This creature full of contradictions, however, has in his being a grand method of acquiring knowledge: he feels the pros and cons, he elevates himself to Justice—that is to say, to the ascertaining of principles beyond the valuations good and evil.
The wisest man would thus be the richest in contradictions, he would also be gifted with mental antennæ wherewith he could understand all kinds of men; and with it all he would have his great moments, when all the chords in his being would ring in splendid unison—the rarest of accidents even in us! A sort of planetary movement.
260.
"To will" is to will an object. But "object," as an idea, involves a valuation. Whence do valuations originate? Is a permanent norm, "pleasant or painful," their basis?
But in an incalculable number of cases we first of all make a thing painful, by investing it with a valuation.
The compass of moral valuations: they play a part in almost every mental impression. To us the world is coloured by them.
We have imagined the purpose and value of all things: owing to this we possess an enormous fund of latent power, but the study of comparative values teaches us that values which were actually opposed to each other have been held in high esteem, and that there have been many tables of laws (they could not, therefore, have been worth anything per se).
The analysis of individual tables of laws revealed the fact that they were framed (often very badly) as the conditions of existence for limited groups of people, to ensure their maintenance.
Upon examining modern men, we found that there are a large number of very different values to hand, and that they no longer contain any creative power—the fundamental principle: "the condition of existence" is now quite divorced from the moral values. It is much more superfluous and not nearly so painful. It becomes an arbitrary matter. Chaos.