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It is always more obvious to me that the philosopher, as a man indispensable for the morrow and the day after the morrow, has ever found himself, and has been obliged to find himself, in contradiction to the day in which he lives; his enemy has always been the ideal of his day. Hitherto all those extraordinary furtherers of humanity whom one calls philosophers⁠—who rarely regarded themselves as lovers of wisdom, but rather as disagreeable fools and dangerous interrogators⁠—have found their mission, their hard, involuntary, imperative mission (in the end, however, the greatness of their mission), in being the bad conscience of their age. In putting the vivisector’s knife to the breast of the very virtues of their age , they have betrayed their own secret; it has been for the sake of a new greatness of man, a new untrodden path to his aggrandizement. They have always disclosed how much hypocrisy, indolence, self-indulgence, and self-neglect, how much falsehood was concealed under the most venerated types of contemporary morality, how much virtue was outlived ; they have always said, “We must remove hence to where you are least at home.” In the face of a world of “modern ideas,” which would like to confine everyone in a corner, in a “specialty,” a philosopher, if there could be philosophers nowadays, would be compelled to place the greatness of man, the conception of “greatness,” precisely in his comprehensiveness and multifariousness, in his all-roundness, he would even determine worth and rank according to the amount and variety of that which a man could bear and take upon himself, according to the extent to which a man could stretch his responsibility. Nowadays the taste and virtue of the age weaken and attenuate the will, nothing is so adapted to the spirit of the age as weakness of will: consequently, in the ideal of the philosopher, strength of will, sternness, and capacity for prolonged resolution, must specially be included in the conception of “greatness,” with as good a right as the opposite doctrine, with its ideal of