take in all that he can and cannot afford to give out; while the other type overflows. Wherever there is power and to spare, it must have an object on which to expend itself, either harming or blessing, and "love gives the highest feeling of power."[1] Sometimes this type of goodness is combined with greatness and then arises "angelic majesty." It is something in which the highest pride bends fatherly and benignly to others and has no other idea than to rule and to guard at once—something lacking, Nietzsche remarks, "in our political parvenus."[2] There is even a kind of prodigality resulting from inner opulence. In this way aristocrats sometimes throw away their privileges and interest themselves for the people, the weak, the poor.[3] Hence too a noble hospitality. "There is a superior and dangerous kind of carelessness, … that of the self-assured and over-rich soul, which has never concerned itself about friends and only knows hospitality and how to practise it—heart and house open for every one who will come in, whether beggar or cripple or king. It is the genuine courtesy (Leutseligkeit): one who has it possesses a hundred 'friends,' but probably no friend."[4] In a similar way grace, or merciful indulgence, is the virtue, the privilege, of the strong—and can only be exercised by them. As we have already seen, Nietzsche can even imagine a society so strong and so self-assured that it could let wrongdoers go unpunished[5]—something, I need not say, that does not hold for the societies of today.
Nietzsche sees power lying back of self-control. Why is it that some always follow immediate impulses? Because, he says in effect, they lack power to inhibit them.[6] They have the power of their impulses, but no surplus, nothing transcending. It is only the strong man with heaped-up force, who can say "no" to this and that wandering desire—who can rule them, give them their proper place and no more, and thus make a
- ↑ Genealogy etc.. III, § 18; Will to Power, § 176.
- ↑ Werke, XI, 367, § 554.
- ↑ Will to Power, §§ 935, 938; from another point of view conduct of this sort is questionable (Beyond Good and Evil, § 258).
- ↑ Will to Power, § 939.
- ↑ Genealogy etc., II, § 10; The Wanderer etc., § 34.
- ↑ Twilight etc., viii, § 6; Will to Power, § 778; Werke, XII, 9, § 14; cf. August Dorner, Pessimismus, Nietzsche, und Naturalismus, pp. 157, 166.
