He is, in truth, anything
but the crown of creation: beside him stand many other animals, all at
similar stages of development.... And even when we say that we say a bit
too much, for man, relatively speaking, is the most botched of all the
animals and the sickliest, and he has wandered the most dangerously from
his instincts--though for all that, to be sure, he remains the most
_interesting_!--As regards the lower animals, it was Descartes who first
had the really admirable daring to describe them as _machina_; the whole
of our physiology is directed toward proving the truth of this doctrine.
Moreover, it is illogical to set man apart, as Descartes did: what we
know of man today is limited precisely by the extent to which we have
regarded him, too, as a machine. Formerly we accorded to man, as his
inheritance from some higher order of beings, what was called "free
will"; now we have taken even this will from him, for the term no longer
describes anything that we can understand. The old word "will" now
connotes only a sort of result, an individual reaction, that follows
inevitably upon a series of partly discordant and partly harmonious
stimuli--the will no longer "acts," or "moves."... Formerly it was
thought that man's consciousness, his "spirit," offered evidence of his
high origin, his divinity. That he might be _perfected_, he was advised,
tortoise-like, to draw his senses in, to have no traffic with earthly
things, to shuffle off his mortal coil--then only the important part of
him, the "pure spirit," would remain. Here again we have thought out the
thing better: to us consciousness, or "the spirit," appears as a symptom
of a relative imperfection of the organism, as an experiment, a groping,
a misunderstanding, as an affliction which uses up nervous force
unnecessarily--we deny that anything can be done perfectly so long as it
is done consciously. The "pure spirit" is a piece of pure stupidity:
take away the nervous system and the senses, the so-called "mortal
shell," and _the rest is miscalculation_--that is all!...

15.

Under Christianity neither morality nor religion has any point of
contact with actuality. It offers purely imaginary _causes_ ("God,"
"soul," "ego," "spirit," "free will"--or even "unfree"), and purely
imaginary _effects_ ("sin," "salvation," "grace," "punishment,"
"forgiveness of sins"). Intercourse between imaginary _beings_ ("God,"
"spirits," "souls"); an imaginary _natural history_ (ant