Now it is easy to understand that happiness and unhappiness, within the phenomena of this world, can only serve the purpose of _means_: the question yet remaining to be answered is, whether it _will ever be possible_ for us to perceive the "object" and "purpose" of life--whether the problem of purposelessness or the reverse is not quite beyond our ken. 37. The development of _Nihilism out of Pessimism._ The denaturalisation of _Values._ Scholasticism of values. The values isolated, idealistic, instead of ruling and leading action, turn _against_ it and condemn it. Opposites introduced in the place of natural gradations and ranks. Hatred of the order of rank. Opposites are compatible with a plebeian age, because they are more easy to grasp. The _rejected_ world is opposed to an artificially constructed "true and valuable" one. At last we discover out of what material the "true" world was built; all that remains, now, is the rejected world, and to the account of our reasons for _rejecting it we place our greatest disillusionment._ At this point _Nihilism_ is reached; the directing values have been retained--nothing more! This gives rise to _the problem of strength and weakness_:-- (1) The weak fall to pieces upon it; (2) The strong destroy what does not fall to pieces of its own accord; (3) The strongest overcome the directing values. _The whole condition of affairs produces the tragic age._ 3. THE NIHILISTIC MOVEMENT AS AN EXPRESSION OF DECADENCE. 38. Just lately an accidental and in every way inappropriate term has been very much misused: everywhere people are speaking of "_Pessimism_," and there is a fight around the question (to which some replies must be forthcoming): which is right--Pessimism or Optimism? People have not yet seen what is so terribly-obvious--namely, that Pessimism is not a problem but a _symptom,_--that the term ought to be replaced by "Nihilism,"--that the question, "to be or not to be," is itself an illness, a sign of degeneracy, an idiosyncrasy. The Nihilistic movement is only an expression of physiological decadence. 39. _To be understood_:--That every kind of decline and tendency to sickness has incessantly been at work in helping to create general evaluations: that in those valuations which now dominate, decadence has even begun to preponderate, that we have not only to combat the conditions which present misery and degeneration have brought into being; but that all decadence, previous to that of our own times, has been transmitted and has therefore remained an _active force_ amongst us. A universal departure of this kind, on the part of man, from his fundamental instincts, such universal decadence of the valuing judgment, is the note of interrogation _par excellence,_ the real riddle, which the animal "man" sets to all philosophers. 40.