"Not whence ye come be your honour in future, but whither ye go!" Your will, and your foot that longeth to get beyond yourselves,—be that your new honour!"
"Your children's land ye shall love (be this your new nobility), the land undiscovered in the remotest sea! For it I bid you set sail and seek!"[5]
"Every elevation of the type man," says Nietzsche, "has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society—and so will it always be—a society believing in a long scale of gradations of rank and differences of worth among human beings, and requiring slavery in some form or other. Without the pathos of distance, such as grows out of the incarnated differences of classes, out of the constant outlooking and downlooking of the ruling caste on subordinates and instruments, and out of their equally constant practice of obeying and commanding, of keeping down and keeping at a distance that other more mysterious pathos could never have arisen, the longing for an ever new widening distance within the soul itself, the formation of ever higher, rarer, further, more extended, more comprehensive states, in short, just the elevation of the type 'man,' the continued 'self-surmounting of man,' to use a moral formula in a super-moral sense."[6]
I cannot attempt to give a full account of the society Nietzsche would fain have seen established on earth. It will be found exhaustively described in Aph. 57 of the Antichrist: while in the book of Manu (Max Müller's "Sacred Books of the East," No. 25), similar sociological prescriptions are to be found, correlated with all the imposing machinery of divine revelation, supernatural authority, and religious earnestness.
Briefly, Nietzsche says this:—
It is ridiculous to pretend to treat every one without regard to those natural distinctions which are manifested by superior intellectuality, or exceptional muscular strength, or mediocrity of spiritual and bodily powers, or inferiority of both. He tells us that it is not the legislator, but nature herself, who establishes these broad classes, and to ignore them when forming a society would be just as foolish as to ignore the order of rank among materials and structural principles when building a monument. Though the base of a pyramid does not require to be of the very finest marble, we know it must be both broad and massive. Nietzsche declares that no society has any solidarity which is not founded upon a broad basis of mediocrity. Though the stones get fewer in the layers as we ascend to the top of the pyramid, we know that their gradation is necessary if the highest point is to be readied. Nietzsche believes in the long scale of gradations of rank with the ascending line leading always to the highest—even if he be only a single individual. Though the very uppermost point consists of a single stone, it is around that single stone that the weather will rage most furiously and the sun shine most gorgeously. That single stone will be the first to cleave the heavy shower, and the first, for, to meet the lightning. Nietzsche says: "Life always becomes harder towards the summit,—the cold increases, responsibility increases."[7]
"Saepius ventis agitatur ingens
pinus, et celsae graviore casu
decidunt turres, feriuntque summos
fulgura montes."[8]—HORACE, Carm. II. X.
Thus he would have the intellectually superior, those who can bear responsibility and endure hardships, at the head. Beneath them are the warriors, the physically strong, who are "the guardians of right, the keepers of order and security, the king above all as the highest formula of warrior, judge, and keeper of the law. The second in rank are the executive of the most intellectual." And below this caste are the mediocre. "Handicraft, trade, agriculture, science, the greater part of art, in a word, the whole compass of business activity, is exclusively compatible with an average amount of ability and pretension." At the very base of the social edifice, Nietzsche sees the class of man who thrives best when he is well looked after and closely observed,—the man who is happy to serve, not because he must, but because he is what he is,—the man uncorrupted by political and religious lies concerning equality, liberty, and fraternity,—who is half conscious of the abyss which separates him from his superiors, and who is happiest when performing those acts which are not beyond his limitations.
He forestalls this sketch of his ideal society by enunciating the moral code wherewith he would transvalue our present values, and I shall now give this code without a single remark or comment, feeling quite sure that the reader who has understood Nietzsche so far will not require any assistance in seeing that it is the necessary and logical outcome of the rest of his teaching.
* * * * * *