726 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



to understand this remarkable thinker and his opposition to our age. 

 The will for power is the fundamental human instinct, the funda- 

 mental human fact. The goal is the creation of a higher type of 

 men, of a race of heroes, as it were. Life in the real sense of the term 

 is impossible without struggle, it is a struggle for existence. Hence 

 war is preferable to peace, indeed peace is a sign of death. War and 

 struggle of course are hard, they bring out the stern elements in man, 

 they can not be carried on without injury, pain and suffering, without 

 hurting the weak. But since all these things are inevitable, since no 

 strong race can be produced without the desire for power, which im- 

 plies war, struggle, pain, suffering, injury to the weak, they are good 

 and their opposites bad. We must fight, we must inflict injury, we 

 must suffer our pain, because life is impossible without these things. 

 " It is customary nowadays/' he says, " even under the guise of science 

 to prate about coming conditions of society which shall be lacking in 

 the ferocious features. That sounds to my ears as though it were 

 intended to invent a life that dispensed with all organic functions." 

 We are not here for our pleasure, for our happiness, we are not here 

 for any purpose, but being here we must hold our own, we must assert 

 ourselves, or go clown. Therefore pity is bad, it injures him that gives 

 and him that takes. It saps the strength of the race, it weakens both 

 the strong and the weak, and is bad. 



It is true that life is terrible, but that is no reason for pessimism. 

 Indeed, pessimism, renunciation, is impossible except in a diseased 

 and degenerate race, for the desire for life is too strong in a healthy 

 mind to be overcome by pain and battle. Again, life is struggle, it 

 means victory for the strong and defeat for the weak; somebody must 

 win and somebody must lose. It is an experiment, a sifting process 

 in which the sheep are separated from the goats. It is selective, aristo- 

 cratic. It brings out the inequalities in human nature, it shows that 

 men are not equal. Some men are better than others, stronger in body 

 and mind. The better men, the natural-horn aristocrats, should have 

 more privileges because they have more duties than the plebeians, the 

 rabble. The best men should rule. Hence democracy, socialism, com- 

 munism, anarchism are all impossible, they all contradict the ideal, 

 they all make impossible the development of strong individuals. 

 Slavery in some form or other has always existed and will always exist. 

 The modern laborer has simply taken the place of the ancient slave. 

 Nor can women have the same rights as men because they are not equal 

 to men in initiative, in energy, in will. Our greatest danger to-day 

 lies in the mania for equality. " For thus it stands," says our 

 thinker, " the dwarfing and leveling of the European man constitutes 

 our gravest clanger, for this outlook wearies us. We see nothing to-day 

 that promises to become greater, we are vaguely suspicious that things 

 are going down, down, that everything is becoming thinner, more 



