What do we mean to-day by the words "botched and bungled"? In the first place, they are used _physiologically_ and not politically. The unhealthiest kind of man all over Europe (in all classes) is the soil out of which Nihilism grows: this species of man will regard eternal recurrence as damnation--once he is bitten by the thought, he can no longer recoil before any action. He would not extirpate passively, but would cause everything to be extirpated which is meaningless and without a goal to this extent; although it is only a spasm, or sort of blind rage in the presence of the fact that everything has existed again and again for an eternity--even this period of Nihilism and destruction. The value of such a _crisis_ is that it _purifies,_ that it unites similar elements, and makes them mutually destructive, that it assigns common duties to men of opposite persuasions, and brings the weaker and more uncertain among them to the light, thus taking the first step towards a new _order of rank_ among forces from the standpoint of health: recognising commanders as commanders, subordinates as subordinates. Naturally irrespective of all the present forms of society. *** What class of men will prove they are strongest in this new order of things? The most moderate--they who do not _require_ any extreme forms of belief, they who not only admit of, but actually like, a certain modicum of chance and nonsense; they who can think of man with a very moderate view of his value, without becoming weak and small on that account; the most rich in health, who are able to withstand a maximum amount of sorrow, and who are therefore not so very much afraid of sorrow--men who are _certain of their power,_ and who represent with conscious pride the state of strength to which man has attained. *** How could such a man think of Eternal Recurrence? 56. _The Periods of European Nihilism._ _The Period of Obscurity_: all kinds of groping measures devised to preserve old institutions and not to arrest the progress of new ones. _The Period of Light_: men see that old and new are fundamental contraries; that the old values are born of descending life, and that the new ones are born of ascending life--_that all old ideals_ are unfriendly to life (born of decadence and determining it, however much they may be decked out in the Sunday finery of morality). We _understand_ the old, but are far from being sufficiently strong for the new. _The Periods of the Three Great Passions_: contempt, pity, destruction. _The Periods of Catastrophes_: the rise of a teaching which will sift mankind ... which drives the weak to some decision and the strong also. II. CONCERNING THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN NIHILISM. _(a)_ MODERN GLOOMINESS. 57.