moment, are, with a few exceptions, canaille; they are so complacent (gutmüthig), that if the most profound spirit of all the ages should appear among them, some savior of the Capitol would imagine that he was to be equally taken into account.[1] The modern industrial situation has its troublous, threatening side in his eyes, partly because our new magnates are not gentlemen, but show by their vulgar ways, their cunning and unscrupulousness, their "red, fat hands" that they are an upstart class.[2] l As a rule, the gentleman is born and bred, the result indeed of generations of training: it is an ideal intimately connected with an aristocracy,[3] and manners tend to deteriorate in general, when the influence of an aristocracy declines.[4]
Such is an incomplete portraiture of great men or "persons," as Nietzsche conceives them. I may add an interesting observation which he makes upon polytheism. This ancient belief rendered, he thinks, a great service in idealizing different types of individuals, and allowing them their rights against one another. While it was counted an aberration for a human being to assert a particular idea of his own and derive from it his law, his joy, and his right, those doing so excusing themselves and saying, "Not I! not I! but a God through me," in the world of higher beings it was admitted to be different. There a number of norms of conduct might exist; one God was not the denial or abuse of another; there for the first time individuals were freely allowed, individual rights revered. The invention of Gods, heroes, and supermen of all kinds, as of dwarfs, fairies, centaurs, satyrs, demons, and devils, he regards as an inestimable preparation for the justification of the human individual in asserting his rights; the freedom given to one God against others became at last the individual's freedom against statutes, customs, and neighbors. Monotheism, on the other hand—really a consequence of the doctrine of a single normal type of man, an assertion of a normal God, beside whom are only false Gods—may be viewed as so far a danger to humanity; it involves a
