Here the long arguments stop. Chapter 4 is 123 numbered sayings, most of them a line or two long, with no bridge from one to the next. Each one has to work alone, and the reader gets no lecture to soften the blow.
Many of them catch the self in the act of lying to itself. "I did that," says memory. "I could not have done that," says pride, and in the end memory gives way. Principles, he notes, can be a way to dominate, excuse, or hide our habits, so two people with the same principles may want opposite things. The will to overcome an emotion is only the will of another emotion. Even "knowledge for its own sake" turns out to be morality's last trap.
Other lines turn to love, vanity, praise, and women, and several of the remarks about women are sharp in a way many readers find unfair. Some read as short tests of maturity. To be grown up, he writes, is to recover the seriousness a child has at play. Madness is rare in single people but the rule in groups, parties, nations, and ages. Whatever is done out of love always happens beyond good and evil.
The most famous line comes late. Whoever fights monsters should take care not to become one, and if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. The chapter does not explain it. It ends instead on a small exchange: "I dislike him." Why? "I am not a match for him." Did anyone ever answer so?
Coming Up in Chapter 5
Next Nietzsche sets Europe's refined moral feeling beside its clumsy science of morals. He calls every moral system a sign-language of the emotions, praises long obedience as the root of discipline, and starts to ask what the herd instinct has made of modern virtue.
