The kind of man is known who has fallen in love with the sentence "_tout comprendre à est tout pardonner"_ It is the weak and, above all, the disillusioned: if there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to contemn! It is the philosophy of disappointment, which here swathes itself so humanly in pity, and gazes out so sweetly. They are Romanticists, whose faith has gone to pot: now they at least wish to look on and see how everything vanishes and fades. They call it _l'art pour l'art,_ "objectivity," etc. 82. _The main symptoms of Pessimism_:--Dinners at Magny's; Russian Pessimism (Tolstoy, Dostoiewsky); æsthetic Pessimism, _l'art pour l'art,_ "description" (the romantic and the anti-romantic Pessimism); Pessimism in the theory of knowledge (Schopenhauer: phenomenalism); anarchical Pessimism; the "religion of pity," Buddhistic preparation; the Pessimism of culture (exoticness, cosmopolitanism); moral Pessimism, myself. 83. "_Without the Christian Faith_" said Pascal, "you would yourselves be like nature and history, _un monstre et un chaos._" We fulfilled this prophecy: once the weak and optimistic eighteenth century had _embellished_ and _rationalised_ man. _Schopenhauer_ and _Pascal._--I none essential point, Schopenhauer is the first who _takes up Pascal's_ movement again: _un monstre et un chaos,_ consequently something that must be negatived ... history, nature, and man himself! "_Our inability to know the truth_ is the result of our _corruption,_ of our moral _decay_" says Pascal. And Schopenhauer says essentially the same. "The more profound the corruption of reason is, the more necessary is the doctrine of salvation"--or, putting it into Schopenhauerian phraseology, negation. 84. _Schopenhauer as an epigone_ (state of affairs before the Revolution):--Pity, sensuality, art, weakness of will, Catholicism of the most intellectual desires--that is, at bottom, the good old eighteenth century. _Schopenhauer's_ fundamental misunderstanding of the _will_ (just as though passion, instinct, and desire were the essential factors of will) is typical: the depreciation of the will to the extent of mistaking it altogether. Likewise the hatred of willing: the attempt at seeing something superior--yea, even superiority itself, and that which really matters, in non-willing, in the "subject-being _without_ aim or intention." Great symptom of _fatigue or of the weakness of will_: for this, in reality, is what treats the passions as master, and directs them as to the way and to the measure.... 85. The undignified attempt has been made to regard Wagner and Schopenhauer as types of the mentally unsound: an infinitely more essential understanding of the matter would have been gained if the exact decadent type which each of them represents had been scientifically and accurately defined. 86.