Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/727

Rh denyn" he says, "that many acts which are called immoral are to be avoided and combatted, likewise that many which are called moral ought to be performed and encouraged—but I think these acts ought to be performed or avoided for different reasons from those given hitherto." Nor does Nietzsche preach a code of license and caprice. His ideal man is not a man of license, an unrestrained force, a wild and lawless savage. He does not wish to bring back the 'blonde beast' of early times, the 'human beast of prey,' the tyrant, the despot, the usurper. "The noble man," he says, "honors in himself the man of power, the man also who has power over himself, the man who can speak and keep silent, who delights in being strict and hard with himself and has respect for strictness and hardness everywhere. Confidence in oneself, pride in oneself, belong to aristocratic morality." "As soon as the noble or aristocratic soul is clear on the question of rank, he moves among his equals and those having equal privileges with the same confidence and gentle reverence which he reveals in his intercourse with himself—he honors himself in them and in the rights which he grants them, he does not doubt that the exchange of honors and rights constitutes the essence of all intercourse and the natural condition of things." What is freedom? "That we have the will to take responsibility. That we keep the distance which separates us. That we become more and more indifferent to toil, hardness, privation, yes even to life itself. That we be ready to sacrifice to our cause human beings, ourselves not excluded. Freedom means that the manly, the warlike and the triumphant instincts dominate the other instincts, for example, the instincts for 'happiness.' "The ideal of personality can only be realized by self-discipline. All morality is a long compulsion. "You ought to obey some one or other and for a long time, otherwise you will go to pieces and lose your self-respect." When you obey yourself, when you are a law unto yourself, then you are a free man. Your act should be your act, the expression of your personality, your self ought to be in it as the mother is in her child. Those are commanded who can not obey themselves, who can not control themselves. "Alas! there is so much lust for fame! There are so many convulsions of ambition! Show me that you are not one of the lustful and ambitious! Alas! there are so many big ideas, they do nothing but inflate like bellows: they blow up and make more empty. You call yourself free? Your controlling idea let me hear and not that you have shaken off a yoke. Are you one of those who had the right to throw off the yoke? There is many a man who threw away his last worth when he threw away his obedience. Free from what? What does Zarathustra care for that! Clearly however your eye shall tell me: Free for what?"

A great man, a heroic man, a good man, is better than a weakling,