The Antichrist · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
6.
It is a painful and tragic spectacle that rises before me: I have drawn back the curtain from the _rottenness_ of man. This word, in my mouth, is at least free from one suspicion: that it involves a moral accusation against humanity. It is used--and I wish to emphasize the fact again--without any moral significance: and this is so far true that the rottenness I speak of is most apparent to me precisely in those quarters where there has been most aspiration, hitherto, toward "virtue" and "godliness." As you probably surmise, I understand rottenness in the sense of _décadence_: my argument is that all the values on which mankind now fixes its highest aspirations are _décadence_-values. I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it _prefers_, what is injurious to it. A history of the "higher feelings," the "ideals of humanity"--and it is possible that I'll have to write it--would almost explain why man is so degenerate. Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for _power_: whenever the will to power fails there is disaster. My contention is that all the highest values of humanity have been emptied of this will--that the values of _décadence_, of _nihilism_, now prevail under the holiest names.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.