Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/281

Rh dominating instinct—he calls it his conscience [part of it]. It is from those thus responsible that the type of "sovereign individual" or "person" (of whom we have heard something and shall hear more) arises, for he who can answer for himself becomes naturally a law unto himself.

In connection with responsibility Nietzsche treats of rights and duties. Buying and selling he regards as among the oldest phenomena of human society. Yet when one buys and does not at once pay, but makes a promise to pay, responsibility comes into play. The debtor naturally wishes to inspire his creditor with confidence, and may also wish to impress on his own conscience the seriousness and sacredness of his engagement; and so he agrees that in case he does not pay, the creditor may take over something that still belongs to him, parts of his body, for instance, or his wife, or his liberty, or even his life—or, where certain religious conceptions prevail (as in ancient Egypt), his soul's salvation or his rest in the grave. These things will make up to the creditor for his loss, if he sustains it—be an equivalent. Bartering, estimating values, fixing prices, devising equivalents—this preoccupied the earliest thinking of man to such an extent that it was in a sense thinking itself: here the oldest kind of acuteness was developed, here the first forms of human pride and sense of superiority over other animals arose—perhaps the word Mensch (manas) means at bottom one who measures. Yet when the measuring has been made and the equivalent fixed upon, the debtor and creditor stand in a peculiar relation: the former owes, has a duty, the latter has a claim, a right. Duties and rights were often grim things in early times—particularly rights. There seems to have been a special desire on the part of the creditor to exact equivalents