themselves.[1] In short, they are whole men, lawgiver and subject in one; they need no laws from without—indeed, "laws," "rules" are crude, unfine, compared with the intimate character of their self-control.[2] To them and to them only is freedom given without risk;[3] they are the justification of the régime of liberty, even if the other fruit of the social tree spoils—better that much should spoil, than that this perfect fruit should not appear. Yes, from this fruit new and fairer social groupings may in time arise.
For though Nietzsche's thought wavers at this point, and he sometimes speaks as if great men were an end, a consummation and not a way to something beyond, his main idea is (to use now another metaphor) that they are eggs, germinal beginnings of new societies and unities.[4] If the old society is strong enough and plastic enough (a rare combination), it may go on itself, simply assuming new forms or allowing new varieties of life within its own limits;[5] but if its strength is of the rigid type, then its flowering time is also a beginning of decay, and the great individuals who spring from it can only perpetuate themselves in a new society. The men of the Periclean epoch were an end, the sound alas! alike with the unsound—even Plato formed no new society, though what he might have done, if circumstances had been more favorable in Sicily, "gives us to think." It was much so with men like Cæsar and Cicero in Rome—though a few with more than ordinary proportions succeeded them in the Empire. In fact, with developments like these in mind, Nietzsche is sometimes tempted to the melancholy reflection that great individuals may be no advantage to a society, but rather a detriment—that its growth in power is best guaranteed by a preponderance of the average or lower type, they being the most fertile and having most of the elements of permanence in them.[6] He only resolves his difficulty by
- ↑ Mixed Opinions etc., § 366; Joyful Science, § 290; Beyond Good and Evil, § 260; Will to Power, § 704.
- ↑ Cf., as to the possible strictness of a sick man with himself. Dawn of Day, § 322.
- ↑ Only to the ennobled man may freedom of spirit be given" (The Wanderer etc., § 350; cf. Zarathustra, I, viii).
- ↑ Will to Power, § 684; Werke, XIII, 114, § 227.
- ↑ Cf. the point of view of Human, etc., § 224.
- ↑ Will to Power, § 685.
