might construct more or less of a picture of the vanished group from data before them. Royal institutions might thus be reconstructed after an age of democracy had set in. The family institution might be reconstructed after the family had disappeared (if that could ever be).
II
It appears to have been in some such way as this that Nietzsche was led to the supposition of an original master-morality and slave-morality. Such distinct things do not exist now, but he fancied that they had existed. He was not an original investigator in history or sociology, but he was a wide reader, and had a keen scent for the meaning, and shades of meaning, of words. In wandering through the many moralities both finer and ruder, which have ruled hitherto on the earth or still rule, he thought he detected certain traits regularly recurring together and connected with one another; and at last two ground-types disclosed themselves and a fundamental distinction appeared—there was a morality of the master or ruling class and one of the slave or subject class. He found survivals of these moralities among us today—there are contrasted ways of feeling and judging and even of speaking, that appeared to him to receive their natural explanation in this way. Sometimes the contrasted standpoints are harmonized (at least attempts are made to harmonize them), sometimes they simply co-exist; they may co-exist in the same individual, who now judges in one way and now in another—it is a part of the criss-cross, the anarchy, of the present moral situation,a as he saw it, to which allusion has been made. He found also another type of morality—that of the priestly class. The good and evil of the priestly class were at bottom identical with the pure and impure—the terms having been understood at the start not so much in a symbolical, as in a simple physical sense. A man was "pure" who bathed himself, who forbade himself foods that caused diseases of the skin, who did not cohabit with unclean women of the lower class, who had a horror of blood—not more than this, at least not much more. In the course of time, "pure" came to have the moral and spiritual meanings with which we are all familiar—yet even
