84 CREATIVE INVOLUTION 



vented then, a horse of death, rattling in the attire of 

 godlike honours ! 



" Ay, this death of many was invented then, death 

 which praiseth itself as life: verily, a welcome service 

 unto all preachers of death ! " 



Thus spake Zarathustra. 



NIETZSCHE. 



" In speaking at such a moment of the community of 

 mankind viewed simply as an ideal of the future, there 

 are two matters which, as I believe, we ought to bear in 

 mind. First: its members will not be merely individual 

 human beings, nor yet mere collections or masses of 

 human beings, however vast, but communities of some 

 sort, communities such as, at any stage of civilisation in 

 which the great community is to be raised to some higher 

 level of organisation, already exist. Ethical individual- 

 ism has been, in the past, one great foe of the great com- 

 munity. Ethical individualism, whether it takes the 

 form of democracy or of the irresponsible search on the 

 part of individuals for private happiness or for any 

 other merely individual good, will never save mankind. 

 Equally useless, however, for the attainment of hu- 

 manity's great end would be any form of mere ethical 

 collectivism, that is, any view which regarded the good 

 of mankind as something which masses or crowds or dis- 

 organised collections of men should win. . . . 



" The detached individual is an essentially lost being. 

 That ethical truth lies at the basis of the Pauline doc- 

 trine of original sin. It lies also at the basis of the 

 pessimism with which the ancient southern Buddhism 

 of the original founder of that faith, Gotama Buddha, 

 viewed the life of man. The essence of the life of the 

 detached individual is, as Gotama Buddha said, an un- 



