Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/443

Rh can solve the question—there are two different categories of men. He would have agreed with Emerson, when, in speaking of aristocracy, the latter says, "If they provoke anger in the least favored class, and the excluded majority revenge themselves on the excluding minority by the strong hand, and kill them, at once a new class finds itself at the top, as certainly as cream rises in a bowl of milk; and if the people should destroy class after class, until two men only were left, one of these would be the leader, and would be involuntarily served and copied by the other. You may keep this minority out of sight and out of mind, but it is tenacious of life and one of the estates of the realm." No one who has read the preceding chapters will imagine that in speaking of rulers Nietzsche has in mind simply men of physical force—they are not even that plus courage and will and many heroic qualities. It is above all intellectual greatness that marks the ruler; if he has not this, he may make trouble, even if he wishes to do well and practise justice. Minds that are not of the highest order should obey, rather than rule.

In two or three places Nietzsche presents his ideal of social organization in some detail. In the principal passage, he does so in connection with a discussion of the Hindu Law-book of Manu, but it is evidently his own conception he brings out, although this stands in close agreement with the presuppositions of that ancient book. After saying that the order of castes there revealed is only the sanction of a natural order, he goes on to the effect that in every healthy society, three physiological types appear, conditioning one another, yet separate from one another, each of which has its own hygiene, its own realm of activity, its own feeling of perfection and mastership. They are not absolutely marked off from one another, but one class is "predominantly" spiritual or intellectual, another has predominant muscular and temperamental strength, while the third are those who are not distinguished in either respect, being simply the average individuals who constitute "Manners," in Society and Solitude. Cf. Will to Power, § 784, on the eventual rise of a Rangordnung even in an individual order of things.