offer more or less vague and scattering illustrations of the general idea that appears to be in his mind. First, he recognizes power on the physical or rather animal level.[1] He does this so frankly that he has given great offense. Who has not heard of the "blond beast roving greedily after prey and victory," whom he is supposed to celebrate? Indeed, "blond beast," "superman," and other striking phrases have become catchwords, most of those who use them having scarcely an idea of what Nietzsche meant by them. As a matter of fact, the phrase "blond beast" occurs just twice, so far as I remember, in Nietzsche's sixteen-volumed works—the important passage being § 11 of the First Essay of Genealogy of Morals, the other, which puts the phrase in quotation marks, being § 2 of a chapter of the later Twilight of the Idols, entitled "The 'Improvers' of Mankind."[2] The connection in which the phrase stands in the principal passage is something like this:—Nietzsche is continuing his earlier discussions of the natural history of morals (in essentially the same spirit, I may say, as our English and American anthropologists and sociologists, though perhaps in a finer, more intimate, or at least more venturesome way), and now is giving his view of the contrasted types of morality which conquering and subject classes naturally develope. By way of illustration he draws a more or less imaginative picture of the earliest Aryan races as they from time to time descended on the aboriginal inhabitants of Europe, and, with all manner of violence, reduced them to subjection.[3] Whether Hellenic, Roman, Germanic, Scandinavian, these marauding tribes were of a common fair or blond type (in this Nietzsche simply follows the prevailing anthropological view); to quote his words, "at the basis of all these superior races, the robber-animal is not to be mistaken, the splendid blond beast roving greedily after prey and vic-
- ↑ It should be said that the predominance he recognizes is always that of body and soul; in speaking of the robber-type which lies at the basis of aristocratic societies, he says, "its superiority lay not primarily in physical force, but in force of soul—they were the more complete men" (Beyond Good and Evil, § 257).
- ↑ I do not mean that an equivalent expression does not sometimes occur—e.g., in Genealogy etc., II, § 17 ("a troop of blond robber-animals").
- ↑ With this passage may be compared the description of the memorials of the founding of states to be discerned everywhere—lands laid waste, towns destroyed, men made wild, consuming hatred between peoples, in Werke, IX, 155.
