Modern, noisy, time-consuming, proud industriousness has extinguished the religious instincts, so that people no longer have any idea of what religions are about and as it were just register their presence in the world with a kind of dumb amazement […] How much naivety, venerable, childlike and boundlessly stupid naivety there is in the scholar’s belief in his superiority, in the good conscience of his tolerance, in the simple unsuspecting certainty with which his instinct treats the religious man as an inferior and lower type which he himself has grown beyond and above – he the little presumptuous dwarf and man of the mob, the brisk and busy head – and handyman of ‘ideas’, of ‘modern ideas’! (Beyond Good and Evil no. 58)
