_To what extent does Schopenhauerian Nihilism continue to be the result of the same ideal as that which gave rise to Christian Theism?_ The amount of certainty concerning the most exalted desiderata, the highest values and the greatest degree of perfection, was so great, that the philosophers started out from it as if it had been an _a priori_ and _absolute fact_: "God" at the head, as the _given quantity_--Truth. "To become like God," "to be absorbed into the Divine Being"--these were for centuries the most ingenuous and most convincing desiderata (but that which convinces is not necessarily true on that account: it is _nothing more nor less than convincing._ An observation for donkeys). The granting of a _personal-reality_ to this accretion of ideals has been unlearned: people have become atheistic. But has the ideal actually been abandoned? The latest metaphysicians, as a matter of fact, still seek their true "reality" in it--the "thing-in-itself" beside which everything else is merely appearance. Their dogma is, that because our world of appearance is so obviously _not_ the expression of that ideal, it therefore cannot be "true"--and at bottom does not even lead back to that metaphysical world as cause. The unconditioned, in so far as it stands for that highest degree of perfection, cannot possibly be the reason of all the conditioned. Schopenhauer, who desired it otherwise, was obliged to imagine this metaphysical basis as the antithesis to the ideal, as "an evil, blind will": thus it could be "that which appears," that which manifests itself in the world of appearance. But even so, he did not give up that ideal absolute--he circumvented it.... (Kant seems to have needed the hypothesis of "intelligible freedom,"[3] in order to relieve the _ens perfectum_ of the responsibility of having contrived this world as it is, in short, in order to explain evil: scandalous logic for a philosopher!). [Footnote 3: See Note on p. 11.] 18. _The most general sign of modern times_: in his own estimation, man has lost an infinite amount of _dignity._ For a long time he was the centre and tragic hero of life in general; then he endeavoured to demonstrate at least his relationship to the most essential and in itself most valuable side of life--as all metaphysicians do, who wish to hold fast to the _dignity of man,_ in their belief that moral values are cardinal values. He who has let God go, clings all the more strongly to the belief in morality. 19. Every purely _moral_ valuation (as, for instance, the Buddhistic) _terminates in Nihilism_: Europe must expect the same thing! It is supposed that one can get along with a morality bereft of a religious background; but in this direction the road to Nihilism is opened. There is nothing in religion which compels us to regard ourselves as valuing creatures. 20.