rather persons, proper. The leader (whether he actually leads or simply gives the guiding thought) is after all a functionary of the flock and does not exist for his own sake. However different his responsibilities and duties are from those of ordinary members of the flock—and they are widely different—he is linked to it, and his supreme duty is to care for it and make himself its servant. In other words, the law for the whole is still the law for him—and to be a law to himself is out of the question. But to be an individual in the great sense, a person, one must take his law from himself and not from the needs of a social complex outside him. Though, as explained in Chapter XXVI, the person is born of society, trained by it, and never physically independent of it, he is in a way superior to it; he has a quantum of being uniquely his own, which urges, and indeed makes it imperative on him, to take the law of his action from the interests of that and not merely from those of society.[1] The attitude may seem egoistic, indeed, the very height of egoism and a self-contradictory egoism at that—for individuals are commonly supposed to have their very being in their social relations; and yet there is a different way of looking at the matter. These autonomous individuals, more or less dissevered from society, may be conceived of as a new human level—the species rising to a new altitude in them. Society may not be the final form of humanity, but rather a preparatory stage, a kind of school. It was in some such way that Nietzsche felt. The self or ego of great individuals is to him no mere personal interest (in the common sense of that term), but a human interest—in such a quantum, humanity itself rises higher, i.e., out of its social, gregarious stage into one of sovereign persons, each of whom has a dominium as significant and sacred as that of any society.[2]
The general character and manner of life of sovereign individuals has already been indicated (Chapters XXVI, XXVII); in the present connection I am only concerned to mark off the supreme examples of the type from the ruling class proper,
