Page 111 - beyond-good-and-evil

196. It is to be INFERRED that there are countless dark
bodies near the sun—such as we shall never see. Among
ourselves, this is an allegory; and the psychologist of mor-
als reads the whole star-writing merely as an allegorical and
symbolic language in which much may be unexpressed.

197. The beast of prey and the man of prey (for instance,
Caesar Borgia) are fundamentally misunderstood, ‘nature’
is misunderstood, so long as one seeks a ‘morbidness’ in
the constitution of these healthiest of all tropical monsters
and growths, or even an innate ‘hell’ in them—as almost all
moralists have done hitherto. Does it not seem that there is
a hatred of the virgin forest and of the tropics among mor-
alists? And that the ‘tropical man’ must be discredited at
all costs, whether as disease and deterioration of mankind,
or as his own hell and self-torture? And why? In favour of
the ‘temperate zones’? In favour of the temperate men? The
‘moral’? The mediocre?—This for the chapter: ‘Morals as Ti-
midity.’

198. All the systems of morals which address themselves
with a view to their ‘happiness,’ as it is called—what else
are they but suggestions for behaviour adapted to the de-
gree of DANGER from themselves in which the individuals
live; recipes for their passions, their good and bad propen-
sities, insofar as such have the Will to Power and would
like to play the master; small and great expediencies and
elaborations, permeated with the musty odour of old fam-
ily medicines and old-wife wisdom; all of them grotesque

110 Beyond Good and Evil