The only law acknowledged by him who would be a master is the bidding of his own will. He makes short work of every other law. Whatever clogs the flight of his indomitable ambition must be ruthlessly swept aside. Obviously, the enactment of this law that would render the individual supreme and absolute would strike the death-knell for all established forms and institutions of the social body. But such is quite within Nietzsche's intention. They are noxious agencies, ingeniously devised for the enslavement of the will, and the most pernicious among them is the Christian religion, because of the alleged divine sanction conferred by it upon subserviency. Christianity would thwart the supreme will of nature by curbing that lust for domination which the laws of nature as revealed by science sanction, nay prescribe. Nietzsche's ideas on this subject are loudly and over-loudly voiced in _Der Antichrist_ ("The Anti-Christ"), written in September 1888 as the first part of a planned treatise in four instalments, entitled _Der Wille zur Macht. Versuch einer Umwertung aller Werte_. ("The Will to Power. An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values".) * * * * * The master-man's will, then, is his only law. That is the essence of _Herrenmoral_. And so the question arises, Whence shall the conscience of the ruler-man derive its distinctions between the Right and the Wrong? The arch-iconoclast brusquely stifles this naïve query beforehand by assuring us that such distinctions in their accepted sense do not exist for personages of that grander stamp. Heedless of the time-hallowed concepts that all men share in common, he enjoins mastermen to take their position uncompromisingly outside the confining area of conventions, in the moral independence that dwells "beyond good and evil." Good and Evil are mere denotations, devoid of any real significance. Right and Wrong are not ideals immutable through the ages, nor even the same at any time in all states of society. They are vague and general notions, varying more or less with the practical exigencies under which they were conceived. What was right for my great-grandfather is not _ipso facto_ right for myself. Hence, the older and better established a law, the more inapposite is it apt to be to the living demands. Why should the ruler-man bow down to outworn statutes or stultify his self-dependent moral sense before the artificial and stupidly uniform moral relics of the dead past? Good is whatever conduces to the increase of my power,--evil is whatever tends to diminish it! Only the weakling and the hypocrite will disagree.