# Nietzsche the thinker/Chapter XXV

CHAPTER XXV
MORAL CONSTRUCTION (Cont.). THE MORAL AIM AND WILL TO POWER
I
"Will to power" is primarily with Nietzsche an analysis of reality—as we have seen in Chapter XV, he finds an impulse of this description at the base of man's being, and then proceeds to construe life and the world at large in terms of it. It is fundamentally a psychological and cosmological, not ethical doctrine. So and so man and the world are made, here lies the bottom spring (or springs)—such is the meaning of it.
As matter of fact, Nietzsche was not laudatory of power in his early days nor was he unqualifiedly so in his second period, and some kinds of power did not have his admiration even in the last period.
Indeed, power in and of itself was never a standard to Nietzsche—and since there is so much misconception on this point, it may be well to bring out the fact clearly at the outset, and then later indicate the connection between power, or will to it, and the general ethical aim which he proposes, as stated in the last chapter.
II
Use is made by some of an incident in Nietzsche's early life, when he was caught out in a thunderstorm and felt, as he said, an incomparable elevation in witnessing the lightning, the tempest, the hail—free, non-ethical forces, pure will untroubled by the intellect. It was an experience such as any ​reflecting student, harassed in various ways, might have, and is essentially Schopenhauerian in the manner in which it is described. But though he felt the glory of nature's life, he did not set up nature as a model, then or at any time. In a striking passage in one of his later books, Beyond Good and Evil, he speaks of the impossibility of living "according to nature." Nature, he says, is wasteful, indifferent, without purpose or consideration, pity or justice, at once fearful, desert-like, and uncertain, indifference itself being power—one recalls Matthew Arnold's sonnet "In Harmony with Nature." The Stoics really put their moral ideal into nature—and then proceeded to find it natural! Indeed, Nietzsche dissents from the whole conception, so common in our day, of morality and life as consisting in adjustment to external conditions. To be determined by our environment, rather than to shape it more or less ourselves, is to him a sign of decadence. Much that looks like a simple effect of environment is, he urges, really the result of an active adaptation from within—exactly the same circumstances being treated in different ways (according to the nature of the inner impulse). He criticises Spencer and Darwin for overvaluing outer conditions and would probably have agreed with William James against John Fiske and Grant Allen in their famous controversy about "Great Men" some years ago. A genius, he says, is not explained by the conditions of his rise, and he counts it one of the weaknesses of modern life that we no longer know how to act, and can only react on incitement from without—examples being historians, critics, analyzers, interpreters, observers, collectors, readers, and scientific men in general, i.e., all who merely note what is and do not create. It is from nowhere save from within and from the innermost impulses of our nature that Nietzsche takes his moral ideal.
Yes, so strong is the idealizing tendency with him that he refuses even to take the dominating morality of our time as the ideal of morality. At present the average man, the social man, is in the foreground and everything is estimated from the ​standpoint of his interests, to the prejudice of rarer, higher individuals who more or less stand apart; and if, says Nietzsche, we make this reality over into a morality we have as the result that the average are of more value than the exceptions—something against which he protests with the whole energy of his nature, declaring, "Against formulating reality into a morality I rebel." Hence a remark, which shows again how little nature and natural tendencies are a norm to him: "I find the 'cruelty of nature,' of which so much is said, in another place: she is cruel to her fortunate children (Glückskinder), she spares and protects les humbles."
That Nietzsche's ideal was not one of mere power (of whatever kind), I shall now show by a number of citations—all from the writings of his middle and later period, when the doctrine of the will to power was taking shape in his mind. We still, he says, fall on our knees before force after the old slave-fashion, but if we ask how far force deserves to be revered we can only answer, to the extent reason blends with it—we must ask how far it is ruled by something higher and serves it as its instrument and means. You stronger and haughty minds, he exclaims, grant us only one thing: lay no new burdens on us, but take some of our burdens on yourselves, as becomes the stronger! He indicates plainly enough that tyrants of the ordinary sort are odious to him—whether in the political or intellectual realm. He calls it one of the limitations of great men that they are too apt to make the lesser kind stupid. We may seek to possess things, but not men; authority so as to command others is not desirable. He is against the tyranny of even true opinions—as if they alone should exist! It is the people with "absolute truth" who burn Jews and heretics and good books, and root out entire cultures, as in Peru and Mexico—fanatical love of power leading them on. The same thing ​leads men of today to do all kinds of shady things to get rich. "Often slime sits on the throne and the throne on slime." Mistaken instincts for power, too, are behind the philosopher's will for a system—really a will, Nietzsche thinks, to make one's self more stupid than one is, "stronger, simpler, more imperious, ruder, more tyrannical." Will to power lies behind religious domination: priests became the ruling class in later Israel; Israel itself, through Christianity, has become a ruling influence in our Western world—such domination is objectionable to Nietzsche. The people, i.e., the mass, are coming to power in modern states—Nietzsche opposes the tendency. Occasionally violent men take advantage of popular disorders to put themselves and their arbitrary will through; but the nobility he wishes to see will be enemies both of the lustful populace and of these upstarts (Gewalt-Herren). Of the Germany of today, he remarks, "It costs dear to come to power: power makes stupid (verdummt);" he means that the interests of culture suffer from this preoccupation with external matters. Again, "Can one interest oneself in the German Empire? Where is the new thought?… To rule and help the highest thought to victory—that is the only thing that could interest me in Germany." Of a certain statesman (Bismarck, presumably), he says, "Strong. Strong. Strong and mad! Not great!" He has misgivings about the book, Will to Power, he is preparing, wishing that it could be written in French, so as not to have the appearance of giving countenance to German imperial aspirations. Indeed, he becomes almost contemptuous: "Power is tiresome (langweilig)—witness the Empire."!
​All this is not taken into account by those—and they are a host, all the way from college presidents down to penny-a-liners in the newspapers—who think that Nietzsche proclaims an indiscriminate "gospel of might," having particularly in mind might of the "wild beast" type; and we shall have to proceed with a little care in connecting his ethical end, as defined in the previous chapter, with will to power. In a way the matter was problematical to him. He makes a note, "Rule! Force my type on others? Horrible (grässlich)! Is not my happiness just in contemplating a variety of types! Problem." Indeed, he writes to a friend about his proposed book, Will to Power, "I have not gone beyond tentatives, introductions, promises of all sorts.… It has been, all in all, a torture, and I have no more courage to think about it. In ten years I shall do better." If Nietzsche had lived even half so long, he might have produced something that would have made his views quite clear; as it is, we have to do the work of clarification more or less ourselves.
III
As nearly as I can make out, the logic of his procedure was something like this:—The world at bottom is a complex of forces, and each pushes itself as far as it can—each on its inner side is a will to power. There is no law over these forces restraining them, but they are held in check by one another. Sometimes order may come from a simple balancing. But some may be stronger than others: there are different levels or gradations of force. A higher level may make the lower subject. What we call the organic world masters thus to a certain extent the inorganic, and the higher organic the lower. Force becomes more sublimated, spiritual. Man, the weakest thing in nature from one point of view, controls through intelligence. He is after power, like every other energy in nature, but he has this peculiar means. The single individual's weakness, too, leads him to combine with others, groups arise, and morality, the law ​of group-life, becomes as vital to him as intelligence—it is a means to power, just as intelligence is. And group-life once attained, and the existence of the species becoming tolerably secure, the underlying urge of force may push to higher levels still and use the group itself as a means. It is the peculiar mark of Nietzsche's ethical thinking that he conceives an end for man beyond society. Society is a form of human existence, but not the highest form. Great individuals spring from society, but they rise above it—the social individual is not the highest type. The lonely, the solitary, those whose occupations and interests are beyond the sympathy and perhaps even the comprehension of most of us, who are half like Epicurean Gods apart from the world and move like stars in orbits of their own—they are the real end of humanity, they alone are properly ends in themselves, mankind existing for them, not they for mankind, save as from afar they shine upon us, and lift our hearts. Yet the driving force of the whole process from humblest plant to possible superman is will to power, will not to be, but to be more, each level putting itself on top of what lies beneath it, and being a new level only as it does so—so that if the plant had not had a will to dominate, it would never have emerged from the lower inorganic realm, if the animal had not had the will to dominate, it would never have differentiated itself from the plant, if man had not had the will to dominate and put plants and animals under his feet, he would never have become what he distinctively is; and if somewhere among men now, there is not the will to dominate over other men, to use the rank and file as means, instruments to ends beyond them, there can never be a higher order of mankind or superman. In other words, will to power is the driving force in the whole scheme of cosmic evolution, and if there is to be any further advance, will to power must still be the inner impulsion.
If then, as stated in the preceding chapter, life and the highest possible ascent of life is Nietzsche's moral aim, will to power turns out to be vitally related to it—is indeed but a closer and more interior determination or definition of it. One ​might even say that will to power itself sets the moral aim which Nietzsche proposes—only instead of working blindly and instinctively, it now deliberately formulates what it desires. "Life is to me instinct for growth, for permanence, for the amassing of force, for power." It is true that the feeling of power and for power may be slight in some; it may be almost non-existent in expiring forms of life; all the same, it is, as Nietzsche conceives things, the essence of the living process, and only as it increases, can there be more and higher life. In a word, if life and the highest reach of life are the aim, here is the pulse of the machine, and this it is that must be quickened.
Nietzsche accordingly says:
"Formula of our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a mark to aim at (Ziel).
"What is good? All that increases the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.
"What is bad (schlecht)? All that comes from weakness.
"What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing—that an obstacle is overcome.
"Not contentment, but more power; not peace, but war; not virtue, but ability (Tüeitigkeit)—virtue in Renaissance style, virtù, virtue free from moralic acid."
But while power is the end, and but a concrete inner rendering of life itself, it is plainly power on the human level and of the human sort that Nietzsche has in mind—not power of any and every description. He does not set up as a standard the power of physical nature, or that of tyrants, or of priests or of the mass or of an empire, but power such as essentially belongs to the evolution of the human type—the final ideal being the full and perfect efflorescence of that type, the domination in the world of men and things of just that. If mere ​abstract power were the ideal, then since the brute forces of the universe may sometime get the better of life, that would be an ideal consummation; or, since the weak by combination may (and actually do in our modern democratic world) make themselves masters of the strong, then that is an end to be desired—any chance force or set of forces that happened to get on top at any time would represent the desired end. Indeed, if any de facto might makes right, a question would arise as to the sense of setting up power as an ideal at all, since it effectuates itself anyway—there being no situation in the world that is not statable as the result of the action and interaction of forces, in which some get the upper hand. But Nietzsche is not bête, and so far as he speaks of power as a desirable end for man he means just a power that does not necessarily effectuate itself, that has to be striven for and may or may not be attained—it is emphatically a power that requires a will to power.
IV
Even so, however, it may be said that power is a vague conception—too much so to give us any definite guidance in acting or judging of things. Let us see then what becomes of it in Nietzsche's hands—how he uses it.
In the first place we notice that in the background of his mind there is a certain sense, for all said and done, of the insecurity of life. Mankind is more or less to him, as to Matthew Arnold, "a feeble wavering line." Life is not an assured gift, it rests on effort, toil, on the will to live—so that there is sense in making it an ideal, and in exalting ideals of power. Schopenhauer and the Buddhists actually propose to weaken the will to live. Certain types of Christianity practically tend the same way. Nietzsche feels that there is need of a fortifying doctrine. It is perhaps something to make life and power in all their vagueness an end, as against non-life.
But more than this, the construing life as will to power enables him to judge between different types of life—those animated by less will to power ranking lower than those with full will to power: the descending and ascending lines of life are not of equal value. Indeed, on a general basis of this sort he conceives of the possibility of a properly scientific ethics arising, ​which should stand to past morals something as chemistry does to alchemy. Knowledge being scientific, as it can apply number and measure, an attempt is in order to see if a scientific order of values cannot be built "on a number and measure scale of force," ascent in the scale signifying increase of value, descent diminution of value—all other estimations being prejudices, naïvetés, misunderstandings. He is aware that we cannot carry out the program as yet, that we must have recourse to physiology and medicine, to sociology and psychology, and that these sciences are not yet developed enough to give us with confidence the data we need. All the same he throws out the general idea, and we find him following it in a rough approximate way in appraising not only differing types of men, but even differing moralities. For example:
(1) He rates great individuals differently from the ordinary social man, because they can more or less stand alone, have greater strength. Gregarious creatures are, as a rule, individually weak—that is why they combine; they crave power (as everything in the world does), but they get it in this way. In packs, herds, communities they are strong. But the leaders of the flock and individuals of the solitary type (like the lion and the eagle among animals) have resources in themselves—they have strength and to spare, can give help instead of needing it, or can prey on others and take them captive. As the stronger, they stand higher in Nietzsche's scale of value. Of course, no independence is absolute and Nietzsche is well aware of it; still beings are graded in his eyes according as they are more or less capable of it.
(2) Moralities rank differently according as they spring from strength or weakness (for, aside from the morality involved in any kind of social existence, there are, according to Nietzsche, special moralities, bound up with the conditions of existence of particular peoples or social classes). He finds, for instance, a difference of tone, of emphasis, even of special valuations, in the moralities of the ruler and subject classes in the past—this we have already seen. And why is the "master-morality" higher than the "slave-morality"? Because it comes ​from strength, formulates the conditions of life of the stronger class. The sense of overflowing power runs through it, while the slave-morality is correlated with weakness and the sense of need. If we look through the circle of virtues and excellences put in the first rank by each class—on the one hand, independence, proud self-respect, honor only for equals with at best condescending care or pity for the rest, masterfulness and daring of all sorts, contempt of danger, also capacity for otium, taste for useless knowledge and accomplishments; on the other hand, helpfulness, sympathy, modesty, obedience, patience, humility, industry, prudence, invention, and whatever intellectual virtues serve the practical needs of life—we see that the one set of virtues and excellences is as naturally the idealism of an aristocratic class, full of the pride and abounding vigor of life, as the other is that of the hard-pressed, much-suffering masses of men. And the aristocratic morality ranks higher just because it comes from the higher, i.e., stronger, type of men.
Nietzsche comments on a matter that is of interest in this connection and it may be well to take it up at this point. How shall we explain the historical antagonism of morality to will to power! Perhaps there is no more prevalent notion than that of a contrast between power and right. Now Nietzsche admits a certain relative justification for the common attitude. Power and the will to it are sometimes dangerous (particularly certain crude forms of it), and have to be held in check. And yet he finds a certain speciousness in the antagonism when stated broadly, as it usually is. "Morality" is not so much antithetical to will to power, as a concealed form of it—that is, behind it lies the will to power of the mass, or old-time subject-class. Considering itself as the equivalent of the group (it does of course compose the majority of it) the mass demands (and commands—this an essential feature in any morality) that all individuals shall serve the group, shall be good according to its understanding of the term and avoid evil as it conceives it, that none shall have separate standards, personal aims, or will to power on their own account—it fears any one who takes things into his own hands and opposes him (naturally loving those who love it, and do its will). But this is only saying that the mass ​wishes to prevail (have supreme power), prevail with its morality and by its morality—for it is not merely a question of physical force. And how far the instincts and desires of the mass have prevailed is indicated in the very fact that makes the starting—point of this paragraph—they have actually succeeded in identifying morality with their morality and have made the idea go into current thought and speech that morality and power are antithetical things. But the power to which "morality" is antithetical is only the power of strong men who make their own laws of conduct (persons proper); morality itself is will to power—only it is the will of the weaker sort of men and of a sort, which takes easily, as the weaker, to deception (conscious or unconscious). In other words, the historical antagonism of morality to will to power roots itself in the antagonism of the mass to higher individuals, of the average to the exceptions, of the weak to the strong. Occasionally Nietzsche turns the tables on morality, saying that it is itself unmoral—meaning according to its own specious antithesis of morality to will to power; for it is itself an assertion of will to power.
In fact, he finds will to power in varying degrees practically everywhere—though it assumes different forms and sometimes hides itself. It often exists in the sickly as truly as in the well—none can surpass, for instance, a feeble, sickly woman in refined ways of ruling, oppressing, tyrannizing. Indeed, so many and such varying wills to power are described by Nietzsche that one is sometimes led to ask whether power and will to power make any kind of a standard to him. As he reads history and particularly modern history, the instinct for power of the mass has actually triumphed over great individuals (or those who might have been such)—a result so deplorable and pitiful in his eyes that one might parody his state of mind by saying that his appeal is to "come to the help of the mighty against the weak"!—and yet a result, to which as a triumph of power his own principles would seem to oblige him to assent. Our perplexity and confusion are only resolved (so far as they are resolved ) ​as we remember that there are different grades or levels of power to his mind, and above all that he is always thinking of the individual specimen of humanity, the type. The mass, by combining, undoubtedly make themselves stronger than the "strong," but they are none the less poorer, feebler specimens of our kind.
(3) Two or three further instances of Nietzsche's fixing rank according to power may be cited. The morality of men like Heraclitus and Plato is something very different from the morality of subjection such as is practised by the ordinary members of society. It is the morality of those who would naturally have ruled in society, but who in a time of change and dissolution can only rule themselves. The ranking in this case is indeed hardly different from that which most of us would instinctively make. Our ordinary judgments, too, of vanity, hypocrisy, and mere prudence seem to rest on the basis of a standard like Nietzsche's. Why do we look down on a vain person? Because he wants to please, to be what others would like, in this showing a lack of original creative force—he is "empty." We judge an unreal, hypocritical person in the same way—the contemptible thing about him is his exceeding deference to the standards of others. So the typically prudent person is not set on high, because something is lacking in him—the abounding energy that sometimes makes one headlong, frank, defiant to one's cost. On the other hand, love and unselfishness suggest one who overflows in power, and the very counting of costs that ranks low, when it is a dictate of prudence, wins an altogether different estimation when a great love, e.g., love for the community, lies back of it.
Nietzsche appears to have had in mind a systematic classification of men and things according to the following schema:
"What springs from strength. What springs from weakness. And whence have we sprung? The great choice."
​Though he never accomplished the classification, it has been attempted in a most interesting way by Professor Richter, who makes a survey and hypothetical valuation of varying religions, philosophies, moralities, types of art, personalities, and cultures, from this point of view.
V
But now let us attend a little more closely to what Nietzsche means by power. He makes no formal definition of it, and does not attempt to say what is its final metaphysical nature. He appears to take the concept simply as he finds it in common use—the essential element being ascendency, effectual superiority of some sort. By giving it an inner turn, taking it practically as will to power, he indicates that it is not anything static that he has in mind, but a principle of movement and progress (or at least change). The implication is that there is no result that does not tend to be transcended, perhaps destroyed. "Whatever I create and however much I love it, I have soon to be hostile to it," says Zarathustra. Power, at least will to power, is eternally avid. Hence successive grades or levels of power, a Rangordnung. It is from inattention to this that Nietzsche is much misconceived—as if "power" must always be on a physical level! Emerson speaks of a "scale of powers;" Nietzsche's idea is the same. Emerson advances the paradoxical idea that it is "not talent but sensibility which is the best," and Nietzsche finds power in things which are often contrasted with it. But the higher sorts of power, though so different from the lower that they seem antithetical and a part of another order of reality, are really extensions, refinements, spiritualizations of the lower sorts, and have the same essential character. They too give predominance, ascendency, though, in other ways, by different means. Indeed, it would seem to go along with the general view that the refinements, spiritualizations of power should be just intensifications of it—since only on this basis can their ascendency over the grosser forms be explained.
Nietzsche gives us no set scale of powers, and I can only ​offer more or less vague and scattering illustrations of the general idea that appears to be in his mind. First, he recognizes power on the physical or rather animal level. He does this so frankly that he has given great offense. Who has not heard of the "blond beast roving greedily after prey and victory," whom he is supposed to celebrate? Indeed, "blond beast," "superman," and other striking phrases have become catchwords, most of those who use them having scarcely an idea of what Nietzsche meant by them. As a matter of fact, the phrase "blond beast" occurs just twice, so far as I remember, in Nietzsche's sixteen-volumed works—the important passage being § 11 of the First Essay of Genealogy of Morals, the other, which puts the phrase in quotation marks, being § 2 of a chapter of the later Twilight of the Idols, entitled "The 'Improvers' of Mankind." The connection in which the phrase stands in the principal passage is something like this:—Nietzsche is continuing his earlier discussions of the natural history of morals (in essentially the same spirit, I may say, as our English and American anthropologists and sociologists, though perhaps in a finer, more intimate, or at least more venturesome way), and now is giving his view of the contrasted types of morality which conquering and subject classes naturally develope. By way of illustration he draws a more or less imaginative picture of the earliest Aryan races as they from time to time descended on the aboriginal inhabitants of Europe, and, with all manner of violence, reduced them to subjection. Whether Hellenic, Roman, Germanic, Scandinavian, these marauding tribes were of a common fair or blond type (in this Nietzsche simply follows the prevailing anthropological view); to quote his words, "at the basis of all these superior races, the robber-animal is not to be mistaken, the splendid blond beast roving greedily after prey and ​victory." It is simply a pictorial, but perhaps for all that quite exact description of our distant Aryan forefathers. In the other passage, superior (vornehme) Germans of the early Middle Ages are spoken of as fine examples of the "blond beast."
Undoubtedly Nietzsche in a certain sense "celebrates" these conquering Aryans. Many of us too are proud of our descent from them, though Nietzsche undermines our feeling somewhat by suggesting that the blood of most of us is probably much mixed. Relatively to those whom they conquered they were the more vigorous stock and had the higher promise of life—even supposing that the subjected populations were more industrious, more peaceful, more moral (in the sense in which morality stands for sympathy and mutual help). Overflowing vitality is the condition of all that is really excellent in Nietzsche's estimation. Not in lessening or depressing this, but in refining and spiritualizing it is the way of progress. But it does not follow that those in whom vitality has risen to higher and finer forms shall make the "blond beast" (in his early form) their model and shall go back to marauding and killing as our fathers did. We may indeed do it on occasion, or something like it—modern European states are doing it in their colonial ventures, though even so the work might be done in a finer and less bungling manner. But in general it is no more necessary that power shall always remain on the animal level than that a grown-up man shall repeat the exuberances of his youth, and it is gratuitious to imagine that Nietzsche proposes any such thing. All the same, this seems to be the ordinary interpretation of Nietzsche, and it is sometimes shared by those from whom one expects more discriminating judgments—professional scholars and philosophers. Among the few to discriminate are Professor Riehl, Professor René Berthelot, and Professor Frank Thilly. While as against weakness, stagnation, or degeneration, with whatever accompaniment of refined feelings and peaceful manners, the "blond beast," the primitive Aryan, was the better man and had more promise for the race, this is not true when the contrast is with a higher, more spiritual development of the same forces that were in him. Emerson speaks ​in the same spirit, when he says, "In politics and in trade, bruisers and pirates are of better promise than talkers and clerks"; and again, "In a good lord there must first be a good animal, at least to the extent of yielding the incomparable advantage of animal spirits." "Most valuations are relative, some things are better than other things (though still other things may be better than these)—and there is no need, nor is it correct, to attribute absolute valuations at this particular point to Nietzsche. The extent to which Nietzsche attached finer and higher meanings to power than mere brute force will appear as I go on.
But before doing so a word should be said as to what Nietzsche regards as the democratic misunderstanding of will to power, namely the identification of it with ambition, love of glory. Napoleon, Cæsar, Alexander are often cited as instances—as if, says Nietzsche, just these men were not despisers of glory. Glory is, of course, honor in the eyes of others, it is distinctively a craving of the social man (i.e., of one who is not sufficient unto himself); the desire for it is akin to vanity and springs from weakness. But it was not the notice of others that these men sought—power itself was what they were after and this is one of the reasons why they rank so high. He also criticises the view of Helvetius that one strives for power in order to get the pleasures that are at the command of the powerful—this, I might say, as many of our wealthy (or becoming-wealthy) class in America do, enjoyments, luxuries, comfort being in the background of their mind. But this is to confuse the strong man with enjoyment-seekers—what such an one really wishes is to put forth his power, not to eat sweets, have country houses, live softly, and so on. As Nietzsche conceives aristocracy, even the idea of it scarcely exists in America.
Nor is Nietzsche's "strong man" a swashbuckler. That this is not what he means is implied in a remark he makes ( ​perhaps unjustly) about present-day Germans. They think, he says, "that force must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then they subject themselves gladly and admiringly. … That there is force in mildness and quietness they do not readily believe. They miss force in Goethe and think that Beethoven has more; and in this they err." Again he says, "When one sits well on a horse he steals an enemy's courage and an onlooker's heart—why wilt thou still attack? Sit like a conquering one!" Moreover, power by no means necessarily intimidates, he thinks, and when punishment is attempted with this sole end in view it is often a sign that real power is lacking—a sign of doubt of one's power. Indeed, Nietzsche's idea of a natural lord of men is often not of an oppressor at all, but of one who brings relief, benefit. He is one "who can lead a cause, carry out a resolve, be loyal to an idea, hold fast a woman, punish and overthrow a rascal—a man who has his anger and his sword and to whom the weak and suffering and oppressed, and even animals gladly turn and naturally belong." His thought of the future is that the European masses who are now being mixed, averaged, democratized, will sooner or later need a strong man as they need their daily bread. M. Faguet overlooks this side of the matter when he represents Nietzsche as teaching that the higher class are to hold down the mass and keep them at their tasks by force. The summit of power, in his conception, is just in making that cruder sort of power unnecessary. If we use violence against another, we may of course subject him, but we do not get his heart—and therefore our power over him is so far incomplete. It reminds one of what Lorenzo de' Medici said after foiling the Pitti conspiracy ​against his house, "He only knows how to conquer, who knows how to forgive."
Indeed, as we have already seen, power takes to Nietzsche's mind a new turn in the human world in general. Man passes as the strongest animal—but why? Because, Nietzsche answers, he is the cunningest. Intelligence is power along the human line of evolution. In the progress of mankind, ever less physical force is necessary; as time goes on, we wisely let machines work, man becomes stronger and more spiritual. Once in speaking of the greatest events and the greatest thoughts, he corrects himself: "but the greatest thoughts are the greatest events." He even allows Zarathustra to say, "thoughts that come with the feet of doves rule the world," and he gives as an instance the thought of good and evil: Zarathustra had seen many lands and peoples and had found no greater power on earth than this category. For what is thinking or knowing? At bottom and in its most commonplace form, it is to Nietzsche a kind of grasping of things to the end of getting control over them, making an idea and orderly scheme of them to the end of control—the senses, memory, all develope in this way: behind the whole process is the instinct for power. Philosophy (as distinguished from ordinary thinking) is a more sublimated expression of the same instinct; and it is because the philosopher wants the best conditions for expanding his force and reaching a maximum of power, that he renounces on occasion the delights of other men, such as home, children, family-ties, even verging towards ascetic ideas. And the difference between the mere skeptic or critic or historian in philosophy and real philosophers, i.e., constructive, creative thinkers, is a difference in power. The former can think to the extent of doubting or analyzing or describing but are incapable of more, while the latter are capable and from the fullness and overflow of their ​energy do creative work. Equally with the robber, the barbarian, and adventurer is the philosophic innovator after power, only it is the supreme kind of power not the lesser. Nietzsche speaks of the calling of the philosopher as a kingly one; he cites Alcuin the Anglo-Saxon's definition of it, prava corrigere et recta corroborare et sancta sublimare (to correct what is wicked, to strengthen what is right, and to lift what is sacred on high). There is something of the Cæsar in the philosopher's nature—Nietzsche speaks of the "Cæsarian trainer and strong man of culture"; and he thinks that the type of philosopher needed in the future will be bred in a caste accustomed to rule and will be its highest spiritualization. For the function of the philosopher is pre-eminently to be a lawgiver, not merely to define and name the valuations that are, but to say what ought to be, to give an end and an aim to mankind, to turn what is and was into means, instruments, hammer for forging the future—his knowing is creating, his creating law-giving, his will to truth will to power. Beyond the actual rulers concerned with the administration of government and in a state apart, is this highest man—a power above powers, determining the values and guiding the will of centuries.
Nietzsche also speaks of power on the moral level. What is the difference between vulgar selfishness (which Nietzsche looks down upon as much as any one), and the love that looks beyond oneself and gives and bestows? It is, according to his view, that the selfish man requires all his energy for his own ends and has no surplus—he is really a needy kind of man who must ​take in all that he can and cannot afford to give out; while the other type overflows. Wherever there is power and to spare, it must have an object on which to expend itself, either harming or blessing, and "love gives the highest feeling of power." Sometimes this type of goodness is combined with greatness and then arises "angelic majesty." It is something in which the highest pride bends fatherly and benignly to others and has no other idea than to rule and to guard at once—something lacking, Nietzsche remarks, "in our political parvenus." There is even a kind of prodigality resulting from inner opulence. In this way aristocrats sometimes throw away their privileges and interest themselves for the people, the weak, the poor. Hence too a noble hospitality. "There is a superior and dangerous kind of carelessness, … that of the self-assured and over-rich soul, which has never concerned itself about friends and only knows hospitality and how to practise it—heart and house open for every one who will come in, whether beggar or cripple or king. It is the genuine courtesy (Leutseligkeit): one who has it possesses a hundred 'friends,' but probably no friend." In a similar way grace, or merciful indulgence, is the virtue, the privilege, of the strong—and can only be exercised by them. As we have already seen, Nietzsche can even imagine a society so strong and so self-assured that it could let wrongdoers go unpunished—something, I need not say, that does not hold for the societies of today.
Nietzsche sees power lying back of self-control. Why is it that some always follow immediate impulses? Because, he says in effect, they lack power to inhibit them. They have the power of their impulses, but no surplus, nothing transcending. It is only the strong man with heaped-up force, who can say "no" to this and that wandering desire—who can rule them, give them their proper place and no more, and thus make a ​harmony, instead of a discord and contradiction, of his inner life. "Unfree will" is defined as defect in inhibitory power against stimuli; with power comes free-will (in the legitimate sense of that phrase). Libertinism, laisser aller, is not power, but the antithesis of it: whether practised by an individual in relation to his impulses, or by society in relation to the mass of its members, it is symptomatic of weakness and degeneration—strength is ever in rule, in organization. The decadents of our or any time find their definition (in part) as those who cannot control themselves—this is the meaning of their irritability: all predominantly irritable people belong to the descending line of life—they are impulse merely, have no surplus strength. This holds of the sexual as of other instincts—one who does not have them under control is not a strong man; the artist, Nietzsche holds, is a temperate, often a chaste man, his dominating instinct making him so—one of the regular symptoms of exhausted stock is inability not to respond to the slightest sexual stimulus. Once he speaks of the necessity on occasion of fighting, even knocking out of their senses, impulses, though they are not on that account to be called evil, but only to be downed, made subservient—for power over, not destruction of, the passions is the true aim. The body does best itself when it is best ruled—and the underlying truth is a general one; power is organized and attains its maximum of efficiency and happiness, when higher, stronger power directs it. For culture as for war we need "great leaders, and all education begins ​with obedience." What Nietzsche calls Züchtung (training, discipline) he ranks high for this reason: it increases strength—untrained men being weak, wasteful, inconstant. He even sees the higher meaning of asceticism from this point of view, however hostile he is to it in other ways. Why did a mediæval baron on occasion bow before a saint—not merely one of the Franciscan type, but the sterner sort as well, above all one of the sterner sort? Because, Nietzsche answers, however strong his own will to power, he recognized in the saint a kindred will to power, though taking a different turn. The baron conquered others, the saint conquered himself, laid a strong hand on the natural impulses welling up in him—and the baron might well ask from his own experience, which was the greater victory and showed the greater power? Nietzsche says that the feeling of power has hitherto reached its highest point in continent priests and hermits (for example, among the Brahmans). Further, it is possible not only to control "natural impulses"; we can triumph over suffering and pain. Nietzsche uses the word "tyrannize" on one occasion. A measure of the power of the will is how much opposition, pain, torture it can bear and turn to account. It is one of the characteristic marks of the most spiritual, i.e., strongest, men, the great individuals on whom Nietzsche sets his heart, that they practise hardness against themselves: "it is their pleasure to subdue themselves, asceticism becomes nature, need, instinct with them."
Indeed, virtue in general finds its definition with Nietzsche in terms of strength—and after all this is only returning to ancient usage. Virtue for him is literally virtus, ἀρετή, Italian Renaissance virtù, i.e., strong excellence of some sort, manly ​superiority. Underlying it is will, courage—its opposite is laziness, weakness, fear. Many, he says, do not put through their best right, because a right is a sort of power and they are too lazy or too afraid to exercise power—decorating then their fault perhaps by talking of forbearance and patience. Power, as Nietzsche uses the term, includes will to power, and the trouble with many is that they don't will—they long, they desire, they are ambitious, but they do not will. Willing is saying, So let it be: it is a kind of commanding. Hence Zarathustra's warning, "Do what you will, but first be such as can will." It is, in Nietzsche's eyes, a trouble with the Germans, that they know how to obey, but not to command, though in exceptional circumstances they may do it. In general, the greatest danger for man is not in the qualities that belong to the robber-animal, but in sickliness, weakness. This makes virtue proper impossible. Vice, on the other hand, is the self-indulgence of the weak, their inability to inhibit impulse. I do not mean that Nietzsche counts as virtue everything that goes by that name—he will first have it proved that "virtues" are virtue, i.e., come from strength, and in effect suggests a re-estimation of them, according to the nature of their source. So vices are regarded as manifestations of weakness. It is even possible that what is vice for a weak man should be a permissible liberty to another.
The intimate connection of virtue with power Nietzsche implies in another connection. It is, he says, "in order that the ​manliest men should rule"; indeed, "there is no sorer misfortune in all human destiny than when the mighty of the earth are not also the first men. And yet, he adds (and this is the point now), when the highest kind of men are not in power, there is something lacking in the higher men themselves. Not only should the best rule, but the best will rule, and where there is a different idea, the best are wanting, i.e., it enters into the idea of the best that they take the responsibility their nature entails; if they do not, they are not the best. At this point we see again how impossible it is to hold that in Nietzsche's view any kind of might makes right. If we are occasionally tried by passages that look this way we must remember that to him there are different levels of power, that one level may be higher than another and yet be lower than one higher still, and that the highest kind of power alone had his unmixed admiration. In any case, the fact that men are "the mighty of the earth" nowise decides the question of their worth. Time and again he speaks of the degeneration or inadequacy of matter-of-fact rulers and ruling classes. I have already indicated his view of the German Empire. Even in Napoleon, a far greater man in his estimation than any German of the political order, he saw defects—Napoleon was compromised by the means he had to use. Of certain Roman Emperors he says: "without them and the [degenerate] Roman society [of that time], Christianity would not have come to power.… When Nero and Caracalla sat on the throne, the paradox arose that the lowest man was worth more than the man on top." And something of this sort may always happen. Now the corrupt ruling classes are spoiling the image of the ruler in the minds of men, and many want no ruler. "Often slime sits on the throne, and the throne on slime." All the same, the failure of previous ​aristocracies, temporal and spiritual, proves nothing against the necessity of a new aristocracy. And when the best come once more, the ἄριστοι, best in body, mind, and soul, they will rule again. And that Nietzsche has an ideal in mind and does not bow down before brute actuality now any more than when he wrote "On the Use and Harm of History for Life" in 1873, is shown in no way more clearly than by the fact that the supreme specimens of power to which his faith and longing went out, do not exist now (though power of some description rules the world now as truly as ever), but belong to the future, the function of present humanity being above all to make their advent possible.
We may accept Nietzsche's moral aim and his practical identification of it with will to power, or we may not: it is a matter for our own critical judgment and choice. I have only sought to make his views as clear as their somewhat uncertain nature would allow. And perhaps I should append his own remark that it is part of the humanity of a teacher to warn his pupils against him.
VI
If a name is desired for Nietzsche's general ethical view, I know of none better than one used occasionally by Professor Simmel: Personalism. Utilitarianism on a pleasure and pain basis, no matter how universalistically conceived, Nietzsche distinctly rejects. "Egoism" is misleading; the egoism of the mass of men is no ideal to him, and that of the degenerate sickens, "stinkt." "Individualism" is equally objectionable. Nietzsche conducts a polemic against individualism: he does not think that each and every man is important on his own account, that all have equal rights, that progress consists in making individuals as free as possible from social control, that each should live out his own life and pursue happiness in his own way. ​An ideal like this verges on anarchy, and Nietzsche is not a friend of anarchy. He thinks that some people are more important than others, that, as Professor Karl Pearson has recently put it, "one able leader, one inspirer or controller of men is worth to the race thousands of every-day workers," or, in Heraclitus's language, that, "one man is equal to ten thousand, if he be the best." In other words, there are gradations of rank among men, and it is a caste society that makes his idea—"my philosophy is directed to an order of rank (Rangordnung), not to an individualistic morality." But "Personalism," though like any general term it lacks complete definiteness, comes nearer to describing his thought than any other single word I know of. For to Nietzsche persons are the summit of human evolution, and the creation or furthering of them is the highest end which men can now propose to themselves—persons being those who direct themselves and make their own law, the strong, complete, final specimens of our kind who naturally rule the rest of us, or, if they do not rule, make a semi-divine race above us. I shall try to show in some detail what Nietzsche means by persons in the following chapter.
* ↑ Richter remarks tahet larger interpretation comes in Nietzsche's closing period, the doctrine having ben primarily psychological (op. cit., p. 271).
* ↑ N. Awxentieff in his interesting study, Kultur-ethisches Ideal Nietzsches, expounds first the doctrine of will to power, and then the theory of "natural" morality (see particularly pp.117-38).
* ↑ E.g. by A. S. Pringle-Pattison (op. cit., pp.261-2).
* ↑ Letter to von Gersdorff, April 7, 1866 (Briefe, I, 25-6).
* ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 9.
* ↑ Will to Power, § 49.
* ↑ Ibid., § 70.
* ↑ As to Darwin, cf. ibid., § 647.
* ↑ Ibid., § 70.
* ↑ Ibid., § 71.
* ↑ Ibid., § 685.
* ↑ Will to Power, § 685.
* ↑ Dawn of Day, § 548.
* ↑ Ibid., § 514; cf. Human, etc., § 158.
* ↑ Dawn of Day, §§ 199, 320.
* ↑ Will to Power, § 875; cf. Human, etc., § 260.
* ↑ Werke, XII, 129-30, § 249.
* ↑ Dawn of Day, § 507.
* ↑ Ibid., § 204.
* ↑ Ibid., § 204; cf. Emerson of Americans, "We are great by exclusion, grasping, and egotism" ("Success" in Society and Solitude).
* ↑ Zarathustra, I, xi.
* ↑ Werke, XIV, 353, § 216.
* ↑ Cf. Dawn of Day, § 205; The Antichristian, § 27.
* ↑ Cf. Zarathustra, III, xii, § 11; IV, xiii, § 3 (the "Pübel-Mischmasch" are the "Herren von Heute"); Werke, XIV, 218, § 440 (lower kind of men victorious—strange clashing of two principles of morality).
* ↑ Zarathustra, III, xii, § 11.
* ↑ Twilight etc., viii, § 1; cf. Werke, XIII, 350-1, § 870.
* ↑ Werke, XIII, 352, § 872; cf. XIV, 374, § 251 (on the lowering effect of national egoism and hate).
* ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 241.
* ↑ Werke, XIV, 420, § 304.
* ↑ Ibid., 244, § 505.
* ↑ Cf. J. G. Hibben'a chapter, "The Gospel of Might," in A Defense of Prejudice.
* ↑ Werke, XII, 365, § 706.
* ↑ Letter to Peter Gast, February 13, 1887.
* ↑ Cf. Will to Power, § 856.
* ↑ There may be different kinds of morality in different groups, but all alike have this as their hidden spring (Zaruthustra, I, xv).
* ↑ See Simmel's illuminating remarks, op. cit., pp. 206-11.
* ↑ The Antichristian, § 6.
* ↑ Ibid., §§ 1, 2. Other statements are: "I estimate man according to the amount of power and the fullness of his will" (Will to Power, § 382); "the strongest in body and soul are the best—ground-principle for Zarathustra" (Werke, XII, 410); "I teach 'No' to all that weakens, exhausts, 'Yes' to all that strengthens, treasures up force, justifies the feeling of force" (Will to Power, § 54); "to go on spinning the whole warp and woof of life, and to do it in such a way that the thread ever becomes stronger—that is the task" (ibid., § 674).
* ↑ Cf. Dawn of Day, § 103; Will to Power, § 710.
* ↑ Cf. Will to Power, § 886.
* ↑ Ibid., §§ 720, 1025.
* ↑ Cf. Will to Power, §§ 274, 401, 461, 720, 721, and Dolson's happy explanatory statement, as against Hollitscher's Friedrich Nietzsche, in the Philosophical Review, May, 1905, p. 373. Even the Greeks had not the courage [insight?] to transcend the antithesis (Will to Power, § 428).
* ↑ Genealogy etc., III, § 14.
* ↑ As to the supreme significance of the individual specimen, see Will to Power, §§ 679-82, 713, and Simmel's remarks, op. cit., pp. 206-10.
* ↑ Werke, XI, 251, § 221.
* ↑ Ibid., XIII, 177-8, § 406.
* ↑ Ibid., XVI, 434.
* ↑ Op. cit., pp. 240-54.
* ↑ Zarathustra, II, xii.
* ↑ "Success," in Society and Solitude.
* ↑ It should be said that the predominance he recognizes is always that of body and soul; in speaking of the robber-type which lies at the basis of aristocratic societies, he says, "its superiority lay not primarily in physical force, but in force of soul—they were the more complete men" (Beyond Good and Evil, § 257).
* ↑ I do not mean that an equivalent expression does not sometimes occur—e.g., in Genealogy etc., II, § 17 ("a troop of blond robber-animals").
* ↑ With this passage may be compared the description of the memorials of the founding of states to be discerned everywhere—lands laid waste, towns destroyed, men made wild, consuming hatred between peoples, in Werke, IX, 155.
* ↑ Cf. Werke, XIII, 326, § 797.
* ↑ Will to Power, § 751.
* ↑ Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 261 (there is nothing harder for a really superior man to understand than vanity).
* ↑ Will to Power, § 751.
* ↑ Cf. Werke, XIII, 177, § 405 (happiness is not the aim, but feeling of power). Happiness is an indeterminate conception anyway: "not 'happiness follows virtue,' but the strong man fixes his happy state as virtue" (Will to Power, § 1026).
* ↑ Werke, XI, 363-4, § 543. Cf. another remark, "I have found force where one does not look for it, in simple, mild, and agreeable men who have not the slightest desire to rule"—his idea being that strong natures rule anyway, even if (as he says) they do not lift a finger and during their whole life bury themselves in a garden.
* ↑ Mixed Opinions etc., § 354.
* ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 199.
* ↑ Ibid., § 293.
* ↑ Ibid., § 242.
* ↑ En lisant Nietzsche, p. 344 ff. Faguet does, hcwever, admit that the force is not brutality, or at least brutal manners, for he says that in Nietzsche's dream of a superhuman élite, who will deliberately conquer and oppress, he always makes beautiful manners enter (p. 307).
* ↑ Will to Power, § 769.
* ↑ Roscoe's Life of Lorenzo de' Medici, p. 87. Cf. what Cæsar said, in letting his enemies of Pompey's party go free after they had fallen into his hands: "I will conquer after a new fashion and fortify myself in the possession of the power I acquire, by generosity and mercy."
* ↑ Will to Power, § 856; cf. § 544; The Antichristian, § 14; Werke, XIV, 97, § 207.
* ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 285.
* ↑ Zarathustra, II, xxii; I, xv.
* ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 9; Genealogy etc., III, § 7.
* ↑ Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 210; Will to Power, § 972.
* ↑ Will to Power, § 779.
* ↑ Ibid., § 977.
* ↑ Ibid., § 978; cf. § 960, and Beyond Good and Evil, § 213.
* ↑ Cf. Will to Power, § 422, as to the contrast with the purely scientific man who now is supreme; even Hegel made the philosopher subject to reality—he prepares for it, nothing more.
* ↑ Will to Power, § 972; Beyond Good and Evil, § 211.
* ↑ Will to Power, §§ 998-9. Somewhat in the same spirit Nietzsche ranks the church as an institution higher than the state, i.e., because it gives to the spiritual type of men the supreme place and has such confidencein the power of spirituality (Geistigkeit) that it renounces the use of rude force (Joyful Science, § 358). So the rule exercised by heads of religious orders is spoken of as "the highest kind of ruling" (Beyond Good and Evil, § 61). Cf. the striking picture of the Vornehmheit of the higher Catholic clergy, Dawn of Day, § 60.
* ↑ Genealogy etc.. III, § 18; Will to Power, § 176.
* ↑ Werke, XI, 367, § 554.
* ↑ Will to Power, §§ 935, 938; from another point of view conduct of this sort is questionable (Beyond Good and Evil, § 258).
* ↑ Will to Power, § 939.
* ↑ Genealogy etc., II, § 10; The Wanderer etc., § 34.
* ↑ Twilight etc., viii, § 6; Will to Power, § 778; Werke, XII, 9, § 14; cf. August Dorner, Pessimismus, Nietzsche, und Naturalismus, pp. 157, 166.
* ↑ Will to Power, § 1020.
* ↑ Ibid., § 122. Cf. the reflection on those whose bad impulses thirst for freedom, whose wild dogs want liberty, Zarathustra, I, viii. Contrary to his usual custom, libertinism of the intellect is once spoken of without disparagement (ibid., § 120), but the thought is much the same as that underlying his use of the assassin-motto, "Nothing is true, everythingis permitted" (see supra, pp. 320, 336).
* ↑ Will to Power, § 737.
* ↑ Ibid., §§ 815, 934; cf. Werke, XIV, 273, § 58, and views of his earlier period as cited, supra, p. 125. Yet Paul Carus can say: "Nietzsche knows nothing of self-control;" he "made himself the advocate of vice and gloried in it;" among the thoughts of George Moore which he might have written is, "I boasted of dissipation" (op. cit., pp. 34, 61, 104). Even The Nation (New York, February 22, 1912) speaks of his denying the validity of any check within ourselves contrary to the primitive instincts and impulses of nature." It is the general ignorance.
* ↑ Dawn of Day, § 76; Will to Power, § 933.
* ↑ Werke, XIV, 81, § 161.
* ↑ Will to Power, § 398. Yet John Dewey speaks of Nietzsche as "a rebel against any philosophy of regimentation and subordination" (Atlantic Monthly, February, 1916, p. 254).
* ↑ He devotes one of the Essays of Genealogy of Morals to the question, "What do Ascetic Ideals signify?"
* ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 51.
* ↑ Werke, XI, 253, § 229 (he remarks here that the reabsorption of the semen into the blood makes the strongest nourishment, and stimulates to an extraordinary degree the impulse for mastery, as also the craving for something contradictory and opposed on which the impulse may expend itself).
* ↑ Dawn of Day, § 113; Will to Power, § 382.
* ↑ The Antichristian, § 57.
* ↑ The Wanderer etc., § 251. A virtue is properly something strong and individual, characterizing above all the exceptional man, Will to Power, § 317.
* ↑ Nietzsche sharply distinguishes between the two things, Zarathustra, I, xvii.
* ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 19.
* ↑ Zarathustra, III, v, § 3.
* ↑ Dawn of the Day § 207. Cf. the contemptuous references to the German soul with its involuntary bowing to titles of honor, orders, gracious looks from above, etc., Werke, XIII, 344, § 855; also, Zarathustra, III, vii. Ralph Barton Perry's references in this connection to Nietzsche (The Moral Economy) show little acquaintance with him.
* ↑ Genealogy etc.. III, § 14; cf. Will to Power, § 98.
* ↑ Cf. Werke, XIV, 119, § 251 (vice, along with sickliness, mental derangement and hypernervosity, a symptom of physiological decadence); Will to Power, § 42 (crime, celibacy, alcoholism, pessimism, anarchism, libertinism, social and intellectual, classed along with vice); ibid., § 871 (men of power and will the antithesis of the vicious and unbridled).
* ↑ Cf. Werke, XIII, 209, § 481.
* ↑ Werke, XIII, 347, § 859; Zarathustra, IV, iii, § 1.
* ↑ Werke, XIV, 65, § 128; Zarathustra, III, xii, § 21.
* ↑ Cf. Werke, XIV, 64, § 125.
* ↑ Cf., for example, Werke, XIV, 340, § 191; Will to Power, § 874.
* ↑ Cf. Werke, XIV, 65, § 129; Will to Power, § 1026.
* ↑ Will to Power, § 874. Chatterton-Hill overlooks this passage in reasoning that Nietzsche "must have been an admirer of Nero" (op. cit., pp. 67-8).
* ↑ Ibid., § 750.
* ↑ Zarathustra, I, xi. At best princes today are in danger of becoming solemn nothings" (Dawn of Day, § 526).
* ↑ Will to Power, § 953.
* ↑ See particularly sects. 8 and 9 of that noteworthy essay.
* ↑ Dawn of Day, § 447.
* ↑ Cf. op. cit., p. 242. The title which Simmel specially chooses is, however, "Die Moral der Vomehmheit" ("Vornehmheit" covering the distinctive characteristics of the "Vornehmen" or superior class).
* ↑ Cf. supra, p. 347.
* ↑ Cf. Zarathustra's language: "Callest thou thyself free? Thy ruling thought would I hear and not that thou hast escaped a yoke. Art thou one who dare escape a yoke? Many a man has cast aside his last worth, when he cast aside his servatude" (Zarathustra, I, xvii).
* ↑ In an address on Sir Francis Galton.
* ↑ Will to power, §§ 854, 287. Cf. the general attack on individualism, ibid., §§ 782-4, 859, and Simmel's thoroughgoing treatment of the subject, op. cit., pp. 206-11.