Zarathustra, the prophet of the coming order, has repose, can wait. Life and action having got a purpose and meaning, there is no need of leaping, and each step onward may be perfect and give happy feeling. All violent longing is to be overcome—the calm of the great stream is to come in its place.[1] Speaking more prosaically, we are to guard against exchanging the customary morality for a new valuation suddenly and violently—we must continue to live in the old for a long time and take the new in small doses repeatedly, till we find, very late, probably, that the new valuation has got predominant force and that the little doses have made a new nature in us.[2] Indeed, in order to be taught, the new morality must introduce itself in connection with the existing moral law and under its names and guises—that is, it must be more or less opportunist and compromising.[3] Nietzsche does not think much of "agitators," all too apt to be empty heads, who flatten and inflate any good idea they get hold of and give it out with a hollow sound.[4] It is a change in the depths of thought that is needed, not a noisy enthusiasm. And this is why he might have had reserves as to some who call themselves Nietzscheans today—for, he observes, with a touch of humor, the first disciples of a doctrine prove nothing against it! b
I have said that his thought as to how to reach the superman is vague. It may be something, however, to turn the mind in this direction, and to have a clear conviction that the result is more or less in our hands. If mankind were really persuaded that its chief function is not to make itself happy and secure on the earth, but to produce godlike individuals, it would surely make a difference. At present, the old Christian thought of heaven and hell being no longer regnant, there is, Nietzsche thinks, no common aim, and things are going by luck, hit or miss. If there is any faith, it is a vague and more or less lazy confidence that things will come out right anyway, "Providence" or "evolution" or "progress" or "the course of things" being the determining matter—as if, says Nietzsche, it did not depend on us how things come out, as if we could let them go their
