31.  In our youthful years we still venerate and despise without the art of nuance, which is the best gain of life, and we have rightly to do hard penance for having fallen upon men and things with Yea and Nay.  Everything is so arranged that the worst of all tastes, the taste for the unconditional, is cruelly befooled and abused, until a man learns to introduce a little art into his sentiments, and prefers to try conclusions with the artificial, as do the real artists of life.  The angry and reverent spirit peculiar to youth appears to allow itself no peace, until it has suitably falsified men and things, to be able to vent its passion upon them:  youth in itself even, is something falsifying and deceptive.  Later on, when the young soul, tortured by continual disillusions, finally turns suspiciously against itself—­still ardent and savage even in its suspicion and remorse of conscience:  how it upbraids itself, how impatiently it tears itself, how it revenges itself for its long self-blinding, as though it had been a voluntary blindness!  In this transition one punishes oneself by distrust of one’s sentiments; one tortures one’s enthusiasm with doubt, one feels even the good conscience to be a danger, as if it were the self-concealment and lassitude of a more refined uprightness; and above all, one espouses upon principle the cause against “youth.”—­A decade later, and one comprehends that all this was also still—­youth!

32.  Throughout the longest period of human history—­one calls it the prehistoric period—­the value or non-value of an action was inferred from its consequences; the action in itself was not taken into consideration, any more than its origin; but pretty much as in China at present, where the distinction or disgrace of a child redounds to its parents, the retro-operating power of success or failure was what induced men to think well or ill of an action.  Let us call this period the pre-moral period of mankind; the imperative, “Know thyself!” was then still unknown.  —­In the last ten thousand years, on the other hand, on certain large portions of the earth, one has gradually got so far, that one no longer lets the consequences of an action, but its origin, decide with regard to its worth:  a great achievement as a whole, an important refinement of vision and of criterion, the unconscious effect of the supremacy of aristocratic values and of the belief in “origin,” the mark of a period which may be designated in the narrower sense as the moral one:  the first attempt at self-knowledge is thereby made.  Instead of the consequences, the origin—­what an inversion of perspective!  And assuredly an inversion effected only after long struggle and wavering!  To be sure, an ominous new superstition, a peculiar narrowness of interpretation, attained supremacy precisely thereby:  the origin of an action was interpreted in the most definite sense possible, as origin out