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I hope people forgive me the discovery that all moral philosophy so far has been boring and has belonged among things which send us to sleep - and that, in my eyes, "virtue" has been impaired by nothing so much as by this tediousness of its advocates. In saying this I still don't wish to deny their general utility. A great deal rests on the fact that as few people as possible think about morality - and so it's very important that morality does not one day become something interesting! But that's not something people should worry about! These days things still stand they way they always have: I don't see anyone in Europe who might have (or might provide ) some idea about how reflecting on morality could be conducted dangerously, awkwardly, seductively - that there could be disaster in the process. People should consider, for example, the tireless unavoidable English utilitarians, how they wander around crudely and honourably in Bentham's footsteps, moving this way and that (a Homeric metaphor says it more clearly), just as Bentham himself had already wandered in the footsteps of the honourable Helvetius (this Helvetius - no, he was no dangerous man!).⁷ No new idea, nothing of a more refined expression and bending of an old idea, not even a real history of an earlier idea: an impossible literature in its totality, unless we understand how to spice it up with some malice. For in these moralists as well (whom we really have to read with ulterior motives, if we have to read them -) that old English vice called cant and moral Tartufferie [hypocrisy], has inserted itself, this time hidden under a new form of scientific thinking. Nor is there any lack of a secret resistance against the pangs of a guilty conscience, something a race of former Puritans justifiably will suffer from in all its scientific preoccupations with morality. (Isn't a moralist the opposite of a Puritan, namely, a thinker who considers morality something questionable, worth raising questions about, in short, as a problem? Shouldn't moralizing be - immoral?). In the end they all want English morality to be considered right, so that then mankind or "general needs" or "the happiness of the greatest number" - no! England's good fortune - will be best served. They want to prove with all their might that striving for English happiness, I mean for comfort and fashion (and, as the highest priority, a seat in Parliament) is at the same time also the right path to virtue, in fact, that all virtue which has existed in the world so far has consisted of just such striving. Not one of all these ponderous herd animals with uneasy consciences (who commit themselves to promoting egoism as an issue of general welfare -) wants to know or catch a whiff of the fact that the "general welfare" is no ideal, no goal, not even a concept one can somehow grasp, but is only an emetic - that what is right for one man cannot in any way also be right for another man, that the demand for a single morality for everyone is a direct restriction on the higher men, in short, that there is a rank ordering between man and man, and thus, as a result, also between morality and morality. These utilitarian Englishmen are a modest and thoroughly mediocre kind of man and, as mentioned, insofar as they are boring, we cannot think highly enough of their utility. We should even encourage them, just as, to some extent, someone has tried to do in the following rhyme:

Hail to you, brave working lout,
"It's always better when drawn out."
Always stiff in head and knee
Never funny, never keen,
Always sticking to the mean.
Sans genie et sans esprit.
[Without genius and without wit]