[1] _Cf._ the tenth Pythian ode. See also the fourth book of Herodotus. The Hyperboreans were a mythical people beyond the Rhipaean mountains, in the far North. They enjoyed unbroken happiness and perpetual youth. 2. What is good?--Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man. What is evil?--Whatever springs from weakness. What is happiness?--The feeling that power _increases_--that resistance is overcome. Not contentment, but more power; _not_ peace at any price, but war; _not_ virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, _virtu_, virtue free of moral acid). The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of _our_ charity. And one should help them to it. What is more harmful than any vice?--Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak--Christianity.... 3. The problem that I set here is not what shall replace mankind in the order of living creatures (--man is an end--): but what type of man must be _bred_, must be _willed_, as being the most valuable, the most worthy of life, the most secure guarantee of the future. This more valuable type has appeared often enough in the past: but always as a happy accident, as an exception, never as deliberately _willed_. Very often it has been precisely the most feared; hitherto it has been almost _the_ terror of terrors;--and out of that terror the contrary type has been willed, cultivated and _attained_: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick brute-man--the Christian.... 4. Mankind surely does _not_ represent an evolution toward a better or stronger or higher level, as progress is now understood. This "progress" is merely a modern idea, which is to say, a false idea. The European of today, in his essential worth, falls far below the European of the Renaissance; the process of evolution does _not_ necessarily mean elevation, enhancement, strengthening. True enough, it succeeds in isolated and individual cases in various parts of the earth and under the most widely different cultures, and in these cases a _higher_ type certainly manifests itself; something which, compared to mankind in the mass, appears as a sort of superman. Such happy strokes of high success have always been possible, and will remain possible, perhaps, for all time to come. Even whole races, tribes and nations may occasionally represent such lucky accidents. 5.