simists in this sense, because the world has not the particular value commonly ascribed to it, it does not follow that it is less valuable—it may be more so. For what are the standards of value which are commonly set up? what is it that is deified? Goodness, justice, love. But what are goodness, justice, love but qualities by the help of which men get along together in societies, necessary rules for their association in flocks? What are we doing then but taking certain utilities of flock-life and making a God of them, an absolute standard by which the world is judged, so that it is good if it conforms to them and bad if it does not.[1] It seems a presumptuous thing to Nietzsche, an extravagant aberration of human vanity and unreason—indeed he finds something laughable in man's proposing to invent values that are to exceed the value of the actual world.[2]
How the world is still valuable in his eyes after the downfall of moralistic faith, we have already seen in part and shall see more clearly later on. I may only say in general now that it is the possible outcome of existence, which justifies existence to his mind—the type or types of life that may emerge. It is not that pleasure may preponderate over pain—to considerations of pleasure and pain he gives a quite secondary place. Every sound individual, he thinks, refuses to judge life by these incidents. Pain might preponderate, and there be none the less a mighty will to life, a saying yes to it, a feeling even of the necessity of this preponderance.[3] A measure of the will's power is its capacity to endure opposition, pain, and torture, and to turn them to advantage. With this in mind, he says, "I do not reckon the evil and painful character of existence an objection to it, but hope that it will sometime be more evil and more painful than heretofore."[4] He despises the "pessimism of sensibility" and calls it "a sign of deep impoverishment of life";[5] more than once he quotes Voltaire's lines,
"Un monstre gai vaut mieux
Qu'un sentimental ennuyeux."[6]
He thus departs widely from Spencerian and all hedonistic measurements of the worth of life. When we come into the
