Thus Spoke Zarathustra

truly consequential, future-transforming psychology is the moralistic one. It does not only deal with stimuli; it does not only require people who understand dissection, galvanization, cooking, and evaporation—it deals above all with motives; it is an analytics of psychic sensations and actions and requires for its cultivation people with a multiplicity of gifts and a sharpness and depth of vision that are rare. The moralistic thinker, the true scrutator cordium examiner of hearts, must understand the mechanistic conception as well as the half-fantastic and wholly fantastic mode of perception of ordinary people and geniuses, of the religious and the artists, of men, women, children, animals. Like the dramatist, he must be rich enough to reproduce within himself every sensation of the most diversely developed individuals, even those of remote ages, and yet, as one who knows, stand far above them. As one who knows, he perceives that there are no simple sensations, that every sensation is mixed from a hundred others, all of which never appear alone: the moralistic thinker provides the semiotics of sensations and their accompanying thoughts; he lays bare their root system; he dissolves every unity into a multiplicity. If the psychologist is now himself a philosopher, that is: if he is at the same time that man who has made the higher breeding of humanity a matter of his conscience and his responsibility, then his moralistic knowing will serve a very specific purpose: precisely that higher breeding. Yet—we expressed ourselves incorrectly. This purpose is not added to the Nietzschean moralistics that we mean only later: rather, this purpose is the primary driving force within it. Whoever did not want to aim for a new, different goal than that which the herd-humanity living around him has would not see many new problems in the moral sphere at all—for him, the moral phenomena would remain those compact, fat notions, at the mention of which the people feel a pleasant swelling or unpleasant decrease of self-esteem, and whose essence to make transparent, whose composition and origin to investigate, is not given to them. Nietzsche's astonishing productivity in the field of psychological research is to be attributed solely to the nobility of his will: like the Asian founders of religion, he felt himself to be the very incarnation of the will to the elevation of humanity. And he was in fact...