asses,
out of the constant out-looking and down-looking of the ruling caste on
subordinates and instruments, and out of their equally constant
practice of obeying and commanding, of keeping down and keeping at a
distance--that other more mysterious pathos could never have arisen, the
longing for an ever new widening of distance within the soul itself,
the formation of ever higher, rarer, further, more extended, more
comprehensive states, in short, just the elevation of the type "man,"
the continued "self-surmounting of man," to use a moral formula in
a supermoral sense. To be sure, one must not resign oneself to
any humanitarian illusions about the history of the origin of an
aristocratic society (that is to say, of the preliminary condition for
the elevation of the type "man"): the truth is hard. Let us acknowledge
unprejudicedly how every higher civilization hitherto has ORIGINATED!
Men with a still natural nature, barbarians in every terrible sense of
the word, men of prey, still in possession of unbroken strength of will
and desire for power, threw themselves upon weaker, more moral, more
peaceful races (perhaps trading or cattle-rearing communities), or upon
old mellow civilizations in which the final vital force was flickering
out in brilliant fireworks of wit and depravity. At the commencement,
the noble caste was always the barbarian caste: their superiority did
not consist first of all in their physical, but in their psychical
power--they were more COMPLETE men (which at every point also implies
the same as "more complete beasts").

258. Corruption--as the indication that anarchy threatens to break out
among the instincts, and that the foundation of the emotions, called
"life," is convulsed--is something radically different according to
the organization in which it manifests itself. When, for instance, an
aristocracy like that of France at the beginning of the Revolution,
flung away its privileges with sublime disgust and sacrificed itself
to an excess of its moral sentiments, it was corruption:--it was really
only the closing act of the corruption which had existed for centuries,
by virtue of which that aristocracy had abdicated step by step its
lordly prerogatives and lowered itself to a FUNCTION of royalty (in
the end even to its decoration and parade-dress). The essential thing,
however, in a good and healthy aristocracy is that it should not regard
itself as a function either of the kingship or the commonw