Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/307

Rh of esoteric and exoteric in a doctrine or a religion, corresponding to different dates grades of intelligence in its followers. Even the same words people understand differently—they have different feelings, scent, wishes, in connection with them: "what group of sensations and ideas are in the foreground of a soul and are quickest aroused, is the ultimately decisive things about its rank." Not all have the right to the same judgments; Nietzsche will not admit the right of others to criticise Wagner as he does. He hates his pure "I will" from course mouths. Independence is for the fewest—a privilege of the strong. One must have the right even to do one's own thinking, and not all have it, for right is conditioned on power. Men are indeed so different that there cannot be an universal law for them; it is selfishness to say that what I should do under given circumstances is imperative on all others—a blind kind of selfishness too, since it shows that I have not yet discovered myself and created my own ideal, something that can never be that of another, not to say of all. "And how indeed could there be a 'common good'! The expression contradicts itself: that which could be common has ever only small value. In the end it must be as it is and ever has been: great things remain for those who are great, abysses for the deep, delicate things and tremulous things for the fine, and, to sum up briefly, everything rare for the rare." The way, the ideal, there is not; that such a thing may be, all must be alike, on the same level.

Nietzsche goes so far as to admit that, because of radical inequality, of ascending grades of life, sacrifice is necessary. Our natural instincts not only of sympathy, but of fair play, lead as to regard all forms of life, even the lowest, as ends in themselves and to wish for each a full and perfect development. But these instincts have only a limited scope in a world