Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/530

514 undefined The paradox that the weak in combination, by making laws against the strong, prove themselves the stronger, plays its part in the argument of Socrates against Callicles in Plato's "Gorgias" (488). One feels in reading the dialogue that Socrates is the greater dialectician, but that it is chiefly a verbal victory which he wins over Callicles, who really has in mind a strong type of man, yet is not able to express himself clearly and perhaps has not thought out his meaning anyway.

undefined Richter remarks on the vagueness of the concept (op. cit., p. 325); cf. Fouillée, Nietzsche et l'Immoralisme, II, chap. 1, and F. C. S. Schiller, Quarterly Review, January, 1915, p. 157 ("He never unambiguously explains what he means by 'strength' and seems to have no consistent notion of it"). But is not the vagueness of the concept partly owing to the fact that, like all abstractions, it gets its real meaning in concrete instances, and a more or less varied meaning as the instances differ?

undefined So far as he attempts an explanation of the world in terms of will (or wills) to power, it is only, to use a happy expression of Richter's, a metaphysics of the first degree; what the real and ultimate nature of power (and will to it) is, he leaves undetermined, perhaps viewing it as an unnecessary question.

undefined Not that the possibilities of progress are infinite. The total amount of force, energy, or power (they are equivalent expressions to Nietzsche) in the world, however great, is limited, and the combinations it can make and the heights it can attain, however far beyond anything we know now, have their limits too. When then the end is reached, power can only turn on itself, dissolve the fabrics it has made, and allow the play to begin again (cf. Will to Power, § 712; Zarathustra, III, xiii, § 2; Joyful Science, § 111). It is Heraclitus' Æon, or the great "world-child Zeus," over again (cf. "Philosophy in the Tragic Period of the Greeks," sects. 7, 8; Will to Power, § 797).

undefined As to the inner mechanics of the evolution of higher sorts of power from lower, I am not able to make out a clear consistent view in Nietzsche. He sometimes speaks as if the higher powers seized on the lower and subjugated them, being presumably then independent existences themselves (the kinship being only that all are alike forms of power); and yet he generally uses the language of strict evolution. Perhaps, even if there are eternally different kinds of power, this is not inconsistent with the higher being spiritualizations of the lower, rather than of a different substance.

undefined Mind, for instance, may have its ascendancy over matter, just because it is a spiritualization of the same energy that is in matter (this aside from the fact that matter may be itself only statable ultimately in energetic terms).

undefined It can only be said in charity that even those "who know" cannot in this age of the world be expected to know everything, especially when the subject is so strange and multiform a thinker as Nietzsche. I give only a few of the many instances of hasty judgment:—The superman "will strive to become like the 'blonde BeastieBestie [sic]' of the old German forests, etc." (J. M. Warbeke, Harvard Theological Review, July, 1909, p. 373); Nietzsche's speculations, "if ever they come to be acted upon, would dissolve society as we understand it and bring us back to the 'dragons of the prime'" (Bennett Hume, London Quarterly Review, October, 1900, p. 338); "'We have now at last,' says Nietzsche, 'arrived at the brink of the period when wickedness shall prevail again, as it did in the good old heroic times when the strong man scalped, and stole, and lied, and cheated, and abducted'" (Oswald Crauford, Nineteenth Century, October, 1900, p. 604); "One must … get back once more to a primitive naturalness in which man is a magnificent blond beast, etc." (H. T. Peck, Bookman, September, 1898, p. 30); "imagined as Nietzsche describes