realms of human life. So he calls it well to take "right," "wrong," etc., in a definite, narrow, "bourgeois" sense, as in the saying "do right and fear no one": that is, to do one's duty according to the rough, definite scheme, by following which a community maintains itself—and he charges us not to think lightly of what two thousand years of moral training have bred in our mind![1] Although morality is now oppressive, i.e., to those of his type, he expresses the "deepest gratitude for the service it has hitherto rendered"; it has itself bred the force that now drives us to venture on the untried[2]—indeed, we need very much morality to be immoral in this fine way.[3] That Nietzsche means to preserve something of the subtle spirit of the old morality, we shall see still more clearly in the ensuing chapters.
Once we have a list of what he deems the four principal virtues—they are courage, insight, sympathy, solitude. Other formulations are: honesty, courage, generosity, courtesy; honesty, courage, justice, love.[4] I have already cited what he says of a "broken word."[5] There are actions we cannot permit to ourselves, he declares, even as means to the highest ends, e.g., betraying a friend; better perish and hope that there will be more favorable conditions for accomplishing the ends.[6] He comments on the shameless readiness of the ancient Greek nobles to break their word.[7] Though he sees the place of destruction, malice and hatred in the world, as well as of conservation and love, the highest thing to him is love—at least the highest love, the "great love"; it is this indeed that is the final sanction of war and inequality and all the successive stages and bridges of advancing life.[8] Justice stands out the higher to him as it is differentiated from revenge. At times he may seem to justify
- ↑ Ibid., § 267. Cf. the relative justification of the morality of the old Greek cities, as against the abstractions, universalizations, of Socrates and Plato, ibid., §§ 428-9.
- ↑ Ibid., §§ 404-5. Cf. as to the indispensableness of morality in man's early contest with nature and wild animals, § 403.
- ↑ Ibid., § 273.
- ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 284; Dawn of Day, § 556; Werke, XIV, 312.
- ↑ Werke, XIII, 196-7, § 433.
- ↑ See ante, p. 285, footnote 35.
- ↑ Dawn of Day, § 199; cf. § 165.
- ↑ Zarathustra, II, vii; cf. III, vii (Zarathustra takes to task one who despises great cities and everything in them, saying that one's contempt
