fix with certainty what is the end, and what is the means to that end; above all, to reckon, to have power to calculate--how thoroughly must man have first become _calculable, disciplined, necessitated_ even for himself and his own conception of himself, that, like a man entering into a promise, he could guarantee himself _as a future_. 2. This is simply the long history of the origin of _responsibility_. That task of breeding an animal which can make promises, includes, as we have already grasped, as its condition and preliminary, the more immediate task of first _making_ man to a certain extent, necessitated, uniform, like among his like, regular, and consequently calculable. The immense work of what I have called, "morality of custom"[1] (cp. _Dawn of Day_, Aphs. 9, 14, and 16), the actual work of man on himself during the longest period of the human race, his whole prehistoric work, finds its meaning, its great justification (in spite of all its innate hardness, despotism, stupidity, and idiocy) in this fact: man, with the help of the morality of customs and of social strait-waistcoats, was _made_ genuinely calculable. If, however, we place ourselves at the end of this colossal process, at the point where the tree finally matures its fruits, when society and its morality of custom finally bring to light that to which it was only the means, then do we find as the ripest fruit on its tree the _sovereign individual_, that resembles only himself, that has got loose from the morality of custom, the autonomous "super-moral" individual (for "autonomous" and "moral" are mutually-exclusive terms),--in short, the man of the personal, long, and independent will, _competent to promise_, and we find in him a proud consciousness (vibrating in every fibre), of _what_ has been at last achieved and become vivified in him, a genuine consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling of human perfection in general. And this man who has grown to freedom, who is really _competent_ to promise, this lord of the _free_ will, this sovereign--how is it possible for him not to know how great is his superiority over everything incapable of binding itself by promises, or of being its own security, how great is the trust, the awe, the reverence that he awakes--he "deserves" all three--not to know that with this mastery over himself he is necessarily also given the mastery over circumstances, over nature, over all creatures with shorter wills, less reliable characters? The "free" man, the owner of a long unbreakable will, finds in this possession his _standard of value_: looking out from himself upon the others, he honours or he despises, and just as necessarily as he honours his peers, the strong and the reliable (those who can bind themselves by promises),--that is, every one who promises like a sovereign, with difficulty, rarely and slowly, who is sparing with his trusts but confers _honour_ by the very fact of trusting, who gives