A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at six or seven great men, and then to get around them. The state is the organization of immorality for the attainment of this purpose. But as existing to-day the state is a very imperfect instrument, subject at any moment to democratic foundering. What concerns the thinker here is the slow and hesitant formation of a united Europe. This was the thought, and the sole real work and impulse, of the only broad-minded and deep-thinking men of this century,--the tentative effort to anticipate the future of “the European.” Only in their weaker moments, or when they grew old, did they fall back again into the national narrowness of the “Fatherlanders”--then they were once more “patriots.” One thinks here of men like Napoleon, Heine, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Schopenhauer. And after all, is there a single idea behind this bovine nationalism? What possible value can there be in encouraging this arrogant self-conceit when everything to-day points to greater and more common interests?--at a moment when the spiritual dependence and denationalization which are obvious to all are paving the way for the _rapprochements_ and fertilizations which make up the real value and sense of present-day culture?[266] What an instrument such a united Europe would be for the development and protection and expression of superior individuals! What a buoyant ascent of life after this long descent into democracy! See now, in review, the two movements which we have studied and on which we have strung our philosophy: on the one hand Christian mythology and morality, the cult of weakness, the fear of life, the deterioration of the species, ever increasing suppression of the privileged and the strong, the lapse into democracy, feminism, socialism, and at last into anarchy,--all terminating in pessimism, despair, total loss of the love of life; on the other hand the reaffirmation of the worth of life, the resolute distinction between slave-morality and master-morality, the recognition of the aristocratic valuation of health, vigor, energy, as moral in all their forms, and of the will to power as the source and significance of all action and all living; the conception of the higher man, of the exceptional individual, as the goal of human endeavor; the redirection of marriage, of education, of social structure, to the fostering and cherishing of these higher types;--culminating in the supernational organization of Europe as the instrumentality and artistic expression of the superior man.[267] Is this philosophy too hard to bear? Very well. But those races that cannot bear it are doomed; and those which regard it as the greatest blessing are destined to be masters of the world.[268] IV Criticism