he says, “I am dynamite”; he writes like a man who feels error after error exploding at his touch; and he defines a philosopher as “a terrible explosive in the presence of which everything is in danger.”[140] “There are more idols than realities in the world; and I have an ‘evil eye’ for idols.”[141] What is this philosophy which seemed to its creator more important than even the mightiest events of the past? How shall we compress it without distorting it, as it has been distorted by so many of its lovers and its haters? Let us ask the man himself to speak to us; let us see if we cannot put the matter in his own words, ourselves but supplying, so to speak, connective tissue. That done, we shall understand the man better, and ourselves, and perhaps our social problem. III Exposition 1 _Morality as Impotence_ From a biological standpoint the phenomenon morality is of a highly suspicious nature.[142] _Cui bono?_--Whom shall we suspect of profiting by this institution? Is it a mode of enhancing life?--Does it make men stronger and more perfect?--or does it make for deterioration and decay? It is obvious that up to the present, morality has not been a problem at all; it has rather been the very ground on which people have met after all distrust, dissension, and contradiction, the hallowed place of peace, where thinkers could obtain rest even from themselves.[143] But what if morality be the greatest of all the stumbling-blocks in the way of human self-betterment? Is it possible that morality itself is the social problem, and that the solution of that problem lies in the judicious abolition of morality? It is a view for which something can be said.