Part Iv, the Narrative Section, Answers the Query Often Raised: for

whom is Nietzsche's philosophy intended? It does away once and for all with the assumption of certain critics that his writings were for all classes. In fact, this assumption, constantly posited by scholars--even those who claim to possess an intimate knowledge of Nietzsche's work--is nowhere borne out in his text. As far back as "Thoughts out of Season" the reverse of this supposition was inferentially stated; and in "The Antichrist" and "The Will to Power" we have definite denials that his doctrines were intended for every one. Yet one is constantly encountering critical refutations of his philosophy based on the theory that he addressed his teachings to all men. Nothing could be further from the truth. He held no vision of a race of supermen: a millennium founded on the exertion of power was neither his aim nor his hope. His philosophy was entirely aristocratic. It was a system of ethics designed for the masters of the race; and his books were gifts for the intelligent man alone. Locke, Rousseau and Hume are often brought forward by critics as answers to his attempts at transvaluation; but a close inspection of Nietzsche's definition of slave-morality, which was an important factor in his ethical scheme, will show that it is possible to accept the philosophy of the superman without abrogating the softer ethics of these three other thinkers. Nietzsche's stand in regard to his audience is made obvious in the fable of Zarathustra. The poet-philosopher experiences the instinct for pity, but on going out into the world, he recognises this instinct as pertaining only to the "higher men." When he finds numerous of these men in danger from the ignorance of the populace and from the restrictions of environment, he leads them to his cave, and there, isolated from the inferior man, discourses with them on the problems of life and points out to them the course they must take in order to bring about the superman.

Because of the nature of the book it is extremely difficult to select detached passages from it which will give an entirely adequate idea of its contents. Often a single philosophical point will be contained in a long parable, and the only way to present that point in Nietzsche's own words would have been to embody the whole parable in this chapter. That, of course, would have been impossible. Therefore, many of the ideas set forth in the book have not been included in the following excerpts. Part IV does not lend itself at all to mutilation, and I have been unable to take anything save a few general passages from this section. However, "Thus Spake Zarathustra" is not a book to which one should go to become familiar with Nietzsche's teachings. When one sits down to read it, my advice is that the notes of Mr. Anthony M. Ludovici which are to be found in the appendix of the standard English edition, be followed closely.

EXCERPTS FROM "THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA"

I teach you the Superman... Man is something that is to be surpassed. 6

What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame. 6

Ye have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm. Once were ye apes, and even yet man is more of an ape than any of the apes. 7

I conjure you, my brethren, remain true to the earth. and believe not those who speak unto you of super-earthly hopes! Poisoners are they, whether they know it or not. 7

To blaspheme the earth is now the dreadfulest sin.... 7

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman--a rope over an abyss. 9

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.... 9

I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.... 12

Three metamorphoses of the spirit do I designate to you: how the spirit becometh a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.

Many heavy things are there for the spirit, the strong load-bearing spirit in which reverence dwelleth: for the heavy and the heaviest longeth its strength.

What is heavy? so asketh the load-bearing spirit; then kneeleth it down like the camel, and wanteth to be well laden.

What is the heaviest thing, ye heroes? asketh the load-bearing spirit, that I may take it upon me and rejoice in my strength.

Is it not this: To humiliate oneself in order to mortify one's pride? To exhibit one's folly in order to mock at one's wisdom?

Or is it this: To desert our cause when it celebrateth its triumph? To ascend high mountains to tempt the tempter?

Or is it this: To feed on the acorns and grass of knowledge, and for the sake of truth to suffer hunger of soul?

Or is it this: To be sick and dismiss comforters, and make friends of the deaf, who never hear thy requests?

Or is it this: To go into foul water when it is the water of truth, and not disclaim cold frogs and hot toads?

Or is it this: To love those who despise us, and give one's hand to the phantom when it is going to frighten us?

All these heaviest things the load-bearing spirit taketh upon itself: and like the camel, which, when laden, hasteneth into the wilderness, so hasteneth the spirit into its wilderness.

But in the loneliest wilderness happeneth the second metamorphosis: here the spirit becometh a lion; freedom will it capture, and lordship in its own wilderness.

Its last Lord it here seeketh: hostile will it be to him, and to its last God; for victory will it struggle with the great dragon.

What is the great dragon which the spirit is no longer inclined to call Lord and God? "Thou shalt," is the great dragon called. But the spirit of the lion saith, "I will."

"Thou shalt," lieth in its path, sparkling with gold--a scale-covered beast; and on every scale glittereth golden, "Thou shalt!"

The values of a thousand years glitter on those scales, and thus speaketh the mightiest of all dragons: "All the values of things--glitter on me."

"All values have already been created, and all created values--do I represent. Verily, there shall be no 'I will' any more." Thus speaketh the dragon.

My brethren, wherefore is there need of the lion in the spirit? Why sufficeth not the beast of burden, which renounceth and is reverent?

To create new values--that, even the lion cannot yet accomplish: but to create itself freedom for new creating--that can the might of the lion do.

To create itself freedom, and give a holy Nay even unto duty: for that, my brethren, there is need of the lion.

To assume the right to new values--that is the most formidable assumption for a load-bearing and reverent spirit. Verily, unto such a spirit it is preying, and the work of a beast of prey.

As its holiest, it once loved "Thou shalt": now is it forced to find illusion and arbitrariness even in the holiest things, that it may capture freedom from its love: the lion is needed for this capture.

But tell me, my brethren, what the child can do, which even the lion could not do? Why hath the preying lion still to become a child?

Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea.

Aye, for the game of creating, my brethren, there is needed a holy Yea unto life: its own will, willeth now the spirit; his own world winneth the world's outcast.

Three metamorphoses of the spirit have I designated to you: how the spirit became a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child. 25-27

A new pride ... teach I unto men: no longer to thrust the head into the sand of celestial things, but to carry it freely, a terrestrial head, which giveth meaning to the earth!

A new will teach I unto men: to choose that path which man hath followed blindly, and to approve of it--and no longer to slink aside from it, like the sick and perishing!

The sick and perishing--it was they who despised the body and the earth, and invented the heavenly world, and the redeeming blood-drops; but even those sweet and sad poisons they borrowed from the body and the earth! 33-34

The awakened one, the knowing one, saith: "Body am I entirely, and nothing more; and soul is only the name of something in the body." 35

The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd.

An instrument of thy body is also thy little sagacity, my brother, which thou callest "spirit"--a little instrument and plaything of thy big sagacity.

Instruments and playthings are sense and spirit: behind them there is still the Self. The Self seeketh with the eyes of the senses, it hearkeneth also with the ears of the spirit. 36

Behind thy thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown sage--it is called Self; it dwelleth in thy body, it is thy body. 36

When thou hast a virtue, and it is thine own virtue, thou hast it in common with no one. 38

If thou be fortunate, then wilt thou have one virtue and no more: thus goest thou easier over the bridge. 39

"Enemy" shall ye say but not "villain," "invalid" shall ye say but not "wretch," "fool" shall ye say but not "sinner." 41

Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit. 43

Ye look aloft when ye long for exaltation; and I look downward because I am exalted.

Who among you can at the same time laugh and be exalted?

He who climbeth on the highest mountains, laugheth at all tragic plays and tragic realities.

Courageous, unconcerned, scornful, coercive--so wisdom wisheth us; she is a woman, and ever loveth a warrior. 44

It is true we love life; not because we are wont to live, but because we are wont to love. 44

I should only believe in a God that would know how to dance. 45

Not by wrath, but by laughter, do we slay. Come, let us slay the spirit of gravity! 45

Full is the earth of the superfluous; marred is life by the many-too-many. May they be decoyed out of this life by the "life eternal"! 49

Ye are not great enough not to know of hatred and envy. Then be great enough not to be ashamed of them! 51

Ye shall love peace as a means to new wars--and the short peace more than the long.

You I advise not to work, but to fight. You, I advise not to peace, but to victory. Let your work be a fight, let your peace be a victory! 52

Ye say it is the good cause which halloweth even war? I say unto you: it is the good war which halloweth every cause. 52

"What is good?" ye ask. To be brave is good. 52

Ye shall only have enemies to be hated, but not enemies to be despised. Ye must be proud of your enemies; then, the successes of your enemies are also your successes. 53

A state is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: "I, the state, am the people." 54

Just see these superfluous ones! They steal the works of the inventors and the treasures of the wise. Culture, they call their theft--and everything becometh sickness and trouble unto them! 56

Around the devisers of new values revolveth the world:--invisibly it revolveth. But around the actors revolve the people and the glory: such is the course of things. 58

Would that ye were perfect--at least as animals! But to animals belongeth innocence. 61

Chastity is a virtue with some, but with many almost a vice. 61

To whom chastity is difficult, it is to be dissuaded: lest it become the road to hell--to filth and lust of soul. 62

If one would have a friend, then must one also be willing to wage war for him: and in order to wage war, one must be capable of being an enemy. 63

In one's friend one shall have one's best enemy. Thou shalt be closest unto him with thy heart when thou withstandest him. 63

Art thou a slave? Then thou canst not be a friend. Art thou a tyrant? Then thou canst not have friends.

Far too long hath there been a slave and a tyrant concealed in woman. On that account woman is not yet capable of friendship: she knoweth only love.

In woman's love there is injustice and blindness to all she doth not love. And even in woman's conscious love, there is still always surprise and lightning and night, along with the light. 65

Values did man only assign to things in order to maintain himself--he created only the significance of things, a human significance! Therefore, calleth he himself "man," that is, the valuator. 67

A thousand goals have there been hitherto, for a thousand peoples have there been. Only the fetter for the thousand necks is still lacking; there is lacking the one goal. As yet humanity hath not a goal. 69

Do I advise you to neighbour-love? Rather do I advise you to neighbour-flight and to furthest love!

Higher than love to your neighbour is love to the furthest and future ones; higher still than love to men, is love to things and phantoms.

The phantom that runneth on before thee, my brother, is fairer than thou; why dost thou not give unto it thy flesh and thy bones?... 69

Art thou one entitled to escape from a yoke? Many a one hath cast away his final worth when he hath cast away his servitude.

Free from what? What doth that matter to Zarathustra! Clearly, however, shall thine eye show unto me: free for what? 71

Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman hath one solution--it is called pregnancy.

Man is for woman, a means: the purpose is always the child. But what is woman for man?

Two different things wanteth the true man: danger and diversion. Therefore wanteth he woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

Man shall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly.

Two sweet fruits--these the warrior liketh not. Therefore liketh he woman;--bitter is ever the sweetest woman.

Better than man doth woman understand children, but man is more childish than woman.

In the true man there is a child hidden: it wanteth to play. Up then, ye women, and discover the child in man!

A plaything let woman be, pure and fine like the precious stone, illumined with the virtues of a world not yet come.

Let the beam of a star shine in your love! Let your hope say: "May I bear the Superman!"

In your love let there be valour! With your love shall ye assail him who inspireth you with fear!

In your love be your honour! Little doth woman understand otherwise about honour. But let this be your honour: always to love more than ye are loved, and never be the second.

Let man fear woman when she loveth: then maketh she every sacrifice, and everything else she regardeth as worthless.

Let man fear woman when she hateth: for man in his innermost soul is merely evil; woman, however, is mean.

Whom hateth woman most?--Thus spake the iron to the loadstone: "I hate thee most, because thou attractest, but art too weak to draw unto thee."

The happiness of man is, "I will." The happiness of woman is, "He will." 76

Thou goest to women? Do not forget thy whip! 77

When ... ye have an enemy, then return him not good for evil: for that would abash him. But prove that he hath done something good to you.

And rather be angry than abash any one! And when ye are cursed, it pleaseth me not that ye should then desire to bless. Rather curse a little also! 78

Tell me: where find we justice, which is love with seeing eyes? 78

Thou art young, and desirest child and marriage. But I ask thee: Art thou a man entitled to desire a child? Art thou the victorious one, the self-conqueror, the ruler of thy passions, the master of thy virtues? Thus do I ask thee.

Or doth the animal speak in thy wish, and necessity? Or isolation? Or discord in thee?

I would have thy victory and freedom long for a child. Living monuments shalt thou build to thy victory and emancipation.

Beyond thyself shalt thou build. But first of all must thou be built thyself, rectangular in body and soul. 79

Marriage: so call I the will of the twain to create the one that is more than those who created it. 80

That which the many-too-many call marriage, those superfluous ones--ah, what shall I call it?

Ah, the poverty of soul in the twain! Ah, the filth of soul in the twain! Ah, the pitiable self-complacency in the twain!

Marriage they call it all; and they say their marriages are made in heaven.

Well, I do not like it, that heaven of the superfluous; No, I do not like them, those animals tangled in the heavenly toils!

Far from me also be the God who limpeth thither to bless what he hath not matched!

Laugh not at such marriages! What child hath not had reason to weep over its parents? 80

Every one regardeth dying as a great matter: but as yet death is not a festival. Not yet have people learned to inaugurate the finest festivals. 82

My death, praise I unto you, the voluntary death, which cometh unto me because I want it.

And when shall I want it?--He that hath a goal and an heir, wanteth death at the right time for the goal and the heir. 83

It is your thirst to become sacrifices and gifts yourselves: and therefore have ye the thirst to accumulate all riches in your soul.

Insatiably striveth your soul for treasures and jewels, because your virtue is insatiable in desiring to bestow.

Ye constrain all things to flow towards you and into you, so that they shall flow back again out of your fountain as the gifts of your love.

Verily, an appropriator of all values must such bestowing love become; but healthy and holy, call I this selfishness. 86

When ye are exalted above praise and blame, and your will would command all things, as a loving one's will: there is the origin of your virtue. 87

Remain true to the earth, my brethren, with the power of your virtue! Let your bestowing love and your knowledge be devoted to be the meaning of the earth! Thus do I pray and conjure you.

Let it not fly away from the earthly and beat against eternal walls with its wings! 88

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends. 90

Once did people say God, when they looked out upon distant seas; now, however, have I taught you to say, Superman. 98

Could ye conceive a God?--But let this mean Will to Truth unto you, that everything be transformed into the humanly conceivable, the humanly visible, the humanly sensible! Your own discernment shall ye follow out to the end! 99

Creating--that is the great salvation from suffering, and life's alleviation. But for the creator to appear, suffering itself is needed, and much transformation. 100

What would there be to create if there were--? Gods! 101

Man himself is to the discerning one: the animal with red cheeks. 102

Verily, I like them not, the merciful ones, whose bliss is in their pity: too destitute are they of bashfulness.

If I must be pitiful, I dislike to be called so; and if I be so, it is preferably at a distance. 102

Since humanity came into being, man hath enjoyed himself too little: that alone, my brethren, is our original sin! 103

Great obligations do not make grateful, but revengeful; and when a small kindness is not forgotten, it becometh a gnawing worm. 103

The sting of conscience teacheth one to sting. 103

Ah, where in the world have there been greater follies than with the pitiful? And what in the world hath caused more suffering than the follies of the pitiful?

Woe unto all loving ones who have not an elevation which is above their pity!

Thus spake the devil unto me, once a time: "Even God hath his hell: it is his love for man." 105

All great love is above all its pity: for it seeketh--to create what is loved!

"Myself do I offer unto my love, and my neighbour as myself"--such is the language of all creators. 105

"Here are priests: but although they are mine enemies, pass them quietly and with sleeping swords!"

Even among them there are heroes; many of them have suffered too much:--so they want to make others suffer.

Bad enemies are they: nothing is more revengeful than their meekness. 106

When a person goeth through fire for his teaching--what doth that prove! It is more, verily, when out of one's own burning cometh one's own teaching! 108

That your very Self be in your action, as the mother is in the child: let that be your formula of virtue! 112

Life is a well of delight; but where the rabble also drink, there all fountains are poisoned. 113

Ye who make the soul giddy, ye preachers of equality! Tarantulas are ye unto me, and secretly revengeful ones! 116

Ye preachers of equality, the tyrant-frenzy of impotence crieth thus in you for "equality": your most secret tyrant-longings disguise themselves thus in virtue-words!

Fretted conceit and suppressed envy--perhaps your fathers' conceit and envy: in you break they forth as flame and frenzy of vengeance. 117

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!

They are people of bad race and lineage; out of their countenances peer the hangman and the sleuth-hound.

Distrust all those who talk much of their justice! Verily, in their souls not only honey is lacking.

And when they call themselves "the good and just," forget not, that for them to be Pharisees, nothing is lacking but--power! 118

With these preachers of equality will I not be mixed up and confounded. For thus speaketh justice unto me: "Men are not equal."

And neither shall they become so! 118

Good and evil, and rich and poor, and high and low, and all names of values: weapons shall they be, and sounding signs, that life must again and again surpass itself! 119

Steadfast and beautiful, let us also be enemies, my friends I Divinely will we strive against one another! 120

Hungry, fierce, lonesome, God-forsaken: so doth the lion-will wish itself.

Free from the happiness of slaves, redeemed from Deities and adorations, fearless and fear-inspiring, grand and lonesome: so is the will of the conscientious. 122

Wherever I found a living thing, there found I Will to Power; and even in the will of the servant found I the will to be master.

That to the stronger the weaker shall serve--thereto persuadeth he his will who would be master over a still weaker one. That delight alone he is unwilling to forego.

And as the lesser surrendereth himself to the greater that he may have delight and power over the least of all, so doth even the greatest surrender himself, and staketh--life, for the sake of power.

It is the surrender of the greatest to run risk and danger, and play dice for death. 136

Good and evil which would be everlasting--it doth not exist! Of its own accord must it ever surpass itself anew. 137

He who hath to be a creator in good and evil--verily, he hath first to be a destroyer, and break values in pieces. 138

Ye tell me, friends, that there is to be no dispute about taste and tasting? But all life is a dispute about taste and tasting.

Taste: that is weight at the same time, and scales and weigher; and alas for every living thing that would live without dispute about weight and scales and weigher! 139

Alien to me, and a mockery, are the present-day men, to whom of late my heart impelled me; and exiled am I from fatherlands and motherlands.

Thus do I love only my children's land, the undiscovered in the remotest sea: for it do I bid my sails search and search.

Unto my children will I make amends for being the child of my fathers: and unto all the future--for this present-day! 145

Where is innocence? Where there is will to procreation. And he who seeketh to create beyond himself, hath for me the purest will.

Where is beauty? Where I must will with my whole Will; where I will love and perish, that an image may not remain merely an image.

Loving and perishing: these have rhymed from eternity. Will to love: that is to be ready also for death. 147

Dare only to believe in yourselves--in yourselves and in your inward parts! He who doth not believe in himself always lieth. 147

All Gods are poets-symbolisations, poet-sophistications! 153

"Freedom" ye all roar most eagerly: but I have unlearned the belief in "great events," when there is much roaring and smoke about them.

And believe me, friend Hollaballoo! The greatest events--are not our noisiest, but our stillest hours.

Not around the inventors of new noise, but around the inventors of new values, doth the world revolve: inaudibly it revolveth. 158

To redeem what is past, and to transform every "It was" into "Thus would have it!"--that only do I call redemption! 168

The spirit of revenge: my friends, that hath hitherto been man's best contemplation; and where there was suffering, it was claimed there was always penalty.

"Penalty," so calleth itself revenge. With a lying word it feigneth a good conscience. 169

This is my first manly prudence, that I allow myself to be deceived, so as not to be on my guard against deceivers. 172

He who would not languish amongst men, must learn to drink out of all glasses; and he who would keep clean amongst men, must know how to wash himself even with dirty water. 172

Verily, there is still a future even for evil! And the warmest south is still undiscovered by man.

How many things are now called the worst wickedness, which are only twelve feet broad and three months long! Some day, however, will greater dragons come into the world.

For that the Superman may not lack his dragon, the superdragon that is worthy of him, there must still much warm sun glow on moist virgin forests!

Out of your wild cats must tigers have evolved, and out of your poison-toads, crocodiles: for the good hunter shall have a good hunt!

And verily, ye good and just! In you there is much to be laughed at, and especially your fear of what hath hitherto been called "the devil"!

So alien are ye in your souls to what is great, that to you the Superman would be frightful in his goodness!

And ye wise and knowing ones, ye would flee from the solar-glow of the wisdom in which the Superman joyfully batheth his nakedness!

Ye highest men who have come within my ken! this is my doubt of you, and my secret laughter: I suspect ye would call my Superman--a devil!

Ah, I became tired of those highest and best ones: from their "height" did I long to be up, out, and away to the Superman!

A horror came over me when I saw those best ones naked: then there grew for me the pinions to soar away into distant futures.

Into more distant futures, into more southern souths than ever artist dreamed of: thither, where Gods are ashamed of all clothes!

But disguised do I want to see you, ye neighbours and fellowmen, and well-attired and vain and estimable, as "the good and just";--

And disguised will I myself sit amongst you--that I may mistake you and myself: for that is my last manly prudence. 174-175

He who would become a child must surmount even his youth. 178

Thou goest the way to thy greatness: here shall no one steal after thee! Thy foot itself hath effaced the path behind thee, and over it standeth written: Impossibility. 184

From the gateway, This Moment, there runneth a long eternal lane backwards: behind us lieth an eternity.

Must not whatever can run its course of all things, have already run along that lane? Must not whatever can happen of all things have already happened, resulted, and gone by?

And if everything have already existed, what thinkest thou, dwarf, of This Moment? Must not this gateway also--have already existed?

And are not all things closely bound together in such wise that This Moment draweth all coming things after it? Consequently--itself also?

For whatever can run its course of all things, also in this long lane outward--must it once more run!--

And this slow spider which creepeth in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and thou and I in this gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things--must we not all have already existed? 186

And must we not return and run in that other lane out before us, that long weird lane--must we not eternally return? 190-191

All things are baptised at the font of eternity, and beyond good and evil; good and evil themselves, however, are but fugitive shadows and damp afflictions and passing clouds.

Verily, it is a blessing and not a blasphemy when I teach that "above all things there standeth, the heaven of chance, the heaven of innocence, the heaven of hazard, the heaven of wantonness."

"Of Hazard"--that is the oldest nobility in the world; that gave I back to all things; I emancipated them from bondage under purpose.

This freedom and celestial serenity did I put like an azure bell above all things, when I taught that over them and through them, no "eternal will"--willeth.

This wantonness and folly did I put in place of that will, when I taught that "In everything there is one thing impossible--rationality!" 201

I pass through this people and keep mine eyes open: they do not forgive me for not envying their virtues.

They bite at me, because I say unto them that for small people, small virtues are necessary--and because it is hard for me to understand that small people are necessary! 203

Only he who is man enough, will--save the woman in woman. 205

So much kindness, so much weakness do I see. So much justice and pity, so much weakness.

Round, fair, and considerate are they to one another, as grains of sand are round, fair, and considerate to grains of sand.

Modestly to embrace a small happiness--that do they call "submission"! and at the same time they peer modestly after a new small happiness.

In their hearts they want simply one thing most of all: that no one hurt them. Thus do they anticipate every one's wishes and do well unto every one.

That, however, is cowardice, though it be called "virtue."

And when they chance to speak harshly, those small people, then do I hear therein only their hoarseness--every draught of air maketh them hoarse.

Shrewd indeed are they, their virtues have shrewd fingers. But they lack fists: their fingers do not know how to creep behind fists.

Virtue for them is what maketh modest and tame: therewith have they made the wolf a dog, and man himself man's best domestic animal.

"We set our chair in the midst"--so saith their smirking unto me--"and as far from dying gladiators as from satisfied swine."

That, however, is--mediocrity, though it be called moderation. 206

Those teachers of submission! Wherever there is aught puny, or sickly, or scabby, there do they creep like lice; and only my disgust preventeth me from cracking them. 207

Too tender, too yielding: so is your soil! But for a tree to become great, it seeketh to twine hard roots around hard rocks! 208

Do ever what ye will--but first be such as can will. 208

Love ever your neighbour as yourselves--but first be such as love themselves. 208

Out of love alone shall my contempt and my warning bird take wing; but not out of the swamp! 216

In indulging and pitying lay ever my greatest danger; and all human hubbub wisheth to be indulged and tolerated. 226

He who liveth amongst the good--pity teacheth him to lie. Pity maketh stifling air for all free souls. For the stupidity of the good is unfathomable. 227

Voluptuousness: to free hearts, a thing innocent and free, the garden-happiness of the earth, all the future's thanks overflow to the present.

Voluptuousness: only to the withered a sweet poison; to the lion-willed, however, the great cordial, and the reverently saved wine of wines.

Voluptuousness: the great symbolic happiness of a higher happiness and highest hope. For to many is marriage promised, and more than marriage.

To many that are more unknown to each other than man and woman:--and who hath fully understood have unknown to each other are man and woman!

Voluptuousness:--but I will have hedges around my thoughts, and even around my words, lest swine and libertine should break into my gardens! 230

Passion for power: the earthquake which breaketh and upbreaketh all that is rotten and hollow; the rolling, rumbling, punitive demolisher of whited sepulchres; the flashing interrogative-sign beside premature answers.

Passion for power: before whose glance man creepeth and croucheth and drudgeth, and becometh lower than the serpent and the swine:--until at last great contempt crieth out of him,--

Passion for power: the terrible teacher of great contempt, which preacheth to their face to cities and empires: "Away with thee!"--until a voice crieth out of themselves: "Away with me!"

Passion for power: which; however, mounteth alluringly even to the pure and lonesome, and up to self-satisfied elevations, glowing like a love that painteth purple felicities alluringly on earthly heavens.

Passion for power: but who would call it passion, when the height longeth to stoop for power! Verily, nothing sick or diseased is there in such longing and descending!

That the lonesome height may not for ever remain lonesome and self-sufficing: that the mountains may come to the valleys and the winds of the heights to the plains:

Oh, who could find the right prenomen and honouring name for such longing! "Bestowing virtue"--thus did Zarathustra once name the unnamable.

And then it happened also,--and verily, it happened for the first time!--that his word blessed selfishness, the wholesome, healthy selfishness, that springeth from the powerful soul:--

From the powerful soul, to which the high body appertaineth, the handsome, triumphing, refreshing body, around which everything becometh a mirror:

The pliant, persuasive body, the dancer, whose symbol and epitome is the self-enjoying soul. Of such bodies and souls the self-enjoyment calleth itself "virtue." 232

He who wisheth to become light, and be a bird, must love himself:--thus do I teach.

Not, to be sure, with the love of the sick and infected, for with them stinketh even self-love!

One must learn to love oneself--thus do I teach--with a wholesome and healthy love: that one may endure to be with oneself, and not go roving about.

Such roving about christeneth itself "brotherly love"; with these words hath there hitherto been the best lying and dissembling, and especially by those who have been burdensome to every one.

And verily, it is no commandment for to-day and to-morrow to learn to love oneself. Rather is it of all arts the finest, subtlest, last and patientest. 235

No one yet knoweth what is good and bad:--unless it be the creating one!

It is he however createth man's goal, and giveth to the earth its meaning and its future: he only effecteth it that aught is good and bad. 240

Man is a bridge and not a goal. 241

Be not considerate of thy neighbour! Man is something that must be surpassed. 243

He who cannot command himself shall obey. And many a one can command himself, but still sorely lacketh self-obedience! 243

He who is of the populace wisheth to live gratuitously; we others, however, to whom life hath given itself--we are ever considering what we can best give in return! 243

One should not wish to enjoy where one doth not contribute to the enjoyment. And one should not wish to enjoy! 243

"Thou shalt not rob! Thou shalt not slay!"--such precepts were once called holy; before them did one bow the knee and the head, and took off one's shoes.

But I ask you: Where have there ever been better robbers and slayers in the world than such holy precepts?

Is there not even in all life--robbing and slaying? And for such precepts to be called holy, was not truth itself thereby--slain? 246

Let it not be your honour henceforth whence ye come, but whither ye go! Your Will and your feet which seek to surpass you--let these be your new honour! 248

The best shall rule, the best also willeth to rule! And where the teaching is different, there--the best is lacking. 257

Thus would I have man and woman: fit for war, the one, fit for maternity, the other; both, however, fit for dancing with head and legs.

And lost be the day to us in which a measure hath not been danced. And false be every truth which hath not had laughter along with it! 257

The stupidity of the good is unfathomably wise.

The good must crucify him who deviseth his own virtue! That is the truth!

The second one, however, who discovered their country--the country, heart and soil of the good and just,--it was he who asked: "Whom do they hate most?"

The creator, hate they most, him who breaketh the tables and old values, the breaker,--him they call the law-breaker.

For the good--they cannot create; they are always the beginning of the end:--

They crucify him who writeth new values on new tables, they sacrifice unto themselves the future--they crucify the whole human future! 260

This new table, O my brethren, put I up over you: Become hard! 262

Everything goeth, everything returneth; eternally rolleth the wheel of existence. Everything dieth, everything blossometh forth again; eternally runneth on the year of existence.

Everything breaketh, everything is integrated anew; eternally buildeth itself the same house of existence. All things separate, all things again greet one another; eternally true to itself remaineth the ring of existence.

Every moment beginneth existence, around every "Here" rolleth the ball "There." The middle is everywhere. 266

For man his baddest is necessary for his best.

That all that is baddest is the best power, and the hardest stone for the highest creator; and that man must become better and badder:--267

The plexus of causes returneth in which I am intertwined,--it will again create me! I myself pertain to the causes of the eternal return.

I come again with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent--not to a new life, or a better life, or a similar life:

I come again eternally to this identical and selfsame life, in its greatest and its smallest, to teach again the eternal return of all things,--

To speak again the word of the great noontide of earth and man, to announce again to man the Superman. 270-271

"Ye higher men,"--so blinketh the populace--"there are no higher men, we are all equal; man is man, before God--we are all equal!"

Before God!--Now, however, this God hath died. Before the populace, however, we will not be equal. Ye higher men, away from the market-place! 351

Have a good distrust to-day, ye higher men, ye enheartened ones! Ye open-hearted ones! And keep your reasons secret! For this to-day is that of the populace.

What the populace once learned to believe without reasons, who could--refute it to them by means of reasons?

And on the market-place one convinceth with gestures. But reasons make the populace distrustful.

And when truth hath once triumphed there, then ask yourselves with good distrust: "What strong error hath fought for it?" 355

Unlearn, I pray you, this "for," ye creating ones: your very virtue wisheth you to have naught to do with "for" and "on account of" and "because." Against these false little words shall ye stop your ears.

"For one's neighbour," is the virtue only of the petty people: there it is said "like and like" and "hand washeth hand":--they have neither the right nor the power for your self-seeking! 356-357

What hath hitherto been the greatest sin here on earth? Was it not the word of him who said: "Woe unto them that laugh now!"

Did he himself find no cause for laughter on the earth? Then he sought badly. A child even findeth cause for it. 359-360

"The Eternal Recurrence"

He following excerpts from Nietzsche's notes relating to eternal recurrence are set down here merely as supplementary passages to "Thus Spake Zarathustra," in which book this doctrine of the eternally recurring irrationality of all things first made its appearance. Nietzsche's notations on this subject were undoubtedly written in the latter part of 1881, when the idea of Zarathustra first came to him. They were not published, however, until years later, and now form a section of Volume XVI of Nietzsche's complete works in English, along with "The Twilight of the Idols," "The Antichrist" and some explanatory notes on "Thus Spake Zarathustra." This is the only material in Nietzsche's writings which I have not put in chronological order, and my reason for placing these extracts here, and not between "The Dawn of Day" and "The Joyful Wisdom," is due to the fact that after conceiving this doctrine and making notes pertaining to it, Nietzsche put the idea aside and wrote "The Joyful Wisdom" in which this doctrine was not embodied. Not until "Thus Spake Zarathustra" appeared did he make use of this principle of recurrence, and inasmuch as this was the first published statement of it, I have placed that book first and have followed it with these explanatory notes.

Another section of Nietzsche's works also deals with eternal recurrence, namely: the last part of the second volume of "The Will to Power." But here too we find but fragmentary jottings which contain no material not found in the present quotations. It is true that Nietzsche intended to elaborate these notes, but even had he done so I doubt if this doctrine would have assumed a different aspect from the one it at present possesses, or would have become more closely allied with the main structure of his thought; for, even though it is not fully elucidated in its present form, it at least is complete in its conclusions.

In my introduction to the quotations from "Thus Spake Zarathustra" in the preceding chapter will be found a statement relating to this doctrine, in which I have endeavoured to point out just what influence it had on Nietzsche's philosophy, and to offer an explanation for its appearance in his thought.

A reading of the following notes is not at all necessary for an understanding of the Nietzschean ethic, and I have placed these passages here solely for the student to whom every phase of Nietzsche's philosophy is of interest.

EXCERPTS FROM "THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE"

The extent of universal energy is limited; it is not "infinite": we should beware of such excesses in our concepts! Consequently the number of states, changes, combinations, and evolutions of this energy, although it may be enormous and practically incalculable, is at any rate definite and not unlimited. The time, however, in which this universal energy works its changes is infinite--that is to say, energy remains eternally the same and is eternally active:--at this moment an infinity has already elapsed, that is to say, every possible evolution must already have taken place. Consequently the present process of evolution must be a repetition, as was also the one before it, as will also be the one which will follow. And so on forwards and backwards! Inasmuch as the entire state of all forces continually returns, everything has existed an infinite number of times. 237

Energy remains constant and does not require to be infinite. It is eternally active but it is no longer able eternally to create new forms, it must repeat itself: that is my conclusion. 238

The energy of the universe can only have a given number of possible qualities. 238

The assumption that the universe is an organism contradicts the very essence of the organic. 239

We are forced to conclude: (1) either that the universe began its activity at a given moment of time and will end in a similar fashion,--but the beginning of activity is absurd; if a state of equilibrium had been reached it: would have persisted to all eternity; (2) or there is no such thing as an endless number of them which continually recurs: activity is eternal, the number of the products and states of energy is limited. 239

The last physical state of energy which we can imagine must necessarily be the first also. The absorption of energy in latent energy must be the cause of the production of the most vital energy. For a highly positive state must follow a negative state. Space like matter is a subjective form, time is not. The notion of space first arose from the assumption that space could be empty. But there is no such thing as empty space. Everything is energy. 240

Anything like a static state of energy in general is impossible. If stability were possible it would already have been reached. 241

Physics supposes that energy may be divided up: but every one of its possibilities must first be adjusted to reality. There can therefore be no question of dividing energy into equal parts; in every one of its states it manifests a certain quality, and qualities cannot be subdivided: hence a state of equilibrium in energy is impossible. 241

If equilibrium were possible it would already have been reached.--And if this momentary state has already existed then that which bore it and the previous one also would likewise have existed and so on backwards,--and from this it follows that it has already existed not only twice but three times,--just as it will exist again not only twice but three times,--in fact an infinite number of times backwards and forwards. That is to say, the whole process of Becoming consists of a repetition of a definite number of precisely similar states. 242

Imaginic matter, even though in most cases it may once have been organic, can have stored up no experience as it is always without a past! If the reverse were the case a repetition would be impossible--for then matter would for ever be producing new qualities with new pasts. 247

Let us guard against believing that the universe has a tendency to attain to certain forms, or that it aims at becoming more beautiful, more perfect, more complicated! All that is anthropomorphism! 248

Our whole world consists of the ashes of an incalculable number of living creatures: and even if living matter is ever so little compared with the whole, everything has already been transformed into life once before and thus the process goes on. If we grant eternal time we must assume the eternal change of matter. 249

The world of energy suffers no diminution: otherwise with eternal time it would have grown weak and finally have perished altogether. The world of energy suffers no stationary state, otherwise this would already have been reached, and the clock of the universe would be at a standstill. The world of energy does not therefore reach a state of equilibrium; for no instant in its career has it had rest; its energy and its movement have been the same for all time. Whatever state this world could have reached must ere now have been attained, and not only once but an incalculable number of times. 249

My doctrine is: Live so that thou mayest desire to live again,--that is thy duty,--for in any case thou wilt live again! He unto whom striving is the greatest happiness, let him strive; he unto whom peace is the greatest happiness, let him rest; he unto whom subordination, following, obedience, is the greatest happiness, let him obey. 251

The mightiest of all thoughts absorbs a good deal, of energy which formerly stood at the disposal of other aspirations, and in this way it exercises a modifying influence; it creates new laws of motion in energy, though no new energy. 252

Ye fancy that ye will have a long rest ere your second birth takes place,--but do not deceive yourselves! 'Twixt your last moment of consciousness and the first ray of the dawn of your new life no time will elapse,--as a flash of lightning will the space go by, even though living creatures think it is millions of years.... 253

Are ye now prepared? Ye must have experienced every form of scepticism and ye must have wallowed with voluptuousness in ice-cold baths,--otherwise ye have no right to this thought; I wish to protect myself against those who gush over anything! I would defend my doctrine in advance. It must be the religion of the freest, most cheerful and most sublime souls, a delightful pastureland somewhere between golden ice and a pure heaven! 256

VII

"Beyond Good and Evil"

Double purpose animated Nietzsche in his writing of "Beyond Good and Evil" ("Jenseits von Gut und Böse"). It is at once an explanation and an elucidation of "Thus Spake Zarathustra," and a preparatory book for his greatest and most important work, "The Will to Power." In it Nietzsche attempts to define the relative terms of "good" and "evil," and to draw a line of distinction between immorality and unmorality. He saw the inconsistencies evolved in the attempt to harmonise an ancient moral code with the needs of modern life, and recognised the compromises which were constantly being made between moral theory and social practice. His object was to establish a relationship between morality and necessity, and to formulate a workable basis for human conduct. Consequently "Beyond Good and Evil" is one of his most important contributions to a new system of ethics, and touches on many of the deepest principles of his philosophy. As it stands, it is by no means a complete expression of Nietzsche's doctrines, but it is sufficiently profound and suggestive to be of valuable service in an understanding of his later works. The book was begun in the summer of 1885 and finished the following winter. Again there was difficulty with publishers, and finally the book was issued at the author's own expense in the autumn of 1886.

Nietzsche opens "Beyond Good and Evil" with a long chapter headed "Prejudices of Philosophers," in which he outlines the course to be taken by his dialectic. The exposition is accomplished by two methods: first, by an analysis and a refutation of the systems of thinking made use of by antecedent doctrinaires, and secondly, by defining the hypotheses on which his own philosophy is built. This chapter is a most important one, setting forth, as it does, the rationale of his doctrine of the will to power. It has been impossible to make extracts of any unified sequence from this chapter because of its intricate and compact reasoning, and the student would do well to read it in its entirety. It establishes Nietzsche's philosophic position and presents a closely knit explanation of the course pursued in the following chapters. The relativity of all truth--the hypothesis so often assumed in his previous work--Nietzsche here defends by analogy and argument. Using other leading forms of philosophy as a ground for exploration, he questions the absolutism of truth and shows wherein lies the difficulty of a final definition. Here we become conscious of that plasticity of mind which was the dominating quality of his thinking. It is not, however, that form of plasticity which on inspection resolves itself into amorphic and unstable reasoning, but a logical, almost scientific, method of valuing. The mercurial habits of the metaphysicians who deny absolutism are nowhere discernible in Nietzsche's thought. His mind is definite without being static. The basis of his argumentation is what one might call floating. It rises and falls with the human tide of causation; yet the structure built upon it remains at all times upright and unchanged.

Nietzsche points out that the numerous "logical" conclusions of philosophers have been for the most part a priori propositions, the results of prejudices or desires, and that the syllogistic structures reared to them came as explanations and defences, rather than as dialectic preambles. In their adopting a hypothetical truth as a premise, he sees only the advocacy for a point of view, arguing that in order to erect a system of logic the initial thesis must be proved. Therefore he questions the fundamental worth of certainty as opposed to uncertainty, and of truth as opposed to falsity, thus striking at the very foundations reared by those philosophers who have assumed, without substantiation, that only certainty and truth are valuable. Nietzsche calls these absolutists astute defenders of prejudices, and characterises the verbalistic prestidigitation of Kant as a highly developed form of prejudice-defending. Spinoza, with his mathematical system of reasoning, likewise falls in the category of those thinkers who first assume conclusions and then prepare explanations for them by a process of inverted reasoning. Nietzsche proceeds to pose the instinctive functions against conscious thinking. He asserts that the channels taken by thought are defined by the thinker's nature, and that even logic is influenced by physiological considerations. The whole fabric of philosophic thought is held up to the light of immediate necessity.

Going further, he inquires into the "impulse to knowledge." He finds that a specific purpose has always been the actuating force of any philosophy, and that consequently philosophy, even in its most abstract form, has had a residuum of autobiography in it. In fine, that philosophy, far from being a search, has been an aim toward a definite preconceived result. The moral or ethical impulse, being always imperious, has not infrequently resulted in philosophising, and in all such cases knowledge has been used as an instrument. Thus knowledge which led to a philosophical conclusion has been the outgrowth of a personal instinct. In those cases where an impersonal "impulse to knowledge" may have existed, it has led, not into philosophical channels, but into practical and often commercial activities. The scholar has ever remained personal in his quest for philosophical formulas. In Kant's "Table of Categories," wherein that philosopher claimed to have found the faculty of synthetic judgment a priori, Nietzsche finds only a circle of reasoning which begins and ends in personal instinct. And in Kant's discovery of a new moral faculty, Nietzsche sees only sophistical invention, and accounts for its widespread acceptance by the moral state of the Germans at that period. Ignoring the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori, Nietzsche advances the query as to their necessity, and lays stress on the impracticability of truth without belief. The inherent falsity or truth of a proposition has no bearing on philosophical doctrines so long as a contrary belief is present, a belief such as we exert toward the illusions of the world of reality when we make practical use of that world's perspective.

The schemes of personal philosophy, such, for instance, as we find in Schopenhauer, are dealt with by Nietzsche in a single paragraph: "When I analyse the process that is expressed in the sentence, 'I think,' I find a whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative proof of which would be difficult, perhaps impossible: for instance, that it is I who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an 'ego,' and finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking--that I know what thinking is. For if I had not already decided within myself what it is, by what standard could I determine whether that which is just happening is not perhaps 'willing' or 'feeling'? In short, the assertion 'I think,' assumes that I compare my state at the present moment with other states of myself which I know, in order to determine what it is: on account of this retrospective connection with further 'knowledge,' it has at any rate no immediate certainty for me." Thus the smug materialistic philosopher finds himself necessitated to fall back on purely metaphysical explanations for answers to the questions arising out of his definition of truth.

Locke falls under a critical survey in this chapter. In answer to this thinker's theory regarding the origin of ideas, Nietzsche names the great cycles of philosophical systems and calls attention to the similarity of processes in such cycles. Furthermore, he shows that the foundations of all previous philosophies are discoverable in the new styles of contemporaneous thought. And in those national schools of philosophy conceived in languages which stem from the same origin, he finds an undeniable resemblance. All of which leads to a conclusion incompatible with Locke's theory. Nietzsche attacks the conclusions of the physicists, denying them any place in philosophy because their research consists solely in interpretations of natural laws in accordance with their own prejudices and beliefs. The theories which might be deduced from natural phenomena are not discoverable in their doctrines; their activities have consisted in twisting natural events to suit preconceived valuations.

Finally Nietzsche inquires into the habits and practices of psychologists. Not even among these workers does he find a basis for philosophy. Psychology, he argues, has been guided, not by a detached and lofty desire to ascertain truth in its relation to the human mind, but by prejudices and fears grounded in moral considerations. He finds a constant desire on the part of experimenters to account for "good" impulses as distinguished from "bad" ones. And in this desire lies the superimposing of moral prejudices on a science which, more than all others, deals with problems farthest removed from moral influences. These prejudices in psychology, as well as in all branches of philosophy, are the obstacles which stand in the way of any deep penetration into the motives beneath human conduct. Nietzsche, in his analyses and criticisms, is not solely destructive: he is subterraneously constructing his own philosophical system founded on the will to power. This phrase is used many times in the careful research of the first chapter. As the book proceeds, this doctrine develops.

Nietzsche's best definition of what he calls the "free spirit," namely: the thinking man, the intellectual aristocrat, the philosopher and ruler, is contained in the twenty-six pages of the second chapter of "Beyond Good and Evil." In a series of paragraphs--longer than is Nietzsche's wont--the leading characteristics of this superior man are described. The "free spirit," however, must not be confused with the superman. The former is the "bridge" which the present-day man must cross in the process of surpassing himself. In the delineation and analysis of him, as presented to us here, we can glimpse his most salient mental features. Heretofore, as in "Thus Spake Zarathustra," he has been but partially and provisionally defined. Now his instincts and desires, his habits and activities are outlined. Furthermore, we are given an explanation of his relation to the inferior man and to the organisms of his environment. The chapter is an important one, for at many points it is a subtle elucidation of many of Nietzsche's dominant philosophic principles. By inference, the differences of class distinction are strictly drawn. The slave-morality (sklavmoral) and the master-morality (herrenmoral), though as yet undefined, are balanced against each other; and the deportmental standards of the masters and slaves are defined by way of differentiating between these two opposing human factions. While the serving class is constantly manifesting its need of a guiding dogma, the ruling class is constantly approaching the state wherein the arbitrary moral mandates are denied. Nietzsche sees a new order of philosophers appearing--men who will stand beyond good and evil, who will be not only free spirits, "but something more, higher, greater, and fundamentally different." In describing these men of the future, of which the present free men are the heralds and forerunners, Nietzsche establishes an individualistic ideal which he develops fully in later chapters.

A keen and far-reaching analysis of the various aspects assumed by religious faith constitutes a third section of "Beyond Good and Evil." Though touching upon various influences of Christianity, this section is more general in its religious scope than even "The Antichrist," many indications of which are to be found here. This chapter has to do with the numerous inner experiences of man, which are directly or indirectly attributable to religious doctrines. The origin of the instinct for faith itself is sought, and the results of this faith are balanced against the needs of the individuals and of the race. The relation between religious ecstasy and sensuality; the attempt on the part of religious practitioners to arrive at a negation of the will; the transition from religious gratitude to fear; the psychology at the bottom of saint-worship;--to problems such as these Nietzsche devotes his energies in his inquiry of the religious mood. The geographical considerations which enter into the character and intensity of religious faith form an important basis for study; and the differences between Comte's sociology and Sainte-Beuve's anti-Jesuit utterances are explained from a standpoint of national influences. Nietzsche examines the many phases of atheism and the principal anti-Christian tendencies of all philosophy since Descartes. There is an illuminating exposition of the important stages in religious cruelty and of the motives underlying the various forms of religious sacrifices. Again we run upon the doctrine of eternal recurrence, but here, as elsewhere, it may be regarded, not as a basic element in Nietzsche's philosophical scheme, but as a by-product of his thought. Nietzsche emphasises the necessity of idleness in all religious lives, and shows how the adherence to the religious mood works against the activities, both of mind and of body, which make for the highest efficiency.

A very important phase of Nietzsche's teaching is contained in this criticism of the religious life. The detractors of the Nietzschean doctrine, almost without exception, base their judgments on the assumption that the universal acceptation of his theories would result in social chaos. As I have pointed out before, Nietzsche desired no such general adoption of his beliefs. In his bitterest diatribes against Christianity, his object was not to shake the faith of the great majority of mankind in their idols. He sought merely to free the strong men from the restrictions of a religion which fitted the needs of only the weaker members of society. He neither hoped nor desired to wean the mass of humanity from Christianity or any similar dogmatic comfort. On the contrary, he denounced those superficial atheists who endeavoured to weaken the foundations of religion. He saw the positive necessity of such religions as a basis for his slave morality, and in the present chapter he exhorts the rulers to preserve the religious faith of the serving classes, and to use it as a means of government--as an instrument in the work of disciplining and educating. In paragraph 61 he says: "The selecting and disciplining influence--destructive as well as creative and fashioning--which can be exercised by means of religion is manifold and varied, according to the sort of people placed under its spell and protection." Not only is this an expression of the utilitarian value of religious formulas, but a definite voicing of one of the main factors in his philosophy. His entire system of ethics is built on the complete disseverance of the dominating class and the serving class; and his doctrine of "beyond good and evil" should be considered only as it pertains to the superior man. To apply it to all classes would be to reduce Nietzsche's whole system of ethics to impracticability, and therefore to an absurdity.

Passing from a consideration of the religious mood, Nietzsche enters a broader sphere of ethical research, and endeavours to trace the history and development of morals. He accuses the philosophers of having avoided the real problem of morality, namely: the testing of the faith and motives which lie beneath moral beliefs. This is the task he sets for himself, and in his chapter, "The Natural History of Morals," he makes an examination of moral origins--an examination which is extended into an exhaustive treatise in "The Genealogy of Morals." However, his dissection here is carried out on a broader and far more general scale than in his previous books, such as "Human, All-Too-Human" and "The Dawn of Day." Heretofore he had confined himself to codes and systems, to acts of morality and immorality, to judgments of conducts. In "Beyond Good and Evil" he treats of moral prejudices as forces working hand in hand with human progress. In addition, there is a definite attitude of constructive thinking here which is absent from his earlier work. He outlines the course to be taken by the men of the future, and points to the results which have accrued from the moralities of modern nations. He offers the will to power in place of the older "will to belief," and characterises the foundations of acceptance for all moral codes as "fictions" and "premature hypotheses." He defines the racial ideals which have grown up out of moral influences, and, applying them to the needs of the present day, finds them inadequate and dangerous. The conclusion to which his observations and analyses point is that, unless the rulers of the race take a stand beyond the outposts of good and evil and govern on a basis of expediency divorced from all moral influences, the individual is in constant danger of being lowered to the level of the gregarious conscience.

In the chapter, "We Scholars," Nietzsche continues his definition of the philosopher, whom he holds to be the highest type of man. Besides being a mere description of the intellectual traits of this "free spirit," the chapter is also an exposition of the shortcomings of those modern men who pose as philosophers. In the path of these new thinkers Nietzsche sees many difficulties both from within and from without, and points out methods whereby these obstacles may be overcome. Also the man of science and the man of genius are analyzed and weighed as to their relative importance in the community. In fact, we have here Nietzsche's most concise and complete definition of the individuals upon whom rests the burden of progress. These valuations of the intellectual leaders are important to the student, for by one's understanding them, along with the reasons for such valuations, a comprehension of the ensuing volumes is facilitated. Nietzsche hereby establishes the qualities of those entitled to the master-morality code; and, by thus drawing the line of demarcation in humanity, he defines at the same time that class whose constitutions and predispositions demand the slave-morality. In addition, he affixes, according to his philosophical formula, a scale of values to such mental attributes as objectivity, power to will, scepticism, positivity and constraint.

Important material touching on many of the fundamental points of Nietzsche's philosophy is embodied in the chapter entitled "Our Virtues." The more general inquiries into conduct and the research along the broader lines of ethics are supplanted by inquiries into specific moral attributes. The current virtues are questioned, and their historical significance is determined. The value of such virtues is tested in their relation to different types of men. Sacrifice, sympathy, brotherly love, service, loyalty, altruism and similar ideals of conduct are examined, and the results of such virtues are shown to be incompatible with the demands of modern social intercourse. Nietzsche poses against these virtues the sterner and more rigid forms of conduct, pointing out wherein they meet with the present requirements of human progress. The chapter is a preparation for his establishment of a new morality and also an explanation of the dual ethical code which is one of the main pillars in his philosophical structure. Before presenting his precept of a dual morality, Nietzsche endeavours to determine woman's place in the political and social scheme, and points out the necessity, not only of individual feminine functioning, but of the preservation of a distinct polarity in sexual relationship.

In the final chapter many of Nietzsche's philosophical ideas take definite shape. The doctrine of slave-morality and master-morality, prepared for and partially defined in preceding chapters, is here directly set forth, and those virtues and attitudes which constitute the "nobility" of the master class are specifically defined. Nietzsche designates the duty of his aristocracy, and segregates the human attributes according to the rank of individuals. The Dionysian ideal, which underlies all the books that follow "Beyond Good and Evil," receives its first direct exposition and application. The hardier human traits such as egotism, cruelty, arrogance, retaliation and appropriation are given ascendency over the softer virtues such as sympathy, charity, forgiveness, loyalty and humility, and are pronounced necessary constituents in the moral code of a natural aristocracy. At this point is begun the transvaluation of values which was to have been completed in "The Will to Power." The student should read carefully this chapter, for it is an introduction as well as an explanation for what follows, and was written with that purpose in view.

EXCERPTS FROM "BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL"

To recognise untruth as a condition of life: that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil. 9

Psychologists should bethink themselves before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength--life itself is Will to Power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results thereof. 20

It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is the privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the best right, but without being obliged to do so, proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. 43

The virtues of the common man would perhaps mean vice and weakness in a philosopher; it might be possible for a highly developed man, supposing him to degenerate and go to ruin, to acquire qualities thereby alone, for the sake of which he would have to be honoured as a saint in the lower world into which he had sunk. 44

Books for the general reader are always ill-smelling books, the odour of paltry people clings to them. Where the populace eat and drink, and even where they reverence, it is accustomed to stink. One should not go into churches if one wishes to breathe pure air. 44

"Will" can naturally only operate on "will"--and not on "matter" (not on "nerves," for instance): in short, the hypothesis must be hazarded, whether will does not operate on will wherever "effects" are recognised--and whether all mechanical action, inasmuch as a power operates therein, is not just the power of will, the effect of will. Granted, finally, that we succeed in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one fundamental form of will--namely, the Will to Power, as my thesis puts it; granted that all organic functions could be traced back to this Will to Power, and that the solution of the problem of generation and nutrition--it is one problem--could also be found therein: one would thus have acquired the right to define all active force unequivocally as Will to Power. The world seen from within, the world defined and designated according to its "intelligible character"--it would simply be "Will to Power," and nothing else. 52

Happiness and virtue are no arguments. It is willingly forgotten, however, even on the part of thoughtful minds, that to make unhappy and to make bad are just as little counter-arguments. A thing could be true, although it were in the highest degree injurious and dangerous; indeed, the fundamental constitution of existence might be such that one succumbed by a full knowledge of it--so that the strength of a mind might be measured by the amount of "truth" it could endure--or to speak more plainly, by the extent to which it required truth attenuated, veiled, sweetened, damped, and falsified. 53-54

Everything that is profound loves the mask; the profoundest things have a hatred even of figure and likeness. Should not the contrary only be the right disguise for the shame of a God to go about in? 54-55

One must renounce the bad taste of wishing to agree with many people. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbour takes it into his mouth. And how could there be a "common good." The expression contradicts itself; that which can be common is always of small value. In the end things must be as they are and have always been--the great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for the rare. 57-58

In every country of Europe, and the same in America, there is at present ... a very narrow, prepossessed, enchained class of spirits.... Briefly and regrettably, they belong to the levellers, these wrongly named "free spirits"--as glib-tongued and scribe-fingered slaves of the democratic taste and its "modern ideas"; all of them men without solitude, without personal solitude, blunt honest fellows to whom neither courage nor honourable conduct ought to be denied; only, they are not free, and are ludicrously superficial, especially in their innate partiality for seeing the cause of almost all human misery and failure in the old forms in which society has hitherto existed--a notion which happily inverts the truth entirely. 53-59

We believe that severity, violence, slavery, danger in the street and in the heart, secrecy, stoicism, tempter's art and revelry of every kind,--that everything wicked, terrible, tyrannical, predatory, and serpentine in man, serves as well for the elevation of the human species as its opposite.... 59

The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice: the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit; it is at the same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation. 65

The mightiest men have hitherto always bowed reverently before the saint, as the enigma of self-subjugation and utter voluntary privation.--Why did they thus bow? They divined in him--and as it were behind the questionableness of his frail and wretched appearance--the superior force which wished to test itself by such a subjugation; the strength and love of power, and knew how to honour it: they honoured something in themselves when they honoured the saint.... The mighty ones of the world learned to have a new fear before him, they divined a new power, a strange, still unconquered enemy:--it was the "Will to Power" which obliged them to halt before the saint. 70-71

Perhaps the most solemn conceptions that have caused the most fighting and suffering, the conceptions "God" and "sin," will one day seem to us of no more importance than a child's plaything or a child's pain seems to an old man.... 75

To love mankind for God's sake--this has so far been the noblest and remotest sentiment to which mankind has attained. 79

For those who are strong and independent, destined and trained to command, in whom the judgment and skill of a ruling race is incorporated, religion is an additional means for overcoming, betraying and surrendering to the former the conscience of the latter, their inmost heart, which would fain escape obedience. 80

Asceticism and Puritanism are almost indispensable means of educating and ennobling a race which seeks to rise above its hereditary baseness and work itself upward to future supremacy. And finally, to ordinary men, to the majority of the people, who exist for service and general utility, and are only so far entitled to exist, religion gives invaluable contentedness with their lot and condition, peace of heart, ennoblement of obedience, additional social happiness and sympathy, with something of transfiguration and embellishment, something of justification of all the commonplaceness, all the meanness, all the semi-animal poverty of their souls. 81

"Knowledge for its own sake"--that is the last snare laid by morality: we are thereby completely entangled in morals once more. 85

He who attains his ideal, precisely thereby surpasses it. 86

Sympathy for all--would be harshness and tyranny for thee, my good neighbour! 88

To be ashamed of one's immorality is a step on the ladder at the end of which one is ashamed also of one's morality. 89

A discerning one might easily regard himself at present as the animalisation of God. 90

Not their love of humanity, but the impotence of their love, prevents the Christians of to-day--burning us. 91

There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena. 91

The criminal is often enough not equal to his deed: he extenuates and maligns it. 91

The great epochs of our life are at the points when we gain courage to rebaptise our badness as the best in us. 92

It is a curious thing that God learned Greek when he wished to turn author--and that he did not learn it better. 93

Even concubinage has been corrupted--by marriage. 93

A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at six or seven great men--Yes, and then to get round them. 94

From the senses originate all trustworthiness, all good conscience, all evidence of truth. 95

Our vanity would like what we do best to pass precisely for what is most difficult to us.--Concerning the origin of many systems of morals. 96

When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is generally something wrong with her sexual nature. Barrenness itself conduces to a certain virility of taste; man, indeed, if I may say so, is "the barren animal." 96

That which an age considers evil is usually an unseasonable echo of what was formerly considered good--the atavism of an old ideal. 97

What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil. 98

Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology. 98

The Jews---a people "born for slavery," as Tacitus and the whole ancient world say of them; "the chosen people among the nations," as they themselves say and believe--the Jews performed the miracle of the inversion of valuations, by means of which life on earth obtained a new and dangerous charm for a couple of millenniums. Their prophets fused into one the expressions "rich," "godless," "wicked," "violent," "sensual," and for the first time coined the word "world" as a term of reproach. In this inversion of valuations (in which is also included the use of the word "poor" as synonymous with "saint" and "friend") the significance of the Jewish people is to be found; it is with them that the slave-insurrection in morals commences. 117

The beast of prey and the man of prey (for instance, Cæsar Borgia) are fundamentally misunderstood, "nature" is misunderstood, so long as one seeks a "morbidness" in the constitution of these healthiest of all tropical monsters and growths.... 118

All the systems of morals which address themselves to individuals with a view to their "happiness," as it is called--what else are they but suggestions for behaviour adapted to the degree of danger from themselves in which the individuals live; recipes for their passions, their good and bad propensities in so far as such have the Will to Power and would like to play the master; small and great expediencies and elaborations, permeated with the musty odour of old family medicines and old-wife wisdom; all of them grotesque and absurd in their form--because they address themselves to "all," because they generalise where generalisation is not authorised; all of them speaking unconditionally, and taking themselves unconditionally; all of them flavoured not merely with one grain of salt, but rather endurable only, and sometimes even seductive, when they are over-spiced and begin to smell dangerously, especially of "the other world." 118-119

In view ... of the fact that obedience has been most practised and fostered among mankind hitherto, one may reasonably suppose that, generally speaking, the need thereof is now innate in every one, as a kind of formal conscience.... 120

The history of the influence of Napoleon is almost the history of the higher happiness to which the entire century has attained in its worthiest individuals and periods. 121

As long as the utility which determines moral estimates is only gregarious utility, as long as the preservation of the community is only kept in view, and the immoral is sought precisely and exclusively in what seems dangerous to the maintenance of the community, there can be no "morality of love to one's neighbour." 123

"Love of our neighbour," is always a secondary matter, partly conventional and arbitrarily manifested in relation to our fear of our neighbour. 123

Everything that elevates the individual above the herd, and is a source of fear to the neighbour, is henceforth called evil; the tolerant, unassuming, self-adapting, self-equalising disposition, the mediocrity of desires, attains to moral distinction and honour. 125

The democratic movement is the inheritance of the Christian movement. 127

We, who regard the democratic movement, not only as a degenerating form of political organisation, but as equivalent to a degenerating, a waning type of man, as involving his mediocrising and depreciation: where have we to fix our hopes? In new philosophers--there is no other alternative: in minds strong and original enough to initiate opposite estimates of value, to transvalue and invert "eternal valuations"; in forerunners, in men of the future, who in the present shall fix the constraints and fasten the knots which will compel millenniums to take new paths. To teach men the future of humanity as his will, as depending on human will, and to make preparation for vast hazardous enterprises and collective attempts in rearing and educating, in order thereby to put an end to the frightful rule of folly and chance which has hitherto gone by the name of "history" (the folly of the "greatest number" is only its last form)--for that purpose a new type of philosophers and commanders will some time or other be needed, at the very idea of which everything that has existed in the way of occult, terrible, and benevolent beings might look pale and dwarfed. 128-129

The universal degeneracy of mankind to the level of the "man of the future"--as idealised by the socialistic fools and shallow-pates--this degeneracy and dwarfing of man to an absolutely gregarious animal (or as they call it, to a man of "free society"), this brutalising of man into a pigmy with equal rights and claims, is undoubtedly possible! He who has thought out this possibility to its ultimate conclusion knows another loathing unknown to the rest of mankind--and perhaps also a new mission! 130-131

Supposing ... that in the picture of the philosophers of the future, some trait suggests the question whether they must not perhaps be sceptics in the last-mentioned sense, something in them would only be designated thereby--and not they themselves. With equal right they might call themselves critics; and assuredly they will be men of experiments.... They will be sterner (and perhaps not always towards themselves only) ... they will not deal with the "truth" in order that it may "please" them, or "elevate" and "inspire" them--they will rather have little faith in "truth" bringing with it such revels for the feelings. They will smile, those rigorous spirits, when any one says in their presence: "that thought elevates me, why should it not be true?" or; "that artist enlarges me, why should he not be great?" Perhaps they will not only have a smile, but a genuine disgust for all that is thus rapturous, idealistic, feminine and hermaphroditic; and if any one could look into their inmost heart, he would not easily find therein the intention to reconcile "Christian sentiments" with "antique taste," or even with "modern parliamentarism" (the kind of reconciliation necessarily found even amongst philosophers in our very uncertain and consequently very conciliatory century). Critical discipline, and every habit that conduces to purity and rigour in intellectual matters, will not only be demanded from themselves by these philosophers of the future; they may even make a display thereof as their special adornment--nevertheless they will not want to be called critics on that account. It will seem to them no small indignity to philosophy to have it decreed, as is so welcome nowadays, that "philosophy itself is criticism and critical science--and nothing else whatever!" 149-151

The real philosophers ... are commanders and law-givers; they say: "Thus shall it be." They determine first the Whither and the Why of mankind, and thereby set aside the previous labour of all philosophical workers, and all subjugators of the past--they grasp at the future with a creative hand, and whatever is and was, becomes for them thereby a means, an instrument, and a hammer. Their "knowing" is creating, their creating is a law-giving, their will to truth is--Will to Tower.... 52

At present ... when throughout Europe the herding animal alone attains to honours, and dispenses honours, when "equality of right" can too readily be transformed into equality in wrong: I mean to say into general war against everything rare, strange, and privileged, against the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, the creative plenipotence and lordliness--at present it belongs to the conception of "greatness" to be noble, to wish to be apart, to be capable of being different, to stand alone, to have to live by personal initiative; and the philosopher will betray something of his own ideal when he asserts: "He shall be the greatest who can be the most solitary, the most concealed, the most divergent, the man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, and of superabundance of will; precisely this shall be called greatness: as diversified as can be entire, as ample as can be full." 154-155

Morality as attitude is opposed to our taste nowadays. This is also an advance, as it was an advance in our fathers that religion as an attitude finally became opposed to their taste.... 161

The practice of judging and condemning morally is the favourite revenge of the intellectually shallow on those who are less so.... 162

Whoever has really offered sacrifice knows that he wanted and obtained something for it--perhaps something from himself for something from himself; that he relinquished here in order to have more there, perhaps in general to be more, or even feel himself "more." 164

Wherever sympathy (fellow-suffering) is preached nowadays ... let the psychologist have his ears open: through all the vanity, through all the noise which is natural to these preachers (as to all preachers), he will hear a hoarse, groaning, genuine note of self-contempt. 65

We are prepared as no other age has ever been for a carnival in the grand style, for the most spiritual festival-laughter and arrogance, for the transcendental height of supreme folly and Aristophanic ridicule of the world. Perhaps we are still discovering the domain of our invention just here, the domain where even we can still be original, probably as parodists of the world's history and as God's Merry-Andrews,--perhaps, though nothing else of the present have a future, our laughter itself may have a future! 168

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering--know ye not that it is only this discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity hitherto? 171

It is desirable that as few people as possible should reflect upon morals, and consequently it is very desirable that morals should not some day become interesting! 174

Not one of those ponderous, conscience-stricken herding-animals (who undertake to advocate the cause of egoism as conducive to the general welfare) wants to have any knowledge or inkling of the facts that the "general welfare" is no ideal, no goal, no notion that can be at all grasped, but is only a nostrum,--that what is fair to one may not at all be fair to another, that the requirement of one morality for all is really a detriment to higher men, in short, that there is a distinction of rank between man and man, and consequently between morality and morality. 175

That which constitutes the painful delight of tragedy is cruelty; that which operates agreeably in so-called tragic sympathy, and at the basis even of everything sublime, up to the highest and most delicate thrills of metaphysics, obtains its sweetness solely from the intermingled ingredient of cruelty. 177

Enlightenment hitherto has fortunately been men's affair, men's gift--we remained therewith "among ourselves"; and in the end, in view of all that women write about "woman," we may well have considerable doubt as to whether woman really desires enlightenment about herself--and can desire it. If woman does not thereby seek a new ornament for herself--I believe ornamentation belongs to the eternally feminine?--why, then, she wishes to make herself feared; perhaps she thereby wishes to get the mastery. But she does not want truth--what does woman care for truth. From the very first nothing is more foreign, more repugnant, or more hostile to woman than truth--her great art is falsehood, her chief concern is appearance and beauty. 183

It betrays corruption of the instincts--apart from the fact that it betrays bad taste--when a woman refers to Madame Roland, or Madame de Staël, or Monsieur George Sand, as though something were proved thereby in favour of "woman as she is." Among men, these are the three comical women as they are--nothing more--and just the best involuntary counter-arguments against feminine emancipation and autonomy. 184

Stupidity in the kitchen; woman as cook; the terrible thoughtlessness with which the feeding of the family and the master of the house is managed. Woman does not understand what food means, and she insists on being cook. If woman had been a thinking creature, she should certainly, as cook for thousands of years, have discovered the most important physiological facts, and should likewise have got possession of the healing art. Through bad female cooks--through the entire lack of reason in the kitchen--the development of mankind has been longest retarded and most interfered with. 184-185

To be mistaken in the fundamental problem of "man and woman," to deny here the profoundest antagonism and the necessity for an eternally hostile tension, to dream here perhaps of equal rights, equal training, equal claims and obligations: that is a typical sign of shallow-mindedness; and a thinker who has proved himself shallow at this dangerous spot--shallow in instinct--may generally be regarded as suspicious, nay more, as betrayed, as discovered: he will probably prove too "short" for all fundamental questions of life, future as well as present, and will be unable to descend into any of the depths. On the other hand, a man who has depth of spirit as well as of desires, and has also the depth of benevolence which is capable of severity and harshness, and easily confounded with them, can only think of woman as Orientals do: he must conceive of her as a possession, as confinable property, as a being predestined for service and accomplishing her mission therein.... 186-187

The weaker sex has in no previous age been treated with so much respect by men as at present--this belongs to the tendency and fundamental taste of democracy, in the same way as disrespectfulness to old age--what wonder is it that abuse should be immediately made of this respect? They want more, they learn to make claims, the tribute of respect is at last felt to be well-nigh galling.... 187

Wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over the military and aristocratic spirit, woman strives for the economic and legal independence of a clerk: "woman as clerkess" is inscribed on the portal of the modern society which is in course of formation. While she thus appropriates new rights, aspires to be "master," and inscribes "progress" of woman on her flags and banners, the very opposite realises itself with terrible obviousness: woman retrogrades. Since the French Revolution the influence of woman in Europe has declined in proportion as she has increased her rights and claims; and the "emancipation of woman," in so far as it is desired and demanded by women themselves (and not only by masculine shallow-pates), thus proves to be a remarkable symptom of the increased weakening and deadening of the most womanly instincts. There is stupidity in this movement, an almost masculine stupidity, of which a well-reared woman--who is always a sensible woman--might be heartily ashamed. 187-188

Every elevation of the type "man," has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society--and so will it always be--a society believing in a long scale of gradations of rank and differences of worth among human beings, and requiring slavery in some form or other. 223

The essential thing ... in a good and healthy aristocracy is that it should not regard itself as a function either of the kingship or the commonwealth, but as the significance and highest justification thereof--that it should therefore accept with a good conscience the sacrifice of a legion of individuals, who, for its sake, must be suppressed and reduced to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments. Its fundamental belief must be precisely that society is not allowed to exist for its own sake, but only as a foundation and scaffolding, by means of which a select class of beings may be able to elevate themselves to their higher duties, and in general to a higher existence.... 225

Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation.... 226

People now rave everywhere, even under the guise of science, about coming conditions of society in which "the exploiting character" is to be absent:--that sounds to my ears as if they promised to invent a mode of life which should refrain from all organic functions. "Exploitation" does not belong to a depraved, or imperfect and primitive society; it belongs to the nature of the living being as a primary organic function; it is a consequence of the intrinsic Will to Power, which is precisely the Will to Life. 226

In a tour through the many finer and coarser moralities which have hitherto prevailed or still prevail on the earth, I found certain traits recurring regularly together and connected with one another, until finally two primary types revealed themselves to me, and a radical distinction was brought to light. There is master-morality and slave-morality;--I would at once add, however, that in all higher and mixed civilisations, there are also attempts at the reconciliation of the two moralities; but one finds still oftener the confusion and mutual misunderstanding of them, indeed, sometimes their close juxtaposition--even in the same man, within one soul. 227

The noble type of man regards himself as a determiner of values; he does not require to be approved of; he passes the judgment: "What is injurious to me is injurious in itself"; he knows that it is he himself only who confers honour on things; he is a creator of values. He honours whatever he recognises in himself: such morality is self-glorification. In the foreground there is the feeling of plenitude, of power, which seeks to overflow, the happiness of high tension, the conscientiousness of a wealth which would fain give and bestow:--the noble man also helps the unfortunate, but not--or scarcely--out of pity, but rather from an impulse generated by the superabundance of power. The noble man honours in himself the powerful one, him also who has power over himself, who knows how to speak and how to keep silence, who takes pleasure in subjecting himself to severity and hardness, and has reverence for all that is severe and hard. 229

A morality of the ruling class ... is ... especially foreign and irritating to present-day taste in the sternness of its principle that one has duties only to one's equals; that one may act towards beings of a lower rank, towards all that is foreign, just as seems good to one, or "as the heart desires," and in any case "beyond good and evil": it is here that sympathy and similar sentiments can have a place. The ability and obligation to exercise prolonged gratitude and prolonged revenge--both only within the circle of equals,--artfulness in retaliation, raffinement of the idea in friendship, a certain necessity to have enemies as outlets for the emotions of envy, quarrelsomeness, arrogance--in fact, in order to be a good friend: all these are typical characteristics of the noble morality. 229-230

Slave-morality is essentially the morality of utility. Here is the seat of the origin of the famous antithesis "good" and "evil":--power and dangerousness are assumed to reside in the evil, a certain dreadfulness, subtlety, and strength, which do not admit of being despised. According to slave-morality, therefore, the "evil" man arouses fear; according to master-morality, it is precisely the "good" man who arouses fear and seeks to arouse it, while the bad man is regarded as the despicable being. The contrast attains its maximum when, in accordance with the logical consequences of slave-morality, a shade of depreciation--it may be slight and well-intentioned--at last attaches itself even to the "good" man of this morality; because, according to the servile mode of thought, the good man must in any case be the safe man: he is good-natured, easily deceived, perhaps a little stupid, un bonhomme. Everywhere that slave-morality gains the ascendency, language shows a tendency to approximate the significations of the words "good" and "stupid."--A last fundamental difference: the desire for freedom, the instinct for happiness and the refinements of the feeling of liberty belong as necessarily to slave-morals and morality, as artifice and enthusiasm in reverence and devotion are the regular symptoms of an aristocratic mode of thinking and estimating. 231

A species originates, and a type becomes established and strong in the long struggle with essentially constant unfavourable conditions. On the other hand, it is known by the experience of breeders that species which receive superabundant nourishment, and in general a surplus of protection and care, immediately tend in the most marked way to develop variations, and are fertile in prodigies and monstrosities (also in monstrous vices). 234

I submit that egoism belongs to the essence of a noble soul, I mean the unalterable belief that to a being such as "we," other beings must naturally be in subjection, and have to sacrifice themselves. 240

Woman would like to believe that love can do everything--it is the superstition peculiar to her. Alas, he who knows the heart finds out how poor, helpless, pretentious, and blundering even the best and deepest love is--he finds that it rather destroys than saves! 246

Signs of nobility: never to think of lowering our duties to the rank of duties for everybody; to be unwilling to renounce or to share our responsibilities; to count our prerogatives, and the exercise of them, among our duties. 249

A man strives after great things, looks upon every one whom he encounters on his way either as a means of advance, or a delay and hindrance--or as a temporary resting-place. 249

If one wishes to praise at all, it is a delicate and at the same time a noble self-control, to praise only where one does not agree.... 254

All society makes one somehow, somewhere, or sometimes--"commonplace." 254-255

The noble soul has reverence for itself. 256

A man who can conduct a case, carry out a resolution, remain true to an opinion, keep hold of a woman, punish and overthrow insolence; a man who has his indignation and his sword, and to whom the weak, the suffering, the oppressed, and even the animals willingly submit and naturally belong; in short, a man who is a master by nature--when such a man has sympathy, well, that sympathy has value! 259

I would even allow myself to rank philosophers according to the quality of their laughing--up to those who are capable of golden laughter. 260

VIII

"The Genealogy of Morals"

("Zur Genealogie der Moral") was written by Nietzsche primarily as an elaboration and elucidation of the philosophic points which were merely sketched in "Beyond Good and Evil." This former work had met with small success, and the critics, failing to understand its doctrines, read converse meanings in it. One critic hailed Nietzsche at once as an anarchist, and this review went far in actuating him in drawing up the three essays which comprise the present book. As will be remembered, several of Nietzsche's most important principles were stated and outlined in "Beyond Good and Evil," especially his doctrine of slave-morality and master-morality. Now he undertakes to develop this proposition, as well as many others which he set forth provisionally in his earlier work. This new polemic may be looked upon both as a completing of former works and as a further preparation for "The Will to Power." The book, a comparatively brief one (it contains barely 40,000 words), was written in a period of about two weeks during the early part of 1887. In July the manuscript was sent to the publisher, but was recalled for revisions and addenda; and most of Nietzsche's summer was devoted to correcting it. Later that same year the book appeared; and thereby its author acquired another friendly reader, Georg Brandes, to whom, more than to any other critic, Nietzsche owes his early recognition.

The style of "The Genealogy of Morals" is less aphoristic than any of the books which immediately preceded or followed it. Few new doctrines are propounded in it; and since it was for the most part an analytic commentary on what had gone before, its expositional needs were best met by Nietzsche's earlier style of writing. I have spoken before of the desultory and sporadic manner in which Nietzsche was necessitated to present his philosophy. Nowhere is his method of work better exemplified than in this new work. Nearly every one of his books overlaps another. Propositions are sketchily stated in one essay, which receive elucidation only in future volumes. "Beyond Good and Evil" was a commentary on "Thus Spake Zarathustra"; "The Genealogy of Morals" is a commentary on the newly propounded theses in "Beyond Good and Evil" and is in addition an elaboration of many of the ideas which took birth as far back as "Human, All-Too-Human." Out of "The Genealogy of Morals" in turn grew "The Antichrist" which dealt specifically with the theological phase of the former's discussion of general morals. And all of these books were but preparations for "The Will to Power." For this reason it is difficult to acquire a complete understanding of Nietzsche's philosophy unless one follows it consecutively and chronologically. The book at present under discussion is a most valuable one from an academic standpoint, for, while it may not set forth any new and important doctrines, it goes deep into the origins and history of moral concepts, and explains many of the important conclusions in Nietzsche's moral code. It brings more and more into prominence the main pillars of his ethical system and explains at length the steps in the syllogism which led to his doctrine of master-morality. It ascertains the origin of the concept of sin, and describes the racial deterioration which has followed in the train of Christian ideals.

In many ways this book is the profoundest of all the writings Nietzsche left us. For the first time he separates theological and moral prejudices and traces them to different origins. This is one of the most important steps taken by him. By so doing he became an explorer of entirely new fields. The moral historians and psychologists who preceded him had considered moral precepts and Christian injunctions as stemming from the same source: their genealogies had led them to the same common spring. Nietzsche entered the search with new methods. He applied the philologie test to all moral values. He brought to his task, in addition to a historical sense, what he calls "an innate faculty of psychological discrimination par excellence." He posed the following questions, and endeavoured to answer them by inquiring into the minutest aspects of historical conditions: "Under what conditions did Man invent for himself those judgments of value, 'good' and 'evil'? And what intrinsic value do they possess in themselves? Have they up to the present hindered or advanced human well-being"? Are they a symptom of the distress, impoverishment, and degeneration of Human Life? Or, conversely, is it in them that is manifested the fulness, the strength, and the will of Life, its courage, its self-confidence, its future?" In his research, Nietzsche first questioned the value of pity. He found it to be a symptom of modern civilisation--a quality held in contempt by the older philosophers, even by such widely dissimilar minds as Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld and Kant--but a quality given high place by the more modern thinkers. Despite the seemingly apparent isolation of the problem of pity-morality, Nietzsche saw that in truth it was a question which underlay all other moral propositions; and, using it as a ground-work for his research, he began to question the utility of all those values held as "good," to apply the qualities of the "good man" to the needs of civilisation, and to inquire into the results left upon the race by the "bad man."

So great was the misunderstanding which attached to his phrase, "beyond good and evil," and so persistently was this phrase interpreted in its narrow sense of "beyond good and bad," that he felt the necessity of drawing the line of distinction between these two diametrically opposed conceptions and of explaining the origin of each. His first essay in "The Genealogy of Morals" is devoted to this task. At the outset he devotes considerable space criticising the methods and conclusions of former genealogists of morals, especially of the English psychologists who attribute an intrinsic merit to altruism because at one time altruism possessed a utilitarian value. Herbert Spencer's theory that "good" is the same as "purposive" brings from Nietzsche a protest founded on the contention that because a thing was at one time useful, and therefore "good," it does not follow that the thing is good in itself. By the etymology of the descriptive words of morality, Nietzsche traces the history of modern moral attributes through class distinctions to their origin in the instincts of the "nobles" and the "vulgarians." He shows the relationship between the Latin bonus and the "warrior," by deriving bonus from duonus. Bellum, he shows, equals duellum which equals duen-lum, in which word duonus is contained. Likewise, he points out the aristocratic origin of "happiness"--a quality arising from an abundance of energy and the consciousness of power.

"Good and evil," according to Nietzsche, is a sign of slave-morality; while "good and bad" represents the qualities in the master-morality. The one stands for the adopted qualities of the subservient races; the other embodies the natural functioning of dominating races. The origin of the "good" in these two instances is by no means the same. In the strong man "good" represented an entirely different condition than the "good" in the resentful and weak man; and these two "goods" arose out of different causes. The one was spontaneous and natural--inherent in the individual of strength: the other was a manufactured condition, an optional selection of qualities to soften and ameliorate the conditions of existence. "Evil" and "bad," by the same token, became attributes originating in widely separated sources. The "evil" of the weak man was any condition which worked against the manufactured ideals of goodness, which brought about unhappiness--it was the beginning of the conception of a slave-morality, a term applied to all enemies. The "bad" of the strong man was the concept which grew directly out of his feeling for "good," and which had no application to another individual. Thus the ideas of "good" and "bad" are directly inherited from the nobles of the race, and these ideas included within themselves the tendency toward establishing social distinctions.

The second section of "The Genealogy of Morals," called "'Guilt,' 'Bad Conscience,' and the Like," is another important document, the reading of which is almost imperative for the student who would understand the processes of thought which led to Nietzsche's philosophic conclusions. In this essay Nietzsche traces the origin of sin to debt, thereby disagreeing with all the genealogists of morals who preceded him. He starts with the birth of memory in man and with the corresponding will to forgetfulness, showing that out of these two mental qualities was born responsibility. Out of responsibility in turn grew the function of promising and the accepting of promises, which at once made possible between individuals the relationship of "debtor" and "creditor." As soon as this relationship was established, one man had rights over another. The creditor could exact payment from the debtor, either in the form of material equivalent or by inflicting an injury in which was contained the sensation of satisfaction. Thus the creditor had the right to punish in cases where actual repayment was impossible. And in this idea of punishment began not only class distinction but primitive law. Later, when the power to punish was transferred into the hands of the community, the law of contract came into existence. Here, says Nietzsche, we find the cradle of the whole moral world of the ideas of "guilt," "conscience," and "duty"; and adds, "Their commencement, like the commencement of all great things in the world, is thoroughly and continuously saturated in blood."

Carrying out the principle underlying the relationship of debtor and creditor we arrive at the formation of the community. In return for protection and for communal advantages the individual pledged his good behaviour. When he violated this contract with the community, the community, in the guise of the defrauded creditor, took its revenge, or exacted its payment, from the debtor, the criminal. And, as was the case in early history, the community deprived the violator of future advantages and protection. The debtor was divested of all rights, even of mercy, for then there were no degrees in law-breaking. Primitive law was martial law. Says Nietzsche, "This shows why war itself (counting the sacrificial cult of war) has produced all the forms under which punishment has manifested itself in history." Later, as the community gathered strength, the offences of the individual debtors were looked upon as less serious. Out of its security grew leniency toward the offender: the penal code became mitigated, and, as in all powerful nations to-day, the criminal was protected. Only when there was a consciousness of weakness in a community did the acts of individual offenders take on an exaggerated seriousness, and under such conditions the law was consequently harshest. Thus, justice and the infliction of legal penalties are direct outgrowths of the primitive relation of debt between individuals. Herein we have the origin of guilt.

Nietzsche attempts an elaborate analysis of the history of punishment, in an effort to ascertain its true meaning, its relation to guilt and to the community, and its final effects on both the individual and society. It has been impossible to present the sequence of this analysis by direct excerpts from his own words, due to the close, synthetic manner in which he has made his research. Therefore I offer the following brief exposition of pages 88 to 99 inclusive, in which he examines the causes and effects of punishment. To begin with, Nietzsche disassociates the "origin" and the "end" of punishment, and regards them as two separate and distinct problems. He argues that the final utility of a thing, in the sense that revenge and deterrence are the final utilities of punishment, is in all cases opposed to the origin of that thing; that every force or principle is constantly being put to new purposes by forces greater than itself, thus making it impossible to determine its inception by the end for which it is used. Therefore the "function" of punishing was not conceived with a view to punishing, but may have been employed for any number of ends, according as a will to power has overcome that function and made use of it for its own purpose: in short; punishment, like any organ or custom or "thing," has passed through a series of new interpretations and adjustments and meanings--and is not a direct and logical progress as to an end.

Having established this point, Nietzsche endeavours to determine the utilisation to which the custom of punishment has been put--to ascertain the meaning which has been interpreted into it. He finds that even in modern times not one but many uses have been made of punishment, and that in ancient times so diverse have been the utilisations of punishment that it is impossible to define them all. In fact, one cannot determine the precise reason for punishment. To emphasise this point, Nietzsche gives a long list of possible meanings. Taking up the more popular supposed utilities of punishment at the present time--such as creating in the wrong-doer the consciousness of guilt, which is supposed to evolve into conscience and remorse--he shows wherein punishment fails in its object. Against this theory of the creation of remorse, he advances psychology and shows that, to the contrary, punishment numbs and hardens. He argues also that punishment for the purpose of making the wrong-doer conscious of the intrinsic reprehensibility of his crime, fails because the very act for which he is chastened is practised in the service of justice and is called "good." Eliminating thus the supposed effects of punishment, Nietzsche arrives at the conclusion (included in the excerpts at the end of this chapter) that punishment makes only for caution and secrecy, and is therefore detrimental.

In his analysis of the origin of the "bad conscience," Nietzsche lends himself to quotation. Therefore I have been able to present in his own words a fair resume of the course pursued by him in his examination of the history of conscience. This particular branch of his research is carried into the formation of the "State" which, according to him, grew out of "a herd of blonde beasts." The older theory of the state, namely: that it originated in the adoption of a contract, is set aside as untenable when dealing with a peoples who possessed conquerors or masters. These masters, argues Nietzsche, had no need of contracts. By using the "bad conscience" as a ground for inquiry, the causes for the existence of altruism are shown to be included in the self-cruelty which followed in the wake of the instinct for freedom. (This last point is developed fully in the discussion of ascetic ideals which is found at the end of the book now under consideration.) Nietzsche traces the birth of deities back along the lines of credit and debt. First came the fear of ancestors. Then followed the obligation to ancestors. At length the sacrifice to ancestors marked the beginning of a conception of duty (debt) to the supernatural. The ancestors of powerful nations in time became heroes, and finally evolved into gods. Later monotheism came as a natural consequence, and God became the creditor. In the expiation of sin, as symbolised in the crucifixion of Christianity, we have this same relationship of debtor and creditor carried out into a more complex form through the avenues of self-torture.

The most important essay in "The Genealogy of Morals" is the last, called "What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?" Nietzsche examines this question in relation to the artist, to the philosopher, to the priest, and to the race generally. In his examination of the problem in regard to artists he uses Wagner as a basis of inquiry, comparing the two phases of Wagner's art--the Parsifalian and the ante-Parsifalian. Artists, asserts Nietzsche, need a support of constituted authority; they are unable to stand alone--"standing alone is opposed to their deepest instincts"--and so they make use of asceticism as a rampart, as building material, to give their work authority. In his application of the ascetic ideal to philosophers, Nietzsche presents the cases of Schopenhauer and Kant, and concludes that asceticism in such instances is used as an escape from torture--a means to recreation and happiness. With the philosopher the ideal of asceticism is not a denial of existence. Rather is it an affirmation of existence. It permits him freedom of the intellect. It relieves him of the numerous obligations of life. Furthermore, the philosophic spirit, in order to establish itself, found it necessary to disguise itself as "one of the previously fixed types of the contemplative man," as a priest or soothsayer. Only in such a religious masquerade was philosophy taken with any seriousness or reverence.

The history of asceticism in the priest I have been able to set forth with a certain degree of completeness in Nietzsche's own words. The priest was the sick physician who administered to the needs of a sick populace. His was the mission of mitigating suffering and of performing every kind of consolation. Wherein he failed, says Nietzsche, was in not going to the source, the cause, of suffering, but in dealing merely with its manifestations. These manifestations were the result of physiological depressions which prevailed at intervals among portions of the population. These depressions were the outgrowth of diverse causes, such as long wars, emigration to unsuitable climates, wrong diet, miscegenation on a large scale, disease, etc. According to Nietzsche the cure for such physiological phenomena can be found only in the realm of moral psychology, for here the origin is considered and administered to by disciplinary systems grounded in true knowledge. But the method employed by the priest was far from scientific. He combated these depressions by reducing the consciousness of life itself to the lowest possible degree--that is, by a doctrine of asceticism, of self-abnegation, equanimity, self-hypnotism. By thus minimising the consciousness of life, these depressions took on more and more the aspect of normality. The effects of this treatment, however, were transient, for the starving of the physical desires and the abstinence from exercising the physical impulses paved the way for all manner of mental disorders, excesses and insanity. Herein lies Nietzsche's explanation for religious ecstasies, hallucinations, and sensual outbursts.

Another form of treatment devised by the ascetic priests for a depressed people gave birth to the "blessedness" which, under the Christian code, attaches to work. These priests attempted to turn the attention of the people from their suffering by the establishment of mechanical activity, namely: work, routine and obedience. The sick man forgot himself in the labour which had received sanctification. The priests also combated depression by permitting pleasure through the creation and production of joy. That is, they set men to helping and comforting each other, by instilling in them the notion of brotherly love. Thereby the community mutually strengthened itself, and at the same time it reaped the joy of service which had been sanctioned by the priests. Out of this last method sprang many of the Christian virtues, especially those which benefit others rather than oneself.

Such methods as these--devitalisation, labour, brotherly love--are called by Nietzsche the "innocent" prescriptions in the fight against depression. The "guilty" ones are far different, and are embodied in the one method: the production of emotional excess. This, the priests understood, was the most efficacious manner in overcoming protracted depression and pain. Confronted by the query: By what means can this emotional excess be produced? they made use of "the whole pack of hounds that rage in the human kennel"--rage, fear, lust, revenge, hope, despair, cruelty and the like. And once these emotional excesses became established, the priests, when asked by the "patients" for a "cause" of their suffering, declared it to be within the man himself, in his own guiltiness. Thus was the sick man turned into a sinner. Here originated also the conception of suffering as a state of punishment, the fear of retribution, the iniquitous conscience, and the hope of redemption. Nietzsche goes further, and shows the racial and individual decadence which has followed in the train of this system of treatment. Dr. Oscar Levy says with justice that this last essay, considered in the light which it throws upon the attitude of the ecclesiast to the man of resentment and misfortune, "is one of the most valuable contributions to sacerdotal psychology."

EXCERPTS FROM "THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS"

The pathos of nobility and distance,... the chronic and despotic esprit de corps and fundamental instinct of a higher dominant race coming into association with a meaner race, an "under race," this is the origin of the antitheses of good and bad. 20

The knightly-aristocratic "values" are based on a careful cult of the physical, on a flowering, rich, and even effervescing healthiness, that goes considerably beyond what is necessary for maintaining life, on war, adventure, the chase, the dance, the tourney--on everything, in fact, which is contained in strong, free, and joyous action. The priestly aristocratic mode of valuation is--we have seen--based on other hypotheses: it is bad enough for this class when it is a question of war! Yet the priests are, as is notorious, the worst enemies--why? Because they are the weakest. 29

The slave-morality requires as the condition of its existence an external and objective world, to employ physiological terminology, it requires objective stimuli to be of action at all--its action is fundamentally a reaction. The contrary is the case when we come to the aristocrat's system of values: it acts and grows spontaneously, it merely seeks its antithesis in order to pronounce a more grateful and exultant "yes" to its own self.... 35

The aristocratic man conceives the root idea "good" spontaneously and straight away, that is to say, out of himself, and from that material then creates for himself a concept of "bad"! This "bad" of aristocratic origin and that "evil" out of the cauldron of unsatisfied hatred--the former an imitation, an "extra," an additional nuance; the latter, on the other hand, the original, the beginning, the essential act in the conception of a slave-morality--these two words "bad" and "evil," how great a difference do they mark in spite of the fact that they have an identical contrary in the idea "good." 39

It is impossible not to recognise at the core of all these aristocratic races the beast of prey; the magnificent blonde brute, avidly rampant for spoil and victory; this hidden core needed an outlet from time to time, the beast must get loose again, must return into the wilderness--the Roman, Arabic, German, and Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings, are all alike in this need. It is the aristocratic races who have left the idea "Barbarian" on all the tracks in which they have marched; nay, a consciousness of this very barbarianism, and even a pride in it, manifests itself even in their highest civilisation. 40

What produces to-day our repulsion towards "man"?--for we suffer from "man," there is no doubt about it. It is not fear; it is rather that we have nothing more to fear from men; it is that the worm "man" is in the foreground and pullulates; it is that the "tame man," the wretched mediocre and unedifying creature, has learnt to consider himself a goal and a pinnacle, an inner meaning, an historic principle, a "higher man." ... 42-43

In the dwarfing and levelling of the European man lurks our greatest peril, for it is this outlook which fatigues--we see to-day nothing which wishes to be greater, we surmise that the process is always still backwards, still backwards towards something more attenuated, more inoffensive, more cunning, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian. 44

To require of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a wish to overpower, a wish to overthrow, a wish to become master, a thirst for enemies and antagonisms and triumphs, is just as absurd as to require of weakness that it should express itself as strength. A quantum of force is just such a quantum of movement, will, action. 45

The impotence which requites not, is turned to "goodness," craven baseness to meekness, submission to those whom one hates, to obedience (namely, obedience to one of whom they say that he ordered this submission--they call him God). The inoffensive character of the weak, the very cowardice in which he is rich, his standing at the door, his forced necessity of waiting, gain here fine names, such as "patience," which is also called "virtue"; not being able to avenge one's self, is called not wishing to avenge one's self, perhaps even forgiveness. 48

They are miserable, there is no doubt about it, all these whisperers and counterfeiters in the corners, although they try to get warm by crouching close to each other, but they tell me that their misery is a favour and distinction given to them by God, just as one beats the dogs one likes best; that perhaps this misery is also a preparation, a probation, a training; that perhaps it is still more something which will one day be compensated and paid back with a tremendous interest in gold, nay in happiness. This they call "Blessedness." 45-49

The two opposing values "good and bad," "good and evil," have fought a dreadful, thousand-year fight in the world, and though indubitably the second value has been for a long time in the preponderance, there are not wanting places where the fortune of the fight is still undecisive. It can almost be said that in the meanwhile the fight reaches a higher and higher level, and that in the meanwhile it has become more and more intense, and always more and more psychological; so that nowadays there is perhaps no more decisive mark of the higher nature, of the more psychological nature, than to be in that sense self-contradictory, and to be actually still a battle-ground for those two opposites. The symbol of this fight, written in a writing which has remained worthy of perusal throughout the course of history up to the present time, is called "Rome against Judæa, Judæa against Rome." Hitherto there has been no greater event than that fight, the putting of that question, that deadly antagonism. Rome found in the Jew the incarnation of the unnatural, as though it were its diametrically opposed monstrosity, and in Rome the Jew was held to be convicted of hatred of the whole human race: and rightly so, in so far as it is right to link the well-being and the future of the human race to the unconditional mastery of the aristocratic values, of the Roman values. What, conversely, did the Jews feel against Rome? One can surmise it from a thousand symptoms, but it is sufficient to carry one's mind back to the Johannian Apocalypse, that most obscene of all the written outbursts, which has revenge on its conscience. 53-54

Beyond Good and Evil--at any rate that is not the same as "Beyond Good and Bad." 57

The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, of this power over himself and over fate, has sunk right down to his innermost depths, and has become an instinct, a dominating instinct--what name will he give to it, to this dominating instinct if he needs to have a word for it? But there is no doubt about it--the sovereign man calls it his conscience. 65

Have these current genealogists of morals ever allowed themselves to have even the vaguest notion, for instance, that the cardinal moral idea of "ought" originates from the very material idea of "owe"? Or that punishment developed as a retaliation absolutely independently of any preliminary hypothesis of the freedom or determination of the will?--And this to such an extent, that a high degree of civilisation was always first necessary for the animal man to begin to make those much more primitive distinctions of "intentional," "negligent," "accidental," "responsible," and their contraries, and apply them in the assessing of punishment. That idea--"the wrong-doer deserves punishment because he might have acted otherwise," in spite of the fact that it is nowadays so cheap, obvious, natural, and inevitable, and that it has had to serve as an illustration of the way in which the sentiment of justice appeared on earth is in point of fact an exceedingly late, and even refined form of human judgment and inference; the placing of this idea back at the beginning of the world is simply a clumsy violation of the principles of primitive psychology. 69

The sight of suffering does one good, the infliction of suffering does one more good--this is a hard maxim, but none the less a fundamental maxim, old, powerful, and "human, all-too-human"; one, moreover, to which perhaps even the apes as well would subscribe: for it is said that in inventing bizarre cruelties they are giving abundant proof of their future humanity, to which, as it were, they are playing the prelude. Without cruelty, no feast: so teaches the oldest and longest history of man--and in punishment too is there so much of the festive. 75

The darkening of the heavens over man has always increased in proportion to the growth of man's shame before man.The tired pessimistic outlook, the mistrust of the riddle of life, the icy negation of disgusted ennui, all those are not the signs of the most evil age of the human race: much rather do they come first to the light of day, as the swamp-flowers, which they are, when the swamp to which they belong comes into existence--I mean the diseased refinement and moralisation, thanks to which the "animal man" has at last learnt to be ashamed of all his instincts. 75

The curve of human sensibilities to pain seems indeed to sink in an extraordinary and almost sudden fashion, as soon as one has passed the upper ten thousand or ten millions of over-civilised humanity, and I personally have no doubt that, by comparison with one painful night passed by one single hysterical chit of a cultured woman, the suffering of all the animals taken together who have been put to the question of the knife, so as to give scientific answers, are simply negligible. 76-77

Man ... arrived at the great generalisation "everything has its price, all can be paid for," the oldest and most naïve moral canon of justice the beginning of all "kindness," of all "equity," of all "goodwill," of all "objectivity" in the world. 80

The self-destruction of Justice! we know the pretty name it calls itself--Grace! it remains, as is obvious, the privilege of the strongest, better still, their super-law. 83-84

The aggressive man has at all times enjoyed the stronger, bolder, more aristocratic, and also freer outlook, the better conscience. On the other hand, we already surmise who it really is that has on his conscience the invention of the "bad conscience,"--the resentful man! 86

To talk of intrinsic right and intrinsic wrong is absolutely nonsensical; intrinsically, an injury, an oppression, an exploitation, an annihilation can be nothing wrong, inasmuch as life is essentially (that is, in its cardinal functions) something which functions by injuring, oppressing, exploiting, and annihilating, and is absolutely inconceivable without such a character. 88

Evildoers have throughout thousands of years felt when overtaken by punishment exactly like Spinoza, on the subject of their "offence": "here is something which went wrong contrary to my anticipation, not I ought not to have done this."--They submitted themselves to punishment, just as one submits one's self to a disease, to a misfortune, or to death, with that stubborn and resigned fatalism which gives the Russians, for instance, even nowadays, the advantage over us Westerners, in the handling of life. If at that period there was a critique of action, the criterion was prudence: the real effect of punishment is unquestionably chiefly to be found in a sharpening of the sense of prudence, in a lengthening of the memory, in a will to adopt more of a policy of caution, suspicion, and secrecy; in the recognition that there are many things which are unquestionably beyond one's capacity; in a kind of improvement in self-criticism. The broad effects which can be obtained by punishment in man and beast, are the increase of fear, the sharpening of the sense of cunning, the mastery of the desires: so it is that punishment tames man, but does not make him "better"--it would be more correct even to go so far as to assert the contrary. 99

All instincts which do not find a vent without, turn inwards--this is what I mean by the growing "internalisation" of man: consequently we have the first growth in man, of what subsequently was called his soul. The whole inner world, originally as thin as if it had been stretched between two layers of skin, burst apart and expanded proportionately, and obtained depth, breadth, and height, when man's external outlet became obstructed. These terrible bulwarks, with which the social organisation protected itself against the old instincts of freedom (punishments belong pre-eminently to these bulwarks), brought it about that all those instincts of wild, free, prowling man became turned backwards against man himself. Enmity, cruelty, the delight in persecution, in surprises, change, destruction--the turning all these instincts against their own possessors: this is the origin of the "bad conscience." It was man, who, lacking external enemies and obstacles, and imprisoned as he was in the oppressive narrowness and monotony of custom, in his own impatience lacerated, persecuted, gnawed, frightened, and ill-treated himself; it was this animal in the hands of the tamer, which beat itself against the bars of its cage; it was this being who, pining and yearning for that desert home of which it had been deprived, was compelled to create out of its own self, an adventure, a torture-chamber, a hazardous and perilous desert--it was this fool, this homesick and desperate prisoner--who invented the "bad conscience." 100-101

A herd of blonde beasts of prey, a race of conquerors and masters, which with all its warlike organisation and all its organising power pounces with its terrible claws on a population, in numbers possibly tremendously superior, but as yet formless, as yet nomad. Such is the origin of the "State." That fantastic theory that makes it begin with a contract is, I think, disposed of. He who can command, he who is a master by "nature," he who comes on the scene forceful in deed and gesture--what has he to do with contracts? Such beings defy calculation, they come like fate, without cause, reason, notice, excuse, they are there like the lightning is there, too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too "different," to be personally even hated. Their work is an instinctive creating and impressing of forms, they are the most involuntary, unconscious artists that there are.... 103

It is only the bad conscience, only the will for self-abuse, that provides the necessary conditions for the existence of altruism as a value. 105

The feeling of owing a debt to the deity has grown continuously for several centuries, always in the same proportion in which the idea of God and the consciousness of God have grown and become exalted among mankind. (The whole history of ethnic fights, victories, reconciliations, amalgamations, everything, in fact, which precedes the eventual classing of all the social elements in each great race synthesis, are mirrored in the hotch-potch genealogy of their gods, in the legends of their fights, victories, and reconciliations, Progress towards universal empires invariably means progress towards universal deities; despotism, with its subjugation of the independent nobility, always paves the way for some system or other of monotheism.) The appearance of the Christian god, as the record god up to this time, has for that very reason brought equally into the world the record amount of guilt consciousness. 109

This is a kind of madness of the will in the sphere of psychological cruelty which is absolutely unparalleled:--man's will to find himself guilty and blameworthy to the point of inexpiability, his will to think of himself as punished, without the punishment ever being able to balance the guilt, his will to infect and to poison the fundamental basis of the universe with the problem of punishment and guilt, in order to cut off once and for all any escape out of this labyrinth of "fixed ideas," his will for rearing an ideal--that of the "holy God"--face to face with which he can have tangible proof of his own unworthiness. Alas for this mad melancholy beast man! 112-113

What is the meaning of ascetic ideals? In artists, nothing, or too much; in philosophers and scholars, a kind of "flair" and instinct for the conditions most favourable to advanced intellectualism; in women, at best an additional seductive fascination, a little morbidezza on a fine piece of flesh, the angelhood of a fat, pretty animal; in physiological failures and whiners (in the majority of mortals), an attempt to pose as "too good" for this world, a holy form of debauchery, their chief weapon, in the battle with lingering pain and ennui; in priests, the actual priestly faith, their best engine of power, and also the supreme authority for power; in saints, finally a pretext for hibernation, their novissima gloria cupido, their peace in nothingness ("God"), their form of madness. 121

All good things were once bad things; from every original sin has grown an original virtue. Marriage, for example, seemed for a long time a sin against the rights of the community; a man formerly paid a fine for the insolence of claiming one woman to himself. 144-145

The soft, benevolent yielding, sympathetic feelings--eventually valued so highly that they almost become "intrinsic values," were for a very long time actually despised by their possessors; gentleness was then a subject for shame, just as hardness is now. 145

The ascetic ideal springs from the prophylactic and self-preservative instincts which mark a decadent life, which seeks by every means in its power to maintain its position and fight for its existence; it points to a partial physiological depression and exhaustion, against which the most profound and intact life-instincts fight ceaselessly with new weapons and discoveries. The ascetic ideal is such a weapon: its position is consequently exactly the reverse of that which the worshippers of the ideal imagine--life struggles in it and through it with death and against death; the ascetic ideal is a dodge for the preservation of life. 154

The ascetic priest is the incarnate wish for an existence of another kind, an existence on another plane,--he is, in fact, the highest point of this wish, its official ecstasy and passion: but it is the very power of this wish which is the fetter that binds him here; it is just that which makes him into a tool that must labour to create more favourable conditions for earthly existence, for existence on the human plane--it is with this very power that he keeps the whole herd of failures, distortions, abortions, unfortunates, sufferers from themselves of every kind, fast to existence, while he as the herdsman goes instinctively on in front. 154-155

The sick are the great danger of man, not the evil, not the "beasts of prey." They who are from the outset botched, oppressed, broken, those are they, the weakest are they, who most undermine the life beneath the feet of man, who instil the most dangerous venom and scepticism into our trust in life, in man, in ourselves. 157

Preventing the sick making the healthy sick ... this ought to be our supreme object in the world--but for this it is above all essential that the healthy should remain separated from the sick, that they should even guard themselves from the look of the sick, that they should not even associate with the sick. Or may it, perchance, be their mission to be nurses or doctors? But they could not mistake or disown their mission more grossly--the higher must not degrade itself to be the tool of the lower, the pathos of distance must to all eternity keep their missions also separate. The right of the happy to existence, the right of bells with a full tone over the discordant cracked bells, is verily a thousand times greater: they alone are the sureties of the future, they alone are bound to man's future. 160-161

The ascetic priest must be accepted by us as the predestined saviour, herdsman, and champion of the sick herd: thereby do we first understand his awful historic mission. 162

"I suffer: it must be somebody's fault"--so thinks every sick sheep. But his herdsman, the ascetic priest, says to him, "Quite so, my sheep, it must be the fault of some one; but thou thyself art that some one, it is all the fault of thyself alone--it is the fault of thyself alone against thyself": that is bold enough, false enough, but one thing is at least attained; thereby, as I have said, the course of resentment is--diverted. 165

All sick and diseased people strive instinctively after a herd-organisation, out of a desire to shake off their sense of oppressive discomfort and weakness; the ascetic priest divines this instinct and promotes it; wherever a herd exists it is the instinct of weakness which has wished for the herd, and the cleverness of the priests which has organised it, for, mark this: by an equally natural necessity the strong strive as much for isolation as the weak for union: when the former bind themselves it is only with a view to an aggressive joint action and joint satisfaction of their Will for Power, much against the wishes of their individual consciences; the latter, on the contrary, range themselves together with positive delight in such a muster--their instincts are as much gratified thereby as the instincts of the "born master" (that is the solitary beast-of-prey species of man) are disturbed and wounded to the quick by organisation. 176-177

The keynote by which the ascetic priest was enabled to get every kind of agonising and ecstatic music to play on the fibres of the human soul--was, as every one knows, the exploitation of the feeling of "guilt." 182

The ascetic ideal and its sublime moral cult, this most ingenious, reckless, and perilous systématisation of all methods of emotional excess, is writ large in a dreadful and unforgettable fashion on the whole history of man, and unfortunately not only on history. I was scarcely able to put forward any other element which attacked the health and race efficiency of Europeans with more destructive power than did this ideal; it can be dubbed, without exaggeration, the real fatality in the history of the health of the European man. 186-187

The ascetic ideal has corrupted not only health and taste, there are also third, fourth, fifth, and sixth things which it has corrupted--I shall take care not to go through the catalogue (when should I get to the end?). 190

The periods in a nation in which the learned man comes into prominence; they are the periods of exhaustion, often of sunset, of decay--the effervescing strength, the confidence of life, the confidence in the future are no more. The preponderance of the mandarins never signifies any good, any more than does the advent of democracy, or arbitration instead of war, equal rights for women, the religion of pity, and all the other symptoms of declining life. 200

The ascetic ideal simply means this: that something was lacking, that a tremendous void encircled man--he did not know how to justify himself, to explain himself, to affirm himself, he suffered from the problem of his own meaning. He suffered also in other ways, he was in the main a diseased animal; but his problem was not suffering itself, but the lack of an answer to that crying question, "To what purpose do we suffer?" Man, the bravest animal and the one most inured to suffering, does not repudiate suffering in itself: he wills it, he even seeks it out, provided that he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering was the curse which till then lay spread over humanity--and the ascetic ideal gave it a meaning! It was up till then the only meaning; but any meaning is better than no meaning; the ascetic ideal was in that connection the "faute de mieux" par excellence that existed at that time. In that ideal suffering found an explanation; the tremendous gap seemed filled; the door to all suicidal Nihilism was closed. The explanation--there is no doubt about it--brought in its train new suffering, deeper, more penetrating, more venomous, gnawing more brutally into life: it brought all suffering under the perspective of guilt; but in spite of all that--man was saved thereby, he had a meaning, and from henceforth was no more like a leaf in the wind, a shuttlecock, of chance, of nonsense, he could now "will" something--absolutely immaterial to what end, to what purpose, with that means he wished: the will itself was saved. It is absolutely impossible to disguise what in point of fact is made clear by every complete will that has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hate of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this desire to get right away from all illusion, change, growth, death, wishing and even desiring--all this means--let us have the courage to grasp it--a will for Nothingness, a will opposed to life, a repudiation of the most fundamental conditions of life, but it is and remains a will!--and to say at the end that which I said at the beginning--man will wish Nothingness rather than not wish at all. 210-211

"The Twilight of the Idols"

Nietzsche followed "The Genealogy of Morals" with "The Case of Wagner," that famous pamphlet in which he excoriated the creator of Parsifal. Immediately after the publication of this attack, he began work on what was to be still another preparatory book for "The Will to Power." For its title he first chose "Idle Hours of a Psychologist." The book, a brief one, was already on the presses when he changed the caption to "Götzendämmerung"--"The Twilight of the Idols"--a titular parody on Wagner's "Götterdämmerung" For a subtitle he appended a characteristically Nietzschean phrase--"How to Philosophise with the Hammer." The writing of this work was done with great rapidity: it was accomplished in but a few days during August, 1888. In September it was sent to the publisher, but during its printing Nietzsche added a chapter headed "What the Germans Lack," and several aphorisms to the section called "Skirmishes in a War with the Age." In January, 1889, the book appeared.

Nietzsche was then stricken with his fatal illness, and this was the last book of his to appear during his lifetime. "The Antichrist" was already finished, having been written in the fall of 1888 immediately after the completion of "The Twilight of the Idols." "Ecce Homo" his autobiography, was written in October, 1888; and during December Nietzsche again gave his attention to Wagner, drafting "Nietzsche contra Wagner," a pamphlet made up entirely of excerpts from his earlier writings. This work, intended to supplement "The Case of Wagner," was not published until 1895, although it had been printed and corrected before the author's final breakdown. "The Antichrist" appeared at the same time as this second Wagner document, while "Ecce Homo" was withheld from publication until 1908. "The Twilight of the Idols" sold 9,000 copies, but Nietzsche's mind was too clouded to know or care that at last he was coming into his own, that the public which had denied him so long had finally begun to open its eyes to his greatness.

In many ways "The Twilight of the Idols" is one of Nietzsche's most brilliant books. Being more compact, it consequently possesses a greater degree of precision and clarity than is found in his more analytical writings. It is not, however, a treatise to which one may go without considerable preparation. With the exception of "Thus Spake Zarathustra," it demands more on the part of the reader than any of Nietzsche's other books. It is, for the most part, composed of conclusions and comments which grow directly out of the laborious ethical research of his preceding volumes, and presupposes in the student an enormous amount of reading, not only of Nietzsche's own writings but of philosophical works in general. But once equipped with this preparation, one will find more of contemporary interest in it than in the closely organised books such as "Beyond Good and Evil" and "The Genealogy of Morals." There are few points in Nietzsche's philosophy not found here. For a compact expression of his entire teaching I know of no better book to which one might turn. Nietzsche himself, to judge from a passage in his "Ecce Homo" intended this book as a statement of his whole ethical system. He probably meant that it should present in toto the principal data of his foregoing studies, in order that the reader might be familiar with all the steps in his philosophy before setting forth upon the formidable doctrines of "The Will to Power." Obviously, therefore, it is not a book for beginners. Being expositional rather than argumentative, it is open to misunderstanding and misinterpretation. It contains apparent contradictions which might confuse the student who has not followed Nietzsche in the successive points which led to his conclusions, and who is unfamiliar with the exact definitions attached to certain words relating to human conduct.

Other qualities of a misleading nature are to be encountered in this book. Many of the paragraphs have about them an air of mere cleverness, although in reality they embody profound concepts. The reader ignorant of the inner seriousness of Nietzsche will accept these passages only at their surface value. Of the forty-four short epigrams which comprise the opening chapter, I have appended but three, for fear they would be judged solely by their superficial characteristics. Many of the other aphorisms throughout the book lend themselves all too easily to the same narrow judgment.

Again, "The Problem of Socrates," the second division of the book, because of its profundity, presents many difficulties to the unprepared student. Here is a criticism of the Socratic ideals which requires, in order that it be intelligently grasped, not only a wide general knowledge, but also a specific training in the uprooting of prejudices and of traditional ethical conceptions--such a training as can be acquired only by a close study of Nietzsche's own destructive works. The explanation of Socrates's power, the condemnation of that ancient philosopher's subtle glorification of the canaille, the reasons for his secret fascination, and the interpretation of his whole mental progress culminating in his death--all this is profound and categorical criticism which has its roots in the very fundamentals of Nietzsche's philosophy. But because it is so deep-rooted, it therefore presents a wide and all-inclusive vista of that philosophy from which it stems. Furthermore, this criticism of Socrates poses a specific problem which can be answered only by resorting to the doctrines which underlie Nietzsche's entire thought. In like manner the chapter, "Reason in Philosophy," is understandable only in the light of those investigations set forth in "Beyond Good and Evil."

Under the caption, "The Four Great Errors," Nietzsche uproots a series of correlated beliefs which have the accumulated impetus of centuries of acceptance behind them. These "errors," as stated, are (1) the error of the confusion of cause and effect, (2) the error of false causality, (3) the error of imaginary causes, and (4) the error of free will. The eradication of these errors is necessary for a complete acceptance of Nietzsche's philosophy. But unless one is familiar with the vast amount of criticism which has led up to the present discussion of them, one will experience difficulty in following the subtly drawn arguments and analogies presented against them. To demonstrate briefly the specific application of the first error, namely: the confusion of cause and effect, I offer an analogy stated in the passage. We know that Christian morality teaches us that a people perish through vice and luxury--that is to say, that these two conditions are causes of racial degeneration. Nietzsche's contention to the contrary is that when a nation is approaching physiological degeneration, vice and luxury result in the guise of stimuli adopted by exhausted natures. By this it can be seen how the Christian conscience is developed by a misunderstanding of causes; and it can also be seen how this error may affect the very foundation on which morality is built. I am here stating merely the conclusion: for the reasons leading up to this conclusion one must go to the book direct.

Nietzsche denies the embodiment of the motive of an action in the "inner facts of consciousness" where, so we have been taught by psychologists and physicists, the responsibilities of conduct are contained. The will itself, he argues, is not a motivating force; rather is it an effect of other deeper causes. This is what he discusses in his paragraphs dealing with the second error of false causality. In his criticism of the third error relating to imaginary causes, he points to the comfort we obtain by attributing a certain unexplained fact to a familiar cause--by tracing it to a commonplace source--thereby doing away with its seeming mystery. Thus ordinary maladies or afflictions, or, to carry the case into moral regions, misfortunes and unaccountable strokes of fate, are explained by finding trite and plausible reasons for their existence. As a consequence the habit of postulating causes becomes a fixed mental habit. In the great majority of cases, and especially in the domain of morality and religion, the causes are false, inasmuch as the operation of finding them depends on the mental characteristics of the searcher. The error of free will Nietzsche attributes to the theologians' attempt to make mankind responsible for its acts and therefore amenable to punishment. I have been able to present his own words in explanation of this error, and they will be found at the end of this chapter--41-42 and 43.

In "Skirmishes in a War with the Age," the longest section in the book, Nietzsche gives us much brilliant and incisive criticism of men, art and human attributes. He is here at his best, both in clarity of mind and in his manner of expression. This passage, one of the last things to come from his pen, contains the full ripeness of his nature, and is a portion of his work which no student can afford to overlook. It contains the whole of the Nietzschean philosophy applied to the conditions of his age. Because it is not a direct voicing of his doctrines it does not lend itself to mutilation except where it touches on principles of conduct and abstract aspects of morality. Many of the most widely read passages of all of Nietzsche's work are contained in it. But here again, as in the case of "Thus Spake Zarathustra," one regrets that the surface brilliance of its style attracted readers in England and America before these nations were acquainted with the books which came before. The casual reader, unfamiliar with the principles underlying Nietzsche's ethic, will see only a bold and satanic flippancy in his definition of Zola--"the love of stinking," or in his characterisation of George Sand as "the cow with plenty of beautiful milk," or in his bracketing of "tea-grocers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats." Yet it is significant that Nietzsche did not venture upon these remarks until he had the great bulk of his life's work behind him.

In this chapter are discussions of Renan, Sainte-Beuve, George Eliot, George Sand, Emerson, Carlyle, Darwin, Schopenhauer, Goethe and other famous men and women. In the short essays devoted to these writers we have, however, more than mere detached valuations. Beneath all the criticisms is a rationale of judgment based on definite philosophical doctrines. This same basis of appreciation is present in the discussion of art and artists, to which subjects many pages are devoted. In fact, "The Twilight of the Idols" contains most of the art theories and æsthetic doctrines which Nietzsche advanced. He defines the psychology of the artist, and draws the line between the two concepts, Apollonian and Dionysian, as applied to art. He analyses the meaning of beauty and ugliness, and endeavours to show in what manner the conceptions of these qualities are related to the racial instincts. He also inquires into the doctrine of "l'art pour l'art" and points out wherein it fails in its purpose. A valuable explanation of "genius" is put forth in the theory that the accumulative power of generations breaks forth in the great men of a nation, and that these great men mark the end of an age, as in the case of the Renaissance.

The most significant brief essay in this section is an answer made to certain critics who, in reviewing "Beyond Good and Evil," claimed a superiority for the present age over the older civilisations. Nietzsche calls this essay "Have We Become Moral?" and proceeds to make comparisons of contemporaneous virtues with those of the ancients. He denies that to-day, without our decrepit humanitarianism and our doctrines of weakness, we would be able to withstand, either nervously or muscularly, the conditions that prevailed during the Renaissance. He points out that our morals are those of senility, and that we have deteriorated, physically as well as mentally, as a result of an adherence to a code of morality invented to meet the needs of a weak and impoverished people. Our virtues, he says, are determined and stimulated by our weakness, so that we have come to admire the moralities of the slave, the most prominent among which is the doctrine of equality. In the decline of all the positive forces of life Nietzsche sees only racial decadence. In this regard it is important to take note of one of the passages relative to the discussion of this decadence, namely: the one wherein he characterises the anarchist as "the mouthpiece of the decaying strata of society." The appellation of "anarchist" has not infrequently been applied to Nietzsche himself by those who have read him superficially or whose acquaintance with him has been the result of distorted hearsay. I know of no better analysis of anarchistic motives or of no keener dissection of anarchistic weakness than is set forth here. Nor do I know of any better answer to those critics who have accused Nietzsche of anarchy, than the criticism contained in this passage.

In a final chapter, under the caption of "Things I Owe to the Ancients," Nietzsche outlines the inspirational source of many of his doctrines and literary habits. This chapter is important only to the student who wishes to go to the remoter influences in Nietzsche's writings, and for that reason I have omitted from the following excerpts any quotation from it.

EXCERPTS FROM "THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS"

Man thinks woman profound--why? Because he can never fathom her depths. Woman is not even shallow. 5

The trodden worm curls up. This testifies to its caution. It thus reduces its chances of being trodden upon again. In the language of morality: Humility. 5-6

The Church combats passion by means of excision of all kinds: its practise, its "remedy," is castration. It never inquires "how can a desire be spiritualised, beautified, deified?"--In all ages it has laid the weight of discipline in the process of extirpation (the extirpation of sensuality, pride, lust of dominion, lust of property, and revenge).--But to attack the passions at their roots, means attacking life itself at its source: the method of the Church is hostile to life. 27

Only degenerates find radical methods indispensable: weakness of will, or more strictly speaking, the inability not to react to a stimulus, is in itself simply another form of degeneracy. Radical and mortal hostility to sensuality, remains a suspicious symptom: it justifies one in being suspicious of the general state of one who goes to such extremes. 27

A man is productive only in so far as he is rich in contrasted instincts; he can remain young only on condition that his soul does not begin to take things easy and to yearn for peace. 28-29

All naturalism is morality--that is to say, every sound morality is ruled by a life instinct--any one of the laws of life is fulfilled by the definite canon "thou shalt," "thou shalt not," and any sort of obstacle or hostile element in the road of life is thus cleared away. Conversely, the morality which is antagonistic to nature--that is to say, almost every morality that has been taught, honoured and preached hitherto, is directed precisely against the life-instincts.... 30

Morality, as it has been understood hitherto, is the instinct of degeneration itself, which converts itself into an imperative: it says: "Perish!" It is the death sentence of men who are already doomed. 31

Morality, in so far it condemns per se, and not out of any aim, consideration or motive of life, is a specific error, for which no one should feel any mercy, a degenerate idiosyncrasy, that has done an unutterable amount of harm. 32

Every mistake is in every sense the sequel to degeneration of the instincts to disintegration of the will. This is almost the definition of evil. 35

Morality and religion are completely and utterly parts of the psychology of error: in every particular case cause and effect are confounded. 41

At present we no longer have any mercy upon the concept "free-will": we know only too well what it is--the most egregious theological trick that has ever existed for the purpose of making mankind "responsible" in a theological manner--that is to say, to make mankind dependent upon theologians. 41

The doctrine of the will was invented principally for the purpose of punishment,--that is to say, with the intention of tracing guilt. The whole of ancient psychology, or the psychology of the will, is the outcome of the fact that its originators, who were the priests at the head of ancient communities, wanted to create for themselves a right to administer punishments--or the right for God to do so. Men were thought of as "free" in order that they might be held guilty.... 42

The fact that no one shall any longer be made responsible, that the nature of existence may not be traced to a causa prima, that the world is an entity neither as a sensorium nor as a spirit--this alone is the great deliverance,--thus alone is the innocence of Becoming restored. ... The concept "God" has been the greatest objection to existence hitherto.... We deny God, we deny responsibility in God: thus alone do we save the world. 43

Moral judgment has this in common with the religious one, that it believes in realities which are not real. Morality is only an interpretation of certain phenomena: or more strictly speaking, a misinterpretation of them. Moral judgment, like the religious one, belongs to a stage of ignorance in which even the concept of reality, the distinction between real and imagined things, is still lacking.... 44

In the early years of the Middle Ages, during which the Church was most distinctly and above all a menagerie, the most beautiful examples of the "blond beast" were hunted down in all directions,--the noble Germans, for instance, were "improved." But what did this "improved" German, who had been lured to the monastery look like after the process? He looked like a caricature of man, like an abortion: he had become a "sinner," he was caged up, he had been imprisoned behind a host of appalling notions. He now lay there, sick, wretched, malevolent even toward himself: full of hate for the instincts of life, full of suspicion in regard to all that is still strong and happy. In short a "Christian." In physiological terms: in a fight with an animal, the only way of making it weak may be to make it sick. The Church understood this: it ruined man, it made him weak,--but it laid claim to having "improved" him. 45-46

All means which have been used heretofore with the object of making man moral, were through and through immoral. 49

My impossible people--Seneca, or the toreador of virtue.--Rousseau, or the return to nature, in impuris naturalibus.--Schiller, or the Moral Trumpeter of Säckingen.--Dante, or the hyæna that writes poetry in tombs.--Kant, or cant as an intelligible character.--Victor Hugo, or the lighthouse on the sea of nonsense.--Liszt, or the school of racing--after women.--George Sand, or lactea ubertas, in plain English: the cow with plenty beautiful milk.--Michelet, or enthusiasm in its shirt sleeves.--Carlyle, or Pessimism after undigested meals.--John Stuart Mill, or offensive lucidity.--The brothers Goncourt, or the two Ajaxes fighting with Homer. Music by Offenbach.--Zola, or the love of stinking. 60

For art to be possible at all--that is to say, in order that an æsthetic mode of action and of observation may exist, a certain preliminary physiological state is indispensable: ecstasy. This state of ecstasy must first have intensified the susceptibility of the whole machine: otherwise, no art is possible. All kinds of ecstasy, however differently produced, have this power to create art, and above all the state dependent upon sexual excitement--this most venerable and primitive form of ecstasy. The same applies to that ecstasy which is the outcome of all great desires, all strong passions; the ecstasy of the feast, of the arena, of the act of bravery, of victory, of all extreme action; the ecstasy of cruelty; the ecstasy of destruction; the ecstasy following upon certain meteorological influences, as for instance that of springtime, or upon the use of narcotics; and finally the ecstasy of will, that ecstasy which results from accumulated and surging will-power. 68-68

What is the meaning of the antithetical concepts Apollonian and Dionysian which I have introduced into the vocabulary of Æsthetic, as representing two distinct modes of ecstasy?--Apollonian ecstasy acts above all as a force stimulating the eye, so that it acquires the power of vision. The painter, the sculptor, the epic poet are essentially visionaries. In the Dionysian state, on the other hand, the whole system of passions is stimulated and intensified, so that it discharges itself by all the means of expression at once, and vents all its power of representation, of imitation, of transfiguration, of transformation, together with every kind of mimicry and histrionic display at the same time. 67-68

As to the famous "struggle for existence," it seems to me, for the present, to be more of an assumption than a fact. It does occur, but as an exception. The general condition of life is not one of want or famine, but rather of riches, of lavish luxuriance, and even of absurd prodigality,--where there is a struggle, it is a struggle for power. 71

The most intellectual men, provided they are also the most courageous, experience the most excruciating tragedies: but on that very account they honour life, because it confronts them with its more formidable antagonism. 73

When the anarchist, as the mouthpiece of the decaying strata of society, raises his voice in splendid indignation for "right," "justice," "equal rights," he is only groaning under the burden of his ignorance, which cannot understand why he actually suffers,--what his poverty consists of--the poverty of life. 86

To bewail one's lot is always despicable: it is always the outcome of weakness. Whether one ascribes one's afflictions to others or to one's self, it is all the same. The socialist does the former, the Christian, for instance, does the latter. That which is common to both attitudes, or rather that which is equally ignoble in them both, is the fact that somebody must be to blame if one suffers--in short that the sufferer drugs himself with the honey of revenge to allay his anguish. 86

Why a Beyond, if it be not a means of splashing mud over a "Here," over this world? 87

An "altruistic" morality, a morality under which selfishness withers, is in all circumstances a bad sign. This is true of individuals and above all of nations. The best are lacking when selfishness begins to be lacking. Instinctively to select that which is harmful to one, to be lured by "disinterested" motives,--these things almost provide the formula for decadence. "Not to have one's own interests at heart"--this is simply a moral fig-leaf concealing a very different fact, a physiological one, to wit:--"I no longer know how to find what is to my interest."... Disintegration of the instincts!--All is up with man when he becomes altruistic. 87

One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death should be chosen freely,--death at the right time, faced clearly and joyfully and embraced while one is surrounded by one's children and other witnesses. It should be affected in such a way that a proper farewell is still possible, that he who is about to take leave of us is still himself, and really capable not only of valuing what he has achieved and willed in life, but also of summing-up the value of life itself. Everything precisely the opposite of the ghastly comedy which Christianity has made of the hour of death. We should never forgive Christianity for having so abused the weakness of the dying man as to do violence to his conscience, or for having used his manner of dying as a means of valuing both man and his past!--In spite of all cowardly prejudices, it is our duty, in this respect, above all to reinstate the proper--that is to say, the physiological, aspect of so-called natural death, which after all is perfectly "unnatural" and nothing else than suicide. One never perishes through anybody's fault but one's own. The only thing is that the death which takes place in the most contemptible circumstances, the death that is not free, the death which occurs at the wrong time, is the death of a coward. Out of the very love one bears to life, one should wish death to be different from this--that is to say, free, deliberate, and neither a matter of chance nor of surprise. Finally let me whisper a word of advice to our friends the pessimists and all other decadents. We have not the power to prevent ourselves from being born: but this error--for sometimes it is an error--can be rectified if we choose. The man who does away with himself performs the most estimable of deeds: he almost deserves to live for having done so. 88-89

The decline of the instincts of hostility and of those instincts that arouse suspicion,--for this if anything is what constitutes our progress--is only one of the results manifested by the general decline in vitality: it requires a hundred times more trouble and caution to live such a dependent and senile existence. In such circumstances everybody gives everybody else a helping hand, and, to a certain extent, everybody is either an invalid or an invalid's attendant. This is then called "virtue": among those men who knew a different life--that is to say, a fuller, more prodigal, more superabundant sort of life, it might have been called by another name,--possibly "cowardice," or "vileness," or "old woman's morality." 91-92

Ages should be measured according to their positive forces;--valued by this standard that prodigal and fateful age of the Renaissance, appears as the last great age, while we moderns with our anxious care of ourselves and love of our neighbours, with all our unassuming virtues of industry, equity, and scientific method--with our lust of collection, of economy and of mechanism--represent a weak age. 93

Liberalism, or, in plain English, the transformation of mankind into cattle. 94

Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves. It is to preserve the distance which separates us from other men. To grow more indifferent to hardship, to severity, to privation, and even to life itself. To be ready to sacrifice men for one's cause, one's self included. Freedom denotes that the virile instincts which rejoice in war and in victory, prevail over other instincts; for instance, over the instincts of "happiness." The man who has won his freedom, and how much more so, therefore, the spirit that has won his freedom, tramples ruthlessly upon that contemptible kind of comfort which tea-grocers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats worship in their dreams. The free man is a warrior. 94-95

By showing ever more and more favour to love-marriages, the very foundation of matrimony, that which alone makes it an institution, has been undermined. No institution ever has been nor ever will be built upon an idiosyncrasy; as I say, marriage cannot be based upon "love." 97-98

The mere fact that there is such a thing as the question of the working-man is due to stupidity, or at bottom to degenerate instincts which are the cause of all the stupidity of modern times. Concerning certain things no questions ought to be put: the first imperative principle of instinct. For the life of me I cannot see what people want to do with the working-man of Europe; now that they have made a question of him. He is far too comfortable to cease from questioning, ever more and more, and with ever less modesty. After all, he has the majority on his side. There is now not the slightest hope that an unassuming and contented sort of man, after the style of the Chinaman, will come into being in this quarter: and this would have been the reasonable course, it was even a dire necessity. What has been done? Everything has been done with the view of nipping the very pre-requisite of this accomplishment in the bud,--with the most frivolous thoughtlessness those self-same instincts by means of which a working-class becomes possible, and tolerable even to its members themselves, have been destroyed root and branch. The working-man has been declared fit for military service; he has been granted the right of combination, and of franchise: can it be wondered at that he already regards his condition as one of distress (expressed morally, as an injustice)? But, again I ask, what do people want? If they desire a certain end, then they should desire the means thereto. If they will have slaves, then it is madness to educate them to be masters. 98-99

Great men, like great ages, are explosive material, in which a stupendous amount of power is accumulated; the first conditions of their existence are always historical and physiological; they are the outcome of the fact that for long ages energy has been collected, hoarded up, saved up and preserved for their use, and that no explosion has taken place. When the tension in the bulk has become sufficiently excessive, the most fortuitous stimulus suffices in order to call "genius," "great deeds," and momentous fate into the world. 101-102

The criminal type is the type of the strong man and unfavourable conditions, a strong man made sick. He lacks the wild and savage state, a form of nature and existence which is freer and more dangerous, in which everything that constitutes the shield and the sword in the instinct of the strong man, takes a place by right. Society puts a ban upon his virtues; the most spirited instincts inherent in him immediately become involved with the depressing passions, with suspicion, fear and dishonour. But this is almost the recipe for physiological degeneration. When a man has to do that which he is best suited to do, which he is most fond of doing, not only clandestinely, but also with long suspense, caution and ruse, he becomes anæmic; and inasmuch as he is always having to pay for his instincts in the form of danger, persecution and fatalities, even his feelings begin to turn against these instincts--he begins to regard them as fatal. It is society, our tame, mediocre, castrated society, in which an untutored son of nature who comes to us from his mountains or from his adventures at sea, must necessarily degenerate into a criminal. Or almost necessarily: for there are cases in which such a man shows himself to be stronger than society: the Corsican Napoleon is the most celebrated case of this. 103-104

As long as the priest represented the highest type of man, every valuable kind of man was depreciated.... The time is coming--this I guarantee--when he will pass as the lowest type, as our Chandala, as the falsest and most disreputable kind of man. 105

Everything good is an inheritance: that which is not inherited is imperfect, it is simply a beginning. 107

Christianity with its contempt of the body is the greatest mishap that has ever befallen mankind. 108

I also speak of a "return to nature," although it is not a process of going back but of going up--up into lofty, free and even terrible nature and naturalness; such a nature as can play with great tasks and may play with them. 108

The doctrine of equality!... But there is no more deadly poison than this for it seems to proceed from the very lips of justice, whereas in reality it draws the curtain down on all justice.... "To equals equality, to unequals inequality"--that would be the real speech of justice and that which follows from it. "Never make unequal things equal." The fact that so much horror and blood are associated with this doctrine of equality, has lent this "modern idea" par excellence such a halo of fire and glory, that the Revolution as a drama has misled even the most noble minds. 108-109

"The Antichrist" ("Der Antichrist") was written in September, 1888, work evidently having been begun on it as soon as "The Twilight of the Idols" had been sent to the publisher. Its composition could not have occupied more than a few weeks at most, for the former book was not despatched until September 7, and the present work was completed before October. At this time Nietzsche was working at high pressure. He must have had some presentiment of his impending breakdown for he filled in every available minute with ardent and rapid writing. The fall of 1888 was the most prolific period of his life. No less than four books "The Twilight of the Idols," "The Antichrist," "Nietzsche contra Wagner" and "Ecce Homo"--were completed by him between the late summer and the first of the year; and in addition to this he made many notes for his future volumes and read and corrected a considerable amount of proofs. "The Antichrist," however, though completed in 1888, was not published until the end of 1894, six years after he had laid aside his work forever, and at a time when his mind was too darkened to know or care about the circumstances of its issuance. It appeared in Vol. XIII of Nietzsches Werke which, although published at the close of 1894, bore the date of the following year.

"The Antichrist" which, like "Beyond Good and Evil," "The Genealogy of Morals" and "The Twilight of the Idols," forms a part of Nietzsche's final philosophic scheme, was intended--to judge from the evidence contained in his notebooks--as the first division of a work to be entitled "The Trans valuation of All Values" ("Die Umwertung Aller Werte"). In fact this title and also "The Will to Power" were considered alternately for his magnum opus which he intended writing after the completion of "The Transvaluation of All Values." He finally decided on the latter title for his great work, although he used the former caption as a subtitle. The complete outline for the volumes which were to be called "The Transvaluation of All Values" and which were to be incorporated in his final general plan, is as follows:

1. "The Antichrist. An Attempted Criticism of Christianity." ("Der Antichrist: Versuch einer Kritik des Christenthums.")

2. "The Free Spirit. A Criticism of Philosophy as a Nihilistic Movement." ("Der freie Geist: Kritik der Philosophie als einer nihilistischen Bewegung")

3. "The Immoralist. A Criticism of the Most Fatal Species of Ignorance, Morality." ("Der Immoralist: Kritik der verhängnissvollsten Art von Unwissenheit, der Moral")

4. "Dionysus, the Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence." ("Dionysus, Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkunft")

But Nietzsche did not finish this task, although "The Antichrist" is in the form in which he intended it to be published. Nevertheless, it must be considered merely as a fragment of a much more extensive plan. Though Nietzsche was far from being the first, he yet was the most effective critic who ever waged war against Christianity. This was due to the fact that he went about his destructive work from an entirely new angle. Before him there had been many competent anti-Christian writers and scientists. Even during his own time there was a large and loud school of atheists at work undermining the foundations of Nazarene morality. With the methods of his predecessors and contemporaries, however, he had nothing in common. He saw that, despite the scientific denial of the miracles of Christianity and the biological opposition to the origin of Christian history, the theologian was always able to reply to the denial of Christian truth with the counter-argument of Christian practicability. Thus, while the reasoning of such men as Darwin, Huxley and Spencer held good so far as the scientific aspects of Christianity went, the results of Christianity were not involved. The church, meeting the onslaughts of the "higher criticism," denied the necessity of a literal belief in the Gospels, and asserted that, while all the anti-Christian critics might be accurate in their purely scientific and logical conclusions, Christianity itself as a workable code was still efficient and deserving of consideration as the most perfect system of conduct the world had ever known. Nietzsche therefore did not go into the field already ploughed by Voltaire, Hume, Huxley, Spencer, Paine and a host of lesser "free thinkers." The preliminary battles in the great warfare against Christianity had already been won, and he saw the futility of proceeding along historical and scientific lines. Consequently he turned his attention to a consideration of the effects of Christian morality upon the race, to an inquiry into the causes of pity-morality, and to a comparison of moral codes in their relation to the needs of humanity. Whether or not the origins of Christianity conformed to biological laws did not concern him, although he assumed as his hypothesis the conclusions of the scientific investigators. The only way of determining the merits and demerits of the Christian code, he argued, was to ascertain the actual results of its application, and to compare these with the results which had accrued from the application of hardier and healthier codes. To this investigation Nietzsche devotes practically the whole of "The Antichrist," although there are a few analytical passages relating to the early dissemination of Jewish ethics. But with these passages the student need not seriously concern himself. They are speculative and non-essential.

Nietzsche's criticism of the effects of Christian virtues, however, did not begin in "The Antichrist," although this book is the final flowering of those anti-Christian ideas which cropped up continually throughout his entire work. This religious antipathy was present even in his early academic essays, and in "Human, All-Too-Human" we find him well launched upon his campaign. No book of his, with the exception of his unfinished pamphlet, "The Eternal Recurrence," is free from this criticism. But one will find all his earlier conclusions and arguments drawn together in a compact and complete whole in the present volume.

Nietzsche's accusation against Christianity, reduced to a few words, is that it works against the higher development of the individual; that, being a religion of weakness, it fails to meet the requirements of the modern man; in short, that it is dangerous. This conclusion is founded on the principle of biological monism. Nietzsche assumes Darwin's law of the struggle for existence, and argues that the Christian virtues oppose not only this law but the law of natural selection as well. By this opposition the race has been weakened, for self-sacrifice, the basis of Christian morality, detracts from the power of the individual and consequently lessens his chances for existence. Furthermore, the Christian ideal in itself is opposed to progress and all that progress entails, such as science and research. Knowledge of any kind tends to make man more independent, and thereby reduces his need for theological supervision. As a result of the passing over of power from the strong to the weak, in accordance with the morality of Christianity, the strength of the race as a whole is depleted. Furthermore, such a procedure is in direct opposition to the laws of nature, and so long as man lives in a natural environment the only way to insure progress is to conform to the conditions of that environment. Nietzsche therefore makes a plea for the adoption of other than Christian standards--standards compatible with the laws of existence. He points out that already the race has been almost irremediably weakened by its adherence to anti-natural doctrines, that each day of Christian activity is another step in the complete degeneration of man. And he asserts that the only reason the race has maintained its power as long as it has is because the stronger members of society, despite their voiced belief, do not live up to the Christian code, but are continually compromising with it.

The problem of the origin of Christianity interests Nietzsche, because he sees in it an explanation of the results which it wished to accomplish. Christianity, says he, can be understood only in relation to the soil out of which it grew. When the Jewish people, subjugated and in a position of slavery, were confronted with the danger of extermination at the hands of a stronger people, they invented a system of conduct which would insure their continued existence. They realised that the adherence to such virtues as retaliation, aggressiveness, initiative, cruelty, arrogance and the like would mean death; the stronger nations would not have countenanced such qualities in a weak and depleted nation. As a result the Jews replaced retaliation with "long suffering," aggressiveness with peacefulness, cruelty with kindness, and arrogance with humility. These negative virtues took the place of positive virtues, and were turned into "beatitudes." By thus "turning the other cheek" and "forgiving one's enemies," instead of resenting persecution and attempting to avenge the wrongs perpetrated against them, they were able to prolong life. This system of conduct, says Nietzsche, was a direct falsification of all natural conditions and a perversion of all healthy instincts. It was the morality of an impoverished and subservient people, and was adopted by the Jews only when they had been stripped of their power.

Nietzsche presents a psychological history of Israel as an example of the process by which natural values were denaturalised. The God of Israel was Jehovah. He was the expression of the nation's consciousness of power, of joy and of hope. Victory and salvation were expected from him: he was the God of justice. The Assyrians and internal anarchy changed the conditions of Israel. Jehovah was no longer able to bring victory to his people, and consequently the nature of this God was changed. In the hands of the priest he became a weapon, and unhappiness was interpreted as punishment for "sins." Jehovah became a moral dictator, and consequently morality among the Israelites ceased to be an expression of the conditions of life and became an abstract theory opposed to life. Nor did the Jewish priesthood stop at this. It interpreted the whole of history with a view to showing that all sin against Jehovah led to punishment and that all pious worship of Jehovah resulted in reward. A moral order of the universe was thus substituted for a natural one. To bolster up this theory a "revelation" became necessary. Accordingly a "stupendous literary fraud" was perpetrated, and the "holy scriptures" were "discovered" and foisted upon the people. The priests, avid for power, made themselves indispensable by attributing to the will of God all those acts they desired of the people. Repentance, namely: submission to the priests, was inaugurated. Thus Christianity, hostile to all reality and power, gained its footing.

The psychology of Christ, as set forth in "The Antichrist," and the use made of his doctrines by those who directly followed him, form an important part of Nietzsche's argument against Christian morality. Christ's doctrine, according to Nietzsche, was one of immediacy. It was a mode of conduct and not, according to the present Christian conception, a preparation for a future world. Christ was a simple heretic in his rebellion against the existing political order. He represented a reactionary mode of existence---a system of conduct which said Nay to life, a code of inaction and non-interference. His death on the cross was meant as a supreme example and proof of this doctrine. It remained for his disciples to attach other meanings to it. Loving Christ as they did, and consequently blinded by that love, they were unable to forgive his execution at the hands of the State. At the same time they were unprepared to follow his example and to give their own lives to the cause of his teachings. A feeling of revenge sprang up in them, and they endeavoured to find an excuse for his death. To what was it attributable? And the answer they found, says Nietzsche, was "dominant Judaism, its ruling class." For the moment they failed to realise that the "Kingdom of God," as preached by Christ, was an earthly thing, something contained within the individual; and after the crucifixion it was necessary for them either to follow Christ's example or to interpret his death, a voluntary one, as a promise of future happiness, that is, to translate his practical doctrine into symbolic terms. They unhesitatingly chose the latter.

In their search for an explanation as to how God could have allowed his "son" to be executed, they fell upon the theory that Christ's death was a sacrifice for their sins, an expiation for their guilt. From that time on, says Nietzsche, "there was gradually imported into the type of the Saviour the doctrine of the Last Judgment, and of the 'second coming,' the doctrine of sacrificial death, and the doctrine of Resurrection, by means of which the whole concept 'blessedness,' the entire and only reality of the gospel, is conjured away--in favour of a state after death." St. Paul then rationalised the conception by introducing into it the doctrine of personal immortality by means of having Christ rise from the dead; and he preached this immortality as a reward for virtue. Thus, asserts Nietzsche, Christ's effort toward a Buddhistic movement of peace, "toward real and not merely promised happiness on earth" was controverted by his posterity. Nothing of Christ's original doctrine remained, once Paul, the forger, set to work to twist it to his own ends. Paul went further and by changing and falsifying it turned all Jewish history into a prophecy for his own teachings. Thus the whole doctrine of Christ, the true meaning of his death and the realities which he taught, were altered and distorted. In short, Christ's life was used as a means for furthering the religion of Paul, who gave to it the name of Christianity.

A most important part of "The Antichrist" is that passage wherein Nietzsche defines his order of castes. Every healthy society, says he, falls naturally into three separate and distinct types. These classes condition one another and "gravitate differently in the psychological sense." Each type has its own work, its own duties, its own emotions, its own compensations and mastership. The first class, comprising the rulers, is distinguished by its intellectual superiority. It devolves upon this class "to represent happiness, beauty and goodness on earth." The members of this superior class are in the minority, but they are nevertheless the creators of values. "Their delight is self-mastery: with them asceticism becomes a second nature, a need, an instinct. They regard a difficult task as their privilege; to play with burdens which crush their fellows is to them a recreation." They are at once the most honourable, cheerful and gracious of all men. The second class is composed of those who relieve the first class of their duties and execute the will of the rulers. They are the guardians of the law, the merchants and professional men, the warriors and the judges. In brief, they are the executors of the race. The third class is made up of the workers, the lowest order of man--those destined for menial and disagreeable tasks. "The fact," says Nietzsche, "that one is publicly useful, a wheel, a function, presupposes a certain natural destiny: it is not society, but the only kind of happiness of which the great majority are capable, that makes them intelligent machines. For the mediocre it is a joy to be mediocre; in them mastery in one thing, a specialty, is a natural instinct." The conception of these classes contains the nucleus of Nietzsche's doctrine. It embodies his whole idea of a natural aristocracy as opposed to the spurious European aristocracy of the present day, wherein the rulers are in reality merely members of the second class.

The charge is constantly brought against Nietzsche by the ecclesiastic dialecticians that his criticism of Christianity is fraught with the very nihilism against which he so eloquently argues. There is perhaps a slight basis for such a contention if we confine ourselves strictly to those of his utterances against the Jewish morality which appear in his previous books. But in "The Antichrist" this does not hold true even in the slightest manner. Nietzsche is constantly supplanting modes of action for every Christian virtue he denies. He is as constructive as he is destructive. "The Antichrist" contains, not only a complete denial of all Christian morality, but a statement of a new and consistent system of ethics based on the research of all his works.

EXCERPTS FROM "THE ANTICHRIST"

What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power, the Will to Power, and power itself in man. What is bad?--All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness?--The feeling that power is increasing,- that resistance has been overcome.

Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, free from all moralic acid). The weak and botched shall perish: first principle of our humanity. And they ought even to be helped to perish.

What is more harmful than any vice?--Practical sympathy with all the botched and the weak--Christianity. 128

We must not deck out and adorn Christianity: it has waged a deadly war upon this higher type of man, it has set a ban upon all the fundamental instincts of this type, and has distilled evil and the devil himself out of these instincts:--the strong man as the typical pariah, the villain. Christianity has sided with everything weak, low, and botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism against all the self-preservative instincts of strong life: it has corrupted even the reason of the strongest intellects, by teaching that the highest values of intellectuality are sinful, misleading and full of temptations. 130

I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it selects and prefers that which is detrimental to it. 131

Life itself, to my mind, is nothing more nor less than the instinct of growth, of permanence, of accumulating forces, of power: where the will to power is lacking, degeneration sets in. 131

Pity is opposed to the tonic passions which enhance the energy of the feeling of life: its action is depressing. A man loses power when he pities. By means of pity the drain on strength which suffering itself already introduces into the world is multiplied a thousandfold. 131

On the whole, pity thwarts the law of development which is the law of selection. It preserves that which is ripe for death, it fights in favour of the disinherited and the condemned of life. 131-132

This depressing and infectious instinct thwarts those instincts which aim at the preservation and enhancement of the value of life: by multiplying misery quite as much as by preserving all that is miserable, it is the principal agent in promoting decadence. 132

That which a theologian considers true, must of necessity be false: this furnishes almost the criterion of truth. It is his most profound self-preservative instinct which forbids reality ever to attain to honour in any way, or even to raise its voice. Whithersoever the influence of the theologian extends, valuations are topsy-turvy, and the concepts "true" and "false" have necessarily changed places: that which is most deleterious to life, is here called "true," that which enhances it, elevates it, says Yea to it, justifies it and renders it triumphant, is called "false." 135

What is there that destroys a man more speedily than to work, think, feel, as an automaton of "duty," without internal promptings, without a profound personal predilection, without joy? This is the recipe par excellence of decadence and even of idiocy. 137

In Christianity, neither morality nor religion comes in touch at all with reality. Nothing but imaginary causes (God, the soul, the ego, spirit, free will--or even non-free will); nothing but imaginary effects (sin, salvation, grace, punishment, forgiveness of sins). Imaginary beings are supposed to have intercourse (God, spirits, souls); imaginary Natural History (anthropocentric: total lack of the notion, "natural causes"); an imaginary psychology (nothing but misunderstandings of self, interpretations of pleasant or unpleasant general feelings; for instance of the states of the nervus sympathicus, with the help of the sign language of a religio-moral idiosyncrasy,--repentance, pangs of conscience, the temptation of the devil, the presence of God); an imaginary teleology (the Kingdom of God, the Last Judgment, Everlasting Life). 141-142

A proud people requires a God, unto whom it can sacrifice things.... Religion, when restricted to these principles, is a form of gratitude. A man is grateful for his own existence; for this he must have a God.--Such a God must be able to profit and to injure him, he must be able to act the friend and the foe. He must be esteemed for his good as well as for his evil qualities. 143

When a people is on the road to ruin; when it feels its belief in a future, its hope of freedom vanishing for ever; when it becomes conscious of submission as the most useful quality, and of the virtues of the submissive as self-preservative measures, then its God must also modify himself. He then becomes a tremulous and unassuming sneak; he counsels "peace of the soul," the cessation of all hatred, leniency and "love" even towards friend and foe. He is for ever moralising, he crawls into the heart of every private virtue, becomes a God for everybody. 143

The Christian concept of God--God as the deity of the sick, God as a spider, God as a spirit--is one of the most corrupt concepts of God that has ever been attained on earth. Maybe it represents the low-water mark in the evolutionary ebb of the godlike type. God degenerated into the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yea! With God war is declared on life, nature, and the will to life! God is the formula for every calumny of this world and for every lie concerning a beyond! 146

Christianity aims at mastering beasts of prey; its expedient is to make them ill,--to render feeble is the Christian recipe for taming, for "civilisation." 151

If faith is above all necessary, then reason, knowledge, and scientific research must be brought into evil repute: the road to truth becomes the forbidden road.--Strong hope is a much greater stimulant of life than any single realised joy could be. Sufferers must be sustained by a hope which no actuality can contradict,--and which cannot ever be realised: the hope of another world. (Precisely on account of this power that hope has of making the unhappy linger on, the Greeks regarded it as the evil of evils, as the most mischievous evil: it remained behind in Pandora's box.) In order that love may be possible, God must be a person. In order that the lowest instincts may also make their voices heard God must be young. For the ardour of the women a beautiful saint, and for the ardour of the men a Virgin Mary has to be pressed into the foreground. All this on condition that Christianity wishes to rule over a certain soil, on which Aphrodisiac or Adonis cults had already determined the notion of a cult. To insist upon chastity only intensifies the vehemence and profundity of the religious instinct--it makes the cult warmer, more enthusiastic, more soulful.--Love is the state in which man sees things most widely different from what they are. The force of illusion reaches its zenith here, as likewise the sweetening and transfiguring power. When a man is in love he endures more than at other times; he submits to everything. The thing was to discover a religion in which it was possible to love: by this means the worst in life is overcome--it is no longer even seen.--So much for three Christian virtues Faith, Hope, and Charity: I call them the three Christian precautionary measures. 152-153

What is Jewish morality, what is Christian morality? Chance robbed of its innocence; unhappiness polluted with the idea of "sin"; well being interpreted as a danger, as a "temptation"; physiological indisposition poisoned by means of the cankerworm of conscience. 157-158

What does a "moral order of the universe" mean? That once and for all there is such a thing as will of God which determines what man has to do and what he has to leave undone; that the value of a people or of an individual is measured according to how much or how little the one or the other obeys the will of God; that in the destinies of a people or of an individual, the will of God shows itself dominant, that is to say it punishes or rewards according to the degree of obedience. In the place of this miserable falsehood reality says: a parasitical type of man, who can flourish only at the cost of all the healthy elements of life, the priest abuses the name of God: he calls that state of affairs in which the priest determines the value of things "the Kingdom of God"; he calls the means whereby such a state of affairs is attained or maintained, "the Will of God"; with cold-blooded cynicism he measures peoples, ages and individuals according to whether they favour or oppose the ascendency of the priesthood. 158-159

I fail to see against whom was directed the insurrection of which rightly or wrongly Jesus is understood to have been the promoter, if it were not directed against the Jewish church. 162

This saintly anarchist who called the lowest of the low, the outcasts and "sinners," the Chandala of Judaism, to revolt against the established order of things (and in language which, if the gospels are to be trusted, would get one sent to Siberia even to-day)--this man was a political criminal in so far as political criminals were possible in a community so absurdly non-political. This brought him to the cross: the proof of this is the inscription found thereon. He died for his sins--and no matter how often the contrary has been asserted there is absolutely nothing to show that he died for the sins of others. 162-163

The instinctive hatred of reality is the outcome of an extreme susceptibility to pain and to irritation, which can no longer endure to be "touched" at all, because every sensation strikes too deep.

The instinctive exclusion of all aversion, of all hostility, of all boundaries and distances in feeling, is the outcome of an extreme susceptibility to pain and to irritation, which regards all resistance, all compulsory resistance as insufferable anguish(--that is to say, as harmful, as deprecated by the self-preservative instinct), and which knows blessedness (happiness) only when it is no longer obliged to offer resistance to anybody, either evil or detrimental,--love as the only ultimate possibility of life....

These are the two physiological realities upon which and out of which the doctrine of salvation has grown. 166

With a little terminological laxity Jesus might be called a "free spirit"--he cares not a jot for anything that is established: the word killeth, everything fixed killeth. The idea, experience, "life" as he alone knows it, is, according to him, opposed to every kind of word, formula, law, faith and dogma. He speaks only of the innermost things: "life" or "truth" or "light," is his expression for the innermost things,--everything else the whole of reality, the whole of nature, language even, has only the value of a sign, of a simile for him. 169-170

The whole psychology of the "gospels" lacks the concept of guilt and punishment, as also that of reward. "Sin," any sort of aloofness between God and man, is done away with,--this is precisely what constitutes the "glad tidings." Eternal bliss is not promised, it is not bound up with certain conditions; it is the only reality--the rest consists only of signs wherewith to speak about it....

The results of such a state project themselves into a new practice of life, the actual evangelical practice. It is not a "faith" which distinguishes himself by means of a different mode of action.... 171

The life of the Saviour was naught else than this practice,--neither was his death. He no longer required any formulæ, any rites for his relations with God--not even prayer. He has done with all the Jewish teaching of repentance and of atonement; he alone knows the mode of life which makes one feel "divine," "saved," "evangelical," and at all times a "child of God." Not "repentance," not "prayer and forgiveness" are the roads to God: the evangelical mode of life alone leads to God, it is "God."--That which the gospels abolished was the Judaism of the concepts "sin," "forgiveness of sin," "faith," "salvation through faith,"--the whole doctrine of the Jewish church was denied by the "glad tidings."

The profound instinct of how one must live in order to feel "in Heaven," in order to feel "eternal," while in every other respect one feels by no means "in Heaven": this alone is the psychological reality of "Salvation."--A new life and not a new faith.... 171-172

This "messenger of glad tidings" died as he lived and as he taught--not in order "to save mankind," but in order to show how one ought to live. It was a mode of life that he bequeathed to mankind: his behaviour before his judges, his attitude towards his executioners, his accusers, and all kinds of calumny and scorn,--his demeanour on the cross. 174

The history of Christianity--from the death on the cross onwards--is the history of a gradual and ever coarser misunderstanding of an original symbolism. 175

"The world" to Christianity means that a man is a soldier, a judge, a patriot, that he defends himself, that he values his honour, that he desires his own advantage, that he is proud. ... The conduct of every moment, every instinct, every valuation that leads to a deed, is at present anti-Christian: what an abortion of falsehood modern man must be, in order to be able without a blush still to call himself a Christian! 178

The very word "Christianity" is a misunderstanding,--truth to tell, there never was more than one Christian, and he died on the Cross. The "gospel" died on the cross. That which thenceforward was called "gospel" was the reverse of that "gospel" that Christ had lived: it was "evil tidings," a dysangel. It is false to the point of nonsense to see in "faith," in the faith in salvation through Christ, the distinguishing trait of the Christian; the only thing that is Christian is the Christian mode of existence, a life such as he led who died on the Cross.... To this day a life of this kind is still possible; for certain men, it is even necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity will be possible in all ages.... Not a faith, but a course of action. 173-179

To regard a man like St.-Paul as honest (a man whose home was the very headquarters of Stoical enlightenment) when he devises a proof of the continued existence of the Saviour out of a hallucination; or even to believe him when he declares that he had this hallucination, would amount to foolishness on the part of a psychologist: St.-Paul desired the end, consequently he also desired the means.... Even what he himself did not believe, was believed in by the idiots among whom he spread his doctrine.--What he wanted was power; with St.-Paul the priest again aspired to power. 185

When the centre of gravity of life is laid, not in life, but in a beyond--in nonentity, life is utterly robbed of its balance. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all nature in the instincts,--everything in the instincts that is beneficent, that promotes life and that is a guarantee of the future, henceforward aroused suspicion. The very meaning of life is now construed as the effort to live in such a way that life no longer has any point.... Why show any public spirit? Why be grateful for one's origin and one's forebears? Why collaborate with one's fellows, and be confident? Why be concerned about the general weal or strive after it?... All these things are merely so many "temptations," so many deviations from the "straight path." "One thing only is necessary" ... that everybody, as an "immortal soul," should have equal rank, that in the totality of beings, the "salvation" of each individual may lay claim to eternal importance, that insignificant bigots and three-quarter-lunatics may have the right to suppose that the laws of nature may be persistently broken on their account,--any such magnification of every kind of selfishness to infinity, to insolence, cannot be branded with sufficient contempt. And yet it is to this miserable flattery of personal vanity that Christianity owed its triumph,--by this means it lured all the bungled and the botched, all revolting and revolted people, all abortions, the whole of the refuse and offal of humanity, over to its side. 185-186

With Christianity, the art of feeling holy lies, which constitutes the whole of Judaism, reaches its final mastership, thanks to many centuries of Jewish and most thoroughly serious training and practice. 188

Only read the gospels as books calculated to seduce by means of morality--morality is appropriated by these petty people,--they know what morality can do! The best way of leading mankind by the nose is with morality! The fact is that the most conscious conceit of people who believe themselves to be chosen, here simulates modesty: in this way they, the Christian community, the "good and the just" place themselves once and for all on a certain side, the side "of Truth"--and the rest of mankind, "the world" on the other.... This was the most fatal kind of megalomania that had ever yet existed on earth; insignificant little abortions of bigots and liars began to lay sole claim to the concepts "God," "Truth," "Light," "Spirit," "Love," "Wisdom," "Life," as if these things were, so to speak, synonyms of themselves, in order to fence themselves off from "the world"; little ultra-Jews, ripe for every kind of madhouse, twisted values round in order to suit themselves, just as if the Christian, alone, were the meaning, the salt, the standard and even the "ultimate tribunal" of all the rest of mankind. 189-190

One does well to put on one's gloves when reading the New Testament. The proximity of so much pitch almost defiles one. We should feel just as little inclined to hobnob with "the first Christians" as with Polish Jews: not that we need explain our objections.... They simply smell bad.--In vain have I sought for a single sympathetic feature in the New Testament; there is not a trace of freedom, kindliness, openheartedness and honesty to be found in it. Humaneness has not even made a start in this book, while cleanly instincts are entirely absent from it.... Only evil instincts are to be found in the New Testament, it shows no sign of courage, these people lack even the courage of these evil instincts. All is cowardice, all is a closing of one's eyes and self-deception. Every book becomes clean, after one has just read the New Testament. 193-194

In the whole of the New Testament only one figure appears which we cannot help respecting. Pilate, the Roman Governor. To take a Jewish quarrel seriously was a thing he could not get himself to do. One Jew more or less--what did it matter?... The noble scorn of a Roman, in whose presence the word "truth" had been shamelessly abused, has enriched the New Testament with the only saying which is of value,--and this saying is not only the criticism, but actually the shattering of that Testament: "What is truth!" 195-196

No one is either a philologist or a doctor, who is not also an Antichrist. As a philologist, for instance, a man sees behind the "holy books" as a doctor he sees behind the physiological rottenness of the typical Christian. The Doctor says "incurable," the philologist says "forgery." 197

The priest knows only one great danger, and that is science,--the healthy concept of cause and effect. But, on the whole, science flourishes only in happy conditions,--a man must have time, he must also have superfluous mental energy in order to "pursue knowledge." ... "Consequently man must be made unhappy,"--this has been the argument of the priest of all ages.--You have already divined what, in accordance with such a manner of arguing, must first have come into the world:--"sin."... The notion of guilt and punishment, the whole "moral order of the universe," was invented against science. 199

The notion of guilt and punishment, including the doctrine of "grace," of "salvation" and of "forgiveness"--all lies through and through without a shred of psychological reality--were invented in order to destroy man's sense of causality: they are an attack with the fist, with the knife, with honesty in hate and love! But one actuated by the most cowardly, most crafty, and most ignoble instincts! A priest's attack! A parasite's attack! A vampyrism of pale subterranean leeches! 200

"Faith saveth; therefore it is true."--It might be objected here that it is precisely salvation which is not probed but only promised; salvation is bound up with the condition "faith,"--one shall be saved, because one has faith.... But how prove that that which the priest promises to the faithful really will take place, to wit: the "Beyond" which defies all demonstration?--The assumed "proof of power" is at bottom once again only a belief in the fact that the effect which faith promises will not fail to take place. In a formula: "I believe that faith saveth;--consequently it is true."--But with this we are at the end of our tether. 201

Holiness in itself is simply a symptom of an impoverished, enervated and incurably deteriorated body! 203-204

Christianity is built upon the rancour of the sick; its instinct is directed against the sound, against health. Everything well-constituted, proud, high-spirited, and beautiful is offensive to its ears and eyes. 204

"Faith" simply means the refusal to know what is true. 205

The conclusion which all idiots, women and common people come to, that there must be something in a cause for which some one lays down his life (or which, as in the case of primitive Christianity, provokes an epidemic of sacrifices),--this conclusion put a tremendous check upon all investigation, upon the spirit of investigation and of caution. Martyrs have harmed the cause of truth. 208

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. 209-210

Whom do I hate most among the rabble, the Chandala apostles, who undermine the working man's instinct, his happiness and his feeling of contentedness with his insignificant existence,--who make him envious, and who teach him revenge.... The wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in the claim to equal rights. 220

The Christian and the anarchist are both decadents; they are both incapable of acting in any other way than disintegratingly, poisonously and witheringly, like bloodsuckers; they are both actuated by an instinct of mortal hatred of everything that stands erect, that is great, that is lasting, and that is a guarantee of the future. 221-222

Christianity destroyed the harvest we might have reaped from the culture of antiquity, later it also destroyed our harvest of the culture of Islam. The wonderful Moorish world of Spanish culture, which in its essence is more closely related to us, and which appeals more to our sense and taste than Rome and Greece, was trampled to death(--I do not say by what kind of feet), why?--because it owed its origin to noble, to manly instincts, because it said yea to life, even that life so full of the race, and refined luxuries of the Moors! 226

I condemn Christianity and confront it with the most terrible accusation that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. To my mind it is the greatest of all conceivable corruptions, it has had the will to the last imaginable corruption. The Christian Church allowed nothing to escape from its corruption; it converted every value into its opposite, every truth into a lie, and every honest impulse into an ignominy of the soul. Let any one dare to speak to me of its humanitarian blessings! To abolish any sort of distress was opposed to its profoundest interests; its very existence depended on states of distress; it created states of distress in order to make itself immortal.... The cancer germ of sin, for instance: the Church was the first to enrich mankind with this misery!--The "equality of souls before God," this falsehood, this pretext for the rancunes of all the base-minded, this anarchist bomb of a concept, which has ultimately become the revolution, the modern idea, the principle of decay of the whole of social order,--this is Christian dynamite.... The "humanitarian" blessings of Christianity! To breed a self-contradiction, an art of self-profanation, a will to lie at any price, an aversion, a contempt of all good and honest instincts out of humanitas! Is this what you call the blessings of Christianity?--Parasitism as the only method of the Church; sucking all the blood, all the love, all the hope of life out of mankind with anæmic and sacred ideals. A "Beyond" as the will to deny all reality; the cross as the trade-mark of the most subterranean form of conspiracy that has ever existed,--against health, beauty, well-constitutedness, bravery, intellect, kindliness of soul, against Life itself....

This eternal accusation against Christianity I would fain write on all walls, wherever there are walls,--I have letters with which I can make even the blind see.... I call Christianity the one great curse, the one enormous and innermost perversion, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are too venomous, too underhand, too underground and too petty,--I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.... 230-231

"The Will to Power"