Today we are suffering from impuissant personality, from cowardice, from weakness of the will. Taming the great wild strong instincts, making them small and weak, choking them, so that man can will nothing or do nothing great and original and special--this is what we call civilization. A comfortable existence, this is the final end of life, according to this civilization. No conflict, no danger, for these menace comfort! Not to know the comfort of a calm, safe existence from which you can look down upon the struggles in a neck-breaking life far below--that is barbarism indeed! And is not this comfort a virtue, buttressed by moral principles at that? So buttressed, one's slumbers are not disturbed. And may not one add to this virtue of comfort that other cardinal virtue of hatred of all that keeps matters stirred up, all that causes unrest, that causes sleepless nights and stormy days? What the man of civilization hates he calls "bad," what he loves he calls "good." Accordingly, as Nietzsche saw and said, the weak are the "good" people, the brave and the strong are the "bad." Accordingly, also, it is comfortable to be "moral." All one needs is to attune one's life to the "common run," to quarantine against every profound disturbance, to steal by every dangerous abyss of life. And if powers stir in man which do not amiably submit to taming, why, "morality" may be used as a whip to lash these insubordinate stirrings into subjection. And if the living heart crouches into submission under the lash, why, such crouching is called "virtue," and the daring to resist and escape the lash, this of course is "vice." In a word, the most will-less is the most virtuous. Thus--such was Nietzsche's uncanny insight--"moral laws" are devices for disciplining the will into weakness! "Morality" is a poison with which man is inoculated, so that his strength may be palsied. "Morality" is itself death to a man, a will to weakness, a destruction of the will, while life is a will to power, a will to self-affirmation.