The highest equity and mildness as a condition of weakness (the New Testament and the early Christian community—manifesting itself in the form of utter foolishness in the Englishmen, Darwin and Wallace). Your equity, ye higher men, drives you to universal suffrage, etc.; your "humanity" urges you to be milder towards crime and stupidity. In the end you will thus help stupidity and harmlessness to conquer.
Outwardly: Ages of terrible wars, insurrections, explosions. Inwardly: ever more and more weakness among men; events take the form of excitants. The Parisian as the type of the European extreme.
Consequences: (1) Savages (at first, of course, in conformity with the culture that has reigned hitherto); (2) Sovereign individuals (where powerful barbarous masses and emancipation from all that has been, are crossed). The age of greatest stupidity, brutality, and wretchedness in the masses, and in the highest individuals.
131.
An incalculable number of higher individuals now perish: but he who escapes their fate is as strong as the devil. In this respect we are reminded of the conditions which prevailed in the Renaissance.
132.
How are Good Europeans such as ourselves distinguished from the patriots? In the first place, we are atheists and immoralists, but we take care to support the religions and the morality which we associate with the gregarious instinct: for by means of them, an order of men is, so to speak, being prepared, which must at some time or other fall into our hands, which must actually crave for our hands.
Beyond Good and Evil,—certainly; but we insist upon the unconditional and strict preservation of herd-morality.
We reserve ourselves the right to several kinds of philosophy which it is necessary to learn: under certain circumstances, the pessimistic kind as a hammer; a European Buddhism might perhaps be indispensable.
We should probably support the development and the maturation of democratic tendencies; for it conduces to weakness of will: in "Socialism" we recognise a thorn which prevents smug ease.