Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/537

Rh desired that I might see him offer battle, or at least guide his horses in the chariot-race; but Hercules did not wait for a contest; he conquered whether he stood or walked or sat, or whatever he did."

undefined Beyond Good and Evil, § 258. Cf. Will to Power, § 898, where after speaking of the equalizing process (Ausgleichung) going on in modern democratic society, he says, "This equalized species needs, as soon as it is attained, a justification: it is for the service of a higher sovereign type which stands upon it and only so can lift itself to its own task. Not merely a master-race whose function is exhausted in ruling; but a race with its own sphere of life, with a surplus of energy enabling it to carry beauty, bravery, culture, manners into their most spiritual expressions; an affirmative race which can allow itself every great luxury—strong enough not to need a tyrannical imperative to virtue, rich enough not to need petty economy and pedantry, beyond good and evil; a hothouse for strange and choice plants." In ibid., 937, he quotes a French emigré, M. de Montlosier, who in his De la monarchie française had expressed the ancient sentiment of his class in an astonishingly frank manner: "Race d'affranchis, race d'esclaves arrachés de nos mains, peuple tributaire, peuple nouveau, license vous fut octroyée d'être libres, et non pas à nous d'être nobles; pour nous tout est de droit, pour vous tout est de grace, nous ne somme point de votre communauté; nous sommes un tout par nous-mêmes." Nietzsche remarks that Augustin Thierry read this in 1814, and with a cry of anger proceeded to write his own book on the Revolution.

undefined He said in one of his earliest essays ("On the Use and Harm of History for Life," sect. 9): "The masses appear to me to deserve a glance only in three ways: first, as fading copies of great men, made on bad paper and with wornout plates, then as a force of opposition to the great, and finally as instruments for the great; aside from this, the devil and statistics take them"! This is disparagement, but not altogether so.

undefined Henri Lichtenberger, in one of the most illuminating expositions of Nietzsche's social conceptions yet made, remarks that this is a part of his ethics which Nietzsche has left in the shade ("L'Individualisme de Nietzsche," Entre Camerades, Paris, 1901, pp. 341-57). See also his La Philosophie de Nietzsche, p. 151.

undefined All this is left out of account by writers, like a critic in the London Academy (June 28, 1913), who speaks of the "overman" as crushing out the weaker masses, and even by Brandes in his first article on Nietzsche (Deutsche Rundschau, April, 1890), who represents him as having only hatred and contempt for the undermost strata of the social pyramid.

undefined This is a subtlety that appears to escape the subtle Mr. Balfour himself and all who argue for the necessity of an other than naturalistic ethics, if the weak are to be respected; it was perhaps first strikingly set forth by C. C. Everett, in an article, "The New Ethics," Unitarian Review, Vol. X, p. 408 ff. (reprinted in Poetry, Comedy, and Duty, see pp. 287-8).

undefined Meyer (op. dt., p. 310) thinks that Nietzsche started with the ordinary economic or political meaning of "slave," and then generalized, beginning to do so in Human, All-too-Human.

undefined When we in America speak of slavery, we are apt to think of what existed in our country, before the Civil War, when a black man had "no rights which a white man was bound to respect"—but this laisser faire or anarchy is not a necessary accompaniment of slavery.

undefined Cf. Richter (op. cit., pp. 244-5), "Why recommend measures to the weak, by which they preserve themselves? Should not all the weak disappear? This Nietzsche believes that he must positively deny. The mass … will always be necessary in the interest of the strong; … only those who are altogether sickly and crippled in mind and body,