him, he [the Übermensch] reels back into the beast" (Encyclopedia Britannica, art. "Ethics"). So A. S. Pringle Pattison speaks of this "wild beast theory of ethics," and finds Nietzsche's message to be "Back therefore to instinct, to 'the original text' of man" (Man's Place in the Cosmos, 2d ed., p. 317). C. C. Everett, rarum nomen among American philosophical writers, who indeed expresses his perfect agreement with Nietzsche's doctrine that the desire of power is the fundamental element of life, the only question being what kind of a self is asserted, finds Nietzsche's point of view practically "identical with that of a robber-baron of the Middle Ages" (Essays Theological and Literary, pp. 124-9). G. Lowes Dickinson, in commenting on Nietzsche's view that power is the only thing that man will care to pursue, says that a man who has a right to such opinions would in our society become a great criminal, an active revolutionary, or an anarchist (Justice and Liberty, pp. 14-19)—a dictum the stranger, since the author himself says later, "Moral force in the end is the only force" (p. 217).
o Riehl says, "The already proverbial 'blond beast' is not an ideal of Nietzsche's, but his symbol for man as he was before culture was developed, the man of nature—his symbol for a pre-historic, pre-moral fact, and what appeared so attractive to him was the still unbroken force of nature there, not its bestiality" (op. cit., p. 159)—a statement which only needs correction in so far as Nietzsche had in mind not primitive man in general, but the primitive Aryans. See also Berthelot's article, "Nietzsche," in the Grande Encyclopédie (a notable contrast to the meager misleading article under the same heading in the Encyclopedia Britannica). Thilly remarks, "He [Nietzsche] does not wish to bring back the 'blond beast' of early times" (Popular Science Monthly, December, 1905, p. 721).
p "Manners," in Society and Solitude. Of a similar temper is the remark (in connection with certain political agitations before our Civil War): "If it be only a question between the most civil and the most forcible, I lean to the last. These Hoosiers and Suckers are really better than the snivelling opposition. Their wrath is at least of a bold and manly sort."
q Meyer, while speaking of it as remarkable that the "blond beast," who is this and nothing more, is wanting among the "higher men," whose hypertrophy of single traits is portrayed in the Fourth Part of Zarathustra, adds that after all it is not remarkable, since he is really no higher man, but only the condition or presupposition (Vorbedingung) of one (op. cit., p. 435). What in part misleads the reader is the apparent gusto with which Nietzsche describes the violence of the "blond beast" in the first of the two passages cited in the text. In a similar way Weinel charges Nietzsche with a thirst for blood, or at least with championing an impulse of that sort, because he portrays with astonishing and, for the moment, sympathetic penetration the psychology of the "pale criminal" (op. cit., p. 183; cf. Zarathustra, I, vi). But Nietzsche almost always becomes a part (for the time) of that which he describes—that is, he tries to take an inside view of it. Actually, however, ordinary deeds of blood were as repulsive to him as to any one, and he counsels no uncertain methods in dealing with them—his views of civil punishment really deserve special treatment.
r The following are some of the trying passages: Zarathustra, III, xii, 4, "A right which thou canst seize upon, thou shalt not allow to be given thee." Of this it can only be said that Zarathustra is here speaking to his disciples, who are to take his ideal from the mountain-top down into the world, and that truth and moral commandments and the right to rule do not necessarily rest upon the general assent. Will to Power, §§ 735, 736, the tenor of which is that the weak and sickly may have
