The Genealogy of Morals The Complete Works, Volume Thirteen, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy. · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
5.
With regard to our problem, which can justly be called an intimate problem, and which elects to appeal to only a limited number of ears: it is of no small interest to ascertain that in those words and roots which denote "good" we catch glimpses of that arch-trait, on the strength of which the aristocrats feel themselves to be beings of a higher order than their fellows. Indeed, they call themselves in perhaps the most frequent instances simply after their superiority in power (_e.g._ "the powerful," "the lords," "the commanders"), or after the most obvious sign of their superiority, as for example "the rich," "the possessors" (that is the meaning of _arya_; and the Iranian and Slav languages correspond). But they also call themselves after some _characteristic idiosyncrasy_; and this is the case which now concerns us. They name themselves, for instance, "the truthful": this is first done by the Greek nobility whose mouthpiece is found in Theognis, the Megarian poet. The word ἐσθλος, which is coined for the purpose, signifies etymologically "one who _is_," who has reality, who is real, who is true; and then with a subjective twist, the "true," as the "truthful": at this stage in the evolution of the idea, it becomes the motto and party cry of the nobility, and quite completes the transition to the meaning "noble," so as to place outside the pale the lying, vulgar man, as Theognis conceives and portrays him--till finally the word after the decay of the nobility is left to delineate psychological _noblesse_, and becomes as it were ripe and mellow. In the word κακός as in δειλός (the plebeian in contrast to the ἀγαθός) the cowardice is emphasised. This affords perhaps an inkling on what lines the etymological origin of the very ambiguous ἀγαθός is to be investigated.
In the Latin _malus_ (which I place side by side with μέλας) the vulgar man can be distinguished as the dark-coloured, and above all as the black-haired ("_hic niger est_"), as the pre-Aryan inhabitants of the Italian soil, whose complexion formed the clearest feature of distinction from the dominant blondes, namely, the Aryan conquering race:--at any rate Gaelic has afforded me the exact analogue--_Fin_ (for instance, in the name Fin-Gal), the distinctive word of the nobility, finally--good, noble, clean, but originally the blonde-haired man in contrast to the dark black-haired aboriginals. The Celts, if I may make a parenthetic statement, were throughout a blonde race; and it is wrong to connect, as Virchow still connects, those traces of an essentially dark-haired population which are to be seen on the more elaborate ethnographical maps of Germany with any Celtic ancestry or with any admixture of Celtic blood: in this context it is rather the _pre-Aryan_ population of Germany which surges up to these districts. (The same is true substantially of the whole of Europe: in point of fact, the subject race has finally again obtained the upper hand, in complexion and the shortness of the skull, and perhaps in the intellectual and social qualities.
Who can guarantee that modern democracy, still more modern anarchy, and indeed that tendency to the "Commune," the most primitive form of society, which is now common to all the Socialists in Europe, does not in its real essence signify a monstrous reversion--and that the conquering and _master_ race--the Aryan race, is not also becoming inferior physiologically?) I believe that I can explain the Latin _bonus_ as the "warrior": my hypothesis is that I am right in deriving _bonus_ from an older _duonus_ (compare _bellum_ = _duellum_ = _duen-lum_, in which the word _duonus_ appears to me to be contained). Bonus accordingly as the man of discord, of variance, "entzweiung" (_duo_), as the warrior: one sees what in ancient Rome "the good" meant for a man. Must not our actual German word _gut_ mean "_the godlike_, the man of godlike race"? and be identical with the national name (originally the nobles' name) of the _Goths_? The grounds for this supposition do not appertain to this work.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.