Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/726

720 weak themselves and need protection; they call the healthy egoism of the lords bad because the lords push them so hard. Their morality is the morality of gregarious animals, Heerdentiermoral, it is the morality of the timid, weak and sick; their virtues are the virtues of the herd, and these are praised because they preserve the herd.

But all that is perverse; the traditional pity-morality is a degeneracy. Life, the affirmation of life, the exercise of healthy robust instincts, is good. Life, more life, intenser, fuller life, is the demand. This is clearly brought out in the relations which the states assume to one another; societies do not follow the pity-morality in their treatment of other societies, they are not altruistic towards each other. The study of society is so valuable because man as society is much more naive than man as individual. Society has never looked upon virtue as anything but a means of power, strength and order. Outwardly, in its dealings with other collective bodies, the herd is hostile, selfish, merciless, greedy for rule, full of distrust.

The lord, or strong man, the aristocrat, feels that life is good, and calls everything that makes for his ideal good. He and his equals, the robust natures, are good; their self-assertion, their self-glorification, their love of life, their will for power, their desire for struggle, that is good. The strong and noble despise the weaklings, the slaves; these are schlecht, low, base, plebeian, vulgar. The very word schlecht means low, base, common, of low descent, despicable. It expresses certain incapacities which are physiologically connected with the type of degeneracy: e. g., weakness of will, vacillation, inability to check the reaction to a stimulus and to control oneself, lack of freedom in the presence of any kind of suggestion on the part of another's will. Fear, cowardice, flattery, baseness, humility, mendacity and weakness are the qualities of the base-born.

Whatever tends to preserve and develop the robust men, the great individuals, the higher type, is good, whatever tends to hinder the realization of this end is bad. The qualities which make for the preservation of the good type are good, whatever acts and qualities tend to keep the stock pure are right. Hence the lords have no duties to their inferiors, but only to their equals. Indeed, the massess are merely so much food for the geniuses, the necessary background and instrument for the higher types. They do not count. The aristocrat fixes the values, and he values himself alone.

It is not correct to say that Neitzsche is a moral nihilist, that he repudiates all morality. He does repudiate the traditional morality, but sets up in its stead a new morality, the Herrenmoral, which, as he believes, is the morality of health and power, the original morality, which was displaced by the slave-morality, a heritage of the Jews. Indeed, the main thing for him after all is the principle that should underlie all morality, the principle of the higher type. "I do not