The soft, benevolent, yielding, sympathetic feelings—eventually valued so highly that they almost became “intrinsic values,” were for a very long time actually despised by their possessors: gentleness was then a subject for shame, just as hardness is now (compare Beyond Good and Evil , Aph. 260). The submission to law: oh, with what qualms of conscience was it that the noble races throughout the world renounced the vendetta and gave the law power over themselves! Law was long a vetitum , a blasphemy, an innovation; it was introduced with force, like a force, to which men only submitted with a sense of personal shame. Every tiny step forward in the world was formerly made at the cost of mental and physical torture. Nowadays the whole of this point of view—“that not only stepping forward, nay, stepping at all, movement, change, all needed their countless martyrs,” rings in our ears quite strangely. I have put it forward in the
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