morality has any value _per se_—it would even fill us with scorn. On the other hand, do not let us doubt that we moderns, wrapped as we are in the thick cotton wool of our humanitarianism which would shrink even from grazing a stone, would present a comedy to Cæsar Borgia’s contemporaries which would literally make them die of laughter. We are indeed, without knowing it, exceedingly ridiculous with our modern “virtues.” ... The decline of the instincts of hostility and of those instincts that arouse suspicion,—for this if anything is what constitutes our progress—is only one of the results manifested by the general decline in _vitality_: it requires a hundred times more trouble and caution to live such a dependent and senile existence. In such circumstances everybody gives everybody else a helping hand, and, to a certain extent, everybody is either an invalid or an invalid’s attendant. This is then called “virtue”: among those men who knew a different life—that is to say, a fuller, more prodigal, more superabundant sort of life, it might have been called by another name,—possibly “cowardice,” or “vileness,” or “old woman’s morality.” ... Our mollification of morals—this is my cry; this it you will is my _innovation_—is the outcome of our decline; conversely hardness and terribleness in morals may be the result of a surplus of life. When the latter state prevails, much is dared, much is challenged, and much is also _squandered_. That which formerly was simply the salt of life, would now be our _poison_. To be indifferent—even this is a form of strength—for that, likewise, we are too senile, too decrepit: our morality of fellow-feeling, against which I was the first to raise a finger of warning, that which might be called _moral impressionism_, is one symptom the more of the excessive physiological irritability which is peculiar to everything decadent. That movement which attempted to introduce itself in a scientific manner on the shoulders of Schopenhauer’s morality of pity—a very sad attempt!—is in its essence the movement of decadence in morality, and as such it is intimately related to Christian morality. Strong ages and noble cultures see something contemptible in pity, in the “love of one’s neighbour,” and in a lack of egoism and of self-esteem.—Ages should be measured according to their _positive forces_;—valued by this standard that prodigal and fateful age of the Renaissance, appears as the last _great_ age, while we moderns with our anxious care of ourselves and love of our neighbours, with all our unassuming virtues of industry, equity, and scientific method—with our lust of collection, of economy and of mechanism—represent a _weak_ age.... Our virtues are necessarily determined, and are even stimulated, by our weakness. “Equality,” a certain definite process of making everybody uniform, which only finds its expression in the theory of equal rights, is essentially bound up with a declining culture: the chasm between