51

Such as we still are!  'Let us be forbearing towards the great one-eyed!'  said John Stuart Mill: as though it were necessary to beg for forbearance where one is accustomed to render them belief and almost worship! I say: let us be forbearing towards the two-eyed, great and small  for, such as we are, we shall never attain to anything higher than forbearance!

52

Where are the new physicians of the soul?  It has been the means of comfort which have bestowed upon life that fundamental character of suffering it is now believed to possess; the worst sickness of mankind originated in the way in which they have combated their sicknesses, and what seemed to cure has in the long run produced something worse than that which it was supposed to overcome. The means which worked immediately, anaesthetising and intoxicating, the so-called consolations, were ignorantly supposed to be actual cures; the fact was not even noticed, indeed, that these instantaneous alleviations often had to be paid for with a general and profound worsening of the complaint, that the invalid had to suffer from the after-effect of intoxication, later from the withdrawal of intoxication, and later still from an oppressive general feeling of restlessness, nervous agitation and ill-health. Past a certain degree of sickness one never recovered  the physicians of the soul, those universally believed in and worshipped, saw to that.  It is said of Schopenhauer, and with justice, that after they had been neglected for so long he again took seriously the sufferings of mankind: where is he who, after they have been neglected for so long, will again take seriously the antidotes to these sufferings and put in the pillory the unheard-of quack-doctoring with which, under the most glorious names, mankind has hitherto been accustomed to treat the sicknesses of its soul?

53

Misuse of the conscientious.  It has been the conscientious and not the conscienceless who have had to suffer so dreadfully from the oppression of Lenten preachers²⁵ and the fears of Hell, especially when they were at the same time people of imagination. Thus life has been made most gloomy precisely for those who had need of cheerfulness and pleasant pictures  not only for their own refreshment and recovery from themselves, but so that mankind might take pleasure in them and absorb from them a ray of their beauty. Oh, how much superfluous cruelty and vivisection have proceeded from those religions which invented sin! And from those people who desired by means of it to gain the highest enjoyment of their power!

54

Thinking about illness!  To calm the imagination of the invalid, so that at least he should not, as hitherto, have to suffer more from thinking about his illness than from the illness itself  that, I think, would be something! It would be a great deal! Do you now understand our task?

55

'Ways'.  The supposed 'shorter ways' have always put mankind into great danger; at the glad tidings that such a shorter way has been found, they always desert their way  and lose their way.