Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/428

412 very great. The only thing plain to him is what ought to be, what he desires—and the fact that we can set the type on high in our estimation, and be ready for any manifestation of it when it appears; and also that those who feel that they anywise approximate to it can more or less train themselves.

Of this self-training Nietzsche makes much. Men of the type he looks for may heighten courage, insight, hardness, independence, the feeling of responsibility in themselves—they may live differently from the mass now, and will probably find plenty of opposition without seeking it or coming to an actual passage of arms. Nietzsche was aloof from the world of today, and had and has plenty of opposition. Is not his an evil name in the mouths of most men now? I hear little but dispraise of him, or at best condescension and pity towards him, in America (this quite apart from the ignorant abuse of him just now, as one of the causes of the present war). He himself had no illusions about the probable lot of men who thought as he did. In the figure of Zarathustra he tells us that he attempted a portraiture of the pain and sacrifice involved in a higher man's training—he leaves home, family, fatherland, is contemned by current morality, and has the suffering attendant on new ventures and mistakes, without any of the comfort which older ideals bestow. Nietzsche says of his own disciples: "To the men who concern me I wish suffering, solitude, illness, mistreatment, disgrace—I desire that deep self-contempt, the suffering of self-mistrust, the pitiful state of the vanquished, may not be unknown to them: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the one thing that can prove today whether a man has worth or not—that he hold his ground." These men, looking before and after, may in certain particulars anticipate the immensely slow processes of natural selection, put aside conditions not propitious to them (isolate themselves), select influences (nature, books, high events) that suit them, doing much thinking on the subject; they may keep in mind benevolent opponents only, independent friends, and put out of view the