II + 

When I came unto men, then found I them resting on an old infatuation: all of them thought they had long known what was good and bad for men. + 

An old wearisome business seemed to them all discourse about virtue; and he who wished to sleep well spake of “good” and “bad” ere retiring to rest. + 

This somnolence did I disturb when I taught that no one yet knoweth what is good and bad:⁠—unless it be the creating one! + 

—It is he, however, who createth man’s goal, and giveth to the earth its meaning and its future: he only effecteth it that aught is good or bad. + 

And I bade them upset their old academic chairs, and wherever that old infatuation had sat; I bade them laugh at their great moralists, their saints, their poets, and their Saviours. + 

At their gloomy sages did I bid them laugh, and whoever had sat admonishing as a black scarecrow on the tree of life. + 

On their great grave-highway did I seat myself, and even beside the carrion and vultures⁠—and I laughed at all their bygone and its mellow decaying glory. + 

Verily, like penitential preachers and fools did I cry wrath and shame on all their greatness and smallness. Oh, that their best is so very small! Oh, that their worst is so very small! Thus did I laugh. + 

Thus did my wise longing, born in the mountains, cry and laugh in me; a wild wisdom, verily!⁠—my great pinion-rustling longing. + 

And oft did it carry me off and up and away and in the midst of laughter; then flew I quivering like an arrow with sun-intoxicated rapture: + 

—Out into distant futures, which no dream hath yet seen, into warmer souths than ever sculptor conceived⁠—where gods in their dancing are ashamed of all clothes: + 

(That I may speak in parables and halt and stammer like the poets: and verily I am ashamed that I have still to be a poet!) + 

Where all becoming seemed to me dancing of Gods, and wantoning of Gods, and the world unloosed and unbridled and fleeing back to itself:⁠— + 

—As an eternal self-fleeing and re-seeking of one another of many Gods, as the blessed self-contradicting, recommuning, and refraternising with one another of many Gods:⁠— + 

Where all time seemed to me a blessed mockery of moments, where necessity was freedom itself, which played happily with the goad of freedom:⁠— + 

Where I also found again mine old devil and arch-enemy, the spirit of gravity, and all that it created: constraint, law, necessity and consequence and purpose and will and good and evil:⁠— + 

For must there not be that which is danced over, danced beyond? Must there not, for the sake of the nimble, the nimblest⁠—be moles and clumsy dwarfs?⁠— + 