Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/425

Rh

Under what general social conditions would the higher species (or the incipient approaches thereto) best arise? Nietzsche's view is almost paradoxical. Not favorable, but unfavorable conditions are best for them. With all said and done as to aiming at them and facilitating them, circumstances must not be too easy, conditions too soft, for them. He generally gives us the extremes of his thought (of course, at different times or in different connections), leaving us to reconcile them—and I am not sure that I can quite reconcile them in this case. The underlying idea is that the men of the future will be men of power and can only be proved by opposition. He early saw the place of insecurity, peril, and danger in educating the race and bringing out its higher qualities, and he applies the view in the present connection. He had made a special study of Greek life, and of the marked individuals who appeared in such numbers in the Greek city-states he observes, "It was necessary to be strong: danger was near—it lurked everywhere." Men became great not so much from the good intentions of the people, as because danger challenged them and they asserted themselves even to the point of seeming böse to the people. So with the Romans—they were the outcome of a long-continued struggle for power: it was in this way that they reached their giant stature, like that of a primeval forest. Let one go through history, says Nietzsche: the times when the individual becomes ripe for his perfection, i.e., free, when the classic type of the sovereign man is reached—"oh, no, they were never humane times!" There must be no choice, either above or below trodden under foot. It is no small advantage to have a hundred Damocles-swords over one—thereby one learns to dance, comes to "fredomfreedom [sic] of motion." The view seems