abstract power were the ideal, then since the brute forces of the universe may sometime get the better of life, that would be an ideal consummation; or, since the weak by combination may (and actually do in our modern democratic world) make themselves masters of the strong, then that is an end to be desired—any chance force or set of forces that happened to get on top at any time would represent the desired end. Indeed, if any de facto might makes right, a question would arise as to the sense of setting up power as an ideal at all, since it effectuates itself anyway—there being no situation in the world that is not statable as the result of the action and interaction of forces, in which some get the upper hand. But Nietzsche is not bête, and so far as he speaks of power as a desirable end for man he means just a power that does not necessarily effectuate itself, that has to be striven for and may or may not be attained—it is emphatically a power that requires a will to power.
IV
Even so, however, it may be said that power is a vague conception—too much so to give us any definite guidance in acting or judging of things. Let us see then what becomes of it in Nietzsche's hands—how he uses it.
In the first place we notice that in the background of his mind there is a certain sense, for all said and done, of the insecurity of life. Mankind is more or less to him, as to Matthew Arnold, "a feeble wavering line." Life is not an assured gift, it rests on effort, toil, on the will to live—so that there is sense in making it an ideal, and in exalting ideals of power. Schopenhauer and the Buddhists actually propose to weaken the will to live. Certain types of Christianity practically tend the same way. Nietzsche feels that there is need of a fortifying doctrine. It is perhaps something to make life and power in all their vagueness an end, as against non-life.
But more than this, the construing life as will to power enables him to judge between different types of life—those animated by less will to power ranking lower than those with full will to power: the descending and ascending lines of life are not of equal value. Indeed, on a general basis of this sort he conceives of the possibility of a properly scientific ethics arising,
