"I suffer: it must be somebody's fault"--so thinks every sick sheep. But his herdsman, the ascetic priest, says to him, "Quite so, my sheep, it must be the fault of some one; but thou thyself art that some one, it is all the fault of thyself alone--_it is the fault of thyself alone against thyself":_ that is bold enough, false enough, but one thing is at least attained; thereby, as I have said, the course of resentment is--_diverted_. 165 All sick and diseased people strive instinctively after a herd-organisation, out of a desire to shake off their sense of oppressive discomfort and weakness; the ascetic priest divines this instinct and promotes it; wherever a herd exists it is the instinct of weakness which has wished for the herd, and the cleverness of the priests which has organised it, for, mark this: by an equally natural necessity the strong strive as much for _isolation_ as the weak for _union:_ when the former bind themselves it is only with a view to an aggressive joint action and joint satisfaction of their Will for Power, much against the wishes of their individual consciences; the latter, on the contrary, range themselves together with positive _delight_ in such a muster--their instincts are as much gratified thereby as the instincts of the "born master" (that is the solitary beast-of-prey species of man) are disturbed and wounded to the quick by organisation. 176-177 The keynote by which the ascetic priest was enabled to get every kind of agonising and ecstatic music to play on the fibres of the human soul--was, as every one knows, the exploitation of the feeling of _"guilt."_ 182 The ascetic ideal and its sublime moral cult, this most ingenious, reckless, and perilous systématisation of all methods of emotional excess, is writ large in a dreadful and unforgettable fashion on the whole history of man, and unfortunately not only on history. I was scarcely able to put forward any other element which attacked the _health_ and race efficiency of Europeans with more destructive power than did this ideal; it can be dubbed, without exaggeration, _the real fatality_ in the history of the health of the European man. 186-187 The ascetic ideal has corrupted not only health and taste, there are also third, fourth, fifth, and sixth things which it has corrupted--I shall take care not to go through the catalogue (when should I get to the end?). 190 The periods in a nation in which the learned man comes into prominence; they are the periods of exhaustion, often of sunset, of decay--the effervescing strength, the confidence of life, the confidence in the future are no more. The preponderance of the mandarins never signifies any good, any more than does the advent of democracy, or arbitration instead of war, equal rights for women, the religion of pity, and all the other symptoms of declining life. 200