The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
734.
_Another commandment of philanthropy._--There are cases where to have a child would be a crime--for example, for chronic invalids and extreme neurasthenics. These people should be converted to chastity, and for this purpose the music of _Parsifal_ might at all events be tried. For Parsifal himself, that born fool, had ample reasons for not desiring to propagate. Unfortunately, however, one of the regular symptoms of exhausted stock is the inability to exercise any self-restraint in the presence of stimuli, and the tendency to respond to the smallest sexual attraction. It would be quite a mistake, for instance, to think of Leopardi as a chaste man. In such cases the priest and moralist play a hopeless game: it would be far better to send for the apothecary. Lastly, society here has a positive duty to fulfil, and of all the demands that are made on it, there are few more urgent and necessary than this one. Society as the trustee of life, is responsible to life for every botched life that comes into existence, and as it has to atone for such lives, it ought consequently to make it impossible for them ever to see the light of day: it should in many cases actually prevent the act of procreation, and may, without any regard for rank, descent, or intellect, hold in readiness the most rigorous forms of compulsion and restriction, and, under certain circumstances, have recourse to castration. The Mosaic law, "Thou shalt do no murder," is a piece of ingenuous puerility compared with the earnestness of this forbidding of life to decadents, "Thou shalt not beget"!!! ... For life itself recognises no solidarity or equality of rights between the healthy and unhealthy parts of an organism. The latter must at all cost be _eliminated,_ lest the whole fall to pieces. Compassion for decadents, equal rights for the physiologically botched--this would be the very pinnacle of immorality, it would be setting up Nature's most formidable opponent as morality itself! There are some delicate and morbid natures, the so-called idealists, who can never under any circumstances rise above a coarse, immature crime: yet it is the great justification of their anæmic little existence, it is the small requital for their lives of cowardice and falsehood to have been for one _instant_ at least--strong. But they generally collapse after such an act.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.