giving into his own hands, he is going to legislate just as others do. He may be different from others, have a different end from others, or, with the same end, may see deeper or differently as to how to reach it. c To tell a sovereign what law he shall give himself is more than a naveté—it is a contradiction.
"Castilian gentlemen
Choose not their task,—they choose to do it well,"
says George Eliot in The Spanish Gypsy. But a real sovereign chooses his task, as well as the doing of it. He sets himself his duty. At least so Nietzsche conceived the matter. The very thing that urges the type of individual in question to be a law unto himself is the more or less dim sense that he is different from others, and needs, in order to serve those particulars in which he is different, a different regimen and method of procedure. One who feels that he is one of many, all essentially alike, can neither have nor desire to have a peculiar moral law; but he who is conscious of a quantum of being that is unique, may feel that he is even lacking in respect where respect is due, if he owns only a common law. Rather does he ask, What agrees with my conditions of existence? and he may as reverently bend to that duty as any average individual can to his. And yet really to find out oneself and the law that will serve it—what a task![1] Just to the extent that the individual is unique, he can get no help from others. Society, or rather societies, know (or think they know) themselves, and the kinds of conduct that will serve them—hence morality or moralities, all socially imposed laws for social purposes; but societies know the individual so little, that they either fail to consider him (save as they try to restrain him or to make him useful), or else they touch merely the surface of him—we have already found Nietzsche remarking on the unfineness of morality's prescriptions for individual well-being.[2] Hence when men take themselves in hand and attempt to mark out their own course, they may go astray. Nietzsche says that the first tentative individuals generally go to pieces.[3] They are great enough to feel the inadequacy of the law of the average, but not great enough, or lucky enough to
