The creator of slave-morality was one who, out of the poverty of his soul, transfigured all he saw and heard, and declared it smaller, meaner, and less beautiful than it appeared to the creator of the master values. Great misanthropists, pessimists, demagogues, tasteless artists, nihilists, spiteful authors and dramatists, and resentful saints belong to the class that created slave-morality. The first order of values are active, creative, Dionysiac. The second are passive, defensive, venomous, subterranean; to them belong "Adaptation," "adjustment," and "utilitarian relationship to environment." Now, seeing that mankind is undoubtedly moulded by the nature of the values which prevail over it, it is manifestly of paramount importance to the philosopher to know which order of values conduces to rear the most desirable species of man, and then to advocate that order, with all the art and science at his disposal. Nietzsche saw two lines of life: an ascending and a descending line. At the end of the one he pictured an ideal type, robust in mind and body, rich enough in spirit and vigour to make giving and bestowing a necessary condition of its existence; at the end of the other line he already perceived degeneracy, poverty of blood and spirit, and a sufficiently low degree of vitality to make parasitism a biological need. He believed that the first, or noble morality, when it prevailed, made for an ascending line of life and therefore favoured the multiplication of a desirable type of man; and he was now equally convinced that whenever ignoble or slave morality was supreme, life not only tended to follow the descending line, but that the very men whose existence it favoured were the least likely to stem the declining tide. Hence it seemed to him that the most essential of all tasks was to ascertain what kind of morality now prevailed, in order that we might immediately transvalue our values, while there was still time, if we believed this change to be necessary. What then are our present values? Nietzsche replies most emphatically --they are Christian values. In the last chapter we saw that although Christian dogma was very rapidly becoming mere wreckage, its most earnest opposers and destroyers nevertheless clung with fanatical faith to Christian morality. Thus, in addition to the vast multitude of those professing the old religion, there was also a host of atheists, agnostics, rationalists, and materialists, who, as far as Nietzsche was concerned, could quite logically be classed with those who were avowedly Christian. And, as for the remainder--a few indifferent and perhaps nameless people,--what could they matter? Even they, perhaps, if hard pressed, would have betrayed a sneaking, cowardly trust in Christian ethics, if only out of a sense of security; and with these the total sum of the civilised world was fully made up.