follow feelings that are instinctive to most of us, in the other we have to transcend them. "Who will attain anything great, if he does not feel within himself the power and the will to inflict great pain? Ability to suffer is the smallest thing: in this weak women and even slaves often come to mastery. But not to perish of inner distress and uncertainty, when we inflict great suffering and hear the cry of this suffering—that is great, that belongs to greatness."[1] As illness, whether of body or soul and particularly of the soul, is instructive, sometimes more so than health, so those who make ill may be as necessary as medicine-men and saviours.[2] Nietzsche says boldly, "To lessen suffering and to escape from suffering (i.e., from life)—is that moral? To create suffering—for oneself and others—in order to enable them to reach the highest life, that of the conqueror—were my aim."[3]g For to his mind, it is not suffering that is evil, but senseless suffering, and he throws out the extraordinary idea that we must take upon ourselves all the suffering that has been borne, whether by men or by animals, and affirm it and have an aim in which it acquires reason. He calls it his principal doctrine, that "in our power lies the reinterpretation of suffering into blessing, of poison into nourishment."[4]
Nietzsche is quite aware of the unsettling effect of considerations like these. Once he says that if we are led to feel that "evil" forces are fundamentally necessary in the total economy of life and hence must be heightened, not lessened, if life is to advance, we suffer as from seasickness.[5] The trouble is, I need not say, that we have not been accustomed to seeing good and evil in perspective, that we look on them and the contrast between them as absolute. Strong feeling always tends to absolutize its judgments—and perhaps there has been no stronger feeling in the world in the past than group-feeling, of which we thus experience the effects. But there is no real contradiction between saying that certain things are prejudicial to, or even incompatible with, the life of a group, and that they may be useful in larger relations. There is no question, and Nietz-
