My ideas about the origin of our moral preconceptions - because that is exactly what I deal with in this polemical work - were first presented discreetly and laconically, in that collection of aphorisms entitled "Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits". I had started writing the work in Sorrento, one winter when I happened to stop there like a traveler who disembarks somewhere, and embrace with my gaze the boundless and dangerous country that my spirit had crossed until then. It was the winter of 1876-77. But my ideas themselves were even older. Essentially, they were the same ideas that I am reworking in these studies... let us hope that the long period of time that has passed has benefited them, that they have become more mature, more clear, more solid, more perfect! The fact that I remain steadfast in them even today, that in the meantime they have become more interconnected, that they have mixed and merged with each other, intensifies within me the joyful certainty that they were not born in my spirit partial, random, and sporadic, but on the contrary, that they sprouted from the same root, from a deep desire for knowledge that dominates the inner world, and that expresses increasingly decisive demands for more precise concepts. Only in this way does a philosopher deserve to contemplate.