For there is no other virtue than health, vigor, energy. All virtues should be looked upon as physiological conditions, and moral judgments are symptoms of physiological prosperity or the reverse. Indeed, it might be worth while to try to see whether a scientific order of values might not be constructed according to a scale of numbers and measures representing energy. All other values are matters of prejudice, simplicity, and misunderstanding.[224] Instead of moral values let us use naturalistic values, physiological values; let us say frankly with Spinoza that virtue and power are one and the same. What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power, the will to power, and power itself, in man. What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is increasing, that resistance is being overcome.[225] This is not orthodox ethics; and perhaps it will not do for long ears,--though an unspoiled youth would understand it. A healthy and vigorous boy will look up sarcastically if you ask him, “Do you wish to become virtuous?”--but ask him, “Do you wish to become stronger than your comrades?” and he is all eagerness at once.[226] Youth knows that ability is virtue; watch the athletic field. Youth is not at home in the class room, because there knowledge is estranged from action; and youth measures the height of what a man knows by the depth of his power to do.[227] There is a better gospel in the boy on the field than in the man in the pulpit. Which of the boys whom we know do we love best in our secret hearts--the prayerful Aloysius, or the masterful leader of the urchins in the street? We moralize and sermonize in mean efforts to bring the young tyrant down to our virtuous anæmia; but we know that we are wrong, and respect him most when he stands his ground most firmly. To require of strength that it should express itself as weakness is just as absurd as to require of weakness that it should express itself as strength.[228] Let us go to school to our children, and we shall understand that all native propensities are beneficent, that the evil impulses are to a far view as necessary and preservative as the good.[229] In truth we worship youth because at its finest it is a free discharge of instinctive strength; and we know that happiness is nothing else than that. To abandon instinct, to deliberate, to clog action with conscious thought,--that is to achieve old age. After all, nothing can be done perfectly so long as it is done consciously; consciousness is a defect to be overcome.[230] Instinct is the most intelligent of all kinds of intelligence which have hitherto been discovered.[231] Genius lies in the instincts; goodness too; all consciousness is theatricality.[232] When a people begins to worship reason, it begins to die.[233] Youth knows better: it follows instinct trustfully, and worships power.