Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/253

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EVIL AND CRUELTY
237

thinks differently. He finds a vital meaning in pain, something without which life, particularly progressive life, could hardly be. He notes the curious fact, which may be taken for what it is worth, that primitive man looked on suffering differently from ourselves, even finding a pleasure at times in witnessing it, and a still greater pleasure in causing it.[1] He notes too that on the sufferer himself pain may act in two ways—or rather in three: if he is not strong enough, it may undo him, but if he is sufficiently strong, it may either serve as a warning to take in sail, or act as a positive stimulus and challenge, leading him to put forth his highest power. Some, he remarks, are never prouder or more warlike than before great pain.[2] A well-made individual finds illnesses to be the greatest stimulants of his life.[3] Nietzsche makes a striking portrayal of the way in which sickness may strike inward and lead one to face the last realities of existence, in § 144 of Dawn of Day. "I know not," he says elsewhere, "whether such suffering make better, but I know that it makes deeper."[4] He raises the question whether even for the development of our virtue sickness and suffering can be dispensed with, and whether especially our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge does not require the sick soul as well as the healthy one—whether the will for health alone is not a prejudice and a cowardice.[5] One may even come out of these hells with a new love and a new sense of love—and understand Dante's meaning, when he wrote over the gates of his Inferno, "Also me did eternal love create."[6] The bitter experiences may not be good for all, may submerge some, but for the strong they bring on the "great health."[7] In this connection Nietzsche has a good word for Christianity, saying that in contrast with all utilitarianism, aiming ultimately at wellbeing, comfort, pleasure, it teaches that life is a testing and education of the soul, and that there is danger in all well-

  1. Genealogy etc., II, § 6; cf. § 7; also Werke, XI, 197-8, § 106; Dawn of Day, § 18.
  2. Joyful Science, § 318; cf. Will to Power, § 778.
  3. Will to Power, § 1003.
  4. Preface, § 3, to Joyful Science.
  5. Joyful Science, § 1120; cf. Genealogy etc., III, § 9.
  6. Will to Power, § 1030.
  7. 'Ibid., § 1013.