To harm stupidity. – Surely the creed concerning the reprehensibility of egoism, preached so stubbornly and with so much conviction, has on the whole harmed egoism (to the advantage of, as I will repeat a hundred times, the herd instincts!) – above all, by depriving egoism of its good conscience and telling us to seek in it the true source of all unhappiness. ‘Your selfishness is the reason your life is miserable (Unheil)’ – that was preached for millennia and, as I said, harmed selfishness and deprived it of much spirit, much cheerfulness, much inventiveness, much beauty; it made selfishness stupid and ugly and poisoned it! Ancient philosophy, by contrast, taught a quite different main source of misery (Unheil): from Socrates onwards these thinkers never tired of preaching, ‘Your thoughtlessness and stupidity, your way of living according to the rule, your subordination to the opinion of your neighbour is the reason why you so seldom achieve happiness we thinkers are, as thinkers, the happiest.’ Let us not decide here whether this sermon against stupidity had better reasons on its side than the sermon against selfishness; what is certain, however, is that it deprived stupidity of its good conscience – these philosophers harmed stupidity.