those in which he pictures the great soul giving. When Zarathustra is expostulated with for leaving his high solitudes to come down among men, his answer is, "I love men—I bring to them a gift."[1] When the mountain comes down to the valley and the winds from the heights descend to the levels below, what is the right name for such a longing? Zarathustra asks, and "bestowing virtue" is the only answer he can give.[2] It is a love that does not wait to be thanked, but thanks any one who will receive it—a love that suffers if it cannot pour itself out.[3] Perhaps when we reach this love, if only in imagination, it does not matter much what we call it, egoistic, unegoistic, selfish, unselfish—words, categories, being but
""Sound and smoke,
Hiding heaven's glow."
Nietzsche criticises the "golden rule." He considers it first as a dictate of prudence, showing that one's ends are not necessarily reached in the manner prescribed by the rule, and remarking that one's best actions are marked by a disregard of prudence anyway; but secondly and principally in so far as the notion of equality lies behind it. So far as men are equal, it is indeed a reasonable requirement, and the flock instinct, disregarding differences between the members of the flock, is behind it.[4] But so far as men are unlike, it is without application. What a great man does, that others cannot do to him. "What thou doest, no one can do to thee in return." Moreover, "What I do not wish that you should do to me, why may I not be allowed to do it to you? And, indeed, what I must do to you, just that you could not do to me."[5] The thought is that, so far as men are different, their powers and privileges and duties are different.
That, however, Nietzsche was inspired by no lack of consideration and tenderness for others appears in what he says of the treatment of injuries. It is paradoxical in form, and the reader is liable to be shocked by it at first. Zarathustra is
