The first stimulus to publish something of my hypothesis concerning the origin of morality was given to me by a lucid, tidy, clever, even precocious little book, in which for the first time I clearly ran into a topsy-turvy, perverse type of genealogical hypothesis—a genuinely English style. It drew me with that power of attraction which everything opposite, everything antipodal, contains. The title of this booklet was The Origin of the Moral Feelings. Its author was Dr Paul Rée, and it appeared in the year 1877.* I have perhaps never read anything which I would have denied, statement by statement, conclusion by conclusion, as I did with this book, but without any sense of annoyance or impatience. In the work I mentioned above, on which I was working at the time, I made opportune and inopportune references to statements in Dr. Rée’s book, not in order to prove them wrong—what have I to do with preparing refutations!—but, as is appropriate to a positive spirit, to put in the place of something unlikely something more likely and possibly in the place of some error a different error. In that period, as I said, for the first time I brought into the light of day that hypotheses about genealogy to which these essays have been dedicated—but clumsily, as I will be the last to deny, still fettered, still without my own language for these concerns of mine, and with all sorts of retreating and vacillating. For particular details, you should compare what I said in Human, All-too Human, 45, about the double nature of the prehistory of good and evil (that is, in the spheres of the nobility and the slaves); similarly, section 136, concerning the worth and origin of ascetic morality, as well as sections 96, 99, and 2.89 concerning the “Morality of Custom,” that much older and more primitive style of morality, which lies toto coelo [an enormous distance] from the altruistic way of valuing (which Dr. Rée, like all English genealogists of morality, sees as the very essence of moral evaluation); similarly, 1.92, Wanderer section 26, and The Dawn 112, concerning the origin of justice as a compromise between approximately equal powers (equality as a precondition of all contracts and therefore of all justice); likewise concerning the origin of punishment in Wanderer 22, 33, for which an intent to terrify is neither the essential thing nor the origin (as Dr. Rée claims:—it is far more likely first brought in under a specific set of conditions and always as something incidental, something additional).*

Paul Rée (1849-1901): German philosopher and friend of Nietzsche’s. His The Origin of the Moral Sensations was published in 1877.

Wanderer was published in 1880 and Daybreak (or Dawn) in 1881. In these references to Nietzsche’s earlier works the page numbers he gives in his text have been replaced with section numbers