Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/170

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154
NIETZSCHE THE THINKER

phere of great faith in this last period. We know our powers, he says, not our power—we should regard ourselves as a variable quantity whose capacity of performance might be of the highest under favorable circumstances.[1] "Raphael without hands," i.e., genius without the happy conditions that lend it power to execute,—may it not be the rule rather than the exception? The world—particularly the human world[2]—is a bottomless rich sea. Things which have been long weak and embryonic may at last come to light; unconscious possibilities in fathers may stand revealed in their children or children's children—we all have hidden gardens and plantations within us, or, to use another metaphor, are volcanoes which may some day have an hour of eruption;[3] even in the souls of Germans, "these poor bears," lurk "hidden nymphs and wood-gods" and "still higher divinities."[4] Nietzsche is as far as ever from deriving our higher powers or qualities (after the manner of Kant or Schopenhauer) from a metaphysical source; but they are real all the same—he once speaks of the hero who is hidden in every man, and he can imagine transgressors giving themselves up to justice.[5] Though our unrealized possibilities are a chaos rather than a cosmos, a kind of milky way or labyrinth,[6] his faith is plainly that order, suns and stars, may come out of them. If man is sicklier and more uncertain than any other animal, it is just because he makes so many changes—because of the undefined range of his possibilities. He the great experimenter with himself, the unsatisfied, who enters the lists for the last supremacy with animals, nature, and Gods; he the still unconquered, the eternally expectant, whose own inner force urges him on and gives him no rest—how could he not be liable to maladies such as nothing else in nature knows?[7] We know what is or was, not what may be or might have been. Nietzsche touches on Plato's reforming thoughts and attempts to carry them into effect in Sicily—he thinks it conceivable that he should have succeeded, even as the legislation of Mohammed went into effect among his Arabs, and the still stranger thoughts of Christianity prevailed in another quarter: a few

  1. Dawn of Day, § 326.
  2. Zarathustra, IV, i.
  3. Joyful Science, § 9.
  4. Ibid., § 105.
  5. Ibid., § 78; Dawn of Day, § 322.
  6. Joyful Science, § 322,
  7. Genealogy etc.. III, § 13.