sciously or unconsciously, moral codes which correspond to the conditions of their existence and power; they say that individuals shall take their standard rather than their own—they shape them after their mold and seem almost to negate a separate and individual being; and yet it is all part of a process by which independent individuals are made. The result may even be opposed—and yet it comes. How it comes is suggested in a passage which takes the form of inquiries, as follows: (1) How far may sympathetic and communal feelings be a lower, preparatory stage, at a time when personal self-feeling and individual initiative in valuing are not yet possible. (2) How far may the elevation of the collective self-feeling, the group's pride of distance, its sense of unlikeness to other groups, its aversion to accommodation and reconciliation be a school for individual self-feeling—particularly to the extent it forces the individual to represent the pride of the whole—for he must speak and act with an extreme self-respect, if he represents the community in person (just as when the individual feels himself an instrument and mouthpiece of the divinity). (3) How far may these forms of depersonalization (Entselbstung) lend to the person in fact an enormous importance—higher powers using him (cf. the religious awe of himself which the prophet or poet feels). (4) How far may responsibility for the whole beget and authorize a wide outlook, a strict and fearful hand, a presence of mind and coolness, a greatness of bearing and demeanor, which the individual could not allow to himself on his own account. Nietzsche's conclusion is that collective self-feelings may be regarded as the great preparatory school for personal sovereignty, and that the higher (vornehme) class in any group is the one which inherits the effect of the training.[1] The point, I need hardly say, is that standing for the organism, the individual comes to share its attributes—its sense of itself and of distinctness from all outside it, its freedom to do what it will, its determination to follow its own law. He has these feelings first representatively, but later on his own account, the distinction between what he is and what he has been made passing out of view. A strong free man, Nietzsche remarks in another passage, feels in himself as over against everything
- ↑ Will to Power, § 773; cf. Werke, XII, 114-6, § 228.
