venuto
Cellini; nor is it power in the vulgar sense of dominion which seems to
be the confused ideal of some ultra-contemporaries; virtue is power in
the sense of the Greek ideal that virtue is human excellence. It was
therefore very natural for Nietzsche who consciously went back to the
Greeks to hail Spinoza as his only philosophical forerunner, the only
philosopher who dwelt with him on the highest mountain-tops, perilous
only for those who are born for the base valleys of life. And it was
equally natural for Nietzsche to fail to see the important differences
between his own violent and turbid thinking and the sure and disciplined
thinking of Spinoza--on those very points upon which Nietzsche thought
they agreed.

Perfection and imperfection are, in Spinoza's thought, identical with
the real and the unreal. The perfect is the completed, the perfected;
the imperfect, the uncompleted, the unperfected. These terms have, in
their first intention, no specifically ethical significance. Nature is
perfect, that is, absolutely real or completed; but in no intelligible
sense is Nature ethically good. However, it is possible to convert
non-ethical into ethical terms. We can do this by designating, for
example, a certain type of character as the "perfect" type. If we reach
that type we are perfect or supremely "good"; insofar as we fall short
of it, we are imperfect, or "bad."

Just what constitutes human excellence is determined in each case by the
specific nature and relations of the individual involved. The excellence
of a child is not that of a man; and the excellence of a free man
differs from that of a slave. For the parent, the perfect child is
docile, beautiful and full of promise; for the ruler, the perfect man
is industrious, respectful of law and order, eager to pay taxes and go
to war; for the free man, the perfect man is a rational being, living a
harmonious life in knowledge and love of himself, his neighbor and God.
Moreover, within any one class the excellences vary in harmony with the
variations in the individuals. There is no excellence in general.

But because ethical standards are quite human and vary, they do not
lack, therefore, all validity. They are within their range of
applicability, absolute, even though they are, in a more comprehensive
universe, relative. A just appreciation of the relative nature, but
absolute value of specific ethical judgments, is above all things
vitally necessary in ethics. S