Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/722

716 full of danger and battle and pain and cruelty. In this he agrees with Schopenhauer. He is not an optimist in the sense of finding everything pleasant and easy and good; it is not a world of sunshine and perpetual joy in which we are living, but a battlefield, a terrible battlefield reeking with blood. But Nietzsche does not conclude from this that we should therefore negate life, that we should fly from it, that we should renounce the world, that we should throw down our arms and give up the fight. All pessimism is a sign of decadence, the expression of a weak will, of a degenerate instinct. The strong and healthy man wills to live—in spite of all suffering and sorrow he wills to live, yes, as we have seen, these very sorrows he makes the means of an intenser, fuller life. "Praised be what makes us hard! I do not praise the land where milk and honey flow" Nietzsche's pessimism is a spur to the will; "with this will in our breast we do not fear the terrible and questionable in all existence, we seek it out." "How did I endure it" he asks, "how did I recover from such wounds? How did my soul again rise up out of these graves? Yea, there is something in me that can not be wounded, that can not be buried, something that can move mountains: that is my will.—Yea, thou art still the destroyer of all my graves: Hail to thee my will! And only where there are graves can there be resurrections."

And because the desire for life and power means self-assertion, willaction, the realization of instincts, asceticism or renunciation or the suppression of instinct is bad. Non-being can not be the goal. Asceticism is a symptom of exhaustion, of weakness of will and degeneracy. There are many forms of asceticism, but all of them ask man to negate his natural instincts, to cease desiring or willing, to do the very thing which according to our philosopher will hinder the realization of life and the higher type of man. "That, however, the ascetic ideal has meant so much for man is an expression of the fundamental fact of the human will: its horror vacui; it needs a goal—and it would rather will the nothing than not to will at all." But deliverance from life, negation of the will, nirvana, is not the goal, but life, more life. Only when asceticism furthers life, when it makes the will stronger, when it serves as a gymnastic of will, is it good.

Let us now turn to Nietzsche's anti-democratic teachings and see how they follow from his fundamental principle. If life and power are the ideal, then the strong wills, the great personalities, the higher types of man, the happy few, are better than the many, the masses, the weaklings, the failures, the degenerates. Men are not equal, and it is impossible for them to be made equal. The democratic ideal of equality is a dream. "There is no more venomous poison than the doctrine of equality, for it seems to be preached by justice itself when in fact it is the end of all justice." The equality-theory would make of man a dwarf-animal of equal rights and privileges. The herd, of course, is