_(e)_ People once more believe in good and evil; so that the victory of the good and the annihilation of the evil is regarded as a _duty_ (this is English, and is typical of that blockhead, John Stuart Mill). (f) The contempt felt for "naturalness," for the desires and for the ego: the attempt to regard even the highest intellectuality of art as a result of an impersonal and disinterested attitude. (g) The Church is still allowed to meddle in all the essential occurrences and incidents in the life of the individual, with a view to consecrating it and giving it a _loftier_ meaning: we still have the "Christian State" and the "Christian marriage." 31. There have been more thoughtful and more destructively thoughtful[4] times than ours: times like those in which Buddha appeared, for instance, in which the people themselves, after centuries of sectarian quarrels, had sunk so deeply into the abyss of philosophical dogmas, as, from time to time, European people have done in regard to the fine points of religious dogma. "Literature" and the press would be the last things to seduce one to any high opinion of the spirit of our times: the millions of Spiritists, and a Christianity with gymnastic exercises of that ghastly ugliness which is characteristic of all English inventions, throw more light on the subject. European _Pessimism_ is still in its infancy--a fact which argues against it: it has not yet attained to that prodigious and yearning fixity of sight to which it attained in India once upon a time, and in which nonentity is reflected; there is still too much of the "ready-made," and not enough of the "evolved" in its constitution, too much learned and poetic Pessimism; I mean that a good deal of it has been discovered, invented, and "created," but not caused. [Footnote 4: _zerdachtere_.] 32. Criticism of the Pessimism which has prevailed hitherto. The want of the eudæmonological standpoint, as a last abbreviation of the question: what is the _purpose_ of it all? The reduction of gloom. _Our_ Pessimism: the world has not the value which we believed it to have,--our faith itself has so increased our instinct for research that we are _compelled_ to say this to-day. In the first place, it seems of less value: _at first it is felt_ to be of less value,--only in this sense are we pessimists,--that is to say, with the will to acknowledge this transvaluation without reserve, and no longer, as heretofore, to deceive ourselves and chant the old old story. It is precisely in this way that we find the pathos which urges us to seek for _new values._ In short: the world might have far more value than we thought--we must get behind the _naïveté of our ideals,_ for it is possible that, in our conscious effort to give it the highest interpretation, we have not bestowed even a moderately just value upon it. What has been _deified_? The valuing instinct inside the _community_ (that which enabled it to survive).