Creative Mechanician delights them. The conception is really an attempt to humanize necessity—a last refuge of mythological fancy.[1]
In this moving chaos man arises, with no end of causes behind him—but not from any superior design.[2] He arises, and he passes away—he is as perishable as any other creature. Some fancy that man is possessed of a soul in the sense of something separable from his bodily organization and capable of surviving it; Nietzsche does not think so. k "In former times the effort was to win a sense of the glory of man, by pointing to his divine origin: it is a forbidden way now, for at the door to it stands, along with other terrible creatures, the ape, who shows his teeth understandingly, as if to say: no further in this direction! So now we look in the opposite direction: the way whither humanity goes shall serve to show its glory and likeness to God. Alas, with this also nothing is proven! At the end of this way stands the funeral-urn of the last man and grave-digger (with the inscription 'nihil humani a me alienum puto'). However high humanity may have developed itself—and perhaps it will be lower at the end than at the beginning—there is no transition for it into a higher order, any more than there is an ascent to god-likeness and eternity for the ant and the earwig at the close of their 'earthly course.' Becoming draws having been in tow after it: why should there be an exception from this eternal play for some little planet, or again for a little species upon it! Away with such sentimentalities!"[3] Another passage is to similar effect. "In the midst of the ocean of becoming, we awake on an island which is not bigger than a boat, we adventuring and wandering birds, and look around us for a little while: we do so as quickly and as curiously as possible, for how quickly may a wind blow us away or a wave sweep over the island, so that nothing is left of us! But here, in this little space, we find other wandering birds and hear of earlier ones—and so we live a precious moment of knowing and of guessing, with happy flapping of wings and twittering with one another, and in spirit venture out on the ocean, no less proud than it."[4] One might turn these pictures
