"confessed" forgets). Here there exists a great need: for sewers and pure cleansing waters are required also for spiritual filth, and rapid currents of love are needed, and strong, lowly, pure hearts, who qualify and sacrifice themselves for such service of the non-public health department—for it _is_ a sacrificing, the priest is, and continues to be, a human sacrifice.... The people regard such sacrificed, silent, serious men of "faith" as "_wise_," that is to say, as men who have become sages, as "reliable" in relation to their own unreliability. Who would desire to deprive the people of that expression and that veneration?—But as is fair on the other side, among philosophers the priest also is still held to belong to the "people," and is _not_ regarded as a sage, because, above all, they themselves do not believe in "sages," and they already scent "the people" in this very belief and superstition. It was _modesty_ which invented in Greece the word "philosopher," and left to the play-actors of the spirit the superb arrogance of assuming the name "wise"—the modesty of such monsters of pride and self-glorification as Pythagoras and Plato.— 352. _Why we can hardly Dispense with Morality._—The naked man is generally an ignominious spectacle—I speak of us European males (and by no means of European females!). If the most joyous company at table suddenly found themselves stripped and divested of their garments through the trick of an enchanter, I believe that not only would the joyousness be gone and the strongest appetite lost;—it seems that we Europeans cannot at all dispense with the masquerade that is called clothing. But should not the disguise of "moral men," the screening under moral formulæ and notions of decency, the whole kindly concealment of our conduct under conceptions of duty, virtue, public sentiment, honourableness, and disinterestedness, have just as good reasons in support of it? Not that I mean hereby that human wickedness and baseness, in short, the evil wild beast in us, should be disguised; on the contrary, my idea is that it is precisely as _tame animals_ that we are an ignominious spectacle and require moral disguising,—that the "inner man" in Europe is far from having enough of intrinsic evil "to let himself be seen" with it (to be _beautiful_ with it). The European disguises himself _in morality_ because he has become a sick, sickly, crippled animal, who has good reasons for being "tame," because he is almost an abortion, an imperfect, weak and clumsy thing.... It is not the fierceness of the beast of prey that finds moral disguise necessary, but the gregarious animal, with its profound mediocrity, anxiety and ennui. _Morality dresses up the European_—let us acknowledge it!—in more distinguished, more important, more conspicuous guise—in "divine" guise— 353.