55.  There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, with many rounds; but three of these are the most important.  Once on a time men sacrificed human beings to their God, and perhaps just those they loved the best—­to this category belong the firstling sacrifices of all primitive religions, and also the sacrifice of the Emperor Tiberius in the Mithra-Grotto on the Island of Capri, that most terrible of all Roman anachronisms.  Then, during the moral epoch of mankind, they sacrificed to their God the strongest instincts they possessed, their “nature”; This festal joy shines in the cruel glances of ascetics and “anti-natural” fanatics.  Finally, what still remained to be sacrificed?  Was it not necessary in the end for men to sacrifice everything comforting, holy, healing, all hope, all faith in hidden harmonies, in future blessedness and justice?  Was it not necessary to sacrifice God himself, and out of cruelty to themselves to worship stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, nothingness?  To sacrifice God for nothingness—­this paradoxical mystery of the ultimate cruelty has been reserved for the rising generation; we all know something thereof already.

56.  Whoever, like myself, prompted by some enigmatical desire, has long endeavoured to go to the bottom of the question of pessimism and free it from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness and stupidity in which it has finally presented itself to this century, namely, in the form of Schopenhauer’s philosophy; whoever, with an Asiatic and super-Asiatic eye, has actually looked inside, and into the most world-renouncing of all possible modes of thought—­beyond good and evil, and no longer like Buddha and Schopenhauer, under the dominion and delusion of morality,—­whoever has done this, has perhaps just thereby, without really desiring it, opened his eyes to behold the opposite ideal:  the ideal of the most world-approving, exuberant, and vivacious man, who has not only learnt to compromise and arrange with that which was and is, but wishes to have it again as it was and is, for all eternity, insatiably calling out da capo, not only to himself, but to the whole piece and play; and not only the play, but actually to him who requires the play—­and makes it necessary; because he always requires himself anew—­and makes himself necessary.—­What?  And this would not be—­circulus vitiosus deus?

57.  The distance, and as it were the space around man, grows with the strength of his intellectual vision and insight:  his world becomes profounder; new stars, new enigmas, and notions are ever coming into view.  Perhaps everything on which the intellectual eye has exercised its acuteness and profundity has just been an occasion for its exercise, something of a game, something for children and childish minds.  Perhaps the most solemn conceptions that have caused the most fighting and suffering, the conceptions “God” and “sin,” will one day seem to us of no more importance than a child’s plaything or a child’s pain seems to an old man;—­ and perhaps another plaything and another pain will then be necessary once more for “the old man”—­always childish enough, an eternal child!