One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death should be chosen freely,--death at the right time, faced clearly and joyfully and embraced while one is surrounded by one's children and other witnesses. It should be affected in such a way that a proper farewell is still possible, that he who is about to take leave of us is still _himself,_ and really capable not only of valuing what he has achieved and willed in life, but also of _summing-up_ the value of life itself. Everything precisely the opposite of the ghastly comedy which Christianity has made of the hour of death. We should never forgive Christianity for having so abused the weakness of the dying man as to do violence to his conscience, or for having used his manner of dying as a means of valuing both man and his past!--In spite of all cowardly prejudices, it is our duty, in this respect, above all to reinstate the proper--that is to say, the physiological, aspect of so-called _natural_ death, which after all is perfectly "unnatural" and nothing else than suicide. One never perishes through anybody's fault but one's own. The only thing is that the death which takes place in the most contemptible circumstances, the death that is not free, the death which occurs at the wrong time, is the death of a coward. Out of the very love one bears to life, one should wish death to be different from this--that is to say, free, deliberate, and neither a matter of chance nor of surprise. Finally let me whisper a word of advice to our friends the pessimists and all other decadents. We have not the power to prevent ourselves from being born: but this error--for sometimes it is an error--can be rectified if we choose. The man who does away with himself performs the most estimable of deeds: he almost deserves to live for having done so. 88-89 The decline of the instincts of hostility and of those instincts that arouse suspicion,--for this if anything is what constitutes our progress--is only one of the results manifested by the general decline in _vitality:_ it requires a hundred times more trouble and caution to live such a dependent and senile existence. In such circumstances everybody gives everybody else a helping hand, and, to a certain extent, everybody is either an invalid or an invalid's attendant. This is then called "virtue": among those men who knew a different life--that is to say, a fuller, more prodigal, more superabundant sort of life, it might have been called by another name,--possibly "cowardice," or "vileness," or "old woman's morality." 91-92 Ages should be measured according to their _positive forces;_--valued by this standard that prodigal and fateful age of the Renaissance, appears as the last _great_ age, while we moderns with our anxious care of ourselves and love of our neighbours, with all our unassuming virtues of industry, equity, and scientific method--with our lust of collection, of economy and of mechanism--represent a _weak_ age. 93