with an immense surplusage of failure, a field of ruins. g A people is nature's roundabout way of getting six or seven great men.[1] So little equality is there between men that a single individual may on occasion justify the existence of whole millenniums—one full, rich, great, whole man may complement innumerable fractional men.[2] "Not man, but superman is the goal."[3] And when the higher type appear, they have feelings about themselves that would be abnormal in ordinary men—they revere themselves, and this not because of any actions they may perform that prove them great, but because of what they are. h Nietzsche is aware that the attitude of reverence for oneself is a perilous one, but allowing for the possibility of aberration in individual cases, he thinks that it may be truly taken, and that then aberration consists in giving it up. It is by this token that a true aristocracy is known. An aristocracy, he says, when it reaches any perfection, looks upon itself not as a function, but as the meaning and highest justification of royalty or the commonwealth, something then for which the governing and lower classes may well labor and sacrifice, something to which with perfect seemliness they may give extraordinary privileges and power. Nothing is more contrary to our democratic conceptions, and yet in no connection is Nietzsche more unflinching. To him it is degeneration, corruption (something he defines as anarchy in the instincts lying at the foundation of life), when, for example, an aristocracy like that of France at the beginning of the Revolution throws away its privileges and sacrifices itself to extravagances of its moral feeling—though in this particular case, the corruption had been going on for centuries, leading the nobles as it had to give up step by step their lordly prerogatives and to lower themselves to a function of royalty (finally, indeed, to a mere ornament and decoration of it). A sound aristocracy cannot act in this way, and looks at itself as already indicated. Its ground feeling is that society does not exist for its own sake, but as a foundation and scaffolding, on which a higher species of being may arise—like those climbing plants in Java, the Sipo Matador, which clamber about an oak tree, and at last, high
