100 Beyond Good and Evilbunglers say, and thereby deem themselves wise—‘from sub-
mission to arbitrary laws,’ as the anarchists say, and thereby
fancy themselves ‘free,’ even free-spirited. The singular fact
remains, however, that everything of the nature of freedom,
elegance, boldness, dance, and masterly certainty, which
exists or has existed, whether it be in thought itself, or in
administration, or in speaking and persuading, in art just
as in conduct, has only developed by means of the tyranny
of such arbitrary law, and in all seriousness, it is not at all
improbable that precisely this is ‘nature’ and ‘natural’—and
not laisser-aller! Every artist knows how different from the
state of letting himself go, is his ‘most natural’ condition,
the free arranging, locating, disposing, and constructing
in the moments of ‘inspiration’—and how strictly and deli-
cately he then obeys a thousand laws, which, by their very
rigidness and precision, defy all formulation by means of
ideas (even the most stable idea has, in comparison there-
with, something floating, manifold, and ambiguous in it).
The essential thing ‘in heaven and in earth’ is, apparently
(to repeat it once more), that there should be long OBEDI-
ENCE in the same direction, there thereby results, and has
always resulted in the long run, something which has made
life worth living; for instance, virtue, art, music, dancing,
reason, spirituality— anything whatever that is transfig-
uring, refined, foolish, or divine. The long bondage of the
spirit, the distrustful constraint in the communicability of
ideas, the discipline which the thinker imposed on himself
to think in accordance with the rules of a church or a court,
or conformable to Aristotelian premises, the persistent