152 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



other men and lives gladly and freely and fully, obeying his instincts 

 and ignoring the common priest-taught, slave-born distinction between 

 good and evil. Power, intellectual and physical, the power to do a 

 thing, to conquer others, to use men of less power for his own ends, is 

 the mark of an excellence that should suffer no check from the plebeian 

 teachings of a Jewish and slave morality. 



To the influence of the Greek spirit as Nietzsche felt it there was 

 added the influence of Schopenhauer to whom he was indebted for his 

 conception of the highest instinct of man as being " The Will to Power." 

 For him this will to power is so fundamental a part of the natures of all 

 men of the higher sort that he finds in it the motive for the imposing of 

 punishment upon those who injure the state or their fellow men. He 

 says: 



By the administration of punishment against the debtor the creditor will 

 become a sharer in a privilege of the master. At last he also will for once be 

 inspired by the elevated feeling of being allowed to despise and maltreat some- 

 body as being " lower than himself," or, at any rate, in case the proper power 

 of punishment, the executive power, has already passed to the authorities, the 

 feeling of seeing him despised and maltreated. 



This is but one phase of what he calls " the true nature and function 

 of life, which is will to power." We hear a great deal lately of the 

 superman, and we are likely to associate the conception with the name 

 of George Bernard Shaw, but he has borrowed it from Nietzsche. If 

 the select few are left free to exercise this " true nature and function 

 of life," as they will, they may develop into an order of beings of higher 

 tastes and greater powers than are exhibited by man in the present. 

 This process, however, can not go on to the evolution of the superman 

 as long as society is under the dominance of a slave morality of which 

 the first consequence is a transformation of values by which the humble 

 and the lowly and the weak are made the equals of the strong and the 

 victorious and the successful. 



Of this individualism in Nietzsche it is to be observed first that it 

 is based primarily on a personal predilection. The circumstance that 

 Nietzsche finds some human qualities admirable and others contemptible 

 is not a sufficient ground for the establishment of a system of ethics or 

 philosophy. A preference for the Eoman over the Jew is, after all, but 

 a preference, and Nietzsche does not sufficiently show that it is founded 

 in some clear superiority of one over the other as determined by some 

 recognized standard of worth. In the same way he is personal and 

 dogmatic in declaring that the will to power is the true nature and 

 function of life. He cared for power, but it is not a necessary corollary 

 from that fact that the gratification of the will in the pursuit of power 

 is the distinguishing mark of the nobler man. Nietzsche's individu- 

 alism here must have another support beyond that of his own sense of 

 values. It happened that just at this time science was presenting a 



