No More Learning

(#71) #################################################

"GOOD AND EVIL," "GOOD AND BAD. " S7

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 tkat consumma-
tion 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 con-
clusion, — 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. " I

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 con-
versations 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— ■pMhs. ps this book may serve to give a for-
cible impetus in such a direction. With regard to a possibility
of this character, the following question deserves considera-
tion. 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 etymo-
logical investigation f "

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 philo-
sophers may be trusted to act as the spokesmen and inter-
mediaries in these particular instances, after, of course, they
have quite succeeded in transforming the relationship between



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58 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

philosophy and physiology and medicine, which is originally
one of coldness and suspicion, into the most friendly and fruit-
ful 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, "What 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/()r 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 grefatest 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 stand-
points : we leave it to the naivety 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.



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SECOND ESSAY.

"GUILT," "BAD CONSCIENCE," AND
THE LIKE.



## p. (#74) #################################################



## p. (#75) #################################################

The breeding of an animal that ca« promis&rr^r
is not this just that very paradox of a task which
nature has set it self liT^regard foTnan ? Is^oT
tKisThe very problem of man^r^'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 oi forgetfulness
which works in oppositioiTT orE Forgetfulness
IS no mere vis inerticB, as the superficial believe,
rather is it a power of nhstniction. a rtivp anH in
the strictest sense of the word , positive-; ^— ? , p^^^f .
res nonsible for the fact that what we have lived .
experienced, taken into ourselves, no more enter s
into xoasKigusaess. during the process of digest ion
(it might be called psychic absorption) than all the
whole manifold process by which our physical
nutrition, the so-called " incorporation," is carried
on. Th e temporary shutting of the doors and
windows ~ of cpn ad-QUSneas. 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 co nsciousness^
so a s to make room aga in for the new, an? ^Bovg
a jOar the moreT Totrlerfg^fions and lunctionariesj
tor ' '



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62 ; THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

is the utility, as I have said, of the a ctive forge tful-
rieSST-which is a very sentinel and nurse of psychic
oFaBTTT^ose, etiquette; and this shows at once
why it is that tfriere ^ can _exist_ no_ha2£iiness, no
gladnessj no hope^no pridfiA_n o real present, withou F
forgetfulness. The man in whom this preventati ve
■apparatus is damaged and discarded, is to be com-
pared~to~ar-d7Spgptte7a'nd" it" Is""s'omething more
than a comparison — he can " get rid of" nothing.
But this very animal who finds it necess ary 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 mem ory, witH
whose help forgetfulness is, in cer tain mstan ces,
kept in check — in the cases, namely, wh ere prom iseg-
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 con-
tin miTg~ana"'a wish to continue what has on ce bee n
willed, an actual rnemory ofihewM}, so that
between the original . "-I- will," " I shalL-dQ,'LaQi_
the actual discharge of the will, its ^ao;. we joap
e asily i nterpose a world_of ne_w 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 b e able to regulate the
future in this way, must man have first learnt to
dis tinguish between necessitated and accidental
^phenomena, to thi nk causally, to see the distant
as~prg5eiit and to anticipate it, to fix with certainty



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"GUILT," " BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE. 63

what is the end, and what is the means to that
end ; abovS all, lu ifccfeonTlEo^have power to calculate
— ^^Eow thoroughly must matTIGave first become
calculable, disciplined, necessitated even for himself
and his own conception of himself, that, like a man
entering into a promise, he could guarantee himself
as a future.

2.

This is simply the long history of the origin of
respormbttttyT Thai Lask uf breeding^ an animal
whiclf^a n n? ake p romises, 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 1 6),
the actual work of man on himself during the
longest period of the human race, his whole pre-
historic work, finds its meaning, its great justifica-
tion (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, how-
ever, 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 individual, that reseliiBles"only
himself, that h as' got' roose~ffonr'the morality of

* The German is : " Sittlichkeit der Sitte. " H. B. S.



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64 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

custom, the autonomous " super-moral " indnddual
(for "autohombus" and "moral" are mutually
exclusive terms), — in short, the man of the personal,
long, and independent will, competent to promuep^
and we find in him a proud consciousness (vibrat-
ing 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
h as grown to freedpm; _^br> jp rpally mmp^fK^f^f »»
promise, thi s lord of the/i^-ge will, this sovereign —
^ low is rtpossibre f or^^trfj nbt to Unow how great
is his su^ eriority^,Qygr_,,eve]ything^tirapahlq_nfJ
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 ? rTbeJifree "
man, the o^<rner of a long unbreakable wiU,^dsin_
this possession his^. ri[«»i&r(/ 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 berelied on,
because he knows himself strong enough to keep it
even in the teeth of disasters, eveiT in'gie '^"SetlT
of fate," — so with equal necessity will he have the



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"GUILT," "BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKf. 65

heel of his foot ready for the lean and empty jack-
as^, 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 oflhejaxtradi
ordinary pri vilege o f respon sibility, the consci QUSr'
ness of thisjare freedom, of this power ovpr bim-gplf
aiiH^ OTcr fate, Jbas. sunk_right dgwnjta his innermost^
depths, and has become an instinct, a_dominating
instinctrr^what name will he give to it, to this
dominating instinct, iTTie" needfTcT Mve "a worH^ "for"
it ? But there is no doubt about it — the sovereign .
man calls it his conscience. J

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
t o guarantee one's self with all due pride, and also
a t the same time to say ves to one's self— -that is, as
hasjbeen said^aripefruit, bi|t also a laie_hm. t : —
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
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 im-
pression to be so deeply fixed upon this ephemeral
E



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66 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

understanding, half dense, and half silly, upon this
incarnate forgetfulness, that it will be perman-
ently present ? " As 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 that 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 solemnity7~~
seriousness, mystery, and gloomy colour's" are ttow->^
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, th&^JfliLr^^
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 neces-
sary to make for himself a memory, he never
accomplishes it without blood, tortures, and
sacrifice ; the most dreadful sacrifices and for-
feitures (among them the sacrifice of the first-bom),
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 polenT""
mnemon ics In a certain sense the whole of asceti-
cism is to be ascribed to this : certain ideas have got
to be made inextinguishable, omnipresent, " fixed,"
with the object of hypnotising the whole nervous



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"GUILT," "BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE. ^J

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 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 (" quarter-



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68 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

ing"), 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 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



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"GUILT," " BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE. 69

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 very
material idea of " owe " ? Or that punishment
developed as a retaliation absolutely independ-
ently of any preliminary hypothesis of the free-
dom 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 dis-
tinctions 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 in-
evitable, 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 t
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

* The German world " schuld " means both debt and
guilt. Cp. the English "owe" and "ought," by which I
occasionally render the double meaning. — H. B. S.



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70 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

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 ineradicable idea has
drawn its strength, this idea of an equivalency
between injury and pain ? I have already re-
vealed 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



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" GUILT," " BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE. J I

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 con-
ditions even his salvation, his soul's 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 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 meti-
culosity 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 con-
tingency cut off, " si plus minusve secuerunt, 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 : in-
stead of an advantage directly compensatory of his
injury (that is, instead of an equalisation in money,



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72 / THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

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
/aire le mal pour le plaisir de le 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 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.

of the ideas of " guilt, " " conscien ce ," " duty. " t he^
""sacredness ^ dut y,"— their commenceme nt,-like__
tEe~ commen cement of all great things in the
wgrld^is ^thoroughly -an d cont inu ouoly saturate^ZT
^svithrrbleed. 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



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" GUILT," " BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE. 73

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. "
pTo put the question yet again, why can suffering be
a compensation for " owing " ? — Because the inflic-
tion 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 creditQjJ These observations
are purely conjectural ; for, apart from the painful
nature of the task, it is hard to plumb such pro-
found depths : the clumsy introduction of the idea
of " revenge " as a connecting-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 con-
stituted the great joy and delight of ancient man,
was an ingredient which seasoned nearly all his
pleasures, and conversely the extent of the nalvet^
and innocence with which he manifested his need for
cruelty, when he actually made as a matter of prin-
ciple " disinterested malice " (or, to use Spinoza's
expression, the sympathia malevolens) into a normal



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p

74 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

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;
m Beyond Good and Evil, Aph. i88 (and even
earlier, in The Dawn of Day, Aphs. i8, TJ, 113),
I have cautiously indicated the continually grow-
ing spiritualisation and " deification " of cruelty,
which pervades the whole history of the higher
civilisation (and in the larger sense even con-
stitutes i. ^ 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-f^, 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 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 con-
temporaries — they read it with the best con-
science in the world as the gayest of books ; they
almost died with laughing at it. ) The sight oil
suffering does one good, the infliction of sufleririg
does one i ' n ore--good^^^iMsTS''a "hard maxim, but
Tione-the less aTTundamehtal maxim, old, powerful,
ati' d " hu man, all -L uu-h tnn^n'^'7 one, moreover, to
which perhaps evenThe^pes'as well would sub-
scribe : for it is said that in in venting bizarre



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"GUILT," "BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE; 75

y

Cj-iioltiffg tlipy arp gnnng ghnnHant pfoniLjif' 4heir

future h um anity, to which, a s_it were, they are

play ing the p relude. VV^ithout cruelty, no feast. :

so teaches the oldest and longest history of man
—and i n punishment too is there so much of the

Entertaining, as I do, these thoughts, I am, let
me say in parenthesis, fundamentally opposed to
helping our pessimists to new water for the dis-
cordant and groaning mills of their disgust with
life; on the contrary, it should be shown specifi-
cally 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 propoxtloji, ,tp. -- the
growth of man's shame before j^n. Thg^ tired
"pessimistic dutloolc, the mistrust of the riddle
of life, tKg~i(! :y fiegatiiM~of "^^sgusteg~enn'ui, all
thos^ ^re jiot the signs of the most evil age of
the human race : much rather do they come
first to the light of day, as the swamp-flowers,
which they are, when the swamp to which they
belong, comes into existence — I mean the diseased
refinement and moralisation, thanks to which the
" animal man " has at last learnt to be ashamed
of all his instincts. On the road to angel-hood^
(not to use in this context a harder -wDni)-inan
has developed that dyspeptic stomach and coated
tongue. wEicE~have made not j jnjvjthe^jov and
"ioQC^. C£_eLj. he _animd repulsive to him, but



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J6 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

I also lifeitselfii — 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 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



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"GUILT," "BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE, •jj''

negligible. ) ( We may perhaps be allowed to MftlTir^
the possibility of the craving for cruelty not neces-
sarily 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 sus-
picious of their real nature (" Tragic pity " is one
of these euphemisnis :J another is " les nostalgies de
la croix "). What really raises one's indignation
against sufferingisTiof~stTfiferhig-4tttriiisicaHy743^
thensensete ssncss o f Bu ffertKgT'sucira senselessness,
However, existed neitHer" in Christianity, which
interpreted suffering into a whole mysterious
salvation-apparatus^ fiof^'Tn^the T)eIiefs~'"of l:he
na? ve"ancient man, wBo only knew how to find a
meaning in suffering from the standpoint of the
spectator, or the inflictor of the suffering. In
QT3er~to get the secret, undiscovered, and un-
witnessed suffering out of the world it was almost
compulsory to invent gods and a hierarcKy~of"
i ntermediate beingsp 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 w^is^with.
t he help of su ch in ventions that li fe got to learn
\'a& tour de f orce, which hasbecome j)art of its
st ock-in jrade, thefog^r de force of self-justification,
of the justification of evil ; nbwadays™th'is"'would
pertiaps require other Auxiliary devices (for
instance, life as a riddle, life as a problem of



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yS , THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

knowledge). " Every evil is justified in the sight
ot 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 iavention,-
so audacious and^ so fatal, which was then
aBsoIutely new to Europe, the . inventioa. of J]^e
will^" of the absolute spontaneity of man in_good_
and evilj_simply havebeen made for the specific^
purpose of justifiying the idea, that" the interest of



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" guilt; " BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE. 79

t he gods in hiimanify and t^ifman virl^iiP— ums-Ji
ine xhaustibl e ?

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
world 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 philo-
sophers, not to ascribe to their gods such a deter-
ministic 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 happi-
ness 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 ower : 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, ex-
changing — all this preoccupied the primal thoughts
of man to such an extent that in a certain sense



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80 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

it constituted thinking itself : it was here that was
trained the oldest form of sagacity, it was here in
this 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 some-
thing of this self-pride : man denoted himself as
the being who measures values, who values and
measures, as the "assessing" animal /«r excellence.
Sale and purchase, together with their psycho-
logical concomitants, are older than the origins of
any form of social organisation and union : it is
rather from the most rudimentary form of indi-
vidual right that the budding consciousness of
exchange, commerce, debt, right, obligation, com-
pensation was first transferred to the rudest and
most elementary of the social complexes (in their
relation to similar complexes), the habit of com-
paring force with force, together with" that~of
measuring, of calculating. His eye was now
focussed to this perspective ; and with that ponder-
ous 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 generalisa-
tion, "everything has its price, all can be paid for,"
the oldest and most naive moral canon ol 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



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" GUILT," " BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE. 8 1

powerful, to compel them to agree among them-
selves to a settlement. I

9.

Measured always by the standard of antiquity
(this antiquity, moreover, is present or again
possible at all periods), the community stands to
its members in that important and radical relation-
ship of creditor to his " owers. " Man lives in a
community, man enjoys the advantages of a com-
munity (and what advantages ! we occasionally
underestimate them nowadays), man lives pro-
tected, 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 " (Slend), — 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 sub-
sidiary: 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:

* German: " Verbrecher. " — H. B. S.
F



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82 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

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 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 v<z 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.

ID.

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



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" GUILT," " BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE. 83

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
{compositid) ; 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 up to a
certain point, to isolate the offender from his act.
As the power and the self-consciousness of al'
community increases, so proportionately does the!
penal law become mitigated ; conversely every}
' weakening and jeopardising of the community!
revives the harshest forms of that law. The
c redit or has always g rown more human e j>fe-
portionately as he has grown more rich : finally
thg_jjso! mtJiLinjur3^he_can_ento
suffering_becomes the criterio n of his wealth . It i
is possible to conceive of a society blessed with
so great a consciousness of its own power as to
indulg£liLthgr iiiusL_aijbl-Uc i a l £L l u jary Sf'Kt! ing~
its wrongjdoers 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, every-
thing 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. — pThe self-destruction of Justice ! we know



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84 } THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

the pretty name it calls itself — Grace I it remains,
as is obvious, the privilege of the strongest, better
still, their super-law. I

II.

A deprecatory word here, against, the sttUBptSi
that have lately been made, to_Jjijd. -th e- origin of —
justice on quite another^ basis— -namely,jaij_Jtliat_-
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 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 oi fusticelas
though Justice were at bottom merely^ adevglog^
ment of the consciousness of injury), . and-thus-,
with the rehabilitation of revenge to reinstate
generally and collectively alLthe reactive ^motiona. .
I object to this last point least of all. It even
seems meritorious when regarded from the stand-
point of the whole problem of biology (from
which standpoint the value of these emotions has
up to the present been oinderestimated). And
that to which I alone call attention, is the circum-
stance that it is the spirit of revenge itself, from
which develops this new nuance of scientific
equity (for the benefit of hate, envy, mistrust,



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"GUILT," "BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE. 85

jealousy, suspicion, rancour, revenge). This
scientific " equity " stops immediately and makes
way for the accents of deadly enmity and pre-
judice, so soon as another group of emotions
comes on the scene, which in my opinion are of
a much higher biological value than these re-
actions, 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. Diihr-
ing. Value of Life ; Course of Philosophy, and
passim^ So much against this tendency in
general : but as for the particular maxim of
Diihring'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 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, con-
tempt, and calumny, the lofty and clear objec-
tivity 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



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86 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

hostility, malice, or innuendo to drive the blood
into his brain and the fairness from it. Thd
active man, the att acking, aggressive man is aJway g
a hiin13re3'^grees nearer to justice than the man
^who^j^rdji-H^JTie certainly has no need to
"adopt the tactics, necessary in the case of the
reacting man, of making false and biassed valua-
tions of his object. It is, in point of fact, for this
reason that the aggressive man has at alTTftlies
enjoyed the "stronger, bolder^ more aristocratic,
and also freer outlook, "tTie beiier cbhscience. ]
pjn the other hand, we already surmise who it
really is that has on his conscience the invention
of the " bad conscience," — the resentful man jj
Finally, let man look at himself in history. _3n_
what sphere up to the present has the whole
a3milristrat4on-of4aw, the actual need of law, found
its earthly home ? Perchance in the sphere of
the reacting man ? Not for a minute : rather fn
that of the active, strong, spontaneous, aggressive
rnajij^^ I deliberately defy the above-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, Jthat judged historically law
in the wo rld represents the very war ammst
the reactive Jeelings,"tHe very war waged on those
feelings by the powers of activity and aggression,
which devote some of their strength to dam ming" "
and keeping within bounds this effervescence of
hysterical reactivity, and tolofcfnglt to some com-
promise. - Ev«ry where where justice is practised and
justice is maintained, it is to be observed that the



## p. (#101) ################################################

87

s tronger power, when confronted with the weaker
^wers whiV . h are inferior to it (whether they be
groups, or individuals), search^^Jiai-JSifiaESJis^to ,
jvut_a n^ end to . the- . s finsdeaa-iLUiy- jaLjceaeotment,
while it carries on its object, p artly by taking the
victim of resentment out of the clutches_of revenge,
p^Qy' by"suTi)'stituting 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 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



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88 ' THE GENEALOGY Of MORALS.

_J

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 exploita-
tion, an annihilation can be nothing wrong, inas-
[jnuch as life is essentially (that is, in its cardinal
[/functions) something which functions by injuring,
{oppressing, exploiting, and annihilating, and is
labsolutely 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 subordin-
ated 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 Diihring's communistic model of treating
every will as equal with every 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 punish-
ment — two problems which are or ought to be



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" GUILT," " BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE. 89

kept distinct, but which unfortunately are usijally
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
ffitoryTKan"tfigTolIowIng, which, difficult though
it is to master^skoz^d none' 11161633 \i€ mastered
in eve ry detaif. ^:r7T. he origin of the existence of
a thing a nd its fina l utility, its practical applica-
tion and incorporation in a system of ends, are
toio f(^/(? opposed to each other — everything, any-
tliihg, which exists and which prevails anywhere,
~"'mlt"^a:tways 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 _gigailic. -WDrld- consists of
overpowe ring and dOnt hrating, and again all over-
E9iK££mg. . and. dP. inination is a new interpretation
and_a. djustm6nt, which must necessarily obscure or
absolutely extinguish the subsisting " meaning "
and " end. ^" "The most perfect comprehension
of the "utility of any physiological organ (or
also of a legal institution, social custom, political

* An allusion to DerZweck im Recht, by the great German
jurist, Professor Ihering.



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9°1

THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

Habit, form in art or in religious worship) does
not for a minute imply any simultaneous com-
prehension of its origin : this may seem un-
comfortable and unpalatable to the older men, —
for it has been the immemorial belief that under-
standing 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 con-
ceived as invented with a view to punishing.
But all ends and all utilities are oxAv si£ns^ _ ^fet
a Will to Power has mastered a less pow erful
force, has impressed thereon out of its own self
the meaning of a function ; and the vyhglff, Jllffloq? .
of a " ThTrig,"" an organ, a custom, can on the
same principle be regarded as a continuous "sjgn-
chain " of perpetually iiew interpre. tationa,. _and,
[adjustments, whose causes, so far from needing
to have even a mutual connection, sometimes
follow and alternate with each other"'aEsolulely
haphazard. Similarly, the evolution' of a^^TErngT*"
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
«^nd cost : it is rather the succession of processes
of subjugation,~mbre or less profound, morejBT
Iess*°mufiiairy independent, which-Tiperate'^orrthe
tEin"g'Itieir;jj tTs,^further,2the"reg}gtatrce" -w
each case , invariably displayed^ this subjugat ion,
the Protean wriggles by way of defence and
reaction, and, further, the results of successful
counter-efforts. The form is fluid, but the mean-



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"GUILT," "BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE. (91

ing is even more so — e ven insi | de , every ind ividual''
organism the case is the same : with every genuine
growtH of the whole, the ^^Junction^' _of ^he
individual organs" beconies shifted, — in certain
cases a partial~perisKiiTg'of these organs, a diminu-
tion of their numbers (for instance, through
annihilation of the connecting members), can be
a symptom of growing strength and perfection.
What . 1 mean is this : even partial loss of
utiH^j^ decay,^nd_^ degeneratio^lToss of ^ function
and, purposej_iin_ajword^_ death, appertain__to_^e
conditions of the genuine progressus ; which always
appears fn the shape of a will and way to greater
power, and is always realised at_ the expense _^,
innumerabl e 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 progre ss. 3 I
emphasise all the more this cardinal characteristic
of the historic method, for the reason that in its
essence it r uns counter to predominant instincts
and_prevaiHng taste, which_ much prefer to put up
with absolute casualness. e ven with the mechanical
senselessness of all phenomena, than with the theory
of a power-will, 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 trans-
formed itself into the guise of intellectualism, the
most abstract intellectualism, that even nowadays
it penetrates and has the right to penetrate step



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92 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

by step into the most exact and apparently the
most objective sciences : this 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 injtne theory
of""adapt-atio » ' ' - b ctng— pusEed forward mto the
vairtrf^he" argument, exploited ; adaptation — that
means to say, a second-class activity, a mere
capacity for " reacting "t; in fact, life itselt has""
been defined (by Herbert Spencer) as an in-
creasingly effec tive internal adaptation to external
circumstances. r This definition, however, fails to
realise the reaf essence of life , its will to powerj
It fails to appreciate _the paramount superiority
enjoyed by those plastic forces~bf spontaneity,
aggression, and encroachment" with "TEeir new~~
interpre^Ea^tcfRs" and" tendencies, To"the operation*
of which adaptation is~ only a natural corollary:
consequently the sovereign_office of UEilMghest
functionaries' iritTie organism itself (among which
the life-will appears as an active and forinative
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,



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" GUILT," " BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE. 93

the act, the " drama," a certain rigid sequence of
methods of procedure ; on the qther hand, the fluid
element, the meaning, the end, the expectation
which is attached to the operation of such pro-
cedure. 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 a. nd 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 hitherto
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 civilisa-
tion (for instance, contemporary Europe) is not
content with manifesting merely one meaning,
but manifests a whole synthesis " of 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 defini-
tion. (It is nowadays impossible to say definitely
the precise reason for punishment: all ideas, in
which a whole process is promiscuously compre-
hended, elude definition ; it is only that which



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94 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

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 predominates
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. — Punish-
ment, as compensation for the injury sustained by
the injured party, in any form whatsoever (including
the form of sentimental compensation). — Punish-
ment, 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 com-
pensation 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



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" GUILT," " BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE. 95

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 administra-
tion. — Punishment, as the payment of a fee stipu-
lated for by the power which protects the evil-doer
from the excesses of revenge. — 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



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g6 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

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 wrong-doers and the victims
of punishment ; prisons and houses of coiTection
are not tke soil on which this worm of remorse
pullulates for choice — this is the unanimous
opinion 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, j 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 un-
hesitating conclusion, that it was simply through
punishment that the evolution of the conscious-
ness 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 pre-
vented from feeling that his deed, the character of
his act, is intrinsically reprehensible : for he sees



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"GUILT," " BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE. 97

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, rack-
ing, murdering. — All this he sees treated by his
judges, not as acts njeriting censure and con-
demnation in themselves, but only in a particular
context and application. It was not on this soil
that grew the " bad conscience," that most sinister
and interesting plant of our 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 irrespons-
ible 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.

IS.

This truth came insidiously enough to the
consciousness of Spinoza (to the disgust of his
commentators, who (like Kuno Fischer, for instance)
G



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98 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

give themselves no end of trouble to misunder-
stand him on this point), when one afternoon (as
he sat raking up who knows what memory) he in-
dulged 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 tanta-
mount 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 conscienticB ? " The antithesis of
gaudiutn" said he at last to himself, — " A sadness
accompanied by the recollection of a past event
which has turned out contrary to all expecta-
tion " {Eth. III. , Propos. XVIIL 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 some-
thing which went wrong contrary to my anticipa-
tion," 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 now-
adays, 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



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" GUILT," " BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE. 99

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, sus-
picion, 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 tentative and provisional expression to my own
hypothesis concerning the origin of the bad con-
science : it is difficult to make it fully appreciated,
and it requires continuous meditation, attention,

and digestion. T regard the )iad coiTi''tpnrp ag

tiie^jerious_Jllog§s„,. ,ffih^

contract under^ the stress of the most, radical
cha nge whic h he has ever expejieaced. -^r-that .
c hange, when he found ^himself finally imprisoned
w ithin the pale of society and_of peaceJ

Just like the plight of the water-animals, when
they were compelled either to become land-
animals or to perish, so was the plight of these



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lOO ) THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

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 un-
consciously to safety — they were reduced, were
those unhappy creatures, to thinking, inferring,
carculating," putting together causes andresujts^
reduced to that poorest and most eixati£_£ttga»
. of theirs," their "c'oiisciousnesfi. ",. 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 !