So great was the misunderstanding which attached to his phrase, "beyond good and evil," and so persistently was this phrase interpreted in its narrow sense of "beyond good and bad," that he felt the necessity of drawing the line of distinction between these two diametrically opposed conceptions and of explaining the origin of each. His first essay in "The Genealogy of Morals" is devoted to this task. At the outset he devotes considerable space criticising the methods and conclusions of former genealogists of morals, especially of the English psychologists who attribute an _intrinsic_ merit to altruism because at one time altruism possessed a utilitarian value. Herbert Spencer's theory that "good" is the same as "purposive" brings from Nietzsche a protest founded on the contention that because a thing was at one time useful, and therefore "good," it does not follow that the thing is good _in itself._ By the etymology of the descriptive words of morality, Nietzsche traces the history of modern moral attributes through class distinctions to their origin in the instincts of the "nobles" and the "vulgarians." He shows the relationship between the Latin _bonus_ and the "warrior," by deriving _bonus_ from _duonus. Bellum,_ he shows, equals _duellum_ which equals _duen-lum,_ in which word _duonus_ is contained. Likewise, he points out the aristocratic origin of "happiness"--a quality arising from an abundance of energy and the consciousness of power. "Good and evil," according to Nietzsche, is a sign of slave-morality; while "good and bad" represents the qualities in the master-morality. The one stands for the adopted qualities of the subservient races; the other embodies the natural functioning of dominating races. The origin of the "good" in these two instances is by no means the same. In the strong man "good" represented an entirely different condition than the "good" in the resentful and weak man; and these two "goods" arose out of different causes. The one was spontaneous and natural--inherent in the individual of strength: the other was a manufactured condition, an optional selection of qualities to soften and ameliorate the conditions of existence. "Evil" and "bad," by the same token, became attributes originating in widely separated sources. The "evil" of the weak man was any condition which worked against the manufactured ideals of goodness, which brought about unhappiness--it was the beginning of the conception of a slave-morality, a term applied to all enemies. The "bad" of the strong man was the concept which grew directly out of his feeling for "good," and which had no application to another individual. Thus the ideas of "good" and "bad" are directly inherited from the nobles of the race, and these ideas included within themselves the tendency toward establishing social distinctions.