Philosophers have had (1) from times immemorial a wonderful capacity for the _contradictio in adjecto,_ (2) they have always trusted concepts as unconditionally as they have mistrusted the senses: it never seems to have occurred to them that notions and words are our inheritance of past ages in which thinking was neither very clear nor very exact. What seems to dawn upon philosophers last of all: that they must no longer allow themselves to be presented with concepts already conceived, nor must they merely purify and polish up those concepts; but they must first _make_ them, _create_ them, themselves, and then present them and get people to accept them. Up to the present, people have trusted their concepts generally, as if they had been a wonderful _dowry_ from some kind of wonderland: but they constitute the inheritance of our most remote, most foolish, and most intelligent forefathers. This _piety_ towards that _which already exists in us_ is perhaps related to the _moral element in science._ What we needed above all is absolute scepticism towards all traditional concepts (like that which a certain philosopher may already have possessed--and he was Plato, of course: for he taught _the reverse_). 410. Profoundly mistrustful towards the dogmas of the theory of knowledge, I liked to look now out of this window, now out of that, though I took good care not to become finally fixed anywhere, indeed I should have thought it dangerous to have done so--though finally: is it within the range of probabilities for an instrument to criticise its own fitness? What I noticed more particularly was, that no scientific scepticism or dogmatism has ever arisen quite free from all _arrières pensées_--that it has only a secondary value as soon as the motive lying immediately behind it is discovered. Fundamental aspect: Kant's, Hegel's, Schopenhauer's, the sceptical and epochistical, the historifying and the pessimistic attitudes--all have a _moral_ origin. I have found no one who has dared to _criticise the moral valuations,_ and I soon turned my back upon the meagre attempts that have been made to describe the evolution of these feelings (by English and German Darwinians). How can Spinoza's position, his denial and repudiation of the moral values, be explained? (It was the result of his Theodicy!) 411.