Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/505

Rh unhesitatingly from it as a premise to free will as a conclusion, he subjects the feeling to critical scrutiny. See particularly Human, etc., § 39, and Richter's comments (op. cit., p. 177).

undefined Cf., for example, chap, ix of J. Cotter Morison's Service of Man. Nietzsche's attitude is also much like Spinoza's; cf. Genealogy of Morals, II, § 15, and Richter, op. cit., pp. 347-8.

undefined How impulses of praise and blame arise is interestingly, if one-sidedly, set forth in Dawn of Day, § 140.

undefined Cf. Genealogy of Morals, III, § 16; Twilight of the Idols, I, § 10; Will to Power, §§ 233, 235. Emerson's remark may be quoted, "The less we have to do with our sins the better. No man can afford to waste his moments in compunctions" ("Swedenborg" in Representative Men).

undefined This is a later statement (Zarathustra, II, xx), but in harmony with the view now. The analysis made of revenge there is interesting: we are impotent to change the injury since it belongs to the past, and yet we wish to assert our power and get even with it, and so we inflict pain, i.e., do a senseless thing rather than nothing.

undefined Cf. a later reference to Plato's "Timaeus" (Werke, XIV, 318, § 154): "very interesting is Plato's 'Timaeus,' p. 86: mental illness occasioned by a defective state of the body; the task of educators and states is to heal at this point. If the cure is not accomplished in time, educators and states, not the sick, to be held responsible."

undefined Cf., on this general subject, Dietrich H. Kerler's Nietzsche und die Vergeltungsidee (zur Strafrechtsreform).

undefined Richter (op. cit., p. 177) notes that these motives are now treated as interchangeable by Nietzsche, though they are so different. Pleasure (in the broad elastic sense) is undoubtedly the more fundamental one, and Nietzsche himself gives preservation a secondary place later on.

undefined Nietzsche goes far in his exaltation of reason at this time, as contrasted with the relative depreciation of it earlier. He even asks whether it is not the head that binds men together (for advantage), and the heart (blind gropings of love and hate) that sunders them (Mixed Opinions etc., § 197; cf. The Wanderer etc., § 41). "Besonnenheit" is called the virtue of virtues (The Wanderer etc., § 294; cf. § 189). He questions whether feelings are the original element in us, suggesting that judgments often lie behind them, though this may be forgotten and the feelings pass on as instinctive inheritances; so temperament in many men may owe its origin to good or bad intellectual habits—if not in themselves, then in their ancestors (Dawn of Day, §§ 247, 35). Once he admits, however, that aversion may be more ultimate than the reasons given for it (ibid., § 358). See on the subject, Riehl, op. cit., p. 65; Richter, op. cit., p. 178.

undefined Occasionally (e.g. Human, etc., § 49) Nietzsche refers to "unegoistic" impulses, and this leads Ziegler (op. cit., p. 86) to the view that he recognized a double source of human action; but in such cases, I take it, he simply relapses into ordinary methods of speech. In Human, etc., § 48, after using the term "unegoistic," he says that the word is never to be understood strictly, but simply as a convenient form of expression (eine Erleichterung des Ausdrucks).

undefined Nietzsche gives still other statements of the stages through which morality passes. For example, according to The Wanderer etc., § 44, morality was at first and at bottom a means of preserving the community or of keeping it on a certain level, the motives appealed to being fear and hope—with perhaps the added fear of an hereafter and a hell; later, it becomes the command of a God (cf. the "Mosaic law"), and later still an absolute law; at length a morality of inclination, of taste arrives—and finally one of insight, which transcends the whole circle of illusionary motives, yet is aware that for ages mankind could have had