Christianity, revolution, the abolition of slavery, equal rights, philanthropy, love of peace, justice, truth: all these big words are only valuable in a struggle, as banners: not as realities, but as _showwords,_ for something quite different (yea, even quite opposed to what they mean!). 68 The nineteenth century shows no advance whatever on the sixteenth: and the German spirit of 1888 is an example of a backward movement when compared with that of 1788.... Mankind does not advance, it does not even exist. The aspect of the whole is much more like that of a huge experimenting workshop where some things in all ages succeed, while an incalculable number of things fail; where all order, logic, co-ordination, and responsibility is lacking. How dare we blink the fact that the rise of Christianity is a decadent movement?--that the German Reformation was a recrudescence of Christian barbarism?--that the Revolution destroyed the instinct for an organisation of society on a large scale?... Man is not an example of progress as compared with animals: the tender son of culture is an abortion compared with the Arab or the Corsican; the Chinaman is a more successful type--that is to say, richer in sustaining power than the European. 72-73 I know best why man is the only animal that laughs: he alone suffers so excruciatingly that he was _compelled_ to invent laughter. The unhappiest and most melancholy animal is, as might have been expected, the most cheerful. 74 Socialism--or the _tyranny_ of the meanest and the most brainless,--that is to say, the superficial, the envious, and the mummers, brought to its zenith,--is, as a matter of fact, the logical conclusion of "modern ideas" and their latent anarchy: but in the genial atmosphere of democratic well-being the capacity for forming resolutions or even for coming _to an end_ at all, is paralysed. Men will follow--but no longer their reason. That is why socialism is on the whole a hopelessly bitter affair: and there is nothing more amusing than to observe the discord between the poisonous and desperate faces of present-day socialists--and what wretched and nonsensical feelings does not their style reveal to us!--and the childish lamblike happiness of their hopes and desires. 102 This is the teaching which life itself preaches to all living things: the morality of Development. To have and to wish to have more, in a word, Growth--that is life itself. In the teaching of socialism "a will to the denial of life" is but poorly concealed: botched men and races they must be who have devised a teaching of this sort. 102 _Spiritual enlightenment_ is an unfailing means of making men uncertain, weak of will, and needful of succour and support; in short, of developing the herding instincts in them. 105