people. "Is
it not sufficient if the criminal be rendered HARMLESS? Why should we
still punish? Punishment itself is terrible!"--with these questions
gregarious morality, the morality of fear, draws its ultimate
conclusion. If one could at all do away with danger, the cause of fear,
one would have done away with this morality at the same time, it
would no longer be necessary, it WOULD NOT CONSIDER ITSELF any longer
necessary!--Whoever examines the conscience of the present-day European,
will always elicit the same imperative from its thousand moral folds
and hidden recesses, the imperative of the timidity of the herd "we wish
that some time or other there may be NOTHING MORE TO FEAR!" Some time
or other--the will and the way THERETO is nowadays called "progress" all
over Europe.

202. Let us at once say again what we have already said a hundred
times, for people's ears nowadays are unwilling to hear such truths--OUR
truths. We know well enough how offensive it sounds when any one
plainly, and without metaphor, counts man among the animals, but it will
be accounted to us almost a CRIME, that it is precisely in respect to
men of "modern ideas" that we have constantly applied the terms "herd,"
"herd-instincts," and such like expressions. What avail is it? We cannot
do otherwise, for it is precisely here that our new insight is. We
have found that in all the principal moral judgments, Europe has become
unanimous, including likewise the countries where European influence
prevails in Europe people evidently KNOW what Socrates thought he
did not know, and what the famous serpent of old once promised to
teach--they "know" today what is good and evil. It must then sound hard
and be distasteful to the ear, when we always insist that that which
here thinks it knows, that which here glorifies itself with praise
and blame, and calls itself good, is the instinct of the herding human
animal, the instinct which has come and is ever coming more and more
to the front, to preponderance and supremacy over other instincts,
according to the increasing physiological approximation and resemblance
of which it is the symptom. MORALITY IN EUROPE AT PRESENT IS
HERDING-ANIMAL MORALITY, and therefore, as we understand the matter,
only one kind of human morality, beside which, before which, and after
which many other moralities, and above all HIGHER moralities, are or
should be possible. Against such a "possibility," against such a "should
be," how