Nothing to date has nauseated me more than the parasites of the spirit:
in our unhealthy Europe one already finds them everywhere-and they have the
best conscience in the world. Perhaps a little dim, a little air pessimiste,
but in the main voracious, dirty, dirtying, creeping in, nestling, thievish,
scurvy-and as innocent as all little sinners and microbes. They live off the
fact that other people have spirit and squander it: they know that it is of
the very essence of the rich spirit to squander itself carelessly, without
petty caution, from day to day.-For the spirit is a bad householder and pays
no heed to how everybody lives and feeds on it.
87 (Spring-Fall 1887)
Decline of Protestantism: understood as a halfway house both
theoretically and historically. Actual superiority of Catholicism; the
feeling of Protestantism extinguished to such an extent that the strongest
anti-Protestant movements are no longer experienced as such (for example,
Wagner's Parsifal). All of the higher regions of the spirit in France are
Catholic in their instincts; Bismarck realizes that Protestantism simply
doesn't exist any more.
