included—we should strengthen and raise the general feeling of human power, though we might not attain more. But even this would be a positive increase of happiness. Then, if this even—but no more! One glance suffices, you have understood.
147
Cause of “altruism.”—Broadly speaking, human language has so emphasised and idolised love, for the sole reason that mankind has enjoyed so little of it and never been allowed its fill of this food: which thus became our “ambrosia”’ Let a poet for once show, in the picture of a Utopia, the existence of universal philanthropy: he surely will have to describe a grievous and ridiculous state, the like of which the earth has never seen—everybody worshipped, bored and sighed for, not only by one lover, but by thousands of lovers, nay, by everybody, owing to an indomitable craving, which will then be as fiercely insulted and cursed as selfishness has been by ancient humanity; and the poets of that state, if we grant them leisure for their compositions, will be dreaming of nothing but the blissful, loveless past, the divine selfishness, the solitude, once upon a time still possible on earth, seclusion, unpopularity, odiousness, contempt, and by whatever name we may denote the utter baseness of the animal world wherein we live.
