796 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
Nietzsche wants the same, but he will have no such society. He posits all this only for the sovereign individual who is great and solitary and stands beyond all society. Here is the differ- ence between the genial poet philosopher and his poor imitator.
Wille does not see that everything which he drives out morality, law, force, etc. he admits again through a rear door There will be no morality, but in its place there will be "reason seeking and recognizing advantage." Now the coordination of morality and reason is as old as human thought, yet Wille thinks he is teaching something entirely new. There will be no " force," no "police," but the individual will be thrown upon his own reason that is, whatever opposes the reason of the large majority will undergo "empirical correction" through social indignation. How far removed is regulated punishment by flagellation?
Wille and all his anarchistic sympathizers entirely lack not only logical clearness and precision but the use of sociological methods of thought. They have not grasped the central thought of our science, viz., evolution. If they possessed this thought they could never arrive at the absurd conceit of dissolving society in order to enable men, without any bond of union or regulation of their relations, to pursue their several ways alongside of each other. They would then know that our social order has devel- oped itself on the basis of eternal physical and psychical laws, and that wherever men live together some form of authority and therewith of "force" must be developed.
It cannot be inferred from this thought, to be sure, that our social order neither needs nor is susceptible of improvement, nor that a social reform is equivalent to an assault upon eternal nat- ural laws. By the idea of evolution we are by no means forced to that stupid satisfaction at which Otto Ammon 1 has arrived, who counts himself happy to have been born into "this best of all worlds."
1 Die Gescllschaftsordnung und ihre natiirlichen Grundlagen. Entwurf einer socialen Anthropologie zum Gebrauche fur alle Gebildete, die sich mit socialen Fragen befassen. Jena, 1895.
