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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