And now for the rights obtained under the second head--by bestowal and
concession. "In this case," says Nietzsche, "one man or race has enough
power, and more than enough, to be able to bestow some of it on another
man or race."[7] The king appoints one subject viceroy of a province,
and so gives him almost regal power, and makes another cup-bearer and
so gives him a perpetual right to bear the royal cup. When the power
of the grantee, through his inefficiency, decreases, the grantor
either restores it to him or takes it away from him altogether. When
the power of the grantee, on the contrary, increases, the grantor, in
alarm, commonly seeks to undermine it and encroach upon it. When the
power of the grantee remains at a level for a considerable time, his
rights become "vested" and he begins to believe that they are inherent
in him--that they constitute a gift from the gods and are beyond the
will and disposal of his fellow men. As Nietzsche points out, this last
happens comparatively seldom. More often, the grantor himself begins
to lose power and so comes into conflict with the grantee, and not
infrequently they exchange places. "National rights," says Nietzsche,
"demonstrate this fact by their constant lapse and regenesis."[8]
Nietzsche believed that a realization of all this would greatly benefit
the human race, by ridding it of some of its most costly delusions. He
held that so long as it sought to make the struggle for existence a
parlor game, with rules laid down by some blundering god--that so long
as it regarded its ideas of morality, its aspirations and its hopes
as notions implanted by the creator in the mind of Father Adam--that
so long as it insisted upon calling things by fanciful names and upon
frowning down all effort to reach the ultimate verities--that just
so long its progress would be fitful and slow. It was morality that
burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the
free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous
imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed
theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting
them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism.