It is difficult to have sufficient respect for man, when one sees how he understands the art of fighting his way, of enduring, of turning circumstances to his own advantage, and of overthrowing opponents; but when he is seen in the light of his _desires,_ he is the most absurd of all animals. It is just as if he required a playground for his cowardice, his laziness, his feebleness, his sweetness, his submissiveness, where he recovers from his strong virile virtues. Just look at man's "_desiderata_" and his "ideals." Man, when he _desires, _ tries to recover from that which is eternally valuable in him, from his deeds; and then he rushes into nonentity, absurdity, valuelessness, childishness. The intellectual indigence and lack of inventive power of this resourceful and inventive animal is simply terrible. The "ideal" is at the same time the penalty man pays for the enormous expenditure which he has to defray in all real and pressing duties.--Should reality cease to prevail, there follow dreams, fatigue, weakness: an "ideal" might even be regarded as a form of dream, fatigue, or weakness. The strongest and the most impotent men become alike when this condition overtakes them: they _deify_ the cessation of work, of war, of passions, of suspense, of contrasts, of "reality "--in short, of the struggle for knowledge and of the _trouble_ of acquiring it. "Innocence" to them is idealised stultification; "blessedness" is idealised idleness; "love," the ideal state of the gregarious animal that will no longer have an enemy. And thus everything that lowers and belittles man is elevated to an _ideal_. 336. A desire _magnifies_ the thing desired; and by not being realised it grows--the _greatest ideas_ are those which have been created by the strongest and longest desiring. Things grow _ever more valuable_ in our estimation, the more our desire for them increases: if "moral values" have become the highest values, it simply shows that the moral ideal is the one which has been _realised least_ (and thus it _represented the Beyond to all suffering,_ as a road to _blessedness_). Man, with ever-increasing ardour, has only been embracing _clouds_: and ultimately called his desperation and impotence "God." 337. Think of the _naïveté_ of all ultimate "desiderata"--when the "wherefore" of man remains unknown. 338. What is the counterfeit coinage of morality? First of all we should know what "good and evil" mean. That is as good as wishing to know why man is here, and what his goal or his destiny is. And that means that one would fain know that man actually _has_ a goal or a destiny.