majority are capable, that makes them intelligent machines. For the mediocre it is a joy to be mediocre; in them mastery in one thing, a specialty, is a natural instinct." The conception of these classes contains the nucleus of Nietzsche's doctrine. It embodies his whole idea of a natural aristocracy as opposed to the spurious European aristocracy of the present day, wherein the rulers are in reality merely members of the second class. The charge is constantly brought against Nietzsche by the ecclesiastic dialecticians that his criticism of Christianity is fraught with the very nihilism against which he so eloquently argues. There is perhaps a slight basis for such a contention if we confine ourselves strictly to those of his utterances against the Jewish morality which appear in his previous books. But in "The Antichrist" this does not hold true even in the slightest manner. Nietzsche is constantly supplanting modes of action for every Christian virtue he denies. He is as constructive as he is destructive. "The Antichrist" contains, not only a complete denial of all Christian morality, but a statement of a new and consistent system of ethics based on the research of all his works. EXCERPTS FROM "THE ANTICHRIST" What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power, the Will to Power, and power itself in man. What is bad?--All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness?--The feeling that power is _increasing,-_ that resistance has been overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, _virtu,_ free from all moralic acid). The weak and botched shall perish: first principle of our humanity. And they ought even to be helped to perish. What is more harmful than any vice?--Practical sympathy with all the botched and the weak--Christianity. 128 We must not deck out and adorn Christianity: it has waged a deadly war upon this _higher_ type of man, it has set a ban upon all the fundamental instincts of this type, and has distilled evil and the devil himself out of these instincts:--the strong man as the typical pariah, the villain. Christianity has sided with everything weak, low, and botched; it has made an ideal out of _antagonism_ against all the self-preservative instincts of strong life: it has corrupted even the reason of the strongest intellects, by teaching that the highest values of intellectuality are sinful, misleading and full of temptations. 130 I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it selects and _prefers_ that which is detrimental to it. 131 Life itself, to my mind, is nothing more nor less than the instinct of growth, of permanence, of accumulating forces, of power: where the will to power is lacking, degeneration sets in. 131