Part 8

"I tell you, your love of your neighbor is your bad love of yourselves.

"Ye flee from yourselves unto your neighbor and would fain make a virtue thereof; but I see through your unselfishness.'

"The thou is older than the I; the thou hath been proclaimed holy, but the I not yet; man thus thrusteth himself upon his neighbor.

"Do I counsel you to love your neighbor? I rather counsel you to flee from your neighbor and to love the most remote.

"Love unto the most remote future man is higher than love unto your neighbor. And I consider love unto things and ghosts to be higher than love unto men.

"This ghost which marcheth before thee, my brother, is more beautiful than thou art. Why dost thou not give him thy flesh and thy bones? Thou art afraid and fleest unto thy neighbor.

"Unable to endure yourselves and not loving yourselves enough, you seek to wheedle your neighbor into loving you and thus to gild you with his error.

"My brethren, I counsel you not to love your neighbor; I counsel you to love those who are the most remote."

In perfect agreement with the ideal of the overman is Nietzsche's view of marriage, and verily it contains a very true and noble thought:

"Thou shalt build beyond thyself. But first thou must be built thyself square in body and soul.

"Thou shalt not only propagate thyself but propagate thyself upwards! Therefore the garden of marriage may help thee!

"Thou shalt create a higher body, a prime motor, a wheel of self-rolling,--thou shalt create a creator.

"Marriage: thus I call the will of two to create that one which is more than they who created it I call marriage reverence unto each other as unto those who will such a will.

"Let this be the significance and the truth of thy marriage. But that which the much-too-many call marriage, those superfluous--alas, what call I that?

"Alas! that soul's poverty of two! Alas! that soul's dirt of two! Alas! that miserable ease of two!

"Marriage they call that; and they say marriage is made in heaven.

"Well, I like it not that heaven of the superfluous!"

Nietzsche takes a Schopenhauerian view of womankind, excepting from the common condemnation his sister alone, to whom he once said, "You are not a woman, you are a friend." He says of woman:

"Too long a slave and a tyrant have been hidden in woman. Therefore woman is not yet capable of friendship; she knoweth love only."

Nietzsche is not aware that the self changes and that it grows by the acquisition of truth. He treats the self as remaining the same, and truth as that which our will has made conceivable. Truth to him is a mere creature of the self. Here is Zarathustra's condemnation of man's search for truth:

"'Will unto truth' ye call, ye wisest men, what inspireth you and maketh you ardent?

"'Will unto the conceivableness of all that is,'--thus I call your will!

"All that is ye are going to make conceivable. For with good mistrust ye doubt whether it is conceivable.

"But it hath to submit itself and bend before yourselves! Thus your will willeth. Smooth it shall become and subject unto spirit as its mirror and reflected image.

"That is your entire will, ye wisest men, as a will unto power; even when ye speak of good and evil and of valuations.

"Ye will create the world before which to kneel down. Thus it is your last hope and drunkenness."

Recognition of truth is regarded as submission:

"To be true,--few are able to be so! And he who is able doth not want to be so. But least of all the good are able.