The Twilight of the Idols · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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Do not allow yourselves to be deceived: great minds are sceptical. Zarathustra is a sceptic. Strength and the _freedom_ which proceeds from the power and excessive power of the mind, _manifests_ itself through scepticism. Men of conviction are of no account whatever in regard to any principles of value or of non-value. Convictions are prisons. They never see far enough, they do not look down from a sufficient height: but in order to have any say in questions of value and non-value, a man must see five hundred convictions _beneath_ him,—_behind_ him.... A spirit who desires great things, and who also desires the means thereto, is necessarily a sceptic. Freedom from every kind of conviction _belongs_ to strength, to the _ability_ to open one’s eyes freely.... The great passion of a sceptic, the basis and power of his being, which is more enlightened and more despotic than he is himself, enlists all his intellect into its service; it makes him unscrupulous; it even gives him the courage to employ unholy means; in certain circumstances it even allows him convictions. Conviction as a _means:_ much is achieved merely by means of a conviction. Great passion makes use of and consumes convictions, it does not submit to them—it knows that it is a sovereign power.
Conversely; the need of faith, of anything either absolutely affirmative or negative, Carlylism (if I may be allowed this expression), is the need of _weakness._ The man of beliefs, the “believer” of every sort and condition, is necessarily a dependent man;—he is one who cannot regard _himself_ as an aim, who cannot postulate aims from the promptings of his own heart The “believer” does not belong to himself, he can be only a means, he must be _used up,_ he is in need of someone who uses him up. His instinct accords the highest honour to a morality of self-abnegation: everything in him, his prudence, his experience, his vanity, persuade him to adopt this morality. Every sort of belief is in itself an expression of self-denial, of self-estrangement. ... If one considers how necessary a regulating code of conduct is to the majority of people, a code of conduct which constrains them and fixes them from outside; and how control, or in a higher sense, _slavery,_ is the only and ultimate condition under which the weak-willed man, and especially woman, flourish; one also understands conviction, “faith.”
The man of conviction finds in the latter his _backbone._ To be _blind_ to many things, to be impartial about nothing, to belong always to a particular side, to hold a strict and necessary point of view in all matters of values—these are the only conditions under which such a man can survive at all. But all this is the reverse of, the _antagonist_ of, the truthful man,—of truth.... The believer is not at liberty to have a conscience for the question “true” and “untrue”: to be upright on _this_ point would mean his immediate downfall. The pathological limitations of his standpoint convert the convinced man into the fanatic—Savonarola, Luther Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon,—these are the reverse type of the strong spirit that has become _free._ But the grandiose poses of these _morbid_ spirits, of these epileptics of ideas, exercise an influence over the masses,—fanatics are picturesque, mankind prefers to look at poses than to listen to reason.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.