sche makes no question, that societies live by what I have ventured to call essential morality, that in all ordinary circumstances their members are strictly bound by it. But if the course of the world were determined by this morality, that would be something ordinary indeed. If we deny the böse forces—those that bring harm and suffering—all play, we in effect accept the world as we find it, wishing only to preserve it or develope it along existing lines. If there is to be change, great change, these forces must be allowed room.
V
Indeed, Nietzsche is skeptical of absolute antitheses in general—that of good and evil is only a special case. He calls the belief in them the ground-belief of metaphysicians—meaning by this apparently that higher things, when contrasted absolutely with lower things, become incapable of derivation from them, and hence to explain them as they appear, we must posit another, higher order of things.[1]h He questions absolute antitheses all along the line. Instinct and consciousness are not really opposites; consciousness may be secretly guided by instinct and forced by it into certain paths.[2] Health and sickness are not really, or at least necessarily, opposed; a measure of health is the efflorescence of the body, the elasticity, courage, and joyfulness of the mind, i.e., the extent to which sickness may be endured, overcome, and made tributary to health: sickness may be a stimulus to the "great health."[3] Even truth, at least what we call such, is so little opposed to error, that it has grown out of it, our "true world" being the result of a simplification, i.e., of leaving some things out of account, ignoring them, willing to ignore them, our science being not so much the antithesis of ignorance, as a refinement of it, the will to know resting on a much more powerful will not to know.[4] The state as a reign of law is contrasted with force and violence, but it originated in force and violence—it is a finer form of them, not their negation.[5] The early morality of mores had
