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Enough! enough! let us leave these curiosities and complexities of the modern spirit, which excite as much laughter as disgust. Our problem can certainly do without them, the problem of the meaning of the ascetic ideal⁠—what has it got to do with yesterday or today? those things shall be handled by me more thoroughly and severely in another connection (under the title “A Contribution to the History of European Nihilism,” I refer for this to a work which I am preparing: The Will to Power, an Attempt at a Transvaluation of All Values ). The only reason why I come to allude to it here is this: the ascetic ideal has at times, even in the most intellectual sphere, only one real kind of enemies and damagers : these are the comedians of this ideal⁠—for they awake mistrust. Everywhere otherwise, where the mind is at work seriously, powerfully, and without counterfeiting, it dispenses altogether now with an ideal (the popular expression for this abstinence is “Atheism”)⁠— with the exception of the will for truth . But this will, this remnant of an ideal, is, if you will believe me, that ideal itself in its severest and cleverest formulation, esoteric through and through, stripped of all outworks, and consequently not so much its remnant as its kernel . Unqualified honest atheism (and its air only do we breathe, we, the most intellectual men of this age) is not opposed to that ideal, to the extent that it appears to be; it is rather one of the final phases of its evolution, one of its syllogisms and pieces of inherent logic⁠—it is the awe-inspiring catastrophe of a two-thousand-year training in truth, which finally forbids itself the lie of the belief in God . (The same course of development in India⁠—quite independently, and consequently of some demonstrative value⁠—the same ideal driving to the same conclusion the decisive point reached five hundred years before the European era, or more precisely at the time of Buddha⁠—it started in the Sankhyam philosophy, and then this was popularised through Buddha, and made into a religion.)