much that was hard, tyrannous, stupid about it; all the same by it man was educated and turned into a reckonable, responsible creature.[1] Some of our highest and purest moral conceptions, such as duty, responsibility, obligation, have (as we shall see later) the trail of blood on them. From impulses of hatred and revenge in ancient Israel—hatred of what was great and powerful—came a new love, the deepest and sublimest kind of love, not as a contradiction but as a climax, for by the doctrine of love the old powers were dethroned and the revenge accomplished.[2] High things grow from low things everywhere. Good conscience had bad conscience for a first stage.[3] Man descends, or ascends, from the animal—he is a higher animal. His mental and moral processes are not antithetical to physiological or vital processes, but a transmutation, sublimation of them, a carrying them to finer issues. Mind and body alike appropriate, absorb, and reject what is not appropriable. Man is after everything, everybody that can serve for his nourishment, and the impulse to own is but a form of this craving; knowledge is in turn a form of ownership, and love a feeling for what we own, or wish to own. Nietzsche suggests that all moral impulses may possibly be traced back to the wish to have and to hold; in any case, the four Socratic virtues—justice, prudence, self-control, courage—have beginnings in the animal world, are the result of the impulses for food and for escaping enemies, and it may not be unpermissible to designate the whole moral phenomenon as animal.[4]
So good and evil are not really antithetical. The mind has been educated, sharpened in the past by distinguishing between them,[5] and the distinction has its validity, but it is not an absolute validity. Good and evil are complementary more than opposite.[6] Each is necessary, useful, good (in the final sense). Let us be naturalistic, says Nietzsche, and concede a good right even to what we have to contend with, whether within or
