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All these moralities that direct themselves at the individual person, for the sake of his "happiness," as people say - what are they except proposals about conduct in relation to the degree of danger in which the individual person lives with himself, recipes against his passions, his good and bad inclinations, to the extent that they have a will to power and would like to play the master; small and great clever sayings and affectations, afflicted with the musty enclosed smell of ancient household remedies or old women's wisdom, all baroque and unreasonable in form - because they direct themselves to "all," because they generalize where we should not generalize - all speaking absolutely, taking themselves absolutely, all spiced with more than one grain of salt, and much more bearable, sometimes even seductive, only when they learn to smell over-seasoned and dangerous, above all "of the other world." By any intellectual standard, all that is worth little and still a far cry from "science," to say nothing of "wisdom," but, to say it again and to say it three times: prudence, prudence, prudence, mixed in with stupidity, stupidity, stupidity - whether it is now that indifference and coldness of a metaphorical statute against the hot-headed foolishness of the emotions, which the Stoics recommended and applied as a cure; or even that no-more-laughing and no-more-crying of Spinoza, his excessively naive support for the destruction of the emotions through analysis and vivisection; or that repression of the emotions to a harmless mean, according to which they should be satisfied, the Aristotelianism of morality; even morality as the enjoyment of emotions in a deliberate dilution and spiritualization through artistic symbolism, something like music or the love of God and of man for God's sake - for in religion the passions have civil rights once more, provided that . . . ; finally even that accommodating and wanton dedication to the emotions, as Hafis and Goethe taught, that daring permission to let go of the reins, that physical-spiritual licentia morum [freedom in behaviour] in the exceptional examples of wise old owls and drunkards, for whom it "has little danger any more." This also for the chapter "morality as timidity."⁷