Every virtue has its double, easily confounded with it, in reality the exact opposite of it. Take meekness, peaceableness. It is a virtue which the cowardly, the over-cautious, arrogate to themselves--those who duck and bow and bend so as to give no offense, and to conjure up no violent conflict. Yet to be peaceable and meek is in truth supreme strength, having one's own stormy heart under control, and being absolutely sure of power over the militant spirits of men. Humility is a sign at once of smallness and of greatness. Patience is at once a lazy lassitude and an active steadfast strength. Chastity may be reduced vitality, fear of disease, fear of being found out, lack of opportunity, slavery to respectability, poverty, or it may be temperance and self-control in satisfying sex-needs. And so on. Every virtue may arise because a man is too weak for the opposite. And this virtue which walks the path of virtue because it lacks the courage and the strength not to do so, this complacent, harmless, untempted virtue, men make the universal criterion of all virtue, the codex of their morality. Today still the pharisee, not the publican, the son who stupidly ate his fill in his father's house, not the "prodigal" who hungered in the far country, heads the scroll of the virtuous. To fear and flee vice, or to "pass a law," this is the current solution of morality, dinged into us from youth up, not to confront vice, battle with it, conquer and coerce it! So misunderstood Nietzsche thought. He thought that the morality of "virtuous people" was, in fact, a foe of life, that the virtue of the weak was a grave for the virtue of the strong, and that, consequently the consciences of men must be aroused so that they could see the whole abomination of this, their virtue, of which they were so proud. To bridle and tame men is not to ennoble them; to make men too weak and cowardly for vice is not to make them strong and brave for the good. This anxious and painful slipping and winding and twisting between virtue and vice, this cannot be the fate of the future, the eternal destiny of man; this is to make man the eternal slave of man; to damn him in his innermost and idiomatic life to the lot of the eternal slave. Virtue and vice are values which men mint, stamps which men imprint upon their ever-changing conduct, not eternal values, born of life itself, sanctioned by the law of life itself. As time goes on tables of old values become sins. To obey them, to have the law outside and not inside us, is "to fall from grace" indeed. A law of life cannot be on paper, for paper is not living. Life must be the law of life. Life must interpret and reveal life. And life must be the criterion of life. What makes us alive, and strong, and mighty of will, is on that account good; what brings death and weakness, foulness and feebleness of will is bad. The courage which in the most desperate situation of life, in the most