No More Learning

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



## p. (#114) ################################################

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 ! 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 jwithout,,^
. turn inwards — this is what I mean by the^
growing. " internalisation " of man : consequently
we have the first growth in man, of what
subsequently was called his souLl The whole

inner world, originally as^ . thin as W it ha'a~

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 bul-



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

warksjwith^ whyh„the, socig,} organisation . protected
its elf against the old instincts of freedo m (punish-
ments belong pre-eminently to these bulwarks),
brought it about that all those instincts of wild,
free, pro wling man became turned backwards
against man himself. Enmity, cruelty, the delidCT^
in_p e. rse. cution, in s urprises, ch ange, des^. uctiOQT^

thejamiQg-j^lJhgsg„ffl§^i^ ag^'P^t tjasii:. jaaii

possessors : t his is the origin of the "bad conscience. 'j
It was man, who, lacking external enemies and
obstacles, and imprisoned as he was Jn , the
oppressive n arrowhesF^anH^monotony of custom,
in his own impatience lacerated, persecuted,
gnawed , frightened, arid 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 com-
pelled to create out of its own selfi_an. ady. eiiture,
a torture-chamber, a hazardous and perilous desert
— it was this foplj 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 spasm-
odic plunge into a new environment and new con-
ditions of existence^the result of a declaration^f
war^gainst the old m? flwefs",;7wHic¥'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,



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102 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

taking part against itself, produced in the world so
novel, profound, unheard-of, problematic, inconsist-
ent, 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 con-
jecture as yet — a drama too subtle, too wonderful,
too paradoxical to warrant its undergoing a non-
sensical 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 kypathesisuQf^
the origin of the bad conscience, that that alteraj^
tion was no gxaduai and no voluntary altststion,
and that it did . not manifest . itself „as,an^organic
adaptation to new conditions, but^as^,Ji,_bre^,'
a jump, a necessity, an inevitable fate, against
which there was no resistance and neyer a spark
of rese ntment. And secondarily, that the fitting
of a hithertolTrichecked and amorphous population
into a fixed form, starting as it had done iii^n act
of violence, could only be accomplished by acts
of violence and nothing else — that the oldest



## p. (#117) ################################################

"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, c
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 " St ate/^ That fantastic theory that
"makes it begin'"wiith a contract is, I think, dis-
posed of. He who can command, he who is a
master^b y "^natur. e,". , he who comes"oal tEe~scene
forceful in deed and gesture — what has he to
^o with contracts ? Such beings defy calculation,
they come like fate^ without cause, reason, notice,
excuse, they are there like the lightning is there,
too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too
"different," to be personally even hated. Their
work is an instinctive creating and impressing ,
of forms, they are the most involuntary, un-
conscious artists that there are : — their appearance
produces instantaneously a scheme of sovereignty
which is live, in which the functions 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 afe\
ignorant of the meaning of guilt, responsibiltiy, '
consideration, are these born organisers ; in them
predominates that terrible artist - egoism, that



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I04 ' THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

gleams like brass, and that . knows itself justified
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 i nto being laten t-^t~is~
already _. clear — this instinct of freedom forced
back, trodden back, imprisoned ,within its elf, an d
finally only able tP find vent and relief in itself;
this, only this, is the beginning of the " bad
conscience. "

Beware of thinking lightly of this phenomenon,
by reason of its initial painful ugliness. At
batt. om it is the s ame active force_^gbich is ai-^pfjjT
on a more grandiose scale in _ those potent artists
and organisers, and, builds^ „ states, which here,
internally, on a smaller and pettierjcale_aQd-5Kith.
a retrogressive tendency, _ makes itself -a-Jaad-^on-
science in the " labyrinth of the breast," to use
Goethe's phrase, and which builds negativ-eJdeals. ;
it is, I repeat, that identiral in. <^t mct of freedom (to
use my own language, the will t o power) : only
the material, on which this force with all its con-
structive 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 sensa-



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"GUILT," "BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE. (^ lOS

tional phenomenon, the other man, other men.
This secret self-tyranny, this crueltjj^of_the„aJltist,
thiis^ delight in giving a form to on e's self as a piece
of difficult, refractorvj and suffering material, in

- -. ,,- n-i |-irx~~— ^ <iiin<lliiii J i n''" ii '■'"'"■ n il *" ■■ i"' " "" " " "T '" ' "' " " ' ' "ii^i

burning in ^ wiU, a critique, a contradiction, a
contempt, a_ n egation ^. . Ihis silUda;~jauad_shastiZ-„
labour of love on the part of a soul^whose will is^
cloven "Tntwo within itself, which makes itself
suffer fromaeTigKt"in tfie inffiction of sufifering ;
this wholly '«c? ? ! ? FT5a'd''"consctehce Tias finally (as
oTie' "already anticipates)— true fountainhead as
it is of idealism and imagination — produced an
abundance of" novel ancT amazing T5eaufy^an3
affirm^tion^^jiiiS perhaps "Kas" really teen thg,,££sJL
to give b irth 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 oi how far
idealism and bea uty can be traced in _such
opposite ideas as '^ seTflessness" self -denial, self-
sacrifice, b ecomes less problematical ; and in-
dubitably in future we shall certainly know the
real and original character of Ithe delight experi- .
enced by the self-less, the self-denying, the self-
sacrificing: this delight is a phase of crueltyj
[—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 o nly the bad con science, only the will for,'
seIfciESiiZIES! ! SSSH^rnecessary conditronsj
for the -existence: of altruism as a value. \ "~ »



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Io6 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

19.

Undoubtedly the bad conscience is an illness,
but an illness like 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 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 exceed-
ingly remarkable and suspicious) into a relation-
ship, 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 con-
viction 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 recog-
nised the owing of a debt, which accumulates
continually by reason of these ancestors never



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" GUILT," " BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE. I07

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, qu& works of the ancestors,
equally their precepts and commands — are the
ancestors ever given enough ? This suspicion
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, accord-
ing 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 con-
trary, 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 invagination — the ancestor becomes at



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I08 THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

last necessarily transfigured into a god. Perhaps
this is the very origin of the gods, that is, an
origin from fear ! 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 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 con-
sciousness 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 com-



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"GUILT," "BAD CONSCIENCE, AND THE LIKE. 109

pulsion or through submission and " mimicry "\
have accommodated themselves to the religion of ]
their masters ; through this channel these inherited
tendencies inundate the world. iThe feeling of
owing a debt to the deity has grown continu-
ously for several centuries, always in the same
proportion in which the idea of God and the con-
sciousness of God have grown and become exalted
among mankind! (The whole history of ethnic
fights, victories, reconciliations, amalgamations,
everything, in fact, which precedes the eventual
classing of all the social elements in each great
race-synthesis, are mirrored in the hotch-potch
genealogy of their gods, in the legends of their
fights, victories, and reconciliations. Progress to-
wards universal empires invariably means progress
towards universal deities ; despotism, with its sub-
jugation 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



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no THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

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 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 evolu-
tion ; 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



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

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 tortured
humanity has found a temporary alleviation, that
stroke of genius calledlChristianity : — God person-
ally 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 ! . . .