morality, in the subjective sense, being definable as action according to them. A Sitte or mos is a long-established social habit or rule—one that may be followed or not,d and that has gravity because it is believed to be vitally related to the welfare of the group. Individuals may impose commands, but only societies can have mores; and because no one knows just whence they come, superstition has free range in accounting for them.e The mores were of a wide range in early communities; they covered health, marriage, medicine, war, agriculture, religion—so that morality was almost co-extensive with the whole of life.[1] On the other hand, in things where no tradition commanded, there was no morality; and the less life was determined by tradition the smaller the circle of morality became—so that with this in mind Nietzsche can say that we now live in a relatively unmoral time, so many things being left to individual judgment or inclination. The opposite of the moral man was one who acted (or was disposed to) according to his own ideas—almost inevitably he seemed evil to the rest of the community; indeed in all primitive conditions of mankind "evil" was practically equivalent to "individual," "free," "arbitrary," "unusual," "unforeseen," "unreckonable."[2] Even if the individual did what was moral, yet not because tradition commanded it, but for other reasons, say for personal advantage, or if in varying from tradition he acted from the very motives of the general advantage which established the tradition in the first place, but of his own motion purely, he was liable to be esteemed unmoral and might view himself in this light—morality being a matter of conformity and obedience altogether. The only way in which one could rise to independence of the mores was to become a lawgiver oneself, a medicine-man or half-God—that is, to make mores, a fearful enterprise in which one risked one's own life.
- ↑ On the range of the mores, cf. Wundt, Ethics (Eng. tr.), I, 265-6; Lazarus, Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie, I, 452.
- ↑ In this circle of conceptions who was the most moral? It was either he who fulfilled the law most often, and so, like the The word here is böse—see the full explanation in the following chapter.
