Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/732

726 to understand this remarkable thinker and his opposition to our age. The will for power is the fundamental human instinct, the fundamental human fact. The goal is the creation of a higher type of men, of a race of heroes, as it were. Life in the real sense of the term is impossible without struggle, it is a struggle for existence. Hence war is preferable to peace, indeed peace is a sign of death. War and struggle of course are hard, they bring out the stern elements in man, they can not be carried on without injury, pain and suffering, without hurting the weak. But since all these things are inevitable, since no strong race can be produced without the desire for power, which implies war, struggle, pain, suffering, injury to the weak, they are good and their opposites bad. We must fight, we must inflict injury, we must suffer our pain, because life is impossible without these things. "It is customary nowadays" he says, "even under the guise of science to prate about coming conditions of society which shall be lacking in the ferocious features. That sounds to my ears as though it were intended to invent a life that dispensed with all organic functions." We are not here for our pleasure, for our happiness, we are not here for any purpose, but being here we must hold our own, we must assert ourselves, or go clown. Therefore pity is bad, it injures him that gives and him that takes. It saps the strength of the race, it weakens both the strong and the weak, and is bad.

It is true that life is terrible, but that is no reason for pessimism. Indeed, pessimism, renunciation, is impossible except in a diseased and degenerate race, for the desire for life is too strong in a healthy mind to be overcome by pain and battle. Again, life is struggle, it means victory for the strong and defeat for the weak; somebody must win and somebody must lose. It is an experiment, a sifting process in which the sheep are separated from the goats. It is selective, aristocratic. It brings out the inequalities in human nature, it shows that men are not equal. Some men are better than others, stronger in body and mind. The better men, the natural-born aristocrats, should have more privileges because they have more duties than the plebeians, the rabble. The best men should rule. Hence democracy, socialism, communism, anarchism are all impossible, they all contradict the ideal, they all make impossible the development of strong individuals. Slavery in some form or other has always existed and will always exist. The modern laborer has simply taken the place of the ancient slave. Nor can women have the same rights as men because they are not equal to men in initiative, in energy, in will. Our greatest danger to-day lies in the mania for equality. "For thus it stands," says our thinker, "the dwarfing and leveling of the European man constitutes our gravest danger, for this outlook wearies us. We see nothing to-day that promises to become greater, we are vaguely suspicious that things are going down, down, that everything is becoming thinner, more