themselves as lovers of wisdom, but rather as disagreeable fools and dangerous interrogators—­have found their mission, their hard, involuntary, imperative mission (in the end, however, the greatness of their mission), in being the bad conscience of their age.  In putting the vivisector’s knife to the breast of the very virtues of their age, they have betrayed their own secret; it has been for the sake of a new greatness of man, a new untrodden path to his aggrandizement.  They have always disclosed how much hypocrisy, indolence, self-indulgence, and self-neglect, how much falsehood was concealed under the most venerated types of contemporary morality, how much virtue was outlived, they have always said “We must remove hence to where you are least at home” In the face of a world of “modern ideas,” which would like to confine every one in a corner, in a “specialty,” a philosopher, if there could be philosophers nowadays, would be compelled to place the greatness of man, the conception of “greatness,” precisely in his comprehensiveness and multifariousness, in his all-roundness, he would even determine worth and rank according to the amount and variety of that which a man could bear and take upon himself, according to the extent to which a man could stretch his responsibility Nowadays the taste and virtue of the age weaken and attenuate the will, nothing is so adapted to the spirit of the age as weakness of will consequently, in the ideal of the philosopher, strength of will, sternness, and capacity for prolonged resolution, must specially be included in the conception of “greatness”, with as good a right as the opposite doctrine, with its ideal of a silly, renouncing, humble, selfless humanity, was suited to an opposite age—­such as the sixteenth century, which suffered from its accumulated energy of will, and from the wildest torrents and floods of selfishness In the time of Socrates, among men only of worn-out instincts, old conservative Athenians who let themselves go—­“for the sake of happiness,” as they said, for the sake of pleasure, as their conduct indicated—­and who had continually on their lips the old pompous words to which they had long forfeited the right by the life they led, irony was perhaps necessary for greatness of soul, the wicked Socratic assurance of the old physician and plebeian, who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as into the flesh and heart of the “noble,” with a look that said plainly enough “Do not dissemble before me! here—­we are equal!” At present, on the contrary, when throughout Europe the herding-animal alone attains to honours, and dispenses honours, when “equality of right” can too readily be transformed into equality in wrong—­I mean to say into general war against everything rare, strange, and privileged, against the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, the creative plenipotence and lordliness—­at present it belongs to