d _the denial of life_ was inscribed. Schopenhauer was
right in this: that by means of pity life is denied, and made _worthy of
denial_--pity is the technic of nihilism. Let me repeat: this depressing
and contagious instinct stands against all those instincts which work
for the preservation and enhancement of life: in the role of _protector_
of the miserable, it is a prime agent in the promotion of
_decadence_--pity persuades to extinction.... Of course, one doesn't say
"extinction": one says "the other world," or "God," or "the _true_
life," or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness.... This innocent rhetoric,
from the realm of religious-ethical balderdash, appears _a good deal
less innocent_ when one reflects upon the tendency that it conceals
beneath sublime words: the tendency to _destroy life_. Schopenhauer was
hostile to life: that is why pity appeared to him as a virtue....
Aristotle, as every one knows, saw in pity a sickly and dangerous state
of mind, the remedy for which was an occasional purgative: he regarded
tragedy as that purgative. The instinct of life should prompt us to seek
some means of puncturing any such pathological and dangerous
accumulation of pity as that appearing in Schopenhauer's case (and also,
alack, in that of our whole literary _decadence_, from St. Petersburg to
Paris, from Tolstoi to Wagner), that it may burst and be discharged....
Nothing is more unhealthy, amid all our unhealthy modernism, than
Christian pity. To be the doctors _here_, to be unmerciful _here_, to
wield the knife _here_--all this is _our_ business, all this is _our_
sort of humanity, by this sign we are philosophers, we Hyperboreans!--

8.

It is necessary to say just _whom_ we regard as our antagonists:
theologians and all who have any theological blood in their veins--this
is our whole philosophy.... One must have faced that menace at close
hand, better still, one must have had experience of it directly and
almost succumbed to it, to realize that it is not to be taken lightly
(--the alleged free-thinking of our naturalists and physiologists seems
to me to be a joke--they have no passion about such things; they have
not suffered--). This poisoning goes a great deal further than most
people think: I find the arrogant habit of the theologian among all who
regard themselves as "idealists"--among all who, by virtue of a higher
point of departure, claim a right to rise above reality, and to look
upon it with suspicion.... The