And he gave his thoughts an even more general and impersonal form by putting the relationship that exists between the injunctions “Do!” and “Do not!” in the place of good and evil. For as long as a morality is in the ascendancy—and this is as true of the spirit of neighborly love as it is of the spirit of a horde of vandals—“Do not!” is merely the reverse and a natural corollary of “Do!”: the doing and the not-doing are a burning passion, and whatever faults they entail hardly matter, because these are the faults of heroes and martyrs. In this condition good and evil are identical with the happiness and unhappiness of the whole person. But as soon as the contested ethos has come to power and has spread, and there are no particular obstacles to its fulfillment, the relationship between commandment and prohibition necessarily passes through a decisive stage where duty is no longer born anew and alive each day but needs to be kept at hand, leached of its substance and dissected into ifs and buts, for every kind of use and application; and thus begins a process in the course of which virtue and vice, due to their provenance in the same rules, laws, exceptions, and restrictions, come to look more and more like each other, until in the end that strange but basically unbearable self-contradiction comes about that was Ulrich’s point of departure: that the distinction between good and evil loses all meaning when compared with the delight of a pure, deep, spontaneous mode of action—a thrill that can leap like a spark from sanctioned as well as from forbidden activities. Indeed, anyone inquiring into this without prejudice will probably recognize that the proscriptive part of morality is more highly charged with this tension than the prescriptive one: While it seems relatively natural that certain actions that are thought of as “bad” must not be performed, or, if one performs them nonetheless, at least should not have been performed, such as appropriating other people’s property or unrestrained sensual indulgence, the corresponding affirmative moral conventions—in this case, unlimited devotion to giving or the mortification of fleshly desire—have almost been lost, and where they are still practiced, they are the business of fools and crackpots or bloodless prigs. And in such a condition, where virtue is decrepit and moral behavior consists mainly in avoiding what is immoral, it can easily happen that the latter appears to be not only more spontaneous and vigorous than the former, but actually more moral, if one may use that term not in the sense of law and justice but as a gauge of whatever passion can still be aroused by matters of conscience. But could anything be more contradictory than cultivating an inward predilection for evil because, with whatever remnants of a soul one still possesses, one is seeking the good?!