_Progress._--Let us be on our guard lest we deceive ourselves! Time flies forward apace,--we would fain believe that everything flies forward with it,--that evolution is an advancing development.... That is the appearance of things which deceives the most circumspect. But the nineteenth century shows no advance whatever on the sixteenth: and the German spirit of 1888 is an example of a backward movement when compared with that of 1788.... Mankind does not advance, it does not even exist. The aspect of the whole is much more like that of a huge experimenting workshop where some things in all ages succeed, while an incalculable number of things fail; where all order, logic, co-ordination, and responsibility is lacking. How dare we blink the fact that the rise of Christianity is a decadent movement?--that the German Reformation was a recrudescence of Christian barbarism?--that the Revolution destroyed the instinct for an organisation of society on a large scale?... Man is not an example of progress as compared with animals: the tender son of culture is an abortion compared with the Arab or the Corsican; the Chinaman is a more successful type--that is to say, richer in sustaining power than the European. _(b)_ THE LAST CENTURIES. 91. Gloominess and pessimistic influence necessarily follow in the wake of enlightenment. Towards 1770 a falling-off in cheerfulness was already noticeable; women, with that very feminine instinct which always defends virtue, believed that immorality was the cause of it. Galiani hit the bull's eye: he quotes Voltaire's verse: "Un monstre gai vaut mieux Qu'un sentimental ennuyeux." If now I maintain that I am ahead, by a century or two of enlightenment, of Voltaire and Galiani--who was much more profound, how deeply must I have sunk into gloominess! This is also true, and betimes I somewhat reluctantly manifested some caution in regard to the German and Christian narrowness and inconsistency of Schopenhauerian or, worse still, Leopardian Pessimism, and sought the most characteristic form (Asia). But, in order to endure that extreme Pessimism (which here and there peeps out of my _Birth of Tragedy),_ to live alone "without God or morality," I was compelled to invent a counter-prop for myself. Perhaps I know best why man is the only animal that laughs: he alone surfers so excruciatingly that he was _compelled_ to invent laughter. The unhappiest and most melancholy animal is, as might have been expected, the most cheerful. 92. In regard to German culture, I have always had a feeling as of _decline._ The fact that I learned to know a declining form of culture has often made me _unfair_ towards the whole phenomenon of European culture. The Germans always follow at some distance behind: they always go to the root of things, for instance:-- Dependance upon foreigners; _Kant_--Rousseau, the sensualists, Hume, Swedenborg. _Schopenhauer_--the Indians and Romanticism, Voltaire.