to the neighbour, is henceforth called evil, the tolerant, unassuming, self-adapting, self-equalizing disposition, the mediocrity of desires, attains to moral distinction and honour.  Finally, under very peaceful circumstances, there is always less opportunity and necessity for training the feelings to severity and rigour, and now every form of severity, even in justice, begins to disturb the conscience, a lofty and rigorous nobleness and self-responsibility almost offends, and awakens distrust, “the lamb,” and still more “the sheep,” wins respect.  There is a point of diseased mellowness and effeminacy in the history of society, at which society itself takes the part of him who injures it, the part of the criminal, and does so, in fact, seriously and honestly.  To punish, appears to it to be somehow unfair—­it is certain that the idea of “punishment” and “the obligation to punish” are then painful and alarming to people.  “Is it not sufficient if the criminal be rendered harmless?  Why should we still punish?  Punishment itself is terrible!”—­with these questions gregarious morality, the morality of fear, draws its ultimate conclusion.  If one could at all do away with danger, the cause of fear, one would have done away with this morality at the same time, it would no longer be necessary, it would not consider itself any longer necessary!—­Whoever examines the conscience of the present-day European, will always elicit the same imperative from its thousand moral folds and hidden recesses, the imperative of the timidity of the herd “we wish that some time or other there may be nothing more to fear!” Some time or other—­the will and the way thereto is nowadays called “progress” all over Europe.

202.  Let us at once say again what we have already said a hundred times, for people’s ears nowadays are unwilling to hear such truths—­our truths.  We know well enough how offensive it sounds when any one plainly, and without metaphor, counts man among the animals, but it will be accounted to us almost a crime, that it is precisely in respect to men of “modern ideas” that we have constantly applied the terms “herd,” “herd-instincts,” and such like expressions.  What avail is it?  We cannot do otherwise, for it is precisely here that our new insight is.  We have found that in all the principal moral judgments, Europe has become unanimous, including likewise the countries where European influence prevails in Europe people evidently know what Socrates thought he did not know, and what the famous serpent of old once promised to teach—­they “know” today what is good and evil.  It must then sound hard and be distasteful to the ear, when we always insist that that which here thinks it knows, that which here glorifies itself with praise and blame, and calls itself good, is the instinct of the herding human animal, the instinct which has come and is ever coming more and more to the front,