It is not _The Will to Power._ His impatience, which is added to by fatigue, does not easily bend to the delays of meditation. Of his old gifts, his genius for improvising, his polemical genius alone survive. Herr Widmann, a Swiss critic, had just written a study on _Beyond Good and Evil_ and saw in this work but a manual of anarchism: "This is dynamite," he said. Friedrich Nietzsche wished to reply, and at once drew up at a spurt in fifteen days one, two, three short essays which he entitled as a whole, _A Genealogy of Morals._ "This work," he wrote on the title-page, "is destined to complete and elucidate my last book, _Beyond Good and Evil._" "I have said," he wrote in substance, "that I place myself beyond Good and Evil--_Gut und Böse._ Does this mean that I wish to liberate myself from every moral category? No. I challenge the exaltation of meekness which is called good; the defamation of energy which is called bad; but the history of the human conscience--do the moralists know that such a history exists?--displays to us a multitude of other moral values, other ways of being good, other ways of being bad, numerous shades of honour and of dishonour. Even here the reality is moving, initiative is free; one must seek, one must create." But Nietzsche developed his thought further: "I have wished," he wrote some months later à propos of this little book, "I have wished to fire a cannon-shot with more sonorous powder." He exposed the distinction between the two moralities, the one dictated by the masters, the other by the slaves; and he thought to recognise in the verbal roots of the words "good" and "evil," their old meaning. _Bonus, buonus,_ said he, comes from _duonus,_ which signifies warrior; _malus_ comes from μέλας, black: the blonde Aryans, the ancestors of the Greek, indicated by this word the type of conduct habitual to their slaves and subjects, the Mediterraneans crossed with Negro and Semitic blood. These primitive notions of what is noble and what is vile, Friedrich Nietzsche does not challenge. On the 18th of July, writing from Sils-Maria, he announced the new work to Peter Gast.