_Taking Things Seriously._--The intellect is with most people an awkward, obscure and creaking machine, which is difficult to set in motion: they call it "_taking a thing seriously_" when they work with this machine and want to think well--oh, how burdensome must good thinking be to them! That delightful animal, man, seems to lose his good-humour whenever he thinks well; he becomes "serious"! And "where there is laughing and gaiety, thinking cannot be worth anything: "--so speaks the prejudice of this serious animal against all "Joyful Wisdom."--Well, then! Let us show that it is prejudice! 328. _Doing Harm to Stupidity._--It is certain that the belief in the reprehensibility of egoism, preached with such stubbornness and conviction, has on the whole done harm to egoism (_in favour of the herd-instinct,_ as I shall repeat a hundred times!), especially by depriving it of a good conscience, and by bidding us seek in it the source of all misfortune. "Thy selfishness is the bane of thy life"--so rang the preaching for millenniums: it did harm, as we have said, to selfishness, and deprived it of much spirit, much cheerfulness, much ingenuity, and much beauty; it stultified and deformed and poisoned selfishness!--Philosophical antiquity, on the other hand, taught that there was another principal source of evil: from Socrates downwards, the thinkers were never weary of preaching that "your thoughtlessness and stupidity, your unthinking way of living according to rule, and your subjection to the opinion of your neighbour, are the reasons why you so seldom attain to happiness,--we thinkers are, as thinkers, the happiest of mortals." Let us not decide here whether this preaching against stupidity was more sound than the preaching against selfishness; it is certain, however, that stupidity was thereby deprived of its good conscience:--those philosophers _did harm to stupidity._ 329.