The will to suffer and those who feel compassion. – Is it good for you yourselves to be above all else compassionate persons? And is it good for those who suffer if you are compassionate? But let us leave the first question unanswered for a moment. What we most deeply and most personally suffer from is incomprehensible and inaccessible to nearly everyone else; here we are hidden from our nearest, even if we eat from the same pot. But whenever we are noticed to be suffering, our suffering is superficially construed; it is the essence of the feeling of compassion that it strips the suffering of what is truly personal: our ‘benefactors’ diminish our worth and our will more than our enemies do. In most cases of beneficence toward those in distress there is something offensive in the intellectual frivolity with which the one who feels compassion plays the role of fate: he knows nothing of the whole inner sequence and interconnection that spells misfortune for me or for you! The entire economy of my soul and the balance effected by ‘misfortune’, the breaking open of new springs and needs, the healing of old wounds, the shedding of entire periods of the past – all such things that can be involved in misfortune do not concern the dear compassionate one: they want to help and have no thought that there is a personal necessity of misfortune; that terrors, deprivations, impoverishments, midnights, adventures, risks, and blunders are as necessary for me and you as their opposites; indeed, to express myself mystically, that the path to one’s own heaven always leads through the voluptuousness of one’s own hell. No, they know nothing of that: the ‘religion of compassion’ (or ‘the heart’) commands them to help, and they believe they have helped best when they have helped most quickly! Should you adherents to this religion really have the same attitude towards yourselves that you have towards your fellow men; should you refuse to let your suffering lie on you even for an hour and instead constantly prevent all possible misfortune ahead of time; should you experience suffering and displeasure as evil, hateful, deserving of annihilation, as a defect of existence, then you have besides your religion of pity also another religion in your hearts; and the latter is perhaps the mother of the former – the religion of snug cosiness. Oh, how little do you know of the happiness of man, you comfortable and good-natured ones! For happiness and misfortune (Glück und Unglück) are two siblings and twins who either grow up together or – as with you – remain small together! But now back to the first question. How is it possible to keep to one’s own path! Some clamour is constantly calling us aside; rarely does our eye see something there that does not make it necessary to drop our own occupation instantly and spring to assistance. I know, there are a hundred decent and praiseworthy ways of losing myselffrom my path, and, verily, highly ‘moral’ ways! Yes, the moral teacher of compassion even goes so far as to hold that precisely this and only this is moral – to lose one’s own way like this in order to help a neighbour. I, too, know with certainty that I need only to expose myself to the sight of real distress and I, too, am lost! If a suffering friend said to me, ‘Look, I am about to die; please promise to die with me’, I would promise it; likewise, the sight of a small mountain tribe fighting for its freedom would make me offer my hand and my life – for once to choose bad examples, for good reasons. Yes, there is a secret seduction even in all these things which arouse compassion and cry out for help, for our own way is so hard and demanding and so far from love and gratitude of others that we are by no means reluctant to escape from it, from it and our ownmost conscience – and take refuge in the conscience of the others and in the lovely temple of the ‘religion of compassion’. As soon as any war breaks out, precisely the noblest men in the population immediately begin to experience a delight which is, to be sure, kept secret: they throw themselves rapturously into the new danger of death because it seems to offer them that long-desired permission – the permission to deviate from their goal; war offers them a detour to suicide, but a detour with a good conscience. And, although I will keep quiet here about some things, I do not wish to keep quiet about my morality, which tells me: Live in seclusion so that you are able to live for yourself! Live in ignorance of what seems most important to your age! Lay at least the skin of three hundred years between you and today! And let the clamour of today, the noise of war and revolutions, be but a murmur to you. You will also want to help – but only those whose distress you properly understand because they share with you one suffering and one hope – your friends – and only in the way you help yourself: I want to make them braver, more persevering, simpler, more full of gaiety. I want to teach them what is today understood by so few, least of all by these preachers of compassion (Mitleiden): to share not pain, but joy (Mitfreude)!