Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/231

Rh Brahman, took the consciousness of it everywhere and into each smallest fraction of time, so that he even invented occasions for fulfilling it; or else he who fulfilled it in the most difficult cases, who sacrificed most of it—at least these were the principal measurements. And where sacrifice was the thing exalted, the motive for it should not be mistaken. The mastery of self implied was not for the individual's benefit, but that the law might stand out sovereign, even against the individual's interest and desire. It is true that in the course of time, some, following in the footsteps of Socrates, took self-mastery and self-denial as the individual's most real advantage and key to happiness, but they were the exception—something we only fail to realize today because we have been educated under their influence; they all went on a new way and encountered the highest disapproval of representatives of the old morality—they were really separatists, and so far unmoral, and, in the deepest sense, evil (böse). To a virtuous Roman of the old stamp, the Christian who "sought first for his own salvation" seemed evil in just the same way.

Such were the original ground-lines of morality, as Nietzsche conceives the matter. As to whether men always existed in groups, his opinion appears to vary. So far as a view anywise approaching consistency can be made out, it was as follows: There may have been a time when men (or some men) existed independently and had to be brought forcibly under social restraint and rule; undefined but practically it is a negligible time, groups, flocks, or herds of some kind having existed as far back in history as we can go, so that properly we can only speak of higher and stronger forms of social organization imposing themselves on lower and weaker forms, with a comparatively weak and relatively unsocial state as a hypothetical beginning. undefined These groups (Heerden is the term Nietzsche often uses, not unmindful of its association with animal phenomena, and partly just for this reason) were veritable entities or wholes—an individual had a feeling for his group out of all proportion to that which he had for a neighbor. undefined Strictly personal relations