Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/360

344 of the past have been in the interest of "peoples," "races," etc., not of the species man and its utmost development, and indeed of peoples who wished to assert themselves against other peoples, classes who wished to mark themselves off from other classes. Morality has been an instrument for the preservation of a group (of some kind), not for the development of the race. This we have seen in the preceding criticism. Even in Christian morality he finds no exception, since he sees in it an assertion of the interest of the mass as against the class that had ordinarily stood above them, the kingdom of heaven being only an order in which the mass-morality (Heerdenmoral) should rule absolutely, leaving no room for moral conceptions of another order, and no place for another than social type of man. But for the mass to aim at their own good and make their valuations supreme, is not necessarily to raise the type of man; nay, just to the extent this morality dominates and excludes all others, it tends to fix the human type as it now exists and prevent the rise of anything different and higher. Here is the secret of the antagonism, violent at times, which Nietzsche manifests to Christian morality. By its very attractiveness and sweetness, by the very validity it has within a limited area (for he never questions the place of mutual love and help), it seduces us to give it an absolute authority and leads us away from the thought of those higher possibilities of mankind that alone, to his mind, make life greatly worth while. The carrying life to new and [practically] superhuman heights, not security, happiness and comfort for the mass, is Nietzsche's ideal.

The aim is vague and yet already with it Nietzsche has a principle for judging things. With an ultimate value, he estimates other things accordingly. If the highest reach of life is the measure of things, then good is what tends that way, and bad what tends in an opposite direction. There are lines of procedure now, possible actions, feelings, thoughts, institutions, laws that harmonize with movement toward the desired goal—they are then to be furthered; other courses are to be opposed.