the mantle of sublime expressions—the tendency of hostility to life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: that is why he elevated pity to a virtue.... Aristotle, as you know, recognised in pity a morbid and dangerous state, of which it was wise to rid one’s self from time to time by a purgative: he regarded tragedy as a purgative. For the sake of the instinct of life, it would certainly seem necessary to find some means of lancing any such morbid and dangerous accumulation of pity, as that which possessed Schopenhauer (and unfortunately the whole of our literary and artistic decadence as well, from St Petersburg to Paris, from Tolstoi to Wagner), if only to make it _burst...._ Nothing is more unhealthy in the midst of our unhealthy modernity, than Christian pity. To be doctors _here,_ to be inexorable _here,_ to wield the knife effectively _here,—_ all this is our business, all this is _our_ kind of love to our fellows, this is what makes _us_ philosophers, us hyperboreans!— 8 It is necessary to state whom we regard as our antithesis:—the theologians, and all those who have the blood of theologians in their veins—the whole of our philosophy.... A man must have had his very nose upon this fatality, or better still he must have experienced it in his own soul; he must almost have perished through it, in order to be unable to treat this matter lightly (—the free-spiritedness of our friends the naturalists and physiologists is, in my opinion, a _joke,_—what they lack in these questions is passion, what they lack is having suffered from these questions—). This poisoning extends much further than people think: I unearthed the “arrogant” instinct of the theologian, wherever nowadays people feel themselves idealists,—wherever, thanks to superior antecedents, they claim the right to rise above reality and to regard it with suspicion.... Like the priest the idealist has every grandiloquent concept in his hand (—and not only in his hand!), he wields them all with kindly contempt against the “understanding,” the “senses,” “honours,” “decent living,” “science”; he regards such things as _beneath_ him, as detrimental and seductive forces, upon the face of which, “the Spirit” moves in pure absoluteness:—as if humility, chastity, poverty, in a word _holiness,_ had not done incalculably more harm to life hitherto, than any sort of horror and vice.... Pure spirit is pure falsehood.... As long as the priest, the _professional_ denier, calumniator and poisoner of life, is considered as the _highest_ kind of man, there can be no answer to the question, what _is_ truth? Truth has already been turned topsy-turvy, when the conscious advocate of nonentity and of denial passes as the representative of “truth.” 9