for belittling himself? Alas, his belief in his dignity, his uniquenesses irreplaceableness in the scheme of existence, is gone⁠—he has become animal, literal, unqualified, and unmitigated animal, he who in his earlier belief was almost God (“child of God,” “demigod”). Since Copernicus man seems to have fallen on to a steep plane⁠—he rolls faster and faster away from the centre⁠—whither? into nothingness? into the “thrilling sensation of his own nothingness” ⁠—Well! this would be the straight way⁠—to the old ideal?⁠— All science (and by no means only astronomy, with regard to the humiliating and deteriorating effect of which Kant has made a remarkable confession, “it annihilates my own importance”), all science, natural as much as unnatural ⁠—by unnatural I mean the self-critique of reason⁠—nowadays sets out to talk man out of his present opinion of himself, as though that opinion had been nothing but a bizarre piece of conceit; you might go so far as to say that science finds its peculiar pride, its peculiar bitter form of stoical ataraxia, in preserving man’s