"I am a dionysian!" cries Nietzsche. "I am an immoralist!" He means simply that his ideal is a being capable of facing the horrors of life unafraid, of meeting great enemies and slaying them, of gazing down upon the earth in pride and scorn, of making his own way and bearing his own burdens. In the profane folk-philosophy of every healthy and vigorous people, we find some trace of this dionysian idea. "Let us so live day by day," says a distinguished American statesman, "that we can look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell!" We get a subtle sort of joy out of this saying because it voices our racial advance toward individualism and away from servility and oppression. We believe in freedom, in toleration, in moral anarchy. We have put this notion into innumerable homely forms.
Things have come to a hell of a pass
When a man can't wallop his own jackass!
So we phrase it. The superman, did he stalk the earth, would say the same thing.
[1] Pythagoras (B.C. 570?-500?) was a Greek who brought the doctrine of the transmigration of souls from Asia Minor to Greece. In Magna Graecia he founded a mystical brotherhood, half political party and half school of philosophy. It survived him for many years and its members revered him as the sage of sages. He was a bitter foe to democracy and took part in wars against its spread.
[2] "Also sprach Zarathustra," III.
[3] North American Review, Dec., 1904.
[4] Vide the chapter on "Truth."
[5] It is very evident, I take it, that the principal function of all science is the widening of our perceptions. The chief argument for idealism used to be the axiom that our power of perception was necessarily limited and that it would be limited forever. This may be true still, but it is now apparent that these limits are being indefinitely extended, and may be extended, in future, almost infinitely. A thousand years ago, if any one had laid down the thesis that malaria was caused by minute animals, he would have been dismissed as a lunatic, because it was evident that no one could see these animals, and it was evident, too—that is to say, the scientists of that time held it to be evident—that this inability to see them would never be removed, because the human eye would always remain substantially as it was. But now we know that the microscope may increase the eye's power of perception a thousandfold. When we consider the fact that the spectroscope has enabled us to make a chemical analysis of the sun, that the telephone has enabled us to hear 2,000 miles and that the x-rays have enabled us to see through flesh and bone, we must admit without reservation, that our power of perception, at some future day, may be infinite. And if we admit this we must admit the essential possibility of the superman.
[6] "Cours de philosophie positive," tr. by Helen Martineau; London, 1853.