Page:Thus Spake Zarathustra - Thomas Common - 1917.djvu/253

 has hitherto been only illusion, and not knowledge; and therefore concerning good and evil there has hitherto been only illusion and not knowledge!

10.
"You shall not rob! you shall not kill!"- such precepts were once called sacred; before them did one bow the knee and the head, and take off one's shoes.

But I ask you: Where have there ever been better robbers and killers in the world than such sacred precepts?

Is there not even in all life- robbing and killing? And for such precepts to be called sacred, was not truth itself thereby- slain?

-Or was it a sermon of death that called sacred what contradicted and dissuaded from life?- O my brothers, break up, break up for me the old law-tablets!

11.
It is my sympathy with all the past that I see it is abandoned,-

-Abandoned to the favor, the spirit and the madness of every generation that comes, and reinterprets all that has been as its bridge!

A great potentate might arise, an artful prodigy, who with approval and disapproval could strain and constrain all the past, until it became for him a bridge, a harbinger, a herald, and a cock-crowing.