directed, are purely accidental causes. In all directions the sufferer finds reasons for cooling his petty passion for revenge. If he is a Christian, I repeat, he finds these reasons in himself. The Christian and the Anarchist—both are decadents. But even when the Christian condemns, slanders, and sullies the world, he is actuated by precisely the same instinct as that which leads the socialistic workman to curse, calumniate and cast dirt at society. The last “Judgment” itself is still the sweetest solace to revenge—revolution, as the socialistic workman expects it, only thought of as a little more remote.... The notion of a “Beyond,” as well—why a Beyond, if it be not a means of splashing mud over a “Here,” over this world? ... 35 _A Criticism of the Morality of Decadence._—An “altruistic” morality, a morality under which selfishness withers, is in all circumstances a bad sign. This is true of individuals and above all of nations. The best are lacking when selfishness begins to be lacking. Instinctively to select that which is harmful to one, to be _lured_ by “disinterested” motives,—these things almost provide the formula for decadence. “Not to have one’s own interests at heart” —this is simply a moral fig-leaf concealing a very different fact, a physiological one, to wit:—“I no longer know how to find what is to my interest.”... Disintegration of the instincts!—All is up with man when he becomes altruistic.—Instead of saying ingenuously “I am no longer any good,” the lie of morality in the decadent’s mouth says: “Nothing is any good,—life is no good.”—A judgment of this kind ultimately becomes a great danger; for it is infectious, and it soon flourishes on the polluted soil of society with tropical luxuriance, now as a religion (Christianity), anon as a philosophy (Schopenhauerism). In certain circumstances the mere effluvia of such a venomous vegetation, springing as it does out of the very heart of putrefaction, can poison life for thousands and thousands of years. 36