“GOOD AND EVIL,” “GOOD AND BAD”.10

The revolt of the slaves in morals begins in the very principle of resentment becoming creative and giving birth to values^a resentment experienced by creatures who, deprived as they are of the proper outlet of action, are forced to find their compensation in an imaginary revenge. While every aristocratic morality springs from a triumphant affirmation of its own demands, the slave morality says "no" from the very outset to what is "outside itself," "different from itself," and "not itself": and this "no" is its creative deed. This volte-face of the valuing standpoint — this inevitable gravitation to the objective instead of back to the subjective- — is typical of "resentment": the slave-morality requires as the condition of its existence an external and objective world, to employ physiological terminology, it requires objective stimuli to be capable of action at all — its action is fundamentally a reaction. The contrary is the case when

we come to the aristocrat's system of values: it acts and grows spontaneously, it merely seeks its antithesis in order to pronounce a more grateful and exultant "yes" to its own self; — its negative conception, "low," "vulgar," "bad," is merely a pale late-born foil in comparison with its positive and fundamental conception (saturated as it is with life and passion), of "we aristocrats, we good ones, we beautiful ones, we happy ones."

When the aristocratic morality goes astray and commits sacrilege on reality, this is limited to that particular* sphere with which it is not sufficiently acquainted — a sphere, in fact, from the real knowledge of which it disdainfully defends itself. It misjudges, in some cases, the sphere which it despises, the sphere of the common vulgar man and the low people: on the other hand, due weight should be given to the consideration that in any case the mood of contempt, of. disdain, of superciliousness, even on the supposition that it falsely portrays the abject of its contempt, will always be far removed from that degree of falsity which will always characterise the attacks — in effigy, of course — of the vindictive hatred and revengefulness of the weak in onslaughts on their enemies. In point of fact, there is in contempt too strong an admixture of nonchalance, of casualness, of boredom, of impatience, even of personal exultation, for it to be capable of distorting its victim into a real caricature or a real monstrosity. Attention again should be paid to the almost benevolent nuances which, for instance, the Greek nobility imports into all the words by which it distinguishes the common people from itself; note how continuously a kind of pity, care, and consideration im-parts its honeyed flavour, until at last almost all the words wtiich are applied to the vulgar man survive finally as expressions for "unhappy," "worthy of pity" (comoare 8stAog, Ssftmo?, jtovr|o6g, pox'O'nQog ; the latter two names really denoting the vulgar man as labour-slave and beast of burden) — and how, conversely, "bad," "low," "unhappy" have never ceased to ring in the Greek ear with a tone in which "unhappy" is the predominant note: this is a heritage of the old noble aristocratic morality, which remains true to itself even in contempt (let philologists remember the sense in which 6T£v(?6g, avo?.6og, tMjixgov, 8uoxnxeiv, |up