Owing to a scrupulosity peculiar to myself, which I confess reluctantly,--it concerns indeed _morality_,--a scrupulosity, which manifests itself in my life at such an early period, with so much spontaneity, with so chronic a persistence and so keen an opposition to environment, epoch, precedent, and ancestry that I should have been almost entitled to style it my "_â priori_"--my curiosity and my suspicion felt themselves betimes bound to halt at the question, of what in point of actual fact was the _origin_ of our "Good" and of our "Evil." Indeed, at the boyish age of thirteen the problem of the origin of Evil already haunted me: at an age "when games and God divide one's heart," I devoted to that problem my first childish attempt at the literary game, my first philosophic essay--and as regards my infantile solution of the problem, well, I gave quite properly the honour to God, and made him the _father_ of evil. Did my own "_â priori_" demand that precise solution from me? that new, immoral, or at least "amoral" "_â priori_" and that "categorical imperative" which was its voice (but oh! how hostile to the Kantian article, and how pregnant with problems!), to which since then I have given more and more attention, and indeed what is more than attention. Fortunately I soon learned to separate theological from moral prejudices, and I gave up looking for a _supernatural_ origin of evil. A certain amount of historical and philological education, to say nothing of an innate faculty of psychological discrimination _par excellence_ succeeded in transforming almost immediately my original problem into the following one:--Under what conditions did Man invent for himself those judgments of values, "Good" and "Evil"? _And what intrinsic value do they possess in themselves?_ Have they up to the present hindered or advanced human well-being? Are they a symptom of the distress, impoverishment, and degeneration of Human Life? Or, conversely, is it in them that is manifested the fulness, the strength, and the will of Life, its courage, its self-confidence, its future? On this point I found and hazarded in my mind the most diverse answers, I established distinctions in periods, peoples, and castes, I became a specialist in my problem, and from my answers grew new questions, new investigations, new conjectures, new probabilities; until at last I had a land of my own and a soil of my own, a whole secret world growing and flowering, like hidden gardens of whose existence no one could have an inkling--oh, how happy are we, we finders of knowledge, provided that we know how to keep silent sufficiently long. 4.