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208. When a philosopher nowadays makes known that he is not a skeptic--I
hope that has been gathered from the foregoing description of the
objective spirit?--people all hear it impatiently; they regard him on
that account with some apprehension, they would like to ask so many,
many questions... indeed among timid hearers, of whom there are now so
many, he is henceforth said to be dangerous. With his repudiation of
skepticism, it seems to them as if they heard some evil-threatening
sound in the distance, as if a new kind of explosive were being tried
somewhere, a dynamite of the spirit, perhaps a newly discovered Russian
NIHILINE, a pessimism BONAE VOLUNTATIS, that not only denies, means
denial, but--dreadful thought! PRACTISES denial. Against this kind of
"good-will"--a will to the veritable, actual negation of life--there is,
as is generally acknowledged nowadays, no better soporific and sedative
than skepticism, the mild, pleasing, lulling poppy of skepticism;
and Hamlet himself is now prescribed by the doctors of the day as an
antidote to the "spirit," and its underground noises. "Are not our ears
already full of bad sounds?" say the skeptics, as lovers of repose, and
almost as a kind of safety police; "this subterranean Nay is terrible!
Be still, ye pessimistic moles!" The skeptic, in effect, that delicate
creature, is far too easily frightened; his conscience is schooled so
as to start at every Nay, and even at that sharp, decided Yea, and feels
something like a bite thereby. Yea! and Nay!--they seem to him opposed
to morality; he loves, on the contrary, to make a festival to his virtue
by a noble aloofness, while perhaps he says with Montaigne: "What do I
know?" Or with Socrates: "I know that I know nothing." Or: "Here I do
not trust myself, no door is open to me." Or: "Even if the door were
open, why should I enter immediately?" Or: "What is the use of any hasty
hypotheses? It might quite well be in good taste to make no hypotheses
at all. Are you absolutely obliged to straighten at once what is
crooked? to stuff every hole with some kind of oakum? Is there not time
enough for that? Has not the time leisure? Oh, ye demons, can ye not
at all WAIT? The uncertain also has its charms, the Sphinx, too, is a
Circe, and Circe, too, was a philosopher."--Thus does a skeptic console
himself; and in truth he needs some consolation. For skepticism is
the most spiritual expression of a certain many-sided physiological
temperament, which in ordinary language is called nervous debility and
sickliness; it arises whenever races or classes which have been long
separated, decisively and suddenly blend with one another. In the new
generation, which has inherited as it were different standards and
valuations in its blood, everything is disquiet, derangement, doubt, and
tentativeness; the best powers operate restrictively, the very virtues
prevent each other growing and becoming strong, equilibrium, ballast,
and perpendicular stability are lacking in body and soul. That, however,
which is most diseased and degenerated in such nondescripts is the
WILL; they are no longer familiar with independence of decision, or
the courageous feeling of pleasure in willing--they are doubtful of the
"freedom of the will" even in their dreams Our present-day Europe,
the scene of a senseless, precipitate attempt at a radical blending of
classes, and CONSEQUENTLY of races, is therefore skeptical in all its
heights and depths, sometimes exhibiting the mobile skepticism which
springs impatiently and wantonly from branch to branch, sometimes with
gloomy aspect, like a cloud over-charged with interrogative signs--and
often sick unto death of its will! Paralysis of will, where do we not
find this cripple sitting nowadays! And yet how bedecked oftentimes' How
seductively ornamented! There are the finest gala dresses and disguises
for this disease, and that, for instance, most of what places itself
nowadays in the show-cases as "objectiveness," "the scientific spirit,"
"L'ART POUR L'ART," and "pure voluntary knowledge," is only decked-out
skepticism and paralysis of will--I am ready to answer for this
diagnosis of the European disease--The disease of the will is diffused
unequally over Europe, it is worst and most varied where civilization
has longest prevailed, it decreases according as "the barbarian"
still--or again--asserts his claims under the loose drapery of Western
culture It is therefore in the France of today, as can be readily
disclosed and comprehended, that the will is most infirm, and France,
which has always had a masterly aptitude for converting even the
portentous crises of its spirit into something charming and seductive,
now manifests emphatically its intellectual ascendancy over Europe,
by being the school and exhibition of all the charms of skepticism The
power to will and to persist, moreover, in a resolution, is already
somewhat stronger in Germany, and again in the North of Germany it
is stronger than in Central Germany, it is considerably stronger in
England, Spain, and Corsica, associated with phlegm in the former and
with hard skulls in the latter--not to mention Italy, which is too young
yet to know what it wants, and must first show whether it can exercise
will, but it is strongest and most surprising of all in that immense
middle empire where Europe as it were flows back to Asia--namely, in
Russia There the power to will has been long stored up and accumulated,
there the will--uncertain whether to be negative or affirmative--waits
threateningly to be discharged (to borrow their pet phrase from our
physicists) Perhaps not only Indian wars and complications in Asia would
be necessary to free Europe from its greatest danger, but also internal
subversion, the shattering of the empire into small states, and above
all the introduction of parliamentary imbecility, together with the
obligation of every one to read his newspaper at breakfast I do not
say this as one who desires it, in my heart I should rather prefer the
contrary--I mean such an increase in the threatening attitude of
Russia, that Europe would have to make up its mind to become equally
threatening--namely, TO ACQUIRE ONE WILL, by means of a new caste to
rule over the Continent, a persistent, dreadful will of its own, that
can set its aims thousands of years ahead; so that the long spun-out
comedy of its petty-statism, and its dynastic as well as its democratic
many-willed-ness, might finally be brought to a close. The time for
petty politics is past; the next century will bring the struggle for the
dominion of the world--the COMPULSION to great politics.

209. As to how far the new warlike age on which we Europeans have
evidently entered may perhaps favour the growth of another and stronger
kind of skepticism, I should like to express myself preliminarily
merely by a parable, which the lovers of German history will already
understand. That unscrupulous enthusiast for big, handsome grenadiers
(who, as King of Prussia, brought into being a military and skeptical
genius--and therewith, in reality, the new and now triumphantly emerged
type of German), the problematic, crazy father of Frederick the Great,
had on one point the very knack and lucky grasp of the genius: he knew
what was then lacking in Germany, the want of which was a hundred times
more alarming and serious than any lack of culture and social form--his
ill-will to the young Frederick resulted from the anxiety of a profound
instinct. MEN WERE LACKING; and he suspected, to his bitterest regret,
that his own son was not man enough. There, however, he deceived
himself; but who would not have deceived himself in his place? He saw
his son lapsed to atheism, to the ESPRIT, to the pleasant frivolity of
clever Frenchmen--he saw in the background the great bloodsucker, the
spider skepticism; he suspected the incurable wretchedness of a heart no
longer hard enough either for evil or good, and of a broken will that no
longer commands, is no longer ABLE to command. Meanwhile, however,
there grew up in his son that new kind of harder and more dangerous
skepticism--who knows TO WHAT EXTENT it was encouraged just by
his father's hatred and the icy melancholy of a will condemned to
solitude?--the skepticism of daring manliness, which is closely related
to the genius for war and conquest, and made its first entrance into
Germany in the person of the great Frederick. This skepticism despises
and nevertheless grasps; it undermines and takes possession; it does
not believe, but it does not thereby lose itself; it gives the spirit a
dangerous liberty, but it keeps strict guard over the heart. It is the
GERMAN form of skepticism, which, as a continued Fredericianism, risen
to the highest spirituality, has kept Europe for a considerable time
under the dominion of the German spirit and its critical and historical
distrust Owing to the insuperably strong and tough masculine character
of the great German philologists and historical critics (who,
rightly estimated, were also all of them artists of destruction
and dissolution), a NEW conception of the German spirit gradually
established itself--in spite of all Romanticism in music and
philosophy--in which the leaning towards masculine skepticism was
decidedly prominent whether, for instance, as fearlessness of gaze, as
courage and sternness of the dissecting hand, or as resolute will to
dangerous voyages of discovery, to spiritualized North Pole expeditions
under barren and dangerous skies. There may be good grounds for it when
warm-blooded and superficial humanitarians cross themselves before this
spirit, CET ESPRIT FATALISTE, IRONIQUE, MEPHISTOPHELIQUE, as Michelet
calls it, not without a shudder. But if one would realize how
characteristic is this fear of the "man" in the German spirit which
awakened Europe out of its "dogmatic slumber," let us call to mind the
former conception which had to be overcome by this new one--and that
it is not so very long ago that a masculinized woman could dare, with
unbridled presumption, to recommend the Germans to the interest of
Europe as gentle, good-hearted, weak-willed, and poetical fools.
Finally, let us only understand profoundly enough Napoleon's
astonishment when he saw Goethe it reveals what had been regarded for
centuries as the "German spirit" "VOILA UN HOMME!"--that was as much as
to say "But this is a MAN! And I only expected to see a German!"