Once again, the origin of the scholars. – To wish to preserve oneself is a sign of distress, of a limitation of the truly basic life-instinct, which aims at the expansion of power and in so doing often enough risks and sacrifices self-preservation. It is symptomatic that certain philosophers, such as the consumptive Spinoza, took and indeed had to take just the so-called self-preservation instinct to be decisive:9 – they were simply people in distress. That today’s natural sciences have become so entangled with the Spinozistic dogma (most recently and crudely in Darwinism with its incredibly one-sided doctrine of ‘the struggle for existence’ –) is probably due to the descent of most natural scientists: in this regard they belong to ‘the people’, their ancestors were poor and lowly folks who knew all too intimately the difficulty of scraping by. English Darwinism exudes something like the stuffy air of English overpopulation, like the small people’s smell of indigence and overcrowding. As a natural scientist, however, one should get out of one’s human corner; and in nature, it is not distress which rules, but rather abundance, squandering – even to the point of absurdity. The struggle for survival is only an exception, a temporary restriction of the will to life; the great and small struggle revolves everywhere around preponderance, around growth and expansion, around power and in accordance with the will to power, which is simply the will to life.