216.  To love one’s enemies?  I think that has been well learnt:  it takes place thousands of times at present on a large and small scale; indeed, at times the higher and sublimer thing takes place:—­we learn to despise when we love, and precisely when we love best; all of it, however, unconsciously, without noise, without ostentation, with the shame and secrecy of goodness, which forbids the utterance of the pompous word and the formula of virtue.  Morality as attitude—­is opposed to our taste nowadays.  This is also an advance, as it was an advance in our fathers that religion as an attitude finally became opposed to their taste, including the enmity and Voltairean bitterness against religion (and all that formerly belonged to freethinker-pantomime).  It is the music in our conscience, the dance in our spirit, to which Puritan litanies, moral sermons, and goody-goodness won’t chime.

217.  Let us be careful in dealing with those who attach great importance to being credited with moral tact and subtlety in moral discernment!  They never forgive us if they have once made a mistake before us (or even with regard to us)—­they inevitably become our instinctive calumniators and detractors, even when they still remain our “friends.”—­Blessed are the forgetful:  for they “get the better” even of their blunders.

218.  The psychologists of France—­and where else are there still psychologists nowadays?—­have never yet exhausted their bitter and manifold enjoyment of the betise bourgeoise, just as though . . . in short, they betray something thereby.  Flaubert, for instance, the honest citizen of Rouen, neither saw, heard, nor tasted anything else in the end; it was his mode of self-torment and refined cruelty.  As this is growing wearisome, I would now recommend for a change something else for a pleasure—­namely, the unconscious astuteness with which good, fat, honest mediocrity always behaves towards loftier spirits and the tasks they have to perform, the subtle, barbed, Jesuitical astuteness, which is a thousand times subtler than the taste and understanding of the middle-class in its best moments—­subtler even than the understanding of its victims:—­a repeated proof that “instinct” is the most intelligent of all kinds of intelligence which have hitherto been discovered.  In short, you psychologists, 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 vivisection on “good people,” on the “homo bonae voluntatis,” On yourselves!