into unrest and distress of conscience; that it knows how to turn superior instincts into poison and to make them sick, till their force, their will to power turns backwards, turns against themselves—till the strong go to pieces from the extravagances of their self-contempt and self-mistreatment: that appalling way of going to pieces, the most illustrious example of which is furnished by Pascal."[1] The same essential idea is repeated when he says that now that the slave-morality of humility, selflessness, absolute obedience has conquered in the world, ruling natures are condemned either to hypocrisy or to torments of conscience.[2] It is an identical inner experience in all these cases, and the process of generating it is the same. Whether the conquerors are an early superior race or a refined spiritual power like Christianity, whether those conquered are primitive roving populations or splendid examples of the "blond beast," like German nobles of the early Middle Ages, conquest lies at the basis of the phenomenon, instincts that had been free and strong before turning while still strong against their possessor and making him ill. The amount of truth in the view may be left to future criticism to disentangle.
Despite Nietzsche's unsympathetic tone, he is far from regarding the rise of bad conscience as an unmixed evil—and he warns us against thinking lightly of it. Let one read § 18, and note also the close of § 16, of Genealogy of Morals, II. When—he says in substance—man turns against himself in the way described, when his old Bosheit is directed inward, a new line of possibilities is opened for him; he awakens an interest, a surprise, a hope, almost a certainty, as if something were heralding itself in him, as if he were no goal, but only a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise. Sickness is utilizable—it is one of Nietzsche's constant points of view—and this sickness may be one only as pregnancy is.[3] A new kind of self may be fashioned by the cruel instincts working remorselessly on the material against which they turn—if they criticise, contradict, despise, say "no" to this and that and burn it in, it may all be to this end. He speaks of this active bad conscience as a veritable
