Nietzsche's conception of the Will to Power may seem to have
brought us back by a long circuit to Hobbes's definition of
human nature as "a perpetual and restless desire of power after
power that ceaseth only in death;" but in reality there is a
whole world between the two. In the levelling principles against
which Hobbes directed his theory of government there was little
or nothing of that notion of sympathy which is rooted in Locke's
naturalism and has its flower in German romanticism; nor, on the
other hand, is there in the Hobbian picture of the natural state
of mankind as a warfare of self-interests any touch of that
morbid of the ego which developed as an inevitable concomitant
of romantic sympathy. At the heart of Nietzsche's philosophy
there is, in fact, a colossal self-deception which has no
counterpart in Hobbism, and to which we shall find no key unless
we bear in mind the long and regular growth of ideas from Locke
to the present day. Nietzsche looked upon himself as, if not the
actual Superman, a