Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE RELIGIOUS LIFE. The Double Contest Against Evil.?If an evil afflicts us we can either so deal with it as to remove its cause or else so deal with it that its effect upon our feeling is changed; hence look upon the evil as a benefit of which the uses will perhaps first become evident in some subsequent period. Religion and art (and also the metaphysical philosophy) strive to effect an alteration of the feeling, partly by an alteration of our judgment respecting the experience (for example, with the aid of the dictum "whom God loves, he chastizes") partly by the awakening of a joy in pain, in emotion especially (whence the art of tragedy had its origin). The more one is disposed to interpret away and justify, the less likely he is to look directly at the causes of evil and eliminate them. An instant alleviation and narcotizing of pain, as is usual in the case of tooth ache, is sufficient for him even in the severest suffering. The more the domination of religions and of all narcotic arts declines, the more searchingly do men look to the elimination of evil itself, which is a rather bad thing for the tragic poets?for there is ever less and less material for tragedy, since the domain of unsparing, immutable destiny grows constantly more circumscribed ? and a still worse thing for the priests, for these last have lived heretofore upon the narcoticizing of human ill. Sorrow is Knowledge.?How willingly would not one exchange the false assertions of the homines religiosi that there is a god who commands us to be good, who is the sentinel and witness of every act, every moment, every thought, who loves us, who plans our welfare in every misfortune?how willingly would not one exchange these for truths as healing, beneficial and grateful as those delusions But there are no s...

弗里德里希·尼采（Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900），19世纪德国哲学家，唯意志论和生命哲学主要代表之一，被认为是世界最伟大的思想家之一。

早年在波恩大学和莱比锡大学学习，获博士学位。不到25岁就被聘为瑞士巴塞尔大学的古典语文学副教授，并在一年以后成为正教授。一生著述颇丰，如《悲剧的诞生》、《查拉图斯特拉如是说》、《善恶的彼岸》、《强力意志》等，对20世纪的思想界产生重大影响。1889年初，在意大利的都灵街头摔倒，就此精神错乱，于11年后在德国的魏玛去世。