This problem, as stated here, seems stupendous enough; in fact, it would be difficult, in the whole realm of human thought, to discover a question of greater moment and intricacy; and yet we shall see that Nietzsche was just as much born to attack and solve it as Cardinal Newman seems, from the _Apologia pro Vita Sua_, to have been born to the Roman Catholic Church. If we reflect a moment, we find that "good" and "evil" are certainly words that exercise a tremendous power in the world. To attach the word "good" to any thing or deed is to give it the hall-mark of desirability: on the other hand, to attach the word "evil" to it is tantamount to proscribing it from existence. Even in the old English proverb, "Give a dog a bad name and hang him," we have a suggestion of the enormous force which has been compressed into the two monosyllables "good" and "bad," and before we seriously take up the problem, it were well to ponder a while over the really profound significance of these two words. Nietzsche, as we have already observed, was never in any doubt as to their importance: his life passion was the desire to solve the meaning, the origin, and the intrinsic value of the two terms; and he did not rest until he had achieved his end. Let us now examine what morality--what "good" and "evil"--means to almost everybody to-day. In the minds of nearly all those people who are neither students nor actual teachers of philosophy, there is a superstition that "good" is a perfectly definite and absolute value, and that "evil" is known unto all. Few seem to doubt that the meaning of these words has been fixed once and for ever. The ordinary European lives, reads, and sleeps, year in, year out, under the delusion that all is quite clear in regard to right and wrong. Such a person is, of course, somewhat abashed when you tell him that a certain people in the East practise infanticide and call it good or that a certain people in the West always separate at meals and eat apart and call _this_ good. He usually gets over the difficulty, however, by saying that they know no better, and when at last he is hard pressed, and is bound to admit that views of good and bad, sometimes the reverse of his own, actually do preserve and unite people in strange lands, he takes refuge in the hope that all differences may one day be broken down and that the problem will thus be solved. No such facile shelving of the question, however, could satisfy Nietzsche. From the very outset he freed himself from all national and even racial prejudices, and could see no particular reason why the kind of morality now prevailing in Europe, or countries like Europe, must necessarily and ultimately overcome and supplant all others. He therefore attacked the question with a perfectly open mind, and asked himself whether he quite understood the part the terms "good" and "evil" have played in human history.