An ideal like this verges on anarchy, and Nietzsche is not a friend of anarchy. He thinks that some people are more important than others, that, as Professor Karl Pearson has recently put it, "one able leader, one inspirer or controller of men is worth to the race thousands of every-day workers,"[1] or, in Heraclitus's language, that, "one man is equal to ten thousand, if he be the best." In other words, there are gradations of rank among men, and it is a caste society that makes his idea—"my philosophy is directed to an order of rank (Rangordnung), not to an individualistic morality."[2] But "Personalism," though like any general term it lacks complete definiteness, comes nearer to describing his thought than any other single word I know of. For to Nietzsche persons are the summit of human evolution, and the creation or furthering of them is the highest end which men can now propose to themselves—persons being those who direct themselves and make their own law, the strong, complete, final specimens of our kind who naturally rule the rest of us, or, if they do not rule, make a semi-divine race above us. I shall try to show in some detail what Nietzsche means by persons in the following chapter.
- ↑ In an address on Sir Francis Galton.
- ↑ Will to power, §§ 854, 287. Cf. the general attack on individualism, ibid., §§ 782-4, 859, and Simmel's thoroughgoing treatment of the subject, op. cit., pp. 206-11.
ruling thought would I hear and not that thou hast escaped a yoke. Art thou one who dare escape a yoke? Many a man has cast aside his last worth, when he cast aside his servatude" (Zarathustra, I, xvii).
