wider field. Both Nietzsche and Machiavelli have an ethic which aims at power and is
deliberately anti-Christian, though Nietzsche is more frank in this respect. What Caesar Borgia
was to Machiavelli, Napoleon was to Nietzsche: a great man defeated by petty opponents.
Nietzsche's criticism of religions and philosophies is dominated entirely by ethical motives. He
admires certain qualities which he believes (perhaps rightly) to be only possible for an
aristocratic minority; the majority, in his opinion, should be only means to the excellence of the
few, and should not be regarded as having any independent claim to happiness or well-being.
He alludes habitually to ordinary human beings as the "bungled and botched," and sees no
objection to their suffering if it is necessary for the production of a great man. Thus the whole
importance of the period from 1789 to 1815 is summed up in Napoleon: "The Revolution made
Napoleon possible: that is its justification. We ought to desire the anarchical collapse of the
whole of our civilization if such a reward were to be its result. Napoleon made nationalism
possible: that is the latter's excuse." Almost all of the higher hopes of this century, he says, are
due to Napoleon.
He is fond of expressing himself paradoxically and with a view to shocking conventional
readers. He does this by employing the words "good" and "evil" with their ordinary
connotations, and then saying that he prefers "evil" to "good." His book, Beyond Good and Evil,
really aims at changing the reader's opinion as to what is good and what is evil, but professes,
except at moments, to be praising what is "evil" and decrying what is "good." He says, for
instance, that it is a mistake to regard it as a duty to aim at the victory of good and the
annihilation of evil; this view is English, and typical of "that blockhead, John Stuart Mill," a
man for whom he has a specially virulent contempt. Of him he says:
"I abhor the man's vulgarity when he says 'What is right for one man is right for another'; 'Do
not to others that which you would not that they should do unto you.' * Such principles would
fain establish the whole of human traffic upon mutual services, so that every action would
appear to be a cash payment for something done to us. The hypothesis here is ignoble to the last
degree: it is taken for granted
* I seem to remember that some one anticipated Mill in this dictum.