in our hearts, and let them smoulder there, and imagine we are
trying new experiments in psychology! Who does not know the radical
woman who demonstrates her emancipation from convention by destroying
her nerves with nicotine? Who does not know the genius of revolt who
demonstrates his repudiation of private property by permitting his
lady loves to support him? Who does not know the man who finds in the
phrases of revolution the most effective devices for the seducing of
young girls?

You will have read this book to ill purpose if you draw the conclusion
that there is anything in it to spare you the duty of getting yourself
moral standards and holding yourself to them. On the contrary, because
your task is the highest and hardest that man has yet undertaken--for
this reason you will need standards the most exacting ever formulated.
Let me quote some words from a teacher you will not accuse of holding
to the slave-moralities:

Free dost thou call thyself? Thy ruling thoughts will I
hear, and not that thou hast escaped a yoke.

Art thou such a one that can escape a yoke? Free from what?
What is that to Zarathustra! Clear shall your eye tell me:
free to what?

Canst thou give to thyself thy good and thine evil, and hang
thy will above thee as thy law? Canst thou be thine own
judge, and avenger of thy law?

Fearful it is to be alone with the judge and the avenger of
thy law. So is a stone flung out into empty space and into
the icy breath of isolation.

Out of the pit of ignorance and despair we emerge into the sunlight of
knowledge, to take control of a world, and to make it over, not
according to the will of any gods, but according to the law in our own
hearts. For that task we have need of all the resources of our being;
of courage and high devotion, of faith in ourselves and our comrades,
of clean, straight thinking, of discipline both of body and mind. We
go to this task with a knowledge as old as the first moral impulse of
mankind--the knowledge that our actions determine the future of life,
not merely for ourselves but for all the race. For this is one of the
laws of the ancient Hebrews which modern science has not repealed, but
on the contrary has reinforced with a thousand confirmations--that the
sins of the fathers are visited upon the children unto the third and
fourth generations.

I get letters from the readers of my books; nearly always they are