In the first place, let us understand that there are two kinds of pity and selflessness, just as there are two kinds of generosity. There is the pity, the selflessness and the generosity which is preached and praised as a virtue by him who urgently requires them because he is ill-constituted, needy, and hungry; and there is the pity, the selflessness and the generosity which suggests itself to the man overflowing with health, trust in the future, and confidence in his own powers. To such a man, pity, selflessness, and generosity are a means of discharging a certain plenitude of power, and in his case giving and bestowing are natural functions. In the first instance, the three virtues are preached from a utilitarian standpoint which tends to increase an undesirable type; in the second, they are the sign of the existence of a desirable type. Let us hear Nietzsche-- "A man who says: 'I like that, I take it for my own, and mean to guard it and protect it from everyone'; and the man who can conduct a case, carry out a resolution, remain true to an opinion, keep hold of a woman, punish and overthrow insolence; a man who has his indignation and his sword, and to whom the weak, the suffering, the oppressed, and even the animals willingly submit and naturally belong; in short, a man who is a master by nature--when such a man has sympathy, well! that sympathy has value! But of what account is the sympathy of those who suffer! or of those even who preach sympathy!" Wherever we find anything akin to "pity," even in nature: the suckling of the young, the maintenance of dependants (the lion's attitude towards the jackal), the protection of the helpless young (as in many fish and mammals), it is always the superabundance of the giver and his Will to Power which creates the pitiful act. But the pity which most of us understand as a virtue in Europe to-day, is merely a sort of sickly sensitiveness and irritability towards pain, an effeminate absence of control in the presence of suffering, which has nothing whatever to do with our powers of alleviating the misery we contemplate, and which is only compatible either with excessive sentimentality or with weak and overstrained nerves. In that case all it does is to add to the misery of this world, and to elevate to a virtue that which is perhaps one of the saddest signs of the times. It is then indiscriminate, rash, and short-sighted, and gives rise to more evil than it tries to dispel. "Ah, where in the world have there been greater follies than with the pitiful? And what in the world hath caused more suffering than the follies of the pitiful? "Woe unto all loving ones who have not an elevation which is above their pity!"[10]