Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/529

Rh Unquestionably the best general treatment of Nietzsche's positive ethics thus far is Richter's, op. cit., pp. 199-268 (see particularly pp. 210 ff., 239 ff.).

undefined Cf., for example, "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth," sect. 11 ("Who of you is ready to renounce power, knowing and feeling that power is evil"?); sect. 8 (reflections on Wagner's own early temptation to seek for "power and glory"); Human, etc., § 588 ("We hate the arrogance of the great man, not so far as he feels his power, but because he wants to feel it only in injuring others, domineering over them and seeing how far they will stand it"); ibid., §261 (on the pride and tyrannical tendencies of the early Greek philosophers).

undefined A more pertinent incident in this connection is mentioned by his sister, namely the feeling aroused in him as he witnessed a train of German cavalry, artillery, and infantry advancing to the front during the Franco-Prussian war. He was deeply stirred, and many years afterward said to his sister, "I felt that the strongest and highest will to life does not come to expression in a pitiful struggle for existence, but as a will for combat, a will for power and supremacy " (Werke, pocket ed., IX, xi). Cf. the comments on the incident by Miss Hamblen (op. cit., pp. 46-7), who, however, appears to me to exaggerate in speaking of the doctrine as a "revelation" or "intuition."

undefined It is true that a different idea of nature as involving order and law appears in Beyond Good and Evil, § 188. There is also an early suggestion ("David Strauss etc.," sect. 7) of the possibility of developing an ethics along the lines of Darwin's conception of nature, where the strong have the mastery (a suggestion which Nietzsche is popularly supposed to have carried out eventually himself—on this point, see pp. 310, 401, 437). In quite another sense, the highest type of man is once spoken of as a copy of nature, namely in the prodigality with which he overflows, exercising much reason in details, but prodigal as a whole and indifferent to consequences (Werke, XIV, 335, § 178; cf. Twilight etc., ix, § 44).

undefined The articles appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, that of James in the number for October, 1880. The latter is reproduced in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (pp. 216-54).

undefined Riehl criticises: "This monotonous power! more power! Power over what, we ask, and above all, power for what?" (op. cit., p. 124). Would he say the same of "life"? Is it monotonous, save to the weary, to speak of life, and more life? Would one ask of life, "for what"? Has it a purpose beyond itself and its own utmost development? Yet to Nietzsche power and will to it are the concrete and foundation meaning of life. I may add that as power, or will to power is to Nietzsche the ultimate reality of things, it has no origin (Will to Power, § 690), and can have no outside legitimation (cf. Werke, XI, 20, § 114; XII, 207, § 441; XIII, 198, § 436; VII, pocket ed., 485, § 34).

undefined Cf. Emerson to the effect that power is rarely found in the right state for an article of commerce, but oftener in the supersaturation or excess which makes it dangerous and destructive, and yet that it cannot be spared, and must be had in that form, and absorbents provided to take off its edge ("Power," in Conduct of Life).

undefined That Nietzsche himself felt the difficulty keenly is shown in Will to Power, § 685; cf. Werke, XIV, 218, § 440. F. C. S. Schiller, in commenting on a similar passage (Will to Power, § 864), says, "The candor of the admission that the 'strong' are in reality the weaker, does not seem to leave much substance in Nietzsche's advocacy of the strong-man doctrine" (Quarterly Review, January, 1913, p. 157).