life, the confidence in the future are no more. The preponderance of the mandarins never signifies any good, any more than does the advent of democracy, or arbitration instead of war, equal rights for women, the religion of pity, and all the other symptoms of declining life. (Science handled as a problem! what is the meaning of science?--upon this point the Preface to the _Birth of Tragedy_.) No! this "modern science"--mark you this well--is at times the _best_ ally for the ascetic ideal, and for the very reason that it is the ally which is most unconscious, most automatic, most secret, and most subterranean! They have been playing into each other's hands up to the present, have these "poor in spirit" and the scientific opponents of that ideal (take care, by the bye, not to think that these opponents are the antithesis of this ideal, that they are the _rich_ in spirit--that they are _not_; I have called them the _hectic_ in spirit). As for these celebrated victories of science; there is no doubt that they are _victories_--but victories over what? There was not for a single minute any victory among their list over the ascetic ideal, rather was it made stronger, that is to say, more elusive, more abstract, more insidious, from the fact that a wall, an outwork, that had got built on to the main fortress and disfigured its appearance, should from time to time be ruthlessly destroyed and broken down by science. Does any one seriously suggest that the downfall of the theological astronomy signified the downfall of that ideal?--Has, perchance, man grown _less in need_ of a transcendental solution of his riddle of existence, because since that time this existence has become more random, casual, and superfluous in the _visible_ order of the universe? Has there not been since the time of Copernicus an unbroken progress in the self-belittling of man and his _will_ for belittling himself? Alas, his belief in his dignity, his uniquenesses irreplaceableness in the scheme of existence, is gone--he has become animal, literal, unqualified, and unmitigated animal, he who in his earlier belief was almost God ("child of God," "demi-God"). Since Copernicus man seems to have fallen on to a steep plane--he rolls faster and faster away from the centre--whither? into nothingness? into the "thrilling sensation of his own nothingness"--Well! this would be the straight way--to the old ideal?--All science (and by no means only astronomy, with regard to the humiliating and deteriorating effect of which Kant has made a remarkable confession, "it annihilates my own importance"), all science, natural as much as _unnatural_--by unnatural I mean the self-critique of reason--nowadays sets out to talk man out of his present opinion of himself, as though that opinion had been nothing but a bizarre piece of conceit; you might go so far as to say that science finds its peculiar pride, its peculiar bitter form of stoical ataraxia, in preserving man's _contempt of himself_,