Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/82

66 on the subject. He does little more than point out that the "great individuals" did not come from any particular friendliness on the part of the people, arising rather amid conflicts in which evil impulses had their part, and states a general conviction that when man's inventive spirit gets to work, there may be other and better results than those which have hitherto come from chance. It is the training (Züchtung) of the higher types, i.e., a conscious purpose in that direction, on which the hope of the future rests.

His derivation of special duties presents little that is unusual. "Duties" are born of ideals. Ultimately we impose them on ourselves; yet they may be strict obligations. He speaks of the "pressure" of the chain of duties which the Schopenhauer type of man fastens on himself. "Favored" is synonymous to him with "fearfully obligated." Freedom is a privilege, an obligation, a heavy one, "and it can only be paid off by great deeds"; those who fail to realize this, do nothing good with their freedom and easily go to pieces. He even speaks of those who enter the lists for a culture such as has been described, as coming to "the feeling of a duty to live" —a different thing, I need not say, from the animal craving to live.

"Justice," "sympathy," "pity," "love" sometimes receive shades of meaning which are determined by his particular views, but substantially they mean the same to him as to the rest of us. He is not laudatory of power, and asks his generation, "Where are those among you who will follow the divine example of Wotan and become greater the more they withdraw—who will renounce power, knowing and feeling that it is evil?" He speaks of Wagner as early tempted to seek for "power and glory," but notes that he had risen to purer air. The man inspired by justice he deems the most reverend specimen of our kind, and he finds it an impulse for the scholar as