Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/341

Rh the fortunes of men and nations as rewards and punishments, is a palpable anthropomorphism—and not an altogether noble one.

Further, the criticism undermines the faith that morality is the thing of supreme moment in life. It is but a means, and has been made an end. It is a means, too, to a special type of life, namely the social or gregarious, and there are other and higher types. Great individuals standing more or less apart are superior to the "social man," and the purely moral instinct is to suspect, look askance at them; particularly is this so with Christian morality, which is social morality par excellence. The flock says, Let them serve us, make themselves one of us, if they are to be good: its type of goodness is the type, the only type. Nietzsche cannot restrain his irony. Why, he asks, should people with these little gregarious virtues imagine that they have pre-eminence on earth and in heaven—"eternal life" being especially for them! Even if an individual brings these virtues to perfection, he is none the less a dear, little absurd sheep—provided always that he does not burst with vanity, and scandalize by assuming the airs of a judge. Again, "What is it that I protest against? That one should take this little peaceful mediocrity, this equilibrium of a soul that knows not the great impulsions arising from great heapings up of force, for something high, possibly even as the measure of man." In a similar spirit he makes reflections on the morality that becomes popular, on the reverence for morality that hinders progress in morality. To him exclusive emphasis on (gregarious) morality is a kind of poison—he invents a chemical name for it, moralin. The social virtues take man a certain way, they are indispensable to the existence of social groups, but, when made absolute, they go against the development of a higher, stronger type—they tend to fix man's form, although it has been a distinction of the human animal hitherto that he was without a fixed and final form. Moreover, the