Nez Percés

“ Seeing that the women of the Nez Perces and Flatheads were gathering up sticks to set fire to their breastwork of logs, an old chief proclaimed in a loud voice from within, the startling intelligence that there were four hundred lodges of his people close at hand, who would soon be there to avenge their deaths, should the whites choose to reduce them to ashes. ”

“ Palmer, Dr. Newell, Mr. McKay, Mr. Lee, Mr. Gilliam. These meet you ; with good hearts they meet you. They bear a message (proposals, law, or a talk) ; from the great chief they bear it. Therefore they call you to meet them.
Keep quiet, ye young men ! do not go over to the Cay uses. Wait till the commissioners speak clearly with you. The good are not to be punished. Only the bad are to be punished. The Nez Percés and the Americans are one; therefore do you not depart from us. Very many Americans are going to seek the bad Cayuses, and the bad only. ”

“ It was a moment of breathless interest; whoever first showed himself would be in danger of a shot. The Nez Perce put an end to the suspense. The moment the logs touched he Sprang upon his feet and discharged the contents of his fusee into the back of his antagonist. By this time the Blackfeet had got possession of the horses, several of their warriors lay dead on the field, and the Nez Perces, ensconced in their lodges, seemed resolved to defend themselves to the last gasp. It so happened that the chief of the Blackfeet party was a renegade from the Nez Perces ”

“ While the first two classes represent the higher ranges of human life, the attaining of which is the supreme end to Nietzsche, they are marked off from each other—the theory of the first class being specially developed and being that part of his general view which Nietzsche had most at heart. (2) The lowest class—the great average mass—has in his eyes an important, yes indispensable place in the social structure: this in contrast with the attitude of depreciation and contempt often exclusively attributed to him. ”

“ Let one think of a Greek polis, or of a primitive Germanic tribe, or of a people arising, as Nietzsche dreams, out of the welter of modern Europe [23] in obedience to a great longing and a great idea and under the leadership of a great man or set of men—in none of these was or will there be anarchy, in the sense of individuals following each his own way regardless of the social whole. Only to the few can it be given to follow their own way—and even so within limits. ”

“ Nietzsche's conclusion is that collective self-feelings may be regarded as the great preparatory school for personal sovereignty, and that the higher (vornehme) class in any group is the one which inherits the effect of the training. [47] The point, I need hardly say, is that standing for the organism, the individual comes to share its attributes—its sense of itself and of distinctness from all outside it, its freedom to do what it will, its determination to follow its own law. ”

“ It may be that the individual, apart from some kind of group-function and training, is a very limited quantity.
And now I come to a kind of paradox in Nietzsche's analysis. Societies, as we have seen, set up, whether consciously or unconsciously, moral codes which correspond to the conditions of their existence and power; they say that individuals shall take their standard rather than their own—they shape them after their mold and seem almost to negate a separate and individual being; and yet it is all part of a process by which independent individuals are made. ”

“ The sort of life which made Nietzsche wish to live again we have just seen. Life was welcome, would be ad infinitum, when lit up with a thought like that described—when a vision of the Divine opened out to it. ”

“ We are accordingly led straightway to what Nietzsche considers the very problematical notion of equality. He takes it broadly—perhaps too broadly—and appears to have no objection to it in and for itself. We may seek equality, he says, either by bringing others down to our level, or by raising ourselves and all up to a higher level. ”

“ These classes, whom Nietzsche puts together as "Pöbel,""Gesindel," are the "lords of today": for there need be no illusions—though they may talk only of freedom, they really want to rule. [9] They have their place, even a necessary place, in society, but they are a lower type of men, and when they wish to order everything for their own benefit, their selfishness is only less revolting than that of degenerates, who say "all for myself." ”

“ Nietzsche is a Spinoza à rebours. The essence of the individual, says Spinoza, 'is the effort by which it endeavors to persevere in its own being.' 'Will and understanding are one and the same.' 'By virtue and power I understand the same thing.' 'The effort to understand is the first and sole basis of virtue.' So far it might be Nietzsche who is speaking. ”

“ This holds of an individual's inner life as truly as of society: one impulse gets on top, commands, the others have to obey. [46] That regulation of impulses which is implied in morality rests in the last resort on one impulse that has the upper hand. [47] In relation to this dominant impulse, we have to let the question Why? go. [48] Of an ought over and above human relations and human wills, Nietzsche knows nothing. [49] d "Ought" is our creation, though it is a necessary one, growing out of the fact that we are at bottom wills—and will must either command or obey. ”

“ For, as already explained, temporary hostility to great men may be justified on grounds of economy—they may use up force too quickly, which, if stored, would grow to greater (Will to Power, § 896) .
aa In one passage (Werke, XII, 119, §233) Nietzsche even questions whether the ends of the individual are necessarily those of the species, but here I think he means of a given species. The variant individual may be the principle of the possibility of a higher species, or he may be a species (so to speak) all by himself: humanity may present a succession of species, one rising above another. ”

“ Morality, in Nietzsche's conception, as we have already seen, concerns the relation of parts of a society to one another and to the whole, but does not apply to the whole as such. [6] Representing the social whole as the shepherd does his flock, the state may act to other societies, and even on occasion to its own subjects, as the individual members of a society in their dealings with one another may not. ”

“ Each class has its good and evil (in the broad sense) corresponding to the conditions of its life, but the good of the one is not the good of the other, and the evil of the one is not the evil of the other.f The rulers can only maintain their particular type of existence by estimating things as they do—to use Nietzsche's metaphor, they protect themselves with their "good" and "schlecht" as with sacred groves; [14] and the mass equally protect themselves by judging as they do. The two classes have, indeed, a different temper throughout. The valuations of the higher class are direct, active ”

“ When, then, Nietzsche says that both types, the social and solitary, are necessary, we may say that he means necessary to humanity, not society—or if to society, then so far as the rarer, higher type is needed to give a final justification to society. ”

“ The very arranging, classifying, interpreting, valuing of the world and of things in it, about the objective validity of which Nietzsche is in doubt, is an incident to this end. The most wonderful of all things is not the world in its mystery, or the truths of values about which we dispute, but what is immediate and best proved, our own willing, valuing, creative selves. ”

“ It is not less astonishing—but likewise easily intelligible for one who knows something of the great Jews of the Middle Ages—that in Disraeli we discover that furious enmity against the doctrine of the natural equality of men which Nietzsche combated all his life. ”

“ Given a world without religious faith, in full social revolution, with possibilities of wealth and power dangled before every man's eyes—what can you expect but the prevalences of a more or less ferocious egoism? We, who are not egoists"—he looked into his companion's eyes—"yet are conscious of unusual strength, may, it seems to me, avail ourselves of the truth in Nietzsche, which, after all, is very much the same as my own theory of the selection of the fit for rule. ”

“ Nor is it a question of aristocratic descent—where in Germany will you find, Nietzsche asks, a great family in whose blood there is not venereal infection and corruption? Peasant blood, he thinks, is still the best. c Not whence you come, but whither you go, is the critical question for the nobility to be. [32] The challenge is, How strong are you, how near completeness in body, mind, and soul, how far can you stand alone, assume responsibility, be your own master, and thereby be fit to master others. ”

“ Nietzsche, on the contrary, with his contempt for the morality of Christianity as the morality of slaves and weaklings, with his eulogy of the blond brute striding over forgotten multitudes of his weaker fellows to a stultifying isolation apart—Nietzsche is self-realization in the mad-house. ”

“ The institutions in which and by which society has lived and been strong in the past are slowly dissolving. Men call it progress, and if progress is movement and movement to an end, progress it is—but, to Nietzsche, progressive decline. ”

“ Nietzsche thinks that the sense of power is what in varying form we all crave, that the love of power is a central, universal instinct: he defines psychology as a doctrine of the development of the will to power and of the forms it takes. ”

“ Some argue that while there may not be, and perhaps should not be, outer equality, there is an inner equality, that souls are equal; but Nietzsche questions it. Souls are as different as bodies; what strong ones endure and profit by may undo average natures—what nourishes and refreshes the higher kind of man may be to others poison. ”

“ For us today "slave" is a derogatory expression, and always, it is true, a slave has ranked lower than a free man; but Nietzsche knows also how to appreciate the slave—and even says that many a man has thrown away his last worth when he threw away his servitude [7] How necessary and vital in his estimation the slave class has been in the past, how necessary and vital their counterparts are today and always will be, we shall see later. [8] I pass now to a more detailed characterization of the two moral types. [9]
First, the ruler morality. ”

“ In a way, the lower class does best for itself when it functions in the way described. Though in a sense it is a sacrificed class, and Nietzsche so speaks of it, the sense is one which the average member of the class would hardly know how to appreciate—for he feels of most consequence as a social functionary, and would scarcely know what to do, if left to himself. s Nietzsche emphasizes the fact that his distinction of the classes has natural foundations. Just as the physical body has enjoyment when it is well ruled (by the higher will-centers) , so in society. ”

“ Each impulse, indeed, would rule if it could—the human problem being to establish an order of rank or precedence between them. Mind itself is of a commanding nature—wants to rule. [67] Philosophy, which seeks to arrange, grasp, comprehend the world and establish values in it, is the most sublimated form of the will to power. [68] One who thinks that philosophy has nothing to do with power should grapple with a philosophical problem, or with Nietzsche himself—and see whether power is needed. ”

“ Yet, perhaps, it is we who are wrong in seeing anything strange in the fact that a man with such orthodox antecedents should have developed into a prophet and reformer of Nietzsche's stamp; for we should remember that only a long tradition of discipline and strict conventionality, lasting over a number of generations, is able to rear that will-power and determination which, as the lives of most great men have shown, are the first conditions of all epoch-making movements started by single individuals. ”

“ Of this self-training Nietzsche makes much. Men of the type he looks for may heighten courage, insight, hardness, independence, the feeling of responsibility in themselves—they may live differently from the mass now, and will probably find plenty of opposition without seeking it or coming to an actual passage of arms. [66] Nietzsche was aloof from the world of today, and had and has plenty of opposition. Is not his an evil name in the mouths of most men now? ”

“ But consciousness is not an end in itself, but a means to the heightening of power. [100] ee Nietzsche even suggests that there may be an oligarchy in the mind itself, there being not necessarily one subject there, as we commonly think, but several, the play and struggle between them making the hidden basis of our thinking and consciousness—or, to use the physical terms, there may be an aristocracy of cells, with vassals more or less obedient. ”

“ Nietzsche's concept of life. We have had life variously defined for us by our own writers, and perhaps one among Nietzsche's greatest contemporaries in England—Herbert Spencer—defined it in the most characteristically English fashion. Spencer said: "Life is activity," or "the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations." Now there is absolutely nothing in either of these definitions, no suggestion or hint, which would lead the most suspicious to conjecture what life really is. ”