great and almost superhuman to come, and of a new German (or European) culture which should look that way, have more or less abated, but he honors the philosopher as before and counts as the highest pleasures those of conceiving works of art and doing noble deeds—so that in effect the old trinity still lingers in his mind.[1] With all his determinism, and perhaps quite consistently with it, he has a sense of human power. Not only can man know, he can do. Active natures, he says, not so much follow the saying, "Know thyself," as feel an inner command, "Will a self—and so become one."[2] We can deal with our impulses more or less as a gardener does with his plants, encouraging now this one and now that: "Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener, but the soil for his plants!"[3] We can strip from our passions their fearful character—it is by neglect that they become monsters; he who conquers them is like a colonist who has become master of forests and swamps and can now turn them to account.[4] "Every day is ill-used and a danger for the next in which we have not at least once denied ourselves in some way: this gymnastics is indispensable, if we wish to keep the joy of being our own master."[5] Nietzsche is sometimes compared to Callicles in Plato's "Gorgias"; he is at least not like him so far as Callicles says, "The temperate man is a fool; only in hungering and eating, in thirsting and drinking, in having all his desires about him and gratifying every possible desire does man live happily."
Nietzsche holds, indeed, that all men seek personal gratification, but he does not mean by this "self-indulgence," nor does he imply that men care for comfort, or luxury, or gain, or honor, or even continued existence more than anything else. The happinesses of different stages of human development [or of different kinds of men] are incomparable and peculiar.[6] The Greeks preferred power which drew upon itself much evil to weakness that experienced only good: the sense of power was itself pleasurable to them—better than any utility or good
