Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/347

Rh also remains. Many "duties" are questioned, and the old absolutist conception of duty disappears—it must be with this absolutist understanding of the word that he says he had never met a man of parts who was not ready to admit that he had lost the sense of duty or had never possessed it. All the same, the superior man, he tells us, ranks his privileges and the exercise of them among his "duties," and if one of this type handles average men with tenderer fingers than he does himself and those like him, it is not mere politeness of the heart—"it is simply his duty." As already noted, even his "immoralists" are "men of duty." Nietzsche's thought is evidently that men may place duties on themselves, that will in man as well as in God, in the individual as well as in society, may generate duty—but of this more hereafter. Even piety does not altogether disappear. A man of the old religious type says to Zarathustra, "Thou art more pious than thou thinkest with such unbelief! Some God converted thee to thy godlessness. Is it not your piety itself that no longer allows you to believe in a God!" And it is always, I may add, with reverence that Nietzsche uses the word "divine." We are then not unprepared for something more than negation in Nietzsche's total attitude to morality.