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378 aristocracies, temporal and spiritual, proves nothing against the necessity of a new aristocracy. And when the best come once more, the, best in body, mind, and soul, they will rule again. And that Nietzsche has an ideal in mind and does not bow down before brute actuality now any more than when he wrote "On the Use and Harm of History for Life" in 1873, is shown in no way more clearly than by the fact that the supreme specimens of power to which his faith and longing went out, do not exist now (though power of some description rules the world now as truly as ever), but belong to the future, the function of present humanity being above all to make their advent possible.

We may accept Nietzsche's moral aim and his practical identification of it with will to power, or we may not: it is a matter for our own critical judgment and choice. I have only sought to make his views as clear as their somewhat uncertain nature would allow. And perhaps I should append his own remark that it is part of the humanity of a teacher to warn his pupils against him.

If a name is desired for Nietzsche's general ethical view, I know of none better than one used occasionally by Professor Simmel: Personalism. Utilitarianism on a pleasure and pain basis, no matter how universalistically conceived, Nietzsche distinctly rejects. "Egoism" is misleading; the egoism of the mass of men is no ideal to him, and that of the degenerate sickens, "stinkt." "Individualism" is equally objectionable. Nietzsche conducts a polemic against individualism: he does not think that each and every man is important on his own account, that all have equal rights, that progress consists in making individuals as free as possible from social control, that each should live out his own life and pursue happiness in his own way.