Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/719

Rh in man help to improve man." "The serpent must first become a dragon in order that some one may become a hero through it." "Your wildcats must become tigers and your venomous toads crocodiles, for the good huntsman shall have a good chase."

We must make the strong stronger and the weak weaker. The misery of toiling men must even be increased in order to make possible a small number of Olympian men. Whatever will realize the goal is good. The weak must go to the wall, that is unavoidable. "We should not attempt to cure what can not be cured. What is falling we ought even to push down. The weaklings and the failures ought to perish. And we ought even to help them to perish." The world is not a hospital.

Oppression and slavery in some form or other are means to the desired end. "The perfection of the type man has thus far always been the work of an aristocratic society—and it will always be so, the work of a society that believes in a long scale of rank and in a great difference of value between man and man, and finds slavery in some form or other necessary."

Of course, all this means pain and suffering, but remember that happiness is not the end and pity is not a virtue. "My sorrow and my pity—what do I care for these? Am I craving for happiness? No, I am craving for my work." "There are higher problems than all pleasure-, pain-and pity-problems, and every philosophy that culminates in these is a naïve philosophy." "You desire if possible to do away with suffering; and we?—it seems: we desire to intensify it, even to make it worse than it was! Well-being as you understand it—why that is no goal, that seems to be an end!—The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—do you not know that this discipline alone has thus far been the cause of every advance toward perfection in man?" "Such human beings as are near to me I desire to experience suffering, neglect, sickness, ill-treatment, humiliation—I hope that they may become acquainted with extreme self-contempt, the torture of self-distrust, the misery of defeat. I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove in our day whether a man has worth or not—that he fight it out" "The most spiritual men also suffer by far the most painful tragedies; but for that very reason they honor life, because it places against them the greatest foes. It almost determines the scale of one's worth how deeply one can suffer." "The man who has become free, and much more the spirit that has become free, tramples under foot the despicable kind of well-being of which grocers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats dream. The free man is a warrior."

The fact is, man does not seek pleasure or happiness, nor does he avoid pain. What man wants, what the smallest part of a living organism wants, is more power. For what do the trees in the forest