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216 were only gradually brought under the rule of morality; Nietzsche even ventures to say that in the best Roman period a pitying action was neither good nor bad, neither moral nor unmoral, or, if praised, was valued slightly in comparison with an action that affected the res publica. Down to the present day he finds morality's prescriptions vague, crude, unfine for personal well-being. And yet there was something elevated in this group-morality despite or rather just because of its taking so little account of individuals; fashioned in this way the individual became a public being, or, as Nietzsche puts it, a collective individual. So organically was he a part of the group, so little did he have a separate life of his own, that he was ready to risk his life for it on occasion. As animals, in whom the social impulses overrule individual ones, perform actions that are to their own hurt, though useful to their herd or flock, so is it with men.

Nietzsche sometimes speaks as if the state [some kind of authoritative organized social existence] were prior to individuals—they arising at the end of the social process rather than existing at the beginning. Older, he says, is the pleasure in the herd than the pleasure in the I; the crafty and loveless I that seeks its own advantage in the advantage of many is not the origin of the herd, but the ruin of it. Society does not form itself out of individuals, does not arise from contracts between them. Peoples created before individuals; indeed the individual himself is the latest creation. Nietzsche roundly asserts, as against Paul Rée, that the herd-instinct was originally the stronger and more powerful thing, and that when one presumed to act separately and individually (i.e., not