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Let us state right away one more time what we have already said a hundred times, for today's ears don't listen willingly to such truths - to our truths. We know well enough how insulting it sounds when an individual reckons human beings in general plainly and simply and unmetaphorically among the animals, but one thing will make people consider us almost guilty, the fact that we, so far as men of "modern ideas" are concerned, constantly use the terms "herd," "herd instincts," and the like. What help is there? We cannot do anything else: for precisely here lies our new insight. We have found that in all major moral judgments Europe, together with those countries where Europe's influence dominates, has become unanimous. People in Europe apparently know what Socrates thought he didn't know and what that famous old snake once promised to teach - today people "know" what good and evil are. Now, it must ring hard and badly on their ears when we keep claiming all the time that what here thinks it knows, what here glorifies itself with its praise and censure and calls itself good, is the instinct of the herd animal man, which has come to break through, to overpower, and to dominate other instincts and continues increasingly to do so, in accordance with the growing physiological assimilation and homogeneity, whose symptom it is. Morality today in Europe is the morality of the herd animal - thus only, as we understand the matter, one kind of human morality, alongside which, before which, and after which there are many other possible moralities, above all higher ones, or there should be. Against such a "possibility," in opposition to such a "should be," however, this morality defends itself with all its forces: it says stubbornly and relentlessly, "I am morality itself, and nothing outside me is moral" - in fact, with the help of a religion which indulged and catered to the most sublime desires of the herd animal, it has reached the point where we find even in the political and social arrangements an always visible expression of this morality: the democratic movement has come into the inheritance of the Christian movement. But the fact is that its tempo is still much too slow and drowsy for the impatient, the sick, and those addicted to the above-mentioned instincts - evidence for that comes from the wailing, which grows constantly more violent, the increasingly open snarling fangs of the anarchist hounds who now swarm through the alleys of European culture, apparently in contrast to the peacefully industrious democrats and ideologues of the revolution, even more to the foolish pseudo-philosophers and those ecstatic about brotherhood, who call themselves socialists and want a "free society." But in reality these anarchists are at one with all of them in their fundamental and instinctive hostility to every other form of society than the autonomous herd (all the way to the rejection of the very ideas of "master" and "servant"- ni dieu ni maitre [neither god nor master] is the way one socialist formula goes -); at one in their strong resistance to all special claims, all special rights and privileges (that means, in the last analysis, against every right, for when all people are equal, then no one needs "rights" any more -); at one in their mistrust of a justice which punishes (as if it were a violation of the weaker people, a wrong against the necessary consequence of all earlier society -); and equally at one in the religion of pity, of sympathy, wherever there is mere feeling, living, and suffering (right down to the animals, right up to "God": - the excessive outpouring of "pity with God" belongs to a democratic age -); at one collectively in their cries for and impatience in their pity, in their deadly hatred for suffering generally, in their almost feminine inability to stand there as spectators, to let suffering happen; at one in their involuntary gloom and softness, under whose spell Europe seems threatened by a new Buddhism; at one in their faith in the morality of mutual pity, as if that was morality in and of itself, as the height, the attained height of humanity, the sole hope of the future, the means of consolation for the present, the great absolution from the guilt of earlier times; - altogether at one in their belief in the community as the saviour , thus in the herd, in themselves . . .