212

a silly, renouncing, humble, selfless humanity, was suited to an opposite age⁠—such as the sixteenth century, which suffered from its accumulated energy of will, and from the wildest torrents and floods of selfishness. In the time of Socrates, among men only of worn-out instincts, old conservative Athenians who let themselves go⁠—“for the sake of happiness,” as they said, for the sake of pleasure, as their conduct indicated⁠—and who had continually on their lips the old pompous words to which they had long forfeited the right by the life they led, irony was perhaps necessary for greatness of soul, the wicked Socratic assurance of the old physician and plebeian, who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as into the flesh and heart of the “noble,” with a look that said plainly enough “Do not dissemble before me! here⁠—we are equal!” At present, on the contrary, when throughout Europe the herding-animal alone attains to honours, and dispenses honours, when “equality of right” can too readily be transformed into equality in wrong⁠—I mean to say into general war against everything rare, strange, and privileged, against the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, the creative plenipotence and lordliness⁠—at present it belongs to the conception of “greatness” to be noble, to wish to be apart, to be capable of being different, to stand alone, to have to live by personal initiative, and the philosopher will betray something of his own ideal when he asserts, “He shall be the greatest who can be the most solitary, the most concealed, the most divergent, the man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, and of superabundance of will; precisely this shall be called greatness : as diversified as can be entire, as ample as can be full.” And to ask once more the question: Is greatness possible ⁠—nowadays?