nitzsche

498 GENEALOGY OF MORALS - nation in Fuarope in which one. still finds today the maximum of trust, seriousness, lack of taste, and matter-of-factness—and with these qualities one has:the right to breed every kind of Furopean mandarin). These Germans have employed fearful means to ac- quite a memory, so as to master their basic mob-instinet and its brutal coarseness. Consider the old German punishments; for exam-. ple, stoning (the sagas already have millstones drop on the head of the guilty), breaking on the wheel (the most characteristic inven- tion and speciality of the German genius in the realm of punish- ment! ), piercing with stakes, tearing apart or trampling by horses (“quartering”), boiling of the criminal in ofl or wine (still employed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), the popular flaying alive (“cutting straps™}, cutting flesh from the chest, and also the prac- tice of smearing the wrongdoer with honey and leaving him in the. blazing sun for the flies. With the aid of such images and procedures, one finally remembers five or six “I will not’s,” in regard to which one had given one’s promise so as to participate in the advantages. of society—and it was indeed with the aid of this kind of memory . that one at last came “to reason”! Ah, reason, seriousness, mastery. ovet the affects, the whole somber thing called reflection, .all these prerogatives and showpieces of man; how dearly they have been bought! how much blood and cruelty lie at the bottom of all “good things™! . : . : ’ 4 But how did that other “somber thing,” the consciousness of guilt, the “bad conscience,” come into the world?— And at this, point we return to the genealogists of morals. To say it again-ot haven’t T said it yet?—they are worthless. A brief span of experience, that is merely one’s own, merely modern; no knowledge or will to knowledge of the past; even less of historical instinet, of that “sec- ond sight” needed here above all—and yet they undertake history of morality: it stands to reason that thejr results stay at 2 more than respectful distance from the truth. Have these genealogists of morals had even the remotest, suspicion that, for example, the major moral concept Schuld [guilt] has its eorigin in the very material concept