of view, morality is itself a species of art. But it is a very particular species, since while it starts with a picture, it proceeds to create in flesh and blood, the philosopher-artist taking the lead, the rest of us being fashioned or fashioning ourselves according to the requirements of the ideal projected. So Goethe's "Prometheus":
"Here sit I, form men
After my image."[1]
Life comes thus to be very strictly under law, and obedience a part of the nature of most of us. "To the good soldier 'Thou shalt' sounds pleasanter than 'I will.'"[2] And for the men of the future whom Nietzsche anticipates, there will be something a hundredfold more important than how they or others feel at the moment, namely an aim for the sake of which they are willing to suffer everything, run every risk, and sacrifice all (themselves and others)—the great passion.[3]
III
And now what is the final aim which Nietzsche proposes? As I have already stated more than once by way of anticipation, it is no other than life, and particularly the highest ranges of life. Man is higher than the animal, and there may be something higher than man, i.e., than man as we ordinarily know him. The instinct for something perfect, or as perfect as the conditions of existence will allow, is, I take it, the bottom instinct, the ruling impulse in Nietzsche. Essentially he was a religious man. Perhaps in the last resort we should not call him a moralist in the ordinary restricted sense of that term. As I read him, deep instincts of reverence preponderate in him, instincts that have their ordinary food and sustenance in the thought of God. But as his scientific conscience forbade him that belief, the instincts were driven to seek other satisfaction and found it (measurably) in the thought of the possibilities of mankind. Very far, indeed, was he, from a Comtean worship
