What kind of men is to be found in such a society? Mediocre men; men stupid to the point of sanctity; fragile, useless souls-de-luxe; men suffering from a sort of hemiplegia of virtue,--that is to say, paralyzed in the self-assertive instincts; men tamed, almost emasculated by a morality whose essence is the abdication of the will.[194] Now, as a rule, the taming of a beast is achieved only by deteriorating it; so too the moral man is not a better man, he is rather a weaker member of his species. He is altruistic, of course; that is, he feels that he needs help. There is no place for really great men in this march towards nonentity; if a great man appears he is called a criminal.[195] A Periclean Greek, a Renaissance Florentine, would breathe like one asphyxiated in this moralic acid atmosphere; the first condition of life for such a man is that he free himself from this Chinadom of the spirit.[196] But the number of those who are capable of rising into the pure air of unmoralism is very small; and those who have made timid sallies into theological heresy are the most addicted to the comfort and security of ethical orthodoxy. In short, men are coming to look upon lowered vitality as the heart of virtue; and morality will be saddled with the guilt if the maximum potentiality of the power and splendor of the human species should never be attained.[197] Men of this stamp require a good deal of religious pepsin to overcome the indigestibility of life; if they leave one faith in the passing bravery of their youth they soon sink back into another.[198] God, previously diluted from tribal deity into _substantia_ and _ding-an-sich_,[199] now recovers a respectable degree of reality; the imaginary pillar on which men lean is made stronger and more concrete as their weakness increases. How much faith a person requires in order to flourish, how much fixed opinion he needs which he does not wish to have shaken, because he holds himself thereby,--is a measure of his power (or more plainly speaking, of his weakness).[200]