“I am not of those of whom one asks ‘why?’” Nietzsche has once written. If you cannot accept his assurance that the deepest spring of conduct is the will to conquer, then accept the contrary doctrine: Nietzsche is prepared to trust his insight that you do this because the contrary doctrine is just the one _you_ need to work out your own scheme of conquest,--as a wolf may on occasion sincerely prefer the pelt of a lamb to his own natural coat. It is to the lust of power in men’s hearts that the gospel of the crucified one appeals! The paradox is perhaps most completely worked out in Nietzsche’s “Genealogie der Moral.” Here history is made to reveal a long conflict between two contradictory estimates of worth. For the one standard a contrast exists between high morals and low; for the other, between holiness and sin. The code of ethics based on the first of these contrasts embodies, as the etymology of its terms indicates, the aristocratic conception of worth. “High morals” are simply the manners of the upper, the ruling class; “low morals,” the habits of the underlings. This standard of valuation is accepted by the high and low alike of a race in its youth and strength. The second standard defining the opposition between good and evil is an invention of the miserable and oppressed; it is their reaction against their conquerors, the expression of their resentment. It can only become dominant in decadent races; its triumph in Christianity is evidence that the modern world has sunk to the ideals of the lowly--that is to say, of the low. If we place these two codes side by side, we realize how completely the acceptance of either demands the “Umwerthung aller Werthe” acknowledged by the other. The highest worth in the aristocratic morality is the pride of strength; the great wickedness to the lowly moralist is just this same pride of strength. The great virtue of the slave-morality is humility; to the aristocratic taste this humility is abject. Of the history of the warfare between the two, Nietzsche gives a sufficiently dramatic account. Characteristic is his picture of the triumph of the slaves: