Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/260

244 without us. In a similar strain, an American poet describes the Puritan: I have no love of ease! My feet are shod with might! If there's no Devil in God's world, Then what have I to fight?

I am a man of war! Such things I understand: When Devils against Cherubim Are leagued throughout the land."

Nietzsche spoke of conjuring up enemies—we need them for our ideal's sake. The educator, if he is great, is like nature—he piles up obstacles that they may be surmounted. More than this, the evil may become good. Lay a highest aim on your passions, Nietzsche says, and they become your virtues and sources of delight; even if you have the blood of the choleric or of the voluptuous or of the fanatical or of the vindictive in you, the result will be the same, the devils will become your angels. Instincts of murder, theft, cruelty, deception are present in the most admired actions and characters. undefined Good acts are sublimated evil ones, the stuff being the same. Though we must protect ourselves against wild energies and call them evil, so long as we do not know how to use them, when we make them serviceable, they are good. What we now honor as philosophical impulses—those to doubt, inquire, analyze, compare—went for a long time against the primary requirements of morality and conscience; marriage at the outset was a sinning against the rights of the community; gentle, sympathetic feelings once excited contempt, it being as much a cause of shame to be mild then as it is now to be hard. And in turn, good things may become evil. From this point of