, he who like us has recognized the extraordinary fortuitousness which has hitherto played its game in respect to the future of mankind⁠—a game in which neither the hand, nor even a “finger of God” has participated!⁠—he who divines the fate that is hidden under the idiotic unwariness and blind confidence of “modern ideas,” and still more under the whole of Christo-European morality⁠—suffers from an anguish with which no other is to be compared. He sees at a glance all that could still be made out of man through a favourable accumulation and augmentation of human powers and arrangements; he knows with all the knowledge of his conviction how unexhausted man still is for the greatest possibilities, and how often in the past the type man has stood in presence of mysterious decisions and new paths:⁠—he knows still better from his painfulest recollections on what wretched obstacles promising developments of the highest rank have hitherto usually gone to pieces, broken down, sunk, and become contemptible. The universal degeneracy of mankind