An old wearisome business seemed to them all discourse about virtue; and he who wished to sleep well spake of “good” and “bad” ere retiring to rest.

This somnolence did I disturb when I taught that no one yet knoweth what is good and bad:⁠—unless it be the creating one!

—It is he, however, who createth man’s goal, and giveth to the earth its meaning and its future: he only effecteth it that aught is good or bad.

And I bade them upset their old academic chairs, and wherever that old infatuation had sat; I bade them laugh at their great moralists, their saints, their poets, and their Saviours.

At their gloomy sages did I bid them laugh, and whoever had sat admonishing as a black scarecrow on the tree of life.