It is not expedient to choose on every occasion the higher rather than the lower, for one may not be able to endure too much living on the heights. If will and capacity were always equal! Then, it is true, there would not be any difficulty; but Life is Life, after all—that is, our will is greater than our capacity. On the other hand, it is not well to develop equally all our faculties—the formula of the Humanist—for among them there is a hierarchy, and some are more worthy of development than others. What course is left? To act always in the interest of what is highest in us, and when we partake of a lower pleasure to regard it as a form of sleep, of necessary forgetting? For even the mind must slumber occasionally if it is to remain healthy.
77
Intellectual Prudence
Among athletes there is a thing known as over-training: if it is persisted in it wrecks the body. A similar phenomenon is to be found among thinkers: thought too severe and protracted may ruin the mind. Was this the explanation of Nietzsche's downfall? Certainly, his intellectual health was that of the athlete who remains vigorous by virtue of a never-sleeping discipline, who maintains his balance by a continuous effort. This is perhaps the highest, the most exquisite form of health, but it is at the same time the most dangerous—a little more, a little less, and the engine of thought is destroyed. It is important that the thinker should discover exactly how far he may discipline himself, and how far permit indulgence. What in the ordinary man—conscious of no secondary raison d'être—is performed without fuss by the instincts, must by him be thought out—a task of great peril.
78
A Dilemma
To be a man is easy: to be a purpose is more difficult; but, on the whole—easy. In the first instance, one has but to exist; in the second, to act. But to unite man and purpose in the same person—to be a type—is both difficult and precarious. For that a balance is imperative: "being" and "doing" must be prevented from injuring each other: action must become rhythm, and rest, a form of energy. To be in doing, to do in being—that is the task of the future man. The danger of our being mere man is that mankind may remain forever stationary, without a goal. The danger of our being mere purpose is that our humanity may altogether drop out and nothing but the purpose be left. And would not that defeat the purpose?
79
Dangers of Genius
Why is it that so many men of genius have been destroyed by falling into chasms of desire which are safely trodden by common men? Is it because there is within the exceptional man greater compass, and, therefore, greater danger? The genius has left the animal further behind than the ordinary man; indeed, in the genius of the nobler sort there is an almost passionate avoidance and disavowal of the animal. In this disavowal lie at once his safety and his danger: by means of it he climbs to perilous heights, and is also secure upon them. But let him abrogate even once this denial of kinship, and he is in the utmost danger. He now finds himself stationed on the edge of a precipice up to which he seems to have climbed in a dream, a dreadful dizziness assails him, along with a mad desire to fling himself into the depths. It was perhaps a leap of this kind that Marlowe made, and Shelley. Meantime, the ordinary man lives in safety at the foot of the precipice: he is never so far above the animal as to be injured by a fall into animalism. Only to the noble does spiritual danger come.