rise to most of the criticism. Whatever their exploitation of the subject-class, however rigorously they may rule them, they are conceived of as ultimately benefiting them, as being as indispensable to them as a shepherd is to his flock (this as against the anarchistic, or, for that matter, democratic view). w The difficulty is with the class above them, and with them only as to one side of their being. For so far as they are the philosophers and lawgivers of society, they are organically related to it and themselves social functionaries, though of a most sublimated sort. x The difficulty is so far as they are conceived of as independent individuals. For from just this point of view, they do not, in any ordinary sense, serve society at all, though society serves them most materially, since without it they could not live. Here then is a one-sided, not a mutual relation—an apparent violation of the organic idea. Indeed, they exist apart from society (save as physically, economically, bound to it)—that is, they have their own spheres of interest, their own occupations—each one indeed more or less his own, for they represent the extremes of individuality, as contrasted with sociality. In this age we exalt sociality—the tendency is transforming economics and ethics, and more or less reshaping psychology itself; even theology, formerly a doctrine "of the One and Only" is affected, society being considered as not only (as the elder James taught) the redeemed form of man,[1] but the more or less necessary form of all life. Yet here is a thinker for whom the most significant line of cleavage between men is as to how social and how solitary they are—and he gives the solitary type the higher place![2] By no means does he forget the original sociality of man, or underrate the educating influence of social life, or overlook the secular processes by which individuals are at last made possible. Sir John Seeley spoke in a notable passage of isolation as the opposite of humanity, and Nietzsche would not have contested it as history, or in most cases as fact now; his thought is simply that society may now and then yield a result beyond itself, that the very education it gives the individual may work that way, that from being trained to obey he can learn to command, and from command-
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