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A piece of foolish piety with a concealed purpose.  What! the inventors of the earliest cultures, the most ancient devisers of tools and measuring-rods, of carts and ships and houses, the first observers of the celestial order and the rules of the twice-times-table  are they something incomparably different from and higher than the inventors and observers of our own day? Do these first steps possess a value with which all our voyages and world-circumnavigations in the realm of discoveries cannot compare? That is the prejudice, that is the argument for the deprecation of the modern spirit. And yet it is palpably obvious that chance was formerly the greatest of all discoverers and observers and the benevolent inspirer of those inventive ancients, and that more spirit, discipline and scientific imagination is employed in the most insignificant invention nowadays than the sum total available in whole eras of the past.

37

False conclusions from utility.  When one has demonstrated that a thing is of the highest utility, one has however thereby taken not one step towards explaining its origin: that is to say, one can never employ utility to make it comprehensible that a thing must necessarily exist. But it is the contrary judgment that has hitherto prevailed  and even into the domain of the most rigorous science. Even in the case of astronomy, has the (supposed) utility in the way the satellites are arranged (to compensate for the diminished light they receive owing to their greater distance from the sun, so that their inhabitants shall not go short of light) not been advanced as the final objective of this arrangement and the explanation of its origin? It reminds us of the reasoning of Columbus: the earth was made for man, therefore if countries exist they must be inhabited. 'Is it probable that the sun should shine on nothing, and that the nocturnal vigils of the stars are squandered upon pathless seas and countries unpeopled?'

38

Drives transformed by moral judgments.  The same drive evolves into the painful feeling of cowardice under the impress of the reproach custom has imposed upon this drive: or into the pleasant feeling of humility if it happens that a custom such as the Christian has taken it to its heart and called it good. That is to say, it is attended by either a good or a bad conscience! In itself it has, like every drive, neither this moral character nor any moral character at all, nor even a definite attendant sensation of pleasure or displeasure: it acquires all this, as its second nature, only when it enters into relations with drives already baptised good or evil or is noted as a quality of beings the people has already evaluated and determined in a moral sense.  Thus the older Greeks felt differently about envy from the way we do; Hesiod¹⁷ counted it among the effects of the good, beneficent Eris¹⁸, and there was nothing offensive in attributing to the gods something of envy: which is comprehensible under a condition of things the soul of which was contest; contest, however, was evaluated and determined as good. The Greeks likewise differed from us in their evaluation of hope: they felt it to be blind and deceitful; Hesiod gave the strongest expression to this attitude in a fable whose sense is so strange no more recent commentator has understood it  for it runs counter to the modern spirit, which has learned from Christianity to believe in hope as a virtue. With the Greeks, on the other hand, to whom the gateway to knowledge of the future seemed not to be entirely closed and in countless cases where we content ourselves with hope elevated inquiry into the future into a religious duty, hope would, thanks to all these oracles and soothsayers, no doubt become somewhat degraded and sink to something evil and dangerous.  The Jews felt differently about anger from the way we do, and called it holy: thus they saw the gloomy majesty of the man with whom it showed itself associated at an elevation which a European is incapable of imagining; they modelled their angry holy Jehovah on their angry holy prophets. Measured against these, the great men of wrath among Europeans are as it were creations at second hand.

39

'Pure spirit' a prejudice.  Wherever the teaching of pure spirituality has ruled, it has destroyed nervous energy with its excesses: it has taught deprecation, neglect or tormenting of the body and men to torment and deprecate themselves on account of the drives which fill them; it has produced gloomy, tense and oppressed souls  which believed, moreover, they knew the cause of their feeling of wretchedness and were perhaps able to abolish it! 'It must reside in the body! the body is still flourishing too well!'  thus they concluded, while in fact the body was, by means of the pains it registered, raising protest after protest against the mockery to which: it was constantly being subjected. A general chronic over-excitability was finally the lot of these virtuous pure-spirits: the only pleasure they could still recognise was in the form of ecstasy and other precursors of madness  and their system attained its summit when it came to take ecstasy for the higher goal of life and the standard by which all earthly things stood condemned.

40

Speculation on usages.  Countless prescriptions of custom hastily read off from some unique strange occurence very soon became incomprehensible; the intention behind them could be ascertained with as little certainty as could the nature of the punishment which would follow their transgression; doubts existed even as to the performance of the ceremonial  but inasmuch as there was vast speculation about it, the object of such speculation increased in value and precisely the most absurd aspect of a usage at length passed over into the holiest sanctity. Do not think lightly of the human energy expended over the millennia in this way, and least of all of the effect of this speculation over usages! We have here arrived at the tremendous exercise ground of the intellect  it is not only that the religions were woven here: this is also the venerable if dreadful prehistoric world of science, here is where the poet, the thinker, the physician, the lawgiver first grew. Fear of the incomprehensible which in an ambiguous way demanded ceremonies of us gradually passed over into the stimulus of the hard to comprehend, and where one did not know how to explain one learned to create.