Ecce Homo Complete Works, Volume Seventeen · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
6
But I have chosen the title of Immoralist as a surname and as a badge of honour in yet another sense; I am very proud to possess this name which distinguishes me from all the rest of mankind. No one hitherto has felt Christian morality beneath him; to that end there were needed height, a remoteness of vision, and an abysmal psychological depth, not believed to be possible hitherto. Up to the present Christian morality has been the Circe of all thinkers--they stood at her service. What man, before my time, had descended into the underground caverns from out of which the poisonous fumes of this ideal--of this slandering of the world--burst forth? What man had even dared to suppose that they were underground caverns? Was a single one of the philosophers who preceded me a psychologist at all, and not the very reverse of a psychologist--that is to say, a "superior swindler," an "Idealist"? Before my time there was no psychology. To be the first in this new realm may amount to a curse; at all events, it is a fatality: _for one is also the first to despise._ My danger is the loathing of mankind.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.