that there is some sort of equivalence in value between my actions and thine." *
True virtue, as opposed to the conventional sort, is not for all, but should remain the
characteristic of an aristocratic minority. It is not profitable or prudent; it isolates its possessor
from other men; it is hostile to order, and does harm to inferiors. It is necessary for higher men
to make war upon the masses, and resist the democratic tendencies of the age, for in all
directions mediocre people are joining hands to make themselves masters. "Everything that
pampers, that softens, and that brings the 'people' or 'woman' to the front, operates in favour of
universal suffrage--that is to say, the dominion of 'inferior' men." The seducer was Rousseau,
who made woman interesting; then came Harriet Beecher Stowe and the slaves; then the
Socialists with their championship of workmen and the poor. All these are to be combated.
Nietzsche's ethic is not one of self-indulgence in any ordinary sense; he believes in Spartan
discipline and the capacity to endure as well as inflict pain for important ends. He admires
strength of will above all things. "I test the power of a will," he says, "according to the amount
of resistance it can offer and the amount of pain and torture it can endure and know how to turn
to its own advantage; I do not point to the evil and pain of existence with the finger of reproach,
but rather entertain the hope that life may one day become more evil and more full of suffering
than it has ever been." He regards compassion as a weakness to be combated. "The object is to
attain that enormous energy of greatness which can model the man of the future by means of
discipline and also by means of the annihilation of millions of the bungled and botched, and
which can yet avoid going to ruin at the sight of the suffering created thereby, the like of which
has never been seen before." He prophesied with a certain glee an era of great wars; one
wonders whether he would have been happy if he had lived to see the fulfilment of his
prophecy.
He is not, however, a worshipper of the State; far from it. He is a passionate individualist, a
believer in the hero. The misery of a whole nation, he says, is of less importance than the
suffering of a great individual: "The misfortunes of all these small folk do not together
constitute a sum-total, except in the feelings of mighty men."
* In all quotations from Nietzsche, the italics are in the original.