guarantee of the future.

This more valuable type has appeared often enough in the past: but
always as a happy accident, as an exception, never as deliberately
_willed_. Very often it has been precisely the most feared; hitherto it
has been almost _the_ terror of terrors;--and out of that terror the
contrary type has been willed, cultivated and _attained_: the domestic
animal, the herd animal, the sick brute-man--the Christian....

4.

Mankind surely does _not_ represent an evolution toward a better or
stronger or higher level, as progress is now understood. This "progress"
is merely a modern idea, which is to say, a false idea. The European of
today, in his essential worth, falls far below the European of the
Renaissance; the process of evolution does _not_ necessarily mean
elevation, enhancement, strengthening.

True enough, it succeeds in isolated and individual cases in various
parts of the earth and under the most widely different cultures, and in
these cases a _higher_ type certainly manifests itself; something which,
compared to mankind in the mass, appears as a sort of superman. Such
happy strokes of high success have always been possible, and will remain
possible, perhaps, for all time to come. Even whole races, tribes and
nations may occasionally represent such lucky accidents.

5.

We should not deck out and embellish Christianity: it has waged a war to
the death against this _higher_ type of man, it has put all the deepest
instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of
evil, of the Evil One himself, out of these instincts--the strong man as
the typical reprobate, the "outcast among men." Christianity has taken
the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out
of _antagonism_ to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it
has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are
intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual
values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation. The most
lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his
intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually
destroyed by Christianity!--

6.

It is a painful and tragic spectacle that rises before me: I have drawn
back the curtain from the _rottenness_ of man. This word, in my mouth,
is at least free from one suspicion: that it involves a moral accusation
against humanity. It is used--and I wish to e