our dealing with men in general. We put them all together, leave out of account their differences, and then we call them a species! The individuals, however, are more real than the species—the latter is an abstraction, a more or less artificial thing. But if individuals do really differ, why is it that they do not act accordingly, and instead fall to imitating one another? The reason is partly, as already explained, the social strait-jacket, the pressure of social necessity, but partly also, as Nietzsche thinks, lack of force in individuals themselves. They are afraid, lazy, deficient in energy. "When the great thinker despises men," he says, "he despises their laziness (Faulheit), on which account they have the look of factory products. The man who does not wish to be merely one of the mass, only needs to cease to be easy with himself."[1] It is the few possessing the surplus vitality and courage that makes them leaders and rulers, who become anywise persons in primitive times. How it happens that while "many are called, few are chosen," I need not now seek to explain—it is a wide and general problem, and nowise peculiar to Nietzsche's set of ideas. a The many, however, are not for nought, since even if not persons, they carry on the stream of life from which now and then persons emerge.
Further, societies may be likened to storehouses of energy in which power is gathered and heaped up to a degree that would not be possible if men lived singly—this is the ultimate justification for the restraints put on individuals in them, for rigidly subjecting them to custom and law. But there comes a time in a given society when this accumulation, long quietly going on, reaches its maximum, and the society acquires at last a certain maturity and ripeness. The necessities under which it lived in precarious earlier epochs hold now in less degree. Individuals who, even if they had willed to be self-acting persons, could not have been allowed to be, may now be given liberty with less danger; indeed, the power that has been accumulating in the social storehouse presses for a vent and almost of necessity pours out through special channels of this descrip-.
- ↑ "Schopenhauer as Educator," sect. 1. During his middle period, marked by a reaction against the cult of "genius," Nietzsche even inclined to the view that great men became so by their own efforts (see Human, etc., § 163).
