187.  Apart from the value of such assertions as “there is a categorical imperative in us,” one can always ask:  What does such an assertion indicate about him who makes it?  There are systems of morals which are meant to justify their author in the eyes of other people; other systems of morals are meant to tranquilize him, and make him self-satisfied; with other systems he wants to crucify and humble himself, with others he wishes to take revenge, with others to conceal himself, with others to glorify himself and gave superiority and distinction,—­this system of morals helps its author to forget, that system makes him, or something of him, forgotten, many a moralist would like to exercise power and creative arbitrariness over mankind, many another, perhaps, Kant especially, gives us to understand by his morals that “what is estimable in me, is that I know how to obey—­and with you it shall not be otherwise than with me!” In short, systems of morals are only a sign-language of the emotions.

188.  In contrast to laisser-aller, every system of morals is a sort of tyranny against “nature” and also against “reason”, that is, however, no objection, unless one should again decree by some system of morals, that all kinds of tyranny and unreasonableness are unlawful What is essential and invaluable in every system of morals, is that it is a long constraint.  In order to understand Stoicism, or Port Royal, or Puritanism, one should remember the constraint under which every language has attained to strength and freedom—­the metrical constraint, the tyranny of rhyme and rhythm.  How much trouble have the poets and orators of every nation given themselves!—­not excepting some of the prose writers of today, in whose ear dwells an inexorable conscientiousness—­ “for the sake of a folly,” as utilitarian bunglers say, and thereby deem themselves wise—­“from submission to arbitrary laws,” as the anarchists say, and thereby fancy themselves “free,” even free-spirited.  The singular fact remains, however, that everything of the nature of freedom, elegance, boldness, dance, and masterly certainty, which exists or has existed, whether it be in thought itself, or in administration, or in speaking and persuading, in art just as in conduct, has only developed by means of the tyranny of such arbitrary law, and in all seriousness, it is not at all improbable that precisely this is “nature” and “natural”—­and not laisser-aller!  Every artist knows how different from the state of letting himself go, is his “most natural” condition, the free arranging, locating, disposing, and constructing in the moments of “inspiration”—­and how strictly and delicately he then obeys a thousand laws, which, by their very rigidness and precision, defy all formulation by means of ideas (even the most stable idea has, in comparison therewith, something floating, manifold, and ambiguous in it).  The essential thing “in heaven and in earth”