We catch some of the glory of these Greeks in the men of the Renaissance: men perfect in their immorality, terrible in their demands; we should not dare to stand amid the conditions which produced these men and which these men produced; we should not even dare to imagine ourselves in those conditions: our nerves would not endure that reality,--not to speak of our muscles. One man of their type, continuator and development of their type, brother (as Taine most rightly says) of Dante and Michelangelo,--one such man we have known with less of the protection of distance; and he was too hard to bear. That _Ens Realissimum_, synthesis of monster and superman, surnamed Napoleon! The first man, and the man of greatest initiative and developed views, of modern times; a man of tolerance, not out of weakness, but out of strength, able to risk the full enjoyment of naturalness and be strong enough for this freedom. In such a man we see something in the nature of “disinterestedness” in his work on his marble, whatever be the number of men that are sacrificed in the process. Men were glad to serve him; as most normal men are glad to serve the great man; the crowd was tired of “equal rights,” tired of being masterless; it longed to worship genius again. What was the excuse for that terrible farce, the French Revolution? It made men ready for Napoleon.[261] When shall we produce another superman? Let us go back to our question: Can we detect about us any signs of strength? Yes. We are learning to get along without God. We are recovering from the noble sentiments of Rousseau. We are giving the body its due; physiology is overcoming theology. We are less hungry for lies,--we are facing squarely some of the ugliness of life,--prostitution, for example. We speak less of “duty” and “principles”; we are not so enamored of bourgeois conventions. We are less ashamed of our instincts; we no longer believe in a right which proceeds from a power that is unable to uphold it. There is an advance towards “naturalness”: in all political questions, even in the relations between parties, even in merchants’, workmen’s circles only questions of power come into play; what one can do is the first question, what one ought to do is a secondary consideration. There is a certain degree of liberal-mindedness regarding morality; where this is most distinctly wanting we regard its absence as a sign of a morbid condition (Carlyle, Ibsen, Schopenhauer); if there is anything which can reconcile us to our age it is precisely the amount of immorality which it allows itself without falling in its own estimation.[262]