Page:Complete Works of Nietzsche - Levy - Volume 14.djvu/71

 ceive that he stands on the same platform with the oppressor, and that he has no individual privilege, nor any higher rank than the latter.

On the contrary ! There is nothing on earth which can have any value, if it have not a modicum of power — granted, of course, that life itself is the Will to Power. Morality protected the botched and bungled against Nihilism, in that it gave every one of them infinite worth, metaphysical worth, and classed them altogether in one order which did not correspond with that of worldly power and order of rank : it taught submission, humility, etc. Admitting that the belief in this morality be destroyed, the botched and the bungled would no longer have any comfort, and would perish.

This perishing seems like self-annihilation, like an instinctive selection of that which must be destroyed. The symptoms of this self-destruction of the botched and the bungled : self-vivisection, poisoning, intoxication, romanticism, and, above all, the instinctive constraint to acts whereby the powerful are made into mortal enemies (training, so to speak, one's own hangmen), the will to destruction as the will of a still deeper instinct of the instinct of self-destruction, of the Will to Nonentity.

Nihilism is a sign that the botched and bungled have no longer any consolation, that they destroy