NEITHER GOD NOR DEVIL
215
launched the same swindle. But whichever it is, the individual will
to power or the national will to power, it destroys itself by the fact
of having to compete with the will of other individuals, other leaders,
other nations, other 'master-races.' The will to power, absolutely just–
ifiable in so far as it tends to challenge the masochistic 'will to in<–
potence' which disarms all too many of the oppressed and exploited,
cannot however pass from the plane of volition to the plane of lasting
reality e:xcept by being transcended into a collective, universal will to
power, into collective man's will to power over nature and over him–
self. Whether he is a solitary hermit in a cave or a hereditary tyrant,
a pope, demagogic general, hedonist or cynic, it is by virtue of a
strange and enduring illusion that one man alone, even a genius,
even with absolute power, can conceal from himself
his
own irremedi–
able weakness. Only humanity is powerful, only a delusion prevents
it from discovering its own power.
This long parenthesis, which I meant for the nietzscheans, brings
me exactly to what I wanted to say to the rationalists, because I
intend to converse with them on their bankruptcy before the dema–
gogues of the irrational.
It is now nearly two centuries since human reason was charted.
The Encyclopredists made a list of its contents, drew its outlines,
appraised its limits, traced its graph. All that was then known of
the outside world, of its working, of the causal succession of events,
of the determination of phenomena, naturally found its place within
human reason and shaped its structure. Then came people who care–
fully labelled it
all,
arranged it in a museum, padlocked the glass
cases and double-locked the door on human Reason. So-called ra-
. tionalists sequestered the poor girl in
this
increasingly dusty abode
and forbade her the slightest contact with all illuminati, the seductive
visionaries who wander in the streets and in their minds, who haunt
laboratories, painters' studios, popular meetings, and who die in an
attic or at a barricade. Pseudo-rationalists have confiscated Reason.
And yet, through the centuries she had reached the age of reason only
by being aware of all currents of thought. She was no less beholden
to alchemists and astrologers than to navigators and doctors, no les.-;
to Paracelsus than to Descartes. In her veins flowed the blood of
mystics and saints as much as that of scientists and philosophers, of
poet, witches and regicides, of law-makers and village idiots. She was
human Reason only because, blending within herself the behaviour
of the seer and of the logician, that of the prophet and of the de–
terminist, she never consented to check her advance nor to abandon
one of her guides to follow the other.
