The dictates of fairness, however, require that we should all the more emphasise the fact that this remedy is applied with _a good conscience_, that the ascetic priest has prescribed it in the most implicit belief in its utility and indispensability;--often enough almost collapsing in the presence of the pain which he created;--that we should similarly emphasise the fact that the violent physiological revenges of such excesses, even perhaps the mental disturbances, are not absolutely inconsistent with the general tenor of this kind of remedy; this remedy, which, as we have shown previously, is _not_ for the purpose of healing diseases, but of fighting the unhappiness of that depression, the alleviation and deadening of which was its object. The object was consequently achieved. The keynote by which the ascetic priest was enabled to get every kind of agonising and ecstatic music to play on the fibres of the human soul--was, as every one knows, the exploitation of the feeling of "_guilt_." I have already indicated in the previous essay the origin of this feeling--as a piece of animal psychology and nothing else: we were thus confronted with the feeling of "guilt," in its crude state, as it were. It was first in the hands of the priest, real artist that he was in the feeling of guilt, that it took shape--oh, what a shape! "Sin"--for that is the name of the new priestly version of the animal "bad-conscience" (the inverted cruelty)--has up to the present been the greatest event in the history of the diseased soul: in "sin" we find the most perilous and fatal masterpiece of religious interpretation. Imagine man, suffering from himself, some way or other but at any rate physiologically, perhaps like an animal shut up in a cage, not clear as to the why and the wherefore! imagine him in his desire for reasons--reasons bring relief--in his desire again for remedies, narcotics at last, consulting one, who knows even the occult--and see, lo and behold, he gets a hint from his wizard, the ascetic priest, his _first_ hint on the "cause" of his trouble: he must search for it in _himself_, in his guiltiness, in a piece of the past, he must understand his very suffering as a _state of punishment_. He has heard, he has understood, has the unfortunate: he is now in the plight of a hen round which a line has been drawn. He never gets out of the circle of lines. The sick man has been turned into "the sinner"--and now for a few thousand years we never get away from the sight of this new invalid, of "a sinner"--shall we ever get away from it?--wherever we just look, everywhere the hypnotic gaze of the sinner always moving in one direction (in the direction of guilt, the _only_ cause of suffering); everywhere the evil conscience, this "_greuliche thier_,"[4] to use Luther's language; everywhere rumination over the past, a distorted view of action, the gaze of the "green-eyed monster" turned on all action; everywhere the wilful misunderstanding