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When a philosopher nowadays lets us know he's not a sceptic - I hope people have sensed this from the description of the objective spirit immediately above? - the whole world is unhappy to hear that. People look at him with some awe and would like to ask so much, to question . . . in fact, among timid listeners, and there are hordes of them today, from that point on he is considered dangerous. For them it is as if in his rejection of scepticism they heard coming from far away some evil threatening noise, as if a new explosive was being tested somewhere, spiritual dynamite, perhaps a newly discovered Russian nihilin , a pessimism bonae voluntatis [of good will], which does not merely say No and will No but - terrible to imagine! - acts No!⁴ Against this form of "good will"- a will to a truly active denial of life - there is today, by general agreement, no better sleeping pill and sedative than scepticism, the peaceful, gentle, soporific poppy of scepticism, and even Hamlet is prescribed these days by contemporary doctors against the "spirit" and its underground rumblings. "Aren't people's ears all full enough already of wicked noises?" says the sceptic, as a friend of peace, almost as a sort of security police: "This subterranean No is terrifying! Be quiet at last, you pessimistic moles!" For the sceptic, this tender creature, is frightened all too easily. His conscience has been trained to twitch with every No, even with every hard, decisive Yes - to respond as if it had been bitten. Yes! And No! - that contradicts his morality. Conversely, he loves to celebrate his virtue with a noble abstinence, by saying with Montaigne, "What do I know?"⁵ Or with Socrates, "I know that I know nothing." Or "Here I don't trust myself. There is no door open to me here." Or "Suppose the door was open, why go in right away?" Or "What use are all rash hypotheses? Not to make any hypotheses at all could easily be part of good taste. Must you be so keen immediately to bend back something crooked? Or stopping up every hole with some piece of oakum? Isn't there time for that? Doesn't time have time? O you devilish fellows, can't you wait, even for a bit? What is unknown also has its attraction - the Sphinx is a Circe, too, and Circe also was a philosopher."⁶ In this way a sceptic consoles himself, and he certainly needs some consolation. For scepticism is the spiritual expression of a certain multifaceted physiological condition which in everyday language is called weak nerves and infirmity. It arises every time races or classes which have been separated from each other a long time suddenly and decisively cross breed. In the new generation, which has inherited in its blood, as it were, different standards and values, everything is restlessness, disturbance, doubt, experiment; the best forces have an inhibiting effect; even the virtues do not allow each other to grow and become strong; the body and soul lack equilibrium, a main focus, a perpendicular self-assurance. But what is most profoundly sick and degenerates in such mixtures is the will. These people no longer know the independence in decision making, the bold sense of pleasure in willing - they have doubts about the "freedom of the will," even in their dreams. Our Europe today, the scene of an insanely sudden attempt at radical mixing of classes and consequently mixing of races, is as a result sceptical in all heights and depths, sometimes with that flexible scepticism which leaps impatiently and greedily from one branch to another, sometimes gloomy, like a cloud overloaded with question marks, and often sick to death of its will! Paralysis of the will - where nowadays do we not find this cripple sitting! And often how well dressed! In such a seductive outfit! This illness has the most beautifully splendid and deceitful clothing. For example, most of what presents itself in the display windows today as "objectivity," "the practice of science," "l'art pour l'art"[art for art's sake], "purely disinterested knowledge" is only dressed up scepticism and paralysis of the will - I'll stand by this diagnosis of the European sickness. The sickness of the will has spread unevenly across Europe. It appears in its greatest and most varied form where the culture has already been indigenous for the longest time, and it disappears to the extent that the "barbarian" still - or again - achieves his rights under the baggy clothing of Western culture. Thus, in contemporary France, we can conclude as easily as we can grasp it in our hands that the will is most seriously ill, and France, which has always had a masterful skill in transforming even the fateful changes in its spirit into something attractive and seductive, truly displays its cultural dominance over Europe today as the school and exhibition place for all the magical tricks of scepticism. The power to will and, indeed, to desire a will that lasts a long time, is somewhat stronger in Germany, and in the north of Germany even more so than in the middle, but it's significantly stronger in England, Spain, and Corsica. In Germany it's bound up with apathy, and in those other places with hard heads - to say nothing of Italy, which is too young to know yet what it wants and which first must demonstrate whether it can will.⁷ - But it's strongest and most amazing in that immense empire in between, where Europe, so to speak, flows back into Asia, that is, in Russia. There the power to will has for a long time lain dormant and built up, there the will waits menacingly - uncertain whether, to borrow a favourite phrase of our physicists today, it will be discharged as a will to negate or a will to affirm. It may require more than Indian wars and developments in Asia for Europe to be relieved of its greatest danger; it will require inner revolutions, too, the breaking up of the empire into small bodies and, above all, the introduction of the parliamentary nonsense, along with every man's duty to read his newspaper at breakfast. I'm not saying this because it's what I want. The opposite would be closer to my heart - I mean such an increase in the Russian danger, that Europe would have to decide to become equally a threat, that is, it would have to acquire a will, by means of a new caste which would rule Europe, a long, fearful, individual will, which could set itself goals for thousands of years from now - so that finally the long spun-out comic plot of its small states, together with its multiple dynastic and democratic petty wills, would come to an end. The time for small politics is over. The next century is already bringing on the battle for the mastery of the earth - the compulsion to grand politics.