It is not The Will to Power. His impatience, which is added to by fatigue, does not easily bend to the delays of meditation. Of his old gifts, his genius for improvising, his polemical genius alone survive. Herr Widmann, a Swiss critic, had just written a study on Beyond Good and Evil and saw in this work but a manual of anarchism: "This is dynamite," he said. Friedrich Nietzsche wished to reply, and at once drew up at a spurt in fifteen days one, two, three short essays which he entitled as a whole, A Genealogy of Morals. "This work," he wrote on the title-page, "is destined to complete and elucidate my last book, Beyond Good and Evil."
"I have said," he wrote in substance, "that I place myself beyond Good and Evil—Gut und Böse. Does this mean that I wish to liberate myself from every moral category? No. I challenge the exaltation of meekness which is called good; the defamation of energy which is called bad; but the history of the human conscience—do the moralists know that such a history exists?—displays to us a multitude of other moral values, other ways of being good, other ways of being bad, numerous shades of honour and of dishonour. Even here the reality is moving, initiative is free; one must seek, one must create."
But Nietzsche developed his thought further: "I have wished," he wrote some months later à propos of this little book, "I have wished to fire a cannon-shot with more sonorous powder." He exposed the distinction between the two moralities, the one dictated by the masters, the other by the slaves; and he thought to recognise in the verbal roots of the words "good" and "evil," their old meaning. Bonus, buonus, said he, comes from duonus, which signifies warrior; malus comes from μέλας, black: the blonde Aryans, the ancestors of the Greek, indicated by this word the type of conduct habitual to their slaves and subjects, the Mediterraneans crossed with Negro and Semitic blood. These primitive notions of what is noble and what is vile, Friedrich Nietzsche does not challenge.
On the 18th of July, writing from Sils-Maria, he announced the new work to Peter Gast.
"I have energetically employed these last days, which were better," he wrote. "I have drawn up a little piece of work which, as I think, puts the problem of my last book in a clear light. Every one has complained of not having understood me; and the hundred copies sold do not permit me to doubt that in effect I am not understood. You know that for three years I have spent about 500 thalers to defray the cost of my books; no honorarium, it goes without saying, and I am 43 years old, and I have written fifteen books! Further: experience, and many applications, more painful to me than I care to say, force me to certify, as a fact, that no German editor wants to have anything to do with me (even if I abandon my author's rights). Perhaps this little book which I am completing to-day will help to sell some copies of my last book (it always pains me to think of the poor Fritzsch on whom all the weight of my work rests). Perhaps my publishers will some day benefit from me. As for myself, I know only too well that when people begin to understand me, I shall not benefit from it."
On the 20th of July, he despatched the manuscript to the publisher. On the 24th July, he called it back by telegram in order to add a few features, a few pages. All his summer was spent in discomfort, melancholy, and the correction of his book, which he never ceased to touch up, to draw out, to render more violent and more alive. Towards the end of August, perceiving an empty space on the last page of the first section, Nietzsche added this curious note, in which he indicated the unstudied problems which he was to have neither strength nor time to attack.
"Remark.—I take the opportunity presented by this essay to express publicly and formally a wish which, so far, I have only mentioned occasionally to certain scholars, in chance conversations. Some Faculty of Philosophy ought, by a series of academical prize-dissertations, to further studies in the history of morality; perhaps this book will serve to give a vigorous impetus in this direction. I would propose the following question:
"What hints are furnished by philology, more especially by etymological research, with reference to the history of the development of moral concepts?
"On the other hand it will be as necessary to interest physiologists and doctors in these problems. In fact and above all, all tables of values, every 'thou shalt' known to history and ethnological research, need to be explained and elucidated in the first place from their physiological side, before any attempt is made to interpret them through psychology.... The question: What is this or that table of values and morality worth? must be considered from the most varied perspectives. Especially 'the worth for what?' must be considered with extraordinary discernment and delicacy. A thing, for instance, which has evident value with reference to the greatest durability of a race might possess quite another value, if it were a question of creating a higher type. The good of the greatest number and the good of the smallest number are antithetical points of view in valuation; we shall let the simplicity of English biologists suppose that the former is by itself of higher value. All sciences must prepare the way for the philosopher of the future, whose task will consist in solving the problem of values and determining their hierarchy."