We in America and England are familiar with a more comprehensible and less ambitious form of the same belief in Matthew Arnold's attempt to find chiefly moral causes for the downfall of men and nations—to make life and history so far a parable of a moral order. It is a form of faith to which some of us have clung the more, if we have had to renounce much that we once held sacred; for with it we could still feel morality to be central in the scheme of things, and so far have an object of quasi-religious reverence. Whether, we have said to ourselves, a God inflicts harm and suffering on man for wrongdoing or not, they are inflicted—there is a natural and necessary connection between righteousness and life, and between unrighteousness and death; even if men succeed outwardly in wrongdoing, their conscience does not leave them at ease, and sooner or later their success is undone. But Nietzsche's criticism follows us even into this stronghold. It is true that wrong, in the strict sense, i.e., breaking an agreement, brings naturally inner unrest to one doing it, and ordinarily has to be compensated for as well.[1] But wrong in the broad sense in which it is often used, wrong as injury and intent to injure simply, does not necessarily have these consequences. If there is no agreement, explicit or implicit, to the contrary—and there is implicit agreement between all members of the same group or community—injury need cause no bad conscience. There was no bad conscience (according to Nietzsche's view[2], when early superior races fell on wandering populations and deprived them of their liberty, as described in the earlier part of the chapter—not even if they did all manner of violence to them. Even within the same society, if it is a caste society and the division of classes is recognized as beneficent or at least necessary, the ruling class may accept sacrifices from the classes below them without twinges of conscience, and the lower classes may not feel wronged in having to make them.[3] It is an error in psychology to think that böse men are necessarily wretched inwardly
- ↑ Cf. Nietzsche's personal confession, "Let one talk as one will about all kinds of immorality: but to be able to endure it! For example, I could not endure a broken word, or even a murder: wasting away (Siechthum) and ruin would sooner or later be my lot!—quite apart from a knowledge of the misdeed or punishment for it" (Werke, XII, 224, § 486).
- ↑ Cf. Genealogy etc., I, § 11.
- ↑ Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 258.
