is injured and prevented from acting, may be compared to a dyspeptic, who is never done with anything. Yet against this strong forgetfulness is now to be developed a contrary power by the help of which forgetfulness is suspended for certain cases—namely, those where promises have been made: not then a mere passive inability to forget, a kind of indigestion in regard to a pledged word, but a will not to forget, a continuous willing of what has been willed, a veritable memory of the will, so that between the original "I will," and the final discharge in act proper, there is no break, whatever new things, circumstances, or even volitions may have intervened. This presupposes much. In order so to dispose of the future, one must have learned to distinguish between the necessary and the accidental, to think causally, to see the future as if it were present and anticipate it, to fix firmly what is end and what means, to reckon and calculate in general. Above all, a man must have become calculable himself—that is regular, necessary, and this not merely to others, but to himself, so that he can answer for himself as a future quantity. How can a memory of this sort be given to the human animal—how stamp on this flighty creature of the moment, this bodily incarnation of forgetfulness, something which will remain ever present with him? How has it been done in the past?
The story is not agreeable reading—Nietzsche thinks that there is perhaps nothing more fearful and uncanny in the early history of mankind than the technique used for creating memory (Mnemotechnik). "We burn in something so that it may stay in mind; only what does not cease to give pain stays in the mind"—this he calls a leading proposition out of the oldest psychology on earth, and alas! the longest-lived. It might even be said that wherever there is still solemnity, earnestness, mystery, gloomy coloring in the life of men and peoples, there lingers something of the after-effect of the frightful conditions under which promises, pledges, vows were originally everywhere made—the breath of the oldest, deepest, hardest past is upon us and rises in us, when we are "earnest." The most horrible sacrifices and forfeits (to which the sacrifices of the first-born belong), the most repulsive mutilations (for example, castration), the cruellest ritual performances of religious cults—all
