Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/427

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THE SUPERMAN
411

nothing; and it is the necessities of the situation, the logic of the production of great men, that lead him to say what he does. "Persons" do not come easily in this world. Good intentions alone are not sufficient—the force of circumstances is generally a co-operating cause. Moreover, rude situations may be necessary, where finer ones cannot be appreciated. Speaking of physical wars and revolutions, he calls them "coarse remedies"[1] [for the overmuch security in which we love to live]. The general truth is simply that a "person," being by nature something more or less isolated, needs temporary isolating and compulsion to an armed manner of existence: if this is not his fortune, he does not develope. What the nature of the compulsion is, or rather must be, depends on the grain of the man. Nietzsche required no wars or physical combats to make him a "person," and one of the most individual ones of modern time; but power on a lower level may require opposition of a coarser sort. Hence, though it is quite possible that the coming aristocracy he looked for will be a fighting aristocracy (in the literal sense) almost from the start, it will not be merely that; the fighting, too, may be forced rather than chosen. Moreover, the fighting may be delayed; at least Nietzsche saw no immediate occasion for it. At present, he says, though the new association will assert itself in warrior fashion, it will be a war without powder, a war between ideas and their marshaled hosts.[2] Most of what he says in praise of war (not all) has reference to war of this sort. How little physical war was an ideal to him appears in his asking whether the higher species might not be reached in some better and quicker way than by the fearful play of wars and revolutions—whether the end might not be gained by maintaining, training, separating certain experimental groups?[3] His mind evidently wavered as to the probable future course of things. One can only describe him as in utrumque paratus. Sometimes he has misgivings as to whether we can foresee the most favorable conditions for the emergence of men of the highest worth—it is too complicated, a thousandfold too complicated a matter, and the chances of miscarriage are great,

  1. Will to Power, § 886.
  2. Werke, XII, 368, § 718.
  3. Ibid., XIII, 175-6, § 401.