surprise, in change, in destruction—all this turning itself against the possessor of such instincts, this is the origin of 'bad conscience.' The man who, in lack of outer enemies and oppositions, confined under a close, oppressive, and unvarying régime of mores, went at himself impatiently, rending, pursuing, biting, startling, mistreating himself, this animal, put into a cage to be tamed and bruising himself against its bars, this creature, who, deprived of his wilderness and consumed with homesickness for it, has to make out of himself a field of adventure, a place of torture, an uncertain and dangerous wilderness—this fool, this longing and despairing captive became the inventor of 'bad conscience.'" The change in situation was so great that Nietzsche compares it to what water-animals must have experienced when they were first obliged to live on land, and, instead of being upborne, had to go on foot and "carry themselves"—a horrible heaviness seized upon them. In default of guidance from their old impulses, men had to fall back on thinking, reasoning, calculating, combining causes and effects, in general on their "consciousness"—the organ in them that had been poorest developed and was most liable to err. Never on earth was there such feeling of misery, such leaden discomfort as then; and yet the old instincts were still there and unsatisfied, and blindly produced the result just mentioned.[1]
If it be asked how man could be subjugated, what or who there was to subject him, the answer is "other men." Some superior group or race, falling on wandering, formless populations, subjugated them and clapped their iron rule upon them. The feeling of misery, the unsatisfied instincts preying on their possessor, which make the essence of "bad conscience," do not appear in the conquering, ruling class, but in the conquered. "Bad conscience" is not a universal phenomenon, and the conquerors, as Nietzsche conceives them in the present instance, are quite without it in what they do.[2]
Nietzsche notes that all depends, in his theory, on the suddenness of the supposed change to which the wild populations were subjected; if there had been a gradual,
