THE GENEALOGY
MORALS
BYF R I E D R I C H

OF

NIETZSCHE

TRANSLATED BY HORACE B. SAMUEL, M. A.

BONI AND LIVERIGHT, INC.
PUBLISHERS

.

• . NEW

YORK

rinted in
the United States of America

EDITOR'S NOTE.
I N 1887, with the view of amplifying and completing
certain new doctrines which he had merely sketched in
Beyond Good and Evil (see especially Aphorism 260),
Nietzsche published The Genealogy of Morals. This work
is perhaps the least aphoristic, in form, of all Nietzsche's
productions. For analytical power, more especially in
those parts where Nietzsche examines the ascetic ideal,
The Genealogy of Morals is unequalled by any other of
his works; and, in the light which it throws upon the attitude of the ecclesiast to the man of resentment and misfortune, it is one of the most valuable contributions to
sacerdotal psychology.

CONTENTS
PAGE

PREFACE

i

F I R S T ESSAY
"GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD" .

I

SECOND ESSAY
" G U I L T , " " B A D CONSCIENCE," AND T H E L I K E

40

T H I R D ESSAY
W H A T I S T H E M E A N I N G OF ASCETIC IDEALS?
PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES

94
179

PREFACE.
i.

W E are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves: this
has its own good reason. We have never searched for
ourselves—how should it then come to pass, that we should
ever find ourselves? Rightly has it been said: "Where
your treasure is, there will your heart be also." Our
treasure is there, where stand the hives of our knowledge.
It is to those hives that we are always striving; as born
creatures of flight, and as the honey-gatherers of the
spirit, we care really in our hearts only for one thing—to
bring something "home to the hive!"
As far as the rest of life with its so-called "experiences"
is concerned, which of us has even sufficient serious interest? or sufficient time? In our dealings with such points
of life, we are, I fear, never properly to the point; to be
precise, our heart is not there, and certainly not our ear.
Rather like one who, delighting in a divine distraction,
or sunken in the seas of his own soul, in whose ear the
clock has just thundered with all its force its twelve strokes
of noon, suddenly wakes up, and asks himself, "What has
in point of fact just struck?" so do we at times rub afterwards, as it were, our puzzled ears, and ask in complete
astonishment and complete embarrassment, "Through
what have we in point of fact just lived?" further, "Who
are we in point of fact?" and count, after they have struck,
i

ii

PREFACE

as I have explained, all the twelve throbbing beats of the
clock of our experience, of our life, of our being—ah!—
and count wrong in the endeavour. Of necessity we remain strangers to ourselves, we understand ourselves not,
in ourselves we are bound to be mistaken, for of us holds
good to all eternity the motto, "Each one is the farthest
away from himself"—as far as ourselves are concerned we
are not "knowers."
2.

My thoughts concerning the genealogy of our moral
prejudices—for they constitute the issue in this polemic—
have their first, bald, and provisional expression in that
collection of aphorisms entitled Human, all-too-Hutnan,
a Book for Free Minds, the writing of which was begun in
Sorrento, during a winter which allowed me to gaze over
the broad and dangerous territory through which my mind
had up to that time wandered. This took place in the
winter of 1876-77; the thoughts themselves are older.
They were in their substance already the same thoughts
which I take up again in the following treatises:—we hope
that they have derived benefit from the long interval,
that they have grown riper, clearer, stronger, more complete. The fact, however, that I still cling to them even
now, that in the meanwhile they have always held faster
by each other, have, in fact, grown out of their original
shape and into each other, all this strengthens in my mind
the joyous confidence that they must have been originally
neither separate disconnected capricious nor sporadic phenomena, but have sprung from a common root from a

PREFACE

iii

fundamental "fiat" of knowledge, whose empire reached
to the soul's depth, and that ever grew more definite in
its voice, and more definite in its demands. That is the
only state of affairs that is proper in the case of a philosopher.
We have no right to be "disconnected"; we must
neither err "disconnectedly" nor strike the truth "disconnectedly." Rather with the necessity with which a
tree bears its fruit, so do our thoughts, our values, our
Yes's and No's and If's and Whether's, grow connected
and interrelated, mutual witnesses of one will, one health,
one kingdom, one sun—as to whether they are to your
taste, these fruits of ours?—But what matters that to the
trees? What matters that to us, us the philosophers?
3Owing to a scrupulosity peculiar to myself, which I confess reluctantly,—it concerns indeed morality,—a scrupulosity, which manifests itself in my life at such an early
period, with so much spontaneity, with so chronic a persistence and so keen an opposition to environment, epoch,
precedent, and ancestry that I should have been almost
entitled to style it my "a priori"—my curiosity and my
suspicion felt themselves betimes bound to halt at the
question, of what in point of actual fact was the origin
of our "Good" and of our "Evil." Indeed, at the boyish
age of thirteen the problem of the origin of Evil already
haunted me: at an age "when games and God divide one's
heart," I devoted to that problem my first childish attempt at the literary game, my first philosophic essay—

iv

PREFACE

and as regards my infantile solution of the problem, well,
I gave quite properly the honour to God, and made him
the father of evil. Did my own "a priori" demand that
precise solution from me? that new, immoral, or at least
"amoral" "a priori" and that "categorical imperative"
which was its voice (but, oh! how hostile to the Kantian article, and how pregnant with problems!), to which
since then I have given more and more attention, and
indeed what is more than attention. Fortunately I soon
learned to separate theological from moral prejudices, and
I gave up looking for a supernatural origin of evil. A
certain amount of historical and philological education, to
say nothing of an innate faculty of psychological discrimination par excellence succeeded in transforming almost
immediately my original problem into the following one:
—Under what conditions did Man invent for himself those
judgments of values, "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?
On this point I found and hazarded in my mind the most
diverse answers, I established distinctions in periods, peoples, and castes, I became a specialist in my problem, and
from my answers grew new questions, new investigations,
new conjectures, new probabilities; until at last I had a
land of my own and a soil of my own, a whole secret7
world growing and flowering, like hidden gardens of
whose existence no one could have an inkling—oh, how

PREFACE

v

lappy are we, we finders of knowledge, provided that we
know how to keep silent sufficiently long.
4-

My first impulse to publish some of my hypotheses concerning the origin of morality I owe to a clear, well-written, and even precocious little book, in which a perverse
and vicious kind of moral philosophy (your real English
kind) was definitely presented to me for the first time; and
this attracted me—with that magnetic attraction, inherent
in that which is diametrically opposed and antithetical to
one's own ideas. The title of the book was The Origin
of the Moral Emotions] its author, Dr. Paul Ree; the
year of its appearance, 1877. I m a y almost say that I
have never read anything in which every single dogma
and conclusion has called forth from me so emphatic a
negation as did that book; albeit a negation untainted by
either pique or intolerance. I referred accordingly both*
in season and out of season in the previous works, at
which I was then working, to the arguments of that book,
not to refute them—for what have I got to do with mere
refutations—but substituting, as is natural to a positive
mind, for an improbable theory one which is more probable, and occasionally no doubt for one philosophic error
another. In that early period I gave, as I have said, the
first public expression to those theories of origin to which
these essays are devoted, but with a clumsiness which I
was the last to conceal from myself, for I was as yet
cramped, being still without a special language for these
special subjects, still frequently liable to relapse and to

VI

PREFACE

vacillation. To go into details, compare what I say \ i
Human, all-too-Human, part i., about the parallel early
history of Good and Evil, Aph. 45 (namely, their origin
from the castes of the aristocrats and the slaves); similarly, Aph. 136 et seq., concerning the birth and value of
ascetic morality; similarly, Aphs. 96, 99, vol. ii., Aph
89, concerning the Morality of Custom, that far older and
more original kind of morality which is toto ccelo different
from the altruistic ethics (in which Dr. Ree, like all the
English moral philosophers, sees the ethical "Thing-initself"); finally, Aph. 92. Similarly, Aph. 26 in Human,
all-too-Human, part ii., and Aph. 112, the Dawn of Day,
concerning the origin of Justice as a balance between persons of approximately equal power (equilibrium as the
hypothesis of all contract, consequently of all law); similarly, concerning the origin of Punishment, Human, alltoo-Human, part ii., Aphs. 22, 23, in regard to which the
deterrent object is neither essential nor original (as Dr.
Ree thinks:—rather is it that this object is only imported,
under certain definite conditions, and always as something
extra and additional).
5.
In reality I had set my heart at that time on something much more important than the nature of the theories
of myself or others concerning the origin of morality (or,
more precisely, the real function from my view of these
theories was to point an end to which they were one
among many means). The issue for me was the value
of morality, and on that subject I had to place myself

PREFACE

vii

in a state of abstraction, in which I was almost alone
with my great teacher Schopenhauer, to whom that book,
with all its passion and inherent contradiction (for that
book also was a polemic), turned for present help as
though he were still alive. The issue was, strangely
enough, the value of the "unegoistic" instincts, the instincts of pity, self-denial, and self-sacrifice which Schopenhauer had so persistently painted in golden colours,
deified and etherealised, that eventually they appeared to
him, as it were, high and dry, as "intrinsic values in themselves," on the strength of which he uttered both to Life
and to himself his own negation. But against these very
instincts there voiced itself in my soul a more and more
fundamental mistrust, a scepticism that dug ever deeper
and deeper: and in this very instinct I saw the great
danger of mankind, its most sublime temptation and seduction—seduction to what? to nothingness?—in these
very instincts I saw the beginning of the end, stability, the
exhaustion that gazes backwards, the will turning against
Life, the last illness announcing itself with its own mincing
melancholy: I realised that the morality of pity which
spread wider and wider, and whose grip infected even
philosophers with its disease, was the most sinister symptom of our modern European civilisation; I realised that
it was the route along which that civilisation slid on its
way to—a new Buddhism?—a European Buddhism?—
Nihilism? This exaggerated estimation in which modern
philosophers have held pity, is quite a new phenomenon:
up to that time philosophers were absolutely unanimous
as to the worthlessness of pity. I need only mention
Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld, and Kant—four minds

viii

PREFACE

as mutually different as is possible, but united on one
point; their contempt of pity.
6.

This problem of the value of pity and of the pitymorality (I am an opponent of the modern infamous
emasculation of our emotions) seems at the first blush a
mere isolated problem, a note of interrogation for itself;
he, however, who once halts at this problem, and learns
how to put questions, will experience what I experienced:
—a new and immense vista unfolds itself before him, a
sense of potentiality seizes him like a vertigo, every species
of doubt, mistrust, and fear springs up, the belief in
morality, nay, in all morality, totters,—finally a new demand voices itself. Let us speak out this new demand:
we need a critique of moral values, the value of these
values is for the first time to be called into question—and
for this purpose a knowledge is necessary of the conditions and circumstances out of which these values grew,
and under which they experienced their evolution and
their distortion (morality as a result, as a symptom, as a
mask, as Tartuffism, as disease, as a misunderstanding;
but also morality as a cause, as a remedy, as a stimulant,
as a fetter, as a drug), especially as such a knowledge has
neither existed up to the present time nor is even now generally desired. The value of these "values" was taken for
granted as an indisputable fact, which was beyond all
question. No one has, up to the present, exhibited the
faintest doubt or hesitation in judging the "good man"
to be of a higher value than the "evil man," of a higher

PREFACE

ix

value with regard specifically to human progress, utility,
and prosperity generally, not forgetting the future.
What? Suppose the converse were the truth! What?
Suppose there lurked in the "good man" a symptom of
retrogression, such as a danger, a temptation, a poison, a
narcotic, by means of which the present battened on the
future! More comfortable and less risky perhaps than
its opposite, but also pettier, meaner! So that morality
would really be saddled with the guilt, if the maximum
potentiality of the power and splendour of the human
species were never to be attained? So that really morality
would be the danger of dangers?
7-

Enough, that after this vista had disclosed itself to me,
I myself had reason to search for learned, bold, and industrious colleagues (I am doing it even to this very day).
It means traversing with new clamorous questions, and at
the same time with new eyes, the immense, distant, and
completely unexplored land of morality—of a morality
which has actually existed and been actually lived! and is
this not practically equivalent to first discovering that
land? If, in this context, I thought, amongst others, of the
aforesaid Dr. Ree, I did so because I had no doubt that
from the very nature of his questions he would be compelled to have recourse to a truer method, in order to obtain his answers. Have I deceived myself on that score?
I wished at all events to give a better direction of vision
to an eye of such keenness and such impartiality. I
wished to direct him to the real history of morality, and

X

PREFACE

to warn him, while there was yet time, against a world
of English theories that culminated in the blue vacuum
of heaven. Other colours, of course, rise immediately to
one's mind as being a hundred times more potent than
blue for a genealogy of morals:—for1 instance, grey, by
which I mean authentic facts capable of definite proof and
having actually existed, or, to put it shortly, the whole
of that long hieroglyphic script (which is so hard to decipher) about the past history of human morals. This
script was unknown to Dr. Ree; but he had read Darwin:—and so in his philosophy the Darwinian beast and
that pink of modernity, the demure weakling and dilettante, who "bites no longer," shake hands politely in a
fashion that; is at least instructive, the latter exhibiting
a certain facial expression of refined and good-humoured
indolence, tinged with a touch of pessimism and exhaustion; as if it really did not pay to take all these things—I
mean moral problems—so seriously. I, on the other hand,
think that there are no subjects which pay better for being
taken seriously; part of this payment is, that perhaps
eventually they admit of being taken gaily. This gaiety,
indeed, or, to use my own language, this joyful wisdom,
is a payment; a payment for a protracted, brave, laborious, and burrowing seriousness, which, it goes without
saying, is the attribute of but a few. But on that day
on which we say from the fullness of our hearts, "Forward! our old morality too is fit material for. Comedy"
we shall have discovered a new plot, and a new possibility
for the Dionysian drama entitled The Soul's Fate—and
he will speedily utilise it, one can wager safely, he, the
great ancient eternal dramatist of the comedy of our
existence.

PREFACE

xi

8.
If this writing be obscure to any individual, and jar
on his ears, I do not think that it is necessarily I who
am to blame. It is clear enough, on the hypothesis which
I presuppose, namely, that the reader has first read my
previous writings and has not grudged them a certain
amount of trouble: it is not, indeed, a simple matter to
get really at their essence. Take, for instance, my Zarathustra; I allow no one to pass muster as knowing that
book, unless every single word therein has at some time
wrought in him a profound wound, and at some time
exercised on him a profound enchantment: then and not
till then can he enjoy the privilege of participating reverently in the halcyon element, from which that work is
born, in its sunny brilliance, its distance, its spaciousness,
its certainty. In other cases the aphoristic form produces
difficulty, but this is only because this form is treated too
casually. An aphorism properly coined and cast into its
final mould is far from being "deciphered" as soon as it
has been read; on the contrary, it is then that it first
requires to be expounded—of course for that purpose an
art of exposition is necessary. The third essay in this
book provides an example of what is offered, of what in
such cases I call exposition: an aphorism is prefixed to
that essay, the essay itself is its commentary. Certainly
one quality which nowadays has been best forgotten—
and that is why it will take some time yet for n : writings
to become readable—is essential in order to practise reading as an art—a quality for the exercise of which it is

PREFACE

xii

necessary to be a cow, and under no circumstances a,
modern man!—rumination.
SILS-MARIA, UPPER ENGADINE,

July, 1887.

FIRST ESSAY
GOOD AND EVIL/' "GOOD AND BAD

THOSE English psychologists, who up to the present are
the only philosophers who are to be thanked for any
endeavour to get as far as a history of the origin of
morality—these men, I say, offer us in their own personalities no paltry problem;—they even have, if I am to
be quite frank about it, in their capacity of living riddles,
an advantage over their books—they themselves are
interesting! These English psychologists—what do they
really mean? We always find them voluntarily or involuntarily at the same task of pushing to the front the
partie honteuse of our inner world, and looking for the
efficient, governing, and decisive principle in that precise
quarter where the intellectual self-respect of the race
would be the most reluctant to find it (for example, in
the vis inertice of habit, or in forgetfulness, or in a blind
and fortuitous mechanism and association of ideas, or in
some factor that is purely passive, reflex, molecular, or
fundamentally stupid)—what is the real motive power
which always impels these psychologists in precisely this
direction? Is it an instinct for human disparagement
somewhat sinister, vulgar, and malignant, or perhaps ini

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
comprehensible even to itself? or perhaps a touch of
pessimistic jealousy, the mistrust of disillusioned idealists
who have become gloomy, poisoned, and bitter? or a petty
subconscious enmity and rancour against Christianity
(and Plato), that has conceivably never crossed the
threshold of consciousness? or just a vicious taste for
those elements of life which are bizarre, painfully paradoxical, mystical, and illogical? or, as a final alternative,
a dash of each of these motives—a little vulgarity, a little
gloominess, a little anti-Christianity, a little craving for
the necessary piquancy?
But I am told that it is simply a case of old frigid and
tedious frogs crawling and hopping around men and inside
men, as if they were as thoroughly at home there, as they
would be in a swamp.
I am opposed to this statement, nay, I do not believe
it; and if, in the impossibility of knowledge, one is permitted to wish, so do I wish from my heart that just the
converse metaphor should apply, and that these analysts
with their psychological microscopes should be, at bottom,
brave, proud, and magnanimous animals who know how
to bridle both their hearts and their smarts, and have
specifically trained themselves to sacrifice what is desirable
to what is true, any truth in fact, even the simple, bitter,
ugly, repulsive, unchristian, and immoral truths—for
there are truths of that description.
2.

All honour, then, to the noble spirits who would fain
dominate these historians of morality. But k is certainly

"GOOD ANI) EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD"

3

a pity that they lack the historical sense itself, that they
themselves are quite deserted by ill the beneficent spirits
of history. The whole train of their thought runs, as was
always the way of old-fashioned philosophers, on thoroughly unhistorical lines: there is no doubt on this point.
The crass ineptitude of their genealogy of morals is
immediately apparent when the question arises of ascertaining the origin of the idea and judgment of "good."
"Man had originally," so speaks their decree, "praised
and called 'good' altruistic acts from the standpoint of
those on whom they were conferred, that is, those to
whom they were useful; subsequently the origin of this
praise was forgotten, and altruistic acts, simply because,
as a sheer matter of habit, they were praised as good,
came also to be felt as good—as though they contained in
themselves some intrinsic goodness." The thing is obvious:—this initial derivation contains already all the
typical and idiosyncratic traits of the English psychologists—we have "utility," "forgetting," "habit," and finally
"error," the whole assemblage forming the basis of a system of values, on which the higher man has up to the
present prided himself as though it were a kind of privilege of man in general. This pride must be brought low,
this system of values must lose its values: is that attained?
Now the first argument that comes ready to my hand
is that the real homestead of the concept "good" is
sought and located in the wrong place: the judgment
"good" did not originate among those to whom goodness
was shown. Much rather has it been the good themselves, that is^ the aristocratic, the powerful, the highstationed, the high-minded, who have felt that they them-

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
selves were good, and tha>. their actions were good, that*
is to say of the first ordti, in contradistinction to all the
low, the low-minded, the vulgar, and the plebeian. It
was out of this pathos of distance that they first arrogated
the right to create values for their own profit, and to
coin the names of such values: what had they to do with
utility? The standpoint of utility is as alien and as
inapplicable as it could possibly be, when we have to deal
with so volcanic an effervescence of supreme values, creating and demarcating as they do a hierarchy within themselves: it is at this juncture that one arrives at an appreciation of the contrast to that tepid temperature, which
is the presupposition on which every combination of
worldly wisdom and every calculation of practical expediency is always based—and not for one occasional,
not for one exceptional instance, but chronically. The
pathos of nobility and distance, as I have said, 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
antithesis of good and bad.
(The masters' right of giving names goes so far that
it is permissible to look upon language itself as the expression of the power of the masters: they say "this is
that, and that," they se«J finally every object and every
event with a sound, and thereby at the same time take
possession of it.) It is because of this origin that the
word "good" is far from liaving any necessary connection
with altruistic acts, in accordance with the superstitious
belief of these moral philosophers. On the contrary, it is
on the occasion of the decay of aristocratic values, that

"GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD"

5

the antitheses between "egoistic" and "altruistic" presses
more and more hea\ily on the human conscience—it is, to
use my own language, the herd instinct which finds in
this antithesis an expression in many ways. And even
then it takes a considerable time for this instinct to become sufficiently dominant, for the valuation to be inextricably dependent on this antithesis (as is the case in
contemporary Europe); for to-day the prejudice is predominant, which, acting even now with all the intensity of
an obsession and brain disease, holds that "moral,"
"altruistic," arid lt desinteresse" are concepts of equal
value.
3In the second plaice, quite apart from the fact that this
hypothesis as to the genesis of the value "good" cannot
be historically upheld, it suffers from an inherent psychological contradiction. The utility of altruistic conduct has
presumably been the origin of its being praised, and this
origin has become jor gotten:—But in what conceivable
way is this forgetting possible? Has perchance the utility
of such conduct ceased at some given moment? The
contrary is the case. This utfi;ty has rather been experienced every day at all times, and is consequently a feature
that obtains a new and regular emphasis with every fresh
day; it follows that, so far from vanishing from the
consciousness, so far indeed from being forgotten, it must
necessarily become impressed on the consciousness with
ever-increasing distinctness. How much more logical is
that contrary theory (it is- not the truer for that) which

6

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

is represented, for instance, by Herbert Spencer, who
places the concept "good" as essentially similar to the
concept "useful," "purposive," so that in the judgments
"good" and "bad" mankind is simply summarising and
investing with a sanction its unforgotten and unforgettable experiences concerning the "useful-purposive" and
the "mischievous-non-purposive." According to this
theory, "good" is the attribute of that which has previously shown itself useful; and so is able to claim to be
considered "valuable in the highest degree," "valuable
in itself." This method of explanation is also, as I have
said, wrong, but at any rate the explanation itself is coherent, and psychologically tenable.
4-

The guide-post which first put me on the right track
was this question—what is the true etymological significance of the various symbols for the idea "good" which
have been coined in the various languages? I then found
that they all led back to the same evolution of the same
idea—that everywhere "aristocrat," "noble" (in the social
sense), is the root idea, out of which have necessarily
developed "good" in the sense of "with aristocratic soul,"
"noble," in the sense of "with a soul of high calibre,"
"with a privileged soul"—a development which invariably
runs parallel with that other evolution by which "vulgar,"
"plebeian," "low," are made to change finally into "bad."
The most eloquent proof of this last contention is the
German word "schlecht" itself: this word is identical with
u
schlicht,f— (compare "schlechtweg" and (<schlechter-

"GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD"

7

dings")—which, originally and as yet without any sinister
innuendo, simply denoted the plebeian man in contrast to
the aristocratic man. It is at the sufficiently late period
of the Thirty Years' War that this sense becomes changed
to the sense now current. From the standpoint of the
Genealogy of Morals this discovery seems to be substantial: the lateness of it is to be attributed to the retarding
influence exercised in the modern world by democratic
prejudice in the sphere of all questions of origin. This
extends, as will shortly be shown, even to the province of
natural science and physiology, which prima facie is the
most objective. The extent of the mischief which is
caused by this prejudice (once it is free of all trammels
except those of its own malice), particularly to Ethics
and History, is shown by the notorious case of Buckle:
it was in Buckle that that plebeianism of the modern
spirit, which is of English origin, broke out once again
from its malignant soil with all the violence of a slimy
volcano, and with that salted, rampant, and vulgar eloquence with which up to the present time all volcanoes
have spoken.
S-

With regard to our problem, which can justly be called
an intimate problem, and which elects to appeal to only
a limited number of ears: it is of no small interest to
ascertain that in those words and roots which denote
"good" we catch glimpses of that arch-trait, on the
strength of which the aristocrats feel themselves to be
beings of a higher order than their fellows. Indeed, they

8

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

call themselves in perhaps the most frequent instances
simply after their superiority in power (e.g. "the powerful," "the lords," "the commanders"), or after the most
obvious sign of their superiority, as for example "the
rich," "the possessors" (that is the meaning of arya; and
the Iranian and Slav languages correspond). But they
also call themselves after some characteristic idiosyncrasy;
and this is the case which now concerns us. They name
themselves, for instance, "the truthful": this is first done
by the Greek nobility whose mouthpiece is found in
Theognis, the Megarian poet. The word ec^Xog, which
is coined for the purpose, signifies etymologically "one
who is," who has reality, who is real, who is true; and
then with a subjective twist, the "true," as the "truthful":
at this stage in the evolution of the idea, it becomes the
motto and party cry of the nobility, and quite completes
the transition to the meaning "noble," so as to place outside the pale the lying, vulgar man, as Theognis conceives
and portrays him—till finally the word after the decay of
the nobility is left to delineate psychological noblesse,
and becomes as it were ripe and mellow. In the word
%a%b<; as in Ssdog (the plebeian in contrast to the
cr/afroc;) the cowardice is emphasised. This affords perhaps an inkling on what lines the etymological origin of
the very ambiguous dya&6<; is to be investigated. In
the Latin malus (which I place side by side with iieXagj
the vulgar man can be distinguished as the dark-coloured,
and above all as the black-haired ("hie niger est"), as
the pre-Aryan inhabitants of the Italian soil, whose complexion formed the clearest feature of distinction from
the dominant blondes, namely, the Aryan conquering

GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD
race:—at any rate Gaelic has afforded me the exact analogue—Fin (for instance, in the name Fin-Gal), the distinctive word of the nobility, finally—good, noble, clean,
but originally the blonde-haired man in contrast to the
dark black-haired aboriginals. The Celts, if I may make
a parenthetic statement, were throughout a blonde race;
and it is wrong to connect, as Virchow still connects,
those traces of an essentially dark-haired population which
are to be seen on the more elaborate ethnographical maps
of Germany with any Celtic ancestry or with any admixture of Celtic blood: in this context it is rather the
pre-Aryan population of Germany which surges up to
these districts. (The same is true substantially of the
whole of Europe: in point of fact, the subject race has
finally again obtained the upper hand, in complexion and
the shortness of the skull, and perhaps in the intellectual
and social qualities. Who can guarantee that modern
democracy, still more modern anarchy, and indeed that
tendency to the " Commune/' the most primitive form of
society, which is now common to all the Socialists in
Europe, does not in its real essence signify a monstrous
reversion—and that the conquering and master race—the
Aryan race, is not also becoming inferior physiologically?)
I believe that I can explain the Latin bonus as the "warrior": my hypothesis is that I am.right in deriving bonus
from an older duonus (compare bellum-duellum
= duen-lum, in which the word duonus appears to me to
be contained). Bonus accordingly as the man of discord,
of variance, "entzweiung" {duo), as the warrior: one sees
what in ancient Rome "the good" meant for a man. Must
not our actual German word gut mean "the godlike, the

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
man of godlike race"? and be identical with the national
name (originally the nobles' name) of the Goths?
The grounds for this supposition do not appertain to
this work.
6.
Above all, there is no exception (though there are opportunities for exceptions) to this rule, that the idea of
political superiority always resolves itself into the idea of
psychological superiority, in those cases where the highest
caste is at the same time the priestly caste, and in accordance with its general characteristics confers on itself the
privilege of a title which alludes specifically to its priestly
function. It is in these cases, for instances, that "clean"
and "unclean" confront each other for the first time as
badges of class distinction; here again there develops a
"good" and a "bad," in a sense which has ceased to be
merely social. Moreover, care should be taken not to
take these ideas of "clean" and "unclean" too seriously,
too broadly, or too symbolically: all the ideas of ancient
man have, on the contrary, got to be understood in their
initial stages, in a sense which is, to an almost inconceivable extent, crude, coarse, physical, and narrow, and
above all essentially unsymbolical. The "clean man" is
originally only a man who washes himself, who abstains
from certain foods which are conducive to skin diseases,
who does not sleep with the unclean women of the lower
classes, who has a horror of blood—not more, not much
more! On the other hand, the very nature of a priestly
aristocracy shows the reasons why just at such an early

"GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD"

n

juncture there should ensue a really dangerous sharpening and intensification of opposed values: it is, in fact,
through these opposed values that gulfs are cleft in the
social plane, which a veritable Achilles of free thought
would shudder to cross. There is from the outset a certain diseased taint in such sacerdotal aristocracies, and
in the habits which prevail in such societies—habits which,
averse as they are to action, constitute a compound of
introspection and explosive emotionalism, as a result of
which there appears that introspective morbidity and
neurasthenia, which adheres almost inevitably to all priests
at all times: with regard, however, to the remedy which
they themselves have invented for this disease—the philosopher has no option but to state, that it has proved
itself in its effects a hundred times more dangerous than
the disease, from which it should have been the deliverer.
.•Humanity itself is still diseased from the effects of the
naivetes of this priestly cure. Take, for instance, certain
kinds of diet (abstention from flesh), fasts, sexual continence, flight into the wilderness (a kind of Weir-Mitchell
isolation, though of course without that system of excessive feeding and fattening w7hich is the most efficient
antidote to all the hysteria of the ascetic ideal); consider too the whole metaphysic of the priests, with its war
on the senses, its enervation, its hair-splitting; consider its
self-hypnotism on the fakir and Brahman principles (it
uses Brahman as a glass disc and obsession), and that
climax which we can understand only too well of an
unusual satiety with its panacea of nothingness (or God:
—the demand for a unto mystica with God is the demand
of the Buddhist for nothingness, Nirvana—and nothing

j2

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

else!). In sacerdotal societies every element is on a more
dangerous scale, not merely cures and remedies, but also
pride, revenge, cunning, exaltation, love, ambition, virtue,
morbidity:—further, it can fairly be stated that it is on
the soil of this essentially dangerous form of human
society, the sacerdotal form, that man really becomes for
the first time an interesting animal, that it is in this form
that the soul of man has in a higher sense attained depths
and become evil—and those are the two fundamental
forms of the superiority which up to the present man has
exhibited over every other animal.
7-

The reader will have already surmised with what *ase
the priestly mode of valuation can branch off from the
knightly aristocratic mode, and then develop into the
very antithesis of the latter: special impetus is given to
this opposition, by every occasion when the castes of the
priests and warriors confront each other with mutual jealousy and cannot agree over the prize. The knightlyaristocratic "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 priestlyaristocratic 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

"GOOD AND EVIL/ 7 "GOOD AND BAD"

13

weakest. Their weakness causes their hate to expand into
a monstrous and sinister shape, a shape which is most
crafty and most poisonous. The really great haters in the
history of the world have always been priests, who are
also the cleverest haters—in comparison with the cleverness of priestly revenge, every other piece of cleverness
is practically negligible. Human history would be too
fatuous for anything were it not for the cleverness imported into it by the weak—take at once the most important instance. All the world's efforts against the "aristocrats," the "mighty," the "masters," the "holders of
power," are negligible by comparison with what has been
accomplished against those classes by the Jews—the
Jews, that priestly nation which eventually realised that
the one method of effecting satisfaction on its enemies and
tyrants was by means of a radical transvaluation of
values, which was at the same time an act of the cleverest
revenge. Yet the method was only appropriate to a
nation of priests, to a nation of the most jealously nursed
priestly revengefulness. It was the Jews who, in opposition to the aristocratic equatk>n (good r=r aristocratic =
beautiful = happy = loved by the gods), dared with a
terrifying logic to suggest the contrary equation, and
indeed to maintain with the teeth of the most profound
hatred (the hatred of weakness) this contrary equation,
namely, "the wretched are alone the good; the poor, the
weak, the lowly, are alone the good; the suffering, the
needy, the sick, the loathsome, are the only ones who are
pious, the only ones who are blessed, for them alone is
salvation—but you, on the other hand, you aristocrats,
you men of power, you are to all eternity the evil, the

14

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

horrible, the covetous, the insatiate, the godless; eternally also shall you be the unblessed, the cursed, the
damned!" We know who it was who reaped the heritage
of this Jewish transvaluation. In the context of the
monstrous and inordinately fateful initiative which the
Jews have exhibited in connection with this most fundamental of all declarations of war, I remember the passage
which came to my pen on another occasion (Beyond
Good and Evil, Aph. 195)—that it was, in fact, with the
Jews that the revolt of the slaves begins in the sphere of
morals; that revolt which has behind it a history of two
millennia, and which at the present day has only moved
out of our sight, because it—has achieved victory.
8.
But you understand this not? You have no eyes for
a force which has taken two thousand years to achieve
victory?—There is nothing wonderful in this: all lengthy
processes are hard to see and to realise. But this is what
took place: from the trunk of that tree of revenge and
hate, Jewish hate,—that most profound and sublime hate,
which creates ideals and changes old values to new creations, the like of which has never been on earth,—there
grew a phenomenon which was equally incomparable, a
new love, the most profound and sublime of all kinds of
love;—and from what other trunk could it have grown?
But beware of supposing that this love has soared on its
upward growth, as in any way a real negation of that
thirst for revenge, as an antithesis to the Jewish hate!
No, the contrary is the truth! This love grew out of

"GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD"

15

that hate, as its crown, as its triumphant crown, circling
wider and wider amid the clarity and fulness of the sun,
and pursuing in the very kingdom of light and height
its goal of hatred, its victory, its spoil, its strategy, with
the same intensity with which the roots of that tree of
hate sank into everything which was deep and evil with
increasing stability and increasing desire. This Jesus of
Nazareth^ the incarnate gospel of love, this "Redeemer"
bringing salvation and victory to the poor, the sick, the
sinful—was he not really temptation in its most sinister
and irresistible form, temptation to take the tortuous
path to those very Jewish values and those very Jewish
ideals? Has not Israel really obtained the final goal of
its sublime revenge, by the tortuous paths of this "Redeemer," for all that he might pose as Israel's adversary
and Israel's destroyer? Is it not due to the black magic
of a really great policy of revenge, of a far-seeing, burrowing revenge, both acting and calculating with slowness, that Israel himself must repudiate before all the
world the actual instrument of his own revenge and nail
it to the cross, so that all the world—that is, all the enemies of Israel—could nibble without suspicion at this
very bait? Could, moreover, any human mind with all
its elaborate ingenuity invent a bait that was more truly
dangerous? Anything that was even equivalent in the
power of its seductive, intoxicating, defiling, and corrupting influence to that symbol of the holy cross, to that
awful paradox of a "god on the cross," to that mystery of
the unthinkable, supreme, and utter horror of the selfcrucifixion of a god for the salvation of man? It is at
least certain that sub hoc signo Israel, with its revenge

16

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

and transvaluation of all values, has up to the present
always triumphed again over all other ideals, over all
more aristocratic ideals.
9<
"But why do you talk of nobler ideals? Let us submit
to the facts; that the people have triumphed—or the
slaves, or the populace, or the herd, or whatever name
you care to give them—if this has happened through
the Jews, so be it! In that case no nation ever had a
greater mission in the world's history. The 'masters'
have been done away with; the morality of the vulgar
man has triumphed. This triumph may also be called a
blood-poisoning (it has mutually fused the races)—I do
not dispute it; but there is no doubt but that this
intoxication has succeeded. The 'redemption' of the
human race (that is, from the masters) is progressing
swimmingly; everything is obviously becoming Judais'ed,
or Christianised, or vulgarised (what is there in the
words?). It seems impossible to stop the course of this
poisoning through the whole body politic of mankind—
but its tempo and pace may from the present time be
slower, more delicate, quieter, more discreet—there is
time enough. In view of this context has the Church
nowadays any necessary purpose? Has it, in fact, a right
to live? Or could man get on without it? Quceritur.
It seems that it fetters and retards this tendency, instead
of accelerating it. Well, even that might be its utility.
The Church certainly is a crude and boorish institution,
that is repugnant to an intelligence with any pretence at

"GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD"

17

delicacy, to a really modern taste. Should it not at any
rate learn to be somewhat more subtle? It alienates
nowadays, more than it allures. Which of us would, forsooth, be a freethinker if there were no Church? It is
the Church which repels us, not its poison—apart from
the Church we like the poison." This is the epilogue
of a freethinker to my discourse, of an honourable animal
(as he has given abundant proof), and a democrat to
boot; he had up to that time listened to me, and could
not endure my silence, but for me, indeed, with regard
to this topic there is much on which to be silent.
10.

The revolt of the slaves in morals begins in the very
principle of resentment becoming creative and giving
birth to values—a resentment experienced by creatures
who, deprived as they are of the proper outlet of action,
are forced to find their compensation in an imaginary
revenge. While every aristocratic morality springs from
a triumphant affirmation of its own demands, the slave
morality says "no" from the very outset to what is "outside itself," "different from itself," and "not itself": and
this "no" is its creative deed. This volte-face of the
valuing standpoint—this inevitable gravitation to the objective instead of back to the subjective—is typical of
"resentment": 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 capable of action at all—its action is fundamentally a reaction. The contrary is the case when

18

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

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;—its negative conception, "low," "vulgar/'
"bad," is merely a pale late-born foil in comparison with
its positive and fundamental conception (saturated as it is
with life and passion), of "we aristocrats, we good ones,
we beautiful ones, we happy ones."
When the aristocratic morality goes astray and commits sacrilege on reality, this is limited to that particular*
sphere with which it is not sufficiently acquainted—a
sphere, in fact, from the real knowledge of which it
disdainfully defends itself. It misjudges, in some cases,
the sphere which it despises, the sphere of the common
vulgar man and the low people: on the other hand, due
weight should be given to the consideration that in any
case the mood of contempt, of disdain, of superciliousness, even on the supposition that it falsely portrays the
object of its contempt, will always be far removed from
that degree of falsity which will always characterise the
attacks—in effigy, of course—of the vindictive hatred and
revengefulness of the weak in onslaughts on their enemies. In point of fact, there is in contempt too strong
an admixture of nonchalance, of casualness, of boredom,
of impatience, even of personal exultation, for it to be
capable of distorting its victim into a real caricature or
a real monstrosity. Attention again should be paid to
the almost benevolent nuances which, for instance, the
Greek nobility imports into all the words by which it
distinguishes the common people from itself; note how
continuously a kind of pity, care, and consideration im-

"GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD"

19

parts its honeyed flavour, until at last almost all the
words wx._:: are applied to the vulgar man survive finally
as expressions icr 'unhappy," "worthy of pity" (com3air Seildc;, Ssitaxiog, JTOVTJQOC;, |xo^T]Q6g; the latter two
mines really denoting the vulgar man as labour-slave and
beast of burden)—and how, conversely, "bad," "low,"
"unhappy" have never ceased to ring in the Greek ear
with a tone in which "unhappy" is the predominant note:
this is a heritage of the old noble aristocratic morality,
which remains true to itself even in contempt (let philologists remember the sense in which oi^uQog, <xvoA,6<x;,
TITJJACOV, bvGTv%Eiv} |vjicpoQct used to be employed. The
"well-born" simply felt themselves the "happy"; they
did not have to manufacture their happiness artificially
through looking at their enemies, or in cases to talk and
lie themselves into happiness (as is the custom with all
resentful men); and similarly, complete men as they were,
exuberant with strength, and consequently necessarily
energetic, they were too wise to dissociate happiness
from action—activity becomes in their minds necessarily
counted as happiness (that is the etymology of z§
jtodrceiv)— all in sharp contrast to the "happiness" of
the weak and the oppressed, with their festering venom
and malignity, among whom happiness appears essentially as a narcotic, a deadening, a quietude, a peace, a
"Sabbath," an enervation of the mind and relaxation of
the limbs,—in short, a purely passive phenomenon. While
the aristocratic man lived in confidence and openness
with himself (yevvaiog, "noble-born," emphasises the
nuance "sincere," and perhaps also "naif"), the resentful
man, on the other hand, is neither sincere nor naif, nor

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
honest and candid with himself. His soul squints; his
mind loves hidden crannies, tortuous paths and backdoors, everything secret appeals to him as his world, his
safety, his balm; he is past master in silence, in not forgetting, in waiting, in provisional self-depreciation and
self-abasement. A race of such resentful men will of
necessity eventually prove more prudent than any aristocratic race, it will honour prudence on quite a distinct
scale, as, in fact, a paramount condition of existence,
while prudence among aristocratic men is apt to be tinged
with a delicate flavour of luxury and refinement; so
among them it plays nothing like so integral a part as
that complete certainty of function of the governing unconscious instincts, or as indeed a certain lack of prudence, such as a vehement and valiant charge, whether
against danger or the enemy, or as those ecstatic bursts
of rage, love, reverence, gratitude, by which at all times
noble souls have recognised each other. When the resentment of the aristocratic man manifests itself, it fulfils
and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction, and consequently instills no venom: on the other hand, it never
manifests itself at all in countless instances, when in the
case of the feeble and weak it would be inevitable. An
inability to take seriously for any length of time their
enemies, their disasters, their misdeeds—that is the sign
of the full strong natures who possess a superfluity of
moulding plastic force, that heals completely and produces forgetfulness: a good example of this in the modern
world is Mirabeau, who had no memory for any insults
and meannesses which were practised on him, and who
was only incapable of forgiving because he forgot. Such

"GOOD AND EVli,,' "GOOD AND BAD"

21

a man indeed shakes off with a shrug many a worm
which would have buried itself in another; it is only in
characters like these that we see the possibility (supposing, of course, that there is such a possibility in the
world) of the real "love of one's enemies." What respect for his enemies is found, forsooth, in an aristocratic
man—and such a reverence is already a bridge to love!
He insists on having his enemy to himself as his distinction. He tolerates no other enemy but a man in whose
character there is nothing to despise and much to honour!
On the other hand, imagine the "enemy" as the resentful
man conceives him—and it is here exactly that we see
his work, his creativeness; he has conceived "the evil
enemy," the "evil one," and indeed that is the root idea
from which he now evolves as a contrasting and corresponding figure a "good one," himself—his very self!
' 11.

The method of this man is quite contrary to that of the
aristocratic man, who 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 slavemorality—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." But the

22

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

idea "good" is not the same: much rather let the question
be asked, "Who is really evil according to the meaning
of the morality of resentment?" In all sternness let it
be answered thus:—just the good man of the other
morality, just the aristocrat, the powerful one, the one
who rules, but who is distorted by the venomous eye of
resentfulness, into a new colour, a new signification, a
new appearance. This particular point we would be the
last to deny: the man who learnt to know those "good"
ones only as enemies, learnt at the same time not to
know them only as "evil enemies/' and the same men
who inter pares were kept so rigorously in bounds through
convention, respect, custom, and gratitude, though much
more through mutual vigilance and jealousy biter pares,
these men who in their relations with each other find so
many new ways of manifesting consideration, self-control,
delicacy, loyalty, pride, and friendship, these men are in
reference to what is outside their circle (where the foreign
element, a foreign country, begins), not much better than
beasts of prey, which have been let loose. They enjoy
there freedom from all social control, they feel that in
the wilderness they can give vent with impunity to that
tension which is produced by enclosure and imprisonment in the peace of society, they revert to the innocence
of the beast-of-prey conscience, like jubilant monsters,
who perhaps come from a ghostly bout of murder, arson,
rape, and torture, with bravado and a moral equanimity,
as though merely some wild student's prank had been
played, perfectly convinced that the poets have now an
ample theme to sing and celebrate. It is impossible not
to recognise at the core of all these aristocratic races the

"GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD"

23

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 (for
example, when Pericles says to his Athenians in that celebrated funeral oration, "Our audacity has forced a way
over every land and sea, rearing everywhere imperishable
memorials of itself for good and for evil"). This audacity of aristocratic races, mad, absurd, and spasmodic as
may be its expression; the incalculable and fantastic
nature of their enterprises,—Pericles sets in special relief
and glory the Qorfruuia of the Athenians, their nonchalance and contempt for safety, body, life, and comfort, their awful joy and intense delight in all destruction,
in all the ecstasies of victory and cruelty,—all these features become crystallised, for those who suffered thereby
in the picture of the "barbarian," of the "evil enemy,"
perhaps of the "Goth" and 01 the "Vandal." The profound, icy mistrust which the German provokes, as soon
as he arrives at power,—even at the present time,—is
always still an aftermath of that inextinguishable horror
with which for whole centuries Europe has regarded the
wrath of the blonde Teuton beast (although between the
old Germans and ourselves there exists scarcely a psychological, let alone a physical, relationship). I have once

24

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

called attention to the embarrassment of Hesiod, when
he conceived the series of social ages, and endeavoured
to express them in gold, silver, and bronze. He could
only dispose of the contradiction, with which he was
confronted, by the Homeric world, an age magnificent indeed, but at the same time so awful and so violent, by
making two ages out of one, which he henceforth placed
one behind the other—first, the age of the heroes and
demigods, as that world had remained in the memories
of the aristocratic families, who found therein their own
ancestors; secondly, the bronze age, as that corresponding age appeared to the descendants of the oppressed,
spoiled, ill-treated, exiled, enslaved; namely, as an age
of bronze, as I have said, hard, cold, terrible, without
feelings and without conscience, crushing everything, and
bespattering everything with blood. Granted the truth
of the theory now believed to be true, that the very
essence of all civilisation is to train out of man, the beast
of prey, a tame and civilised animal, a domesticated
animal, it follows indubitably that we must regard as the
real tools of civilisation all those instincts of reaction and
resentment, by the help of which the aristocratic races,
together with their ideals, were finally degraded and
overpowered; though that has not yet come to be synonymous with saying that the bearers of those tools also
represented the civilisation. It is rather the contrary that
is not only probable—nay, it is palpable to-day; these
bearers of vindictive instincts that have to be bottled up,
these descendants of all European and non-European
slavery, especially of the pre-Aryan population—these
people, I say, represent the decline of humanity! These

"GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD"

25

"tools of civilisation" are a disgrace to humanity, and
constitute in reality more of an argument against civilisation, more of a reason why civilisation should be suspected. One may be perfectly justified in being always
afraid of the blonde beast that lies at the core of all
aristocratic races, and in being on one's guard: but who
would not a hundred times prefer to be afraid, when one
at the same time admires, than to be immune from fear,
at the cost of being perpetually obsessed with the loathsome spectacle of the distorted, the dwarfed, the stunted,
the envenomed? And is that not our fate? 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"; yes, it is that he has a
certain right so to consider himself, in so far as he feels
that in contrast to that excess of deformity, disease, exhaustion, and effeteness whose odour is beginning to pollute present-day Europe, he at any rate has achieved a
relative success, he at any rate still says "yes" to life.
12.

I cannot • refrain at this juncture from uttering a sigh
and one last hope. What is it precisely which I find
intolerable? That which I alone cannot get rid of,
which makes me choke and faint? Bad air! Bad air!

26

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

That something misbegotten comes near me; that I must
inhale the odour of the entrails of a misbegotten soul I —
That excepted, what can one not endure in the way of
need, privation, bad weather, sickness, toil, solitude? In
point of fact, one manages to get over everything, born
as one is to a burrowing and battling existence; one
always returns once again to the light, one always lives
again one's golden hour of victory—and then one stands
as one was born, unbreakable, tense, ready for something more difficult, for something more distant, like a
bow stretched but the tauter by every strain. But from
time to time do ye grant me—assuming that "beyond
good and evil" there are goddesses who can grant—one
glimpse, grant me but one glimpse only, of something
perfect, fully realised, happy, mighty, triumphant, of
something that still gives cause for fear! A glimpse of
a man that justifies the existence of man, a glimpse of
an incarnate human happiness that realises and redeems,
for the sake of which one may hold fast to the belief in
man! For the position is this: 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 attentuated, more inoffensive, more cunning,
more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more
Chinese, more Christian—man, there is no doubt about it,
grows always "better"—the destiny of Europe lies even
in this—that in losing the fear of man, we have also lost
the hope in man, yea, the will to be man. The sight of
man now fatigues.—What is present-day Nihilism if it is
not that?—We are tired of man.

"GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD"

27

But let us come back to it; the problem of another
origin of the good—of the good, as the resentful man
has thought it out—demands its solution. It is not surprising that the lambs should bear a grudge against the
great birds of prey, but that is no reason for blaming
the great birds of prey for taking the little lambs. And
when the lambs say among themselves, "Those birds of
prey are evil, and he who is as far removed from being
a bird of prey, who is rather its opposite, a lamb,—is
he not good?" then there is nothing to cavil at in the
setting up of this ideal, though it may also be that the
birds of prey will regard it a little sneeringly, and perchance say to themselves, "We bear no grudge against
them, these good lambs, we even like them: nothing is
tastier than a tender lamb." 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—
rather it is nothing else than just those very phenomena
of moving, willing, acting, and can only appear otherwise in the misleading errors of language (and the fundamental fallacies of reason which have become petrified
therein), which understands, and understands wrongly,
all working as conditioned by a worker, by a "subject."
And just exactly as the people separate the lightning from

28

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

its flash, and interpret the latter as a thing done, as the
working of a subject which is called lightning, so also
does the popular morality separate strength from the
expression of strength, as though behind the strong man
there existed some indifferent neutral substratum, which
enjoyed a caprice and option as to whether or not it
should express strength. But there is no such substratum,
there is no "being" behind doing, working, becoming;
"the doer" is a mere appanage to the action. The action
is everything. In point of fact, the people duplicate the
doing, when they make the lightning lighten, that is a
"doing-doing"; they make the same phenomenon first a
cause, and then, secondly, the effect of that cause. The
scientists fail to improve matters when they say, "Force
moves, force causes," and so on. Our whole science is
still, in spite of all its coldness, of all its freedom from
passion, a dupe of the tricks of language, and has never
succeeded in getting rid of that superstitious changeling
"the subject" (the atom, to give another instance, is
such a changeling, just as the Kantian "Thing-in-itself").
What wonder, if the suppressed and stealthily simmering passions of revenge and hatred exploit for their own
advantage their belief, and indeed hold no belief with a
more steadfast enthusiasm than this—"that the strong
has the option of being weak, and the bird of prey of
being a lamb." Thereby do they win for themselves the
right of attributing to the birds of prey the responsibility
for being birds of prey: when the oppressed, downtrodden, and overpowered say to themselves with the
vindictive guile of weakness, "Let us be otherwise than
the evil, namely, good! and good is every one who does

"GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD"

29

not oppress, who hurts no one, who does not attack, who
does not pay back, who hands over revenge to God, who
holds himself, as we do, in hiding; who goes out of the
way of evil, and demands, in short, little from life; like
ourselves the patient, the meek, the just,"—yet all this,
in its cold and unprejudiced interpretation, means nothing more than "once for all, the weak are weak; it is
good to do nothing for which we are not strong enough";
but this dismal state of affairs, this prudence of the lowest
order, which even insects possess (which in a great danger
are fain to sham death so as to avoid doing "too much"),
has, thanks to the counterfeiting and self-deception of
weakness, come to masquerade in the pomp of an ascetic,
mute, and expectant virtue, just as though the very weakness of the weak—that is, forsooth, its being, its working,
its whole unique inevitable inseparable reality—were a
voluntary result, something wished, chosen, a deed, an act
of merit. This kind of man finds the belief in a neutral,
free-choosing "subject" necessary from an instinct of selfpreservation, of self-assertion, in which every lie is fain
to sanctify itself. The subject (or, to use popular language, the soul) has perhaps proved itself the best dogma
in the world simply because it rendered possible to the
horde of mortal, weak, and oppressed individuals of
every kind, that most sublime specimen of self-deception,
the interpretation of weakness as freedom, of being this,
or being that, as merit.
14.

Will any one look a little into—right into—the mystery

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
of how ideals are manufactured in this world? Who has
the courage to do it? Come!
Here we have a vista opened into these grimy workshops. Wait just a moment, dear Mr. Inquisitive and
Foolhardy; your eye must first grow accustomed to this
false changing light—Yes! Enough!
Now speak!
What is happening below down yonder? Speak out! Tell
what you see, man of the most dangerous curiosity—for
now / am the listener.
"I see nothing, I hear the more. It is a cautious,
spiteful, gentle whispering and muttering together in all
the corners and crannies. It seems to me that they are
lying; a sugary softness adheres to every sound. Weakness is turned to merit, there is no doubt about it—it is
just as you say."
Further!
"And 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 (for they know not what they do—we alone
know what they do). They also talk of the 'love of their
enemies' and sweat thereby."
Further!
"They are miserable, there is no doubt about it, all

"GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD"

31

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.' "
Further!
"They are now giving me to understand, that not
only are they better men than the mighty, the lords
of the earth, whose spittle they have got to lick (not
out of fear, not at all out of fear! But because God
ordains that one should honour all authority)—not only
are they better men, but that they also have a 'better
time,' at any rate, will one day have a 'better time.'
But enough! Enough! I can endure it no longer. Bad
air! Bad air! These workshops where ideals are manufactured—verily they reek with the crassest lies."
Nay. Just one minute! You are saying nothing about
the masterpieces of these virtuosos of black magic, who
can produce whiteness, milk, and innocence out of any
black you like: have you not noticed what a pitch of
refinement is attained by their chef d'ceuvre, their most
audacious, subtle, ingenious, and lying artist-trick? Take
care! These cellar-beasts, full of revenge and hate—
what do they make, forsooth, out of their revenge and
hate? Do you hear these words? Would you suspect,
if you trusted only their words, that you are among men
of resentment and nothing else?

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
"I understand, I prick my ears up again (ah! ah! ah!
and I hold my nose). Now do I hear for the first time
that which they have said so often: 'We good, we are
the righteous'—what they demand they call not revenge
but 'the triumph of righteousness'; what they hate is not
their enemy, no, they hate 'unrighteousness,' 'godlessness'; what they believe in and hope is not the hope of
revenge, the intoxication of sweet revenge (—"sweeter
than honey," did Homer call it?), but the victory of
God, of the righteous God over the 'godless'; what is
left for them to love in this world is not their brothers in
hate, but their 'brothers in love/ as they say, all the good
and righteous on the earth."
And how do they name that which serves them as a
solace against all the troubles of life—their phantasmagoria of their anticipated future blessedness?
"How? Do I hear right? They call it 'the last judgment/ the advent of their kingdom, 'the kingdom of God'
—but in the meanwhile they live 'in faith/ 'in love/ 'in
hope.' "
Enough! Enough!
15.

In the faith in what? In the love for what? In the
hope of what? These weaklings!—they also, forsooth,
wish to be strong some time; there is no doubt about it,
some time their kingdom also must come—"the kingdom
of God" is their name for it, as has been mentioned:—
they are so meek in everything! Yet in order to experience that kingdom it is necessary to live long, to live

"GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD"

33

beyond death,—yes, eternal life is necessary so that one
can make up for ever for that earthly life "in faith," "in
love," "in hope." Make up for what? Make up by
what? Dante, as it seems to me, made a crass mistake
when with awe-inspiring ingenuity he placed that inscription over the gate of his hell, "Me too made eternal
love": at any rate the following inscription would have a
much better right to stand over the gate of the Christian
Paradise and its "eternal blessedness"—"Me too made
eternal hate"—granted of course that a truth may rightly
stand over the gate to a lie! For what is the blessedness of that Paradise? Possibly we could quickly surmise it; but it is better that it should be explicitly
attested by an authority who in such matters is not to
be disparaged, Thomas of Aquinas, the great teacher and
saint. "Beati in regno celesti" says he, as gently as a
lamb, "videbunt poenas datnnatorum, nt beatitudo Mis
magis complaceai.yy Or if we wish to hear a stronger
tone, a word from the mouth of a triumphant father of
the Church, who warned his disciples against the cruel
ecstasies of the public spectacles—But why? Faith offers
us much more,—says he, de Spectac, c. 29 ss.,—something much stronger; thanks to the redemption, joys of
quite another kind stand at our disposal; instead of
athletes we have our martyrs; we wish for blood, well,
we have the blood of Christ—but what then awaits us on
the day of his return, of his triumph? And then does he
proceed, does this enraptured visionary: "at enim supersunt alia spectacula, tile ultimus et perpetuus judicii dies,
tile nationibus insperatus, Me derisus, cum tanta sceculi
vetustas et tot ejus nativitates uno igne haurientur. Quce

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
tunc spectaculi latitudo! Quid admirer! quid rideamf
Ubi gaudeamf Ubi exultem, spectans tot et tantos reges,
qui in ccelum recepti nuntiabantur, cum ipso Jove eh
ipsis suis testibus in imis tenebris congemescentes! Item
prcesides" (the provisional governors) "persecutores dominici nominis scevioribus quam ipsi flammis scevierunt insult antibus contra Christianos Hquescentes! Quos prceterea
sapientes illos philosophos coram disciptdis suis una conflagrantibus erubescentes, quibus nihil ad deum pertinere
suadebant, quibus animas aut nullas aut non in pristina
corpora redituras affirmabant! Etiam poetas non ad
Rhadamanti nee ad Minois, sed ad inopinati Christi
tribunal palpitantes! Tunc magis tragcedi audiendi,
magis scilicet vocales" (with louder tones and more violent shrieks) "in sua propria calamitate; tunc histriones
eognoscendi, solutiores multo per ignem; tunc spectandus
auriga in flammea rota totus rub ens, tunc xystici contemplandi non in gymnasiis, sed in igne jaculati, nisi quod ne
tunc quidem illos velim vivos, ut qui malim ad eos potius
conspectum insatiabilem conferre, qui in dominum
scevierunt. Hie est illes, dicam jabri aut qucestuaricz filius"
(as is shown by the whole of the following, and in particular by this well-known description of the mother of
Jesus from the Talmud, Tertullian is henceforth referring to the Jews), usabbati destructor, Samarites et
dcemonium habens. Hie est quern a Juda redemistis, hie
est ille arundine et colaphis diverberatus, sputamentis de
decoratus, felle et aceto potatus. Hie est, quern clam
discentes subripuerunt, ut resurrexisse dicatur vel hortulanus detraxit, ne lactucce suce frequentia commeantium
Icederentur. Ut talia species, ut talibus exultes, quis tibi

"GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD"

35

praetor aut consul aut sacerdos de sua liberalitat&
prcestabit? Et tamen hcec jam habemus quodammodo
per fidem spiritu imaginante reprcesentata. Ceterum
qualia ilia sunt, quce nee oculus vidit nee auris audivit
nee in cor hominis ascenderunt?" (I Cor. ii. 9.) "Credo
circo et utraque cavea" (first and fourth row, or, according to others, the comic and the tragic stage) "et omni
studio gratiora" Per fidem: so stands it written.
16.

Let us come to a conclusion. 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 battleground 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 Judaea, Judaea 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

36

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

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.
(One should also appraise at its full value the profound
logic of the Christian instinct, when over this very book
of hate it wrote the name of the Disciple of Love, that
self-same disciple to whom it attributed that impassioned
and ecstatic Gospel—therein lurks a portion of truth,
however much literary forging may have been necessary
for this purpose.) The Romans were the strong and
aristocratic; a nation stronger and more aristocratic has
never existed in the world, has never even been dreamed
of; every relic of them, every inscription enraptures,
granted that one can divine what it is that writes the
inscription. The Jews, conversely, were that priestly
nation of resentment par excellence, possessed by a unique
genius for popular morals: just compare with the Jews
the nations with analogous gifts, such as the Chinese or
the Germans, so as to realise afterwards what is first rate,
and what is fifth rate.
Which of them has been provisionally victorious, Rome
or Judaea? but there is not a shadow of doubt; just consider to whom in Rome itself nowadays you bow down,
as though before the quintessence of all the highest values

"GOOD AND EVIL/' "GOOD AND BAD"

37

—and not only in Rome, but almost over half the world,
everywhere where man has been tamed or is about to be
tamed—to three Jews, as we know, and one Jewess (to
Jesus of Nazareth, to Peter the fisher, to Paul the tentmaker, and to the mother of the aforesaid Jesus, named
Mary). This is very remarkable: Rome is undoubtedly
defeated. At any rate there took place in the Renaissance
a brilliantly sinister revival of the classical ideal, of the
aristocratic valuation of all things: Rome herself, like a
man waking up from a trance, stirred beneath the burBen of the new Judaised Rome that had been built over
her, which presented the appearance of an oecumenical
synagogue and was called the "Church": but immediately
Judaea triumphed again, thanks to that fundamentally
popular (German and English) movement of revenge,
which is called the Reformation, and taking also into
account its inevitable corollary, the restoration of the
Church—the restoration also of the ancient graveyard
peace of classical Rome. Judaea proved yet once more
victorious over the classical ideal in the French Revolution, and in a sense which was even more crucial and
even more profound: the last political aristocracy that
existed in Europe, that of the French seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, broke into pieces beneath the instincts of a resentful populace—never had the world heard
a greater jubilation, a more uproarious enthusiasm:
indeed, there took place in the midst of it the most monstrous and unexpected phenomenon; the ancient ideal
itself swept before the eyes and conscience of humanity
with all its life and with unheard-of splendour, and in
opposition to resentment's lying war-cry of the preroga-

$8

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

live of the most, in opposition to the will to lowliness,
abasement, and equalisation, the will to a retrogression
and twilight of humanity, there rang out once again,
stronger, simpler, more penetrating than ever, the terrible and enchanting counter-war-cry of the prerogative of
the jew! Like a final sign-post to other ways, there
appeared Napoleon, the most unique and violent anachronism that ever existed, and in him the incarnate problem
of the aristocratic ideal in itself—consider well what a
problem it is:—Napoleon, that synthesis of Monster and
Superman.
17.

Was it therewith over? Was that greatest of all antitheses of ideals thereby relegated ad acta for all time?
Or only postponed, postponed for a long time? May
there not take place at some time or other a much more
awful, much more carefully prepared flaring up of the
old conflagration? Further! Should not one wish that
consummation with all one's strength?—will it one's self?
demand it one's self? He who at this juncture begins,
like my readers, to reflect, to think further, will have
difficulty in coming quickly to a conclusion,—ground
enough for me to come myself to a conclusion, taking it
for granted that for some time past what I mean has been
sufficiently clear, what I exactly mean by that dangerous
motto which is inscribed on the body of my last book:
Beyond Good and Evil—at any rate that is not the same
as "Beyond Good and Bad."

"GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD"

39

NOTE.—I avail myself of the opportunity offered by this
treatise to express, openly and formally, a wish which up to
the present has only been expressed in occasional conversations with scholars, namely, that some Faculty of philosophy
should, by means of a series of prize essays, gain the glory
of having promoted the further study of the history of morals—perhaps this book may serve to give a forcible impetus
in such a direction. With regard to a possibility of this character, the following question deserves consideration. It merits quite as much the attention of philologists and historians
as of actual professional philosophers.
"What indication of the history of the evolution of the moral
ideas is afforded by philology, and especially by etymological
investigation ?"
On the other hand, it is, of course, equally necessary to
induce physiologists and doctors to be interested in these
problems (of the value of the valuations which have prevailed
up to the present) : in this connection the professional philosophers may be trusted to act as the spokesmen and intermediaries in these particular instances, after, of course, they
have quite succeeded in transforming the relationship between
philosophy and physiology and medicine, which is originally
one of coldness and suspicion, into the most friendly and fruitful reciprocity. In point of fact, all tables of values, all the
"thou shalts" known to history and ethnology, need primarily
a physiological, at any rate in preference to a psychological,
elucidation and interpretation; all equally require a critique
from medical science. The question, " W h a t is the value
of this or that table of Values' and morality?" will be asked
from the most varied standpoints. For instance, the question
of "valuable for what" can never be analysed with sufficient
nicety. That, for instance, which would evidently have value
with regard to promoting in a race the greatest possible powers
of endurance (or with regard to increasing its adaptability
to a specific climate, or with regard to the preservation of the
greatest number) would have nothing like the same value, if
it were a question of evolving a stronger species. In gauging
values, the good of the majority and the good of the minority
are opposed standpoints: we leave it to the naivete of English
biologists to regard the former standpoint as
intrinsically
superior. All the sciences have now to pave the way for the
future task of the philosopher; this task being understood to
mean, that he must solve the problem of value, that he has to
fix the hierarchy of values.

SECOND ESSAY
"GUILT," "BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE

T H E breeding of an animal that can promise—is not
this just that very paradox of a task which nature has
set itself in regard to man? Is not this the very problem
of man? The fact that this problem has been to a great
extent solved, must appear all the more phenomenal to
one who can estimate at its full value that force of
forgetjulness which works in opposition to it. Forgetfulness is no mere vis inertice, as the superficial believe,
rather is it a power of obstruction, active and, in the
strictest sense of the word, positive—a power responsible
for the fact that what we have lived, experienced, taken
into ourselves, no more enters into consciousness during
the process of digestion (it might be called psychic absorption) than all the whole manifold process by which
our physical nutrition, the so-called "incorporation," is
carried on. The temporary shutting of the doors and
windows of consciousness, the relief from the clamant
alarums and excursions, with which our subconscious
world of servant organs works in mutual co-operation and
antagonism; a little quietude, a little tabula rasa of the
40

GUILT" AND "BAD CONSCIENCE"
consciousness, so as to make room again for the new, and
above all for the more neble functions and functionaries,
room for government, foresight, predetermination (for
our organism is on an oligarchic model)—this is the utility, as I have said, of the active forgetfulness, which
is a very sentinel and nurse of psychic order, repose,
etiquette; and this shows at once why it is that there can
exist no happiness, no gladness, no hope, no pride, no
real present, without forgetfulness. The man in whom
this preventative apparatus is damaged and discarded, is
to be compared to a dyspeptic, and it is something more
than a comparison—he can "get rid of" nothing. But
this very animal who finds it necessary to be forgetful,
in whom, in fact, forgetfulness represents a force and a
form of robust health, has reared for himself an opposition-power, a memory, with whose help forgetfulness is,
in certain instances, kept in check—in the cases, namely,
where promises have to be made;—so that it is by no
means a mere passive inability to get rid of a once indented impression, not merely the indigestion occasioned
by a once pledged word, which one cannot dispose of, but
an active refusal to get rid of it, a continuing and a wish
to continue what has once been willed, an actual memory
of the will; so that between the original "I will," "I shall
do/' and the actual discharge of the will, its act, we can
easily interpose a world of new strange phenomena, circumstances, veritable volitions, without the snapping of
this long chain of the will. But what is the underlying
hypothesis of all this? How thoroughly, in order to be
able to regulate the future in this way, must man have
first learnt to distinguish between necessitated and acci-

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
dental phenomena, to think casually, to see the distant
as present and to anticipate it, to fix with certainty what
is the end, and what is the means to that end; above
all, to reckon, to have power to calculate—how thoroughly must man have first become calculable, disciplined,
necessitated even for himself and his own conception of
himself, that, like a man entering a promise, he could
guarantee himself as a future.
2.

This is simply the long history of the origin of responsibility. That task of breeding an animal which can
make promises, includes, as we have already grasped, as
its condition and preliminary, the more immediate task
of first making man to a certain extent, necessitated,
uniform, like among his like, regular, and consequently
calculable. The immense work of what I have called,
"morality of custom" * (cp. Dawn of Day, Aphs. 9, 14,
and 16), the actual work of man on himself during the
longest period of the human race, his whole prehistoric
work, finds its meaning, its great justification (in spite of
all its innate hardness, despotism, stupidity, and idiocy)
in this fact: man, with the help of the morality of customs and of social strait-waistcoats, was made genuinely
calculable. If, however, we place ourselves at the end of
this colossal process, at the point where the tree finally
matures its fruits, when society and its morality of custom
finally bring to light that to which it was only the means,
then do we find as the ripest fruit on its tree the sovereign
* The German is: "Sittlichkeit der Sitte." H. B. S.

"GUILT" AND "BAD CONSCIENCE1
individual, that resembles only himself, that has got loose
from the morality of custom, the autonomous "supermoral" individual (for "autonomous" and "moral" are
mutually exclusive terms),—in short, the man of the personal, long, and independent will, competent to promise,
—and we find in him a proud consciousness (vibrating
in every fibre), of what has been at last achieved and
become vivified in him, a genuine consciousness of power
and freedom, a feeling of human perfection in general.
And this man who has grown to freedom, who is really
competent to promise, this lord of the jree will, this sovereign—how is it possible for him not to know how great
is his superiority over everything incapable of binding
itself by promises, or of being its own security, how great
is the trust, the awe, the reverence that he awakes—he
"deserves" all three—not to know that with this mastery
over himself he is necessarily also given the mastery over
circumstances, over nature, over all creatures with shorter
wills, less reliable characters? The "free" man, the owner
of a long unbreakable will, finds in this possession his
standard of value: looking out from himself upon the
others, he honours or he despises, and just as necessarily
as he honours his peers, the strong and the reliable (those
who can bind themselves by promises),—that is, every
one who promises like a sovereign, with difficulty, rarely
and slowly, who is sparing with his trusts but confers
honour by the very fact of trusting, who gives his word
as something that can be relied on, because he knows
himself strong enough to keep it even in the teeth of
disasters, even in the "teeth of fate,"—so with equal
necessity will he have the heel of his foot ready for the

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
lean and empty jackasses, who promise when they have
no business to do so, and his rod of chastisement ready
for the liar, who already breaks his word at the very
minute when it is on his lips. 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.
3-

His conscience?—One apprehends at once that the idea
"conscience/' which is here seen in its supreme manifestation, supreme in fact to almost the point of strangeness, should already have behind it a long history and
evolution. The ability to guarantee one's self with all
due pride, and also at the same time to say yes to one's
self—that is, as has been said, a ripe fruit, but also a late
fruit:—How long must needs this fruit hang sour and
bitter on the tree! And for an even longer period there
was not a glimpse of such a fruit to be had—no one had
taken it on himself to promise it, although everything
on the tree was quite ready for it, and everything was
maturing for that very consummation. "How is a memory to be made for the man-animal? How is an impression to be so deeply fixed upon this ephemeral understanding, half dense, and half silly, upon this incarnate
forgetfulness, that it will be permanently present?" As

"GUILT" AND "BAD CONSCIENCE*

45

one may imagine, this primeval problem was not solved
by exactly gentle answers and gentle means; perhaps
there is nothing more awful and more sinister in the early
history of man than his system of mnemonics. "Something is burnt in so as to remain in his memory: only th*t
which never stops hurting remains in his memory." This
is an axiom of the oldest (unfortunately also the longest)
psychology in the world. It might even be said that
wherever solemnity, seriousness, mystery, and gloomy
colours are now found in the life of the men and of nations
of the world, there is some survival of that horror which
was once the universal concomitant of all promises,
pledges, and obligations. The past, the past with all its
length, depth, and hardness, wafts to us its breath, and
bubbles up in us again, when we become "serious."
When man thinks it necessary to make for himself a
memory, he never accomplishes it without blood, tortures
and sacrifice; the most dreadful sacrifices and forfeitures
(among them the sacrifice of the first-born), the most
loathsome mutilation (for instance, castration), the most
cruel rituals of all the religious cults (for all religions
are really at bottom systems of cruelty)—all these things
originate from that instinct which found in pain its most
potent mnemonic. In a certain sense the whole of asceticism is to be ascribed to this: certain ideas have got to
be made inextinguishable, omnipresent, "fixed," with the
object of hypnotising the whole nervous and intellectual
system through these "fixed ideas"—and the ascetic
methods and modes of life are the means of freeing those
ideas from the competition of all other ideas so as to
make them "unforgettable." The worse memory man

46

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

had, the ghastlier the signs presented by his customs;
the severity of the penal laws affords in particular a
gauge of the extent of man's difficulty in conquering
forgetfulness, and in keeping a few primal postulates of
social intercourse ever present to the minds of those who
were the slaves of every momentary emotion and every
momentary desire. We Germans do certainly not regard
ourselves as an especially cruel and hard-hearted nation,
still less as an especially casual and happy-go-lucky one;
but one has only to look at our old penal ordinances in
order to realise what a lot of trouble it takes in the world
to evolve a "nation of thinkers" (I mean: the European
nation which exhibits at this very day the maximum of
reliability, seriousness, bad taste, and positiveness, which
has on the strength of these qualities a right to train
every kind of European mandarin). These Germans employed terrible means to make for themselves a memory,
to enable them to master their rooted plebeian instincts
and the brutal crudity of those instincts: think of the old
German punishments, for instance, stoning (as far back
as the legend, the millstone falls on the head of the guilty
man), breaking on the wheel (the most original invention and speciality of the German genius in the sphere
of punishment), dart-throwing, tearing, or trampling by
horses ("quartering"), boiling the criminal in oil or wine
(still prevalent in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries),
the highly popular flaying ("slicing into strips"), cutting
the flesh out of the breast; think also of the evil-doer
being besmeared with honey, and then exposed to the
flies in a blazing sun. It was by the help of such images
and precedents that man eventually kept in his memory

"GUILT" AND "BAD CONSCIENCE'1
five or six "I will nots" with regard to which he had
already given his promise, so as to be able to enjoy the
advantages of society—and verily with the help of this
kind of memory man eventually attained "reason"!
Alas! reason, seriousness, mastery over the emotions, all
these gloomy, dismal things which are called reflection,
all these privileges and pageantries of humanity: how
dear is the price that they have exacted! How much
blood and cruelty is the foundation of all "good things"!
4-

But how is it that that other melancholy object, the
consciousness of sin, the whole "bad conscience," came
into the world? And it is here that we turn back to our
genealogists of morals. For the second time I say—or
have I not said it yet?—that they are worth nothing.
Just their own five-spans-long limited modern experience;
no knowledge of the past, and no wish to know it; still
less a historic instinct, a power of "second sight" (which
is what is really required in this case)—and despite this
to go in for the history of morals. It stands to reason*
that this must needs produce results which are removed
from the truth by something more than a respectful distance.
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 German word "schuld" means both debt and guilt
Cp. the English "owe" and "ought," by which I occasionally
ender the double meaning.—H. B. S.

48

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

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. Throughout the
longest period of human history punishment was never
based on the responsibility of the evil-doer for his action,
and was consequently not based on the hypothesis that
only the guilty should be punished;—on the contrary,
punishment was inflicted in those days for the same reason
that parents punish their children even nowadays, out of
anger at an injury that they have suffered, an anger
which vents itself mechanically on the author of the
injury—but this anger is kept in bounds and modified
through the idea that every injury has somewhere or other
its equivalent price, and can really be paid off, even
though it be by means of pain to the author. Whence
is it that this ancient deep-rooted and now perhaps in-

"GUILT" AND "BAD CONSCIENCE"

40

eradicable idea has drawn its strength, this idea of an
equivalency between injury and pain? I have already
revealed its origin, in the contractual relationship between
creditor and ower, that is as old as the existence of legal
rights at all, and in its turn points back to the primary
forms of purchase, sale, barter, and trade.
5.
The realisation of these contractual relations excites,
of course (as would be already expected from our previous observations), a great deal of suspicion and opposition towards the primitive society which made or sanctioned them. In this society promises will be made; in
this society the object is to provide the promiser with a
memory; in this society, so may we suspect, there will
be full scope for hardness, cruelty, and pain: the "ower,"
in order to induce credit in his promise of repayment, in
order to give a guarantee of the earnestness and sanctity
of his promise, in order to drill into his own conscience
the duty, the solemn duty, of repayment, will, by virtue
of a contract with his creditor to meet the contingency of
his not paying, pledge something that he still possesses,
something that he still has in his power, for instance, his
life or his wife, or his freedom or his body (or under
certain religious conditions even his salvation, his souTs
welfare, even his peace in the grave; so in Egypt, where
the corpse of the ower found even in the grave no rest
from the creditor—of course, from the Egyptian standpoint, this peace was a matter of particular importance).
But especially has the creditor the power of inflicting on

So

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

the body of the ower all kinds of pain and torture—the
power, for instance, of cutting off from it an amount that
appeared proportionate to the greatness of the debt;—
this point of view resulted in the universal prevalence at
an early date of precise schemes of valuation, frequently
horrible in the minuteness and meticulosity of their application, legally sanctioned schemes of valuation for
individual limbs and parts of the body. I consider it as
already a progress, as a proof of a freer, less petty, and
more Roman conception of law, when the Roman Code of
the Twelve Tables decreed that it was immaterial how
much or how little the creditors in such a contingency
cut off, "si plus minusve secneriint, ne fraude esto." Let
us make the logic of the whole of this equalisation process
clear; it is strange enough. The equivalence consists in
this: instead of an advantage directly compensatory of
his injury (that is, instead of an equalisation in money,
lands, or some kind of chattel), the creditor is granted
by way of repayment and compensation a certain sensation of satisfaction—the satisfaction of being able to vent,
without any trouble, his power on one who is powerless,
the delight "de faire le mal pour le plaisir de la faire,"
the joy in sheer violence: and this joy will be relished in
proportion to the lowness and humbleness of the creditor
in the social scale, and is quite apt to have the effect of
the most delicious dainty, and even seem the foretaste of a
higher social position. Thanks to the punishment of the
"ower," the creditor participates in the rights of the masters. At last he too, for once in a way, attains the edifying consciousness of being able to despise and ill-treat
a creature—as an "inferior"—or at any rate of seeing

"GUILT" AND "BAD CONSCIENCE

51

him being despised and ill-treated, in case the actual
power of punishment, the administration of punishment,
has already become transferred to the "authorities." The
compensation consequently consists in a claim on cruelty
and a right to draw thereon.
6.
It is then in this sphere of the law of contract that we
find the cradle of the whole moral world of the ideas of
"guilt," "conscience," "duty," the "sacredness of duty,"
—their commencement, like the commencement of all
great things in the world, is thoroughly and continuously
saturated with blood. And should we not add that this
world has never really lost a certain savour of blood and
torture (not even in old Kant: the categorical imperative
reeks of cruelty). It was in this sphere likewise that
there first became formed that sinister and perhaps now
indissoluble association of the ideas of "guilt" and "suffering." To put the question yet again, why can suffering be a compensation for "owing"?—Because the infliction of suffering produces the highest degree of happiness, because the injured party will get in exchange for
his loss (including his vexation at his loss) an extraordinary counter-pleasure: the infliction of suffering—a real
feast, something that, as I have said, was all the more
appreciated the greater the paradox created by the rank
and social status of the creditor. These observations are
purely conjectural; for, apart from the painful nature
of the task, it is hard to plumb such profound depths: the
clumsy introduction of the idea of "revenge" as a con-

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
necting-link simply hides and obscures the view instead
of rendering it clearer (revenge itself simply leads back
again to the identical problem—"How can the infliction
of suffering be a satisfaction?"). In my opinion it is
repugnant to the delicacy, and still more to the hypocrisy
of tame domestic animals (that is, modern men; that is,
ourselves), to realise with all their energy the extent to
which cruelty constituted the great joy and delight of
ancient man, was an ingredient which seasoned nearly all
his pleasures, and conversely the extent of the naivete
and innocence with which he manifested his need for
cruelty, when he actually made as a matter of principle
"disinterested malice" (or, to use Spinoza's expression,
the sympathia malevolens) into a normal characteristic of
man—as consequently something to which the conscience
says a hearty yes. The more profound observer has perhaps already had sufficient opportunity for noticing this
most ancient and radical joy and delight of mankind; in
Beyond Good and Evil, Aph. 188 (and even earlier, in
The Dawn of Day, Aphs. 18, 77, 113), I have cautiously
indicated the continually growing spiritualisation and
"deification" of cruelty, which pervades the whole history
of the higher civilisation (and in the larger sense even
constitutes it). At any rate the time is not so long past
when it was impossible to conceive of royal weddings and
national festivals on a grand scale, without executions,
tortures, or perhaps an auto-da-fe, or similarly to conceive
of an aristocratic household, without a creature to serve
as a butt for the cruel and malicious baiting of the inmates. (The reader will perhaps remember Don Quixote
at the court of the Duchess: we read nowadays the whole

"GUILT" AND "BAD CONSCIENCE"

53

of Don Quixote with a bitter taste in the mouth, almost
with a sensation of torture, a fact which would appear
very strange and very incomprehensible to the author and
his contemporaries—they read it with the best conscience
in the world as the gayest of books; they almost died with
laughing at it.) 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.
7.
Entertaining, as I do, these thoughts, I am, let me say
in parenthesis, fundamentally opposed to helping our pessimists to new water for the discordant and groaning mills
of their disgust with life; on the contrary, it should be
shown specifically that, at the time when mankind was
not yet ashamed of its cruelty, life in the world was
brighter than it is nowadays when there are pessimists.
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

54

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

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. On the road to angel-hood (not to use in
this context a harder word) man has developed that dyspeptic stomach and coated tongue, which have made not
only the joy and innocence of the animal repulsive to
him, but also life itself:—so that sometimes he stands
with stopped nostrils before his own self, and, like Pope
Innocent the Third, makes a black list of his own horrors
("unclean generation, loathsome nutrition when in the
maternal body, badness of the matter out of which man
develops, awful stench, secretion of saliva, urine, and excrement"). Nowadays, when suffering is always trotted
out as the first argument against existence, as its most sinister query, it is well to remember the times when men
judged on converse principles because they could not dispense with the infliction of suffering, and saw therein a
magic of the first order, a veritable bait of seduction to
life.
Perhaps in those days (this is to solace the weaklings)
pain did not hurt so much as it does nowadays: any
physician who has treated negroes (granted that these are
taken as representative of the prehistoric man) suffering
from severe internal inflammations which would bring a
European, even though he had the soundest constitution,
almost to despair, would be in a position to come to this
conclusion. Pain has not the same effect with negroes.
(The curve of human sensibilities to pain seems indeed to

GUILT" AND "BAD CONSCIENCE"

55

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.) We may perhaps be
allowed to admit the possibility of the craving for cruelty
not necessarily having become really extinct: it only requires, in view of the fact that pain hurts more nowadays,
a certain sublimation and subtilisation, it must especially
be translated to the imaginative and psychic plane, and be
adorned with such smug euphemisms, that even the most
fastidious and hypocritical conscience could never grow
suspicious of their real nature ("Tragic pity" is one of
these euphemisms: another is "les nostalgies de la croix").
What really raises one's indignation against suffering is
not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering; such a senselessness, however, existed neither in
Christianity, which interpreted suffering into a whole mysterious salvation-apparatus, nor in the beliefs of the naive
ancient man, who only knew how to find a meaning in
suffering from the standpoint of the spectator, or the infractor of the suffering. In order to get the secret, undiscovered, and unwitnessed suffering out of the world it was
almost compulsory to invent gods and a hierarchy of intermediate beings, in short, something which wanders even
among secret places, sees even in the dark, and makes a
point of never missing an interesting and painful spectacle.
It was with the help of such inventions that life got to

56

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

learn the tour de force, which has become part of its
stock-in-trade, the tour de force of self-justification, of
the justification of evil; nowadays this would perhaps require other auxiliary devices (for instance, life as a riddle,
life as a problem of knowledge). "Every evil is justified
in the sight of which a god finds edification," so rang the
logic of primitive sentiment—and, indeed, was it only of
primitive? The gods conceived as friends of spectacles of
cruelty—oh, how far does this primeval conception extend even nowadays into our European civilisation! One
would perhaps like in this context to consult Luther and
Calvin. It is at any rate certain that even the Greeks
knew no more piquant seasoning for the happiness of
their gods than the joys of cruelty. What, do you think,
was the mood with which Homer makes his gods look down
upon the fates of men? What final meaning have at
bottom the Trojan War and similar tragic horrors? It
is impossible to entertain any doubt on the point: they
were intended as festival games for the gods, and, in so far
as the poet is of a more godlike breed than other men, as
festival games also for the poets. It was in just this spirit
and no other, that at a later date the moral philosophers
of Greece conceived the eyes of God as still looking down
on the moral struggle, the heroism, and the self-torture of
the virtuous; the Heracles of duty was on a stage, and
was conscious of the fact; virtue without witnesses was
something quite unthinkable for this nation of actors.
Must not that philosophic invention, so audacious and so
fatal, which was then absolutely new to Europe, the invention of "free will," of the absolute spontaneity of man
in good and evil, simply have been made for the specific

GUILT" AND "BAD CONSCIENCE'7
purpose of justifying the idea, that the interest of the
gods in humanity and human virtue was inexhaustible?
There would never on the stage of this free-will world
be a dearth of really new, really novel and exciting situations, plots, catastrophes. A w7orld thought out on completely deterministic lines would be easily guessed by the
gods, and would consequently soon bore them—sufficient
reason for these friends of the gods, the philosophers, not
to ascribe to their gods such a deterministic world. The
whole of ancient humanity is full of delicate consideration
for the spectator, being as it is a world of thorough publicity and theatricality, which could not conceive of happiness without spectacles and festivals.—And, as has already
been said, even in great punishment there is so much
which is festive.
8.
The feeling of "ought," of personal obligation (to take
up again the train of our inquiry), has had, as we saw, its
origin in the oldest and most original personal relationship
that there is, the relationship between buyer and seller,
creditor and owner: here it was that individual confronted
individual, and that individual matched himself against
individual. There has not yet been found a grade of
civilisation so low, as not to manifest some trace of this
relationship. Making prices, assessing values, thinking
out equivalents, exchanging—all this preoccupied the
primal thoughts of man to such an extent that in a certain
sense it constituted thinking itself: it was here that was
trained the oldest form of sagacity, it was here in this

58

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

sphere that we can perhaps trace the first commencement
of man's pride, of his feeling of superiority over other animals. Perhaps our word "Mensch" (manas) still expresses just something of this self-pride: man denoted
himself as the being who measures values, who values and
measures, as the "assessing" animal par excellence. Sale
and purchase, together with their psychological concomitants, are older than the origins of any form of social organisation and union: it is rather from the most rudimentary form of individual right that the budding consciousness of exchange, commerce, debt, right, obligation,
compensation was first transferred to the rudest and most
elementary of the social complexes (in their relation to
similar complexes), the habit of comparing force with
force, together with that of measuring, of calculating. His
eye v/as now focussed to this perspective; and with that
ponderous consistency characteristic of ancient thought,
which, though set in motion with difficulty, yet proceeds
inflexibly along the line on which it has started, man soon
arrived at the great generalisation, " everything has its
price, all can be paid for," the oldest and most naive moral
canon of justice, the beginning of all "kindness," of all
"equity," of all "goodwill," of all "objectivity" in the
world. Justice in this initial phase is the goodwill among
people of about equal power to come to terms with each
other, to come to an understanding again by means of a
settlement, and with regard to the less powerful, to com-*
pel them to agree among themselves to a settlement.
9Measured always by the standard of antiquity (this

'GUILT" AND "BAD CONSCIENCE'
antiquity, moreover, is present or again possible at all
periods), the community stands to its members in that important and radical relationship of creditor to his owers." Man lives in a community, man enjoys the advantages of a community (and what advantages! we occasionally underestimate them nowadays), man lives protected,
spared, in peace and trust, secure from certain injuries
and enmities, to which the man outside the community,
the "peaceless" man, is exposed,—a German understands
the original meaning of "Elend" (elend),—secure because
he has entered into pledges and obligations to the community in respect of these very injuries and enmities.
What happens when this is not the case? The community, the defrauded creditor, will get itself paid, as well as
it can, one can reckon on that. In this case the question
of the direct damage done by the offender is quite subsidiary: quite apart from this the criminal* is above all a
breaker, a breaker of word and covenant to the whole, as
regards all the advantages and amenities of the communal
life in which up to that time he had participated. The
criminal is an "ower" who not only fails to repay the advances and advantages that have been given to him, but
even sets out to attack his creditor: consequently he is in
the future not only, as is fair, deprived of all these advantages and amenities—he is in addition reminded of
the importance of those advantages. The wrath of the
injured creditor, of the community, puts him back in the
wild and outlawed status from which he was previously
protected: the community repudiates him—and now every
kind of enmity can vent itself on him. Punishment is in
* German: "Verbrecher."—H. B. S.

60

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

this stage of civilisation simply the copy, the mimic, of
the normal treatment of the hated, disdained, and conquered enemy, who is not only deprived of every right
and protection but of every mercy; so we have the martial law and triumphant festival of the vce victis! in all its
mercilessness and cruelty. This shows why war itself
(counting the sacrificial cult of war) has produced all the
forms under which punishment has manifested itself in
history.
10.

As it grows more powerful, the community tends to take
the offences of the individual less seriously, because they
are now regarded as being much less revolutionary and
dangerous to the corporate existence: the evil-doer is no
more outlawed and put outside the pale, the common
wrath can no longer vent itself upon him with its old
licence,—on the contrary, from this very time it is against
this wrath, and particularly against the wrath of those
directly injured, that the evil-doer is carefully shielded and
protected by the community. As, in fact, the penal law
develops, the following characteristics become more and
more clearly marked: compromise with the wrath of those
directly affected by the misdeed; a consequent endeavour
to localise the matter and to prevent a further, or indeed
a general spread of the disturbance; attempts to find
equivalents and to settle the whole matter (compositio);
above all, the will, which manifests itself with increasing
definiteness, to treat every offence as in a certain degree
capable of being paid off, and consequently, at any rate

"GUILT" AND "BAD CONSCIENCE"

61

up to a certain point, to isolate the offender from his act.
As the power and the self-consciousness of a community
increases, so proportionately does the penal lav/ become
mitigated; conversely every weakening and jeopardising
of the community revives the harshest forms of that law.
The creditor has always grown more humane proportionately as he has grown more rich; finally the amount of
injury he can endure without really suffering becomes the
criterion of his wealth. It is possible to conceive of a
society blessed with so great a consciousness of its own
power as to indulge in the most aristocratic luxury of
letting its wrong-doers go scot-free.—"What do my parasites matter to me?" might society say. "Let them live
and flourish! I am strong enough for it."—The justice
which began with the maxim, "Everything can be paid
off, everything must be paid off," ends with connivance
at the escape of those who cannot pay to escape—it ends,,
like every good thing on earth, by destroying itself.—
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.
II.

A deprecatory word here against the attempts, that
have lately been made, to find the origin of justice on
quite another basis—namely, on that of resentment. Let
me whisper a word in the ear of the psychologists, if they
would fain study revenge itself at close quarters: this
plant blooms its prettiest at present among Anarchists
and anti-Semites, a hidden flower, as it has ever been, like

62

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

the violet, though, forsooth, with another perfume. And
as like must necessarily emanate from like, it will not be
a matter for surprise that it is just in such circles that we
see the birth of endeavours (it is their old birthplace—
compare above, First Essay, paragraph 14), to sanctify
revenge under the name of justice (as though Justice were
at bottom merely a development of the consciousness of
injury), and thus with the rehabilitation of revenge to
reinstate generally and collectively all the reactive emotions. I object to this last point least of all. It even
seems meritorious when regarded from the standpoint
of the whole problem of biology (from which standpoint
the value of these emotions has up to the present been
underestimated). And that to which I alone call attention, is the circumstance that it is the spirit of revenge
itself, from which develops this new nuance of scientific
equity (for the benefit of hate, envy, mistrust, jealousy,
suspicion, rancour, revenge). This scientific "equity"
stops immediately and makes way for the accents of
deadly enmity and prejudice, so soon as another group
of emotions comes on the scene, which in my opinion are
of a much higher biological value than these reactions,
and consequently have a paramount claim to the valuation and appreciation of science: I mean the really active
emotions, such as personal and material ambition, and
so forth. (E. Duhring, Value of Life; Course of Philosophy, and passim.) So much against this tendency in
general: but as for the particular maxim of Duhring's,
that the home of Justice is to be found in the sphere of
the reactive feelings, our love of truth compels us drastically to invert his own proposition and to oppose to him

"GUILT" AND "BAD CONSCIENCE"

63

this other maxim: the last sphere conquered by the spirit
of justice is the sphere of the feeling of reaction! When
it really comes about that the just man remains just even
as regards his injurer (and not merely cold, moderate, reserved, indifferent: being just is always a positive state);
when, in spite of the strong provocation of personal insult,
contempt, and calumny, the lofty and clear objectivity of
the just and judging eye (whose glance is as profound as
it is gentle) is untroubled, why then we have a piece of
perfection, a past master of the world—something, in
fact, which it would not be wise to expect, and which
should not at any rate be too easily believed. Speaking
generally, there is no doubt but that even the justest individual only requires a little dose of hostility, malice, or
innuendo to drive the blood into his brain and the fairness
from it. The active man, the attacking, aggressive man
is always a hundred degrees nearer to justice than the man
who merely reacts; he certainly has no need to adopt the
tactics, necessary in the case of the reacting man, of making false and biassed valuations of his object. It is, in
point of fact, for this reason that 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! Finally, let man look at himself in history.
In what sphere up to the present has the whole administration of law, the acutal need of law, found its earthly
home? Perchance in the sphere of the reacting man? Not
for a minute: rather in that of the active, strong, spontaneous, aggressive man? I deliberately defy the above-

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THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

mentioned agitator (who himself makes this self-confession, "the creed of revenge has run through all my works
and endeavours like the red thread of Justice"), and say,
that judged historically law in the world represents the
very war against the reactive feelings, the very war wraged
on those feelings by the powers of activity and aggression, which devote some of their strength to damming and
keeping within bounds this effervescence of hysterical reactivity, and to forcing it to some compromise. Everywhere where justice is practised and justice is maintained,
it is to be observed that the stronger power, when confronted with the weaker powers which are inferior to it
(whether they be groups, or individuals), searches for
weapons to put an end to the senseless fury of resentment, while it carries on its object, partly by taking the
victim of resentment out of the clutches of revenge, partly
by substituting for revenge a campaign of its own against
the enemies of peace and order, partly by finding, suggesting, and occasionally enforcing settlements, partly by
standardising certain equivalents for injuries, to which
equivalents the element of resentment is henceforth finally
referred. The most drastic measure, however, taken and
effectuated by the supreme power, to combat the preponderance of the feelings of spite and vindictiveness—
it takes this measure as soon as it is at all strong enough
to do so—is the foundation of law, the imperative declaration of what in its eyes is to be regarded as just and
lawful, and what unjust and unlawful: and while, after
the foundation of law, the supreme power treats the aggressive and arbitrary acts of individuals, or of whole

"GUILT" AND "BAD CONSCIENCE"

65

groups, as a violation of law, and a revolt against itself,
it distracts the feelings of its subjects from the immediate
injury inflicted by such a violation, and thus eventually
attains the very opposite result to that always desired by
revenge, which sees and recognises nothing but the standpoint of the injured party. From henceforth the eye becomes trained to a more and more impersonal valuation
of the deed, even the eye of the injured party himself
(though this is in the final stage of all, as has been previously remarked)—on this principle "right" and "wrong"
first manifest themselves after the foundation of law (and
not, as Duhring maintains, only after the act of violation).
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. It is necessary to make
an even more serious confession:—viewed from the most
advanced biological standpoint, conditions of legality can
be only exceptional conditions, in that they are partial
restrictions of the real life-will, which makes for power,
and in that they are subordinated to the life-will's general
end as particular means, that is, as means to create larger
units of strength. A legal organisation, conceived of as
sovereign and universal, not as a weapon in a fight of
complexes of power, but as a weapon against fighting,
generally something after the style of Duhring's communistic model of treating every will as equal with every

66

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

other will, would be a principle hostile to life, a destroyer
and dissolver of man, an outrage on the future of man, a
symptom of fatigue, a secret cut to Nothingness.—
12.

A word more on the origin and end of punishment—
two problems which are or ought to be kept distinct, but
which unfortunately are usually lumped into one. And
what tactics have our moral genealogists employed up to
the present in these cases? Their inveterate naivete.
They find out some "end" in the punishment, for instance,
revenge and deterrence, and then in all their innocence
set this end at the beginning, as the causa fiendi of the
punishment, and—they have done the trick. But the
patching up of a history of the origin of law is the last
use to which the "End in Law"* ought to be put. Perhaps there is no more pregnant principle for any kind of
history than the following, which, difficult though it is to
master, should none the less be mastered in every detail.—
The origin of the existence of a thing and its final utility,
its practical application and incorporation in a system of
ends, are toto ccelo opposed to each other—everything,
anything, which exists and which prevails anywhere, will
always be put to new purposes by a force superior to itself, will be commandeered afresh, will be turned and
transformed to new uses; all "happening" in the organic
world consists of overpowering and dominating, and again
all overpowering and domination is a new interpretation
and adjustment, which must necessarily obscure or absolutely extinguish the subsisting "meaning" and "end."

"GUILT" AND "BAD CONSCIENCE"

67

The most perfect comprehension of the utility of any
physiological organ (or also of a legal institution, social
custom, political habit, form in art or in religious worship) does not for a minute imply any simultaneous comprehension of its origin: this may seem uncomfortable
and unpalatable to the older men,—for* it has been the
immemorial belief that understanding the final cause or
the utility of a thing, a form, an institution, means also
understanding the reason for its origin: to give an example of this logic, the eye was made to see, the hand
was made to grasp. So even punishment was conceived
as invented with a view to punishing. But all ends and
all utilities are only signs that a Will to Power has mastered a less powerful force, has impressed thereon out of
its own self the meaning of a function; and the whole
history of a "Thing," an organ, a custom, can on the
same principle be regarded as a continuous "sign-chain"
of perpetually new interpretations and adjustments, whose
causes, so far from needing to have even a mutual connection, sometimes follow and alternate with each other
absolutely haphazard. Similarly, the evolution of a
"Thing," of a custom, is anything but its progressus to
an end, still less a logical and direct progressus attained
with the minimum expenditure of energy and cost: it is
rather the succession of processes of subjugation, more or
less profound, more or less mutually independent, which
operate on the thing itself; it is, further, the resistance
which in each case invariably displayed this subjugation,
the Protean wriggles by way of defence and reaction, and,
* An allusion to Der Zweck im Recht, by the great German
jurist, Professor Ihering.

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THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

further, the results of successful counter-efforts. The
form is fluid, but the meaning is even more so—even inside every individual organism the case is the same: with
every genuine growth of the whole, the "function" of the
individual organs becomes shifted,—in certain cases a
partial perishing of these organs, a diminution of their
numbers (for instance, through annihilation of the connecting members), can be a symptom of growing strength
and perfection. What I mean is this: even partial loss
of utility, decay, and degeneration, loss of function and
purpose, in a word, death, appertain to the conditions of
the genuine progressus; which always appears in the shape
of a will and way to greater power, and is always realised
at the expense of innumerable smaller powers. The magnitude of a "progress" is gauged by the greatness of the
sacrifice that it requires: humanity as a mass sacrificed to
the prosperity of the one stronger species of Man—that
would be a progress. I emphasise all the more this cardinal characteristic of the historic method, for the reason
that in its essence it runs counter to predominant instincts
and prevailing taste, which must prefer to put up with
absolute casualness, even with the mechanical senselessness of all phenomena, than with the theory of a powerwill, in exhaustive play throughout all phenomena. The
democratic idiosyncrasy against everything which rules
and wishes to rule, the modern misarchism (to coin a bad
word for a bad thing), has gradually but so thoroughly
transformed itself into the guise of intellectualism, the
most abstract intellectualism, that even nowadays it penetrates and has the right to penetrate step by step into the
most exact and apparently the most objective sciences: this

"GUILT" AND "BAD CONSCIENCE"

69

tendency has, in fact, in my view already dominated the
whole of physiology and biology, and to their detriment,
as is obvious, in so far as it has spirited away a radical
idea, the idea of true activity. The tyranny of this idiosyncrasy, however, results in the theory of "adaptation"
being pushed forward into the van of the argument, exploited; adaptation—that means to say, a second-class
activity, a mere capacity for "reacting"; in fact, life itself
has been defined (by Herbert Spencer) as an increasingly
effective internal adaptation to external circumstances.
This definition, however, fails to realise the real essence
of life, its will to power. It fails to appreciate the paramount superiority enjoyed by those plastic forces of spontaneity, aggression, and encroachment with their new interpretations and tendencies, to the operation of which
adaptation is only a natural corollary: consequently the
sovereign office of the highest functionaries in the organism itself (among which the life-will appears as an active
and formative principle) is repudiated. One remembers
Huxley's reproach to Spencer of his "administrative Nihilism": but it is a case of something much more than
"administration."
13.

To return to our subject, namely punishment, we must
make consequently a double distinction: first, the relatively permanent element, the custom, the act, the
"drama," a certain rigid sequence of methods of procedure; on the other hand, the fluid element, the meaning, the end, the expectation which is attached to the oper-

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
ation of such procedure. At this point we immediately
assume, per analogiam (in accordance with the theory of
the historic method, which we have elaborated above),
that the procedure itself is something older and earlier
than its utilisation in punishment, that this utilisation was
introduced and interpreted into the procedure (which had
existed for a long time, but whose employment had another
meaning), in short, that the case is different from that
hftherto supposed by our naif genealogists of morals and
of law, who thought that the procedure was invented for
the purpose of punishment, in the same way that the
hand had been previously thought to have been invented
for the purpose of grasping. With regard to the other
element in punishment, its fluid element, its meaning, the
idea of punishment in a very late stage of civilisation (for
instance, contemporary Europe) is not content with manifesting merely one meaning, but manifests a whole synthesis aof meanings." The past general history of punishment, the history of its employment for the most diverse
ends, crystallises eventually into a kind of unity, which is
difficult to analyse into its parts, and which, it is necessary to emphasise, absolutely defies definition. (It is
nowadays impossible to say definitely the precise reason
for punishment: all ideas, in which a whole process is
promiscuously comprehended, elude definition; it is only
that which has no history, which can be defined.) ,At
an earlier stage, on the contrary, that synthesis of meanings appears much less rigid and much more elastic; we
can realise how in each individual case the elements of
the synthesis change their value and their position, so
that now one element and now another stands out and pre-

GUILT" AND "BAD CONSCIENCE1
dominates over the others, nay, in certain cases one element (perhaps the end of deterrence) seems to eliminate
all the rest. At any rate, so as to give some idea of the
uncertain, supplementary, and accidental nature of the
meaning of punishment and of the manner in which one
identical procedure can be employed and adapted for the
most diametrically opposed objects, I will at this point
give a scheme that has suggested itself to me, a scheme itself based on comparatively small and accidental material.—Punishment, as rendering the criminal harmless
and incapable of further injury.—Punishment, as compensation for the injury sustained by the injured party,
in any form whatsoever (including the form of sentimental compensation).—Punishment, as an isolation of
that which disturbs the equilibrium, so as to prevent the
further spreading of the disturbance.—Punishment as a
means of inspiring fear of those who determine and execute the punishment.—Punishment as a kind of compensation for advantages which the wrong-doer has up to that
time enjoyed (for example, when he is utilised as a slave
in the mines).—Punishment, as the elimination of an element of decay (sometimes of a whole branch, as according to the Chinese laws, consequently as a means to the
purification of the race, or the preservation of a social
type).—Punishment as a festival, as the violent oppression and humiliation of an enemy that has at last been
subdued.—Punishment as a mnemonic, whether for him
who suffers the punishment—the so-called "correction,"
or for the witnesses of its administration.—Punishment, as
the payment of a fee stipulated for by the power which
protects the evil-doer from the excesses of revenge.—

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
Punishment, as a compromise with the natural-phenomenon of revenge, in so far as revenge is still maintained
and claimed as a privilege by the stronger races.—Punishment as a declaration and measure of war against an
enemy of peace, of law, of order, of authority, who is
fought by society with the weapons which war provides,
as a spirit dangerous to the community, as a breaker of
the contract on which the community is based, as a rebel,
a traitor, and a breaker of the peace.
14.

This list is certainly not complete; it is obvious that
punishment is overloaded with utilities of all kinds. This
makes it all the more permissible to eliminate one supposed
utility, which passes, at any rate in the popular mind,
for its most essential utility, and which is just what even
now provides the strongest support for that faith in punishment which is nowadays for many reasons tottering.
Punishment is supposed to have the value of exciting in
the guilty the consciousness of guilt; in punishment is
sought the proper instrumentum of that psychic reaction
which becomes known as a "bad conscience," "remorse."
But this theory is even, from the point of view of the
present, a violation of reality and psychology: and how
much more so is the case when we have to deal with the
longest period of man's history, his primitive history!
Genuine remorse is certainly extremely rare among wrongdoers and the victims of punishment; prisons and houses
of correction are not the soil on which this worm of remorse pullulates for choice—this is the unanimous opinion

'GUILT" AND "BAD CONSCIENCE
of all conscientious observers, who in many cases arrive
at such a judgment with enough reluctance and against
their own personal wishes. Speaking generally, punishment hardens and numbs, it produces concentration, it
sharpens the consciousness of alienation, it strengthens the
power of resistance. When it happens that it breaks the
man's energy and brings about a piteous prostration and
abjectness, such a result is certainly even less salutary
than the average effect of punishment, which is characterised by a harsh and sinister doggedness. The thought of
those prehistoric millennia brings us to the unhesitating
conclusion, that it was simply through punishment that
the evolution of the consciousness of guilt was most forcibly retarded—at any rate in the victims of the punishing
power. In particular, let us not underestimate the extent
to which, by the very sight of the judicial and executive
procedure, the wrong-doer is himself prevented from feeling that his deed, the character of his act, is intrinsically
reprehensible: for he sees clearly the same kind of acts
practised in the service of justice, and then called good,
and practised with a good conscience; acts such as espionage, trickery, bribery, trapping, the whole intriguing
and insidious art of the policeman and the informer—
the whole system, in fact, manifested in the different kinds
of punishment (a system not excused by passion, but
based on principle), of robbing, oppressing, insulting, imprisoning, racking, murdering.—All this he sees treated by
his judges, not as acts meriting censure and condemnation
in themselves, but only in a particular context and application. It was not on tins soil that grew the "bad conscience," that most sinister and interesting plant of our

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THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

earthly vegetation—in point of fact, throughout a most
lengthy period, no suggestion of having to do with a
"guilty man" manifested itself in the consciousness of the
man who judged and punished. One had merely to deal
with an author of an injury, an irresponsible piece of fate.
And the man himself, on whom the punishment subsequently fell like a piece of fate, was occasioned no more
of an "inner pain" than would be occasioned by the sudden approach of some uncalculated event, some terrible
natural catastrophe, a rushing, crushing avalanche against
which there is no resistance.
15.

This truth came insidiously enough to the consciousness
of Spinoza (to the disgust of his commentators, who (like
Kuno Fischer, for instance) give themselves no end of
trouble to misunderstand him on this point), when one
afternoon (as he sat raking up who knows what memory)
he indulged in the question of what was really left for him
personally of the celebrated Morsus conscientice—Spinoza,
who had relegated "good and evil" to the sphere of human
imagination, and indignantly defended the honour of his
"free" God against those blasphemers who affirmed that
God did everything sub ratione boni ("but this was tantamount to subordinating God to fate, and would really be
the greatest of all absurdities"). For Spinoza the world
had returned again to that innocence in which it lay before the discovery of the bad conscience: what, then, had
happened to the morsus consciehtice? "The antithesis of
gaudiurn," said he at last to himself,—"A sadness ac-

"GUILT" AND "BAD CONSCIENCE"

75

companied by the recollection of a past event which has
turned out contrary to all expectation" (Eth. iii., Propos.
XVIII. Schol. i. ii.). Evil-doers 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 ("Injury makes a man cunning,"
says a popular proverb: so far as it makes him cunning,
it makes him also bad. Fortunately, it often enough
makes him stupid).
16.

At this juncture I cannot avoid trying to give a tenia-

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THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

tive and provisional expression to my own hypothesis concerning the origin of the bad conscience: it is difficult to
make it fully appreciated, and it requires continuous meditation, attention, and digestion. I regard the bad conscience as the serious illness which man was bound to contract under the stress of the most radical change which he
has ever experienced—that change, when he found himself
finally imprisoned within the pale of society and of peace.
Just like the plight of the water-animals, when they
wrere compelled either to become land-animals or to perish, so was the plight of these half-animals, perfectly
adapted as they were to the savage life of war, prowling,
and adventure—suddenly all their instincts were rendered
worthless and "switched off." Henceforward they had to
walk on their feet—"carry themselves," whereas heretofore they had been carried by the water: a terrible heaviness oppressed them. They found themselves clumsy in
obeying the simplest directions, confronted with this new
and unknown world they had no longer their old guides—
the regulative instincts that had led them unconsciously
to safety—they were reduced, were those unhappy creatures, to thinking, inferring, calculating, putting together
causes and results, reduced to that poorest and most erratic organ of theirs, their "consciousness." I do not believe there was ever in the world such a feeling of misery,
such a leaden discomfort—further, those old instincts had
not immediately ceased their demands! Only it was difficult and rarely possible to gratify them: speaking
broadly, they were compelled to satisfy themselves by
new and, as it were, hole-and-corner methods. All instincts which do not find a vent without, turn inwards—

GUILT" AND "BAD CONSCIENCE"
this is what I mean by the growing "intp|-na1UaHnn-,t .©£
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."
But thereby he introduced that most grave and sinister
illness, from which mankind has not yet recovered, the
suffering of man from the disease called man, as the result of a violent breaking from his animal past, the result,
as it were, of a spasmodic plunge into a new environment

78

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

and new conditions of existence, the result of a declaration of war against the old instincts, which up to that time
had been the staple of his power, his joy, his formidableness. Let us immediately add that this fact of an animal
ego turning against itself, taking part against itself, produced in the world so novel, profound, unheard-of, problematic, inconsistent, and pregnant a phenomenon, that
the aspect of the world was radically altered thereby. In
sooth, only divine spectators could have appreciated the
drama that then began, and whose end baffles conjecture
as yet—a drama too subtle, too wonderful, too paradoxical to warrant its undergoing a nonsensical and unheeded
performance on some random grotesque planet! Henceforth man is to be counted as one of the most unexpected
and sensational lucky shots in the game of the "big baby"
of Heracleitus, whether he be called Zeus or Chance—he
awakens on his behalf the interest, excitement, hope, almost the confidence, of his being the harbinger and forerunner of something, of man being no end, but only a
stage, an interlude, a bridge, a great promise.
17-

It is primarily involved in this hypothesis of the origin
of the bad conscience, that that alteration was no gradual
and no voluntary alteration, and that it did not manifest
itself as an organic adaptation to new conditions, but as
a break, a jump, a necessity, an inevitable fate, against
which there was no resistance and never a spark of resentment. And secondarily, that the fitting of a hitherto
unchecked and amorphous population into a fixed form,

"GUILT" AND "BAD CONSCIENCE"

79

starting as it had done in an act of violence, could only
be accomplished by acts of violence and nothing else—
that the oldest "State" appeared consequently as a ghastly
tyranny, a grinding ruthless piece of machinery, which
went on working, till this raw material of a semi-animal
populace was not only thoroughly kneaded and elastic,
but also moulded. I used the word "State"; my meaning
is self-evident, namely, 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 as 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:—
their appearance produces instantaneously a scheme of
sovereignty which is live, in which the functious are partitioned and apportioned, in which above all no part is received or finds a place, until pregnant with a "meaning"
in regard to the whole. They are ignorant of the meaning of guilt, responsibility, consideration, are these born
organisers; in them predominates that terrible artist-egoism, that gleams like brass, and that knows itself justified

'8o

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

to all eternity, in its work, even as a mother in her child.
It is not in them that there grew the bad conscience, that
is elementary—but it would not have grown without them,
repulsive growth as it was, it would be missing, had not
a tremendous quantity of freedom been expelled from the
world by the stress of their hammer-strokes, their artist
violence, or been at any rate made invisible and, as it were,
latent. This instinct of freedom forced into being latent
—it is already clear—this instinct of freedom forced back,
trodden back, imprisoned within itself, and finally only
able to find vent and relief in itself; this, only this, is the
beginning of the "bad conscience."
18.

Beware of thinking lightly of this phenomenon, by reason of its initial painful ugliness. At bottom it is the
same active force which is at work on a more grandiose
scale in those potent artists and organisers, and builds
states, where here, internally, on a smaller and pettier
scale and with a retrogressive tendency, makes itself a
bad conscience in the "labyrinth of the breast," to use
Goethe's phrase, and which builds negative ideals; it is,
I repeat, that identical instinct of freedom (to use my own
language, the will to power): only the material, on which
this force with all its constructive and tyrannous nature
is let loose, is here man himself, his whole old animal self
—and not as in the case of that more grandiose and sensational phenomenon, the other man, other men. This secret self-tyranny, this cruelty of the artist, this delight
in giving a form to one's self as a piece of difficult, re-

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81

fractory, and suffering material, in burning in a will, a
critique, a contradiction, a contempt, a negation; this sinister and ghastly labour of love on the part of a soul,
whose will is cloven in two within itself, which makes itself
suffer from delight in the infliction of suffering; this
wholly active bad conscience has finally (as one already
anticipates)—true fountainhead as it is of idealism and
imagination—produced an abundance of novel and amazing beauty and affirmation, and perhaps has really been
the first to give birth to beauty at all. What would beauty
be, forsooth, if its contradiction had not first been presented to consciousness, if the ugly had not first said to
itself, "I am ugly"? At any rate, after this hint the
problem of how far idealism and beauty can be traced
in such opposite ideas as "selflessness," self-denial, selfsacrifice, becomes less problematical; and indubitably in
future we shall certainly know the real and original character of the delight experienced by the self-less, the selfdenying, the self-sacrificing: this delight is a phase of
cruelty.—So much provisionally for the origin of "altruism" as a moral value, and the marking out the ground
from which this value has grown: 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.
19.

Undoubtedly the bad conscience is an illness, but an
illness as pregnancy is an illness. If we search out the
conditions under which this illness reaches its most terrible and sublime zenith, we shall see what really first

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THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

brought about its entry into the world. But to do this
we must take a long breath, and we must first of all go
back once again to an earlier point of view. The relation
at civil law of the ower to his creditor (which has already been discussed in detail), has been interpreted once
again (and indeed in a manner which historically is exceedingly remarkable and suspicious) into a relationship,
which is perhaps more incomprehensible to us moderns
than to any other era; that is, into the relationship of
the existing generation to its ancestors. Within the original tribal association—we are talking of primitive times
—each living generation recognises a legal obligation towards the earlier generation, and particularly towards the
earliest, which founded the family (and this is something
much more than a mere sentimental obligation, the existence of which, during the longest period of man's history, is by no means indisputable). There prevails in
them the conviction that it is only thanks to sacrifices
and efforts of their ancestors, that the race persists at all
—and that this has to be paid back to them by sacrifices
and services. Thus is recognized the owing of a debt,
which accumulates continually by reason of these ancestors never ceasing in their subsequent life as potent
spirits to secure by their power new privileges and advantages to the race. Gratis, perchance? But there is no
gratis for that raw and "mean-souled" age. What return
can be made?—Sacrifice (at first, nourishment, in its
crudest sense), festivals, temples, tributes of veneration,
above all, obedience—since all customs are, qua works
of the ancestors, equally their precepts and commands—
are the ancestors ever given enough? This suspicion

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83

remains and grows: from time to time it extorts a great
wholesale ransom, something monstrous in the way of repayment of the creditor (the notorious sacrifice of the
first-born, for example, blood, human blood in any case).
The fear of ancestors and their power, the consciousness
of owing debts to them, necessarily increases, according
to this kind of logic, in the exact proportion that the race
itself increases, that the race itself becomes more victorious, more independent, more honoured, more feared.
This, and not the contrary, is the fact. Each step towards race decay, all disastrous events, all symptoms of
degeneration; of approaching disintegration, always diminish the fear of the founders' spirit, and whittle away the
idea of his sagacity, providence, and potent presence.
Conceive this crude kind of logic carried to its climax: it
follows that the ancestors of the most powerful races must,
through the growing fear that they exercise on the imaginations, grow themselves into monstrous dimensions, and
become relegated to the gloom of a divine mystery that
transcends imagination—the ancestor becomes at last
necessarily transfigured into a god. Perhaps this is the
very origin of the gods, that is, an origin from fear I And
those who feel bound to add, "but from piety also," will
have difficulty in maintaining this theory, with regard to
the primeval and longest period of the human race. And,
of course, this is even more the case as regards the middle
period, the formative period of the aristocratic races—
the aristocratic races which have given back with interest
to their founders, the ancestors (heroes, gods), all those
qualities which in the meanwhile have appeared in themselves, that is, the aristocratic qualities. We will later on

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glance again at the ennobling and promotion of the gods
(which, of course, is totally distinct from their "sanctification"): let us now provisionally follow to its end the
course of the whole of this development of the consciousness of "owing."
20.

According to the teaching of history, the consciousness
of owing debts to the deity by no means came to an end
with the decay of the clan organisation of society; just
as mankind has inherited the ideas of "good" and "bad"
from the race-nobility (together with its fundamental
tendency towards establishing social distinctions), so with
the heritage of the racial and tribal gods it has also inherited the incubus of debts as yet unpaid and the desire
to discharge them. The transition is effected by those
large populations of slaves and bondsmen, who, whether
through compulsion or through submission and "rnitnicry," have accommodated themselves to the religion of
their masters; through this channel these inherited
tendencies inundate the world. 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. Prog-

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85

ress 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. Granted that we
have gradually started on the reverse movement, there is
no little probability in the deduction, based on the continuous decay in the belief in the Christian god, to the
effect that there also already exists a considerable decay
in the human consciousness of owing (ought); in fact,
we cannot shut our eyes to the prospect of the complete
and eventual triumph of atheism freeing mankind from all
this feeling of obligation to their origin, their causa prima.
Atheism and a kind of second innocence complement and
supplement each other.
21.

So much for my rough and preliminary sketch of the
interrelation of the ideas "ought" (owe) and "duty" with
the postulates of religion. I have intentionally shelved up
to the present the actual moralisation of these ideas (their
being pushed back into the conscience, or more precisely
the interweaving of the bad conscience with the idea of
God), and at the end of the last paragraph used language
to the effect that this moralisation did not exist, and that
consequently these ideas had necessarily come to an end,
by reason of what had happened to their hypothesis, the
credence in our "creditor," in God. The actual facts

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differ terribly from this theory. It is with the moralisation of the ideas "ought" and "duty," and with their
being pushed back into the bad conscience, that comes
the first actual attempt to reverse the direction of the development we have just described, or at any rate to arrest
its evolution; it is just at this juncture that the very hope
of an eventual redemption has to put itself once for all
into the prison of pessimism, it is at this juncture that the
eye has to recoil and rebound in despair from off an adamantine impossibility, it is at this juncture that the ideas
"guilt" and "duty" have to turn backwards—turn backwards against whom} There is no doubt about it; primarily against the "ower," in whom the bad conscience
now establishes itself, eats, extends, and grows like a polypus throughout its length and breadth, all with such virulence, that at last, with the impossibility of paying the
debt, there becomes conceived the idea of the impossibility
of paying the penalty, the thought of its inexpiability
(the idea of "eternal punishment")—finally, too, it turns
against the "creditor," whether found in the causa prima
of man, the origin of the human race, its sire, who henceforth becomes burdened with a curse ("Adam," "original
sin," "determination of the will"), or in Nature from
whose womb man springs, and on whom the responsibility
for the principle of evil is now cast ("Diabolisation of
Nature"), or in existence generally, on this logic an absolute white elephant, with which mankind is landed (the
Nihilistic flight from life, the demand for Nothingness, or
for the opposite of existence, for some other existence,
Buddhism and the like)—till suddenly we stand before
that paradoxical and awful expedient, through which a

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87

tortured humanity has found a temporary alleviation,
that stroke of genius called Christianity:—God personally immolating himself for the debt of man, God paying
himself personally out of a pound of his own flesh, God
as the one being who can deliver man from what man had
become unable to deliver himself—the creditor playing
scapegoat for his debtor, from love (can you believe it?),,
from love of his debtor! . . .
22.

The reader will already have conjectured what took
place on the stage and behind the scenes of this drama.
That will for self-torture, that inverted cruelty of the animal man, who, turned subjective and scared into introspection (encaged as he was in "the State," as part of
his taming process), invented the bad conscience so as
to hurt himself, after the natural outlet for this will to
hurt, became blocked—in other words, this man of the
bad conscience exploited the religious hypothesis so as to
carry his martyrdom to the ghastliest pitch of agonised
intensity. Owing something to God: this thought becomes
his instrument of torture. He apprehends in God the
most extreme antitheses that he can find to his own characteristic and ineradicable animal instincts, he himself
gives a new interpretation to these animal instincts as being against what he "owes" to God (as enmity, rebellion,
and revolt against the "Lord," the "Father," the "Sire,"
the "Beginning of the world"), he places himself between
the horns of the dilemma, "God" and "Devil." Every
negation which he is inclined to utter to himself, to the

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nature, naturalness, and reality of his being, he whips
into an ejaculation of "yes," uttering it as something existing, living, efficient, as being God, as the holiness of
God, the judgment of God, as the hangmanship of God,
as transcendence, as eternity, as unending torment, as hell,
as infinity of punishment and guilt. 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! What phantasies invade it, what paroxysms of perversity, hysterical senselessness, and mental
bestiality break out immediately, at the very slightest
check on its being the beast of action! All this is excessively interesting, but at the same time tainted with a
black, gloomy, enervating melancholy, so that a forcible
veto must be invoked against looking too long into these
abysses. Here is disease, undubitably, the most ghastly
disease that has as yet played havoc among men: and he
who can still hear (but man turns now deaf ears to such
sounds), how in this night of torment and nonsense there
has rung out the cry of love, the cry of the most passionate ecstasy, of redemption in love, he turns away gripped

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89

by an invincible horror—in man there is so much that is
ghastly—too long has the world been a mad-house.
23.

Let this suffice once for all concerning the origin of the
"holy God." The fact that in itself the conception of gods
is not bound to lead necessarily to this degradation of the
imagination (a temporary representation of whose vagaries, we felt bound to give), the fact that there exist nobler
methods of utilising the invention of gods than in this
self-crucifixion and self-degradation of man, in which the
last two thousand years of Europe have been past masters—these facts can fortunately be still perceived from
every glance that we cast at the Grecian gods, these mirrors of noble and grandiose men, in which the animal in
man felt itself deified, and did not devour itself in subjective frenzy. These Greeks long utilised their gods as
simple buffers against the "bad conscience"—so that they
could continue to enjoy their freedom of soul: this, of
course, is diametrically opposed to Christianity's theory
of its god. They went very far on this principle, did these
splendid and lion-hearted children; and there is no lesser
authority than that of the Homeric Zeus for making them
realise occasionally that they are taking life too casually.
"Wonderful," says he on one occasion—it has to do with
the case of iEgistheus, a very bad case indeed—
"Wonderful how they grumble, the mortals against the
immortals

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
Only from us, they presume, comes evil, but in their
folly,
Fashion they, spite of fate, the doom of their own disaster."
Yet the reader will note and observe that this Olympian
spectator and judge is far from being angry with them
and thinking evil of them on this score. "How foolish they
are," so thinks he of the misdeeds of mortals—and "folly,"
"imprudence," "a little brain disturbance," and nothing
more, are what the Greeks, even of the strongest, bravest
period, have admitted to be the ground of much that is
evil and fatal.—Folly, not sin, do you understand? . . .
But even this brain disturbance was a problem—"Come,
how is it even possible? How could it have really got in
brains like ours, the brains of men of aristocratic ancestry,
of men of fortune, of men of good natural endowments,
of men of the best society, of men of nobility and virtue?"
This was the question that for century on century the
aristocratic Greek put to himself when confronted with
every (to him incomprehensible) outrage and sacrilege
with which one of his peers had polluted himself. "It
must be that a god had infatuated him," he would say at
last, nodding his head.—This solution is typical of the
Greeks, . . . accordingly the gods in those times subserved the functions of justifying man to a certain extent
even in evil—in those days they took upon themselves
not the punishment, but, what is more noble, the guilt.
24.

I conclude with three queries, as you will see. "Is an

'GUILT" AND "BAD CONSCIENCE7
ideal actually set up here, or is one pulled down?" I am
perhaps asked. . . . But have ye sufficiently asked yourselves how dear a payment has the setting up of every
ideal in the world exacted? To achieve that consummation how much truth must always be traduced and misunderstood, how many lies must be sanctified, how much
conscience has got to be disturbed, how many pounds of
"God" have got to be sacrificed every time? To enable
a sanctuary to be set up a sanctuary has got to be destroyed: that is a law—show me an instance where it has
not been fulfilled! . . . We modern men, we inherit the
immemorial tradition of vivisecting the conscience, and
practising cruelty to our animal selves. That is the sphere
of our most protracted training, perhaps of our artistic
prowess, at any rate of our dilettantism and our perverted
taste. Man has for too long regarded his natural proclivities with an "evil eye," so that eventually they have
become in his system affiliated to a bad conscience. A
converse endeavour would be intrinsically feasible—but
who is strong enough to attempt it?—namely, to affiliate
to the "bad conscience" all those unnatural proclivities,
all those transcendental aspirations, contrary to sense,
instinct, nature, and animalism—in short, all past and
present ideals, which are all ideals opposed to life, and
traducing the world. To whom is one to turn nowadays
with such hopes and pretensions?—It is just the good
men that we should thus bring about our ears; and in addition, as stands to reason, the indolent, the hedgers, the
vain, the hysterical, the tired. . . . What is more offensive
or more thoroughly calculated to alienate, than giving any
hint of the exalted severity with which we treat ourselves?

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
And again how conciliatory, how full of love does all the
world show itself towards us so soon as we do as all the
world does, and "let ourselves go" like all the world. For
such a consummation we need spirits of different calibre
than seems really feasible in this age; spirits rendered
potent through wars and victories, to whom conquest,
adventure, danger, even pain, have become a need; for
such a consummation we need habituation to sharp, rare
air, to winter wanderings, to literal and metaphorical ice
and mountains; we even need a kind of sublime malice,
a supreme and most self-conscious insolence of knowledge,
which is the appanage of great health; we need (to summarise the awful truth) just this great healthl
Is this even feasible to-day? . . . But some day, in a
stronger age than this rotting and introspective present,
must he in sooth come to us, even the redeemer of great
love and scorn, the creative spirit, rebounding by the impetus of his own force back again away from every transcendental plane and dimension, he whose solitude is misunderstanded of the people, as though it were a flight
from reality;—while actually it is only his diving, burrowing, and penetrating into reality, so that when he
comes again to the light he can at once bring about by
these means the redemption of this reality; its redemption
from the curse which the old ideal has laid upon it. This
man of the future, who in this wise will redeem us from
the old ideal, as he will from that ideal's necessary corollary of great nausea, will to nothingness, and Nihilism;
this tocsin of noon and of the great verdict, which renders
the will again free, who gives back to the world its goal
and to man his hope, this Antichrist and Antinihilist, this

"GUILT" AND "BAD CONSCIENCE
conqueror of God and of Nothingness—he must one day
come.
25.
But what am I talking of? Enough! Enough? At
this juncture I have only one proper course, silence:
otherwise I trespass on a domain open alone to one who
is younger than I, one stronger, more "future" than I—
open alone to Zarathustra, Zarathustra the godless.

THIRD ESSAY.
WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS?
"Careless, mocking, forceful—so does wisdom wish us:
she is a woman, and never loves any one but a warrior."
Thus Spake Zarathustra.

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 glorice cupido, their peace
in nothingness ("God"), their form of madness.
But in the very fact that the ascetic ideal has meant so
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95

much to man, lies expressed the fundamental feature of
man's will, his horror vacui: he needs a goal—and he will
sooner will nothingness than not will at all.—Am I not
understood?—Have I not been understood?—"Certainly
not, sir?"—Well, let us begin at the beginning.
2.

What is the meaning of ascetic ideals? Or, to take an
individual case in regard to which I have often been consulted, what is the meaning, for example, of an artist like
Richard Wagner paying homage to chastity in his old
age? He had always done so, of course, in a certain sense,
but it was not till quite the end, that he did so in an
ascetic sense. What is the meaning of this "change of attitude," this radical revolution in his attitude—for that
was what it was? Wagner veered thereby straight round
into his own opposite. What is the meaning of an artist
veering round into his own opposite? At this point
(granted that we do not mind stopping a little over this
question), we immediately call to mind the best, strongest, gayest, and boldest period, that there perhaps ever was
in Wagner's life: that was the period when he was genuinely and deeply occupied with the idea of "Luther's
Wedding." WTio knows what chance is responsible for
our now having the Meistersingers instead of this wedding music? And how much in the latter is perhaps just
an echo of the former? But there is no doubt but that
the theme would have dealt with the praise of chastity.
And certainly it would also have dealt with the praise of
sensuality, and even so, it would seem quite in order, and

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even so, it would have been equally Wagnerian. For
there is no necessary antithesis between chastity and sensuality: every good marriage, every authentic heart-felt
love transcends this antithesis. Wagner would, it seems
to me, have done well to have brought this pleasing reality
home once again to his Germans, by means of a bold and
graceful "Luther Comedy," for there were and are among
the Germans many revilers of sensuality; and perhaps
Luther's greatest merit lies just in the fact of his having
had the courage of his sensuality (it used to be called,
prettily enough, "evangelistic freedom"). But even in
those cases where that antithesis between chastity and
sensuality does exist, there has fortunately been for some
time no necessity for it to be in any way a tragic antithesis. This should, at any rate, be the case with all beings who are sound in mind and body, who are far from
reckoning their delicate balance between "animal" and
"angel," as being on the face of it one of the principles opposed to existence—the most subtle and brilliant spirits,
such as Goethe, such as Hafiz, have even seen in this a
further charm of life. Such "conflicts" actually allure
one to life. On the other hand, it is only too clear that
when once these ruined swine are reduced to worshipping
chastity—and there are such swine—they only see and
worship in it the antithesis to themselves, the antithesis
to ruined swine. Oh, what a tragic grunting and eagerness! You can just think of it—they worship that painful' and superfluous contrast, which Richard Wagner in
his latter days undoubtedly wished to set to music, and
to place on the stage! "For what purpose, jorsooth?"

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97

as we may reasonably ask. What did the swine matter
to him; what do they matter to us?
3-

At this point it is impossible to beg the further question
of what he really had to do with that manly (ah, so unmanly) country bumpkin, that poor devil and natural,
Parsifal, whom he eventually made a Catholic by such
fraudulent devices. What? Was this Parsifal really
meant seriously? One might be tempted to suppose the
contrary, even to wish it—that the Wagnerian Parsifal
was meant joyously, like a concluding play of a trilogy
or satyric drama, in which Wagner the tragedian wished to
take farewell of us, of himself, above all of tragedy, and
to do so in a manner that should be quite fitting and
worthy, that is, with an excess of the most extreme and
flippant parody of the tragic itself, of the ghastly earthly
seriousness and earthly woe of old—a parody of that most
crude phase in the unnaturalness of the ascetic ideal,
that had at length been overcome. That, as I have said,
would have been quite worthy of a great tragedian; who
like every artist first attains the supreme pinnacle of his
greatness when he can look down into himself and his art,
when he can laugh at himself. Is Wagner's Parsifal his
secret laugh of superiority over himself, the triumph of
that supreme artistic freedom and artistic transcendency
which he has at length attained. We might, I repeat, wish
it were so, for what can Parsifal, taken seriously, amount
to? Is it really necessary to see in it (according to an ex-

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pression once used against me) the product of an insane
hate of knowledge, mind, and flesh? A curse on flesh and
spirit in one breath of hate? An apostasy and reversion
to the morbid Christian and obscurantist ideals? And
finally a self-negation and self-elimination on the part of
an artist, who till then had devoted all the strength of his
will to the contrary, namely, the highest artistic expression of soul and body. And not only his art; of his life as
well. Just remember with what enthusiasm Wagner followed in the footsteps of Feuerbach. Feuerbach's motto
of "healthy sensuality" rang in the ears of Wagner during the thirties and forties of the century, as it did in the
ears of many Germans (they dubbed themselves u Young
Germans"), like the word of redemption. Did he eventually change his mind on the subject? For it seems at
any rate that he eventually wished to change his teaching on that subject . . . and not only is that the case
with the Parsifal trumpets on the stage: in the melancholy,
cramped, and embarrassed lucubrations of his later years,
there are a hundred places in which there are manifestations of a secret wish and will, a despondent, uncertain,
unavowed will to preach actual retrogression, conversion,
Christianity, medievalism, and to say to his disciples,
"All is vanity! Seek salvation elsewhere!" Even the
"blood of the Redeemer" is once invoked.
4-

Let me speak out my mind in a case like this, which
has many painful elements—and it is a typical case: it is
certainly best to separate an artist from his work so com-

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99

pletely that he cannot be taken as seriously as his work.
He is after all merely the presupposition of his work, the
womb, the soil, in certain cases the dung and manure, on
which and out of which it grows—and consequently, in
most cases, something that must be forgotten if the work
itself is to be enjoyed. The insight into the origin of a
work is a matter for psychologists and vivisectors, but
never either in the present or the future for the sesthetes,
the artists. The author and creator of Parsifal was as
little spared the necessity of sinking and living himself
into the terrible depths and foundations of mediaeval soulcontrasts, the necessity of a malignant abstraction from
all intellectual elevation, severity, and discipline, the necessity of a kind of mental perversity (if the reader will
pardon me such a word), as little as a pregnant woman is
spared the horrors and marvels of pregnancy, which, as I
have said, must be forgotten if the child is to be enjoyed.
We must guard ourselves against the confusion, into
which an artist himself would fall only too easily (to employ the English terminology) out of psychological "contiguity"; as though the artist himself actually were the
object which he is able to represent, imagine, and express.
In point of fact, the position is that even if he conceived
he were such an object, he would certainly not represent,
conceive, express it. Homer would not have created an
Achilles, nor Goethe a Faust, if Homer had been an
Achilles or if Goethe had been a Faust. A complete and
perfect artist is to all eternity separated from the "real,"
from the actual; on the other hand, it will be appreciated
that he can at times get tired to the point of despair of this
eternal "unreality" and falseness of his innermost being—

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
and that he then sometimes attempts to trespass on to the
most forbidden ground, on reality, and attempts to have
real existence. With what success? The success will be
guessed—it is the typical velleity of the artist; the same
velleity to which Wagner fell a victim in his old age, and
for which he had to pay so dearly and so fatally (he lost
thereby his most valuable friends). But after all, quite
apart from this velleity, who would not wish emphatically
for Wagner's own sake that he had taken farewell of us
and of his art in a different manner, not with a Parsifal,
but in more victorious, more self-confident, more Wagnerian style—a style less misleading, a style less ambiguous with regard to his whole meaning, less Schopenhauerian, less Nihilistic? . . .
5What, then, is the meaning of ascetic ideals? In the
case of an artist we are getting to understand their meaning: Nothing at all . . . or so much that it is as good as
nothing at all. Indeed, what is the use of them? Our
artists have for a long time past not taken up a sufficiently
independent attitude, either in the world or against it, to
warrant their valuations and the changes in these valuations exciting interest. At all times they have played the
valet of some morality, philosophy, or religion, quite apart
from the fact that unfortunately they have often enough
been the inordinately supple courtiers of their clients and
patrons, and the inquisitive toadies of the powers that are
existing, or even of the new powers to come. To put it at
the lowest, they always need a rampart, a support, an already constituted authority: artists never stand by them-

ASCETIC IDEALS

IOI

selves, standing alone is opposed to their deepest instincts.
So, for example, did Richard Wagner take, "when the
time had come," the philosopher Schopenhauer for his
covering man in front, for his rampart. Who would consider it even thinkable, that he would have had the courage
for an ascetic ideal, without the support afforded him by
the philosophy of Schopenhauer, without the authority of
Schopenhauer, which dominated Europe in the seventies?
(This is without consideration of the question whether an
artist without the milk * of an orthodoxy would have been
possible at all.) This brings us to the more serious question: What is the meaning of a real philosopher paying
homage to the ascetic ideal, a really self-dependent intellect like Schopenhauer, a man and knight with a glance
of bronze, who has the courage to be himself, who knows
how to stand alone without first waiting for men who cover
him in front, and the nods of his superiors? Let us now
consider at once the remarkable attitude of Schopenhauer
towards art, an attitude which has even a fascination for
certain types. For that is obviously the reason why
Richard Wagner all at once went over to Schopenhauer
(persuaded thereto, as one knows, by a poet, Herwegh),
went over so completely that there ensued the cleavage
of a complete theoretic contradiction between his earlier
and his later aesthetic faiths—the earlier, for example,
being expressed in Opera and Drama, the later in the
writings which he published from 1870 onwards. In particular, Wagner from that time onwards (and this is the
volte-face which alienates us the most) had no scruples
* An allusion to the celebrated monologue in William Tell.

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about changing his judgment concerning the value and
position of music itself. What did he care if up to that
time he had made of music a means, a medium, a
"woman," that in order to thrive needed an end, a man—
that is, the drama? He suddenly realised that more could
be effected by the novelty of the Schopenhauerian theory
in major em musicce gloriam—that is to say, by means of
the sovereignty of music, as Schopenhauer understood it;
music abstracted from and opposed to all the other arts,
music as the independent art-in-itself, not like the other
arts, affording reflections of the phenomenal world, but
rather the language of the will itself, speaking straight out
of the "abyss" as its most personal, original, and direct
manifestation. This extraordinary rise in the value of
music (a rise which seemed to grow out of the Schopenhauerian philosophy) was at once accompanied by an unprecedented rise in the estimation in which the musician
himself was held: he became now an oracle, a priest, nay,
more than a priest, a kind of mouthpiece for the "intrinsic
essence of things," a telephone from the other world—
from henceforward he talked not only music, did this ventriloquist of God, he talked metaphysic; what wonder that
one day he eventually talked ascetic ideals!
6.
Schopenhauer has made use of the Kantian treatment
of the aesthetic problem—though he certainly did not regard it with the Kantian eyes. Kant thought that he
showed honour to art when he favoured and placed in the
foreground those of the predicates of the beautiful, which

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103

constitute the honour of knowledge: impersonality and
universality. This is not the place to discuss whether this
was not a complete mistake; all that I wish to emphasise
is that Kant, just like other philosophers, instead of envisaging the aesthetic problem from the standpoint of the
experiences of the artist (the creator), has only considered
art and beauty from the standpoint of the spectator, and
has thereby imperceptibly imported the spectator himself
into the idea of the "beautiful"! But if only the philosophers of the beautiful had sufficient knowledge of this
"spectator"!—Knowledge of him as a great fact of personality, as a great experience, as a wealth of strong and
most individual events, desires, surprises, and raptures in
the sphere of beauty! But, as I feared, the contrary was
always the case. And so we get from our philosophers,
from the very beginning, definitions on which the lack of
a subtler personal experience squats like a fat worm of
crass error, as it does on Kant's famous definition of the
beautiful. "That is beautiful," says Kant, "which pleases
without interesting." Without interesting! Compare this
definition with this other one, made by a real "spectator"
and "artist"—by Stendhal, who once called the beautiful
une promesse de bonheur. Here, at any rate, the one
point which Kant makes prominent in the aesthetic position
Is repudiated and eliminated—le disinter essement. Who
is right, Kant or Stendhal? When, forsooth, our aesthetes
never get tired of throwing into the scales in Kant's favour
the fact that under the magic of beauty men can look at
even naked female statues "without interest," we can
certainly laugh a little at their expense:—in regard to
this ticklish point the experiences of artists are more

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"interesting," and at any rate Pygmalion was not necessarily an "unaesthetic man." Let us think all the better
of the innocence of our aesthetes, reflected as it is in such
arguments; let us, for instance, count to Kant's honour
the country-parson naivete of his doctrine concerning the
peculiar character of the sense of touch! And here we
come back to Schopenhauer, who stood in much closer
neighbourhood to the arts than did Kant, and yet never
escaped outside the pale of the Kantian definition; how
was that? The circumstance is marvellous enough: he
interprets the expression, "without interest," in the most
personal fashion, out of an experience which must in his
case have been part and parcel of his regular routine. On
few subjects does Schopenhauer speak with such certainty
as on the working of aesthetic contemplation: he says of
it that it simply counteracts sexual interest, like lupulin
and camphor; he never gets tired of glorifying this escape
from the "Life-will" as the great advantage and utility of
the aesthetic state. In fact, one is tempted to ask if his
fundamental conception of Will and Idea, the thought that
there can only exist freedom from the "will" by means of
"idea," did not originate in a generalisation from this sexual experience. (In all questions concerning the Schopenhauerian philosophy, one should, by the bye, never lose
sight of the consideration that it is the conception of a
youth of twenty-six, so that it participates not only in
what is peculiar to Schopenhauer's life, but in what is
peculiar to that special period of his life.) Let us listen,
for instance, to one of the most expressive among the
countless passages which he has written in honour of the
aesthetic state (World as Will and Idea, i. 231); let us

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listen to the tone, the suffering, the happiness, the gratitude, with which such words are uttered: "This is the
painless state which Epicurus praised as the highest good
and as the state of the gods; we are during that moment
freed from the vile pressure of the will, we celebrate the
Sabbath of the will's hard labour, the wheel of Ixion
stands still." What vehemence of language! What
images of anguish and protracted revulsion! How almost
pathological is that temporal antithesis between "that moment" and everything else, the "wheel of Ixion," "the
hard labour of the will," "the vile pressure of the will."
But granted that Schopenhauer was a hundred times right
for himself personally, how does that help our insight into
the nature of the beautiful? Schopenhauer has described
one effect of the beautiful,—the calming of the will,—
but is this effect really normal? As has been mentioned,
Stendhal, an equally sensual but more happily constituted
nature than Schopenhauer, gives prominence to another
effect of the "beautiful." "The beautiful promises happiness." To him it is just the excitement of the will (the
"interest") by the beauty that seems the essential fact.
And does not Schopenhauer ultimately lay himself open to
the objection, that he is quite wrong in regarding himself
as a Kantian on this point, that he has absolutely failed
to understand in a Kantian sense the Kantian definition
of the beautiful—that the beautiful pleased him as well
by means of an interest, by means, in fact, of the strongest and most personal interest of all, that of the victim
of torture who escapes from his torture?—And to come
back again to our first question, "What is the meaning
of a philosopher paying homage to ascetic ideals?" We

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get now, at any rate, a first hint; he wishes to escape from
a torture.
7-

Let us beware of making dismal faces at the word
"torture"—there is certainly in this case enough to deduct, enough to discount—there is even something to
laugh at. For we must certainly not underestimate the
fact that Schopenhauer, who in practice treated sexuality
as a personal enemy (including its tool, woman, that
"instrumenturn diaboli"), needed enemies to keep him in
a good humour; that he loved grim, bitter, blackish-green
words; that he raged for the sake of raging, out of passion; that he would have grown ill, would have become
a pessimist (for he was not a pessimist, however much he
wished to be), without his enemies, without Hegel,
woman, sensuality, and the whole "will for existence"
"keeping on." Without them Schopenhauer would not
have "kept on," that is a safe wager; he would have run
away: but his enemies held him fast, his enemies always
enticed him back again to existence, his wrath was just
as theirs was to the ancient Cynics, his balm, his recreation, his recompense, his remedium against disgust, his
happiness. So much with regard to what is most personal in the case of Schopenhauer; on the other hand,
there is still much which is typical in him—and only now
we come back to our problem. It is an accepted and
indisputable fact, so long as there are philosophers in
the world, and wherever philosophers have existed (from
India to England, to take the opposite poles of philo-

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sophic ability), that there exists a real irritation and
rancour on the part of philosophers towards sensuality.
Schopenhauer is merely the most eloquent, and if one has
the ear for it, also the most fascinating and enchanting
outburst. There similarly exists a real philosophic bias
and affection for the whole ascetic ideal; there should be
no illusions on this score. Both these feelings, as has been
said, belong to the type; if a philosopher lacks both of
them, then he is—you may be certain of it—never anything but a "pseudo." What does this mean? For this
state of affairs must first be interpreted: in itself it stands
there stupid to all eternity, like any "Thing-in-itself.n
Every animal, including la bete philosophe, strives instinctively after an optimum of favourable conditions, under which he can let his whole strength have play, and
achieves his maximum consciousness of power; with equal
instinctiveness, and with a fine perceptive flair which is
superior to any reason, every animal shudders mortally
at every kind of disturbance and hindrance which obstructs or could obstruct his way to that optimum (it is
not his way to happiness of which I am talking, but his
way to power, to action, the most powerful action, and
in point of fact in many cases his way to unhappiness).
Similarly, the philosopher shudders mortally at marriage,
together with all that could persuade him to it—marriage
as a fatal hindrance on the way to the optimum. Up to
the present what great philosophers have been married?
Heracleitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant,
Schopenhauer—they were not married, and, further, one
cannot imagine them as married. A married philosopher
belongs to comedy, that is my rule; as for that exception

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of a Socrates—the malicious Socrates married himself, it
seems, ironice, just to prove this very rule. Every philosopher would say, as Buddha said, when the birth of a son
was announced to him: "Rahoula has been born to me,
a fetter has been forged for me" (Rahoula means here
"a little demon"); there must come an hour of reflection
to every "free spirit" (granted that he has had previously an hour of thoughtlessness), just as one came once
to the same Buddha: "Narrowly cramped," he reflected,
"is life in the house; it is a place of uncleanness; freedom
is found in leaving the house." Because he thought like
this, he left the house. So many bridges to independence
are shown in the ascetic ideal, that the philosopher cannot refrain from exultation and clapping of hands when
he hears the history of all those resolute ones, who on one
day uttered a nay to all servitude and went into some
desert; even granting that they were only strong asses,
and the absolute opposite of strong minds. What, then,
does the ascetic ideal mean in a philosopher? This is my
answer—it will have been guessed long ago: when he sees
this ideal the philosopher smiles because he sees therein
an optimum of the conditions of the highest and boldest
intellectuality; he does not thereby deny "existence," he
rather affirms thereby his existence and only his existence,
and this perhaps to the point of not being far off the
blasphemous wish, pereat mundus, fiat philosophia, fiat
philosophus, fiaml . . .
8.
These philosophers, you see, are by no means uncor-

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rupted witnesses and judges of the value of the ascetic
ideal. They think of themselves—what is the "saint" to
them? They think of that which to them personally is
most indispensable; of freedom from compulsion, disturbance, noise; freedom from business, duties, cares; of a
clear head; of the dance, spring, and flight of thoughts; of
good air—rare, clear, free, dry, as is the air on the
heights, in which every animal creature becomes more intellectual and gains wings; they think of peace in every
cellar; all the hounds neatly chained; no baying of enmity
and uncouth rancour; no remorse of wounded ambition;
quiet and submissive internal organs, busy as mills, but
unnoticed; the heart alien, transcendent, future, posthumous—to summarise, they mean by the ascetic ideal the
joyous asceticism of a deified and newly fledged animal,
sweeping over life rather than resting. We know what
are the three great catch-words of the ascetic ideal: poverty, humility, chastity; and now just look closely at the
life of all the great fruitful inventive spirits—you will
always find again and again these three qualities up to a
certain extent. Not for a minute, as is self-evident, as
though, perchance, they were part of their virtues—what
has this type of man to do with virtues—but as the most
essential and natural conditions of their best existence,
their finest fruitfulness. In this connection it is quite possible that their predominant intellectualism had first to
curb an unruly and irritable pride, or an insolent sensualism, or that it had all its work cut out to maintain its
wish for the "desert" against perhaps an inclination to
luxury and dilettantism, or similarly against an extravagant liberality of heart and hand. But their intellect did

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
effect all this, simply because it was the dominant instinct,
which carried through its orders in the case of all the
other instincts. It effects it still; if it ceased to do so, it
would simply not be dominant. But there is not one iota
of "virtue" in all this. Further, the desert, of which I
just spoke, in which the strong, independent, and wellequipped spirits retreat into their hermitage—oh, how
different is it from the cultured classes' dream of a desert!
In certain cases, in fact, the cultured classes themselves
are the desert. And it is certain that all the actors of
the intellect would not endure this desert for a minute.
It is nothing like romantic and Syrian enough for them,
nothing like enough of a stage desert! Here as well there
are plenty of asses, but at this point the resemblance
ceases. But a desert nowadays is something like this—
perhaps a deliberate obscurity; a getting-out-of the way
of one's self; a fear of noise, admiration, papers, influence;
a little office, a daily task, something that hides rather
than brings to light; sometimes associating with harmless,
cheerful beasts and fowls, the sight of which refreshes; a
mountain for company, but not a dead one, one with eyes
(that is, with lakes); in certain cases even a room in a
crowded hotel where one can reckon on not being recognised, and on being able to talk with impunity to every
one: here is the desert—oh, it is lonely enough, believe
me! I grant that when Heracleitus retreated to the courts
and cloisters of the colossal temple of Artemis, that
"wilderness" was worthier; why do we lack such temples?
(perchance we do not lack them: I just think of my
splendid study in the Piazza di San Marco, in spring, of
course, and in the morning, between ten and twelve).

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i n

But that which Heracleitus shunned is still just what we
too avoid nowadays: the noise and democratic babble of
the Ephesians, their politics, their news from the "empire"
(I mean, of course, Persia), their market-trade in "the
things of to-day"—for there is one thing from which we
philosophers especially need a rest—from the things of
"to-day." We honour the silent, the cold, the noble, the
far, the past, everything, in fact, at the sight of which
the soul is not bound to brace itself up and defend itself
—something with which one can speak without speaking
aloud. Just listen now to the tone a spirit has when it
speaks; every spirit has its own tone and loves its own
tone. That thing yonder, for instance, is bound to be an
agitator, that is, a hollow head, a hollow mug: whatever
may go into him, everything comes back from him dull
and thick, heavy with the echo of the great void. That
spirit yonder nearly always speaks hoarse: has he, perchance, thought himself hoarse? It may be so—ask the
physiologists—but he who thinks in words, thinks as a
speaker and not as a thinker (it shows that he does not
think of objects or think objectively, but only of his relations with objects—that, in point of fact, he only thinks
of himself and his audience). This third one speaks
aggressively, he comes too near our body, his breath
blows on us—we shut our mouth involuntarily, although
he speaks to us through a book: the tone of his style
supplies the reason—he has no time, he has small faith
in himself, he finds expression now or never. But a spirit
who is sure of himself speaks softly; he seeks secrecy, he
lets himself be awaited. A philosopher is recognised by
the fact that he shuns three brilliant and noisy things—

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
fame, princes, and women: which is not to say that they
do not come to him. He shuns every glaring light:
therefore he shuns his time and its "daylight." Therein
he is as a shadow; the deeper sinks the sun, the greater
grows the shadow. As for his humility, he endures, as he
endures darkness, a certain dependence and obscurity:
further, he is afraid of the shock of lightning, he shudders
at the insecurity of a tree which is too isolated and too
exposed, on which every storm vents its temper, every
temper its storm. His "maternal" instinct, his secret love
for that which grows in him, guides him into states where
he is relieved from the necessity of taking care of himself,
in the same way in which the "mother" instinct in woman
has thoroughly maintained up to the present woman's
dependent position. After all, they demand little enough,
do these philosophers, their favourite motto is, "He who
possesses is possessed." All this is not, as I must say
again and again, to be attributed to a virtue, to a meritorious wish for moderation and simplicity; but because
their supreme lord so "demands of them, demands wisely
and inexorably; their lord "who is eager only for one thing,
for which alone he musters, and for which alone he hoards
everything—time, strength, love, interest. This kind of
man likes not to be disturbed by enmity, he likes not to
be disturbed by friendship, it is a type which forgets or
despises easily. It strikes him as bad form to play the
martyr, "to suffer for truth"—he leaves all that to the
ambitious and to the stage-heroes of the intellect, and to
all those, in fact, who have time enough for such luxuries
(they themselves, the philosophers, have something to do
for truth). They make a sparing use of big words; they

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are said to be adverse to the word "truth" itself: it has a
"high falutin' " ring. Finally, as far as the chastity ot
philosophers is concerned, the fruitfulness of this type of
mind is manifestly in another sphere than that of children; perchance in some other sphere, too, they have the
survival of their name, their little immortality (philosophers in ancient India would express themselves with still
greater boldness: "Of what use is posterity to him whose
soul is the world?"). In this attitude there is not a trace
of chastity, by reason of any ascetic scruple or hatred of
the flesh, any more than it is chastity for an athlete or a
jockey to abstain from women; it is rather the will of the
dominant instinct, at any rate, during the period of their
advanced philosophic pregnancy. Every artist knows the
harm done by sexual intercourse on occasions of great
mental strain and preparation; as far as the strongest
artists and those with the surest instincts are concerned,
this is not necessarily a case of experience—hard experience—but it is simply their "maternal" instinct which, in
order to benefit the growing work, disposes recklessly
(beyond all its normal stocks and supplies) of the vigour
of its animal life; the greater power then absorbs the
lesser. Let us now apply this interpretation to gauge correctly the case of Schopenhauer, which we have already
mentioned: in his case, the sight of the beautiful acted
manifestly like a resolving irritant on the chief power of
his nature (the power of contemplation and of intense
penetration); so that this strength exploded and became
suddenly master of his consciousness. But this by no
means excludes the possibility of that particular sweetness and fulness, which is peculiar to the aesthetic state,

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
springing directly from the ingredient of sensuality (just
as that "idealism" which is peculiar to girls at puberty
originates in the same source)—it may be, consequently,
that sensuality is not removed by the approach of the
aesthetic state, as Schopenhauer believed, but merely becomes transfigured, and ceases to enter into the consciousness as sexual excitement. (I shall return once again to
this point in connection with the more delicate problems
of the physiology of the (Esthetic, a subject which up to
the present has been singularly untouched and unelucidated.)
9A certain asceticism, a grimly gay whole-hearted renunciation, is, as we have seen, one of the most favourable
conditions for the highest intellectualism, and, consequently, for the most natural corollaries of such intellectualism: we shall therefore be proof against any surprise at the philosophers in particular always treating the
ascetic ideal with a certain amount of predilection. A
serious historical investigation shows the bond between
the ascetic ideal and philosophy to be still much tighter
and still much stronger. It may be said that it was only
in the leading strings of this ideal that philosophy really
learnt to make its first steps and baby paces—alas how
clumsily, alas how crossly, alas how ready to tumble down
and lie on its stomach was this shy little darling of a
brat with its bandy legs! The early history of philosophy
is like that of all good things;—for a long time they had
not the courage to be themselves, they kept always look-

ASCETIC IDEALS

US

ing round to see if no one would come to their help; further, they were afraid of all who looked at them. Just
enumerate in order the particular tendencies and virtues
of the philosopher—his tendency to doubt, his tendency
to deny, his tendency to wait (to be "ephectic"), his
tendency to analyse, search, explore, dare, his tendency to
compare and to equalise, his will to be neutral and objective, his will for everything which is "sine ira et
studio": has it yet been realised that for quite a lengthy
period these tendencies went counter to the first claims of
morality and conscience? (To say nothing at all of
Reason, which even Luther chose to call Frau Kliiglin*
the sly whore.) Has it been yet appreciated that a philosopher, in the event of his arriving at self-consciousness,
must needs feel himself an incarnate "nitimur in vetitutn"
—and consequently guard himself against "his own sensations," against self-consciousness? It is, I repeat, just
the same with all good things, on which we now pride
ourselves; even judged by the standard of the ancient
Greeks, our whole modern life, in so far as it is not weakness, but power and the consciousness of power, appears
pure "Hybris" and godlessness: for the things which are
the very reverse of those which we honour to-day, have
had for a long time conscience on their side, and God as
their guardian. "Hybris" is our whole attitude to nature
nowadays, our violation of nature with the help of machinery, and all the unscrupulous ingenuity of our scientists and engineers. "Hybris" is our attitude to God, that
is, to some alleged teleological and ethical spider behind
the meshes of the great trap of the causal web. Like
•Mistress Sly.—TR.

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THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

Charles the Bold in his war with Louis the Eleventh, we
may say, "je combats Vuniverselle araignee"; "Hybris" is
our attitude to ourselves—for we experiment with ourselves in a way that we would not allow with any animal,
and with pleasure and curiosity open our soul in our
living body: what matters now to us the "salvation" of the
soul? We heal ourselves afterwards: being ill is instructive, we doubt it not, even more instructive than being
well—inoculators of disease seem to us to-day even more
necessary than any medicine-men and "saviours." There
is no doubt we do violence to ourselves nowadays, we
crackers of the soul's kernel, we incarnate riddles, who are
ever asking riddles, as though life were naught else than
the cracking of a nut; and even thereby must we necessarily become day by day more and more worthy to be
asked questions and worthy to ask them, even thereby
do we perchance also become worthier to—live?
. . . 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 line for
the insolence of claiming one woman to himself (to this
phase belongs, for instance, the jus primce noctis, to-day
still in Cambodia the privilege of the priest, that guardian
of the "good old customs").
The soft, benevolent, yielding, sympathetic feelings—
eventually valued so highly that they almost became
"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 (compare Beyond
Good and Evil, Aph. 260). The submission to law: oh,

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with what qualms of conscience was it that the noble races
throughout the world renounced the vendetta and gave
the law power over themselves! Law was long a vetitum,
a blasphemy, an innovation; it was introduced with force
like a force, to which men only submitted with a sense of
personal shame. Every tiny step forward in the world
was formerly made at the cost of mental and physical
torture. Nowadays the whole of this point of view—
"that not only stepping forward, nay, stepping at all,
movement, change, all needed their countless martyrs,"
rings in our ears quite strangely. I have put it forward
in the Dawn of Day, Aph. 18. "Nothing is purchased
more dearly," says the same book a little later, "than the
modicum of human reason and freedom which is now
our pride. But that pride is the reason why it is now
almost impossible for us to feel in sympathy with those
immense periods of the 'Morality of Custom/ which lie
at the beginning of the 'world's history/ constituting as
they do the real decisive historical principle which has
fixed the character of humanity; those periods, I repeat,
when throughout the world suffering passed for virtue,
cruelty for virtue, deceit for virtue, revenge for virtue,
repudiation of the reason for virtue; and when, conversely, well-being passed current for danger, the desire
for knowledge for danger, pity for danger, peace for danger, being pitied for shame, work for shame, madness for
divinity, and change for immorality and incarnate corruption!"
10.

There is in the same book, Aph. 12, an explanation

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of the burden of unpopularity under which the earliest
race of contemplative men had to live—despised almost
as widely as they were first feared! Contemplation first
appeared on earth in a disguised shape, in an ambiguous
form, with an evil heart and often with an uneasy head:
there is no doubt about it. The inactive, brooding, unwarlike element in the instincts of contemplative men
long invested them with a cloud of suspicion: the only
way to combat this was to excite a definite fear. And
the old Brahmans, for example, knew to a nicety how to
do this! The oldest philosophers were well versed in
giving to their very existence and appearance, meaning,
firmness, background, by reason whereof men learnt to
fear them; considered more precisely, they did this from
an even more fundamental need, the need of inspiring in
themselves fear and self-reverence. For they found even
in their own souls all the valuations turned against themselves; they had to fight down every kind of suspicion
and antagonism against "the philosophic element in themselves." Being men of a terrible age, they did this with
terrible means: cruelty to themselves, ingenious selfmortification—this was the chief method of these ambitious hermits and intellectual revolutionaries, who were
obliged to force down the gods and the traditions of their
own soul, so as to enable themselves to believe in their
own revolution. I remember the famous story of the
King Vicvamitra, who, as the result of a thousand years
of self-martyrdom, reached such a consciousness of power
and such a confidence in himself that he undertook to
build a new heaven: the sinister symbol of the oldest
and newest history of philosophy in the whole world.

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Every one who has ever built anywhere a "new heaven"
first found the power thereto in his own hell. . . . Let us
compress the facts into a short formula. The philosophic
spirit had, in order to be possible to any extent at all, to
masquerade and disguise itself as one of the previously
fixed types of the contemplative man, to disguise itself
as priest, wizard, soothsayer, as a religious man generally:
the ascetic ideal has for a long time served the philosopher as a superficial form, as a condition which enabled
him to exist. . . . To be able to be a philosopher he had
to exemplify the ideal; to exemplify it, he was bound to
believe in it. The peculiarly etherealised abstraction of
philosophers, with their negation of the world, their enmity
to life, their disbelief in the senses, which has been maintained up to the most recent time, and has almost thereby
come to be accepted as the ideal philosophic attitude—
this abstraction is the result of those enforced conditions
under which philosophy came into existence, and continued to exist; inasmuch as for quite a very long time
philosophy would have been absolutely impossible in the
world without an ascetic cloak and dress, without an
ascetic self-misunderstanding. Expressed plainly and
palpably, the ascetic priest has taken the repulsive and
sinister form of the caterpillar, beneath which and behind
which alone philosophy could live and slink about. . . .
Has all that really changed? Has that flamboyant
and dangerous winged creature, that "spirit" which that
caterpillar concealed within itself, has it, I say, thanks to
a sunnier, warmer, lighter world, really and finally flung
off its hood and escaped into the light? Can we to-day
point to enough pride, enough daring, enough courage,

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enough self-confidence, enough mental will, enough will
for responsibility, enough freedom of the will, to enable
the philosopher to be now in the world really—possible?
ii.

And now, after we have caught sight of the ascetic
priesty let us tackle our problem. What is the meaning
of the ascetic ideal? It now first becomes serious—
vitally serious. We are now confronted with the real
representatives of the serious. "What is the meaning of
all seriousness?" This even more radical question is perchance ahead}/ on the tip of our tongue: a question,
fairly, for physiologists, but which we for the time being
skip. In that ideal the ascetic priest finds not only his
faith, but also his will, his power, his interest. His right
to existence stands and falls with that ideal. What wonder that we here run up against a terrible opponent (on
the supposition, of course, that we are the opponents of
that ideal), an opponent fighting for his life against those
who repudiate that ideal! . . . On the other hand, it is
from the outset improbable that such a biased attitude
towards our problem will do him any particular good;
the ascetic priest himself will scarcely prove the happiest
champion of his own ideal (on the same principle on
which a woman usually fails when she wishes to champion
"woman")—let alone proving the most objective critic
and judge of the controversy now raised. We shall therefore—so much is already obvious—rather have actually
to help him to defend himself properly against ourselves,
than we shall have to fear being too well beaten by him.

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The idea, which is the subject of this dispute, is the
value of our life from the standpoint of the ascetic priests:
this life, then (together with the whole of which it is a
part, "Nature," "the world/' the whole sphere of becoming and passing away), is placed by them in relation to
an existence of quite another character, which it excludes
and to which it is opposed, unless it deny its own self:
in this case, the case of an ascetic life, life is taken as a
bridge to another existence. The ascetic treats life as a
maze, in which one must walk backwards till one comes
to the place where it starts; or he treats it as an error
which one may, nay must, refute by action: for he demands that he should be followed; he enforces, where he
can, his valuation of existence. What does this mean?
Such a monstrous valuation is not an exceptional case,
or a curiosity recorded in human history: it is one of the
most general and persistent facts that there are. The
reading from the vantage of a distant star of the capital
letters of our earthly life, would perchance lead to the
conclusion that the earth was the especially ascetic planet,
a den of discontented, arrogant, and repulsive creatures,
who never got rid of a deep disgust of themselves, of the
world, of all life, and did themselves as much hurt as
possible out of pleasure in hurting—presumably their one
and only pleasure. Let us consider how regularly, how
universally, how practically at every single period the
ascetic priest puts in his appearance: he belongs to no
particular race; he thrives everywhere; he grows out of
all classes. Not that he perhaps bred this valuation by
heredity and propagated it—the contrary is the case.
It must be a necessity of the first order which makes

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this species, hostile, as it is, to life, always grow again
and always thrive again.—Life itself must certainly have
an interest in the continuance of such a type of self-contradiction. For an ascetic life is a self-contradiction:
here rules resentment without parallel, the resentment of
an insatiate instinct and ambition, that would be master,
not over some element in life, but over life itself, over
life's deepest, strongest, innermost conditions; here is an
attempt made to utilise power to dam the sources of
power; here does the green eye of jealousy turn even
against physiological well-being, especially against the
expression of such well-being, beauty, joy; while a sense
of pleasure is experienced and sought in abortion, in
decay, in pain, in misfortune, in ugliness, in voluntary
punishment, in the exercising, flagellation, and sacrifice of
the self. All this is in the highest degree paradoxical:
we are here confronted with a rift that wills itself to be a
rift, which enjoys itself in this very suffering, and even
becomes more and more certain of itself, more and more
triumphant, in proportion as its own presupposition,
physiological vitality, decreases. "The triumph just in
the supreme agony": under this extravagant emblem did
the ascetic ideal fight from of old; in this mystery of
seduction, in this picture of rapture and torture, it recognised its brightest light, its salvation, its final victory.
Crux, nux, lux—it has all these three in one.
12.

Granted that such an incarnate will for contradiction
and unnaturalness is induced to philosophise; on what

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will it vent its pet caprice? On that which has been felt
with the greatest certainty to be true, to be real; it will
look for error in those very places where the life instinct
fixes truth with the greatest positiveness. It will, for
instance, after the example of the ascetics of the Vedanta
Philosophy, reduce matter to an illusion, and similarly
treat pain, multiplicity, the whole logical contrast of
"Subject" and "Object"—errors, nothing but errors! To
renounce the belief in one's own ego, to deny to one's self
one's own "reality"—what a triumph! and here already
we have a much higher kind of triumph, which is not
merely a triumph over the senses, over the palpable, but
an infliction of violence and cruelty on reason; and this
ecstasy culminates in the ascetic self-contempt, the ascetic
scorn of one's own reason making this decree: there is
a domain of truth and of life, but reason is specially
excluded therefrom. . . . By the bye, even in the Kantian
idea of "the intelligible character of things" there remains
a trace of that schism, so dear to the heart of the ascetic,
that schism which likes to turn reason against reason;
in fact, "intelligible character" means in Kant a kind of
quality in things of which the intellect comprehends so
much, that for it, the intellect, it is absolutely incomprehensible. After all, let us, in our character of knowers, not be ungrateful towards such determined reversals
of the ordinary perspectives and values, with which the
mind had for too long raged against itself with an apparently futile sacrilege! In the same way the very
seeing of another vista, the very wishing to see another
vista, is no little training and preparation of the intellect
for its eternal "Objectivity"—objectivity being under-

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stood not as "contemplation without interest" (for that is
inconceivable and nonsensical), but as the ability to have
the pros and cons in one's power and to switch them on
and off, so as to get to know how to utilise, for the
advancement of knowledge, the difference in the perspective and in the emotional interpretations. But let
us, forsooth, my philosophic colleagues, henceforward
guard ourselves more carefully against this mythology of
dangerous ancient ideas, which has set up a "pure, willless, painless, timeless subject of knowledge"; let us guard
ourselves from the tentacles of such contradictory ideas
as "pure reason," "absolute spirituality," "knowledge-initself":—in these theories an eye that cannot be thought
of is required to think, an eye which ex hypothesi has no
direction at all, an eye in which the active and interpreting functions are cramped, are absent; those functions, I say, by means of which "abstract" seeing first
became seeing something; in these theories consequently
the absurd and the nonsensical is always demanded of
the eye. There is only a seeing from a perspective, only
a "knowing" from a perspective, and the more emotions
we express over a thing, the more eyes, different eyes,
we train on the same thing, the more complete will be
our "idea" of that thing, our "objectivity." But the
elimination of the will altogether, the switching off of
the emotions all and sundry, granted that we could do so,
what! would not that be called intellectual castration?
13-

But let us turn back.

Such a self-contradiction, as

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apparently manifests itself among the ascetics, "Life
turned against Life," is—so much is absolutely obvious
—from the physiological and not now from the psychological standpoint, simply nonsense. It can only be an
apparent contradiction; it must be a kind of provisional
expression, an explanation, a formula, an adjustment, a
psychological misunderstanding of something, whose real
nature could not be understood for a long time, and
whose real essence could not be described; a mere word
jammed into an old gap of human knowledge. To put
briefly the facts against its being real: 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. An important fact is brought out in the extent to which, as history
teaches, this ideal could rule and exercise power over
man, especially in all those places where the civilisation
and taming of man was completed: that fact is, the diseased state of man up to the present, at any rate, of the
man who has been tamed, the physiological struggle of
man with death (more precisely, with the disgust with
life, with exhaustion, with the wish for the "end"). The
ascetic priest is the incarnate wish for an existence of

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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. You understand me already: this ascetic
priest, this apparent enemy of life, this denier—he actually belongs to the really great conservative and affirmative
forces of life. . . . What does it come from, this diseased
state? For man is more diseased, more uncertain, more
changeable, more unstable than any other animal, there
is no doubt of it—he is the diseased animal: what does it
spring from? Certainly he has also dared, innovated,
braved more, challenged fate more than all the other animals put together; he, the great experimenter with himself, the unsatisfied, the insatiate, who struggles for the
supreme mastery with beast, Nature, and gods, he, the
as yet ever uncompelled, the ever future, who finds no
more any rest from his own aggressive strength, goaded
inexorably on by the spur of the future dug into the flesh
of the present:—how should not so brave and rich an
animal also be the most endangered, the animal with the
longest and deepest sickness among all sick animals?
. . . Man is sick of it, oft enough there are whole epidemics of this satiety (as about 1348, the time of the
Dance of Death): but even this very nausea, this tired-

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ness, this disgust with himself, all this is discharged from
him with such force that it is immediately made into a
new fetter. His "nay," which he utters to life, brings
to light as though by magic an abundance of graceful
"yeas"; even when he wounds himself, this master of
destruction, of self-destruction, it is subsequently the
wound itself that forces him to live.
14.
The more normal is this sickliness in man—and we
cannot dispute this normality—the higher honour should
be paid to the rare cases of psychical and physical powerfulness, the windfalls of humanity, and the more strictly
should the sound be guarded from that worst of air, the
air of the sick-room. Is that done? The sick are the
greatest danger for the healthy; it is not from the strongest that harm comes to the strong, but from the weakest.
Is that known? Broadly considered, it is not for a minute the fear of man, whose diminution should be wished
for; for this fear forces the strong to be strong, to be at
times terrible—it preserves in its integrity the sound type
of man. What is to be feared, what does work with a
fatality found in no other fate, is not the great fear of,
but the great nausea with, man; and equally so the great
pity for man. Supposing that both these things were
one day to espouse each other, then inevitably the maximum of monstrousness would immediately come into the
world—the "last will" of man, his will for nothingness,
Nihilism. And, in sooth, the way is well paved thereto.
He who not only has his nose to smell with, but also has

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eyes and ears, he sniffs almost wherever he goes to-day
an air something like that of a mad-house, the air of a
hospital—I am speaking, as stands to reason, of the cultured areas of mankind, of every kind of "Europe" that
there is in fact in the world. 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. Where shall we escape from it, from
that covert look (from which we carry away a deep
sadness), from that averted look of him who is misborn
from the beginning, that look which betrays what such a
man says to himself—that look which is a groan? "Would
that I were something else," so groans this look, "but
there is no hope. I am what I am: how could I get
away from myself? And, verily—/ am sick of niyself!"
On such a soil of self-contempt, a veritable swamp soil,
grows that weed, that poisonous growth, and all so tiny,
so hidden, so ignoble, so sugary. Here teem the worms of
revenge and vindictiveness; here the air reeks of things
secret and unmentionable; here is ever spun the net of
the most malignant conspiracy—the conspiracy of the
sufferers against the sound and the victorious; here is the
sight of the victorious hated. And what lying so as not
to acknowledge this hate as hate! What a show of big
words and attitudes, what an art of "righteous" calumniation! These abortions! what a noble eloquence gushes
from their lips! What an amount of sugary, slimy,
humble submission oozes in their eyes! What do they

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really want? At any rate to represent righteousness, love,
wisdom, superiority, that is the ambition of these "lowest ones,'7 these sick ones! And how clever does such an
ambition make them! You cannot, in fact, but admire
the counterfeiter dexterity with which the stamp of virtue,
even the ring, the golden ring of virtue, is here imitated.
They have taken a lease of virtue absolutely for themselves, have these weaklings and wretched invalids, there
is no doubt of it; "We alone are the good, the righteous,"
so do they speak, "we alone are the homines bonce voluntatis"
They stalk about in our midst as living reproaches, as warnings to us—as though health, fitness,
strength, pride, the sensation of power, were really vicious
things in themselves, for which one would have some day
to do penance, bitter penance. Oh, how they themselves
are ready in their hearts to exact penance, how they thirst
after being hangmen!
Among them is an abundance of revengeful ones disguised as judges, who ever mouth the word righteousness
like a venomous spittle—with mouth, I say, always
pursed, always ready to spit at everything, which does
not wear a discontented look, but is of good cheer as it
goes on its way. Among them, again, is that most loathsome species of the vain, the lying abortions, who make a
point of representing "beautiful souls," and perchance
of bringing to the market as "purity of heart" their distorted sensualism swathed in verses and other bandages;
the species of "self-comforters" and masturbators of their
own souls. The sick man's will to represent some form
or other of superiority, his instinct for crooked paths,
which lead to a tyranny over the healthy—where can it

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not be found, this will to power of the very weakest?
The sick woman especially: no one surpasses her in refinements for ruling, oppressing, tyrannising. The sick
woman, moreover, spares nothing living, nothing dead;
she grubs up again the most buried things (the Bogos
say, "Woman is a hyena"). Look into the background
of every family, of every body, of every community:
everywhere the fight of the sick against the healthy—a
silent fight for the most part with minute poisoned
powders, with pin-pricks, with spiteful grimaces of patience, but also at times with that diseased pharisaism
of pure pantomime, which plays for the choice role of
"righteous indignation." Right into the hallowed chambers of knowledge can it make itself heard, can this
hoarse yelping of sick hounds, this rabid lying and frenzy
of such "noble" Pharisees (I remind readers, who have
ears, once more of that Berlin apostle of revenge, Eugen
Duhring, who makes most disreputable and revolting use
in all present-day Germany of moral refuse; Duhring,
the paramount moral blusterer that there is to-day, even
among his own kidney, the Anti-Semites). They are all
men of resentment, are these physiological distortions and
worm-riddled objects, a whole quivering kingdom of burrowing revenge, indefatigable and insatiable in its outbursts against the happy, and equally so in disguises for
revenge, in pretexts for revenge: when will they really
reach their final, fondest, most sublime triumph of revenge? At that time, doubtless, when they succeed in
pushing their own misery, in fact, all misery, into the
consciousness of the happy; so that the latter begin one
day to be ashamed of their happiness, and perchance say

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to themselves when they meet, "It is a shame to be
happy; there is too much misery!" . . . But there could
not possibly be a greater and more fatal misunderstanding
than that of the happy, the fit, the strong in body and
soul, beginning in this way to doubt their right to happiness. Away with this "perverse world"! Away with
this shameful soddenness of sentiment! Preventing the
sick making the healthy sick—for that is what such a
soddenness comes to—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 and 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. What
they can, what they must do, that can the sick never do,
should never do! but if they are to be enabled to do what
only they must do, how can they possibly be free to play
the doctor, the comforter, the "Saviour" of the sick?
• . . And therefore good air! good air! and away, at any
rate, from the neighbourhood of all the madhouses and
hospitals of civilisation! And therefore good company,
our own company, or solitude, if it must be so! but away^
at any rate, from the evil fumes of internal corruption

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and the secret worm-eaten state of the sick! that, forsooth, my friends, we may defend ourselves, at any rate
for still a time, against the two worst plagues that could
have been reserved for us—against the great nausea with
man! against the great pity for man!
IS-

If you have understood in all their depths—and I
demand that you should grasp them profoundly and
understand them profoundly—the reasons for the impossibility of its being the business of the healthy to nurse
the sick, to make the sick healthy, it follows that you
have grasped this further necessity—the necessity of doctors and nurses who themselves are sick. And now we
have and hold with both our hands the essence of the
ascetic priest. 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. The lordship over sufferers is his kingdom,
to that points his instinct, in that he finds his own special art, his master-skill, his kind of happiness. He must
himself be sick, he must be kith and kin to the sick and
the abortions so as to understand them, so as to arrive
at an understanding with them; but he must also be
strong, even more master of himself than of others, impregnable, forsooth, in his will for power, so as to acquire
the trust and the awe of the weak, so that he can be
their hold, bulwark, prop, compulsion, overseer, tyrant,
god. He has to protect them, protect his herds—against
whom? Against the healthy, doubtless also against the

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*35

envy towards the healthy. He must be the natural adversary and scorner of every rough, stormy, reinless, hard,
violently-predatory health and power. The priest is the
first form of the more delicate animal that scorns more
easily than it hates. He will not be spared the waging
of war with the beasts of prey, a war of guile (of "spirit")
rather than of force, as is self-evident—he will in certain cases find it necessary to conjure up out of himself,
or at any rate to represent practically a new type of the
beast of prey—a new animal monstrosity in which the
polar bear, the supple, cold, crouching panther, and, not
least important, the fox, are joined together in a trinity
as fascinating as it is fearsome. If necessity exacts it,
then will he come on the scene with bearish seriousness,
venerable, wise, cold, full of treacherous superiority, as
the herald and mouthpiece of mysterious powers, sometimes going among even the other kind of beasts of prey,
determined as he is to sow on their soil, wherever he can,
suffering, discord, self-contradiction, and only too sure of
his art, always to be lord of sufferers at all times. He
brings with him, doubtless, salve and balsam; but before
he can play the physician he must first wound; so, while
he soothes the pain which the wound makes, he at the
same time poisons the wound. Well versed is he in this
above all things, is this wizard and wild beast tamer, in
whose vicinity everything healthy must needs become ill,
and everything ill must needs become tame. He protects,
in sooth, his sick herd well enough, does this strange
herdsman; he protects them also against themselves,
against the sparks (even in the centre of the herd) of
wickedness, knavery, malice, and all the other ills that

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
the plaguey and the sick are heir to; he fights with cunning, hardness, and stealth against anarchy and against
the ever imminent break-up inside the herd, where resentment, that most dangerous blasting-stuff and explosive,
ever accumulates and accumulates. Getting rid of this
blasting-stuff in such a way that it does not blow up the
herd and the herdsman, that is his real feat, his supreme
utility; if you wish to comprise in the shortest formula
the value of the priestly life, it would be correct to say
the priest is the diverter of the course of resentment.
Every sufferer, in fact, searches instinctively for a cause
of his suffering; to put it more exactly, a doer,—to put
it still more precisely, a sentient responsible doer,—in
brief, something living, on which, either actually or in
effigy, he can on any pretext vent his emotions. For
the venting of emotions is the sufferer's greatest attempt
at alleviation, that is to say, stupefaction, his mechanically desired narcotic against pain of any kind. It is in
this phenomenon alone that is found, according to my
judgment, the real physiological cause of resentment, revenge, and their family is to be found—that is, in a
demand for the deadening of pain through emotion: this
cause is generally, but in my view very erroneously,
looked for in the defensive parry of a bare protective
principle of reaction, of a "reflex movement" in the case
of any sudden hurt and danger, after the manner that a
decapitated frog still moves in order to get away from a
corrosive acid. But the difference is fundamental. In
one case the object is to prevent being hurt any more;
in the other case the object is to deaden a racking, insidious, nearly unbearable pain by a more violent emotion

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of any kind whatsoever, and at any rate for the time
being to drive it out of the consciousness—for this purpose an emotion is needed, as wild an emotion as possible, and to excite that emotion some excuse or other is
needed. "It must be somebody's fault that I feel bad"—
this kind of reasoning is peculiar to all invalids, and is
but the more pronounced, the more ignorant they remain
of the real cause of their feeling bad, the physiological
cause (the cause may lie in a disease of the nervous
sympathicus, or in an excessive secretion of bile, or in a
want of sulphate and phosphate of potash in the blood,
or in pressure in the bowels which stops the circulation of
the blood, or in degeneration of the ovaries, and so forth).
All sufferers have an awful resourcefulness and ingenuity
in finding excuses for painful emotions; they even enjoy
their jealousy, their broodings over base actions and apparent injuries, they burrow through the intestines of their
past and present in their search for obscure mysteries,
wherein they will be at liberty to wallow in a torturing
suspicion and get drunk on the venom of their own
malice—they tear open the oldest wounds, they make
themselves bleed from the scars which have long been
healed, they make evil-doers out of friends, wife, child,
and everything which is nearest to them. "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 same one, it is all the fault of thyself
alone—it is* the fault of thyself alone against thyself7:
that is bold enough, false enough, but one thing is at least

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attained; thereby, as I have said, the course of resentment is—diverted.
16.

You can see now what the remedial instinct of life has
at least tried to effect, according to my conception,
through the ascetic priest, and the purpose for which he
had to employ a temporary tyranny of such paradoxical
and anomalous ideas as "guilt," "sin," "sinfulness,"
"corruption," "damnation." What was done was to make
the sick harmless up to a certain point, to destroy the
incurable by means of themselves, to turn the milder
cases severely on to themselves, to give their resentment
a backward direction ("man needs but one thing"), and
to exploit similarly the bad instincts of all sufferers with
a view to self-discipline, self-surveillance, self-mastery.
It is obvious that there can be no question at all in the
case of a "medication" of this kind, a mere emotional
medication, of any real healing of the sick in the physiological sense; it cannot even for a moment be asserted
that in this connection the instinct of life has taken healing as its goal and purpose. On the one hand, a kind
of congestion and organisation of the sick (the word
"Church" is the most popular name for it); on the other,
a kind of provisional safeguarding of the comparatively
healthy, the more perfect specimens, the cleavage of a
rift between healthy and sick—for a long time that was
all! and it was much! it was very much!
I am proceeding, as you see, in this essay, from an
hypothesis which, as far as such readers as I w7ant are

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concerned, does not require to be proved; the hypothesis
that "sinfulness" in man is not an actual fact, but rather
merely the interpretation of a fact, of a physiological
discomfort,—a discomfort seen through a moral religious
perspective which is no longer binding upon us. The
fact, therefore, that any one feels "guilty," "sinful," is
certainly not yet any proof that he is right in feeling so,
any more than any one is healthy simply because he feels
healthy. Remember the celebrated witch-ordeals: in
those days the most acute and humane judges had no
doubt but that in these cases they were confronted with
guilt,—the "witches" themselves had no doubt on the
pointy—and yet the guilt was lacking. Let me elaborate
this hypothesis: I do not for a minute accept the very
"pain in the soul" as a real fact, but only as an explanation (a casual explanation) of facts that could not hitherto be precisely formulated; I regard it therefore as
something as yet absolutely in the air and devoid of scientific cogency—just a nice fat word in the place of a lean
note of interrogation. When any one fails to get rid of
his "pain in the soul," the cause is, speaking crudely,
to be found not in his "soul" but more probably in his
stomach (speaking crudely, I repeat, but by no means
wishing thereby that you should listen to me or understand me in a crude spirit). A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds all
included) just as he digests his meats, even when he has
some tough morsels to swallow. If he fails to "relieve
himself" of an experience, this kind of indigestion is quite
as much physiological as the other indigestion—and
indeed, in more ways than one, simply one of the results

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of the other. You can adopt such a theory, and yet
entre nous be nevertheless the strongest opponent of all
materialism.
17.
But is he really a physician, this ascetic priest? We
already understand why we are scarcely allowed to call
him a physician, however much he likes to feel a "saviour"
and let himself be worshipped as a saviour.* It is only
the actual suffering, the discomfort of the sufferer, which
he combats, not its cause, not the actual state of sickness—this needs must constitute our most radical objection to priestly medication. But just once put yourself
into that point of view, of which the priests have a
monopoly, you will find it hard to exhaust your amazement, at what from that standpoint he has completely
seen, sought, and found. The mitigation of suffering,
every kind of "consoling"—all this manifests itself as his
very genius: with what ingenuity has he interpreted his
mission of consoler, with what aplomb and audacity has
he chosen weapons necessary for the part. Christianity
in particular should be dubbed a great treasure-chamber
of ingenious consolations,—such a store of refreshing,
soothing, deadening drugs has it accumulated within
itself; so many of the most dangerous and daring expedients has it hazarded; with such subtlety, refinement,
Oriental refinement, has it divined what emotional stimulants can conquer, at any rate for a time, the deep de* In the German text "Heiland." This has the double meaning of "healer" and "saviour."—H. B. S.

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pression, the leaden fatigue, the black melancholy of
physiological cripples—for, speaking generally, all religions are mainly concerned with fighting a certain fatigue
and heaviness that has infected everything. You can
regard it as prima facie probable that in certain places
in the world there was almost bound to prevail from time
to time among large masses of the population a sense of
physiological depression, which, however, owing to their
lack of physiological knowledge, did not appear to their
consciousness as such, so that consequently its "cause"
and its cure can only be sought and essayed in the science
of moral psychology (this, in fact, is my most general
formula for what is generally called a "religion"). Such
a feeling of depression can have the most diverse origins;
it may be the result of the crossing of too heterogeneous
races (or of classes—genealogical and racial differences
are also brought out in the classes: the European "Weltschmerz," the "Pessimism" of the nineteenth century, is
really the result of an absurd and sudden class-mixture);
it may be brought about by a mistaken emigration—a
race falling into a climate for which its power of adaptation is insufficient (the case of the Indians in India); it
may be the effect of old age and fatigue (the Parisian
pessimism from 1850 onwards); it may be a wrong diet
(the alcoholism of the Middle Ages, the nonsense of vegetarianism—which, however, have in their favour the
authority of Sir Christopher in Shakespeare); it may be
blood-deterioration, malaria, syphilis, and the like (German depression after the Thirty Years' War, which infected half Germany with evil diseases, and thereby paved
the way for German servility, for German pusillanimity).

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In such a case there is invariably recourse to a war on a
grand scale with the feeling of depression; let us inform
ourselves briefly on its most important practices and
phases (I leave on one side, as stands to reason, the
actual philosophic war against the feeling of depression
which is usually simultaneous—it is interesting enough,
but too absurd, too practically negligible, too full of cobwebs, too much of a hole-and-corner affair, especially
when pain is proved to be a mistake, on the naif hypothesis that pain must needs vanish when the mistake underlying it is recognised—but behold! it does anything but
vanish . . .). That dominant depression is primarily
fought by weapons which reduce the consciousness of life
itself, to the lowest degree. Wherever possible, no more
wishes, no more wants; shun everything which produces
emotion, which produces "blood" (eating no salt, the
fakir hygiene); no love; no hate; equanimity; no revenge; no getting rich; no work; begging 1 as far as possible, no woman, or as little woman as possible; as far
as the intellect is concerned, Pascal's principle, "il faut
s'abetir" To put the result in ethical and psychological
language, "self-annihilation," "sanctification"; to put it in
physiological language, "hypnotism"—the attempt to find
some approximate human equivalent for what hibernation
is for certain animals, for what (estivation is for many
tropical plants, a minimum of assimilation and metabolism in which life just manages to subsist without really
coming into the consciousness. An amazing amount of
human energy has been devoted to this object—perhaps
uselessly? There cannot be the slightest doubt but that
such sportsmen of "saintliness," in whom at times nearly

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every nation has abounded, have really found a genuine
relief from that which they have combated with such a
rigorous training—in countless cases they really escaped
by the help of their system of hypnotism away from deep
physiological depression; their method is consequently
counted among the most universal ethnological facts.
Similarly it is improper to consider such a plan for starving the physical element and the desires, as in itself a
symptom of insanity (as a clumsy species of roast-beefeating "freethinkers" and Sir Christophers are fain to do);
all the more certain is it that their method can and does
pave the way to all kinds of mental disturbances, for instance, "inner lights" (as far as the case of Hesychasts
of Mount Athos), auditory and visual hallucinations,
voluptuous ecstasies and effervescences of sensualism (the
history of St. Theresa). The explanation of. such events
given by the victims is always the acme of fanatical falsehood; this is self-evident. Note well, however, the tone
of implicit gratitude that rings in the very will for an
explanation of such a character. The supreme state, salvation itself, that final goal of universal hypnosis and
peace, is always regarded by them as the mystery of
mysteries, which even the most supreme symbols are
inadequate to express; it is regarded as an entry and
homecoming to the essence of things, as a liberation from
all illusions, as "knowledge," as "truth," as "being," as
an escape from every end, every wish, every action, as
something even beyond Good and Evil.
"Good and Evil," quoth the Buddhists, "both are
fetters. The perfect man is master of them both."
"The done and the undone," quoth the disciple of the

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
Vedanta, "do him no hurt; the good and the evil he
shakes from off him, sage that he is; his kingdom suffers
no more from any act; good and evil, he goes beyond
them both."—An absolutely Indian conception, as much
Brahmanist as Buddhist. Neither in the Indian nor in
the Christian doctrine is this "Redemption" regarded as
attainable by means of virtue and moral improvement,
however, high they may place the value of the hypnotic
efficiency of virtue: keep clear on this point—indeed it
simply corresponds with the facts. The fact that they
remained true on this point is perhaps to be regarded
as the best specimen of realism in the three great religions,
absolutely soaked as they are with morality, with this one
exception. "For those who know, there is no duty."
"Redemption is not attained by the acquisition of virtues;
for redemption consists in being one with Brahman, who
is incapable of acquiring any perfection; and equally little
does it consist in the giving up of faults, for the Brahman,
unity with whom is what constitutes redemption, is eternally pure" (these passages are from the Commentaries
of the Cankara, quoted from the first real European
expert of the Indian philosophy, my friend Paul Deussen).
We wish, therefore, to pay honour to the idea of "redemption" in the great religions, but it is somewhat hard to
remain serious in view of the appreciation meted out to
the deep sleep by these exhausted pessmists who are too
tired even to dream—to the deep sleep considered, that
is, as already a fusing into Brahman, as the attainment of
the unio mystica with God. "When he has completely
gone to sleep," says on this point the oldest and most
venerable "script," "and come to perfect rest, so that

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he sees no more any vision, then, oh dear one, is he united
with Being, he has entered into his own self—encircled by
the Self with its absolute knowledge, he has no more any
consciousness of that which is without or of that which
is within. Day and night cross not these bridges, nor
age, nor death, nor suffering, nor good deeds, nor evil
deeds." "In deep sleep," say similarly the believers in
this deepest of the three great religions, "does the soul
lift itself from out this body of ours, enters the supreme
light and stands out therein in its true shape: therein is it
the supreme spirit itself, which travels about, while it
jests and plays and enjoys itself, whether with women, or
chariots, or friends; there do its thoughts turn no more
back to this appanage of a body, to which the 'prana*
(the vital breath) is harnessed like a beast of burden
to the cart." None the less we will take care to realise
(as we did when discussing "redemption") that in spite
of all its pomps of Oriental extravagance this simply expresses the same criticism on life as did the clear, cold,
Greekly cold, but yet suffering Epicurus. The hypnotic
sensation of nothingness, the peace of deepest sleep,
anaesthesia in short—that is what passes with the sufferers and the absolutely depressed for, forsooth, their
supreme good, their value of values; that is what must be
treasured by them as something positive, be felt by them
as the essence of the Positive (according to the same
logic of the feelings, nothingness is in all pessimistic
religions called God).
18.

Such a hypnotic deadening of sensibility and suscep-

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tibility to pain, which presupposes somewhat rare powers,
especially courage, contempt of opinion, intellectual
stoicism, is less frequent than another and certainly easier
training which is tried against states of depression. I
mean mechancal activity. It is indisputable that a suffering existence can be thereby considerably alleviated.
This fact is called to-day by the somewhat ignoble title
of the "Blessing of work." The alleviation consists in the
attention of the sufferer being absolutely diverted from
suffering, in the incessant monopoly of the consciousness
by action, so that consequently there is little room left for
suffering—for narrow is it, this chamber of human consciousness! Mechanical activity and its corollaries, such
as absolute regularity, punctilious unreasoning obedience,
the chronic routine of life, the complete occupation of
time, a certain liberty to be impersonal, nay, a training in
"impersonality," self-forgetfulness, "incuria sui"—with
what thoroughness and expert subtlety have all these
methods been exploited by the ascetic priest in his war
with pain!
When he has to tackle sufferers of the lower orders,
slaves, or prisoners (or women, who for the most part are
a compound of labour-slave and prisoner), all he has to
do is to juggle a little with the names, and to rechristen,
so as to make them see henceforth a benefit, a comparative happiness, in objects which they hated—the slave's
discontent with his lot was at any rate not invented by
the priests. An even more popular means of fighting
depression is the ordaining of a little joy, which is easily
accessible and can be made into a rule; this medication is
frequently used in conjunctioii with the former ones. The

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most frequent form in which joy is prescribed as a cure
is the joy in producing joy (such as doing good, giving
presents, alleviating, helping, exhorting, comforting, praising, treating with distinction); together with the prescription of "love your neighbour." The ascetic priest prescribes, though in the most cautious doses, what is practically a stimulation of the strongest and most lifeassertive impulse—the Will for Power. The happiness
involved in the "smallest superiority" which is the concomitant of all benefiting, helping, extolling, making one's
self useful, is the most ample consolation, of which, if
they are well-advised, physiological distortions avail themselves: in other cases they hurt each other, and naturally
in obedience to the same radical instinct. An investigation of the origin of Christianity in the Roman world
shows that co-operative unions for poverty, sickness, and
burial sprang up in the lowest stratum of contemporary
society, amid which the chief antidote against depression,
the little joy experienced in mutual benefits, was deliberately fostered. Perchance this was then a novelty, a
real discovery? This conjuring up of the will for cooperation, for family organisation, for communal life, for
"Coznacula" necessarily brought the Will for Power,
which had been already infinitesimally stimulated, to a
new and much fuller manifestation. The herd organisation is a genuine advance and triumph in the fight with
depression. With the growth of the community there
matures even to individuals a new interest, which often
enough takes him out of the more personal element in
his discontent, his aversion to himself, the "despectus
sui" of Geulincx. All sick and diseased people strive

i46

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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.
There is always lurking beneath every oligarchy—such is
the universal lesson of history—the desire for tyranny.
Every oligarchy is continually quivering with the tension
of the effort required by each individual to keep mastering this desire. (Such, e.g., was the Greek; Plato shows
it in a hundred places, Plato, who knew his contemporaries—and himself.)
19.
The methods employed by the ascetic priest, which we
have already learnt to know—stifling of all vitality, mechanical energy, the little joy, and especially the method
of "love your neighbour" herd-organisation, the awaking
of the communal consciousness of power, to such a pitch

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that the individual's disgust with himself becomes eclipsed
by his delight in the thriving of the community—these
are, according to modern standards, the "innocent"
methods employed in the fight with depression; let us
turn now to the more interesting topic of the "guilty"
methods. The guilty methods spell one thing: to produce
emotional excess—which is used as the most efficacious
anaesthetic against their depressing state of protracted
pain; this is why priestly ingenuity has proved quite inexhaustible in thinking out this one question: "By what
means can you produce an emotional excess?" This
sounds harsh: it is manifest that it would sound nicer
and would grate on one's ears less, if I were to say,
forsooth: "The ascetic priest made use at all times of
the enthusiasm contained in all strong emotions." But
what is the good of still soothing the delicate ears of our
modern effeminates? What is the good on our side of
budging one single inch before their verbal Pecksniffianism? For us psychologists to do that would be at once
practical Pecksniffianism, apart from the fact of its nauseating us. Tlhe good taste (others might say, the righteousness) of a psychologist nowadays consists, if at all, in
combating the shamefully moralised language with which
all modern judgments on men and things are smeared.
For, do not deceive yourself: what constitutes the chief
characteristic of modern souls and of modern books is not
the lying, but the innocence which is part and parcel of
their intellectual dishonesty. The inevitable running up
against this "innocence" everywhere constitutes the most
distasteful feature of the somewhat dangerous business
which a modern psychologist has to undertake: it is a

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part of our great danger—it is a road which perhaps leads
us straight to the great nausea—I know quite well the
purpose which all modern books will and can serve
(granted that they last, which I am not afraid of, and
granted equally that there is to be at some future day a
generation with a more rigid, more severe, and healthier
taste)—the junction which all modernity generally will
serve with posterity: that of an emetic,—and this by
reason of its moral sugariness and falsity, its ingrained
feminism, which it is pleased to call "Idealism," and at
any rate believes to be idealism. Our cultured men of
to-day, our "good" men, do not lie—that is true; but it
doe? not redound to their honour! The real lie, the genuine, determined, "honest" lie (on whose value you can
listen to Plato) would prove too tough and strong an
article for them by a long way; it would be asking them
to do what people have been forbidden to ask them to do,
to open their* eyes to their own selves, and to learn to
distinguish between "true" and "false" in their own
selves. The dishonest lie alone suits them: everything
which fools a good man is perfectly incapable of any other
attitude to anything than that of a dishonourable liar, an
absolute liar, but none the less an innocent liar, a blueeyed liar, a virtuous liar. These "good men," they are all
now tainted with morality through and through, and as
far as honour is concerned they are disgraced and corrupted for all eternity. Which of them could stand a
further truth "about man"? or, put more tangibly, which
of them could put up with a true biography? One or
two instances: Lord Byron composed a most personal
autobiography, but Thomas Moore was "too good" for

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it; he burnt his friend's papers. Dr. G winner, Schopenhauer's executor, is said to have done the same; for
Schopenhauer as well wrote much about himself, and
perhaps also against himself (stg eaxrrov). The virtuous
American Thayer, Beethoven's biographer, suddenly
stopped his work: he had come to a certain point in that
honourable and simple life, and could stand it no longer.
Moral: What sensible man nowadays writes one honest
word about himself? He must already belong to the
Order of Holy Foolhardiness. We are promised an autobiography of Richard Wagner; who doubts but that it
would be a clever autobiography? Think, forsooth, of
the grotesque horror which the Catholic priest Janssen
aroused in Germany with his inconceivably square and
harmless pictures of the German Reformation; what
wouldn't people do if some real psychologist were to
tell us about a genuine Luther, tell us, not with the
moralist simplicity of a country priest or the sweet and
cautious modesty of a Protestant historian, but say
with the fearlessness of a Taine, that springs from force
of character and not from a prudent toleration of force.
(The Germans, by the bye, have already produced the
classic specimen of this toleration—they may well be
allowed to reckon him as one of their own, in Leopold
Ranke, that born classical advocate of every causa fortior,
that cleverest of all the clever opportunists.)
20.

But you will soon understand me.—Putting it shortly,
there is reason enough, is there not, for us psychologists

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
nowadays never to get away from a certain mistrust of
our own selves? Probably even we ourselves are still
"too good" for our work; probably, whatever contempt
we feel for this popular craze for morality, we ourselves
are perhaps none the less its victims, prey, and slaves;
probably it infects even us. Of what was that diplomat
warning us, when he said to his, colleagues: "Let us
especially mistrust our first impulses, gentlemen! they
are almost always good"? So should nowadays every
psychologist talk to his colleagues. And thus we get
back to our problem, which in point of fact does require
from us a certain severity, a certain mistrust especially
against "first impulses." The ascetic ideal in the service
of projected emotional excess:—he who remembers the
previous essay will already partially anticipate the essential meaning compressed into these above ten words.
The thorough unswitching of the human soul, the plunging of it into terror, frost, ardour, rapture, so as to free
it, as through some lightning shock, from all the smallness and pettiness of unhappiness, depression, and discomfort: what ways lead to this goal? And which of
these ways does so most safely? . . . At bottom all great
emotions have this power, provided that they find a
sudden outlet—emotions such as rage, fear, lust, revenge,
hope, triumph, despair, cruelty; and, in sooth, the ascetic
priest has had no scruples in taking into his service the
whole pack of hounds that rage in the human kennel,
unleashing now these and now those, with the same constant object of waking man out of his protracted melancholy, of chasing away, at any rate for a time, his dull
pain, his shrinking misery, but always under the sanction

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of a religious interpretation and justification. This emotional excess has subsequently to be paid for, this is selfevident—it makes the ill more ill—and therefore this kind
of remedy for pain is according to modern standards a
"guilty" kind.
The dictates of fairness, however, require that we should
all the more emphasise the fact that this remedy is applied with a good conscience, that the ascetic priest has
prescribed it in the most implicit belief in its utility and
indispensability;—often enough almost collapsing in the
presence of the pain which he created;—that we should
similarly emphasise the fact that the violent physiological
revenges of such excesses, even perhaps the mental disturbances, are not absolutely inconsistent with the general
tenor of this kind of remedy; this remedy, which, as we
have shown previously, is not for the purpose of healing
diseases, but of fighting the unhappiness of that depression, the alleviation and deadening of which was its
object. The object was consequently achieved. 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"
I have already
indicated in the previous essay the origin of this feeling
—as a piece of animal psychology and nothing else: we
were thus confronted with the feeling of "guilt," in its
crude state, as it were. It was first in the hands of the
priest, real artist that he was in the feeling of guilt, that
it took shape—oh, what a shape!
"Sin"—for that is the name of the new priestly version
of the animal "bad-conscience" (the inverted cruelty)—

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has up to the present been the greatest event in the history of the diseased soul; in "sin" we find the most
perilous and fatal masterpiece of religious interpretation.
Imagine man, suffering from himself, some way or other
but at any rate physiologically, perhaps like an animal
shut up in a cage, not clear as to the why and the wherefore! imagine him in his desire for reasons—reasons bring
relief—in his desire again for remedies, narcotics at last,
consulting one, who knows even the occult—and see, lo
and behold, he gets a hint from his wizard, the ascetic
priest, his first hint on the "cause" of his trouble: he
must search for it in himself, in his guiltiness, in a piece
of the past, he must understand his very suffering as a
state of punishment. He has heard, he has understood,
has the unfortunate: he is now in the plight of a hen
round which a line has been drawn. He never gets out
of the circle of lines. The sick man has been turned into
"the sinner"—and now for a few thousand years we
never get away from the sight of this new invalid, of "a
sinner"—shall we ever get away from it?—wherever we
just look, everywhere the hypnotic gaze of the sinner
always moving in one direction (in the direction of guilt,
the only cause of suffering); everywhere the evil conscience, this "greuliche Thier"* to use Luther's language;
everywhere rumination over the past, a distorted view
of action, the gaze of the "green-eyed monster" turned on
all action; everywhere the wilful misunderstanding of
suffering, its transvaluation into feelings of guilt, fear of
retribution; everywhere the scourge, the hairy shirt, the
starving body, contrition; everywhere the sinner break* "Horrible beast."

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ing himself on the ghastly wheel of a restless and morbidly eager conscience; everywhere mute pain, extreme
fear, the agony of a tortured heart, the spasms of an
unknown happiness, the shriek for "redemption." In
point of fact, thanks to this system of procedure, the
old depression, dullness, and fatigue were absolutely conquered, life itself became very interesting again, awake,
eternally awake, sleepless, glowing, burnt away, exhausted
and yet not tired—such was the figure cut by man, "the
sinner," who was initiated into these mysteries. This
grand old wizard of an ascetic priest fighting with depression—he had clearly triumphed, his kingdom had
come: men no longer grumbled at pain, men panted after
pain: "More pain! More pain!" So for centuries on
end shrieked the demand of his acolytes and initiates.
Every emotional excess which hurt; everything which
broke, overthrew, crushed, transported, ravished; the
mystery of torture-chambers, the ingenuity of hell itself—
all this was now discovered, divined, exploited, all this
was at the service of the wizard, all this served to promote the triumph of his ideal, the ascetic ideal. "My
kingdom is not of this world/' quoth he, both at the beginning and at the end: had he still the right to talk like
that?—Goethe has maintained that there are only thirtysix tragic situations: we would infer from that, did we
not know otherwise, that Goethe was no ascetic priest. He
—knows more.
21.

So far as all this kind of priestly medicine-mongering,'

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the "guilty" kind, is concerned, every word of criticism
is superfluous. As for the suggestion that emotional
excess of the type, which in these cases the ascetic priest
is fain to order to his sick patients (under the most sacred
euphemism, as is obvious, and equally impregnated with
the sanctity of his purpose), has ever really been of use
to any sick man, who, forsooth, would feel inclined to
maintain a proposition of that character? At any rate,
some understanding should be come to as to the expression "be of use." If you only wish to express that such
a system of treatment has reformed man, I do not gainsay it: I merely add that "reformed" conveys to my mind
much as "tamed," "weakened," "discouraged," "refined,"
"daintined," "emasculated" (and thus it means almost as
much as injured). But when you have to deal principally with sick, depressed, and oppressed creatures, such
a system, even granted that it makes the ill "better,"
under any circumstances also makes them more ill: ask
the mad-doctors the invariable result of a methodical
application of penance-torture, contritions, and salvation
ecstasies. Similarly ask history. In every body politic
where the ascetic priest has established this treatment of
the sick, disease has on every occasion spread with sinister speed throughout its length and breadth. What
was always the "result"? A shattered nervous system,
in addition to the existing malady, and this in the greatest
as in the smallest, in the individuals as in masses. We
find, in consequence of the penance and redemptiontraining, awful epileptic epidemics, the greatest known to
history, such as the St. Vitus and St. John dances of the

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Middle Ages; we find, as another phase of its aftereffect, frightful mutilations and chronic depressions, by
means of which the temperament of a nation or a city
(Geneva, Bale) is turned once for all into its opposite; —
this training, again, is responsible for the witch-hysteria,
a phenomenon analogous to somnambulism (eight great
epidemic outbursts of this only between 1564 and 1605);
—we find similarly in its train those delirious deathcravings of large masses, whose awful "shriek," "evviva
la morte!" was heard over the whole of Europe, now
interrupted by voluptuous variations and anon by a rage
for destruction, just as the same emotional sequence with
the same intermittencies and sudden changes is now universally observed in every case where the ascetic doctrine of sin scores once more a great success (religious
neurosis appears as a manifestation of the devil, there
is no doubt of it. What is it? Quceritur). Speaking generally, the ascetic ideal and its sublime-moral cult, this
most ingenious, reckless, and perilous systematisation 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. At the most you can
merely draw a comparison with the specifically German
influence: I mean the alcohol poisoning of Europe, which
up to the present has kept pace exactly with the political
and racial predominance of the Germans (where they

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inoculated their blood, there too did they inoculate their
vice). Third in the series comes syphilis—magno sed
proximo intervallo.
22.

The ascetic priest has, wherever he has obtained the
mastery, corrupted the health of the soul, he has consequently also corrupted taste in artibus et Utteris—he
corrupts it still. "Consequently?" I hope I shall be
granted this "consequently"; at any rate, I am not going
to prove it first. One solitary indication, it concerns the
arch-book of Christian literature, their real model, their
"book-in-itself." In the very midst of the Grceco-Roman
splendour, which was also a splendour of books, face to
face with an ancient world of writings which had not
yet fallen into decay and ruin, at a time when certain
books were still to be read, to possess which we would
give nowadays half our literature in exchange, at that
time the simplicity and vanity of Christian agitators (they
are generally called Fathers of the Church) dared to declare: "We too have our classical literature, we do not
need that oj the Greeks11—and meanwhile they proudly
pointed to their books of legends, their letters of apostles,
and their apologetic tractlets, just in the same way that
to-day the English "Salvation Army" wages its fight
against Shakespeare and other "heathens" with an analogous literature, You already guess it, I do not like the
"New Testament"; it almost upsets me that I stand so
isolated in my taste so far as concerns this valued, this
over-valued Scripture; the taste of two thousand years is

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*57

against me; but what boots it! "Here I stand! I cannot help myself" *—I have the courage of my bad taste.
The Old Testament—yes, that is something quite different, all honour to the Old Testament! I find therein
great men, an heroic landscape, and one of the rarest
phenomena in the world, the incomparable naivete of the
strong heart; further still, I find a people. In the New,
on the contrary, just a hostel of petty sects, pure rococo
of the soul, twisting angles and fancy touches, nothing
but conventicle air, not to forget an occasional whiff of
bucolic sweetness which appertains to the epoch {and the
Roman province) and is less Jewish than Hellenistic.
Meekness and braggadocio cheek by jowl; an emotional
garrulousness that almost deafens; passionate hysteria,
but no passion; painful pantomime; here manifestly every
one lacked good breeding. How dare any one make so
much fuss about their little failings as do these pious
little fellows! No one cares a straw about it—let alone
God. Finally they actually wish to have "the crown of
eternal life," do all these little provincials! In return for
what, in sooth? For what end? It is impossible to carry
insolence any further. An immortal Peter! who could
stand him! They have an ambition which makes one
laugh: the thing dishes up cut and dried his most personal
life, his melancholies, and common-or-garden troubles, as
though the Universe itself were under an obligation to
bother itself about them, for it never gets tired of wrapping up God Himself in the petty misery in which its
* "Here I stand! I cannot help myself. God help me .
1
Amen"—were Luther's words before the Reichstag at Worms.
—H. B. S.

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troubles are involved. And how about the atrocious form
of this chronic hobnobbing with God? This Jewish, and
not merely Jewish, slobbering and clawing importunacy
towards God!—There exist little despised "heathen
nations" in East Africa, from whom these first Christians
could have learnt something worth learning, a little tact
in worshipping; these nations do not allow themselves to
say aloud the name of their God. This seems to me
delicate enough, it is certain that it is too delicate, and
not only for primitive Christians; to take a contrast, just
recollect Luther, the most "eloquent" and insolent peasant
whom Germany has had, think of the Lutherian tone, in
which he felt quite the most in his element during his
tete-d-tetes with God. Luther's opposition to the mediaeval saints of the Church (in particular, against "that
devil's hog, the Pope"), was, there is no doubt, at bottom
the opposition of a boor, who was offended at the good
etiquette of the Church, that worship-etiquette of the
sacerdotal code, which only admits to the holy of holies
the initiated and the silent, and shuts the door against
the boors. These definitely were not to be allowed a
hearing in this planet—but Luther the peasant simply
wished it otherwise; as it was, it was not German enough
for him. He personally wished himself to talk direct, to
talk personally, to talk "straight from the shoulder" with
his God. Well, he's done it. The ascetic ideal, you will
guess, was at no time and in no place, a school of good
taste, still less of good manners—at the best it was a
school for sacerdotal manners: that is, it contains in
itself something which was a deadly enemy to all good

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manners. Lack of measure, opposition to measure it is
itself a "non plus ultra."
23.

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?). I have
here to expose not what this ideal effected; but rather
only what it means, on what it is based, what lies lurking behind it and under it, that of which it is the provisional expression, an obscure expression bristling with
queries and misunderstandings. And with this object
only in view I presumed "not to spare" my readers a
glance at the awfulness of its results, a glance at its fatal
results; I did this to prepare them for the final and most
awful aspect presented to me by the question of the
significance of that ideal. What is the significance of the
power of that ideal, the monstrousness of its power? Why
is it given such an amount of scope? Why is not a better
resistance offered against it? The ascetic ideal expresses
one will: where is the opposition will, in which an opposition ideal expresses itself? The ascetic ideal has an aim
—this goal is, putting it generally, that all the other
interests of human life should, measured by its standard,
appear petty and narrow; it explains epochs, nations, men,
in reference to this one end; it forbids any other interpretation, any other end; it repudiates, denies, affirms,
confirms, only in the sense of its own interpretation (and

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was there ever a more thoroughly elaborated system of
interpretation?); it subjects itself to no power, rather does
it believe in its own precedence over every power—it
believes that nothing powerful exists in the world that
has not first got to receive from "it" a meaning, a right
to exist, a value, as being an instrument in its work, a
way and means to its end, to one end. Where is the
counterpart of this complete system of will, end, and
interpretation? Why is the counterpart lacking? Where
is the other "one aim"? But I am told it is not lacking,
that not only has it fought a long and fortunate fight
with that ideal, but that further it has already wTon the
mastery over that ideal in all essentials: let our whole
modern science attest this—that modern science, which,
like the genuine reality-philosophy which it is, manifestly
believes in itself alone, manifestly has the courage to be
itself, the will to be itself, and has got on well enough
without God, another world, and negative virtues.
With all their noisy agitator-babble, however, they
effect nothing with me; these trumpeters of reality are
bad musicians, their voices do not come from the deeps
with sufficient audibility, they are not the mouthpiece for
the abyss of scientific knowledge—for to-day scientific
knowledge is an abyss—the word "science," in such
trumpeter-mouths, is a prostitution, an abuse, an impertinence. The truth is just the opposite from what is maintained in the ascetic theory. Science has to-day absolutely no belief in itself, let alone in an ideal superior to
itself, and wherever science still consists of passion, love,
ardour, suffering it is not the opposition to that ascetic
ideal, but rather the incarnation of its latest and noblest

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form. Does that ring strange? There are enough brave
and decent working people, even among the learned men
of to-day, who like their little corner, and who, just because they are pleased so to do, become at times indecently loud with their demand, that people to-day should
be quite content, especially in science—for in science there
is so much useful work to do. I do not deny it—there
is nothing I should like less than to spoil the delight of
these honest workers in their handiwork; for I rejoice
in their work. But the fact of science requiring hard
work, the fact of its having contented workers, is absolutely no proof of science as a whole having to-day one
end, one will, one ideal, one passion for a great faith; the
contrary, as I have said, is the case. When science is not
the latest manifestation of the ascetic ideal—but these
are cases of $uch rarity, selectness, and exquisiteness, as to
preclude the general judgment being affected thereby—
science is a hiding-Mace for every kind of cowardice,
disbelief, remorse, despectio sui, bad conscience—it is the
very anxiety that springs from having no ideal, the suffering from the lack of a great love, the discontent with
an enforced moderation. Oh, what does all science nof
cover to-day? How much, at any rate, does it not try
to cover? The diligence of our best scholars, their senseless industry, their burning the candle of their brain at
both ends—their very mastery in their handiwork—how
often is the real meaning of all that to prevent themselves
continuing to see a certain thing? Science as a selfanaesthetic: do you know that? You wound them—every
one who consorts with scholars experiences this—you
wound them sometimes to the quick through just a harm-

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less word; when you think you are paying them a compliment you embitter them beyond all bounds, simply because you didn't ha\e the finesse to infer the real kind
of customers you had to tackle, the sufferer kind (who
won't own up even to themselves what they really are),
the dazed and unconscious kind who have only one fear—
coming to consciousness.
24.

And now look at the other side, at those rare cases, of
which I spoke, the most supreme idealists to be found
nowadays among philosophers and scholars. Have we,
perchance, found in them the sought-for opponents of the
ascetic ideal, its arti-idealists? In fact, they believe themselves to be such, these "unbelievers" (for they are all
of them that): it seems that this idea is their last remnant of faith, the idea of being opponents of this ideal,
so earnest are they on this subject, so passionate in word
and gesture;—but does it follow that what they believe
must necessarily be true? We "knowers" have grown by
degrees suspicious of all kinds of believers, our suspicion
has step by step habituated us to draw just the opposite
conclusions to what people have drawn before; that is to
say, wherever the strength of a belief is particularly prominent to draw the conclusion of the difficulty of proving
what is believed, the conclusion of its actual improbability.
We do not again deny that "faith produces salvation": for
that very reason we do deny that faith proves anything,—
a strong faith, which produces happiness, causes suspicion
of the object of that faith, it does not establish its "truth,"
it does establish a certain probability of—illusion. What

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is now the position in these cases? These solitaries and
deniers of to-day; these fanatics in one thing, in their
claim to intellectual cleanness; these hard, stern, continent, heroic spirits, who constitute the glory of our time;
all these pale atheists, anti-Christians, immoralists, Nihilists; these sceptics, "ephectics," and "hectics" of the intellect (in a certain sense they are the latter, both collectively and individually); these supreme idealists of knowledge, in whom alone nowadays the intellectual conscience
dwells and is alive—in point of fact they believe themselves as far away as possible from the ascetic ideal, do
these "free, very free spirits": and yet, if I may reveal
what they themselves cannot see—for they stand too near
themselves: this ideal is simply their ideal, they represent
it nowadays and perhaps no one else, they themselves are
its most spiritualised product, its most advanced picket
of skirmishers and scouts, its most insidious delicate and
elusive form of seduction.—If I am in any way a reader of
riddles, then I will be one with this sentence: for some
time past there have been no free spirits; for they still
believe in truth. When the Christian Crusaders in the
East came into collision with that invincible order of assassins, that order of free spirits par excellence, whose
lowest grade lives in a state of discipline such as no order
of monks has ever attained, then in some way or other
they managed to get an inkling of that symbol and tallyword, that was reserved for the highest grade alone as their
secretum, "Nothing is true, everything is allowed,"—in
sooth, that was freedom of thought, thereby was taking
leave of the very belief in truth. Has indeed any European, any Christian freethinker, ever yet wandered into

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this proposition and its labyrinthine consequences? Does
he know from experience the Minotauros of this den.—I
doubt it—nay, I know otherwise. Nothing is more really
alien to these "monofanatics," these so-called "free spirits," than freedom and unfettering in that sense; in no
respect are they more closely tied, the absolute fanaticism
of their belief in truth is unparalleled. I know all this
perhaps too much from experience at close quarters—that
dignified philosophic abstinence to which a belief like that
binds its adherents, that stoicism of the intellect, which
eventually vetoes negation as rigidly as it does affirmation,
that wish for standing still in front of the actual, the
factum brutum, that fatalism in "petits faits" (ce petit
faitalism, as I call it), in which French Science now attempts a kind of moral superiority over German, this renunciation of interpretation generally (that is, of forcing,
doctoring, abridging, omitting, suppressing, inventing, falsifying, and all the other essential attributes of interpretation)—all this, considered broadly, expresses the asceticism of virtue, quite as efficiently as does any repudiation
of the senses (it is at bottom only a modus of that repudiation). But what forces it into that unqualified will for
truth is the faith in the ascetic ideal itself, even though it
take the form of its unconscious imperatives,—make no
mistake about it, it is the faith, I repeat, in a metaphysical value, an intrinsic value of truth, of a character which
is only warranted and guaranteed in this ideal (it stands
and falls with that ideal). Judged strictly, there does not
exist a science without its "hypotheses," the thought of
such a science is inconceivable, illogical: a philosophy, a
faith, must always exist first to enable science to gain

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thereby a direction, a meaning, a limit and method, a right
to existence. (He who holds a contrary opinion on the
subject—he, for example, who takes it upon himself to
establish philosophy "upon a strictly scientific basis"—has
first got to "turn upside-down" not only philosophy but
also truth itself—the gravest insult which could possibly
be offered to two such respectable females!) Yes, there
is no doubt about it—and here I quote my Joyful Wisdom, cp. Book V. Aph. 344: "The man who is truthful
in that daring and extreme fashion, which is the presupposition of the faith in science, asserts thereby a different
world from that of life, nature, and history; and in so far
as he asserts the existence of that different world, come,
must he not similarly repudiate its counterpart, this world,
our world? The belief on which our faith in science is
based has remained to this day a metaphysical belief—
even we knowers of to-day, we godless foes of metaphysics,
we, too, take our fire from that conflagration which was
kindled by a thousand-year-old faith, from that Christian
belief, which was also Plato's belief, the belief that God
is truth, that truth is divine. . . . But what if this belief
becomes more and more incredible, what if nothing proves
itself to be divine, unless it be error, blindness, lies—
what if God Himself proved Himself to be our oldest lie?"
—It is necessary to stop at this point and to consider the
situation carefully. Science itself now needs a justification
(which is not for a minute to say that there is such a
justification). Turn in this context to the most ancient
and the most modern philosophers: they all fail to realise
the extent of the need of a justification on the part of the
Will for Truth—here is a gap in every philosophy—what

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is it caused by? Because up to the present the ascetic
ideal dominated all philosophy, because Truth was fixed
as Being, as God, as the Supreme Court of Appeal, because
Truth was not allowed to be a problem. Do you understand this "allowed"? From the minute that the belief
in the God of the ascetic ideal is repudiated, there exists
a new problem-, the problem of the value of truth. The
Will for Truth needed a critique—let us define by these
words our own task—the value of truth is tentatively
to be called in question. . . . (If this seems too laconically expressed, I recommend the reader to peruse again
that passage from the Joyful Wisdom which bears the
title, "How far we also are still pious," Aph. 344, and
best of all the whole fifth book of that work, as well as
the Preface to The Dawn of Day,
25-

No! You can't get round me with science, when I
search for the natural antagonists of the ascetic ideal,
when I put the question: "Where is the opposed will in
which the opponent ideal expresses itself?" Science is
not, by a long way, independent enough to fulfil this
function; in every department science needs an ideal value,
a power which creates values, and in whose service it can
believe in itself—science itself never creates values. Its
relation to the ascetic ideal is not in itself antagonistic;
speaking roughly, it rather represents the progressive force
in the inner evolution of that ideal. Tested more exactly,
its opposition and antagonism are concerned not with the
ideal itself, but only with that ideal's outworks, its outer

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garb, its masquerade, with its temporary hardening, stiffening, and dogmatising-—it makes the life in the ideal
free once more, while it repudiates its superficial elements.
These two phenomena, science and the ascetic ideal, both
rest on the same basis—I have already made this clear—
the basis, I say, of the same over-appreciation of truth
(more accurately the same belief in the impossibility of
valuing and of criticising truth), and consequently they
are necessarily allies, so that, in the event of their being
attacked, they must always be attacked and called into
question together. A valuation of the ascetic ideal inevitably entails a valuation of science as well; lose no time
in seeing this clearly, and be sharp to catch itt (Art, I
am speaking provisionally, for I will treat it on some other
occasion in greater detail,—art, I repeat, in which lying
is sanctified and the will for deception has good conscience
on its side, is much more fundamentally opposed to the
ascetic ideal than is science: Plato's instinct felt this—
Plato, the greatest enemy of art which Europe has produced up to the present. Plato versus Homer, that is the
complete, the true antagonism—on the one side, the wholehearted "transcendental," the great defamer of life; on the
other, its involuntary panegyrist, the golden nature. An
artistic subservience to the service of the ascetic ideal is
consequently the most absolute artistic corruption that
there can be, though unfortunately it is one of the most
frequent phases, for nothing is more corruptible than an
artist.) Considered physiologically, moreover, science
rests on the same basis as does the ascetic ideal: a certain
impoverishment of life is the presupposition of the latter
as of the former—add, frigidity of the emotions, slacken-

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ing of the tempo, the substitution of dialectic for instinct,
seriousness impressed on mien and gesture (seriousness,
that most unmistakable sign of strenuous metabolism, of
struggling, toiling life). Consider 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 in life, the confidence in the future are no more. The preponderence 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. (Science handled as
a problem! what is the meaning of science?—upon this
point the Preface to the Birth of Tragedy.) No! this
"modern science"—mark you this well—is at times the
best ally for the ascetic ideal, and for the very reason that
it is the ally which is most unconscious, most automatic,
most secret, and most subterranean! They have been
playing into each other's hands up to the present, have
these "poor in spirit" and the scientific opponents of that
ideal (take care, by the bye, not to think that these opponents are the antithesis of this ideal, that they are the
rich in spirit—that they are not; I have called them the
hectic in spirit). As for these celebrated victories of
science; there is no doubt that they are victories—but yictories over what? There was not for a single minute any
victory among their list over the ascetic ideal, rather was
it made stronger, that is to say, more elusive, more abstract, more insidious, from the fact that a wall, an outwork, that had got built on to the main fortress and
disfigured its appearance, should from time to time be

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ruthlessly destroyed and broken down by science. Does
any one seriously suggest that the downfall of the theological astronomy signified the downfall of that ideal?—Has,
perchance, man grown less in need of a transcendental solution of his riddle of existence, because since that time this
existence has become more random, casual, and superfluous in the visible order of the universe? Has there not
been since the time of Copernicus an unbroken progress
in the self-belittling of man and his will for belittling himself? Alas, his belief in his dignity, his uniqueness, his
irreplaceableness in the scheme of existence, is gone—
he has become animal, literal, unqualified, and unmitigated animal, he who in his earlier belief was almost God
("child of God," "demi-God"). Since Copernicus man
seems to have fallen on to a steep plane—he rolls faster
and faster away from the centre—whither? into nothingness? into the "thrilling sensation of his own nothingness"?
—Well! this would be the straight way—to the old ideal?
—All science (and by no means only astronomy, with regard to the humiliating and deteriorating effect of which
Kant has made a remarkable confession, "it annihilates my
own importance"), all science, natural as much as unnatural—by unnatural I mean the self-critique of reason
—nowadays sets out to talk man out of his present opinion
of himself, as though that opinion had been nothing but
a bizarre piece of conceit; you might go so far as to say
that science finds its peculiar pride, its peculiar bitter
form of stoical ataraxia, in preserving man's contempt of
himself, that state which it took so much trouble to bring
about, as man's final and most serious claim to self-appreciation (rightly so, in point of fact, for he who despises

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is always "one who has not forgotten how to appreciate").
But does all this involve any real effort to counteract the
ascetic ideal? Is it really seriously suggested that Kant's
victory over the theological dogmatism about "God,"
"Soul/' "Freedom," "Immortality," has damaged that
ideal in any way (as the theologians have imagined to be
the case for a long time past)?—And in this connection
it does not concern us for a single minute, if Kant himself intended any such consummation. It is certain that
from the time of Kant every type of transcendentalist is
playing a winning game—they are emancipated from the
theologians; what luck!—he has revealed to them that
secret art, by which they can now pursue their "heart's
desire" on their own responsibility, and with all the respectability of science. Similarly, who can grumble at the
agnostics, reverers, as they are, of the unknown and the
absolute mystery, if they now worship their very query
as God? (Xaver Doudan talks somewhere of the ravages
which Vhabitude (Tadmirer Vinintelligible au lieu de rester*
tout simplement dans Vinconnu has produced—the
ancients, he thinks, must have been exempt from those
ravages.) Supposing that everything, "known" to man,
fails to satisfy his desires, and on the contrary contradicts
and horrifies them, what a divine way out of all this to be
able to look for the responsibility, not in the "desiring"
but in "knowing"!—"There is no knowledge. Consequently—there is a God"; what a novel elegantia syllogisnti! what a triumph for the ascetic ideal!
26.

Or, perchance, does the whole of modern history show

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in its demeanour greater confidence in life, greater confidence in its ideals? Its loftiest pretension is now to be
a mirror; it repudiates all teleology; it will have no more
"proving"; it disdains to play the judge, and thereby
shows its good taste—it asserts as little as it denies, it
fixes, it "describes." All this is to a high degree ascetic,
but at the same time it is to a much greater degree nihilistic; make no mistake about this! You see in the historian a gloomy, hard, but determined gaze,—an eye that
looks out as an isolated North Pole explorer looks out
(perhaps so as not to look within, so as not to look back?)
—.there is snow—here is life silenced, the last crows which:
caw here are called "whither?" "Vanity," "Nada"—here
nothing more flourishes and grows, at the most the metapolitics of St. Petersburg and the "pity" of Tolstoi. But
as for that other school of historians a perhaps still more
"modern" school, a voluptuous and lascivious school which
ogles life and the ascetic ideal with equal fervour, which
uses the word "artist" as a glove, and has nowadays established a "corner" for itself, in all the praise given to
contemplation; oh, what a thirst do these sweet intellectuals excite even for ascetics and winter landscapes! Nay!
The devil take these "contemplative" folk! How much
liefer would I wander with those historical Nihilists
through the gloomiest, grey, cold mist!—nay, I shall not
mind listening (supposing I have to choose) to one who
is completely unhistorical and anti-historical (a man, like
Duhring for instance, over whose periods a hitherto shy
and unavowed species of "beautiful souls" has grown intoxicated in contemporary Germany, the species anarchistica within the educated proletariate). The "contemplative" are a hundred times worse—I never knew anything

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
which produced such intense nausea as one of those "objective" chairs* one of those scented mannikins-abouttown of history, a thing half-priest, half-satyr (Renan
parfum), which betrays by the high, shrill falsetto of his
applause what he lacks and where he lacks it, who betrays
where in this case the Fates have plied their ghastly
shears, alas! in too surgeon-like a fashion! This is distasteful to me, and irritates my patience; let him keep
patient at such sights who has nothing to lose thereby,—
such a sight enrages me, such spectators embitter me
against the "play," even more than does the play itself
(history itself, you understand); Anacreontic moods imperceptibly come over me. This Nature, who gave to the
steer its horn, to the lion its yaayC 656vrcov, for what
purpose did Nature give me my foot?—To kick, by St.
Anacreon, and not merely to run away! To trample on
all the worm-eaten "chairs," the cowardly contemplators,
the lascivious eunuchs of history, the flirters with ascetic
Ideals, the righteous hypocrites of impotence! All reverence on my part to the ascetic ideal, in so jar as it is
honourable! So long as it believes in itself and plays no
pranks on us! But I like not all these coquettish bugs
who have an insatiate ambition to smell of the infinite,
until eventually the infinite smells of bugs; I like not the
whited sepulchres with their stagey reproduction of life;
I like not the tired and the used up who wrap themselves
in wisdom and look "objective"; I like not the agitators
dressed up as heroes, who hide their dummy-heads behind
the stalking-horse of an ideal; I like not the ambitious
artists who would fain play the ascetic and the priest, and
* E.g. Lectureships.

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are at bottom nothing but tragic clowns; I like not, again,
these newest speculators in idealism, the Anti-Semites,
who nowadays roll their eyes in the patent ChristianAryan-man-of-honour fashion, and by an abuse of moralist attitudes and agitation dodges, so cheap as to exhaust
any patience, strive to excite all the blockhead elements
in the populace (the invariable success of every kind of
intellectual charlatanism in present-day Germany hangs
together with the almost indisputable and already quite
palpable desolation of the German mind, whose cause I
look for in a too exclusive diet, of papers, politics, beer,
and Wagnerian music, not forgetting the condition precedent of this diet, the national exclusiveness and vanity, the
strong but narrow principle, "Germany, Germany above
everything,"* and finally the paralysis agitans of "modern ideas"). Europe nowadays is, above all, wealthy and
ingenious in means of excitement; it apparently has no
more crying necessity than stimulantia and alcohol.
Hence the enormous counterfeiting of ideals, those most
fiery spirits of the mind; hence too the repulsive, evilsmelling, perjured, pseudo-alcoholic air everywhere. I
should like to know how many cargoes of imitation idealism, of hero-costumes and high falutin' clap-trap, how
many casks of sweetened pity liqueur (Firm: la religion
de la souffrance), how many crutches of righteous indignation for the help of these flat-footed intellects, how
many comedians of the Christian moral ideal would need
to-day to be exported from Europe, to enable its air to
smell pure again. It is obvious that, in regard to this
over-production, a new trade possibility lies open; it is
* An illusion to the well-known patriotic song.—H. B. S.

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obvious that there is a new business to be done in little
ideal idols and obedient "idealists"—don't pass over this
tip! Who has sufficient courage? We have in our hands
the possibility of idealising the whole earth. But what
am I talking about courage? we only need one thing here
—a hand, a free, a very free hand.
27.

Enough! enough! let us leave these curiosities and complexities of the modern spirit, which excite as much laughter as disgust. Our problem can certainly do without
them, the problem of the meaning of the ascetic ideal—
what has it got to do with yesterday or to-day? those
things shall be handled by me more thoroughly and severely in another connection (under the title "A Contribution to the History of European Nihilism," I refer for
this to a work which I am preparing: The Will to Power,
an Attempt at a Transvaluation of All Values). The only
reason why I come to allude to it here is this: the ascetic
ideal has at times, even in the most intellectual sphere,
only one real kind of enemies and damagers: these are
the comedians of this ideal—for they awake mistrust.
Everywhere otherwise, where the mind is at work seriously, powerfully, and without counterfeiting, it dispenses
altogether now with an ideal (the popular expression for
this abstinence is "Atheism")—with the exception of the
will for truth. But this will, this remnant of an ideal, is,
if you will believe me, that ideal itself in its severest and
cleverest formulation, esoteric through and through,
stripped of all outworks, and consequently not so much

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its remnant as its kernel. Unqualified honest atheism
(and its air only do we breathe, we, the most intellectual
men of this age) is not opposed to that ideal, to the extent
that it appears to be; it is rather one of the final phases
of its evolution, one of its syllogisms and pieces of inherent logic—it is the awe-inspiring catastrophe of a twothousand-year training in truth, which finally forbids itself
the lie of the belief in God. (The same course of development in India—quite independently, and consequently of
some demonstrative value—the same ideal driving to the
same conclusion the decisive point reached five hundred
years before the European era, or more precisely at the
time of Buddha—it started in the Sankhyam philosophy,
and then this was popularised through Buddha, and made
into a religion.)
What, I put the question with all strictness, has really
triumphed over the Christian God? The answer stands
in my Joyful Wisdom, Aph. 357: u the Christian morality
itself, the idea of truth, taken as it was with increasing
seriousness, the confessor-subtlety of the Christian conscience translated and sublimated into the scientific conscience into intellectual cleanness at any price. Regarding Nature as though it were a proof of the goodness and
guardianship of God; interpreting history in honour of a
divine reason, as a constant proof of a moral order of the
world and a moral teleology; explaining our own personal
experiences, as pious men have for long enough explained
them, as though every arrangement, every nod, every single thing were invented and sent out of love for the salvation of the soul; all this is now done away with, all this
has the conscience against it, and is regarded by every

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subtler conscience as disreputable, dishonourable, as lying,
feminism, weakness, cowardice—by means of this severity,
if by means of anything at all, are we, in sooth, good
Europeans and heirs of Europe's longest and bravest selfmastery." . . . All great things go to ruin by reason of
themselves, by reason of an act of self-dissolution: so
wills the law of life, the law of necessary "self-mastery"
even in the essence of life—ever is the law-giver finally
exposed to the cry, "patere legem quam ipse tulisti"; in
thus wise did Christianity go to ruin as a dogma, through
its own morality; in thus wise must Christianity go again
to ruin to-day as a morality—we are standing on the
threshold of this event. After Christian truthfulness has
drawn one conclusion after the other, it finally draws its
strongest conclusion, its conclusion against itself; this,
however, happens, when it puts the question, "what is the
meaning of every will for truth?" And here again do I
touch on my problem, on our problem, my unknown
friends (for as yet / know of no friends): what sense has
our whole being, if it does not mean that in our own selves
that will for truth has come to its own consciousness as a
problem?—By reason of this attainment of self-conscious ness on the part of the will for truth, morality from henceforward—there is no doubt about it—goes to pieces: this
is that great hundred-act play that is reserved for the
next two centuries of Europe, the most terrible, the most
mysterious, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all
plays.
28.

If you except the ascetic ideal, man, the animal man

ASCETIC IDEALS

177

had no meaning. His existence on earth contained no
end; "What is the purpose of man at all?" was a question
without an answer; the will for man and the world was
lacking; behind every great human destiny rang as a refrain a still greater "Vanity!" 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. Not suffering, but
the senselessness 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 venrjmotrs, 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 shuttle-cock of chance, of
nonsense, he could now "will" something—absolutely im-

178

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

material to what end, to what purpose, with what 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.

PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES.
TRANSLATED BY J. M. KENNEDY.
(The following twenty-seven fragments were intended by
Nietzsche to form a supplement to Chapter VIII of Beyond
Good and Evil, dealing with Peoples and Countries.)
I.

T H E Europeans now imagine themselves as representing,
in the main, the highest types of men on earth.
2.

A characteristic of Europeans: inconsistency between
word and deed; the Oriental is true to himself in daily
life. How the European has established colonies is explained by his nature, which resembles that of a beast of
prey.
This inconsistency is explained by the fact that Christianity has abandoned the class from which it sprang.
This is the difference between us and the Hellenes:
their morals grew up among the governing castes. Thucydides' morals are the same as those that exploded everywhere with Plato.
179

180

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

Attempts towards honesty at the Renaissance, for example: always for the benefit of the arts. Michael Angelo's conception of God as the "Tyrant of the World" was
an honest one.
3.

I rate Michael Angelo higher than Raphael, because,
through all the Christian clouds and prejudices of his
time, he saw the ideal of a culture nobler than the ChristoRaphaelian: whilst Raphael truly and modestly glorified
only the values handed down to him, and did not carry
within himself any inquiring, yearning instincts. Michael
Angelo, on the other hand, saw and felt the problem of
the law-giver of new values: the problem of the conqueror
made perfect, who first had to subdue the "hero within
himself," the man exalted to his highest pedestal, master
even of his pity, who mercilessly shatters and annihilates
everything that does not bear his own stamp, shining in
Olympian divinity. Michael Angelo was naturally only
at certain moments so high and so far beyond his age and
Christian Europe; for the most part he adopted a condescending attitude towards the eternal feminine in Christianity; it would seem, indeed, that in the end he broke
down before her, and gave up the ideal of his most inspired hours. It was an ideal which only a man in the
strongest and highest vigour of life could bear; but not a
man advanced in years! Indeed, he would have had to
demolish Christianity with his ideal! But he was not
thinker and philosopher enough for that. Perhaps Leonardo da Vinci alone of those artists had a really super-

PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES

181

Christian outlook. He knows the East, the "land of
dawn," within himself as well as without himself. There
is something super-European and silent in him: a characteristic of every one who has seen too wide a circle of
things good and bad.

How much we have learnt and learnt anew in fifty
years! The whole Romantic School with its belief in "the
people" is refuted! No Homeric poetry as "popular"
poetry! No deification of the great powers of Nature!
No deduction from language-relationship to race-relationship! No "intellectual contemplations" of the supernatural! No truth enshrouded in religion!
The problem of truthfulness is quite a new one. I am
astonished. From this standpoint we regard such natures
as Bismarck as culpable out of carelessness, such as Richard Wagner out of want of modesty; we would condemn
Plato for his pia fraus, Kant for the derivation of his
Categorical Imperative, his own belief certainly not having come to him from this source.
Finally, even doubt turns against itself: doubt in doubt.
And the question as to the value of truthfulness and its
extent lies there.
5.
What I observe with pleasure in the German is his
Mephistophelian nature; but, to tell the truth, one must
have a higher conception of Mephistopheles than Goethe

182

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

had, who found it necessary to diminish his Mephistopheles in order to magnify his "inner Faust." The true
German Mephistopheles is much more dangerous, bold,
wicked, and cunning, and consequently more openhearted: remember the nature of Frederick the Great, or
of that much greater Frederick, the Hohenstaufen, Frederick II.
The real German Mephistopheles crosses the Alps, and
believes that everything there belongs to him. Then he
recovers himself, like Winckelmann, like Mozart. He
looks upon Faust and Hamlet as caricatures, invented to
be laughed at, and upon Luther also. Goethe had his good
German moments, when he laughed inwardly at all these
things. But then he fell back again into his cloudy moods.
6.
Perhaps the Germans have only grown up in a wrong
climate! There is something in them that might be Hellenic!—something that is awakened when they are brought
into touch with the South—Winckelmann, Goethe, Mozart. We should not forget, however, that we are still
young. Luther is still our last event; our last book is still
the Bible. The Germans have never yet "moralised."
Also, the very food of the Germans was their doom: its
consequence, Philistinism.
7The Germans are a dangerous people: they are experts
at inventing intoxicants. Gothic, rococo (according to
Semper), the historical sense and exoticism, Hegel, Rich-

PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES

183

ard Wagner—Leibniz, too (dangerous at the present day)
—(they even idealised the serving soul as the virtue of
scholars and soldiers, also as the simple mind). The
Germans may well be the most composite people on earth.
"The people of the Middle," the inventors of porcelain,
and of a kind of Chinese breed of Privy Councillor.
8.
The smallness and baseness of the German soul were
not and are not consequences of the system of small states;
for it is well known that the inhabitants of much smaller
states were proud and independent: and it is not a large
state per se that makes souls freer and more manly. The
man whose soul obeys the slavish command: "Thou shalt
and must kneel!" in whose body there is an involuntary
bowing and scraping to titles, orders, gracious glances
from above—well, such a man in an "Empire" will only
bow all the more deeply and lick the dust more fervently
in the presence of the greater sovereign than in the presence of the lesser: this cannot be doubted. We can still
see in the lower classes of Italians that aristocratic selfsufficiency; manly discipline and self-confidence still form
a part of the long history of their country: these are virtues which once manifested themselves before their eyes.
A poor Venetian gondolier makes a far better figure than
a Privy Councillor from Berlin, and is even a better man
in the end—any one can see this. Just ask the women.
9.
Most artists, even some of the greatest (including the

184

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

historians) have up to the present belonged to the serving
classes (whether they serve people of high position or
princes or women or "the masses"), not to speak of their
dependence upon the Church and upon moral law. Thus
Rubens portrayed the nobility of his age; but only according to their vague conception of taste, not according to
his own measure of beauty—on the whole, therefore,
against his own taste. Van Dyck was nobler in this respect: who in all those whom he painted added a certain
amount of what he himself most highly valued: he did
not descend from himself, but rather lifted up others to
himself when he "rendered."
The slavish humility of the artist to his public (as Sebastian Bach has testified in undying and outrageous
words in the dedication of his High Mass) is perhaps
more difficult to perceive in music; but it is all the more
deeply engrained. A hearing would be refused me if I
endeavoured to impart my views on this subject. Chopin
possesses distinction, like Van Dyck. The disposition of
Beethoven is that of a proud peasant; of Haydn, that of
a proud servant. Mendelssohn, too, possesses distinction
—like Goethe, in the most natural way in the world.
10.

We could at any time have counted on the fingers of
one hand those German learned men who possessed wit:
the remainder have understanding, and a few of them,
happily, that famous "childlike character" which divines. . . . It is our privilege: with this "divination" German science has discovered some things which we can

PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES

185

hardly conceive of, and which, after all, do not exist, perhaps. It is only the Jews among the Germans who do not
" divine" like them.
11.

As Frenchmen reflect the politeness and esprit of French
society, so do Germans reflect something of the deep, pensive earnestness of their mystics and musicians, and also
of their silly childishness. The Italian exhibits a great
deal of republican distinction and art, and can show himself to be noble and proud without vanity.
12.

A larger number of the higher and better-endowed men
will, I hope, have in the end so much self-restraint as to
be able to get rid of their bad taste for affectation and
sentimental darkness, and to turn against Richard Wagner
as much as against Schopenhauer. These two Germans
are leading us to ruin; they flatter our dangerous qualities. A stronger future is prepared for us in Goethe,
Beethoven, and Bismarck than in these racial aberrations.
We have had no philosophers yet.
13.

The peasant is the commonest type of noblesse, for he
is dependent upon himself most of all. Peasant blood is
still the best blood in Germany—for example, Luther,
Niebuhr, Bismarck.

186

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

Bismarck a Slav. Let any one look upon the face of
Germans. Everything that had manly, exuberant blood
in it went abroad. Over the smug populace remaining,
the slave-souled people, there came an improvement from
abroad, especially by a mixture of Slavonic blood.
The Brandenburg nobility and the Prussian nobility in
general (and the peasant of certain North German districts), comprise at present the most manly natures in
Germany.
That the manliest men shall rule: this is only the natural
order of things.
14.

The future of German culture rests with the sons of
the Prussian officers.
15-

There has always been a want of wit in Germany, and
mediocre heads attain there to the highest honours, because even they are rare. What is most highly prized is
diligence and perseverance and a certain cold-blooded,
critical outlook, and, for the sake of such Qualities, German scholarship and the German military system have
become paramount in Europe.
16.

Parliaments may be very useful to a strong and versatile statesman: he has something there to rely upon (every

PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES

187

such thing must, however, be able to resist!)—upon which
he can throw a great deal of responsibility. On the whole,
however, I could wish that the counting mania and the
superstitious belief in majorities were not established in
Germany, as with the Latin races, and that one could
finally invent something new even in politics! It is senseless and dangerous to let the custom of universal suffrage
—which is still but a short time under cultivation, and
could easily be uprooted—take a deeper root: whilst, of
course, its introduction was merely an expedient to steer
clear of temporary difficulties.

Can any one interest himself in this German Empire?
Where is the new thought? Is it only a new combination
of power? All the worse, if it does not know its own mind.
Peace and laisser alter are not types of politics for which
I have any respect. Ruling, and helping the highest
thoughts to victory—the only things that can make me
interested in Germany. England's small-mindedness is
the great danger now on earth. I observe more inclination towards greatness in the feelings of the Russian Nihilists than in those of the English Utilitarians. We require
an intergrowth of the German and Slav races, and we require, too, the cleverest financiers, the Jews, for us to
become masters of the world.
(a) The sense of reality.
(b) A giving-up of the English principle of the people's
right of representation. We require the representation of
the great interests.

i88

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

(c) We require an unconditional union with Russia,
together with a mutual plan of action which shall not permit any English schemata to obtain the mastery in Russia.
No American future!
(d) A national system of politics is untenable, and embarrassment by Christian views is a very great evil. In
Europe all sensible people are sceptics, whether they say
so or not.
18.

I see over and beyond all these national wars, new "empires," and whatever else lies in the foreground. What I
am concerned with—for I see it preparing itself slowly and
hesitatingly—is the United Europe. It was the only real
work, the one impulse in the souls, of all the broad-minded
and deep-thinking men of this century—this preparation
of a new synthesis, and the tentative effort to anticipate
the future of "the European." Only in their weaker moments, or when they grew old, did they fall back again
into the national narrowness of the "Fatherlanders"—
then they were once more "patriots." I am thinking of
men like Napoleon, Heinrich Heine, Goethe, Beethoven,
Stendhal, Schopenhauer. Perhaps Richard Wagner likewise belongs to their number, concerning whom, as a
successful type of German obscurity, nothing can be said
without some such "perhaps."
But to the help of such minds as feel the need of a new
unity there comes a great explanatory economic fact:
the small States of Europe—I refer to all our present
kingdoms and "empires"—will in a short time become

PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES

189

economically untenable, owing to the mad, uncontrolled
struggle for the possession of local and international trade.
Money is even now compelling European nations to
amalgamate into one Power. In order, however, that Europe may enter into the battle for the mastery of the
world with good prospects of victory (it is easy to perceive against whom this battle will be waged), she must
probably "come to an understanding" with England. The
English colonies are needed for this struggle, just as much
as modern Germany, to play her new role of broker and
middleman, requires the colonial possessions of Holland.
For no one any longer believes that England alone is strong
enough to continue to act her old part for fifty years
more; the impossibility of shutting out homines novi from
the government will ruin her, and her continual change
of political parties is a fatal obstacle to the carrying out
of any tasks which require to be spread out over a long
period of time. A man must to-day be a soldier first and
foremost that he may not afterwards lose his credit as a
merchant. Enough; here, as in other matters, the coming
century will be found following in the footsteps of Napoleon—the first man, and the man of greatest initiative
and advanced views, of modern times. For the tasks of
the next century, the methods of popular representation
and parliaments are the most inappropriate imaginable.
19.

The condition of Europe in the next century will once
again lead to the breeding of manly virtues, because men
will live in continual danger. Universal military service

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS
is already the curious antidote which we possess for the
effeminacy of democratic ideas, and it has grown up out
of the struggle of the nations. (Nation—men who speak
one language and read the same newspapers. These men
now call themselves "nations," and would far too readily
trace their descent from the same source and through the
same history; which, however, even with the assistance of
the most malignant lying in the past, they have not succeeded in doing.)
20.

What quagmires and mendacity must there be about if
it is possible, in the modern European hotch-potch, to
raise questions of "race"! (It being premised that the
origin of such writers is not in Horneo and Borneo.)
21.

Maxim: To associate with no man who takes any part
in the mendacious race swindle.
22.

With the freedom of travel now existing, groups of men
of the same kindred can join together and establish communal habits and customs. The overcoming of "nations."
23.

To make Europe a centre of culture, national stupidi-

PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES

191

ties should not make us blind to the fact that in the higher
regions there is already a continuous reciprocal dependence. France and German philosophy. Richard Wagner
and Paris (1830-50). Goethe and Greece. All things are
impelled towards a synthesis of the European past in the
highest types of mind.
24.

Mankind has still much before it—how, generally speaking, could the ideal be taken from the past? Perhaps
merely in relation to the present, which latter is possibly
a lower region.
25.
This is our distrust, which recurs again and again; our
care, which never lets us sleep; our question, which no
one listens to or wishes to listen to; our Sphinx, near which
there is more than one precipice: we believe that the men
of present-day Europe are deceived in regard to the things
which we love best, and a pitiless demon (no, not pitiless,
only indifferent and puerile)—plays with our hearts and
their enthusiasm, as it may perhaps have already played
with everything that lived and loved; I believe that everything which we Europeans of to-day are in the habit of
admiring as the values of all these respected things called
"humanity," "mankind," "sympathy," "pity," may be of
some value as the debilitation and moderating of certain
powerful and dangerous primitive impulses. Nevertheless,
in the long run all these things are nothing else than the

192

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

belittlement of the entire type "man," his mediocrisation,
if in such a desperate situation I may make use of such
a desperate expression. I think that the commedia
umana for an epicurean spectator-god must consist in
this: that the Europeans, by virtue of their growing morality, believe in all their innocence and vanity that they are
rising higher and higher, whereas the truth is that they are
sinking lower and lower—i.e., through the cultivation of all
the virtues which are useful to a herd, and through the
repression of the other and contrary virtues which give rise
to a new, higher, stronger, masterful race of men—the
first-named virtues merely develop the herd-animal in
man and stabilitate the animal "man," for until now man
has been "the animal as yet unstabilitated."
26.
GENIUS AND EPOCH.—Heroism is no form of selfishness, for one is shipwrecked by it. . . . The direction of
power is often conditioned by the state of the period in
which the great man happens to be born; and this fact
brings about the superstition that he is the expression of
his time. But this same power could be applied in several different ways; and between him and his time there
is always this difference: that public opinion always worships the herd instinct,—i.e., the instinct of the weak,—
while he, the strong man, fights for strong ideals.

27.
The fate now overhanging Europe is simply this: that it

PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES
is exactly her strongest sons that come rarely and late to
the spring-time of their existence; that, as a rule, when
they are already in their early youth they perish, saddened, disgusted, darkened in mind, just because they
have already, with the entire passion of their strength,
drained to the dregs the cup of disillusionment, which in
our days means the cup of knowledge, and they would not
have been the strongest had they not also been the most
disillusioned. For that is the test of their power—they
must first of all rise out of the illness of their epoch to
reach their own health. A late spring-time is their mark
of distinction; also, let us add, late merriment, late folly,
the late exuberance of joy! For this is the danger of
to-day: everything that we loved when we were young
has betrayed us. Our last love—the love which makes us
acknowledge her, our love for Truth—let us take care that
she, too, does not betray us!

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Introduction by LUDWIG LEWISOHN
GAUTIER, THEOPHILE (1811-1872)
Mile, de Maupin (53)
GEORGE, W. L. (1882)
A Bed of Roses (75)
Introduction by EDGAR SALTUS
GILBERT, W. S. (1836-1911)
The Mikado, The Pirates of Penzance, lolanthe, The
Gondoliers (26)
Introduction by CLARENCE DAY, JR.
GISSING, GEORGE (1857-1903)
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (46)
Introduction by PAUL ELMER MORE
De-GONCOURT, E. and J. (1822-1896) (1830-1870)
Renee Mauperin (76)
Introduction by EMILE ZOLA
GORKY, MAXIM (1868)
Creatures That Once Were Men and Four Other
Stories (48)
Introduction by G. K. CHESTERTON
HARDY, THOMAS (1840)
• The Mayor of Casterbridge (17)
Introduction by JOYCE KILMER
HUDSON, W. H. (1862)
Green Mansions (89)
Introduction by JOHN GALSWORTHY
IBANEZ, VICENTE BLASCO (1867)
The Cabin (69)
introduction by JOHN GARRETT UNDERHILL

Modern Library of t h e WorlcPs Best Books
IBSEN, HENRIK (1828-1906)
A Doll's House, Ghosts, An Enemy o£ the People (6) ;
Hedda Gabler, Pillars of Society, The Master Builder
(36)
Introduction by H. L. MENCKEN
The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, The League of Youth
(54)
JAMES, HENRY (1843-1916)
Daisy Miller and An International Episode (63)
Introduction by WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
KIPLING, RUDYARD (1865Soldiers Three (3)
LATZKO, ANDREAS (1876Men in War (88)

)
)

LOTI, PIERRE (1850)
Madame Chrepantheme (94)
MACY, JOHN (1877)
The Spirit of American Literature (56)
MAETERLINCK, MAURICE (1862)
A Miracle of St. Antony, Pelleas and Melisande, The
Death of Tintagiles, Alladine and Palomides, Interior,
The Intruder (11)
De MAUPASSANT, GUY (1850-1893)
Love and Other Stories (72)
Edited and translated with an Introduction by
MICHAEL MONAHAN
Mademoiselle Fifi, and Twelve Other Stories (8)
Une Vie (57)
Introduction by HENRY JAMES
MEREDITH, GEORGE (1828-1909)
Diana of the Crossways (14)
Introduction by ARTHUR SYMONS
MOORE, GEORGE (1853)
Confessions of a Young Man (16)
Introduction by FLOYD DELL
MORRISON, ARTHUR (1863)
Tales of Mean Streets (100)
Introduction by H. L. MENCKEN

Modern Library of the World's Best Books
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NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH (1844-1900)
Thus Spake Zarathustra (9)
Introduction by FRAU FOERSTER-NIETZSCHE
Beyond Good and Evil (20)
Introduction by
WILLARD HUNTINGTON WRIGHT
Genealogy of Morals (62)
NCRRIS, FRANK (1870-1902)
McTeague (60)
Introduction by HENRY S. PANCOAST
PATER, WALTER (1839-1894)
Marius the Epicurean (90)
The Renaissance (86)
Introduction by ARTHUR SYMONS
Samuel Pepys' Diary (103)
Condensed with an Introduction by
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
PREVOST, ANTOINE FRANCOIS (1697-1763)
Manon Lescaut (85)
In same volume with Daudet's Sapho
RODIN, T H E ART OF (1840-1917)
64 Black and White Reproductions (41)
Introduction by LOUIS WEINBERG
SCHNITZLER, ARTHUR (1862)
Anatol, Living Hours, The Green Cockatoo (32)
Introduction by ASHLEY DUKES
Bertha Garlan (39)
SCHOPENHAUER, ARTHUR (1788-1860)
Studies in Pessimism (12)
Introduction by T. B. SAUNDERS
SHAW, G. B. (1856)
An Unsocial Socialist (15)
SINCLAIR, MAY
The Belfry (68)
STEPHENS, JAMES
Mary, Mary (30)
Introduction by PADRIAC COLUM
STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS (1850-1894)
Treasure Island (4)
STIRNER, MAX (Johann Caspar Schmidt) (1806-1859)
The Ego and His Own (4Q)

Modern Library of the World's Best Books
STRINDBERG, AUGUST (1849-1912)
Married (2)
Introduction by THOMAS SELTZER
Miss Julie, The Creditor, The Stronger Woman,
Motherly Love, Paria, Simoon (52)
SUDERMANN, HERMANN (1857)
Dame Care (33)
SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES (1837-1909)
Poems (23)
Introduction by ERNEST RHYS
THOMPSON, FRANCIS (1859-1907)
Complete Poems (38)
TOLSTOY, LEO (1828-1910)
Redemption and Two Other Plays (77)
Introduction by ARTHUR HOPKINS
The Death of Ivan Ilyitch and Four Other Stories (64)
TURGENEV, IVAN (1818-1883)
Fathers and Sons (21)
Introduction by THOMAS SELTZER
Smoke (80)
Introduction by JOHN REED
VILLON, FRANCOIS (1431-1461)
Poems (58)
Introduction by JOHN PAYNE
VOLTAIRE, (FRANCOIS MARIE AROUET) (1694-1778)
Candide (47)
Introduction by PHILIP LITTELL
WELLS, H. G. (1866)
Ann Veronica (27)
The War in the Air (5)
New Preface by H. G. Wells for this edition
WHITMAN, WALT (1819)
Poems (97)
Introduction by CARL SANDBURG
WILDE, OSCAR (1859-1900)
An Ideal Husband, A Woman of No Importance (84)
Dorian Gray (1)
Fairy Tales and Poems in Prose (61)
Intentions (96)
Lady Windermere's Fan (83)
Introduction by EDGAR SALTUS
Poems (19)
Salome, The Importance of Being Ernest,