Species and Atomism

In The Gay Science #1, Nietzsche proposes that "The species is everything, one is always none", evoking the influence of Schopenhauer and his Dionysian origins.  On that basis, he argues, Atomism, and the Moralities that promote it by given the 'Individual' a 'purpose', are actually no more than ruses by the species to motivate its members.  However, he stops short of considering the conditions under which such motivation arises.  Plainly, those conditions are constituted by an indistinction of members, which, according to the logic of his analysis, is also an expression, if not a ruse, of the species.  Thus revealed is that the species is determined by two principles--Diversification and Homogenization, and it is in periods in which the former corrects an excess of the latter that Atomism, and the Moralities that promote it, become prominent.  What ultimately prevents him from arriving at that concept of the species is his accepting inheritance from Schopenhauer of the concept of the Species-Member relation as one of Universal-Individual, rather than of Whole-Part, which admits of varieties of degrees of difference and of sameness between Members.