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which have hitherto been discovered. In short, you psychol-
ogists, study the philosophy of the ‘rule’ in its struggle with
the ‘exception”: there you have a spectacle fit for Gods and
godlike malignity! Or, in plainer words, practise vivisec-
tion on ‘good people,’ on the ‘homo bonae voluntatis,’ ON
YOURSELVES!

219. The practice of judging and condemning morally, is
the favourite revenge of the intellectually shallow on those
who are less so, it is also a kind of indemnity for their being
badly endowed by nature, and finally, it is an opportunity
for acquiring spirit and BECOMING subtle—malice spiri-
tualises. They are glad in their inmost heart that there is a
standard according to which those who are over-endowed
with intellectual goods and privileges, are equal to them,
they contend for the ‘equality of all before God,’ and almost
NEED the belief in God for this purpose. It is among them
that the most powerful antagonists of atheism are found. If
any one were to say to them ‘A lofty spirituality is beyond all
comparison with the honesty and respectability of a merely
moral man’—it would make them furious, I shall take care
not to say so. I would rather flatter them with my theory that
lofty spirituality itself exists only as the ultimate product of
moral qualities, that it is a synthesis of all qualities attribut-
ed to the ‘merely moral’ man, after they have been acquired
singly through long training and practice, perhaps during a
whole series of generations, that lofty spirituality is precise-
ly the spiritualising of justice, and the beneficent severity
which knows that it is authorized to maintain GRADA-

1 0 Beyond Good and Evil