[2]The lowest of the Hindu castes.
We have unlearned something. We have become more modest in every way. We no longer derive man from the “spirit,” from the “godhead”; we have dropped him back among the beasts. We regard him as the strongest of the beasts because he is the craftiest; one of the results thereof is his intellectuality. On the other hand, we guard ourselves against a conceit which would assert itself even here: that man is the great second thought in the process of organic evolution. 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 mostinteresting!—As regards the lower animals, it was Descartes who first had the really admirable daring to describe them asmachina; 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 beperfected, 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,” andthe rest is miscalculation—that is all!...
Under Christianity neither morality nor religion has any point of contact with actuality. It offers purely imaginarycauses (“God,” “soul,” “ego,” “spirit,” “free will”—or even “unfree”), and purely imaginaryeffects (“sin,” “salvation,” “grace,” “punishment,” “forgiveness of sins”). Intercourse between imaginarybeings (“God,” “spirits,” “souls”); an imaginarynatural history (anthropocentric; a total denial of the concept of natural causes); an imaginarypsychology (misunderstandings of self, misinterpretations of agreeable or disagreeable general feelings—for example, of the states of thenervus sympathicus with the help of the sign-language of religio-ethical balderdash—, “repentance,” “pangs of conscience,” “temptation by the devil,” “the presence of God”); an imaginaryteleology (the “kingdom of God,” “the last judgment,” “eternal life”).—This purelyfictitious world, greatly to its disadvantage, is to be differentiated from the world of dreams; the latter at least reflects reality, whereas the former falsifies it, cheapens it and denies it. Once the concept of
