Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/718

712 is not peculiar to a corrupt or imperfect and primitive society, it belongs to the very nature of living beings; as the fundamental organic function it is the consequence of the real will for power, which is simply the will for life." Life is in its very nature hard and fierce; you can not have life without injury and attack; to live means to appropriate, to assimilate, to exploit, to coerce, to annihilate other elements. Life, the will for power, means struggle, battle, war; it means the exploitation of the weaker by the stronger. From all this it follows that a philosophy that places peace above war is a symptom of decay. If life is hard and fierce, if it is impossible without all these ferocious elements, and if life and power is the ideal, then these things are good. "You shall seek out your foe," says Nietzsche, "you shall wage your war, and for your own ideas, too. And when your idea is vanquished, your integrity shall applaud the deed. You shall love peace as the means to new wars. And the short peace better than the long one. I do not counsel labor, but battle. Let your labor be a battle, let your peace be a victory. You say it is the good cause that justifies the war? I say unto you: it is the good war that justifies any cause. You should have foes only that you can hate, not foes that you despise. You must be proud of your foe, then the triumphs of your foe will also be your triumphs."

In short, life means war and struggle, war and struggle are necessary, inevitable. You can not live and will without asserting yourself, without fighting, without hurting somebody, without being hard. You are bound to be hammer or anvil, you must conquer or be conquered, you must push others to the wall or go to the wall yourself. Life is by its very nature a terrible thing; in order to realize the goal, to produce strong men, it can not but be terrible. "Every moment devours the preceding one, every birth is the death of countless beings; to procreate, to live and to murder are one. We may, therefore, compare glorious civilization to a bloody victor, who in his triumphal procession drags along with him as slaves the vanquished fettered to his chariot wheels." Civilization can not do without the dangerous, hostile and violent passions. "Let envy, hatred and rivalry consume and torture man, let them drive him to extremes. Then perhaps a spark of the terrible energy thus enkindled may fall by the wayside, and from it there may suddenly burst forth the light of genius." "The 'warm sympathetic heart' does not know what it asks when it demands the removal of this violent phase of life; its own warmth is the product of the fire of the very passions which it desires to have suppressed." Whoever affirms life must say yes to the dangerous, violent and hostile phases of it. "The diminution of the hostile instincts is only one of the consequences of the universal decline of vitality." "Hardness, violence, slavery, danger on the highway and in the heart—the fearful, tyrannical, ferocious, serpent-like elements