immense socialistic crises—being elements capable of the greatest hardness towards themselves and of guaranteeing the longest will."[1] He is sometimes supposed to preach a "return to nature" after the manner of Rousseau (except that the return is to be to a violent instead of a gentle savage),[2] but he tells us himself that it is no "going back," but a "coming-up" that he has in mind—"up to a high, free, even fear-inspiring nature and naturalness, one that plays with great tasks, dares to play." Napoleon was this sort of a "return to nature," another instance being Goethe.[3]
IV
Nietzsche's conjectures as to who, what stocks, will lead in the future organizing work are various. His horizon is practically limited to Europe, which, with all its untoward tendencies, he conceives of as the advance-guard of humanity.[4] America (so far as it may be distinguished from Europe) he does not so much exclude, as fail to take into account. He is actually little acquainted with it—though enough to allow him to say, "no American future"! Indeed, he suspects that Americans use themselves up too quickly, and are perhaps only apparently a future world-power.[5]
As to the Germans, he has mixed feelings. The old stock was deeply injured in the Thirty Years' War, the nobility most of all.[6] A certain deficiency in the higher intellectual qualities shows itself generally—"a people that subjected itself to the
- ↑ Cf. Will to Power, § 868. Nietzsche uses language boldly here as always; barbarism as usually understood is far from having his sympathy—see, for instance, Werke, XI, 373, § 569.
- ↑ So Dolson (op. cit., p. 98). Nietzsche's estimate of Rousseau's primitive man is unfavorable, whether as to his ever having existed (Will to Power, § 1017), or as to the worth of the type ("Schopenhauer as Educator," sect. 4).
- ↑ Twilight etc., §§ 48, 49. Nietzsche raises the question whether there ever was a "natural" mankind, whether anti-natural virtues have not been the rule from the beginning—man coming up to nature after long struggle, not going back to it (Will to Power, § 120). He had early said in answer to the question how man really finds himself, "Thy true being lies not hidden deep within thee, but immeasurably high above thee, or at least above that which thou commonly takest as thyself" ("Schopenhauer as Educator," sect. 1).
- ↑ Cf., however, what is said of the Asiatics, Werke, XIII, 330, §§ 811-2; 326, § 797.
- ↑ Ibid., XIII, 353, § 872; 355, § 876.
- ↑ Ibid., XIII, 346-7, § 857.
