my children? Speak to me of my garden, my Happy Isles, my new beautiful race. For their sake, I am rich, for their sake I became poor; … what have I not surrendered? What would I not surrender that I might have one thing: those children, that living plantation, those life-trees of my will and my highest hope!"[1] One feels the full longing of a man's soul (of one who is woman too in the great, divine sense of the word) in language like this. Yet it is not mere longing with Nietzsche. He speaks of the "unexhausted possibilities" of man and our human world. He is confident that in the long course of history the fundamental law will break through and the best come at last to victory—supposing that man with supreme determination wills their supremacy. "From you, the self-chosen," says Zarathustra to his disciples, "shall a chosen people grow; and from it the superman."[2] Indeed, the conditions for a change in the general attitude exist now—only the great persuasive men are lacking."[3] And from the class of new moralists, or, as he daringly said, "immoralists," he believed they would arise. "We immoralists," he declares—and it is one of his proudest utterances—"are today the only power that needs no allies in order to come to victory: hereby we are by far the strongest of the strong. We do not even need falsehood: what other power can dispense with it? A strong allurement fights for us—perhaps the strongest that exists, the allurement of the truth." And then disdaining that word as savoring of presumption, he adds, "The charm that fights for us, the Venus-eye that ensnares even our opponents and blinds them, is the magic of extremes, the allurement that goes with all daring to the utmost."[4]
Itself an extreme utterance, we say. But it may be safer to let the future decide that. In this strange world, the unexpected, the undreamed of, sometimes happens.
