_The ascetic ideal springs from the prophylactic and self-preservative instincts which mark a decadent life,_ which seeks by every means in its power to maintain its position and fight for its existence; it points to a partial physiological depression and exhaustion, against which the most profound and intact life-instincts fight ceaselessly with new weapons and discoveries. The ascetic ideal is such a weapon: its position is consequently exactly the reverse of that which the worshippers of the ideal imagine--life struggles in it and through it with death and _against_ death; the ascetic ideal is a dodge for the _preservation_ of life. 154 The ascetic priest is the incarnate wish for an existence of another kind, an existence on another plane,--he is, in fact, the highest point of this wish, its official ecstasy and passion: but it is the very _power_ of this wish which is the fetter that binds him here; it is just that which makes him into a tool that must labour to create more favourable conditions for earthly existence, for existence on the human plane--it is with this very _power_ that he keeps the whole herd of failures, distortions, abortions, unfortunates, _sufferers from themselves_ of every kind, fast to existence, while he as the herdsman goes instinctively on in front. 154-155 The _sick_ are the great danger of man, _not_ the evil, _not_ the "beasts of prey." They who are from the outset botched, oppressed, broken, those are they, the weakest are they, who most undermine the life beneath the feet of man, who instil the most dangerous venom and scepticism into our trust in life, in man, in ourselves. 157 Preventing the sick making the healthy sick ... this ought to be our supreme object in the world--but for this it is above all essential that the healthy should remain _separated_ from the sick, that they should even guard themselves from the look of the sick, that they should not even associate with the sick. Or may it, perchance, be their mission to be nurses or doctors? But they could not mistake or disown _their_ mission more grossly--the higher _must_ not degrade itself to be the tool of the lower, the pathos of distance must to all eternity keep their missions also separate. The right of the happy to existence, the right of bells with a full tone over the discordant cracked bells, is verily a thousand times greater: they alone are the _sureties_ of the future, they alone are _bound_ to man's future. 160-161 The ascetic priest must be accepted by us as the predestined saviour, herdsman, and champion of the sick herd: thereby do we first understand his awful historic mission. 162