Just as "evil" may be regarded as exaggeration, discord, and want of proportion, so can "good" be regarded as a sort of protective diet against the danger of exaggeration, discord, and want of proportion. _Hereditary weakness_ as a _dominant_ feeling: the cause of the prevailing values. _N.B._--Weakness is in demand--why?... mostly because people cannot be anything else than weak. _Weakening considered a duty_: The weakening of the desires, of the feelings of pleasure and of pain, of the will to power, of the will to pride, to property and to more property; weakening in the form of humility; weakening in the form of a belief; weakening in the form of repugnance and shame in the presence of all that is natural--in the form of a denial of life, in the form of illness and chronic feebleness; weakening in the form of a refusal to take revenge, to offer resistance, to become an enemy, and to show anger. _Blunders_ in the treatment: there is no attempt at combating weakness by means of any fortifying system; but by a sort of justification consisting of moralising; _i.e.,_ by means of _interpretation._ Two totally different conditions are _confused_: for instance, the _repose of strength,_ which is essentially abstinence from reaction (the prototype of the gods whom nothing moves), and the _peace of exhaustion,_ rigidity to the point of anæsthesia. All these philosophic and ascetic modes of procedure aspire to the second state, but actually pretend to attain to the first ... for they ascribe to the condition they have reached the attributes that would be in keeping only with a divine state. 48. _The most dangerous misunderstanding._--There is one concept which apparently allows of no confusion or ambiguity, and that is the concept _exhaustion._ Exhaustion may be acquired or inherited--in any case it alters the aspect and _value of things._ Unlike him who involuntarily _gives_ of the superabundance which he both feels and represents, to the things about him, and who sees them fuller, mightier, and more pregnant with promises,--who, in fact, _can_ bestow,--the exhausted one belittles and disfigures everything he sees--he impoverishes its worth: he is detrimental.... No mistake seems possible in this matter: and yet history discloses the terrible fact, that the exhausted have always been _confounded_ with those with the most abundant resources, and the latter with the most detrimental. The pauper in vitality, the feeble one, impoverishes even life: the wealthy man, in vital powers, enriches it. The first is the parasite of the second: the second is a bestower of his abundance. How is confusion possible?