BLESSED ARE THE POWERFUL The reign of love is passing, and the reign of power is coming again. The day of popular democracy is nearly done. Already we are entering the twilight, towards the night that is at hand. Before the darkness comes, it is as well to take our directions. It is time to enquire into the nature of power, so that we do not crassly blunder into a new era: or fall down the gulf of anarchy, in the dark, as we cross the borders. We have a confused idea, that _will_ and power are somehow identical. We think we can have a will-to-power. A will-to-power seems to work out as bullying. And bullying is something despicable and detestable. Tyranny, too, which seems to us the apotheosis of power, is detestable. It comes from our mistaken idea of power. It comes from the ancient mistake, old as Moses, of confusing power with _will_. The _power_ of God, and the _will_ of God, we have imagined identical. We need only think for a moment, and we can see the vastness of difference between the two. The Jews, in Moses’ time, and again particularly in the time of the Kings, came to look upon Jehovah as the apotheosis of arbitrary _will_. This is the root of a very great deal of evil; an old, old root. Will is no more than an attribute of the ego. It is, as it were, the accelerator of the engine: or the instrument which increases the pressure. A man may have a strong will, an iron will, as we say, and yet be a stupid mechanical instrument, useful simply as an instrument, without any _power_ at all. An instrument, even an iron one, has no power. The power has to be put into it. This is true of men with iron wills, just the same. The Jews made the mistake of deifying Will, the ethical Will of God. The Germans again made the mistake of deifying the egoistic Will of Man: the will-to-power. There is a certain inherent stupidity in apotheosised Will, and a consequent inevitable inferiority in the devotees thereof. They all have an inferiority complex. Because power is not in the least like Will. Power comes to us, we know not how, from beyond. Whereas our will is our own. When a man prides himself on something that is just in himself, part of his own ego, he falls into conceit, and conceit carries an inferiority complex as its shadow. If a man, or a race, or a nation is to be anything at all, he must have the generosity to admit that his strength comes to him from beyond. It is not his own, self-generated. It comes as electricity comes, out of nowhere into somewhere. It is no good trying to intellectualise about it. All attempts to argue and intellectualise merely strangle the passages of the heart. We wish to keep our hearts open. Therefore we brush aside argument and intellectual haggling. The intellect is one of the most curious instruments of the psyche. But, like the will, it is only an instrument. And it works only under pressure of the will.