My ideas on the origin of our moral preconceptions - which is precisely what I address in this combative work - were first presented discreetly and succinctly in that collection of aphorisms titled "Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits".

I began the composition of this work in Sorrento, one winter when I happened to stop there like a traveler resting somewhere, and to embrace with my gaze the vast and dangerous land that had traversed my mind until then. It was during the winter of 1876-77. However, my pure ideas were even older.

Essentially, they are the same ideas that I am reworking in these studies... let us hope that the long period that has passed has benefited them, that they have become more mature, clearer, more robust, more perfect!

The fact that I remain steadfast in them even today, that in the meantime, they have connected more with one another, that they have mingled and merged into one another, intensifies within me the joyful certainty that they were not born in my mind biased, randomly, and sporadically, but on the contrary, that they sprouted from the same root, from a deep yearning for knowledge that dominates my inner world, and which expresses increasingly definitive demands for ever more precise concepts.

Only in this way is it worthwhile for a philosopher to contemplate.