Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/724

718 The state was in its beginnings probably a terrible tyranny which a hordhorde [sic] of mighty beasts of prey combining for rapine and plunder forced upon a peaceful, but poorly organized mass. The modern state, the so-called ideal or paternal state, the idol of the age, is opposed by Nietzsche because it endangers the individuality of creative minds. The ideal state of the socialists is really hostile to life, it is the destroyer of man, it is a crime against the future of man, a sign of exhaustion, a stealthy path to nothingness. It corrupts the soil on which genius grows, it would make humanity tame and uninteresting and happy.

But Nietzsche does not oppose the state as such, he is not an anarchist. He believes in authority, indeed he maintains that healthy vigorous life is not possible without authority. The rabble ought to be made to understand that there are sacred things which they ought not to touch, in the presence of which they ought to take off their shoes and from which they ought to keep their unclean hands. "The society of men is an experiment, a long search; but it searches for the ruler." This ruler is not a brutal arbitrary tyrant, he is strict with himself and gentle with the weak and suffering. He is a man who says: "This pleases me, this I shall take and defend against everyone," "a man who can lead a cause, carry out a resolve, be loyal to an idea, hold fast a woman, punish and overthrow a rascal; a man who has his anger and his sword, and to whom the weak and suffering and oppressed and even animals gladly turn and naturally belong, a man in short who is by nature a lord—if such a man has pity, very well! This pity has value. But what care we for the pity of those who suffer. Or of those who even preach pity."

For the same reason that Nietzsche opposes the modern democratic tendencies he is against the so-called emancipation of women. The sexes are not equal. Man's strongest instinct is the desire for power; woman's whole life is love, which is merely an episode in man's. "The happiness of man is: This is my will. The happiness of woman is: This is his will." She is made to love and obey, he is made to rule and protect. "Man should be trained for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: everything else is foolishness." Where this natural and healthy relation is perverted, where the man is effeminate and the woman masculine, we have decay. "There is too little of the man around here," says Zarathustra, "therefore their women become mannish. For only one who is man enough will deliver the woman in woman."

We are now prepared for a discussion of Nietzsche's conception of morality, one of the most important phases of his teaching. Nietzsche declares that thus far no one has dared to make morality a problem, to criticize it, to call it in question. "The value of these values (those expressed in the moral laws) has been accepted as a matter of fact, as beyond all dispute. In the entire science of morality so far the