and slavery for the mass in some form or other is a condition and basis of higher culture. Culture, as something beyond a state of nature, is ever the ideal; and rule, not laisser faire, is the way to it. It is time to attempt an organization of mankind with the higher end in view. Present national or racial aims must be transcended—a human aim must overtop them; j and a united Europe is the first step. Yet progress, all real social change, must be slow. "Everything illegitimate is against my nature," Nietzsche once said; he even characterized the "revolutionary" as a form of the "unreal." A new philosophy is the first requirement, and war, if it comes, must be for ideas. The general standpoint of Nietzsche might be described as aristocratic—Georg Brandes called it "aristocratic radicalism," and Nietzsche said that it was the most intelligent word about him which he had yet heard,[1] k though I cannot help thinking that Professor Höffding's phrase, "radical aristocraticism,"[2] more nearly hits the mark.
I may add that Nietzsche's mood at the end as at the beginning was one of hope. He criticised Goethe rarely, but he did so once in this way. The aged man had summed up his experience of life by saying, "As children, we are sensualists; as lovers, we are idealists, who attach to the loved object qualities which are not really there; then love wavers, and before we are aware of it, we are skeptics; the remainder of life is indifferent, we let it go as it will, and end as quietists, as the Hindu philosophers did also." Nietzsche quotes the passage and adds, "So speaks Goethe: was he right? If so, how little reason would there be in becoming as old, as reasonable as Goethe! Rather were it well to learn from the Greeks their judgment on old age—for they hated growing old more than death, and wished to die, when they felt that they were commencing to be reasonable in that fashion." He had been referring to his early attempts to win disciples, and his "impatient hopes"; and "now—after an hundred years according to my reckoning of time!—I am still not yet old enough to have lost all hope"—what was gone was his impatience.[3] It was a noble mood—for his hope was ultimately a hope for the world; so far he too obeyed "the voice at eve obeyed at prime."
