My thoughts concerning the _genealogy_ of our moral prejudices--for they constitute the issue in this polemic--have their first, bald, and provisional expression in that collection of aphorisms entitled _Human, all-too-Human, a Book for Free Minds_, the writing of which was begun in Sorrento, during a winter which allowed me to gaze over the broad and dangerous territory through which my mind had up to that time wandered. This took place in the winter of 1876-77; the thoughts themselves are older. They were in their substance already the same thoughts which I take up again in the following treatises:--we hope that they have derived benefit from the long interval, that they have grown riper, clearer, stronger, more complete. The fact, however, that I still cling to them even now, that in the meanwhile they have always held faster by each other, have, in fact, grown out of their original shape and into each other, all this strengthens in my mind the joyous confidence that they must have been originally neither separate disconnected capricious nor sporadic phenomena, but have sprung from a common root, from a fundamental "_fiat_" of knowledge, whose empire reached to the soul's depth, and that ever grew more definite in its voice, and more definite in its demands. That is the only state of affairs that is proper in the case of a philosopher. We have no right to be "_disconnected_"; we must neither err "disconnectedly" nor strike the truth "disconnectedly." Rather with the necessity with which a tree bears its fruit, so do our thoughts, our values, our Yes's and No's and If's and Whether's, grow connected and interrelated, mutual witnesses of _one_ will, _one_ health, _one_ kingdom, _one_ sun--as to whether they are to _your_ taste, these fruits of ours?--But what matters that to the trees? What matters that to us, us the philosophers? 3.