his time—gives it as his opinion that it is the weaker and more numerous mass who are making the laws and making them for their own advantage, distributing praise and blame, too, from the standpoints of their own interests; they go counter to old ideas of what is just and right and will have nothing of the superior privileges of superior men; equality is their watchword; for one to have more than others (τὸ πλεονεκτειν, translated, in misleading fashion, "dishonesty" by Jowett) is in their eyes shameful and unjust ("Gorgias," pp. 483-4). That Callicles did not oppose law, but that kind of law, is indicated by his questioning whether what a rabble of slaves and nondescripts, who are of no use except perhaps for their physical strength, gather to impose, are laws (489).
m Really the later type of prophets, for the first ones "were probably little more than frenzied seers" (so C. H. Toy, History of the Religion of Israel, p. 34—see e.g., I Samuel xix, 24) .
n "The words anav, sweet, and ani, poor, both springing from the same root signifying modest, become in this limited world of a fanatical people synonymous. The concepts poor, afflicted, oppressed, mild, resigned, pious are no longer distinguished, and the words which properly signify poor (dal, ebion) become equivalent to holy men, friends of God. The anavim or hasidim form the elect of humanity; they are the sweet of the world, the righteous, the upright, the pious. The Hebrew words (asir, gadol, avis) become designations of blame; the rich, the merry, the bold mocker (lec) are for the pious objects of the most furious hate" (Wilhelm Weigand, Friedrich Nietzsche, ein psychologischer Versuch, pp. 58-9).
o Occasionally Christian scholars themselves read between the lines. For example, Weinel, after mentioning the fact that Christianity in its first period lived among the lower strata of the Roman Empire, says, "We must grant that from many an early Christian writing there speaks not the contempt of a higher ideal for what is impure and common, but the hate of the oppressed and trampled upon, the persecuted and exploited. One need only read the Apocalypse of John or the Epistle of James." He adds, however, that this was contrary to the principle and word of Jesus (op. cit., p. 179).
p In Human, etc., § 45, Nietzsche had held that our present morality grew up among the ruling races and classes. The later view developed in the text is contradictory—we may perhaps say that he came to see the present moral situation more distinctly; but the difference may be partly owing to the fact that in the passage cited he conceives of the subject-classes or races as mere heaps of individuals without fellow-feeling, afraid and suspicious of every one.
CHAPTER XX
a At the same time Nietzsche remarks that the air of gloom and severity usually investing duties may lessen, or even pass away. When duty ceases to be hard to us, when after long practice it changes into a pleasant inclination and a need, then the rights of others to which our duties, now our inclinations, correspond, become something different, namely, occasions for agreeable sensations. When the Quietists no longer experienced anything oppressive in their Christianity and found only pleasure in God, they took for their motto "All for the glory of God ": whatever they then did it was sacrifice no longer—the motto might equally have been "All for our pleasure"! To demand that duty shall always be burdensome (lästig)—as Kant does—means that it shall never become habit and custom (Dawn of Day, § 339).
b The state, for instance, did not arise in contract, rather in violence,
