Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/518

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502
NOTES

classes which, in order to inspire reverence in arbitrary dictates, have invested their codes with an authority other than a human one " (What Nietzsche Taught, p. 89)—I know no other passage which looks that way. Morality, in the general sense now under consideration, does not spring, in Nietzsche's estimation, from the dominance of any class, but from the necessities of group-life. Indeed, so far as the dominating class shape a morality, it is, as will appear later, one of their own, more or less different from that of the group at large.

d Mos or Sitte is thereby differentiated from habit as it may exist among animals (see Wundt's Ethics, Engl. tr., I, 131; of. also p. 156, where habit, usage, and Sitte are distinguished) .

e Sophocles, for example, describes them in language approaching to accuracy when he says in the "Antigone,"


""They are not of today nor yesterday,
But live for ever, nor can man assign
When first they sprang into being;"

he passes into superstition when he assigns to them a Divine origin. It is to be noted, too, that Sophocles distinguishes them from a prince's "edicts."

f Cf. implications of this sort in Werke, IX, 154; Human, etc., § 99; The Wanderer etc., § 40; Mixed Opinions etc., § 89; also Genealogy of Morals, II, § 8 (where buying and selling are said to be older than the beginnings of social organization), and II, § 16 (where, in developing a theory of "bad conscience," a wild state of man, before individuals came under the ban of society and peace, is spoken of). It may be noted that Aristotle spoke of the "clanless, lawless, heartless man," as described by Homer (Politics, I, ii). Nietzsche appears to have in mind formless, roving populations (Genealogy etc., II, § 17).

g Only so can I reconcile passages cited in the preceding note with the view now to be developed. But for the citations from Genealogy etc., one might conjecture that the idea of a pre-social state belonged to Nietzsche's earlier periods alone; he now even speaks of the social origin and meaning of our impulses and affects—there is no "state of nature" for them (Werke, XIII, 112, § 224). Dewey and Tufts say, "Psychologically the socializing process is one of building up a social self. Imitation and suggestion … are the aids in building up such a self" (op. cit., p. 11), that is, they too postulate a hypothetical self, not yet social, to start with.

h The group-connection of an individual appeared also in the fact that one member of a group might be attacked for the offense of another member, though he himself had no part in it, and that, on the other hand, the guilt of an individual was felt by the group as its own (Dawn of Day, § 9; cf. Dewey and Tufts, op. cit., pp. 28-9).

i Cf. the striking language, in entire agreement with the primitive view, of the late Father Tyrrell ("A much-abused Letter"): "In such a man [a truly social individual] the general mind and outlook supplants the personal and private; the general ends, interests, and affections absorb and transcend the particular; and, as an active member of the social organism, his internal and external energies are reinforced by those of the whole community, which acts with him and through him." H. L. Stewart is misled in saying that Nietzsche attributed "herd-morality" to a late epoch of decadence and failed to recognize the fact of primitive gregariousness (op. cit., pp. 44-6).

j René Berthelot remarks that since a large part of the content of the moral conscience of individuals is constituted by the collective interest of the social group to which they belong, it follows that in order that there may be no contradiction of duties, there should be society, but not societies, or that different social groups should not be in conflict.