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Rh voluntary passing from a wild to a civilized (or semi-civilized) state, an organic growing into new conditions, the old instincts would have fallen little by little into disuse and lost the vigor and edge needed to produce the characteristic features of the new phenomenon. The roving populations were violently subjected—there was no give and take, no contract: the earliest "state," Nietzsche remarks (and here he expresses a not uncommon opinion), was a fearful tyranny—it was only in this way that the raw formless material could be kneaded, made pliant, and given a shape. He does not mean (I take it) that this was done for all the world at once, but only that the process of subjugation and social formation was of this character as it occurred: always was there for those subjected a violent break with their animal past, the old instincts then surviving in latent form and forced to act in the subterranean way described. Neither does he mean that the full result—bad conscience as we find it, for instance, in Buddhism, Christianity, and Schopenhauer—was reached at once; it suffices to his theory if the general characteristic features of the new phenomenon appeared—if men savagely turned on themselves, and preyed on themselves, however confused their feelings might be.

The theory probably strikes the reader (as it has me) as far-fetched and artificial, and I should add that Nietzsche simply speaks of it as "my hypothesis" and calls the exposition of it which we have—as it turns out, the only one—a "first preliminary expression." And yet it covers three points in the phenomenon in a rather striking manner; first, the sharpness of "bad conscience," its stinginess and fierceness, these being traced to primitive instincts of cruelty—simple departure from an admitted standard might not yield anything so extreme; second, the sense of a guilty nature (not merely of wrong acts), man's animal make-up being particularly in mind—this coming from a forced and violent break with an animal past; third, the lack of reason and intelligence in the phenomenon (as Nietzsche views the matter, for he regards it as an Erkrankung), this