that has to be taken personally), when we notice the connection in which its principal use is made, and follow the highly refined discussion of the value and significance of truth in which it plays a part—a discussion which I have just inadequately summarized (Genealogy etc., III, § 24). In an earlier chapter [XV] we observed the extent of his skepticism as to our possession of truth, and now we see his skepticism as to its value. He could offer an hypothesis only as to the nature of reality, and now he is aware that any kind of a judgment of value presupposes some standard which is created by the mind. Hypotheses, mental constructions or creations are then all he has—and he knows that his right to have them may be questioned by the sort of asceticism that goes by the name of science today. If we bear all this in mind—if we remember that to his mind "truth" is not strictly true, but provisional, shifting, and that instead of an antithetical true and false, there are only grades of likelihood, lighter and darker shadings, different valeurs (to borrow the language of painters),[1] if we remember also that a standard of value is not something independently existing, but a projection of the mind and that he wanted to be free to project his standard, we may perhaps understand (if we do not justify) how in a kind of bravado, reckless of whether he was understood or not, he took up the revolting assassin-motto and made it in a sense his own. Nietzsche proposed life, ascending and victorious life, as the goal and measure of things; he aspired to be one of those philosophers who are at the same time commanders and lawgivers, saying "so should things be," who determine a whither and a reason for man,[2] and the goal and law he proposed were more or less different from those that have been credited in the past, particularly in the Christian past; indeed, the Christian world confronted him with the view that the law for man existed already, laid down by God himself, and it was a law enjoining certain things, like benevolence and pity, which, however good and necessary within limits, cut athwart advancing life, when taken absolutely, as they were by Christianity. And so he turned about and said, No, this is not God's law, nor anybody's save those who posit it; there is no
