to power and to growth leads the whole species "man" one step farther forward, this type was threatened with disaster. By means of the values of this ideal, the growth of such higher men would be checked at the root. For these men, owing to their superior demands and duties, readily accept a more dangerous life (speaking economically, it is a case of an increase in the costs of the undertaking coinciding with a greater chance of failure). What is it we combat in Christianity? That it aims at destroying the strong, at breaking their spirit, at exploiting their moments of weariness and debility, at converting their proud assurance into anxiety and conscience-trouble; that it knows how to poison the noblest instincts and to infect them with disease, until their strength, their will to power, turns inwards, against themselves--until the strong perish through their excessive self-contempt and self-immolation: that gruesome way of perishing, of which _Pascal_ is the most famous example. II. A CRITICISM OF MORALITY. 1. THE ORIGIN OF MORAL VALUATIONS. 253. This is an attempt at investigating morality without being affected by its charm, and not without some mistrust in regard to the beguiling beauty of its attitudes and looks. A world which we can admire, which is in keeping with our capacity for worship--which is continually _demonstrating_ itself--in small things or in large: this is the Christian standpoint which is common to us all. But owing to an increase in our astuteness, in our mistrust, and in our scientific spirit (also through a more developed instinct for truth, which again is due to Christian influence), this interpretation has grown ever less and less tenable for us. The craftiest of subterfuges: Kantian criticism. The intellect not only denies itself every right to interpret things in that way, but also to reject the interpretation once it has been made. People are satisfied with a _greater_ demand upon their credulity and faith, with a renunciation of all right to reason concerning the proof of their creed, with an intangible and superior "Ideal" (God) as a stop-gap. The Hegelian subterfuge, a continuation of the Platonic, a piece of romanticism and reaction, and at the same time a symptom of the historical sense of a new _power_: "Spirit" itself is the "self-revealing and self-realising ideal": we believe that in the "process of, development" an ever greater proportion of this ideal is being manifested--thus the ideal is being realised, faith is vested in the _future_ into which all its noble needs are projected and in which they are being worshipped. In short:-- (1) God is unknowable to us and not to be demonstrated by us (the concealed meaning behind the whole of the epistemological movement); (2) God may be demonstrated, but as something evolving, and we are part of it, as our pressing desire for an ideal proves (the concealed meaning behind the historical movement).