a dice-table—one which Gods have spread out, and on which they play with men; it trembles from the throws they make and their creative new words.[1] We hear of the "heaven of accident" standing over all things—and to teach that accident has so high and ruling a place in the world is not to revile, but to bless.[2] In The Antichristian, after saying that indignation at the general aspect of things is, along with pessimism, the privilege of the Tschandala [the lowest class of men[3]], Nietzsche uses this remarkable language: "The world is perfect—so speaks the instinct of the most spiritual men, the affirmative instinct—imperfection, what lies beneath us of every kind, distance, the pathos of distance, the Tschandala himself belongs to this perfection."[4]
This does not mean that Nietzsche has altered in the slightest his estimate of things from a moral standpoint—that he is not still pessimist, as most would understand that term. "We are seethed," he says, "in the view, and have become cold and hard in it, that things do not go on at all divinely in the world, or even according to human measure rationally, mercifully, or justly; we know it, the world in which we live, is undivine, unmoral, 'unhuman'"—that it is not valuable in the way we have believed is the surest result we have.[5] Injury, violence, stealing, killing inhere in all life.[6] He honors Schopenhauer (in contrast with men like Schiller, W. von Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Schelling) for seeing the world as it is, and the deviltry of it.[7] He feels himself an heir of the veracity and old-fashioned piety of Luther, who recognized that reason could not of itself make out a just and merciful government of the world, and of Kant, who saw that morality could not be based on nature and history, since immorality ruled there;[8] d both, that is, had to put the Divine outside the world (a logic which our new "immanent" theologians might well ponder over). But, he in effect argues, because we are pes-
- ↑ Ibid., III, xvi, § 3.
- ↑ Ibid., III, iv.
- ↑ For a more exact meaning of the Hindu term, see later, p. 453.
- ↑ The Antichristian, § 57; cf. Zarathustra, IV, x; Will to Power, §§ 1031, 1033.
- ↑ Joyful Science, § 346.
- ↑ Zarathustra, III, xii, § 10; Genealogy etc., II, § 11.
- ↑ Dawn of Day, § 190.
- ↑ Preface, §§ 3, 4, to Dawn of Day.
