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THE PHILOSOPHY OF

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE



BY H. L. MENCKEN


    I shall be told, I suppose, that my philosophy is
    comfortless--because I speak the truth; and people prefer to
    believe that everything the Lord made is good. If you are
    one such, go to the priests, and leave philosophers in peace!

                                    _Arthur Schopenhauer._

_Third Edition_

BOSTON

LUCE AND COMPANY

1913




PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION


When this attempt to summarize and interpret the principal ideas of
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was first published, in the early part of
1908, several of his most important books were yet to be translated
into English and the existing commentaries were either fragmentary
and confusing or frankly addressed to the specialist in philosophy.
It was in an effort to make Nietzsche comprehensible to the general
reader, at sea in German and unfamiliar with the technicalities of
the seminaries, that the work was undertaken. It soon appeared that
a considerable public had awaited that effort, for the first edition
was quickly exhausted and there was an immediate demand for a special
edition in England. The larger American edition which followed has
since gone the way of its predecessor, and so the opportunity offers
for a general revision, eliminating certain errors in the first draft
and introducing facts and opinions brought forward by the publication
of Dr. Oscar Levy's admirable complete edition of Nietzsche in English
and by the appearance of several new and informative biographical
studies, and a large number of discussions and criticisms. The whole of
the section upon Nietzsche's intellectual origins has been rewritten,
as has been the section on his critics, and new matter has been added
to the biographical chapters. In addition, the middle portion of the
book has been carefully revised, and a final chapter upon the study of
Nietzsche, far more extensive than the original bibliographical note,
has been appended. The effect of these changes, it is believed, has
been to increase the usefulness of the book, not only to the reader
who will go no further, but also to the reader who plans to proceed to
Nietzsche's own writings and to the arguments of his principal critics
and defenders.

That Nietzsche has been making progress of late goes without saying.
No reader of current literature, nor even of current periodicals, can
have failed to notice the increasing pressure of his ideas. When his
name was first heard in England and America, toward the end of the
nineties, he suffered much by the fact that few of his advocates had
been at any pains to understand him. Thus misrepresented, he took on
the aspect of an horrific intellectual hobgoblin, half Bakúnin and half
Byron, a sacrilegious and sinister fellow, the father of all the wilder
ribaldries of the day. In brief, like Ibsen before him, he had to bear
many a burden that was not his. But in the course of time the truth
about him gradually precipitated itself from this cloud of unordered
enthusiasm, and his principal ideas began to show themselves clearly.
Then the discovery was made that the report of them had been far more
appalling than the substance. Some of them, indeed, had already slipped
into respectable society in disguise, as the original inspirations
of lesser sages, and others, on examination, turned out to be quite
harmless, and even comforting. The worst that could be said of most of
them was that they stood in somewhat violent opposition to the common
platitudes, that they were a bit vociferous in denying this planet to
be the best of all possible worlds. Heresy, of course, but falling,
fortunately enough, upon ears fast growing attuned to heretical music.
The old order now had fewer to defend it than in days gone by. The
feeling that it must yield to something better, that contentment must
give way to striving and struggle, that any change was better than no
change at all--this feeling was abroad in the world. And if the program
of change that Nietzsche offered was startling at first hearing, it
was at least no more startling than the programs offered by other
reformers. Thus he got his day in court at last and thus he won the
serious attention of open-minded and reflective folk.

Not, of course, that Nietzsche threatens, today or in the near future,
to make a grand conquest of Christendom, as Paul conquered, or the
unknown Father of Republics. Far from it, indeed. Filtered through
the comic sieve of a Shaw or sentimentalized by a Roosevelt, some
of his ideas show a considerable popularity, but in their original
state they are not likely to inflame millions. Broadly viewed, they
stand in direct opposition to every dream that soothes the slumber of
mankind in the mass, and therefore mankind in the mass must needs be
suspicious of them, at least for years to come. They are pre-eminently
for the man who is _not_ of the mass, for the man whose head is lifted,
however little, above the common level. They justify the success of
that man, as Christianity justifies the failure of the man below. And
so they give no promise of winning the race in general from its old
idols, despite the fact that the pull of natural laws and of elemental
appetites is on their side. But inasmuch as an idea, to make itself
felt in the world, need not convert the many who serve and wait but
only the few who rule, it must be manifest that the Nietzschean creed,
in the long run, gives promise of exercising a very real influence
upon human thought. Reduced to a single phrase, it may be called
a counterblast to sentimentality--and it is precisely by breaking
down sentimentality, with its fondness for moribund gods, that human
progress is made. If Nietzsche had left no other vital message to
his time, he would have at least forced and deserved a hearing for
his warning that Christianity is a theory for those who distrust and
despair of their strength, and not for those who hope and fight on.

To plat his principal ideas for the reader puzzled by conflicting
reports of them, to prepare the way for an orderly and profitable
reading of his own books--such is the purpose of the present volume.
The works of Nietzsche, as they have been done into English, fill
eighteen volumes as large as this one, and the best available account
of his life would make three or four more. But it is sincerely to be
hoped that the student, once he has learned the main paths through
this extensive country, will proceed to a diligent and thorough
exploration. Of all modern philosophers Nietzsche is the least dull.
He was undoubtedly the greatest German prose writer of his generation,
and even when one reads him through the English veil it is impossible
to escape the charm and color of his phrases and the pyrotechnic
brilliance of his thinking.

MENCKEN.

BALTIMORE, November, 1913.



CONTENTS

NIETZSCHE THE MAN


     I. BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 3
    II. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE PHILOSOPHER 16
   III. BLAZING A NEW PATH 27
    IV. THE PROPHET OF THE SUPERMAN 40
     V. THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE MAN 50


NIETZSCHE THE PHILOSOPHER

     I. DIONYSUS _vs._ APOLLO 63
    II. THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY 74
   III. BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL 88
    IV. THE SUPERMAN 100
     V. ETERNAL RECURRENCE 117
    VI. CHRISTIANITY 126
   VII. TRUTH 147
  VIII. CIVILIZATION 162
    IX. WOMEN AND MARRIAGE 174
     X. GOVERNMENT 192
    XI. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 208
   XII. EDUCATION 216
  XIII. SUNDRY IDEAS 226
   XIV. NIETZSCHE _vs._ WAGNER 242


NIETZSCHE THE PROPHET

     I. NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINS 255
    II. NIETZSCHE AND HIS CRITICS 268

HOW TO STUDY NIETZSCHE 290

INDEX 297




NIETZSCHE THE MAN




FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE




I


BOYHOOD AND YOUTH


Friedrich Nietzsche was a preacher's son, brought up in the fear of
the Lord. It is the ideal training for sham-smashers and freethinkers.
Let a boy of alert, restless intelligence come to early manhood in an
atmosphere of strong faith, wherein doubts are blasphemies and inquiry
is a crime, and rebellion is certain to appear with his beard. So
long as his mind feels itself puny beside the overwhelming pomp and
circumstance of parental authority, he will remain docile and even
pious. But so soon as he begins to see authority as something ever
finite, variable and all-too-human--when he begins to realize that his
father and his mother, in the last analysis, are mere human beings,
and fallible like himself--then he will fly precipitately toward the
intellectual wailing places, to think his own thoughts in his own way
and to worship his own gods beneath the open sky.

As a child Nietzsche was holy; as a man he was the symbol and
embodiment of all unholiness. At nine he was already versed in the
lore of the reverend doctors, and the pulpit, to his happy mother--a
preacher's daughter as well as a preacher's wife--seemed his logical
and lofty goal; at thirty he was chief among those who held that all
pulpits should be torn down and fashioned into bludgeons, to beat out
the silly brains of theologians.

The awakening came to him when he made his first venture away from the
maternal apron-string and fireside: when, as a boy of ten, he learned
that there were many, many men in the world and that these men were of
many minds. With the clash of authority came the end of authority. If
A. was right, B. was wrong--and B. had a disquieting habit of standing
for one's mother, one's grandmother or the holy prophets. Here was the
beginning of intelligence in the boy--the beginning of that weighing
and choosing faculty which seems to give man at once his sense of
mastery and his feeling of helplessness. The old notion that doubt was
a crime crept away. There remained in its place the new notion that
the only real crime in the world--the only unmanly, unspeakable and
unforgivable offense against the race--was unreasoning belief. Thus the
orthodoxy of the Nietzsche home turned upon and devoured itself.

The philosopher of the superman was born on October 15th, 1844, at
Röcken, a small town in the Prussian province of Saxony. His father,
Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, was a country pastor of the Lutheran Church
and a man of eminence in the countryside. But he was more than a mere
rural worthy, with an outlook limited by the fringe of trees on the
horizon, for in his time he had seen something of the great world and
had even played his humble part in it. Years before his son Friedrich
was born he had been tutor to the children of the Duke of Altenburg.
The duke was fond of him and took him, now and then, on memorable
and eventful journeys to Berlin, where that turbulent monarch, King
Friedrich Wilhelm IV, kept a tinsel court and made fast progress from
imbecility to acute dementia. The king met the young tutor and found
him a clever and agreeable person, with excellent opinions regarding
all those things whereon monarchs are wont to differ with mobs. When
the children of the duke became sufficiently saturated with learning,
the work of Pastor Nietzsche at Altenburg was done and he journeyed to
Berlin to face weary days in the anterooms of ecclesiastical magnates
and jobbers of places. The king, hearing by chance of his presence and
remembering him pleasantly, ordered that he be given without delay a
vicarage worthy of his talents. So he was sent to Röcken, and there,
when a son was born to him, he called the boy Friedrich Wilhelm, as a
graceful compliment to his royal patron and admirer.

There were two other children in the house. One was a boy, Josef, who
was named after the Duke of Altenburg, and died in infancy in 1850.
The other was a girl, Therese Elisabeth Alexandra, who became in after
years her brother's housekeeper, guardian angel and biographer. Her
three names were those of the three noble children her father had
grounded in the humanities. Elisabeth--who married toward middle age
and is best known as Frau Förster-Nietzsche--tells us practically all
that we know about the Nietzsche family and the private life of its
distinguished son.[1] The clan came out of Poland, like so many other
families of Eastern Germany, at the time of the sad, vain wars. Legend
maintains that it was noble in its day and Nietzsche himself liked to
think so. The name, says Elisabeth, was originally Nietzschy. "Germany
is a great nation," Nietzsche would say, "only because its people
have so much Polish blood in their veins.... I am proud of my Polish
descent. I remember that in former times a Polish noble, by his simple
veto, could overturn the resolution of a popular assembly. There were
giants in Poland in the time of my forefathers." He wrote a tract
with the French title "_L'Origine de la famille de Nietzsche_" and
presented the manuscript to his sister, as a document to be treasured
and held sacred. She tells us that he was fond of maintaining that the
Nietzsches had suffered greatly and fallen from vast grandeur for their
opinions, religious and political. He had no proof of this, but it
pleased him to think so.

Pastor Nietzsche was thrown from his horse in 1848 and died, after
a lingering illness, on July 28th, 1849, when Friedrich was barely
five years old. Frau Nietzsche then moved her little family to
Naumburg-on-the-Saale--"a Christian, conservative, loyal city." The
household consisted of the mother, the two children, their paternal
grandmother and two maiden aunts--the sisters of the dead pastor. The
grandmother was something of a bluestocking and had been, in her day, a
member of that queer circle of intellectuals and amateurs which raged
and roared around Goethe at Weimar. But that was in the long ago,
before she dreamed of becoming the wife of one preacher and the mother
of another. In the year '50 she was well of all such youthful fancies
and there was no doubt of the divine revelations beneath her pious
roof. Prayers began the day and ended the day. It was a house of holy
women, with something of a convent's placidity and quiet exaltation.
Little Friedrich was the idol in the shrine. It was the hope of all
that he would grow up into a man inimitably noble and impossibly good.

Pampered thus, the boy shrank from the touch of the world's rough
hand. His sister tells us that he disliked the bad little boys of the
neighborhood, who robbed bird's nests, raided orchards and played at
soldiers. There appeared in him a quaint fastidiousness which went
counter to the dearest ideals of the healthy young male. His school
fellows, in derision, called him "the little pastor" and took delight
in waylaying him and venting upon him their grotesque and barbarous
humor. He liked flowers and books and music and when he went abroad
it was for solitary walks. He could recite and sing and he knew the
Bible so well that he was able to dispute about its mysteries. "As I
think of him," said an old school-mate years afterward, "I am forced
irresistibly into a thought of the 12-year-old Jesus in the Temple."
"The serious introspective child, with his dignified politeness," says
his sister, "seemed so strange to other boys that friendly advances
from either side were out of the question."

There is a picture of the boy in all the glory of his first long-tailed
coat. His trousers stop above his shoe-tops, his hair is long and his
legs seem mere airy filaments. As one gazes upon the likeness one can
almost smell the soap that scoured that high, shiny brow and those
thin, white cheeks. The race of such seraphic boys has died out in
the world. Gone are their slick, plastered locks and their translucent
ears! Gone are their ruffled cuffs and their spouting of the golden
text!

Nietzsche wrote verses before he was ten: pious, plaintive verses that
scanned well and showed rhymes and metaphors made respectable by ages
of honorable employment. His maiden effort, so far as we know, was an
elegy entitled "The Grave of My Father." Later on he became aware of
material things and sang the praises of rose and sunset. He played the
piano, too, and knew his Beethoven well, from the snares for the left
hand in "_Für Elise_" to the raging tumults of the C minor symphony.
One Sunday--it was Ascension day--he went to the village church and
heard the choir sing the Hallelujah Chorus from "The Messiah." Here was
music that benumbed the senses and soothed the soul and, boy as he was,
he felt its supreme beauty. That night he covered pages of ruled paper
with impossible pot-hooks. He, too, would write music!

Later on the difficulties of thorough-bass, as it was taught in the
abysmal German text-books of the time, somewhat dampened his ardor,
but more than once during his youth he thought seriously of becoming a
musician. His first really ambitious composition was a piano _pièce_
called "_Mondschein auf der Pussta_"--"Moonlight on the Pussta"--the
pussta being the flat Bohemian prairie. The family circle was
delighted with this maiden _opus_, and we may conjure up a picture
of little Friedrich playing it of a quiet evening at home, while
mother, grandmother, sister and aunts gathered round and marvelled
at his genius. In later life he wrote songs and sonatas, and--if an
enemy is to be believed--an opera in the grand manner. His sister, in
her biography, prints some samples of his music. Candor compels the
admission that it is even worse than it sounds.

Nietzsche, at this time, still seemed like piety on a monument, but
as much as he revered his elders and as much as he relied upon their
infallibility, there were yet problems which assailed him and gave him
disquiet. When he did not walk and think alone, his sister was his
companion, and to her he opened his heart, as one might to a sexless,
impersonal confessor. In her presence, indeed, he really thought aloud,
and this remained his habit until the end of his life. His mind,
awakening, wandered beyond the little world hedged about by doting and
complacent women. Until he entered the gymnasium--that great weighing
place of German brains--he shrank from open revolt, and even from the
thought of it, but he could not help dwelling upon the mysteries that
rose before him. There were things upon which the scriptures, search
them as he might, seemed to throw no light, and of which mothers and
grandmothers and maiden aunts did not discourse. "One day," says
Elisabeth, "when he was yet very young, he said to me: 'You mustn't
expect me to believe those silly stories about storks bringing babies.
Man is a mammal and a mammal must get his own children for himself.'"
Every child, perhaps, ponders such problems, but in the vast majority
knowledge must wait until it may enter fortuitously and from without.
Nietzsche did not belong to the majority. To him ideas were ever things
to be sought out eagerly, to be weighed calmly, to be tried in the
fire. For weal or for woe, the cornerstones of his faith were brought
forth, with sweat and pain, from the quarry of his own mind.

Nietzsche went to various village schools--public and private--until
he was ten, dutifully trudging away each morning with knapsack and
lunch-basket. He kissed his mother at the gate when he departed and
she was waiting for him, with another kiss, when he returned. As
happiness goes, his was probably a happy childhood. The fierce joy of
boyish combat--of fighting, of robbing, of slaying--was never his, but
to a child so athirst for knowledge, each fresh discovery--about the
sayings of Luther, the lions of Africa, the properties of an inverted
fraction--must have brought its thrill. But as he came to the last year
of his first decade, unanswerable questions brought their discontent
and disquiet--as they do to all of us. There is a feeling of oppression
and poignant pain in facing problems that defy solution and facts that
refuse to fit into ordered chains. It is only when mastery follows
that the fine stimulation of conscious efficiency drowns out all moody
vapors.

When Nietzsche went to the gymnasium his whole world was overturned.
Here boys were no longer mute and hollow vessels, to be stuffed with
predigested learning, but human beings whose approach to separate
entity was recognized. It was possible to ask questions and to argue
moot points, and teaching became less the administration of a necessary
medicine and more the sharing of a delightful meal. Your German
school-master is commonly a martinet, and his birch is never idle, but
he has the saving grace of loving his trade and of readily recognizing
true diligence in his pupils. History does not record the name of
the pedagogue who taught Nietzsche at the Naumburg gymnasium, but he
must have been one who ill deserved his oblivion. He fed the eager,
inquiring mind of his little student and made a new boy of him. The
old unhealthy, uncanny embodiment of a fond household's impossible
dreams became more likeable and more human. His exclusiveness and
fastidiousness were native and ineradicable, perhaps, for they remained
with him, in some degree, his whole life long, but his thirst for
knowledge and yearning for disputation soon led him to the discovery
that there were other boys worth cultivating: other boys whose
thoughts, like his own, rose above misdemeanor and horse-play. With two
such he formed a quick friendship, and they were destined to influence
him greatly to the end of his youth. They organized a club for mutual
culture, gave it the sonorous name of "_Der litterarischen Vereinigung
Germania_" ("The German Literary Association") and drew up an elaborate
scheme of study. Once a week there was a meeting, at which each of
the three submitted an essay or a musical composition to the critical
scrutiny of the others. They waded out into the deep water. One week
they discussed "The Infancy of Nations," and after that, "The Dæmonic
Element in Music," "Napoleon III" and "Fatalism in History." Despite
its praiseworthy earnestness, this program causes a smile--and so does
the transformation of the retiring and well-scrubbed little Nietzsche
we have been observing into the long, gaunt Nietzsche of 14, with a
yearning for the companionship of his fellows, and a voice beginning
to grow comically harsh and deep, and a mind awhirl with unutterable
things.

Nietzsche was a brilliant and spectacular pupil and soon won a
scholarship at Pforta, a famous and ancient preparatory academy not far
away. Pforta, in those days, was of a dignity comparable to Eton's or
Harrow's. It was a great school, but tradition overpowered it. Violent
combats between amateur sages were not encouraged: it was a place for
gentlemen to acquire Euclid and the languages in a decent, gentlemanly
way, and not an arena for gawky country philosophers to prance about
in. But Nietzsche, by this time, had already become a frank rebel and
delighted in elaborating and controverting the doctrines of the learned
doctors. He drew up a series of epigrams under the head of "_Ideen_"
and thought so well of them that he sent them home, to astonish and
alarm his mother. Some of them exhibited a quite remarkable faculty
for pithy utterance--as, for example, "War begets poverty and poverty
begets peace"--while others were merely opaque renderings of thoughts
half formed. He began to believe in his own mental cunning, with a
sincerity which never left him, and, as a triumphant proof of it, he
drew up a series of syllogisms designed to make homesickness wither and
die. Thus he wrestled with life's problems as his boy's eyes saw them.

All this was good training for the philosopher, but to the Pforta
professors it gave disquiet. Nietzsche became a bit too sure of himself
and a bit too arrogant for discipline. It seemed to him a waste of time
to wrestle with the studies that every oafish baron's son and future
guardsman sought to master. He neglected mathematics and gave himself
up to the hair-splitting of the Eleatics and the Pythagoreans, the
Sophists and the Skeptics. He pronounced his high curse and anathema
upon geography and would have none of it. The result was that when he
went up for final examination he writhed and floundered miserably and
came within an ace of being set down for further and more diligent
labor with his books. Only his remarkable mastery of the German
language and his vast knowledge of Christian doctrine--a legacy from
his pious childhood--saved him. The old Nietzsche--the shrinking
mother's darling of Naumburg--was now but a memory. The Nietzsche that
went up to Bonn was a young man with a touch of cynicism and one not
a little disposed to pit his sneer against the jurisprudence of the
world: a young man with a swagger, a budding moustache and a head full
of violently novel ideas about everything under the sun.

Nietzsche entered Bonn in October, 1864, when he was just 20 years old.
He was enrolled as a student of philology and theology, but the latter
was a mere concession to family faith and tradition, made grudgingly,
and after the first semester, the reverend doctors of exegetics knew
him no more. At the start he thought the university a delightful place
and its people charming. The classrooms and beer gardens were full
of young Germans like himself, who debated the doings of Bismarck,
composed eulogies of Darwin, sang Rabelaisian songs in bad Latin,
kept dogs, wore ribbons on their walking sticks, fought duels, and
drank unlimited steins of pale beer. In the youth of every man there
comes over him a sudden yearning to be a good fellow: to be "Bill" or
"Jim" to multitudes, and to go down into legend with Sir John Falstaff
and Tom Jones. This melancholy madness seized upon Nietzsche during
his first year at Bonn. He frequented the theatres and posed as a
connoisseur of opera _bouffe,_ malt liquor and the female form divine.
He went upon students' walking tours and carved his name upon the
mutilated tables of country inns. He joined a student corps, bought him
a little cap and set up shop as a devil of a fellow. His mother was
not poor, but she could not afford the outlays that these ambitious
enterprises required. Friedrich overdrew his allowance and the good
woman, no doubt, wept about it, as mothers will, and wondered that
learning came so dear.

But the inevitable reaction followed. Nietzsche was not designed
by nature for a hero of pot-houses and duelling sheds. The old
fastidiousness asserted itself--that queer, unhealthy fastidiousness
which, in his childhood, had set him apart from other boys, and was
destined, all his life long, to make him shrink from too intimate
contact with his fellow-men. The touch of the crowd disgusted him: he
had an almost insane fear of demeaning himself. All of this feeling had
been obscured for awhile, by the strange charm of new delights and new
companions, but in the end, the gloomy spinner of fancies triumphed
over the university buck. Nietzsche resigned from his student corps,
burned his walking sticks, foreswore smoking and roistering, and bade
farewell to Johann Strauss and Offenbach forever. The days of his
youth--of his carefree, merry gamboling--were over. Hereafter he was
all solemnity and all seriousness.

"From these early experiences," says his sister, "there remained with
him a life-long aversion to smoking, beer-drinking and the whole
_biergemüthlichkeit._ He maintained that people who drank beer and
smoked pipes were absolutely incapable of understanding him. Such
people, he thought, lacked the delicacy and clearness of perception
necessary to grasp profound and subtle problems."


[1] "_Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsche's,_" 3 vols. Leipsic, 1895-7-9.




II


THE BEGINNINGS OF THE PHILOSOPHER


At Bonn Nietzsche became a student of Ritschl, the famous
philologist,[1] and when Ritschl left Bonn for Leipsic, Nietzsche
followed him. All traces of the good fellow had disappeared and the
student that remained was not unlike those sophomores of medieval
Toulouse who "rose from bed at 4 o'clock, and having prayed to God,
went at 5 o'clock to their studies, their big books under their arms,
their inkhorns and candles in their hands." Between teacher and pupil
there grew up a bond of strong friendship. Nietzsche was taken, too,
under the wing of motherly old Frau Ritschl, who invited him to her
afternoons of coffee and cinnamon cake and to her evening soirées,
where he met the great men of the university world and the eminent
strangers who came and went. To Ritschl the future philosopher owed
many things, indeed, including his sound knowledge of the ancients, his
first (and last) university appointment and his meeting with Richard
Wagner. Nietzsche always looked back upon these days with pleasure and
there was ever a warm spot in his heart for the kindly old professor
who led him up to grace.

Two years or more were thus spent, and then, in the latter part of
1867, Nietzsche began his term of compulsory military service in the
fourth regiment of Prussian field artillery. He had hoped to escape
because he was near-sighted and the only son of a widow, but a watchful
_oberst-lieutenant_ found loopholes in the law and so ensnared him.
He seems to have been some sort of officer, for a photograph of the
period shows him with epaulets and a sword. But lieutenant or sergeant,
soldiering was scarcely his forte, and he cut a sorry figure on a
horse. After a few months of unwilling service, in fact, he had a
riding accident and came near dying as his father had died before him.
As it was he wrenched his breast muscles so badly that he was condemned
by a medical survey and discharged from the army.

During his long convalescence he busied himself with philological
studies and began his first serious professional work--essays on the
Theogony of Hesiod, the sources of Diogenes Laërtius and the eternal
strife between Hesiod and Homer. He also made an index to an elaborate
collection of German historical fragments and performed odd tasks
of like sort for various professors. In October, 1868, he returned
to Leipsic--not as an undergraduate, but as a special student. This
change was advantageous, for it gave him greater freedom of action and
protected him from that student _bonhomie_ he had learned to despise.
Again old Ritschl was his teacher and friend and again Frau Ritschl
welcomed him to her _salon_ and gave him of her good counsel and her
excellent coffee.

Meanwhile there had occurred something that was destined to direct and
color the whole stream of his life. This was his discovery of Arthur
Schopenhauer. In the 60's, it would appear, the great pessimist was
still scarcely more than a name in the German universities, which, for
all their later heterodoxy, clung long to their ancient first causes.
Nietzsche knew nothing of him, and in the seminaries of Leipsic not a
soul maintained him. Of Kant and of Hegel there was talk unlimited, and
of Lotze and Fichte there were riotous disputations that roared and
raged about the class-room of Fechner, then the university professor
of philosophy. But of Schopenhauer nothing was heard, and so, when
Nietzsche, rambling through an old Leipsic bookshop, happened upon a
second-hand copy of "_Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_"[2] a new
world came floating into his view. This was in 1865.

"I took the book to my lodgings," he said years afterward, "and
flung myself on a sofa and read and read and read. It seemed as if
Schopenhauer were addressing me personally. I felt his enthusiasm and
seemed to see him before me. Every line cried aloud for renunciation,
denial, resignation!"

So much for the first flush of the ecstasy of discovery. That Nietzsche
entirely agreed with everything in the book, even in his wildest
transports of admiration, is rather doubtful. He was but 21--the age of
great passions and great romance--and he was athirst for some writing
that would solve the problems left unanswered by the accepted sages,
but it is probable that when he shouted the Schopenhauer manifesto
loudest he read into the text wild variations of his own. The premises
of the pessimist gave credit and order to thoughts that had been rising
up in his own mind; but the conclusions, if he subscribed to them at
all, led him far afield. No doubt he was like one of those fantastic
messiahs of new cults who search the scriptures for testimony--and
find it. Late in life, when he was accused of inconsistency in first
deifying Schopenhauer and then damning him, he made this defense, and
despite the derisive sneers of his enemies, it seemed a fairly good one.

Schopenhauer's argument, to put it briefly, was that the will to
exist--the primary instinct of life--was the eternal first cause of all
human actions, motives and ideas. The old philosophers of Christendom
had regarded intelligence as the superior of instinct. Some of them
thought that an intelligent god ruled the universe and that nothing
happened without his knowledge and desire. Others believed that man was
a free agent, that whatever he did was the result of his own thought
and choice, and that it was right, in consequence, to condemn him
to hell for his sins and to exalt him to heaven for any goodness he
might chance to show. Schopenhauer turned all this completely about.
Intelligence, he said, was not the source of will, but its effect. When
life first appeared upon earth, it had but one aim and object: that of
perpetuating itself. This instinct, he said, was still at the bottom
of every function of all living beings. Intelligence grew out of the
fact that mankind, in the course of ages, began to notice that certain
manifestations of the will to live were followed by certain invariable
results. This capacity of perceiving was followed by a capacity for
remembering, which in turn produced a capacity for anticipating. An
intelligent man, said Schopenhauer, was merely one who remembered
so many facts (the result either of personal experience or of the
transmitted experience of others) that he could separate them into
groups and observe their relationship, one to the other, and hazard a
close guess as to their future effects: _i.e._ could reason about them.

Going further, Schopenhauer pointed out that this will to exist, this
instinct to preserve and protect life, this old Adam, was to blame for
the unpleasant things of life as well as for the good things--that
it produced avarice, hatred and murder just as well as industry,
resourcefulness and courage--that it led men to seek means of killing
one another as well as means of tilling the earth and procuring food
and raiment. He showed, yet further, that its bad effects were a great
deal more numerous than its good effects and so accounted for the
fact--which many men before him had observed--that life, at best, held
more of sorrow than of joy.[3]

The will-to-live, argued Schopenhauer, was responsible for all this.
Pain, he believed, would always outweigh pleasure in this sad old
world until men ceased to want to live--until no one desired food or
drink or house or wife or money. To put it more briefly, he held that
true happiness would be impossible until mankind had killed will
with will, which is to say, until the will-to-live was willed out of
existence. Therefore the happiest man was the one who had come nearest
this end--the man who had killed all the more obvious human desires,
hopes and aspirations--the solitary ascetic--the monk in his cell--the
soaring, starving poet--the cloud-enshrouded philosopher.

Nietzsche very soon diverged from this conclusion. He believed, with
Schopenhauer, that human life, at best, was often an infliction and a
torture, but in his very first book he showed that he admired, not the
ascetic who tried to escape from the wear and tear of life altogether,
but the proud, stiff-necked hero who held his balance in the face of
both seductive pleasure and staggering pain; who cultivated within
himself a sublime indifference, so that happiness and misery, to him,
became mere words, and no catastrophe, human or superhuman, could
affright or daunt him.[4]

It is obvious that there is a considerable difference between these
ideas, for all their similarity in origin and for all Nietzsche's
youthful worship of Schopenhauer. Nietzsche, in fact, was so enamoured
by the honesty and originality of what may be called the data of
Schopenhauer's philosophy that he took the philosophy itself rather
on trust and did not begin to inquire into it closely or to compare
it carefully with his own ideas until after he had committed himself
in a most embarrassing fashion. The same phenomena is no curiosity in
religion, science or politics.

Before a realization of these differences quite dawned upon Nietzsche
he was busied with other affairs. In 1869, when he was barely 25, he
was appointed, upon Ritschl's recommendation, to the chair of classical
philology at the University of Basel, in Switzerland, an ancient
stronghold of Lutheran theology. He had no degree, but the University
of Leipsic promptly made him a doctor of philosophy, without thesis
or examination, and on April 13th he left the old home at Naumburg to
assume his duties. Thus passed that pious household. The grandmother
had died long before--in 1856--and one of the maiden aunts had preceded
her to the grave by a year. The other, long ill, had followed in 1867.
But Nietzsche's mother lived until 1897, though gradually estranged
from him by his opinions, and his sister, as we know, survived him.

Nietzsche was officially professor of philology, but he also became
teacher of Greek in the pedagogium attached to the University.
He worked like a Trojan and mixed Schopenhauer and Hesiod in his
class-room discourses upon the origin of Greek verbs and other such
dull subjects. But it is not recorded that he made a very profound
impression, except upon a relatively small circle. His learning was
abysmal, but he was far too impatient and unsympathetic to be a
good teacher. His classes, in fact, were never large, except in the
pedagogium. This, however, may have been partly due to the fact that
in 1869, as in later years, there were comparatively few persons
impractical enough to spend their days and nights in the study of
philology.

In 1870 came the Franco-Prussian war and Nietzsche decided to go to
the front. Despite his hatred of all the cant of cheap patriotism and
his pious thankfulness that he was a Pole and not a German, he was at
bottom a good citizen and perfectly willing to suffer and bleed for his
country. But unluckily he had taken out Swiss naturalization papers in
order to be able to accept his appointment at Basel, and so, as the
subject of a neutral state, he had to go to the war, not as a warrior,
but as a hospital steward.

Even as it was, Nietzsche came near giving his life to Germany. He was
not strong physically--he had suffered from severe headaches as far
back as 1862--and his hard work at Basel had further weakened him. On
the battlefields of France he grew ill. Diphtheria and what seems to
have been cholera morbus attacked him and when he finally reached home
again he was a neurasthenic wreck. Ever thereafter his life was one
long struggle against disease. He suffered from migraine, that most
terrible disease of the nerves, and chronic catarrh of the stomach made
him a dyspeptic. Unable to eat or sleep, he resorted to narcotics, and
according to his sister, he continued their use throughout his life.
"He wanted to get well quickly," she says, "and so took double doses."
Nietzsche, indeed, was a slave to drugs, and more than once in after
life, long before insanity finally ended his career, he gave evidence
of it.

Despite his illness he insisted upon resuming work, but during the
following winter he was obliged to take a vacation in Italy. Meanwhile
he had delivered lectures to his classes on the Greek drama and two
of these he revised and published, in 1872, as his first book, "_Die
Geburt der Tragödie_" ("The Birth of Tragedy"). Engelmann, the great
Leipsic publisher, declined it, but Fritsch, of the same city, put it
into type.[5] This book greatly pleased his friends, but the old-line
philologists of the time thought it wild and extravagant, and it almost
cost Nietzsche his professorship. Students were advised to keep away
from him, and during the winter of 1872-3, it is said, he had no pupils
at all.

Nevertheless the book, for all its iconoclasm, was an event. It sounded
Nietzsche's first, faint battle-cry and put the question mark behind
many tilings that seemed honorable and holy in philology. Most of
the philologists of that time were German savants of the comic-paper
sort, and their lives were spent in wondering why one Greek poet made
the name of a certain plant masculine while another made it feminine.
Nietzsche, passing over such scholastic futilities, burrowed down
into the heart of Greek literature. Why, he asked himself, did the
Greeks take pleasure in witnessing representations of bitter, hopeless
conflicts, and how did this form of entertainment arise among them?
Later on, his conclusions will be given at length, but in this place it
may be well to sketch them in outline, because of the bearing they have
upon his later work, and even upon the trend of his life.

In ancient Greece, he pointed out at the start, Apollo was the god of
art--of life as it was recorded and interpreted--and Bacchus Dionysus
was the god of life itself--of eating, drinking and making merry, of
dancing and roistering, of everything that made men acutely conscious
of the vitality and will within them. The difference between the things
they represented has been well set forth in certain homely verses
addressed by Rudyard Kipling to Admiral Robley D. Evans, U. S. N.:

    Zogbaum draws with a pencil
      And I do things with a pen,
    But you sit up in a conning tower,
      Bossing eight hundred men.

    To him that hath shall be given
      And that's why these books are sent
    To the man who has _lived_ more stories
      Than Zogbaum or I could _invent_.

Here we have the plain distinction: Zogbaum and Kipling are apollonic,
while Evans is dionysian. Epic poetry, sculpture, painting and
story-telling are apollonic: they represent, not life itself, but some
one man's visualized idea of life. But dancing, great deeds and, in
some cases, music, are dionysian: they are part and parcel of life as
some actual human being, or collection of human beings, is living it.

Nietzsche maintained that Greek art was at first apollonic, but that
eventually there appeared a dionysian influence--the fruit, perhaps,
of contact with primitive, barbarous peoples. Ever afterward there
was constant conflict between them and this conflict was the essence
of Greek tragedy. As Sarcey tells us, a play, to hold our attention,
must depict some sort of battle, between man and man or idea and idea.
In the melodrama of today the battle is between hero and villain; in
the ancient Greek tragedy it was between Apollo and Dionysus, between
the life contemplative and the life strenuous, between law and outlaw,
between the devil and the seraphim.

Nietzsche, as we shall see, afterward applied this distinction in
morals and life as well as in art. He called himself a dionysian and
the crowning volume of his system of philosophy, which he had barely
started when insanity overtook him, was to have been called "Dionysus."


[1] Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl (1806-1876), the foremost philologist
of modern times. He became a professor of classical literature and
rhetoric in 1839 and founded the science of historical literary
criticism, as we know it today.

[2] Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) published this book, his _magnum
opus_, at Leipsic in 1819. It has been translated into English as "The
World as Will and Idea" and has appeared in many editions.

[3] Schopenhauer (_"Nachträge für Lehre vom Leiden der Welt_") puts the
argument thus: "Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expect it to be and
pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the
pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of
two animals, one of which is eating the other."

[4] Later on, in "_Menschliches allzu Menschliches_," II, Nietzsche
argued that the ascetic was either a coward, who feared the temptations
of pleasure and the agonies of pain, or an exhausted worldling who had
become satiated with life.

[5] Begun in 1869, this maiden work was dedicated to Richard Wagner.
At Wagner's suggestion Nietzsche eliminated a great deal of matter in
the original draft. The full title was "The Birth of Tragedy from the
Spirit of Music," but this was changed, in 1886, when a third edition
was printed, to "The Birth of Tragedy, or Hellenism and Pessimism."
Nietzsche then also added a long preface, entitled "An Attempt at
Self-Criticism." The material originally excluded was published in
1896.




III

BLAZING A NEW PATH



Having given birth, in this theory of Greek tragedy, to an idea which,
whatever its defects otherwise, was at least original, understandable
and workable, Nietzsche began to be conscious, as it were, of his own
intellect--or, in his sister's phrase, "to understand what a great man
he was." During his first years at Basel he had cut quite a figure in
academic society, for he was an excellent musician, he enjoyed dancing
and he had plenty of pretty things to say to the ladies. But as his
ideas clarified and he found himself more and more in conflict with the
pundits about him, he withdrew within himself, and in the end he had
few friends save Richard and Cosima Wagner, who lived at Tribschen,
not far away. To one of his turn of mind, indeed, the atmosphere of
the college town was bound to grow oppressive soon or late. Acutely
aware of his own superiority, he showed no patience with the unctuous
complacency of dons and dignitaries, and so he became embroiled in
various conflicts, and even his admirers among his colleagues seldom
ventured upon friendly advances.

There are critics who see in all this proof that Nietzsche showed signs
of insanity from early manhood, but as a matter of fact it was his
abnormally accurate vision and not a vision gone awry, that made him
stand so aloof from his fellows. In the vast majority of those about
him he saw the coarse metal of sham and pretense beneath the showy
gilding of learning. He had before him, at close range, a good many
of the great men of his time--the intellectuals whose word was law
in the schools. He saw them on parade and he saw them in their shirt
sleeves. What wonder that he lost all false reverence for them and
began to estimate them in terms, not of their dignity and reputation,
but of their actual credibility and worth? It was inevitable that he
should compare his own ideas to theirs, and it was inevitable that he
should perceive the difference between his own fanatical striving for
the truth and the easy dependence upon precedent and formula which lay
beneath their booming bombast. Thus there arose in him a fiery loathing
for all authority, and a firm belief that his own opinion regarding any
matter to which he had given thought was as sound, at the least, as any
other man's. Thenceforth the assertive "_ich_" began to besprinkle his
discourse and his pages. "I condemn Christianity. _I_ have given to
mankind.... _I_ was never yet modest.... _I_ think.... _I_ say.... _I_
do...." Thus he hurled his javelin at authority until the end.

To those about him, perhaps, Nietzsche seemed wild and impossible, but
it is not recorded that any one ever looked upon him as ridiculous.
His high brow, bared by the way in which he brushed his hair; his
keen eyes, with their monstrous overhanging brows, and his immense,
untrimmed moustache gave him an air of alarming earnestness. Beside the
pedagogues about him--with their well-barbered, professorial beards,
their bald heads and their learned spectacles--he seemed like some
incomprehensible foreigner. The exotic air he bore delighted him and he
cultivated it assiduously. He regarded himself as a Polish grandee set
down by an unkind fate among German shopkeepers, and it gave him vast
pleasure when the hotel porters and street beggars, deceived by his
disorderly façade, called him "The Polack."

Thus he lived and had his being. The inquisitive boy of old Naumburg,
the impudent youth of Pforta and the academic free lance of Bonn and
Leipsic had become merged into a man sure of himself and contemptuous
of all whose search for the truth was hampered or hedged about by
any respect for statute or precedent. He saw that the philosophers
and sages of the day, in many of their most gorgeous flights of
logic, started from false premises, and he observed the fact that
certain of the dominant moral, political and social maxims of the
time were mere foolishness. It struck him, too, that all of this
faulty ratiocination--all of this assumption of outworn doctrines and
dependence upon exploded creeds--was not confined to the confessedly
orthodox. There was fallacy no less disgusting in the other camp. The
professed apostles of revolt were becoming as bad as the old crusaders
and apologists.

Nietzsche harbored a fevered yearning to call all of these false
prophets to book and to reduce their fine axioms to absurdity.
Accordingly, he planned a series of twenty-four pamphlets and decided
to call them "_Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen_" which may be translated as
"Inopportune Speculations," or more clearly, "Essays in Sham-Smashing."
In looking about for a head to smash in essay number one, his eye,
naturally enough, alighted upon that of David Strauss, the favorite
philosopher and fashionable iconoclast of the day. Strauss had been a
preacher but had renounced the cloth and set up shop as a critic of
Christianity.[1] He had labored with good intentions, no doubt, but the
net result of all his smug agnosticism was that his disciples were as
self-satisfied, bigoted and prejudiced in the garb of agnostics as they
had been before as Christians. Nietzsche's clear eye saw this and in
the first of his little pamphlets, "_David Strauss, der Bekenner und
der Schriftsteller_" ("David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer"),
he bore down upon Strauss' _bourgeoise_ pseudo-skepticism most
savagely. This was in 1873.

"Strauss," he said, "utterly evades the question, What is the meaning
of life? He had an opportunity to show courage, to turn his back
upon the Philistines, and to boldly deduce a new morality from that
constant warfare which destroys all but the fittest, but to do this
would have required a love of truth infinitely higher than that which
spends itself in violent invectives against parsons, miracles and the
historical humbug of the resurrection. Strauss had no such courage.
Had he worked out the Darwinian doctrine to its last decimal he would
have had the Philistines against him to a man. As it is, they are with
him. He has wasted his time in combatting Christianity's nonessentials.
For the idea at the bottom of it he has proposed no substitute. In
consequence, his philosophy is stale."[2]

As a distinguished critic has pointed out, Nietzsche's attack was
notable, not only for its keen analysis and ruthless honesty, but also
for its courage. It required no little bravery, three years after
Sedan, to tell the Germans that the new culture which constituted their
pride was rotten, and that, unless it were purified in the fire of
absolute truth, it might one day wreck their civilization.

In the year following Nietzsche returned to the attack with a criticism
of history, which was then the fashionable science of the German
universities, on account, chiefly, of its usefulness in exploding
the myths of Christianity. He called his essay _"Vom Nutzen und
Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben_" ("On the Good and Bad Effects
of History upon Human Life") and in it he took issue with the reigning
pedagogues and professors of the day. There was much hard thinking
and no little good writing in this essay and it made its mark. The
mere study of history, argued Nietzsche, unless some definite notion
regarding the destiny of man were kept ever in mind, was misleading
and confusing. There was great danger in assuming that everything
which happened was part of some divine and mysterious plan for the
ultimate attainment of perfection. As a matter of fact, many historical
events were meaningless, and this was particularly true of those
expressions of "governments, public opinion and majorities" which
historians were prone to accentuate. To Nietzsche the ideas and doings
of peoples seemed infinitely less important than the ideas and doings
of exceptional individuals. To put it more simply, he believed that
one man, Hannibal, was of vastly more importance to the world than all
the other Carthaginians of his time taken together. Herein we have a
reappearance of Dionysus and a foreshadowing of the _herrenmoral_ and
superman of later days.

Nietzsche's next essay was devoted to Schopenhauer and was printed
in 1874. He called it "_Schopenhauer als Erzieher_" ("Schopenhauer
as a Teacher") and in it he laid his burnt offering upon the altar
of the great pessimist, who was destined to remain his hero, if no
longer his god, until the end. Nietzsche was already beginning to read
rebellious ideas of his own into "The World as Will and Idea," but in
two things--the theory of will and the impulse toward truth--he and
Schopenhauer were ever as one. He preached a holy war upon all those
influences which had made the apostle of pessimism, in his life-time,
an unheard outcast. He raged against the narrowness of university
schools of philosophy and denounced all governmental interference
in speculation--whether it were expressed crudely, by inquisitorial
laws and the _Index_, or softly and insidiously, by the bribery of
comfortable berths and public honors.

"Experience teaches us," he said, "that nothing stands so much in the
way of developing great philosophers as the custom of supporting bad
ones in state universities.... It is the popular theory that the posts
given to the latter make them 'free' to do original work; as a matter
of fact, the effect is quite the contrary.... No state would ever dare
to patronize such men as Plato and Schopenhauer. And why? Because the
state is always afraid of them.... It seems to me that there is need
for a higher tribunal outside the universities to critically examine
the doctrines they teach. As soon as philosophers are willing to resign
their salaries, they will constitute such a tribunal. Without pay and
without honors, it will be able to free itself from the prejudices
of the age. Like Schopenhauer, it will be the judge of the so-called
culture around it."[3]

Years later Nietzsche denied that, in this essay, he committed himself
irretrievably to the whole philosophy of Schopenhauer and a fair
reading bears him out. He was not defending Schopenhauer's doctrine
of renunciation, but merely asking that he be given a hearing. He was
pleading the case of foes as well as of friends: all he asked was that
the forum be opened to every man who had something new to say.

Nietzsche regarded Schopenhauer as a king among philosophers because
he shook himself entirely free of the dominant thought of his time. In
an age marked, beyond everything, by humanity's rising reliance upon
human reason, he sought to show that reason was a puny offshoot of
an irresistible natural law--the law of self-preservation. Nietzsche
admired the man's courage and agreed with him in his insistence that
this law was at the bottom of all sentient activity, but he was never
a subscriber to Schopenhauer's surrender and despair. From the very
start, indeed, he was a prophet of defiance, and herein his divergence
from Schopenhauer was infinite. As his knowledge broadened and his
scope widened, he expanded and developed his philosophy, and often he
found it necessary to modify it in detail. But that he ever turned
upon himself in fundamentals is untrue. Nietzsche at 40 and Nietzsche
at 25 were essentially the same. The germ of practically all his
writings lies in his first book--nay, it is to be found further back:
in the wild speculations of his youth.

The fourth of the "_Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen_" (and the last, for
the original design of the series was not carried out) was "Richard
Wagner in Bayreuth."[4] This was published in 1876 and neither it
nor the general subject of Nietzsche's relations with Wagner need be
considered here. In a subsequent chapter the whole matter will be
discussed. For the present, it is sufficient to say that Nietzsche met
Wagner through the medium of Ritschl's wife; that they became fast
friends; that Nietzsche hailed the composer as a hero sent to make the
drama an epitome of the life unfettered and unbounded, of life defiant
and joyful; that Wagner, after starting from the Schopenhauer base,
travelled toward St. Francis rather than toward Dionysus, and that
Nietzsche, after vain expostulations, read the author of "Parsifal"
out of meeting and pronounced him anathema. It was all a case of
misunderstanding. Wagner was an artist, and not a philosopher. Right or
wrong, Christianity was beautiful, and as a thing of beauty it called
aloud to him. To Nietzsche beauty seemed a mere phase of truth.

It was during this period of preliminary skirmishing that Nietzsche's
ultimate philosophy began to formulate itself. He saw clearly that
there was something radically wrong with the German culture of the
day--that many things esteemed right and holy were, in reality,
unspeakable, and that many things under the ban of church and state
were far from wrong in themselves. He saw, too, that there had grown
up a false logic and that its taint was upon the whole of contemporary
thought. Men maintained propositions plainly erroneous and excused
themselves by the plea that ideals were greater than actualities. The
race was subscribing to one thing and practicing another. Christianity
was official, but not a single real Christian was to be found in all
Christendom. Thousands bowed down to men and ideas that they despised
and denounced things that every sane man knew were necessary and
inevitable. The result was a flavor of dishonesty and hypocrisy in all
human affairs. In the abstract the laws--of the church, the state and
society--were looked upon as impeccable, but every man, in so far as
they bore upon him personally, tried his best to evade them.

Other philosophers, in Germany and elsewhere, had made the same
observation and there was in progress a grand assault-at-arms upon
old ideas. Huxley and Spencer, in England, were laboring hard in the
vineyard planted by Darwin; Ibsen, in Norway, was preparing for his
epoch-making life-work, and in far America Andrew D. White and others
were battling to free education from the bonds of theology. Thus it
will be seen that, at the start, Nietzsche was no more a pioneer than
any one of a dozen other men. Some of these other men, indeed, were
far better equipped for the fray than he, and their services, for a
long while, seemed a great deal more important. But it was his good
fortune, before his working days were over, to press the conflict much
further afield than the others. Beginning where they ended, he fought
his way into the very citadel of the enemy.

His attack upon Christianity, which is described at length later on,
well exemplifies this uncompromising thoroughness. Nietzsche saw
that the same plan would have to be pursued in examining all other
concepts--religious, political or social. It would be necessary to pass
over surface symptoms and go to the heart of things: to tunnel down
deep into ideas; to trace out their history and seek out their origins.
There were no willing hands to help him in this: it was, in a sense,
a work new to the world. In consequence Nietzsche perceived that he
would have to go slowly and that it would be needful to make every step
plain. It was out of the question to expect encouragement: if the task
attracted notice at all, this notice would probably take the form of
blundering opposition. But Nietzsche began his clearing and his road
cutting with a light heart. The men of his day might call him accursed,
but in time his honesty would shame all denial. This was his attitude
always: he felt that neglect and opprobrium were all in his day's work
and he used to say that if ever the generality of men endorsed any idea
that he had advanced he would be convinced at once that he had made an
error.

In his preliminary path-finding Nietzsche concerned himself much with
the history of specific ideas. He showed how the thing which was a sin
in one age became the virtue of the next. He attacked hope, faith and
charity in this way, and he made excursions into nearly every field
of human thought--from art to primary education. All of this occupied
the first half of the 70's. Nietzsche was in indifferent health and
his labors tired him so greatly that he thought more than once of
giving up his post at Basel, with its dull round of lecturing and
quizzing. But his private means at this time were not great enough
to enable him to surrender his salary and so he had to hold on. He
thought, too, of going to Vienna to study the natural sciences so that
he might attain the wide and certain knowledge possessed by Spencer,
but the same considerations forced him to abandon the plan. He spent
his winters teaching and investigating and his summers at various
watering-places--from Tribschen, in Switzerland, where the Wagners were
his hosts, to Sorrento, in Italy.

At Sorrento he happened to take lodgings in a house which also
sheltered Dr. Paul Rée, the author of "Psychological Observations,"
"The Origin of Moral Feelings," and other metaphysical works. That
Rée gave him great assistance he acknowledged himself in later years,
but that his ideas were, in any sense, due to this chance meeting (as
Max Nordau would have us believe) is out of the question, for, as we
have seen, they were already pretty clear in his mind a long while
before. But Rée widened his outlook a great deal, it is evident,
and undoubtedly made him acquainted with the English naturalists
who had sprung up as spores of Darwin, and with a number of great
Frenchmen--Montaigne, Larochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Fontenelle,
Vauvenargues and Chamfort.

Nietzsche had been setting down his thoughts and conclusions in the
form of brief memoranda and as he grew better acquainted with the
French philosophers, many of whom published their works as collections
of aphorisms, he decided to employ that form himself. Thus he began to
arrange the notes which were to be given to the world as "_Menschliches
allzu Menschliches_" ("Human, All-too Human"). In 1876 he got leave
from Basel and gave his whole time to the work. During the winter of
1876-7, with the aid of a disciple named Bernhard Cron (better known as
Peter Gast) he prepared the first volume for the press. Nietzsche was
well aware that it would make a sensation and while it was being set up
his courage apparently forsook him and he suggested to his publisher
that it be sent forth anonymously. But the latter would not hear of it
and so the first part left the press in 1878.

As the author had expected, the book provoked a fine frenzy of horror
among the pious. The first title chosen for it, "_Die Pflugschar_"
("The Plowshare"), and the one finally selected, "Human, All-too
Human," indicate that it was an attempt to examine the underside of
human ideas. In it Nietzsche challenged the whole of current morality.
He showed that moral ideas were not divine, but human, and that, like
all things human, they were subject to change. He showed that good
and evil were but relative terms, and that it was impossible to say,
finally and absolutely, that a certain action was right and another
wrong. He applied the acid of critical analysis to a hundred and one
specific ideas, and his general conclusion, to put it briefly, was that
no human being had a right, in any way or form, to judge or direct the
actions of any other being. Herein we have, in a few words, that gospel
of individualism which all our sages preach today.[5]

Nietzsche sent a copy of the book to Wagner and the great composer was
so appalled that he was speechless. Even the author's devoted sister,
who worshipped him as an intellectual god, was unable to follow him.
Germany, in general, pronounced the work a conglomeration of crazy
fantasies and wild absurdities--and Nietzsche smiled with satisfaction.
In 1879 he published the second volume, to which he gave the sub-title
of "_Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche_" ("Miscellaneous Opinions and
Aphorisms") and shortly thereafter he finally resigned his chair at
Basel. The third part of the book appeared in 1880 as "_Der Wanderer
und sein Schatten_" ("The Wanderer and His Shadow"). The three volumes
were published as two in 1886 as "_Menschliches allzu Menschliches_"
with the explanatory sub-title, "_Ein Buch für Freie Geister_" ("A Book
for Free Spirits").


[1] David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74) sprang into fame with his "_Das
Leben Jesu,_" 1835 (Eng. tr. by George Eliot, 1846), but the book which
served as Nietzsche's target was "_Der alte und der neue Glaube_" ("The
Old Faith and the New"), 1872.

[2] "_David Strauss, der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller_," § 7.

[3] "_Schopenhauer als Erzieher,_" § 8.

[4] According to Nietzsche's original plan the series was to have
included pamphlets on "Literature and the Press," "Art and Painters,"
"The Higher Education," "German and Counter-German," "War and the
Nation," "The Teacher," "Religion," "Society and Trade," "Society and
Natural Science," and "The City," with an epilogue entitled "The Way to
Freedom."

[5] It must be remembered, in considering all of Nietzsche's writings,
that when he spoke of a human being, he meant a being of the higher
sort--_i.e._ one capable of clear reasoning. He regarded the drudge
class, which is obviously unable to think for itself, as unworthy of
consideration. Its highest mission, he believed, was to serve and
obey the master class. But he held that there should be no artificial
barriers to the rise of an individual born to the drudge class who
showed an accidental capacity for independent reasoning. Such an
individual, he believed, should be admitted, _ipso facto_, to the
master class. Naturally enough, he held to the converse too. _Vide_ the
chapter on "Civilization."




IV


THE PROPHET OF THE SUPERMAN


Nietzsche spent the winter of 1879-80 at Naumburg, his old home. During
the ensuing year he was very ill, indeed, and for awhile he believed
that he had but a short while to live. Like all such invalids he
devoted a great deal of time to observing and discussing his condition.
He became, indeed, a hypochondriac of the first water and began to take
a sort of melancholy pleasure in his infirmities. He sought relief
at all the baths and cures of Europe: he took hot baths, cold baths,
salt-water baths and mud baths. Every new form of pseudo-therapy found
him in its freshman class. To owners of sanatoria and to inventors of
novel styles of massage, irrigation, sweating and feeding he was a joy
unlimited. But he grew worse instead of better.

After 1880, his life was a wandering one. His sister, after her
marriage, went to Paraguay for a while, and during her absence
Nietzsche made his progress from the mountains to the sea, and then
back to the mountains again. He gave up his professorship that he might
spend his winters in Italy and his summers in the Engadine. In the
face of all this suffering and travelling about, close application, of
course, was out of the question. So he contented himself with working
whenever and however his headaches, his doctors and the railway
time-tables would permit--on hotel verandas, in cure-houses and in
the woods. He would take long, solitary walks and struggle with his
problems by the way. He swallowed more and more pills; he imbibed
mineral waters by the gallon; he grew more and more moody and ungenial.
One of his favorite haunts, in the winter time, was a verdant little
neck of land that jutted out into Lake Maggiore. There he could think
and dream undisturbed. One day, when he found that some one had placed
a rustic bench on the diminutive peninsula, that passersby might rest,
he was greatly incensed.

Nietzsche would make brief notes of his thoughts during his daylight
rambles, and in the evenings would polish and expand them. As we have
seen, his early books were sent to the printer as mere collections of
aphorisms, without effort at continuity. Sometimes a dozen subjects are
considered in two pages, and then again, there is occasionally a little
essay of three or four pages. Nietzsche chose this form because it had
been used by the French philosophers he admired, and because it well
suited the methods of work that a pain-racked frame imposed upon him.

He was ever in great fear that some of his precious ideas would be lost
to posterity--that death, the ever-threatening, would rob him of his
rightful immortality and the world of his stupendous wisdom--and so he
made efforts, several times, to engage an amanuensis capable of jotting
down, after the fashion of Johnson's Boswell, the chance phrases that
fell from his lips. His sister was too busy to undertake the task:
whenever she was with him her whole time was employed in guarding him
from lion-hunters, scrutinizing his daily fare and deftly inveigling
him into answering his letters, brushing his clothes and getting his
hair cut. Finally, Paul Rée and another friend, Fräulein von Meysenbug,
brought to his notice a young Russian woman, Mlle. Lou Salomé, who
professed vast interest in his work and offered to help him. But this
arrangement quickly ended in disaster, for Nietzsche fell in love with
the girl--she was only 20--and pursued her over half of Europe when she
fled. To add to the humors of the situation Rée fell in love with her
too, and the two friends thus became foes and there was even some talk
of a duel. Mlle. Salomé, however, went to Rée, and with his aid she
later wrote a book about Nietzsche.[1] Frau Förster-Nietzsche sneers
at that book, but the fact is not to be forgotten that she was very
jealous of Mlle. Salomé, and gave constant proof of it by unfriendly
word and act. In the end, the latter married one Prof. Andreas and
settled down in Göttingen.

Early in 1881 Nietzsche published "_Morgenröte_" ("The Dawn of
Day"). It was begun at Venice in 1880 and continued at Marienbad,
Lago Maggiore and Genoa. It was, in a broad way, a continuation of
_"Menschliches allzu Menschliches_." It dealt with an infinite variety
of subjects, from matrimony to Christianity, and from education to
German patriotism. To all the test of fundamental truth was applied: of
everything Nietzsche asked, not, Is it respectable or lawful? but, Is
it essentially true? These early works, at best, were mere note-books.
Nietzsche saw that the ground would have to be plowed, that people
would have to grow accustomed to the idea of questioning high and holy
things, before a new system of philosophy would be understandable or
possible. In "_Menschliches allzu Menschliches_" and in _"Morgenröte_"
he undertook this preparatory cultivation.

The book which followed, "_Die fröhliche Wissenschaft_" ("The Joyful
Science") continued the same task. The first edition contained four
parts and was published in 1882. In 1887 a fifth part was added.
Nietzsche had now completed his plowing and was ready to sow his crop.
He had demonstrated, by practical examples, that moral ideas were
vulnerable, and that the Ten Commandments might be debated. Going
further, he had adduced excellent historical evidence against the
absolute truth of various current conceptions of right and wrong, and
had traced a number of moral ideas back to decidedly lowly sources. His
work so far had been entirely destructive and he had scarcely ventured
to hint at his plans for a reconstruction of the scheme of things.
As he himself says, he spent the four years between 1878 and 1882 in
preparing the way for his later work.

"I descended," he says, "into the lowest depths, I searched to the
bottom, I examined and pried into an old faith on which, for thousands
of years, philosophers had built as upon a secure foundation. The old
structures came tumbling down about me. I undermined our old faith in
morals."[2]

This labor accomplished, Nietzsche was ready to set forth his own
notion of the end and aim of existence. He had shown that the old
morality was like an apple rotten at the core--that the Christian
ideal of humility made mankind weak and miserable; that many
institutions regarded with superstitious reverence, as the direct
result of commands from the creator (such, for instance, as the family,
the church and the state), were mere products of man's "all-too-human"
cupidity, cowardice, stupidity and yearning for ease. He had turned
the searchlight of truth upon patriotism, charity and self-sacrifice.
He had shown that many things held to be utterly and unquestionably
good or bad by modern civilization were once given quite different
values--that the ancient Greeks considered hope a sign of weakness, and
mercy the attribute of a fool, and that the Jews, in their royal days,
looked upon wrath, not as a sin, but as a virtue--and in general he had
demonstrated, by countless instances and arguments, that all notions of
good and evil were mutable and that no man could ever say, with utter
certainty, that one thing was right and another wrong.

The ground was now cleared for the work of reconstruction and the first
structure that Nietzsche reared was "_Also sprach Zarathustra_" ("Thus
Spake Zoroaster"). This book, to which he gave the sub-title of _"Ein
Buch für Alle und Keinen_" ("A book for all and none"), took the form
of a fantastic, half-poetical half-philosophical rhapsody. Nietzsche
had been delving into oriental mysticism and from the law-giver of the
ancient Persians he borrowed the name of his hero--Zoroaster. But there
was no further resemblance between the two, and no likeness whatever
between Nietzsche's philosophy and that of the Persians.

The Zoroaster of the book is a sage who lives remote from mankind,
and with no attendants but a snake and an eagle. The book is in four
parts and all are made up of discourses by Zoroaster. These discourses
are delivered to various audiences during the prophet's occasional
wanderings and at the conferences he holds with various disciples in
the cave that he calls home. They are decidedly oriental in form and
recall the manner and phraseology of the biblical rhapsodists. Toward
the end Nietzsche throws all restraint to the winds and indulges to his
heart's content in the rare and exhilarating sport of blasphemy. There
is a sort of parody of the last supper and Zoroaster's backsliding
disciples engage in the grotesque and indecent worship of a jackass.
Wagner and other enemies of the author appear, thinly veiled, as
ridiculous buffoons.

In his discourses Zoroaster voices the Nietzschean idea of the
superman--the idea that has come to be associated with Nietzsche more
than any other. Later on, it will be set forth in detail. For the
present, suffice it to say that it is the natural child of the notions
put forward in Nietzsche's first book, "The Birth of Tragedy," and that
it binds his entire life work together into one consistent, harmonious
whole. The first part of "_Also sprach Zarathustra_" was published in
1883, the second part following in the same year, and the third part
was printed in 1884. The last part was privately circulated among the
author's friends in 1885, but was not given to the public until 1892,
when the entire work was printed in one volume. As showing Nietzsche's
wandering life, it may be recorded that the book was conceived in the
Engadine and written in Genoa, Sils Maria, Nice and Mentone.

_"Jenseits von Gut und Böse_" ("Beyond Good and Evil") appeared
in 1886. In this book Nietzsche elaborated and systematized his
criticism of morals, and undertook to show why he considered modern
civilization degrading. Here he finally formulated his definitions of
master-morality and slave-morality, and showed how Christianity was
necessarily the idea of a race oppressed and helpless, and eager to
escape the lash of its masters.

"_Zur Genealogie der Moral_" ("The Genealogy of Morals"), which
appeared in 1887, developed these propositions still further. In it
there was also a partial return to Nietzsche's earlier manner, with
its merciless analysis of moral concepts. In 1888 Nietzsche published
a most vitriolic attack upon Wagner, under the title of "_Der Fall
Wagner_" ("The Case of Wagner"), the burden of which was the author's
discovery that the composer, starting, with him, from Schopenhauer's
premises, had ended, not with the superman, but with the Man on the
cross. "_Götzendämmerung_" ("The Twilight of the Idols") a sort of
parody of Wagner's "_Götterdämmerung_" ("The Twilight of the Gods")
followed in 1889. "_Nietzsche contra Wagner_" ("Nietzsche versus
Wagner") was printed the same year. It was made up of extracts from the
philosopher's early works, and was designed to prove that, contrary to
the allegations of his enemies, he had not veered completely about in
his attitude toward Wagner.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that his health was fast declining and he
was approaching the verge of insanity, Nietzsche made plans for a great
four volume work that was to sum up his philosophy and stand forever as
his _magnum opus._ The four volumes, as he planned them, were to bear
the following titles:

1. "_Der Antichrist: Versuch einer Kritik des Christenthums_" ("The
Anti-Christ: an Attempt at a Criticism of Christianity").

2. "_Der freie Geist: Kritik der Philosophie als einer nihilistischen
Bewegung_" ("The Free Spirit: a Criticism of Philosophy as a Nihilistic
Movement").

3. "_Der Immoralist: Kritik der verhängnissvollsten Art von
Unwissenheit, der Moral_" ("The Immoralist: a Criticism of That Fatal
Species of Ignorance, Morality").

4. "_Dionysus, Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkunft_" ("Dionysus, the
Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence").

This work was to be published under the general title of "_Der Wille
zur Macht: Versuch einer Umwerthung aller Werthe_" ("The Will to Power:
an Attempt at a Transvaluation of all Values"), but Nietzsche got no
further than the first book, "_Der Antichrist_" and a mass of rough
notes for the others. "_Der Antichrist_" probably the most brilliant
piece of writing that Germany had seen in half a century, was written
at great speed between September 3rd and September 30th, 1888, but it
was not published until 1895, six years after the philosopher had laid
down his work forever.

During that same year C. G. Naumann, the Leipsic publisher, began the
issue of a definite edition of all his writings, in fifteen volumes,
under the editorial direction of Frau Förster-Nietzsche, Dr. Fritz
Koegel, Peter Gast and E. von der Hellen. In this edition his notes
for "_Der Wille zur Macht_" and his early philological essays were
included. The notes are of great interest to the serious student of
Nietzsche, for they show how some of his ideas changed with the years
and point out the probable structure of his final system, but the
general reader will find them chaotic, and often incomprehensible.
In October, 1888, but three months before his breakdown, he began a
critical autobiography with the title of "_Ecce Homo_," and it was
completed in three weeks. It is an extremely frank and entertaining
book, with such chapter headings as "Why I am so Wise," "Why I Write
Such Excellent Books" and "Why I am a Fatality." In it Nietzsche sets
forth his private convictions regarding a great many things, from
cooking to climates, and discusses each of his books in detail. "_Ecce
Homo_" was not printed until 1908, when it appeared at Leipsic in a
limited edition of 1250 copies.

In January, 1889, at Turin, where he was living alone in very humble
quarters, Nietzsche suddenly became hopelessly insane. His friends got
news of it from his own hand. "I am Ferdinand de Lesseps," he wrote to
Prof. Burckhardt of Basel. To Cosima Wagner: "Ariadne, I love you!"
To Georg Brandes, the Danish critic, he sent a telegram signed "The
Crucified." Franz Overbeck, an old Basel friend, at once set out for
Turin, and there he found Nietzsche thumping the piano with his elbows
and singing wild songs. Overbeck brought him back to Basel and he was
confined in a private asylum, where his general health greatly improved
and hopes were entertained of his recovery. But he never got well
enough to be left alone, and so his old mother, with whom he had been
on bad terms for years, took him back to Naumburg. When, in 1893, his
sister Elizabeth returned from Paraguay, where her husband had died,
he was well enough to meet her at the railroad station. Four years
later, when their mother died, Elizabeth removed him to Weimar, where
she bought a villa called "_Silberblick_" (Silver View) in the suburbs.
This villa had a garden overlooking the hills and the lazy river Ilm,
and a wide, sheltered veranda for the invalid's couch. There he would
sit day after day, receiving old friends but saying little. His mind
never became clear enough for him to resume work, or even to read. He
had to grope for words, slowly and painfully, and he retained only a
cloudy memory of his own books. His chief delight was in music and he
was always glad when someone came who could play the piano for him.

There is something poignantly pathetic in the picture of this
valiant fighter--this arrogant _ja-sager_--this foe of men, gods and
devils--being nursed and coddled like a little child. His old fierce
pride and courage disappeared and he became docile and gentle. "You
and I, my sister--we are happy!" he would say, and then his hand
would slip out from his coverings and clasp that of the tender and
faithful Lisbeth. Once she mentioned Wagner to him. "_Den habe ich sehr
geliebt!_" he said. All his old fighting spirit was gone. He remembered
only the glad days and the dreams of his youth.

Nietzsche died at Weimar on August 25, 1900, the immediate cause of
death being pneumonia. His ashes are buried in the little village of
Röcken, his birthplace.


[1] "_Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken_;" Vienna, 1894.

[2] Preface to "_Morgenröte_," § 2; autumn, 1886.




V


THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE MAN


"My brother," says Frau Förster-Nietzsche, in her biography, "was
stockily and broadly built and was anything but thin. He had a rather
dark, healthy, ruddy complexion. In all things he was tidy and orderly,
in speech he was soft-spoken, and in general, he was inclined to be
serene under all circumstances. All in all, he was the very antithesis
of a nervous man.

"In the fall of 1888, he said of himself, in a reminiscent memorandum:
'My blood moves slowly. A doctor who treated me a long while for what
was at first diagnosed as a nervous affection said: "No, your trouble
cannot be in your nerves. I myself am much more nervous than you."'...

"My brother, both before and after his long illness seized him, was
a believer in natural methods of healing. He took cold baths, rubbed
down every morning and was quite faithful in continuing light, bed-room
gymnastics."

At one time, she says, Nietzsche became a violent vegetarian and
afflicted his friends with the ancient vegetarian horror of making a
sarcophagus of one's stomach. It seems surprising that a man so quick
to perceive errors, saw none in the silly argument that, because an
ape's organs are designed for a vegetarian diet, a man's are so planned
also. An acquaintance with elementary anatomy and physiology would
have shown him the absurdity of this, but apparently he knew little
about the human body, despite his uncanny skill at unearthing the
secrets of the human mind. Nietzsche had read Emerson in his youth,
and those Emersonian seeds which have come to full flower in the
United States as the so-called New Thought movement--with Christian
Science, osteopathy, mental telepathy, occultism, pseudo-psychology and
that grand lodge of credulous _comiques_, the Society for Psychical
Research, as its final blossoms--all of this probably made its mark on
the philosopher of the superman, too.

Frau Förster-Nietzsche, in her biography, seeks to prove the impossible
thesis that her brother, despite his constant illness, was ever
well-balanced in mind. It is but fair to charge that her own evidence
is against her. From his youth onward, Nietzsche was undoubtedly a
neurasthenic, and after the Franco-Prussian war he was a constant
sufferer from all sorts of terrible ills--some imaginary, no doubt,
but others real enough. In many ways, his own account of his symptoms
recalls vividly the long catalogue of aches and pains given by Herbert
Spencer in his autobiography. Spencer had queer pains in his head and
so did Nietzsche. Spencer roved about all his life in search of health
and so did Nietzsche. Spencer's working hours were limited and so were
Nietzsche's. The latter tells us himself that, in a single year, 1878,
he was disabled 118 days by headaches and pains in the eyes.

Dr. Gould, the prophet of eye-strain, would have us believe that
both of these great philosophers suffered because they had read too
much during adolescence. It is more likely, however, that each was
the victim of some definite organic malady, and perhaps of more
than one. In Nietzsche's case things were constantly made worse by
his fondness for self-medication, that vice of fools. Preparatory to
his service as a hospital steward in 1870 he had attended a brief
course of first-aid lectures at the military hospital at Erlangen,
and thereafter he regarded himself as a finished pathologist and was
forever taking his own doses. The amount of medicine he thus swallowed
was truly appalling, and the only way he could break his appetite for
one drug was by acquiring an appetite for another. Chloral, however,
was his favorite, and toward the end he took it daily and in staggering
quantities.

Meanwhile, his mental disturbances grew more and more visible. At
times he would be highly excited and exalted, denouncing his foes, and
proclaiming his own genius. This was his state when his friends were
finally forced to put him under restraint. At other times he would show
symptoms of melancholia--a feeling of isolation and friendlessness,
a great sadness, a foreboding of death. The hostility with which his
books were received gave sharpness and plausibility to this mood, and
it pursued him through many a despairing day.

"An animal, when it is sick," he wrote to Baron von Seydlitz, in
1888, "slinks away to some dark cavern, and so, too, does the _bête
philosophe_. I am alone--absurdly alone--and in my unflinching and
toilsome struggle against all that men have hitherto held sacred and
venerable, I have become a sort of dark cavern myself--something hidden
and mysterious, which is not to be explored...." But the mood vanished
as the words were penned, and the defiant dionysian roared his
challenge at his foes. "It is not impossible," he said, "that I am the
greatest philosopher of the century--perhaps even more than that! I may
be the decisive and fateful link between two thousand centuries!"[1]

Max Nordau[2] says that Nietzsche was crazy from birth, but the facts
do not bear him out. It is much more reasonable to hold that the
philosopher came into the world a sound and healthy animal, and that it
remained for overstudy in his youth, over-work and over drugging later
on, exposure on the battle field, functional disorders and constant and
violent strife to undermine and eventually overthrow his intellect.

But if we admit the indisputable fact that Nietzsche died a madman
and the equally indisputable fact that his insanity was not sudden,
but progressive, we by no means read him out of court as a thinker. A
man's reasoning is to be judged, not by his physical condition, but
by its own ingenuity and accuracy. If a raving maniac says that twice
two make four, it is just as true as it would be if Pope Pius X or
any other undoubtedly sane man were to maintain it. Judged in this
way Nietzsche's philosophy is very far from insane. Later on we shall
consider it as a workable system, and point out its apparent truths and
apparent errors, but in no place (saving, perhaps, one) is his argument
to be dismissed as the phantasm of a lunatic.

Nietzsche's sister says that, in the practical affairs of life, the
philosopher was absurdly impractical. He cared nothing for money and
during the better part of his life had little need to do so. His
mother, for a country pastor's widow, was well-to-do, and when he was
twenty-five his professorship at Basel brought him 3,000 francs a
year. At Basel, in the late sixties, 3,000 francs was the income of an
independent, not to say opulent man. Nietzsche was a bachelor and lived
very simply. It was only upon books and music and travel that he was
extravagant.

After two years' service at Basel, the university authorities raised
his wage to 4,000 francs, and in 1879, when ill health forced him to
resign, they gave him a pension of 3,000 francs a year. Besides that,
he inherited 30,000 marks from one of his aunts, and so, altogether, he
had an income of $900 or $1,000 a year--the sum which Herbert Spencer
regarded, all his life, as an insurance of perfect tranquillity and
happiness.

Nietzsche's passion and dissipation, throughout his life, was music.
In all his books musical terms and figures of speech are constantly
encountered. He played the piano very well, indeed, and was especially
fond of performing transcriptions of the Wagner opera scores. "My three
solaces," he wrote home from Leipsic, "are Schopenhauer's philosophy,
Schumann's music and solitary walks." In his late youth, Wagner
engrossed him, but his sympathies were broad enough to include Bach,
Schubert and Mendelssohn. His admiration for the last named, in fact,
helped to alienate him from Wagner, who regarded the Mendelssohn scheme
of things as unspeakable.

Nietzsche's own compositions were decidedly heavy and scholastic.
He was a skillful harmonist and contrapuntalist, but his musical
ideas lacked life. Into the simplest songs he introduced harsh and
far-fetched modulations. The music of Richard Strauss, who professes
to be his disciple and has found inspiration in his "_Also sprach
Zarathustra_" would have delighted him. Strauss has achieved the
uncanny feat of writing in two keys at once. Such an effort would have
enlisted Nietzsche's keen interest.

All the same, his music was not a mere creature of the study and
of rules, and we have evidence that he was frequently inspired
to composition by bursts of strong emotion. On his way to the
Franco-Prussian war, he wrote a patriotic song, words and music,
on the train. He called it "Adieu! I Must Go!" and arranged it for
men's chorus, _a capella_. It would be worth while to hear a German
_männerchor_, with its high, beery tenors, and ponderous basses, sing
this curious composition. Certainly no more grotesque music was ever
put on paper by mortal man.

Much has been written by various commentators about the strange charm
of Nietzsche's prose style. He was, indeed, a master of the German
language, but this mastery was not inborn. Like Spencer he made a
deliberate effort, early in life, to acquire ease and force in writing.
His success was far greater than Spencer's. Toward the end--in "_Der
Antichrist_," for instance--he attained a degree of powerful and
convincing utterance almost comparable to Huxley's. But his style never
exhibited quite that wonderful air of clearness, of utter certainty,
of inevitableness which makes the "Lay Sermons" so tremendously
impressive. Nietzsche was ever nearer to Carlyle than to Addison. "His
style," says a writer in the _Athenæum,_ "is a shower of sparks, which
scatter, like fireworks, all over the sky."

"My sense for form," says Nietzsche himself, "awakened on my coming in
contact with Sallust." Later on he studied the great French stylists,
particularly Larochefoucauld, and learned much from them. He became a
master of the aphorism and the epigram, and this skill, very naturally,
led him to descend, now and then, to mere violence and invective.
He called his opponents all sorts of harsh names--liar, swindler,
counterfeiter, ox, ass, snake and thief. Whatever he had to say, he
hammered in with gigantic blows, and to the accompaniment of fearsome
bellowing and grimacing. "Nervous, vivid and picturesques, full of
fire and a splendid vitality," says one critic, "his style flashed and
coruscated like a glowing flame, and had a sort of dithyrambic movement
that at times recalls the swing of the Pindaric odes." Naturally, this
very _abandon_ made his poetry formless and grotesque. He scorned
metres and rhymes and raged on in sheer savagery. Reading his verses
one is forced irresistibly into the thought that they should be printed
in varied fonts of type and in a dozen brilliant inks.

Nietzsche never married, but he was by no means a misogynist. His
sister tells us, indeed, that he made a formal proposal of marriage to
a young Dutch woman, Fräulein Tr----, at Geneva in 1876, and the story
of his melodramatic affair with Mlle. Lou Salomé, six years later, was
briefly rehearsed in the last chapter. There were also other women in
his life, early and late, and certain scandal-mongers do not hesitate
to accuse him of a passion for Cosima Wagner, apparently on the ground
that he wrote to her, in his last mad days, "Ariadne, I love thee!" But
his intentions were seldom serious. Even when he pursued Mlle. Salomé
from Rome to Leipsic and quarrelled with his sister about her, and
threatened poor Rée with fire-arms, there is good reason to believe
that he shied at bell and book. His proposal, in brief, was rather one
of a free union than one of marriage. For the rest, he kept safely to
impossible flirtations. During all his wanderings he was much petted
by the belles of pump room and hotel parlor, not only because he was a
mysterious and romantic looking fellow, but also because his philosophy
was thought to be blasphemous and indecent, particularly by those
who knew nothing about it. But the fair admirers he singled out were
either securely married or hopelessly antique. "For me to marry," he
soliloquized in 1887, "would probably be sheer asininity."

There are sentimental critics who hold that Nietzsche's utter lack
of geniality was due to his lack of a wife. A good woman--alike
beautiful and sensible--would have rescued him, they say, from his
gloomy fancies. He would have expanded and mellowed in the sunshine of
her smiles, and children would have civilized him. The defect in this
theory lies in the fact that philosophers do not seem to flourish amid
scenes of connubial joy. High thinking, it would appear, presupposes
boarding house fare and hall bed-rooms. Spinoza, munching his solitary
herring up his desolate backstairs, makes a picture that pains us,
perhaps, but it must be admitted that it also satisfies our sense
of eternal fitness. A married Spinoza, with two sons at college,
another managing the family lens business, a daughter busy with her
trousseau and a wife growing querulous and fat--the vision, alas, is
preposterous, outrageous and impossible! We must think of philosophers
as beings alone but not lonesome. A married Schopenhauer or Kant or
Nietzsche would be unthinkable.

That a venture into matrimony might have somewhat modified Nietzsche's
view of womankind is not at all improbable, but that this change would
have been in the direction of greater accuracy does not follow. He
would have been either a ridiculously henpecked slave or a violent
domestic tyrant. As a bachelor he was comparatively well-to-do, but
with a wife and children his thousand a year would have meant genteel
beggary. His sister had her own income and her own affairs. When he
needed her, she was ever at his side, but when his working fits were
upon him--when he felt efficient and self-sufficient--she discreetly
disappeared. A wife's constant presence, day in and day out, would have
irritated him beyond measure or reduced him to a state of compliance
and sloth. Nietzsche himself sought to show, in more than one place,
that a man whose whole existence was colored by one woman would
inevitably acquire some trace of her feminine outlook, and so lose his
own sure vision. The ideal state for a philosopher, indeed, is celibacy
tempered by polygamy. He must study women, but he must be free, when
he pleases, to close his note book and go away and digest its contents
with an open mind.

Toward the end of his life, when increasing illness made him helpless,
Nietzsche's faithful sister took the place of wife and mother in his
clouding world. She made a home for him and she sat by and watched
him. They talked for hours--Nietzsche propped up with pillows, his old
ruddiness faded into a deathly white, and his Niagara of a moustache
showing dark against his pallid skin. They talked of Naumburg and the
days of long ago and the fiery prophet of the superman became simple
Brother Fritz. We are apt to forget that a great man is thus not only
great, but also a man: that a philosopher, in a life time, spends less
hours pondering the destiny of the race than he gives over to wondering
if it will rain tomorrow and to meditating upon the toughness of
steaks, the dustiness of roads, the stuffiness of railway coaches and
the brigandage of gas companies.

Nietzsche's sister was the only human being that ever saw him
intimately, as a wife might have seen him. Her affection for him
was perfect and her influence over him perfect, too. Love and
understanding, faith and gentleness--these are the things which make
women the angels of joyous illusion. Lisbeth, the calm and trusting,
had all in boundless richness. There was, indeed, something noble,
and almost holy in the eagerness with which she sought her brother's
comfort and peace of mind during his days of stress and storm, and
magnified his virtues after he was gone.


[1] Thomas Common: "Nietzsche as Critic, Philosopher, Poet and
Prophet;" London, 1901, p. 54.

[2] "Degeneration;" Eng. tr.: New York, 1895; pp. 415-471.




NIETZSCHE THE PHILOSOPHER




I



DIONYSUS VERSUS APOLLO



In one of the preceding chapters Nietzsche's theory of Greek tragedy
was given in outline and its dependence upon the data of Schopenhauer's
philosophy was indicated. It is now in order to examine this theory
a bit more closely and to trace out its origin and development with
greater dwelling upon detail. In itself it is of interest only as a
step forward in the art of literary criticism, but in its influence
upon Nietzsche's ultimate inquiries it has colored, to a measurable
extent, the whole stream of modern thought.

Schopenhauer laid down, as his cardinal principle, it will be recalled,
the idea that, in all the complex whirlpool of phenomena we call
human life, the mere will to survive is at the bottom of everything,
and that intelligence, despite its seeming kingship in civilization,
is nothing more, after all, than a secondary manifestation of this
primary will. In certain purely artificial situations, it may seem to
us that reason stands alone (as when, for example, we essay to solve
an abstract problem in mathematics), but in everything growing out of
our relations as human beings, one to the other, the old instinct of
race-and-self-preservation is plainly discernible. All of our acts,
when they are not based obviously and directly upon our yearning to eat
and take our ease and beget our kind, are founded upon our desire to
appear superior, in some way or other, to our fellow men about us, and
this desire for superiority, reduced to its lowest terms, is merely
a desire to face the struggle for existence--to eat and beget--under
more favorable conditions than those the world accords the average man.
"Happiness is the feeling that power increases--that resistance is
being overcome."[1]

Nietzsche went to Basel firmly convinced that these fundamental ideas
of Schopenhauer were profoundly true, though he soon essayed to make an
amendment to them. This amendment consisted in changing Schopenhauer's
"will to live" into "will to power." That which does not live, he
argued, cannot exercise a will to live, and when a thing is already
in existence, how can it strive after existence? Nietzsche voiced the
argument many times, but its vacuity is apparent upon brief inspection.
He started out, in fact, with an incredibly clumsy misinterpretation
of Schopenhauer's phrase. The philosopher of pessimism, when he said
"will to live" obviously meant, not will to begin living, but will to
continue living. Now, this will to continue living, if we are to accept
words at their usual meaning, is plainly identical, in every respect,
with Nietzsche's will to power. Therefore, Nietzsche's amendment was
nothing more than the coinage of a new phrase to express an old idea.
The unity of the two philosophers and the identity of the two phrases
are proved a thousand times by Nietzsche's own discourses. Like
Schopenhauer he believed that all human ideas were the direct products
of the unconscious and unceasing effort of all living creatures to
remain alive. Like Schopenhauer he believed that abstract ideas, in
man, arose out of concrete ideas, and that the latter arose out of
experience, which, in turn, was nothing more or less than an ordered
remembrance of the results following an endless series of endeavors to
meet the conditions of existence and so survive. Like Schopenhauer,
he believed that the criminal laws, the poetry, the cookery and the
religion of a race were alike expressions of this unconscious groping
for the line of least resistance.

As a philologist, Nietzsche's interest, very naturally, was fixed upon
the literature of Greece and Rome, and so it was but natural that his
first tests of Schopenhauer's doctrines should be made in that field.
Some time before this, he had asked himself (as many another man had
asked before him) why it was that the ancient Greeks, who were an
efficient and vigorous people, living in a green and sunny land, should
so delight in gloomy tragedies. One would fancy that a Greek, when
he set out to spend a pleasant afternoon, would seek entertainment
that was frivolous and gay. But instead, he often preferred to see
one of the plays of Thespis, Æschylus, Phrynichus or Pratinus, in
which the heroes fought hopeless battles with fate and died miserably,
in wretchedness and despair. Nietzsche concluded that the Greeks
had this liking for tragedy because it seemed to them to set forth,
truthfully and understandably, the conditions of life as they found
it: that it appeared to them as a reasonable and accurate picture
of human existence. The gods ordered the drama on the real stage of
the world; the dramatist ordered the drama on the mimic stage of the
theatre--and the latter attained credibility and verisimilitude in
proportion as it approached an exact imitation or reproduction of the
former. Nietzsche saw that this quality of realism was the essence of
all stage plays. "Only insofar as the dramatist," he said, "coalesces
with the primordial dramatist of the world, does he reach the true
function of his craft."[2] "Man posits himself as the standard.... A
race cannot do otherwise than thus acquiesce in itself."[3] In other
words, man is interested in nothing whatever that has no bearing upon
his own fate: he himself is his own hero. Thus the ancient Greeks were
fond of tragedy because it reflected their life in miniature. In the
mighty warriors who stalked the boards and defied the gods each Greek
recognized himself. In the conflicts on the stage he saw replicas of
that titanic conflict which seemed to him to be the eternal essence of
human existence.

But why did the Greeks regard life as a conflict? In seeking an answer
to this Nietzsche studied the growth of their civilization and of
their race ideas. These race ideas, as among all other peoples, were
visualized and crystallized in the qualities, virtues and opinions
attributed to the racial gods. Therefore, Nietzsche undertook an
inquiry into the nature of the gods set up by the Greeks, and
particularly into the nature of the two gods who controlled the general
scheme of Greek life, and, in consequence, of Greek art,--for art, as
we have seen, is nothing more or less than a race's view or opinion of
itself, i.e. an expression of the things it sees and the conclusions it
draws when it observes and considers itself. These gods were Apollo
and Dionysus.

Apollo, according to the Greeks, was the inventor of music, poetry and
oratory, and as such, became the god of all art. Under his beneficent
sway the Greeks became a race of artists and acquired all the
refinement and culture that this implies. But the art that he taught
them was essentially contemplative and subjective. It depicted, not so
much things as they were, as things as they had been. Thus it became
a mere record, and as such, exhibited repose as its chief quality.
Whether it were expressed as sculpture, architecture, painting or epic
poetry, this element of repose, or of action translated into repose,
was uppermost. A painting of a man running, no matter how vividly it
suggests the vitality and activity of the runner, is itself a thing
inert and lifeless. Architecture, no matter how much its curves suggest
motion and its hard lines the strength which may be translated into
energy, is itself a thing immovable. Poetry, so long as it takes the
form of the epic and is thus merely a chronicle of past actions, is as
lifeless, at bottom, as a tax list.

The Greeks, during Apollo's reign as god of art, thus turned art into
a mere inert fossil or record--a record either of human life itself or
of the emotions which the vicissitudes of life arouse in the spectator.
This notion of art was reflected in their whole civilization. They
became singers of songs and weavers of metaphysical webs rather than
doers of deeds, and the man who could carve a flower was more honored
among them than the man who could grow one. In brief, they began to
degenerate and go stale. Great men and great ideas grew few. They were
on the downward road.

What they needed, of course, was the shock of contact with some
barbarous, primitive people--an infusion of good red blood from some
race that was still fighting for its daily bread and had had no time
to grow contemplative and retrospective and fat. This infusion of red
blood came in good time, but instead of coming from without (as it did
years afterward in Rome, when the Goths swooped down from the North),
it came from within. That is to say, there was no actual invasion of
barbarian hordes, but merely an auto-reversion to simpler and more
primitive ideas, which fanned the dormant energy of the Greeks into
flame and so allowed them to accomplish their own salvation. This
impulse came in the form of a sudden craze for a new god--Bacchus
Dionysus.

Bacchus was a rude, boisterous fellow and the very antithesis of the
quiet, contemplative Apollo. We remember him today merely as the god of
wine, but in his time he stood, not only for drinking and carousing,
but also for a whole system of art and a whole notion of civilization.
Apollo represented the life meditative; Bacchus Dionysus represented
the life strenuous. The one favored those forms of art by which human
existence is halted and embalmed in some lifeless medium--sculpture,
architecture, painting or epic poetry. The other was the god of life
in process of actual being, and so stood for those forms of art which
are not mere records or reflections of past existence, but brief
snatches of present existence itself--dancing, singing, music and the
drama.

It will be seen that this barbarous invasion of the new god and his
minions made a profound change in the whole of Greek culture. Instead
of devoting their time to writing epics, praising the laws, splitting
philosophical hairs and hewing dead marble, the Greeks began to
question all things made and ordained and to indulge in riotous and
gorgeous orgies, in which thousands of maidens danced and hundreds of
poets chanted songs of love and war, and musicians vied with cooks
and vintners to make a grand delirium of joy. The result was that the
entire outlook of the Greeks, upon history, upon morality and upon
human life, was changed. Once a people of lofty introspection and
elegant repose, they became a race of violent activity and strong
emotions. They began to devote themselves, not to writing down the
praises of existence as they had found it, but to the task of improving
life and of widening the scope of present and future human activity and
the bounds of possible human happiness.[4]

But in time there came a reaction and Apollo once more triumphed. He
reigned for awhile, unsteadily and uncertainly, and then, again, the
pendulum swung to the other side. Thus the Greeks swayed from one
god to the other. During Apollo's periods of ascendancy they were
contemplative and imaginative, and man, to them, seemed to reach his
loftiest heights when he was most the historian. But when Dionysus was
their best-beloved, they bubbled over with the joy of life, and man
seemed, not an historian, but a maker of history--not an artist, but
a work of art. In the end, they verged toward a safe middle ground
and began to weigh, with cool and calm, the ideas represented by the
two gods. When they had done so, they came to the conclusion that it
was not well to give themselves unreservedly to either. To attain
the highest happiness, they decided, humanity required a dash of
both. There was need in the world for dionysians, to give vitality an
outlet and life a purpose, and there was need, too, for apollonians,
to build life's monuments and read its lessons. They found that true
civilization meant constant conflict between the two--between the
dreamer and the man of action, between the artist who builds temples
and the soldier who burns them down, between the priest and policeman
who insist upon the permanence of laws and customs as they are and the
criminal and reformer and conqueror who insist that they be changed.

When they had learned this lesson, the Greeks began to soar to heights
of culture and civilization that, in the past, had been utterly beyond
them, and so long as they maintained the balance between Apollo
and Dionysus they continued to advance. But now and again, one god
or the other grew stronger, and then there was a halt. When Apollo
had the upper hand, Greece became too contemplative and too placid.
When Dionysus was the victor, Greece became wild and thoughtless
and careless of the desires of others, and so turned a bit toward
barbarism. This seesawing continued for a long while, but Apollo was
the final victor--if victor he may be called. In the eternal struggle
for existence Greece became a mere looker-on. Her highest honors went
to Socrates, a man who tried to reduce all life to syllogisms. Her
favorite sons were rhetoricians, dialecticians and philosophical
cobweb-spinners. She placed ideas above deeds. And in the end, as all
students of history know, the state that once ruled the world descended
to senility and decay, and dionysians from without overran it, and it
perished in anarchy and carnage. But with this we have nothing to do.

Nietzsche noticed that tragedy was most popular in Greece during
the best days of the country's culture, when Apollo and Dionysus
were properly balanced, one against the other. This ideal balancing
between the two gods was the result, he concluded, not of conscious,
but of unconscious impulses. That is to say, the Greeks did not call
parliaments and discuss the matter, as they might have discussed a
question of taxes, but acted entirely in obedience to their racial
instinct. This instinct--this will to live or desire for power--led
them to feel, without putting it into words, or even, for awhile,
into definite thoughts, that they were happiest and safest and most
vigorous, and so best able to preserve their national existence, when
they kept to the golden mean. They didn't reason it out; they merely
felt it.

But as Schopenhauer shows us, instinct, long exercised, means
experience, and the memory of experience, in the end, crystallizes into
what we call intelligence or reason. Thus the unconscious Greek feeling
that the golden mean best served the race, finally took the form of
an idea: _i.e._ that human life was an endless conflict between two
forces, or impulses. These, as the Greeks saw them, were the dionysian
impulse to destroy, to burn the candle, to "use up" life; and the
apollonian impulse to preserve. Seeing life in this light, it was but
natural that the Greeks should try to exhibit it in the same light on
their stage. And so their tragedies were invariably founded upon some
deadly and unending conflict--usually between a human hero and the
gods. In a word, they made their stage plays set forth life as they saw
it and found it, for, like all other human beings, at all times and
everywhere, they were more interested in life as they found it than in
anything else on the earth below or in the vasty void above.

When Nietzsche had worked out this theory of Greek tragedy and of Greek
life, he set out, at once, to apply it to modern civilization, to see
if it could explain certain ideas of the present as satisfactorily as
it had explained one great idea of the past. He found that it could:
that men were still torn between the apollonian impulse to conform and
moralize and the dionysian impulse to exploit and explore. He found
that all mankind might be divided into two classes: the apollonians who
stood for permanence and the dionysians who stood for change. It was
the aim of the former to live in strict obedience to certain invariable
rules, which found expression as religion, law and morality. It was the
aim of the latter to live under the most favorable conditions possible;
to adapt themselves to changing circumstances, and to avoid the snares
of artificial, permanent rules.

Nietzsche believed that an ideal human society would be one in which
these two classes of men were evenly balanced--in which a vast,
inert, religious, moral slave class stood beneath a small, alert,
iconoclastic, immoral, progressive master class. He held that this
master class--this aristocracy of efficiency--should regard the slave
class as all men now regard the tribe of domestic beasts: as an order
of servitors to be exploited and turned to account. The aristocracy
of Europe, though it sought to do this with respect to the workers
of Europe, seemed to him to fail miserably, because it was itself
lacking in true efficiency. Instead of practising a magnificent
opportunism and so adapting itself to changing conditions, it stood
for formalism and permanence. Its fetish was property in land and the
worship of this fetish had got it into such a rut that it was becoming
less and less fitted to survive, and was, indeed, fast sinking into
helpless parasitism. Its whole color and complexion were essentially
apollonic.[5]

Therefore Nietzsche preached the gospel of Dionysus, that a new
aristocracy of efficiency might take the place of this old aristocracy
of memories and inherited glories. He believed that it was only in
this way that mankind could hope to forge ahead. He believed that
there was need in the world for a class freed from the handicap of law
and morality, a class acutely adaptable and immoral; a class bent on
achieving, not the equality of all men, but the production, at the top,
of the superman.


[1] "_Der Antichrist_," § 2.

[2] "_Die Geburt der Tragödie_," § 5.

[3] "_Götzendämmerung_" ix, § 19.

[4] "This enrichment of consciousness among the Greeks ... showed
itself first in the development of lyric poetry, in which the gradual
transition from the expression of universal religious and political
feeling to that which is personal and individual formed a typical
process." Dr. Wilhelm Windelband, "A History of Ancient Philosophy,"
tr. by H. E. Cushman; p. 18; New York, 1901.

[5] _Vide_ the chapter on "Civilization."




II


THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY


It may be urged with some reason, by those who have read the preceding
chapter carefully, that the Nietzschean argument, so far, has served
only to bring us face to face with a serious contradiction. We have
been asked to believe that all human impulses are merely expressions
of the primary instinct to preserve life by meeting the changing
conditions of existence, and in the same breath we have been asked to
believe, too, that the apollonian idea--which, like all other ideas,
must necessarily be a result of this instinct--destroys adaptability
and so tends to make life extra hazardous and difficult and progress
impossible. Here we have our contradiction: the will to live is
achieving, not life, but death. How are we to explain it away? How
are we to account for the fact that the apollonian idea at the bottom
of Christian morality, for example, despite its origin in the will
to live, has an obvious tendency to combat free progress? How are we
to account for the fact that the church, which is based upon this
Christian morality, is, always has been and ever will be a bitter and
implacable foe of good health, intellectual freedom, self-defense and
every other essential factor of efficiency?

Nietzsche answers this by pointing out that an idea, while undoubtedly
an effect or expression of the primary life instinct, is by no means
identical with it. The latter manifests itself in widely different acts
as conditions change: it is necessarily opportunistic and variable.
The former, on the contrary, has a tendency to survive unchanged, even
after its truth is transformed into falsity. That is to say, an idea
which arises from a true and healthy instinct may survive long after
this instinct itself, in consequence of the changing conditions of
existence, has disappeared and given place to an instinct diametrically
opposite. This survival of ideas we call morality. By its operation the
human race is frequently saddled with the notions of generations long
dead and forgotten. Thus we modern Christians still subscribe to the
apollonian morality of the ancient Jews--our moral forebears--despite
the fact that their ideas were evolved under conditions vastly
different from those which confront us today. Thus the expressions of
the life instinct, by obtaining an artificial and unnatural permanence,
turn upon the instinct itself and defeat its beneficent purpose. Thus
our contradiction is explained.

To make this rather complicated reasoning more clear it is necessary
to follow Nietzsche through the devious twists and windings of his
exhaustive inquiry into the origin of moral codes. In making this
inquiry he tried to rid himself of all considerations of authority
and reverence, just as a surgeon, in performing a difficult and
painful operation, tries to rid himself of all sympathy and emotion.
Adopting this plan, he found that a code of morals was nothing more
than a system of customs, laws and ideas which had its origin in the
instinctive desire of some definite race to live under conditions which
best subserved its own welfare. The morality of the Egyptians, he
found, was one thing, and the morality of the Goths was another. The
reason for the difference lay in the fact that the environment of the
Egyptians--the climate of their land, the nature of their food supply
and the characteristics of the peoples surrounding them--differed
from the environment of the Goths. The morality of each race was, in
brief, its consensus of instinct, and once having formulated it and
found it good, each sought to give it force and permanence. This was
accomplished by putting it into the mouths of the gods. What was once
a mere expression of instinct thus became the mandate of a divine
law-giver. What was once a mere attempt to meet imminent--and usually
temporary--conditions of existence, thus became a code of rules to be
obeyed forever, no matter how much these conditions of existence might
change. Wherefore, Nietzsche concluded that the chief characteristic of
a moral system was its tendency to perpetuate itself unchanged, and to
destroy all who questioned it or denied it.[1]

Nietzsche saw that practically all members of a given race, including
the great majority of those who violated these rules, were influenced
into believing them--or at least into professing to believe
them--utterly and unchangeably correct, and that it was the main
function of all religions to enforce and support them by making them
appear as laws laid down, at the beginning of the world, by the lord
of the universe himself, or at some later period, by his son, messiah
or spokesman. "Morality," he said, "not only commands innumerable
terrible means for preventing critical hands being laid upon her: her
security depends still more upon a sort of enchantment at which she is
phenomenally skilled. That is to say, she knows how to _enrapture_.
She appeals to the emotions; her glance paralyzes the reason and
the will.... Ever since there has been talking and persuading on
earth, she has been the supreme mistress of seduction."[2] Thus "a
double wall is put up against the continued testing, selection and
criticism of values. On one hand is revelation, and on the other,
veneration and tradition. The authority of the law is based upon two
assumptions--first, that God gave it, and secondly, that the wise
men of the past obeyed it."[3] Nietzsche came to the conclusion that
this universal tendency to submit to moral codes--this unreasonable,
emotional faith in the invariable truth of moral regulations--was
a curse to the human race and the chief cause of its degeneration,
inefficiency and unhappiness. And then he threw down the gauntlet by
denying that an ever-present deity had anything to do with framing such
codes and by endeavoring to prove that, far from being eternally true,
they commonly became false with the passing of the years. Starting out
as expressions of the primary life-instinct's effort to adapt some
individual or race to certain given conditions of existence, they took
no account of the fact that these conditions were constantly changing,
and that the thing which was advantageous at one time and to one race
was frequently injurious at some other time and to another race.

This reduction of all morality to mere expressions of expedience
engaged the philosopher during what he calls his "tunneling" period. To
exhibit his precise method of "tunneling" let us examine, for example,
a moral idea which is found in the code of every civilized country.
This is the notion that there is something inherently and fundamentally
wrong in the act of taking human life. We have good reason to believe
that murder was as much a crime 5,000 years ago as it is today and that
it took rank at the head of all conceivable outrages against humankind
at the very dawn of civilization. And why? Simply because the man
who took his neighbor's life made the life of everyone else in his
neighborhood precarious and uncomfortable. It was plain that what he
had done once he could do again, and so the peace and security of the
whole district were broken.

Now, it is apparent that the average human being desires peace and
security beyond all things, because it is only when he has them that
he may satisfy his will to live--by procuring food and shelter for
himself and by becoming the father of children. He is ill-fitted to
fight for his existence; the mere business of living and begetting
his kind consumes all of his energies: "the world, as a world," as
Horace Greeley said, "barely makes a living." Therefore, it came to
be recognized at the very beginning of civilization, that the man
who killed other men was a foe to those conditions which the average
man had to seek in order to exist--to peace and order and quiet and
security. Out of this grew the doctrine that it was immoral to commit
murder, and as soon as mankind became imaginative enough to invent
personal gods, this doctrine was put into their mouths and so attained
the force and authority of divine wisdom. In some such manner, said
Nietzsche, the majority of our present moral concepts were evolved. At
the start they were mere echoes of a protest against actions which made
existence difficult and so outraged and opposed the will to live.

As a rule, said Nietzsche, such familiar protests as that against
murder, which laid down the maxim that the community had rights
superior to those of the individual, were voiced by the weak, who found
it difficult to protect themselves, as individuals, against the strong.
One strong man, perhaps, was more than a match, in the struggle for
existence, for ten weak men and so the latter were at a disadvantage.
But fortunately for them they could overcome this by combination, for
they were always in an overwhelming majority, numerically, and in
consequence they were stronger, taken together, than the phalanx of
the strong. Thus it gradually became possible for them to enforce the
rules that they laid down for their own protection--which rules always
operated against the wishes--and, as an obvious corollary, against the
best interests of--the strong.[4] When the time arrived for fashioning
religious systems, these rules were credited to the gods, and again the
weak triumphed. Thus the desire of the weak among the world's early
races of men, to protect their crops and wives against the forays of
the strong, by general laws and divine decrees instead of by each man
fighting for his own, has come down to us in the form of the Christian
commandments: "Thou shalt not steal.... Thou shalt not covet thy
neighbor's house.... Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his
manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything
that is thy neighbor's."

Nietzsche shows that the device of putting man-made rules of morality
into the mouths of the gods--a device practiced by every nation in
history--has vastly increased the respectability and force of all
moral ideas. This is well exhibited by the fact that, even today and
among thinking men, offenses which happen to be included in the scope
of the Ten Commandments, either actually or by interpretation, are
regarded with a horror which seldom, if ever, attaches to offenses
obviously defined and delimited by merely human agencies. Thus, theft
is everywhere looked upon as dishonorable, but cheating at elections,
which is fully as dangerous to the body politic, is commonly pardoned
by public opinion as a normal consequence of enthusiasm, and in some
quarters is even regarded as an evidence of courage, not to say of a
high and noble sense of gratitude and honor.

Nietzsche does not deny that human beings have a right to construct
moral codes for themselves, and neither does he deny that they are
justified, from their immediate standpoint, at least, in giving these
codes the authority and force of divine commands. But he points out
that this procedure is bound to cause trouble in the long run, for the
reason that divine commands are fixed and invariable, and do not change
as fast as the instincts and needs of the race. Suppose, for instance,
that all acts of Parliament and Congress were declared to be the
will of God, and that, as a natural consequence, the power to repeal
or modify them were abandoned. It is apparent that the world would
outgrow them as fast as it does today, but it is also apparent that the
notion that they were infallible would paralyze and block all efforts,
by atheistic reformers, to overturn or amend them. As a result, the
British and American people would be compelled to live in obedience to
rules which, on their very face, would often seem illogical and absurd.

Yet the same thing happens to notions of morality. They are devised, at
the start, as measures of expediency, and then given divine sanction in
order to lend them authority. In the course of time, perhaps, the race
outgrows them, but none the less, they continue in force--at least so
long as the old gods are worshipped. Thus human laws become divine--and
inhuman. Thus morality itself becomes immoral. Thus the old instinct
whereby society differentiates between good things and bad, grows
muddled and uncertain, and the fundamental purpose of morality--that
of producing a workable scheme of living--is defeated. Thereafter it
is next to impossible to distinguish between the laws that are still
useful and those that have outlived their usefulness, and the man who
makes the attempt--the philosopher who endeavors to show humanity
how it is condemning as bad a thing that, in itself, is now good, or
exalting as good a thing that, for all its former goodness, is now
bad--this man is damned as a heretic and anarchist, and according as
fortune serves him, is burned at the stake or merely read out of the
human race.[5]

Nietzsche found that all existing moral ideas might be divided into
two broad classes, corresponding to the two broad varieties of human
beings--the masters and the slaves. Every man is either a master or
a slave, and the same is true of every race. Either it rules some
other race or it is itself ruled by some other race. It is impossible
to think of a man or of a people as being utterly isolated, and even
were this last possible, it is obvious that the community would be
divided into those who ruled and those who obeyed. The masters are
strong and are capable of doing as they please; the slaves are weak
and must obtain whatever rights they crave by deceiving, cajoling or
collectively intimidating their masters. Now, since all moral codes,
as we have seen, are merely collections of the rules laid down by some
definite group of human beings for their comfort and protection, it is
evident that the morality of the master class has for its main object
the preservation of the authority and kingship of that class, while
the morality of the slave class seeks to make slavery as bearable as
possible and to exalt and dignify those things in which the slave can
hope to become the apparent equal or superior of his master.

The civilization which existed in Europe before the dawn of
Christianity was a culture based upon master-morality, and so we find
that the theologians and moralists of those days esteemed a certain
action as right only when it plainly subserved the best interests of
strong, resourceful men. The ideal man of that time was not a meek and
lowly sufferer, bearing his cross uncomplainingly, but an alert, proud
and combative being who knew his rights and dared maintain them. In
consequence we find that in many ancient languages, the words "good"
and "aristocratic" were synonymous. Whatever served to make a man a
nobleman--cunning, wealth, physical strength, eagerness to resent and
punish injuries--was considered virtuous, praiseworthy and moral,[6]
and on the other hand, whatever tended to make a man sink to the level
of the great masses--humility, lack of ambition, modest desires, lavish
liberality and a spirit of ready forgiveness--was regarded as immoral
and wrong.

"Among these master races," says Nietzsche, "the antithesis 'good and
bad' signified practically the same as 'noble and contemptible!' The
despised ones were the cowards, the timid, the insignificant, the
self-abasing--the dog-species of men who allowed themselves to be
misused--the flatterers and, above all, the liars. It is a fundamental
belief of all true aristocrats that the common people are deceitful.
'We true ones,' the ancient Greek nobles called themselves.

"It is obvious that the designations of moral worth were at first
applied to individual men, and not to actions or ideas in the abstract.
The master type of man regards himself as a sufficient judge of worth.
He does not seek approval: his own feelings determine his conduct.
'What is injurious to me,' he reasons, 'is injurious in itself.' This
type of man honors whatever qualities he recognizes in himself: his
morality is self-glorification. He has a feeling of plentitude and
power and the happiness of high tension. He helps the unfortunate,
perhaps, but it is not out of sympathy. The impulse, when it comes
at all, rises out of his superabundance of power--his thirst to
function. He honors his own power, and he knows how to keep it in hand.
He joyfully exercises strictness and severity over himself and he
reverences all that is strict and severe. 'Wotan has put a hard heart
in my breast,' says an old Scandinavian saga. There could be no better
expression of the spirit of a proud viking....

"The morality of the master class is irritating to the taste of the
present day because of its fundamental principle that a man has
obligations only to his equals; that he may act to all of lower rank
and to all that are foreign as he pleases.... The man of the master
class has a capacity for prolonged gratitude and prolonged revenge,
but it is only among his equals. He has, too, great resourcefulness
in retaliation; great capacity for friendship, and a strong need for
enemies, that there may be an outlet for his envy, quarrelsomeness and
arrogance, and that by spending these passions in this manner, he may
be gentle towards his friends."[7]

By this ancient _herrenmoral_, or master-morality, Napoleon Bonaparte
would have been esteemed a god and the Man of Sorrows an enemy to
society. It was the ethical scheme, indeed, of peoples who were sure
of themselves and who had no need to make terms with rivals or to seek
the good will or forbearance of anyone. In its light, such things as
mercy and charity seemed pernicious and immoral, because they meant
a transfer of power from strong men, whose proper business it was to
grow stronger and stronger, to weak men, whose proper business it was
to serve the strong. In a word, this master-morality was the morality
of peoples who knew, by experience, that it was pleasant to rule and
be strong. They knew that the nobleman was to be envied and the slave
to be despised, and so they came to believe that everything which
helped to make a man noble was good and everything which helped to
make him a slave was evil. The idea of nobility and the idea of good
were expressed by the same word, and this verbal identity survives in
the English language today, despite the fact that our present system
of morality, as we shall see, differs vastly from that of the ancient
master races.

In opposition to this master-morality of the strong, healthy nations
there was the _sklavmoral_, or slave-morality, of the weak nations.
The Jews of the four or five centuries preceding the birth of Christ
belonged to the latter class. Compared to the races around them, they
were weak and helpless. It was out of the question for them to conquer
the Greeks or Romans and it was equally impossible for them to force
their laws, their customs or their religion upon their neighbors on
other sides. They were, indeed, in the position of an army surrounded
by a horde of irresistible enemies. The general of such an army, with
the instinct of self-preservation strong within him, does not attempt
to cut his way out. Instead he tries to make the best terms he can, and
if the leader of the enemy insists upon making him and his vanquished
force prisoners, he endeavors to obtain concessions which will make
this imprisonment as bearable as possible. The strong man's object is
to take as much as he can from his victim; the weak man's is to save as
much as he can from his conqueror.

The fruit of this yearning of weak nations to preserve as much of their
national unity as possible is the thing Nietzsche calls slave-morality.
Its first and foremost purpose is to discourage, and if possible, blot
out, all those traits and actions which are apt to excite the ire, the
envy, or the cupidity of the menacing enemies round about. Revenge,
pride and ambition are condemned as evils. Humility, forgiveness,
contentment and resignation are esteemed virtues. The moral man
is the man who has lost all desire to triumph and exult over his
fellow-men--the man of mercy, of charity, of self-sacrifice.

"The impotence which does not retaliate for injuries," says Nietzsche,
"is falsified into 'goodness;' timorous abjectness becomes 'humility;'
subjection to those one hates is called 'obedience,' and the one who
desires and commands this impotence, abjectness and subjection is
called God. The inoffensiveness of the weak, their cowardice (of which
they have ample store); their standing at the door, their unavoidable
time-serving and waiting--all these things get good names. The
inability to get revenge is translated into an _unwillingness_ to get
revenge, and becomes forgiveness, a virtue.

"They are wretched--these mutterers and forgers--but they say that
their wretchedness is of God's choosing and even call it a distinction
that he confers upon them. The dogs which are liked best, they say,
are beaten most. Their wretchedness is a test, a preparation, a
schooling--something which will be paid for, one day, in happiness.
They call that 'bliss.'"[8]

By the laws of this slave-morality the immoral man is he who seeks
power and eminence and riches--the millionaire, the robber, the
fighter, the schemer. The act of acquiring property by conquest--which
is looked upon as a matter of course by master-morality--becomes a
crime and is called theft. The act of mating in obedience to natural
impulses, without considering the desire of others, becomes adultery;
the quite natural act of destroying one's enemies becomes murder.


[1] II Thess. II, 15: "Hold the tradition which ye have been taught."
Eusebius Pamphilus: "Those things which are written believe; those
things which are not written, neither think upon nor inquire after."
St. Austin: "Whatever ye hear from the holy scriptures let it favor
well with you; whatever is without them refuse." See also St. Basil,
Tertullian and every other professional moralist since, down to John
Alexander Dowie and Emperor William of Germany.

[2] "_Morgenröte_," preface, § 3.

[3] "_Der Antichrist_," § 57.

[4] The fact that the state is founded, not upon a mysterious "social
impulse" in man, but upon each individual's regard for his own
interest, was first pointed out by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), in his
argument against Aristotle and Grotius.

[5] The risk of such idol-smashing is well set forth at length by G.
Bernard Shaw in the preface to "The Quintessence of Ibsenism;" London,
1904.

[6] Henry Bradley, in a lecture at the London Institution, in Jan 1907,
showed that this was true of the ancient Britons, as is demonstrated by
their liking for bestowing such names as Wolf and Bear upon themselves.
It was true, also, of the North American Indians and of all primitive
races conscious of their efficiency.

[7] "_Jenseits von Gut und Böse_," § 260.

[8] "_Zur Genealogie der Moral_," I, § 14.




III


BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL


Despite the divine authority which gives permanence to all moral codes,
this permanence is constantly opposed by the changing conditions
of existence, and very often the opposition is successful. The
slave-morality of the ancient Jews has come down to us, with its
outlines little changed, as ideal Christianity, but such tenacious
persistence of a moral scheme is comparatively rare. As a general
rule, in truth, races change their gods very much oftener than we
have changed ours, and have less faith than we in the independence of
intelligence. In consequence they constantly revamp and modify their
moral concepts. The same process of evolution affects even our own
code, despite the extraordinary tendency to permanence just noted. Our
scheme of things, in its fundamentals, has persisted for 2,500 years,
but in matters of detail it is constantly in a state of flux. We still
call ourselves Christians, but we have evolved many moral ideas that
are not to be found in the scriptures and we have sometimes denied
others that are plainly there. Indeed, as will be shown later on, the
beatitudes would have wiped us from the face of the earth centuries ago
had not our forefathers devised means of circumventing them without
openly questioning them. Our progress has been made, not as a result
of our moral code, but as a result of our success in dodging its
inevitable blight.

All morality, in fact, is colored and modified by opportunism, even
when its basic principles are held sacred and kept more or less intact.
The thing that is a sin in one age becomes a virtue in the next. The
ancient Persians, who were Zoroastrians, regarded murder and suicide,
under any circumstances, as crimes. The modern Persians, who are
Mohammedans, think that ferocity and foolhardiness are virtues. The
ancient Japanese, to whom the state appeared more important than the
man, threw themselves joyously upon the spears of the state's enemies.
The modern Japanese, who are fledgling individualists, armor their
ships with nickel steel and fight on land from behind bastions of earth
and masonry. And in the same way the moral ideas that have grown out
of Christianity, and even some of its important original doctrines,
are being constantly modified and revised, despite the persistence of
the fundamental notion of self-sacrifice at the bottom of them. In
Dr. Andrew D. White's monumental treatise "On the Warfare of Science
with Theology in Christendom" there are ten thousand proofs of it.
Things that were crimes in the middle ages are quite respectable at
present. Actions that are punishable by excommunication and ostracism
in Catholic Spain today, are sufficient to make a man honorable in
freethinking England. In France, where the church once stood above
the king, it is now stripped of all rights not inherent in the most
inconsequential social club. In Germany it is a penal offense to poke
fun at the head of the state; in the United States it is looked upon
by many as an evidence of independence and patriotism. In some of the
American states a violation of the seventh commandment, in any form,
is a felony; in Maryland, it is, in one form, a mere misdemeanor, and
another form, no crime at all.

"Many lands did I see," says Zarathustra, "and many peoples, and so I
discovered the good and bad of many peoples.... Much that was regarded
as good by one people was held in scorn and contempt by another. I
found many things called bad here and adorned with purple honors
there.... A catalogue of blessings is posted up for every people. Lo!
it is the catalogue of their triumphs--the voice of their will to
power!... Whatever enables them to rule and conquer and dazzle, to the
dismay and envy of their neighbors, is regarded by them as the summit,
the head, the standard of all things.... Verily, men have made for
themselves all their good and bad. Verily they did not find it so: it
did not come to them as a voice from heaven.... It is only through
valuing that there comes value."[1]

To proceed from the concrete to the general, and to risk a repetition,
it is evident that all morality, as Nietzsche pointed out, is nothing
more than an expression of expediency.[2] A thing is called wrong
solely because a definite group of people, at some specific stage of
their career, have found it injurious to them. The fact that they have
discovered grounds for condemning it in some pronunciamento of their
god signifies nothing, for the reason that the god of a people is never
anything more than a reflection of their ideas for the time being. As
Prof. Otto Pfleiderer has shown,[3] Jesus Christ was a product of his
age, mentally and spiritually as well as physically. Had there been
no Jewish theology before him, he could not have sought or obtained
recognition as a messiah, and the doctrines that he expressed--had
he ever expressed them at all--would have fallen upon unheeding and
uncomprehending ears.

Therefore it is plain that the Ten Commandments are no more immortal
and immutable, in the last analysis, than the acts of Parliament.
They have lasted longer, it is true, and they will probably continue
in force for many years, but this permanence is only relative.
Fundamentally they are merely expressions of expedience, like the
rules of some great game, and it is easily conceivable that there may
arise upon the earth, at some future day, a race to whom they will
appear injurious, unreasonable and utterly immoral. "The time may
come, indeed, when we will prefer the _Memorabilia_ of Socrates to the
Bible."[4]

Admitting this, we must admit the inevitable corollary that morality
in the absolute sense has nothing to do with truth, and that it is,
in fact, truth's exact antithesis. Absolute truth necessarily implies
eternal truth. The statement that a man and a woman are unlike was true
on the day the first man and woman walked the earth and it will be true
so long as there are men and women. Such a statement approaches very
near our ideal of an absolute truth. But the theory that humility is
a virtue is not an absolute truth, for while it was undoubtedly true
in ancient Judea, it was not true in ancient Greece and is debatable,
to say the least, in modern Europe and America. The Western Catholic
Church, despite its extraordinarily successful efforts at permanence,
has given us innumerable proofs that laws, in the long run, always turn
upon themselves. The popes were infallible when they held that the
earth was flat and they were infallible when they decided that it was
round--and so we reach a palpable absurdity. Therefore, we may lay it
down as an axiom that morality, in itself, is the enemy of truth, and
that, for at least half of the time, by the mathematical doctrine of
probabilities, it is necessarily untrue.

If this is so, why should any man bother about moral rules and
regulations? Why should any man conform to laws formulated by a people
whose outlook on the universe probably differed diametrically from
his own? Why should any man obey a regulation which is denounced, by
his common-sense, as a hodge-podge of absurdities, and why should he
model his whole life upon ideals invented to serve the temporary needs
of a forgotten race of some past age? These questions Nietzsche asked
himself. His conclusion was a complete rejection of all fixed codes of
morality, and with them of all gods, messiahs, prophets, saints, popes,
bishops, priests, and rulers.

The proper thing for a man to do, he decided, was to formulate his
own morality as he progressed from lower to higher things. He should
reject the old conceptions of good and evil and substitute for them the
human valuations, good and bad. In a word, he should put behind him
the morality invented by some dead race to make its own progress easy
and pleasant, and credited to some man-made god to give it authority,
and put in the place of this a workable personal morality based upon
his own power of distinguishing between the things which benefit him
and the things which injure him. He should (to make the idea clearer)
judge a given action solely by its effect upon his own welfare; his own
desire or will to live; and that of his children after him. All notions
of sin and virtue should be banished from his mind. He should weigh
everything in the scales of individual expedience.

Such a frank wielding of a razor-edged sword in the struggle for
existence is frowned upon by our Jewish slave-morality. We are taught
to believe that the only true happiness lies in self-effacement; that
it is wrong to profit by the misfortune or weakness of another. But
against this Nietzsche brings the undeniable answer that all life, no
matter how much we idealize it, is, at bottom, nothing more or less
than exploitation. The gain of one man is inevitably the loss of some
other man. That the emperor may die of a surfeit the peasant must die
of starvation. Among human beings, as well as among the bacilli in the
hanging drop and the lions in the jungle, there is ever in progress
this ancient struggle for existence. It is waged decently, perhaps, but
it is none the less savage and unmerciful, and the devil always takes
the hindmost.

"Life," says Nietzsche, "is essentially the appropriation, the injury,
the vanquishing of the unadapted and weak. Its object is to obtrude
its own forms and insure its own unobstructed functioning. Even an
organization whose individuals forbear in their dealings with one
another (a healthy aristocracy, for example) must, if it would live
and not die, act hostilely toward all other organizations. It must
endeavor to gain ground, to obtain advantages, to acquire ascendancy.
And this is not because it is _immoral_, but because it lives, and all
life is will to power."[5]

Nietzsche argues from this that it is absurd to put the stigma of evil
upon the mere symptoms of the great struggle. "In itself," he says,
"an act of injury, violation, exploitation or annihilation cannot be
wrong, for life operates, essentially and fundamentally, by injuring,
violating, exploiting and annihilating, and cannot even be conceived
of out of this character. One must admit, indeed, that, from the
highest biological standpoint, conditions under which the so-called
rights of others are recognized must ever be regarded as exceptional
conditions--that is to say, as partial restrictions of the instinctive
power-seeking will-to-live of the individual, made to satisfy the
more powerful will-to-live of the mass. Thus small units of power are
sacrificed to create large units of power. To regard the rights of
others as being inherent in them, and not as mere compromises for the
benefit of the mass-unit, would be to enunciate a principle hostile to
life itself."[6]

Nietzsche holds that the rights of an individual may be divided into
two classes: those things he is able to do despite the opposition of
his fellow men, and those things he is enabled to do by the grace and
permission of his fellow men. The second class of rights may be divided
again into two groups: those granted through fear and foresight, and
those granted as free gifts. But how do fear and foresight operate
to make one man concede rights to another man? It is easy enough to
discern two ways. In the first place, the grantor may fear the risks
of a combat with the grantee, and so give him what he wants without
a struggle. In the second place, the grantor, while confident of
his ability to overcome the grantee, may forbear because he sees in
the struggle a certain diminution of strength on both sides, and in
consequence, an impaired capacity for joining forces in effective
opposition to some hostile third power.

And now for the rights obtained under the second head--by bestowal and
concession. "In this case," says Nietzsche, "one man or race has enough
power, and more than enough, to be able to bestow some of it on another
man or race."[7] The king appoints one subject viceroy of a province,
and so gives him almost regal power, and makes another cup-bearer and
so gives him a perpetual right to bear the royal cup. When the power
of the grantee, through his inefficiency, decreases, the grantor
either restores it to him or takes it away from him altogether. When
the power of the grantee, on the contrary, increases, the grantor, in
alarm, commonly seeks to undermine it and encroach upon it. When the
power of the grantee remains at a level for a considerable time, his
rights become "vested" and he begins to believe that they are inherent
in him--that they constitute a gift from the gods and are beyond the
will and disposal of his fellow men. As Nietzsche points out, this last
happens comparatively seldom. More often, the grantor himself begins
to lose power and so comes into conflict with the grantee, and not
infrequently they exchange places. "National rights," says Nietzsche,
"demonstrate this fact by their constant lapse and regenesis."[8]

Nietzsche believed that a realization of all this would greatly benefit
the human race, by ridding it of some of its most costly delusions. He
held that so long as it sought to make the struggle for existence a
parlor game, with rules laid down by some blundering god--that so long
as it regarded its ideas of morality, its aspirations and its hopes
as notions implanted by the creator in the mind of Father Adam--that
so long as it insisted upon calling things by fanciful names and upon
frowning down all effort to reach the ultimate verities--that just
so long its progress would be fitful and slow. It was morality that
burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the
free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous
imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed
theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting
them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism.

Nietzsche called himself an immoralist. He believed that all progress
depended upon the truth and that the truth could not prevail while
men yet enmeshed themselves in a web of gratuitous and senseless laws
fashioned by their own hands. He was fond of picturing the ideal
immoralist as "a magnificent blond beast"--innocent of "virtue" and
"sin" and knowing only "good" and "bad." Instead of a god to guide
him, with commandments and the fear of hell, this immoralist would
have his own instincts and intelligence. Instead of doing a given
thing because the church called it a virtue or the current moral code
required it, he would do it because he knew that it would benefit him
or his descendants after him. Instead of refraining from a given action
because the church denounced it as a sin and the law as a crime, he
would avoid it only if he were convinced that the action itself, or its
consequences, might work him or his an injury.

Such a man, were he set down in the world today, would bear an
outward resemblance, perhaps, to the most pious and virtuous of his
fellow-citizens, but it is apparent that his life would have more of
truth in it and less of hypocrisy and cant and pretense than theirs.
He would obey the laws of the land frankly and solely because he was
afraid of incurring their penalties, and for no other reason, and he
would not try to delude his neighbors and himself into believing that
he saw anything sacred in them. He would have no need of a god to teach
him the difference between right and wrong and no need of priests to
remind him of this god's teachings. He would look upon the woes and
ills of life as inevitable and necessary results of life's conflict,
and he would make no effort to read into them the wrath of a peevish
and irrational deity at his own or his ancestors' sins. His mind would
be absolutely free of thoughts of sin and hell, and in consequence, he
would be vastly happier than the majority of persons about him. All
in all, he would be a powerful influence for truth in his community,
and as such, would occupy himself with the most noble and sublime
task possible to mere human beings: the overthrow of superstition and
unreasoning faith, with their long train of fears, horrors, doubts,
frauds, injustice and suffering.[9]

Under an ideal government--which Herbert Spencer defines as a
government in which the number of laws has reached an irreducible
minimum--such a man would prosper a great deal more than the
priest-ridden, creed-barnacled masses about him.[10] In a state wherein
communistic society, with its levelling usages and customs, had
ceased to exist, and wherein each individual of the master class was
permitted to live his life as much as possible in accordance with his
own notions of good and bad, such a man would stand forth from the herd
in proportion as his instincts were more nearly healthy and infallible
than the instincts of the herd. Ideal anarchy, in brief, would insure
the success of those men who were wisest mentally and strongest
physically, and the race would make rapid progress.

It is evident that the communistic and socialistic forms of government
at present in fashion in the world oppose such a consummation as often
as they facilitate it. Civilization, as we know it, makes more paupers
than millionaires, and more cripples than Sandows. Its most conspicuous
products, the church and the king, stand unalterably opposed to all
progress. Like the frog of the fable, which essayed to climb out of a
well, it slips back quite as often as it goes ahead.

And for these reasons Nietzsche was an anarchist--in the true meaning
of that much-bespattered word--just as Herbert Spencer and Arthur
Schopenhauer were anarchists before him.


[1] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_" I.

[2] "The word _mos_, from signifying what is customary, has come to
signify what is right." Sir Wm. Markby: "Elements of Law Considered
with Reference to General Principles of Jurisprudence:" pp. 118, 5th
ed., London, 1896.

[3] In his masterly treatise, "Christian Origins," tr. by David A.
Huebsch: New York, 1906.

[4] "_Menschliches allzu Menschliches_" III.

[5] "_Jenseits von Gut und Böse_" § 259.

[6] "_Zur Genealogie der Moral_" II, § 11.

[7] "_Morgenröte,_" § 112.

[8] "_Morgenröte,_" § 112.

[9] "It is my experience," said Thomas H. Huxley, "that, aside from a
few human affections, the only thing that gives lasting and untainted
pleasure in the world, is the pursuit of truth and the destruction of
error." See "The Life and Letters of T. H. Huxley," by Leonard Huxley;
London, 1900.

[10] "Read the suicide tables and see how many despairing men, hope
less of keeping their homes together, pay with their lives the toil
imposed upon them by squanderers of the public money." Helen Mathers
in _P. T. O._, Feb. 9 1907, p. 180. This is one of Tolstoi's chief
arguments against all government.




IV


THE SUPERMAN


No doubt the reader who has followed the argument in the preceding
chapters will have happened, before now, upon the thought that
Nietzsche's chain of reasoning, so far, still has a gap in it. We have
seen how he started by investigating Greek art in the light of the
Schopenhauerean philosophy, how this led him to look into morality, how
he revealed the origin of morality in transitory manifestations of the
will to power, and how he came to the conclusion that it was best for
a man to reject all ready-made moral ideas and to so order his life
that his every action would be undertaken with some notion of making
it subserve his own welfare or that of his children or children's
children. But a gap remains and it may be expressed in the question:
How is a man to define and determine his own welfare and that of the
race after him?

Here, indeed, our dionysian immoralist is confronted by a very serious
problem, and Nietzsche himself well understood its seriousness. Unless
we have in mind some definite ideal of happiness and some definite
goal of progress we had better sing the doxology and dismiss our
congregation. Christianity has such an ideal and such a goal. The one
is a Christ-like life on earth and the other is a place at the right
hand of Jehovah in the hereafter. Mohammedanism, a tinsel form of
Christianity, paints pictures of the same sort. Buddhism holds out the
tempting bait of a race set free from the thrall of earthly desires,
with an eternity of blissful nothingness.[1] The other oriental faiths
lead in the same direction and Schopenhauer, in his philosophy, laid
down the doctrine that humanity would attain perfect happiness only
when it had overcome its instinct of self-preservation--that is to
say, when it had ceased to desire to live. Even Christian Science--that
most grotesque child of credulous faith and incredible denial--offers
us the double ideal of a mortal life entirely free from mortal pain and
a harp in the heavenly band for all eternity.

What had Nietzsche to offer in place of these things? By what standard
was his immoralist to separate the good--or beneficial--things of the
world from the bad--or damaging--things? And what was the goal that the
philosopher had in mind for his immoralist? The answer to the first
question is to be found in Nietzsche's definition of the terms "good"
and "bad." "All that elevates the sense of power, the will to power,
and power itself"--this is how he defined "good." "All that proceeds
from weakness"--this is how he defined "bad." Happiness, he held, is
"the feeling that power increases--that resistance is being overcome."
"I preach not contentedness," he said, "but more power; not peace, but
war; not virtue, but efficiency. The weak and defective must go to the
wall: that is the first principle of the dionysian charity. And we must
help them to go."[2]

To put it more simply, Nietzsche offers the gospel of prudent and
intelligent selfishness, of absolute and utter individualism. "One
must learn," sang Zarathustra, "how to love oneself, with a whole and
hearty love, that one may find life with oneself endurable, and not go
gadding about. This gadding about is familiar: it is called loving
one's neighbor.'"[3] His ideal was an aristocracy which regarded the
proletariat merely as a conglomeration of draft animals made to be
driven, enslaved and exploited. "A good and healthy aristocracy,"
he said, "must acquiesce, with a good conscience, in the sacrifice
of a legion of individuals, who, for its benefit, must be reduced
to slaves and tools. The masses have no right to exist on their own
account: their sole excuse for living lies in their usefulness as a
sort of superstructure or scaffolding, upon which a more select race
of beings may be elevated."[4] Rejecting all permanent rules of good
and evil and all notions of brotherhood, Nietzsche held that the
aristocratic individualist--and it was to the aristocrat only that he
gave, unreservedly, the name of human being--must seek every possible
opportunity to increase and exalt his own sense of efficiency, of
success, of mastery, of power. Whatever tended to impair him, or to
decrease his efficiency, was bad. Whatever tended to increase it--at
no matter what cost to others--was good. There must be a complete
surrender to the law of natural selection--that invariable natural law
which ordains that the fit shall survive and the unfit shall perish.
All growth must occur at the top. The strong must grow stronger, and
that they may do so, they must waste no strength in the vain task of
trying to lift up the weak.

The reader may interrupt here with the question we encountered at the
start: how is the dionysian individualist to know whether a given
action will benefit him or injure him? The answer, of course, lies
in the obvious fact that, in every healthy man, instinct supplies a
very reliable guide, and that, when instinct fails or is uncertain,
experiment must solve the problem. As a general thing, nothing is more
patent than the feeling of power--the sense of efficiency, of capacity,
of mastery. Every man is constantly and unconsciously measuring himself
with his neighbors, and so becoming acutely aware of those things in
which he is their superior. Let two men clash in the stock market and
it becomes instantly apparent that one is richer, or more resourceful
or more cunning than the other. Let two men run after an omnibus and
it becomes instantly apparent that one is swifter than the other. Let
two men come together as rivals in love, war, drinking or holiness,
and one is bound to feel that he has bested the other. Such contests
are infinite in variety and in number, and all life, in fact, is made
up of them. Therefore, it is plain that every man is conscious of his
power, and aware of it when this power is successfully exerted against
some other man. In such exertions, argues Nietzsche, lies happiness,
and so his prescription for happiness consists in unrestrained
yielding to the will to power. That all men worth discussing so yield,
despite the moral demand for humility, is so plain that it scarcely
needs statement. It is the desire to attain and manifest efficiency
and superiority which makes one man explore the wilds of Africa and
another pile up vast wealth and another write books of philosophy and
another submit to pain and mutilation in the prize ring. It is this
yearning which makes men take chances and risk their lives and limbs
for glory. Everybody knows, indeed, that in the absence of such a
primordial and universal emulation the world would stand still and
the race would die. Nietzsche asks nothing more than that the fact be
openly recognized and admitted; that every man yield to the yearning
unashamed, without hypocrisy and without wasteful efforts to feed and
satisfy the yearning of other men at the expense of his own.

It is evident, of course, that the feeling of superiority has a
complement in the feeling of inferiority. Every man, in other words,
sees himself, in respect to some talent possessed in common by himself
and a rival, in one of three ways: he knows that he is superior, he
knows that he is inferior, or he is in doubt. In the first case, says
Nietzsche, the thing for him to do is to make his superiority still
greater by yielding to its stimulation: to make the gap between himself
and his rival wider and wider. In the second case, the thing for him to
do is to try to make the gap smaller: to lift himself up or to pull his
rival down until they are equal or the old disproportion is reversed.
In the third case, it is his duty to plunge into a contest and risk
his all upon the cast of the die. "I do not exhort you to peace,"
says Zarathustra, "but to victory!"[5] If victory comes not, let it
be defeat, death and annihilation--but, in any event, let there be a
fair fight. Without this constant strife--this constant testing--this
constant elimination of the unfit--there can be no progress. "As
the smaller surrenders himself to the greater, so the greater must
surrender himself to the will to power and stake life upon the issue.
It is the mission of the greatest to run risk and danger--to cast dice
with death."[6] Power, in a word, is never infinite: it is always
becoming.

Practically and in plain language, what does all this mean? Simply that
Nietzsche preaches a mighty crusade against all those ethical ideas
which teach a man to sacrifice himself for the theoretical good of his
inferiors. A culture which tends to equalize, he says, is necessarily
a culture which tends to rob the strong and so drag them down, for the
strong cannot give of their strength to the weak without decreasing
their store. There must be an unending effort to widen the gap; there
must be a constant search for advantage, an infinite alertness. The
strong man must rid himself of all idea that it is disgraceful to yield
to his acute and ever present yearning for still more strength. There
must be an abandonment of the old slave-morality and a transvaluation
of moral values. The will to power must be emancipated from the bonds
of that system of ethics which brands it with infamy, and so makes the
one all-powerful instinct of every sentient creature loathsome and
abominable.

It is only the under-dog, he says, that believes in equality. It
is only the groveling and inefficient mob that seeks to reduce all
humanity to one dead level, for it is only the mob that would gain
by such leveling. "'There are no higher men,' says the crowd in the
market place. 'We are all equal; man is man; in the presence of God
we are all equal!' In the presence of God, indeed! But I tell you
that God is dead!" So thunders Zarathustra.[7] That is to say, our
idea of brotherhood is part of the mob-morality of the ancient Jews,
who evolved it out of their own helplessness and credited it to their
god. We have inherited their morality with their god and so we find
it difficult--in the mass--to rid ourselves of their point of view.
Nietzsche himself rejected utterly the Judaic god and he believed that
the great majority of intelligent men of his time were of his mind.
That he was not far wrong in this assumption is evident to everyone.
At the present time, indeed, it is next to impossible to find a sane
man in all the world who believes in the actual existence of the
deity described in the old testament. All theology is now an effort
to explain away this god. Therefore, argues Nietzsche, it is useless
to profess an insincere concurrence in a theistic idea at which our
common sense revolts, and ridiculous to maintain the inviolability of
an ethical scheme grounded upon this idea.

It may be urged here that, even if the god of Judea is dead, the idea
of brotherhood still fives, and that, as a matter of fact, it is an
idea inherent in the nature of man, and one that owes nothing to the
rejected supernaturalism which once fortified and enforced it. That
is to say, it may be argued that the impulse to self-sacrifice and
mutual help is itself an instinct. The answer to this lies in the very
patent fact that it is not. Nothing, indeed, is more apparent than the
essential selfishness of man. In so far as they are able to defy or
evade the moral code without shame or damage, the strong always exploit
the weak. The rich man puts up the price of the necessities of life
and so makes himself richer and the poor poorer. The emperor combats
democracy. The political boss opposes the will of the people for his
own advantage. The inventor patents his inventions and so increases
his relative superiority to the common run of men. The ecclesiastic
leaves a small parish for a larger one--because the pay is better
or "the field offers wider opportunities," _i.e._ gives him a better
chance to "save souls" and so increases his feeling of efficiency. The
philanthropist gives away millions because the giving visualizes and
makes evident to all men his virtue and power. It is ever the same
in this weary old world: every slave would be a master if he could.
Therefore, why deny it? Why make it a crime to do what every man's
instincts prompt him to do? Why call it a sin to do what every man
does, insofar as he can? The man who throws away his money or cripples
himself with drink, or turns away from his opportunities--we call him a
lunatic or a fool. And yet, wherein does he differ from the ideal holy
man of our slave-morality--the holy man who tortures himself, neglects
his body, starves his mind and reduces himself to parasitism, that the
weak, the useless and unfit may have, through his ministrations, some
measure of ease? Such is the argument of the dionysian philosophy. It
is an argument for the actual facts of existence--however unrighteous
and ugly those facts may be.

That the lifting up of the weak, in the long run, is an unprofitable
and useless business is evident on very brief reflection. Philanthropy,
considered largely, is inevitably a failure. Now and then we may
transform an individual pauper or drunkard into a useful, producing
citizen, but this happens very seldom. Nothing is more patent, indeed,
than the fact that charity merely converts the unfit--who, in the
course of nature, would soon die out and so cease to encumber the
earth--into parasites--who live on indefinitely, a nuisance and a
burden to their betters. The "reformed" drunkard always goes back to
his cups: drunkardness, as every physician knows, is as essentially
incurable as congenital insanity. And it is the same with poverty.
We may help a pauper to survive by giving him food and drink, but we
cannot thereby make an efficient man of him--we cannot rid him of the
unfitness which made him a pauper. There are, of course, exceptions
to this, as to other rules, but the validity of the rule itself will
not be questioned by any observant man. It goes unquestioned, indeed,
by those who preach the doctrine of charity the loudest. They know
it would be absurd to argue that helping the unfit is profitable to
the race, and so they fall back, soon or late, upon the argument that
charity is ordained of God and that the impulse to it is implanted
in every decent man. Nietzsche flatly denies this. Charity, he says,
is a man-made idea, with which the gods have nothing to do. Its sole
effect is to maintain the useless at the expense of the strong. In the
mass, the helped can never hope to discharge in full their debt to the
helpers. The result upon the race is thus retrogression.

And now for our second question. What was the goal Nietzsche had in
mind for his immoralist? What was to be the final outcome of his
overturning of all morality? Did he believe the human race would
progress until men became gods and controlled the sun and stars as they
now control the flow of great rivers? Or did he believe that the end
of it all would be annihilation? After the publication of Nietzsche's
earlier books, with their ruthless tearing down of the old morality,
these questions were asked by critics innumerable in all the countries
of Europe. The philosopher was laughed at as a crazy iconoclast who
destroyed without rebuilding. He was called a visionary and a lunatic,
and it was reported and believed that he had no answer: that his
philosophy was doomed to bear itself to the earth, like an arch without
a keystone. But in April, 1883, he began the publication of "_Also
sprach Zarathustra_" and therein his reply was written large.

"I teach you," cries Zarathustra, "the superman! Man is something that
shall be surpassed. What, to man, is the ape? A joke or a shame. Man
shall be the same to the superman: a joke or shame.... Man is a bridge
connecting ape and superman.... The superman will be the final flower
and ultimate expression of the earth. I conjure you to be faithful to
the earth ... to cease looking beyond the stars for your hopes and
rewards. You must sacrifice yourself to the earth that one day it may
bring forth the superman."[8]

Here we hearken unto the materialist, the empiricist, the monist _par
excellence._ And herein we perceive dimly the outlines of the superman.
He will be rid of all delusions that hamper and oppress the will to
power. He will be perfect in body and perfect in mind. He will know
everything worth knowing and have strength and skill and cunning to
defend himself against any conceivable foe. Because the prospect of
victory will feed his will to power he will delight in combat, and
his increasing capacity for combat will decrease his sensitiveness
to pain. Conscious of his efficiency, he will be happy; having no
illusions regarding a heaven and a hell, he will be content. He will
see life as something pleasant--something to be faced gladly and with
a laugh. He will say "yes" alike to its pleasures and to its ills. Rid
of the notion that there is anything filthy in living--that the flesh
is abominable[9] and life an affliction[10]--he will grow better and
better fitted to meet the conditions of actual existence. He will be
scornful, merciless and supremely fit. He will be set free from man's
fear of gods and of laws, just as man has been set free from the ape's
fear of lions and of open places.

To put it simply, the superman's thesis will be this: that he has been
put into the world without his consent, that he must live in the world,
that he owes nothing to the other people there, and that he knows
nothing whatever of existence beyond the grave. Therefore, it will be
his effort to attain the highest possible measure of satisfaction for
the only unmistakable and genuinely healthy instinct within him: the
yearning to live--to attain power--to meet and overcome the influences
which would weaken or destroy him. "Keep yourselves up, my brethren,"
cautions Zarathustra, "learn to keep yourselves up! The sea is stormy
and many seek to keep afloat by your aid. The sea is stormy and all are
overboard. Well, cheer up and save yourselves, ye old seamen!... What
is your fatherland? The land wherein your children will dwell.... Thus
does your love to these remote ones speak: 'Disregard your neighbors!
Man is something to be surpassed!' Surpass yourself at the expense
of your neighbor. What you cannot seize, let no man _give_ you....
Let him who can command, obey!"[11] The idea, by this time, should be
plain. The superman, in the struggle for existence, asks and gives
no quarter. He believes that it is the destiny of sentient beings to
progress upward, and he is willing to sacrifice himself that his race
may do so. But his sacrifice must benefit, not his neighbor--not the
man who should and must look out for himself--but the generations yet
unborn.

It must be borne in mind that the superman will make a broad
distinction between instinct and passion--that he will not mistake the
complex thing we call love, with its costly and constant hurricanes of
emotion, for the instinct of reproduction--that he will not mistake
mere anger for war--that he will not mistake patriotism, with all its
absurdities and illusions, for the homing instinct. The superman, in
brief, will know how to renounce as well as how to possess, but his
renunciation will be the child, not of faith or of charity, but of
expediency. "Will nothing beyond your capacity," says Zarathustra.
"Demand nothing of yourself that is beyond achievement!... The higher
a thing is, the less often does it succeed. Be of good cheer! What
matter! Learn to laugh at yourselves!... Suppose you have failed? Has
not the future gained by your failure?"[12] The superman, as Nietzsche
was fond of putting it, must play at dice with death. He must have
ever in mind no other goal but the good of the generations after him.
He must be willing to battle with his fellows, as with illusions, that
those who came after may not be afflicted by these enemies. He must be
supremely unmoral and unscrupulous. His must be the gospel of eternal
defiance.

Nietzsche, it will be observed, was unable to give any very definite
picture of this proud, heaven-kissing superman. It is only in
Zarathustra's preachments to "the higher man," a sort of bridge between
man and superman, that we may discern the philosophy of the latter. On
one occasion Nietzsche penned a passage which seemed to compare the
superman to "the great blond beasts" which ranged Europe in the days
of the mammoth, and from this fact many commentators have drawn the
conclusion that he had in mind a mere two-legged brute, with none of
the higher traits that we now speak of as distinctly human. But, as a
matter of fact, he harbored no such idea. In another place, wherein he
speaks of three metamorphoses of the race, under the allegorical names
of the camel, the lion and the child, he makes this plain. The camel,
a hopeless beast of burden, is man. But when the camel goes into the
solitary desert, it throws off its burden and becomes a lion. That is
to say, the heavy and hampering load of artificial dead-weight called
morality is cast aside and the instinct to live--or, as Nietzsche
insists upon regarding it, the will to power--is given free rein.
The lion is the "higher man"--the intermediate stage between man and
superman. The latter appears neither as camel nor lion, but as a little
child. He knows a little child's peace. He has a little child's calm.
Like a babe _in utero_ he is ideally adapted to his environment.

Zarathustra sees man "like a camel kneeling down to be heavy laden."
What are his burdens? One is "to humiliate oneself." Another is
"to love those who despise us." In the desert comes the first
metamorphosis, and the "thou shalt" of the camel becomes the "I will"
of the lion. And what is the mission of the lion? "To create for
itself freedom for new creating." After the lion comes the child. It
is "innocence and oblivion, a new starting, a play, a wheel rolling by
itself, a prime motor, a holy asserting." The thought here is cast in
the heightened language of mystic poetry, but its meaning, I take it,
is not lost.[13]

Nietzsche, even more than Schopenhauer, recognized the fact that great
mental progress--in the sense that mental progress means an increased
capacity for grappling with the conditions of existence--necessarily
has to depend upon physical efficiency. In exceptional cases a great
mind may inhabit a diseased body, but it is obvious that this is not
the rule. A nation in which the average man had but one hand and the
duration of life was but 20 years could not hope to cope with even the
weakest nation of modern Europe. So it is plain that the first step in
the improvement of the race must be the improvement of the body. Jesus
Christ gave expression to this need by healing the sick, and the chief
end and aim of all modern science is that of making life more and more
bearable. Every labor-saving machine ever invented by man has no other
purpose than that of saving bodily wear and tear. Every religion aims
to rescue man from the racking fear of hell and the strain of trying
to solve the great problems of existence for himself. Every scheme of
government that we know is, at bottom, a mere device for protecting
human beings from injury and death.

Thus it will be seen that Nietzsche's program of progress does not
differ from other programs quite so much as, at first sight, it may
seem to do. He laid down the principle that, before anything else could
be accomplished, we must have first looked to the human machine. As
we have seen, the intellect is a mere symptom of the will to live.
Therefore whatever removes obstacles to the free exercise of this will
to live, necessarily promotes and increases intelligence. A race that
was never incapacitated by illness would be better fitted than any
other race for any conceivable intellectual pursuit: from making money
to conjugating Greek verbs. Nietzsche merely states this obvious fact
in an unaccustomed form.

His superman is to give his will to live--or will to power, as you
please--perfect freedom. As a result, those individuals in whom this
instinct most accurately meets the conditions of life on earth will
survive, and in their offspring, by natural laws, the instinct itself
will become more and more accurate. That is to say, there will appear
in future generations individuals in whom this instinct will tend more
and more to order the performance of acts of positive benefit and to
forbid the performance of acts likely to result in injury. This injury,
it is plain, may take the form of unsatisfied wants as well as of
broken skulls. Therefore, the man--or superman--in whom the instinct
reaches perfection will unconsciously steer clear of all the things
which harass and batter mankind today--exhausting self-denials as well
as exhausting passions. Whatever seems likely to benefit him, he will
do; whatever seems likely to injure him he will avoid. When he is in
doubt, he will dare--and accept defeat or victory with equal calm.
His attitude, in brief, will be that of a being who faces life as he
finds it, defiantly and unafraid--who knows how to fight and how to
forbear--who sees things as they actually are, and not as they might or
should be, and so wastes no energy yearning for the moon or in butting
his head against stone walls. "This new table, O my brethren, I put
over you: _Be hard!_"[14]

Such was the goal that Nietzsche held before the human race. Other
philosophers before him had attempted the same thing. Schopenhauer had
put forward his idea of a race that had found happiness in putting
away its desire to live. Comte had seen a vision of a race whose every
member sought the good of all. The humanitarians of all countries
had drawn pictures of Utopias peopled by beings who had outgrown all
human instincts--who had outgrown the _one_ fundamental, unquenchable
and eternal instinct of every living thing: the desire to conquer, to
live, to remain alive. Nietzsche cast out all these fine ideals as
essentially impossible. Man was of the earth, earthy, and his heavens
and hells were creatures of his own vaporings. Only after he had ceased
dreaming of them and thrown off his crushing burden of transcendental
morality--only thus and then could he hope to rise out of the slough of
despond in which he wallowed.


[1] "Nirvana is a cessation of striving for individual existence"--that
is, after death. See "Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology," vol.
II, pp. 178; New York, 1902.

[2] "Der Antichrist," § 2.

[3] "_Also sprach Zarathustra,_" III.

[4] "_Jenseits von Gut und Böse,_" § 258.

[5] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_," I.

[6] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_," II.

[7] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_," IV.

[8] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_," I.

[9] Galatians V, 19, 20, 21.

[10] Job V, 7; XIV, 1; Ecclesiastes I, 1.

[11] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_," I.

[12] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_," IV.

[13] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_," I.

[14] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_," III.




V


ETERNAL RECURRENCE


In the superman Nietzsche showed the world a conceivable and possible
goal for all human effort. But there still remained a problem and it
was this: When the superman at last appears on earth, what then? Will
there be another super-superman to follow and a super-supersuperman
after that? In the end, will man become the equal of the creator of the
universe, whoever or whatever He may be? Or will a period of decline
come after, with a return down the long line, through the superman to
man again, and then on to the anthropoid ape, to the lower mammals, to
the asexual cell, and, finally, to mere inert matter, gas, ether and
empty space?

Nietzsche answered these questions by offering the theory that the
universe moves in regular cycles and that all which is now happening
on earth, and in all the stars, to the uttermost, will be repeated,
again and again, throughout eternity. In other words, he dreamed of a
cosmic year, corresponding, in some fashion, to the terrestrial year.
Man, who has sprung from the elements, will rise into superman, and
perhaps infinitely beyond, and then, in the end, by catastrophe or slow
decline, he will be resolved into the primary elements again, and the
whole process will begin anew.

This notion, it must be admitted, was not original with Nietzsche and
it would have been better for his philosophy and for his repute as an
intelligent thinker had he never sought to elucidate it. In his early
essay on history he first mentioned it and there he credited it to its
probable inventors--the Pythagoreans.[1] It was their belief that,
whenever the heavenly bodies all returned to certain fixed relative
positions, the whole history of the universe began anew. The idea
seemed to fascinate Nietzsche, in whom, despite his worship of the
actual, there was an ever-evident strain of mysticism, and he referred
to it often in his later books. The pure horror of it--of the notion
that all the world's suffering would have to be repeated again and
again, that men would have to die over and over again for all infinity,
that there was no stopping place or final goal--the horror of all this
appealed powerfully to his imagination. Frau Andreas-Salomé tells us
that he "spoke of it only in a low voice and with every sign of the
profoundest emotion" and there is reason to believe that, at one time,
he thought there might be some confirmation of it in the atomic theory,
and that his desire to go to Vienna to study the natural sciences
was prompted by a wish to investigate this notion. Finally he became
convinced that there was no ground for such a belief in any of the
known facts of science, and after that, we are told, his shuddering
horror left him.

It was then possible for him to deal with the doctrine of eternal
recurrence as a mere philosophical speculation, without the
uncomfortable reality of a demonstrated scientific fact, and thereafter
he spent much time considering it. In "_Also sprach Zarathustra_" he
puts it into the brain of his prophet-hero, and shows how it well-nigh
drove the latter mad.

"I will come back," muses Zarathustra, "with this sun, with this earth,
with this eagle, with this serpent--_not_ for a new life or a better
life, but to the same life I am now leading. I will come back unto this
same old life, in the greatest things and in the smallest, in order to
teach once more the eternal recurrence of all things."[2]

In the end, Nietzsche turned this fantastic idea into a device for
exalting his superman. The superman is one who realizes that all of
his struggles will be in vain, and that, in future cycles, he will
have to go through them over and over again. Yet he has attained such
a superhuman immunity to all emotion--to all ideas of pleasure and
pain--that the prospect does not daunt him. Despite its horror, he
faces it unafraid. It is all a part of life, and in consequence it is
good. He has learned to agree to everything that exists--even to the
ghastly necessity for living again and again. In a word, he does not
fear an endless series of lives, because life, to him, has lost all the
terrors which a merely human man sees in it.

"Let us not only endure the inevitable," says Nietzsche, "and still
less hide it from ourselves: _let us love it!_"

As Vernon Lee (Miss Violet Paget)[3] has pointed out, this idea is
scarcely to be distinguished from the fundamental tenet of stoicism.
Miss Paget also says that it bears a close family resemblance to that
denial of pain which forms the basis of Christian Science, but this is
not true, for a vast difference exists between a mere denial of pain
and a willingness to admit it, face it, and triumph over it. But the
notion appears, in endless guises, in many philosophies and Goethe
voiced it, after a fashion, in his maxim, "_Entbehren sollst du_" ("Man
must do without"). The idea of eternal recurrence gives point, again,
to a familiar anecdote. This concerns a joker who goes to an inn, eats
his fill and then says to the innkeeper: "You and I will be here again
in a million years: let me pay you then." "Very well," replies the
quick-witted innkeeper, "but first pay me for the beefsteak you ate the
last time you were here--a million years ago."

Despite Nietzsche's conclusion that the known facts of existence do
not bear it out, and the essential impossibility of discussing it to
profit, the doctrine of eternal recurrence is by no means unthinkable.
The celestial cycle put forward, as an hypothesis, by modern
astronomy--the progression, that is, from gas to molten fluid, from
fluid to solid, and from solid, by catastrophe, back to gas again--is
easily conceivable, and it is easily conceivable, too, that the earth,
which has passed through an uninhabitable state into a habitable state,
may one day become uninhabitable again, and so keep seesawing back and
forth through all eternity.

But what will be the effect of eternal recurrence upon the superman?
The tragedy of it, as we have seen, will merely serve to make him
heroic. He will defy the universe and say "yes" to life. Putting aside
all thought of conscious existence beyond the grave, he will seek to
live as nearly as possible in exact accordance with those laws laid
down for the evolution of sentient beings on earth when the cosmos was
first set spinning. But how will he know when he has attained this
end? How will he avoid going mad with doubts about his own knowledge?
Nietzsche gave much thought, first and last, to this epistemological
problem, and at different times he leaned toward different schools,
but his writing, taken as a whole, indicates that the fruit of his
meditations was a thorough-going empiricism. The superman, indeed, is
an empiricist who differs from Bacon only in the infinitely greater
range of his observation and experiment. He learns by bitter experience
and he generalizes from this knowledge. An utter and unquestioning
materialist, he knows nothing of mind except as a function of body.
To him speculation seems vain and foolish: his concern is ever with
imminent affairs. That is to say, he believes a thing to be true when
his eyes, his ears, his nose and his hands tell him it is true. And in
this he will be at one with all those men who are admittedly above the
mass today. Reject empiricism and you reject at one stroke, the whole
sum of human knowledge.

When a man stubs his toe, for example, the facts that the injured
member swells and that it hurts most frightfully appear to him as
absolute certainties. If we deny that he actually knows these things
and maintain that the spectacle of the swelling and the sensation of
pain are mere creatures of his mind, we cast adrift from all order and
common-sense in the universe and go sailing upon a stormy sea of crazy
metaphysics and senseless contradictions. There are many things that
we do not know, and in the nature of things, never can know. We do not
know _why_ phosphorus has a tendency to combine with oxygen, but the
fact that it _has_ we _do_ know--and if we try to deny we _do_ know it,
we must deny that we are sentient beings, and in consequence, must
regard life and the universe as mere illusions. No man with a sound
mind makes any such denial. The things about us are real, just as our
feeling that we are alive is real.[4]

From this it must be plain that the superman will have the same guides
that we have, viz.: his instincts and senses. But in him they will be
more accurate and more acute than in us, because the whole tendency
of his scheme of things will be to fortify and develop them.[5] If
any race of Europe devoted a century to exercising its right arms,
its descendants, in the century following, would have right arms like
piston-rods. In the same way, the superman, by subordinating everything
else to his instinct to live, will make it evolve into something very
accurate and efficient. His whole concern, in brief, will be to live
as long as possible and so to avoid as much as possible all of those
things which shorten life--by injuring the body from without or by
using up energy within. As a result he will cease all effort to learn
_why_ the world exists and will devote himself to acquiring knowledge
_how_ it exists. This knowledge _how_ will be within his capacity even
more than it is within our capacity today. Our senses, as we have
seen, have given us absolute knowledge that stubbing the toe results
in swelling and pain. The superman's developed senses will give him
absolute knowledge about everything that exists on earth. He will know
exactly _how_ a tubercle bacillus attacks the lung tissue, he will know
exactly _how_ the blood fights the bacillus, and he will know exactly
_how_ to interfere in this battle in such a manner that the blood shall
be invariably victorious. In a word, he will be the possessor of exact
and complete knowledge regarding the working of all the benign and
malignant forces in the world about him, but he will not bother himself
about insoluble problems. He will waste no time speculating as to _why_
tubercle bacilli were sent into the world: his instinct to live will be
satisfied by his success in stamping them out.

The ideal superman then is merely a man in whom instinct works without
interference--a man who feels that it is right to live and that the
only knowledge worth while is that which makes life longer and more
bearable. The superman's instinct for life is so strong that its mere
exercise satisfies him, and so makes him happy. He doesn't bother
about the unknown void beyond the grave: it is sufficient for him to
know that he is alive and that being alive is pleasant. He is, in the
highest sense, a utilitarian, and he believes to the letter in Auguste
Comte's[6] dictum that the only thing living beings can ever hope to
accomplish on earth is to adapt themselves perfectly to the natural
forces around them--to the winds and the rain, the hills and the sea,
the thunderbolt and the germ of disease.

"I am a dionysian!" cries Nietzsche. "I am an immoralist!" He means
simply that his ideal is a being capable of facing the horrors of life
unafraid, of meeting great enemies and slaying them, of gazing down
upon the earth in pride and scorn, of making his own way and bearing
his own burdens. In the profane folk-philosophy of every healthy and
vigorous people, we find some trace of this dionysian idea. "Let us so
live day by day," says a distinguished American statesman, "that we can
look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell!" We get a subtle
sort of joy out of this saying because it voices our racial advance
toward individualism and away from servility and oppression. We believe
in freedom, in toleration, in moral anarchy. We have put this notion
into innumerable homely forms.

Things have come to a hell of a pass
When a man can't wallop his own jackass!

So we phrase it. The superman, did he stalk the earth, would say the
same thing.


[1] Pythagoras (B.C. 570?-500?) was a Greek who brought the doctrine of
the transmigration of souls from Asia Minor to Greece. In Magna Graecia
he founded a mystical brotherhood, half political party and half school
of philosophy. It survived him for many years and its members revered
him as the sage of sages. He was a bitter foe to democracy and took
part in wars against its spread.

[2] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_," III.

[3] _North American Review_, Dec., 1904.

[4] _Vide_ the chapter on "Truth."

[5] It is very evident, I take it, that the principal function of
all science is the widening of our perceptions. The chief argument
for idealism used to be the axiom that our power of perception was
necessarily limited and that it would be limited forever. This may
be true still, but it is now apparent that these limits are being
indefinitely extended, and may be extended, in future, almost
infinitely. A thousand years ago, if any one had laid down the
thesis that malaria was caused by minute animals, he would have been
dismissed as a lunatic, because it was evident that no one could see
these animals, and it was evident, too--that is to say, the scientists
of that time held it to be evident--that this inability to see them
would never be removed, because the human eye would always remain
substantially as it was. But now we know that the microscope may
increase the eye's power of perception a thousandfold. When we consider
the fact that the spectroscope has enabled us to make a chemical
analysis of the sun, that the telephone has enabled us to hear 2,000
miles and that the x-rays have enabled us to see through flesh and
bone, we must admit without reservation, that our power of perception,
at some future day, may be infinite. And if we admit this we must admit
the essential possibility of the superman.

[6] "_Cours de philosophie positive_," tr. by Helen Martineau; London,
1853.




VI


CHRISTIANITY


Nietzsche's astonishingly keen and fearless criticism of Christianity
has probably sent forth wider ripples than any other stone he ever
heaved into the pool of philistine contentment. He opened his attack in
"_Menschliches allzu Menschliches_," the first book of his maturity,
and he was still at it, in full fuming and fury, in "_Der Antichrist_,"
the last thing he was destined to write. The closing chapter of "_Der
Antichrist_"--his swan song--contains his famous phillipic, beginning
"I condemn." It recalls Zola's "_j'accuse_" letter in the Dreyfus case,
but it is infinitely more sweeping and infinitely more uproarious and
daring.

"I condemn Christianity," it begins. "I bring against it the most
terrible of accusations that ever an accuser put into words. It is
to me the greatest of all imaginable corruptions.... It has left
nothing untouched by its depravity. It has made a worthlessness out
of every value, a lie out of every truth, a sin out of everything
straightforward, healthy and honest. Let anyone dare to speak to me of
its humanitarian blessings! To do away with pain and woe is contrary
to its principles. It lives by pain and woe: it has created pain and
woe in order to perpetuate itself. It invented the idea of original
sin.[1] It invented 'the equality of souls before God'--that cover
for all the rancour of the useless and base.... It has bred the art
of self-violation--repugnance and contempt for all good and cleanly
instincts.... Parasitism is its praxis. It combats all good red-blood,
all love and all hope for life, with its anæmic ideal of holiness. It
sets up 'the other world' as a negation of every reality. The cross is
the rallying post for a conspiracy against health, beauty, well-being,
courage, intellect, benevolence--against life itself....

"This eternal accusation I shall write upon all walls: I call
Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity,...
for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean,
mean! I call it the one immortal shame and blemish upon the human
race!"[2]

So much for the philosopher's vociferous hurrah at the close of his
argument. In the argument itself it is apparent that his indictment of
Christianity contains two chief counts. The first is the allegation
that it is essentially untrue and unreasonable, and the second is
the theory that it is degrading. The first of these counts is not
unfamiliar to the students of religious history. It was first voiced by
that high priest who "rent his clothes" and cried "What need have we of
any further witnesses? Ye have heard the blasphemy."[3] It was voiced
again by the Romans who threw converts to the lions, and after the long
silence of the middle ages, it was piped forth again by Voltaire, Hume,
the encyclopedists and Paine. After the philosophers and scientists
who culminated in Darwin had rescued reason for all time from the
transcendental nonsense of the cobweb-spinners and metaphysicians,
Huxley came to the front with his terrific heavy artillery and those
who still maintained that Christianity was historically true--Gladstone
and the rest of the forlorn hope--were mowed down. David Strauss,
Lessing, Eichhorn, Michaelis, Bauer, Meyer, Ritschl,[4] Pfleiderer and
a host of others joined in the chorus and in Nietzsche's early manhood
the battle was practically won. By 1880 no reasonable man actually
believed that there were devils in the swine, and it was already
possible to deny the physical resurrection and still maintain a place
in respectable society. Today a literal faith in the gospel narrative
is confined to ecclesiastical reactionaries, pious old ladies and men
about to be hanged.

Therefore, Nietzsche did not spend much time examining the historical
credibility of Christianity. He did not try to prove, like Huxley,
that the witnesses to the resurrection were superstitious peasants and
hysterical women, nor did he seek to show, like Huxley again, that
Christ might have been taken down from the cross before he was dead.
He was intensely interested in all such inquiries, but he saw that,
in the last analysis, they left a multitude of problems unsolved. The
solution of these unsolved problems was the task that he took unto
himself. Tunneling down, in his characteristic way, into the very
foundations of the faith, he endeavored to prove that it was based upon
contradictions and absurdities; that its dogmas were illogical and its
precepts unworkable; and that its cardinal principles presupposed
the acceptance of propositions which, to the normal human mind, were
essentially unthinkable. This tunneling occupied much of Nietzsche's
energy in "_Menschliches allzu Menschliches_," and he returned to
it again and again, in all of the other books that preceded "_Der
Antichrist_." His method of working may be best exhibited by a few
concrete examples.

Prayer, for instance, is an exceedingly important feature of Christian
worship and any form of worship in which it had no place would be
necessarily unchristian.[5] But upon what theory is prayer based?
Examining the matter from all sides you will have to conclude that it
is reasonable only upon two assumptions: first, that it is possible to
change the infallible will and opinion of the deity, and secondly, that
the petitioner is capable of judging what he needs. Now, Christianity
maintains, as one of its main dogmas, that the deity is omniscient
and all-wise,[6] and, as another fundamental doctrine, that human
beings are absolutely unable to solve their problems without heavenly
aid[7] _i.e._ that the deity necessarily knows what is best for any
given man better than that man can ever hope to know it himself.
Therefore, Christianity, in ordaining prayer, orders, as a condition of
inclusion in its communion, an act which it holds to be useless. This
contradiction, argues Nietzsche, cannot be explained away in terms
comprehensible to the human intelligence.

Again Christianity holds that man is a mere creature of the deity's
will, and yet insists that the individual be judged and punished for
his acts. In other words, it tries to carry free will on one shoulder
and determinism on the other, and its doctors and sages have themselves
shown that they recognize the absurdity of this by their constant, but
futile efforts to decide which of the two shall be abandoned. This
contradiction is a legacy from Judaism, and Mohammedanism suffers
from it, too. Those sects which have sought to remove it by an entire
acceptance of determinism--under the name of predestination, fatalism,
or what not--have become bogged in hopeless morasses of unreason and
dogmatism. It is a cardinal doctrine of Presbyterianism, for instance,
that "by the decree of God, for the manifestation of his glory, some
men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life and others
foreordained to everlasting death ... without any foresight of faith
or good works, or perseverance in either of them, or any other thing
in the creature, as conditions...."[8] In other words, no matter
how faithfully one man tries to follow in the footsteps of Christ,
he may go to hell, and no matter how impiously another sins, he may
be foreordained for heaven. That such a belief makes all religion,
faith and morality absurd is apparent. That it is, at bottom, utterly
unthinkable to a reasoning being is also plain.

Nietzsche devoted a great deal of time during his first period of
activity to similar examinations of Christian ideas and he did a great
deal to supplement the historical investigations of those English and
German savants whose ruthless exposure of fictions and frauds gave
birth to what we now call the higher criticism. But his chief service
was neither in the field of historical criticism nor in that of the
criticism of dogmas. Toward the end of his life he left the business of
examining biblical sources to the archeologists and historians, whose
equipment for the task was necessarily greater than his own, and the
business of reducing Christian logic to contradiction and absurdity to
the logicians. Thereafter, his own work took him a step further down
and in the end he got to the very bottom of the subject. The answer of
the theologians had been that, even if you denied the miracles, the
gospels, the divinity of Christ and his very existence as an actual
man, you would have to admit that Christianity itself was sufficient
excuse for its own existence; that it had made the world better and
that it provided a workable scheme of life by which men could live and
die and rise to higher things. This answer, for awhile, staggered the
agnostics and Huxley himself evidently came near being convinced that
it was beyond rebuttal.[9] But it only made Nietzsche spring into the
arena more confident than ever. "Very well," he said, "we will argue it
out. You say that Christianity has made the world better? I say that it
has made it worse! You say that it is comforting and uplifting? I say
that it is cruel and degrading! You say that it is the best religion
mankind has ever invented? I say it is the most dangerous!"

Having thus thrown down the gage of battle, Nietzsche proceeded to
fight like a Tartar, and it is but common fairness to say that,
for a good while, he bore the weight of his opponents' onslaught
almost unaided. The world was willing enough to abandon its belief
in Christian supernaturalism and as far back as the early 80's the
dignitaries of the Church of England--to employ a blunt but expressive
metaphor--had begun to get in out of the wet. But the pietists still
argued that Christianity remained the fairest flower of civilization
and that it met a real and ever-present human want and made mankind
better. To deny this took courage of a decidedly unusual sort--courage
that was willing to face, not only ecclesiastical anathema and
denunciation, but also the almost automatic opposition of every
so-called respectable man. But Nietzsche, whatever his deficiencies
otherwise, certainly was not lacking in assurance, and so, when he
came to write "_Der Antichrist_" he made his denial thunderous and
uncompromising beyond expression. No medieval bishop ever pronounced
more appalling curses. No backwoods evangelist ever laid down the law
with more violent eloquence. The book is the shortest he ever wrote,
but it is by long odds the most compelling. Beginning _allegro_, it
proceeds from _forte_, by an uninterrupted _crescendo_ to _allegro con
moltissimo molto fortissimo_. The sentences run into mazes of italics,
dashes and asterisks. It is German that one cannot read aloud without
roaring and waving one's arm.

Christianity, says Nietzsche, is the most dangerous system of
slave-morality the world has ever known. "It has waged a deadly
war against the highest type of man. It has put a ban on all his
fundamental instincts. It has distilled evil out of these instincts.
It makes the strong and efficient man its typical outcast man. It has
taken the part of the weak and the low; it has made an ideal out of
its antagonism to the very instincts which tend to preserve life and
well-being.... It has taught men to regard their highest impulses as
sinful--as temptations."[10] In a word, it tends to rob mankind of
all those qualities which fit any living organism to survive in the
struggle for existence.

As we shall see later on, civilization obscures and even opposes this
struggle for existence, but it is in progress all the same, at all
times and under all conditions. Every one knows, for instance, that
one-third of the human beings born into the world every year die before
they are five years old. The reason for this lies in the fact that they
are, in some way or other, less fitted to meet the conditions of life
on earth than the other two-thirds. The germ of cholera infantum is
an enemy to the human race, and so long as it continues to exist upon
earth it will devote all of its activity to attacking human infants
and seeking to destroy them. It happens that some babies recover from
cholera infantum, while others die of it. This is merely another
way of saying that the former, having been born with a capacity for
resisting the attack of the germ, or having been given the capacity
artificially, are better fitted to survive, and that the latter, being
incapable of making this resistance, are unfit.

All life upon earth is nothing more than a battle with the enemies
of life. A germ is such an enemy, cold is such an enemy, lack of
food is such an enemy, and others that may be mentioned are lack of
water, ignorance of natural laws, armed foes and deficient physical
strength. The man who is able to get all of the food he wants, and
so can nourish his body until it becomes strong enough to combat the
germs of disease; who gets enough to drink, who has shelter from the
elements, who has devised means for protecting himself against the
desires of other men--who yearn, perhaps, who take for themselves some
of the things that he has acquired--such a man, it is obvious, is far
better fitted to live than a man who has none of these things. He is
far better fitted to survive, in a purely physical sense, because his
body is nourished and protected, and he is far better fitted to attain
happiness, because most of his powerful wants are satisfied.

Nietzsche maintains that Christianity urges a man to make no such
efforts to insure his personal survival in the struggle for existence.
The beatitudes require, he says, that, instead of trying to do so, the
Christian shall devote his energies to helping others and shall give
no thought to himself. Instead of exalting himself as much as possible
above the common herd and thus raising his chances of surviving, and
those of his children, above those of the average man, he is required
to lift up this average man. Now, it is plain that every time he
lifts up some one else, he must, at the same time, decrease his own
store, because his own store is the only stock from which he can draw.
Therefore, the tendency of the Christian philosophy of humility is to
make men voluntarily throw away their own chances of surviving, which
means their own sense of efficiency, which means their own "feeling of
increasing power," which means their own happiness. As a substitute for
this natural happiness, Christianity offers the happiness derived from
the belief that the deity will help those who make the sacrifice and so
restore them to their old superiority. This belief, as Nietzsche shows,
is no more borne out by known facts than the old belief in witches. It
is, in fact, proved to be an utter absurdity by all human experience.

"I call an animal, a species, an individual, depraved," he says,
"when it loses its instincts, when it selects, when it _prefers_ what
is injurious to it.... Life itself is an instinct for growth, for
continuance, for accumulation of forces, for _power:_ where the will
to power is wanting there is decline."[11] Christianity, he says,
squarely opposes this will to power in the Golden Rule, the cornerstone
of the faith. The man who confines his efforts to attain superiority
over his fellow men to those acts which he would be willing to have
them do toward him, obviously abandons all such efforts entirely.
To put it in another form, a man can't make himself superior to the
race in general without making every other man in the world, to that
extent, his inferior. Now, if he follows the Golden Rule, he must
necessarily abandon all efforts to make himself superior, because if
he didn't he would be suffering all the time from the pain of seeing
other men--whose standpoint the Rule requires him to assume--grow
inferior. Thus his activity is restricted to one of two things:
standing perfectly still or deliberately making himself inferior. The
first is impossible, but Nietzsche shows that the latter is not, and
that, in point of fact, it is but another way of describing the act
of sympathy--one of the things ordered by the fundamental dogma of
Christianity.

Sympathy, says Nietzsche, consists merely of a strong man giving up
some of his strength to a weak man. The strong man, it is evident, is
debilitated thereby, while the weak man, very often, is strengthened
but little. If you go to a hanging and sympathize with the condemned,
it is plain that your mental distress, without helping that gentleman,
weakens, to a perceptible degree, your own mind and body, just as
all other powerful emotions weaken them, by consuming energy, and so
you are handicapped in the struggle for life to the extent of this
weakness. You may get a practical proof of it an hour later by being
overcome and killed by a foot-pad whom you might have been able to
conquer, had you been feeling perfectly well, or by losing money to
some financial rival for whom, under normal conditions, you would have
been a match; and then again you may get no immediate or tangible
proof of it at all. But your organism will have been weakened to some
measurable extent, all the same, and at some time--perhaps on your
death bed--this minute drain will make itself evident, though, of
course, you may never know it.

"Sympathy," says Nietzsche, "stands in direct antithesis to the tonic
passions which elevate the energy of human beings and increase their
feeling of efficiency and power. It is a depressant. One loses force
by sympathizing and any loss of force which has been caused by other
means--personal suffering, for example--is increased and multiplied
by sympathy. Suffering itself becomes contagious through sympathy and
under certain circumstances it may lead to a total loss of life. If
a proof of that is desired, consider the case of the Nazarene, whose
sympathy for his fellow men brought him, in the end, to the cross.

"Again, sympathy thwarts the law of development, of evolution, of the
survival of the fittest. It preserves what is ripe for extinction, it
works in favor of life's condemned ones, it gives to life itself a
gloomy aspect by the number of the ill-constituted it _maintains_ in
life.... It is both a multiplier of misery and a conservator of misery.
It is the principal tool for the advancement of decadence. It leads to
nothingness, to the negation of all those instincts which are at the
basis of life.... But one does not say 'nothingness;' one says instead
'the other world' or 'the better life.'... This innocent rhetoric,
out of the domain of religio-moral fantasy, becomes far from innocent
when one realizes what tendency it conceals: the tendency _hostile to
life_."[12]

The foregoing makes it patent that Nietzsche was a thorough-going and
uncompromising biological monist. That is to say, he believed that man,
while superior to all other animals because of his greater development,
was, after all, merely an animal, like the rest of them; that the
struggle for existence went on among human beings exactly as it went
on among the lions in the jungle and the protozoa in the sea ooze, and
that the law of natural selection ruled all of animated nature--mind
and matter--alike. Indeed, it is but just to credit him with being the
pioneer among modern monists of this school, for he stated and defended
the doctrine of morphological universality at a time when practically
all the evolutionists doubted it, and had pretty well proved its truth
some years before Haeckel wrote his "Monism" and "The Riddle of the
Universe."

To understand all of this, it is necessary to go back to Darwin and his
first statement of the law of natural selection. Darwin proved, in "The
Origin of the Species," that a great many more individuals of any given
species of living being are born into the world each year than can
possibly survive. Those that are best fitted to meet the condition of
existence live on; those that are worst fitted die. The result is that,
by the influence of heredity, the survivors beget a new generation in
which there is a larger percentage of the fit. One might think that
this would cause a greater number to survive, but inasmuch as the food
and room on earth are limited, a large number must always die. But
all the while the half or third, or whatever the percentage may be,
which actually do survive become more and more fit. In consequence, a
species, generation after generation, tends to become more and more
adapted to meet life's vicissitudes, or, as the biologists say, more
and more adapted to its environment.

Darwin proved that this law was true of all the lower animals and
showed that it was responsible for the evolution of the lower apes
into anthropoid apes, and that it could account, theoretically, for a
possible evolution of anthropoid apes into man. But in "The Descent
of Man" he argued that the law of natural selection ceased when man
became an intelligent being. Thereafter, he said, man's own efforts
worked against those of nature. Instead of letting the unfit of his
race die, civilization began to protect and preserve them. The result
was that nature's tendency to make all living beings more and more
sturdy was set aside by man's own conviction that mere sturdiness was
not the thing most to be desired. From this Darwin argued that if two
tribes of human beings lived side by side, and if, in one of them, the
unfit were permitted to perish, while in the other there were many
"courageous, sympathetic and faithful members, who were always ready to
warn each other of danger, and to aid and defend one another"--that in
such a case, the latter tribe would make the most progress, despite its
concerted effort to defy a law of nature.

Darwin's disciples agreed with him in this and some of them went to
the length of asserting that civilization, in its essence, was nothing
more or less than a successful defiance of this sort.[13] Herbert
Spencer was much troubled by the resultant confusion and as one critic
puts it,[14] the whole drift of his thought "appears to be inspired
by the question: how to evade and veil the logical consequence of
evolutionarism for human existence?" John Fiske, another Darwinian,
accepted the situation without such disquieting doubt. "When humanity
began to be evolved," he said, "an entirely new chapter in the history
of the universe was opened. Henceforth the life of the nascent soul
came to be first in importance and the bodily life became subordinated
to it."[15] Even Huxley believed that man would have to be excepted
from the operation of the law of natural selection. "The ethical
progress of society," he said, "depends, not on imitating the cosmic
process and still less on running away from it, but in combating it."
He saw that it was audacious thus to pit man against nature, but he
thought that man was sufficiently important to make such an attempt
and hoped "that the enterprise might meet with a certain measure of
success."[16] And the other Darwinians agreed with him.[17]

As all the best critics of philosophy have pointed out,[18] any
philosophical system which admits such a great contradiction fails
utterly to furnish workable standards of order in the universe, and so
falls short of achieving philosophy's first aim. We must either believe
with the scholastics that intelligence rules, or we must believe, with
Haeckel, that all things happen in obedience to invariable natural
laws. We cannot believe both. A great many men, toward the beginning
of the 90's, began to notice this fatal defect in Darwin's idea of
human progress. In 1891 one of them pointed out the conclusion toward
which it inevitably led.[19] If we admitted, he said, that humanity
had set at naught the law of natural selection, we must admit that
civilization was working against nature's efforts to preserve the race,
and that, in the end, humanity would perish. To put it more succinctly,
man might defy the law of natural selection as much as he pleased, but
he could never hope to set it aside. Soon or late, he would awaken to
the fact that he remained a mere animal, like the rabbit and the worm,
and that, if he permitted his body to degenerate into a thing entirely
lacking in strength and virility, not all the intelligence conceivable
could save him.

Nietzsche saw all this clearly as early as 1877.[20] He saw that what
passed for civilization, as represented by Christianity, was making
such an effort to defy and counteract the law of natural selection,
and he came to the conclusion that the result would be disaster.
Christianity, he said, ordered that the strong should give part of
their strength to the weak, and so tended to weaken the whole race.
Self-sacrifice, he said, was an open defiance of nature, and so were
all the other Christian virtues, in varying degree. He proposed, then,
that before it was too late, humanity should reject Christianity, as
the "greatest of all imaginable corruptions," and admit freely and
fully that the law of natural selection was universal and that the only
way to make real progress was to conform to it.

It may be asked here how Nietzsche accounted for the fact that humanity
had survived so long--for the fact that the majority of men were still
physically healthy and that the race, as a whole, was still fairly
vigorous. He answered this in two ways. First, he denied that the
race was maintaining to the full its old vigor. "The European of the
present," he said, "is far below the European of the Renaissance." It
would be absurd, he pointed out, to allege that the average German
of 1880 was as strong and as healthy--_i.e._ as well fitted to his
environment--as the "blond beast" who roamed the Saxon lowlands in
the days of the mammoth. It would be equally absurd to maintain that
the highest product of modern civilization--the town-dweller--was as
vigorous and as capable of becoming the father of healthy children as
the intelligent farmer, whose life was spent in approximate accordance
with all the more obvious laws of health.

Nietzsche's second answer was that humanity had escaped utter
degeneration and destruction because, despite its dominance as a
theory of action, few men actually practiced Christianity. It was
next to impossible, he said, to find a single man who, literally and
absolutely, obeyed the teachings of Christ.[21] There were plenty of
men who thought they were doing so, but all of them were yielding in
only a partial manner. Absolute Christianity meant absolute disregard
of self. It was obvious that a man who reached this state of mind
would be unable to follow any gainful occupation, and so would find
it impossible to preserve his own life or the lives of his children.
In brief, said Nietzsche, an actual and utter Christian would perish
today just as Christ perished, and so, in his own fate, would provide a
conclusive argument against Christianity.

Nietzsche pointed out further that everything which makes for the
preservation of the human race is diametrically opposed to the
Christian ideal. Thus Christianity becomes the foe of science. The one
argues that man should sit still and let God reign; the other that man
should battle against the tortures which fate inflicts upon him, and
try to overcome them and grow strong. Thus all science is unchristian,
because, in the last analysis, the whole purpose and effort of science
is to arm man against loss of energy and death, and thus make him
self-reliant and unmindful of any duty of propitiating the deity. That
this antagonism between Christianity and the search, for truth really
exists has been shown in a practical way time and again. Since the
beginning of the Christian era the church has been the bitter and
tireless enemy of all science, and this enmity has been due to the fact
that every member of the priest class has realized that the more a man
learned the more he came to depend upon his own efforts, and the less
he was given to asking help from above. In the ages of faith men prayed
to the saints when they were ill. Today they send for a doctor. In the
ages of faith battles were begun with supplications, and it was often
possible to witness the ridiculous spectacle of both sides praying to
the same God. Today every sane person knows that the victory goes to
the wisest generals and largest battalions.

Nietzsche thus showed, first, that Christianity (and all other ethical
systems having self-sacrifice as their basis) tended to oppose the law
of natural selection and so made the race weaker; and secondly, that
the majority of men, consciously or unconsciously, were aware of this,
and so made no effort to be absolute Christians. If Christianity were
to become universal, he said, and every man in the world were to follow
Christ's precepts to the letter in all the relations of daily life,
the race would die out in a generation. This being true--and it may
be observed in passing that no one has ever successfully controverted
it--there follows the converse: that the human race had best abandon
the idea of self-sacrifice altogether and submit itself to the law of
natural selection. If this is done, says Nietzsche, the result will
be a race of supermen--of proud, strong dionysians--of men who will
say "yes" to the world and will be ideally capable of meeting the
conditions under which life must exist on earth.

In his efforts to account for the origin of Christianity, Nietzsche
was less happy, and indeed came very near the border-line of the
ridiculous. The faith of modern Europe, he said, was the result of a
gigantic effort on the part of the ancient Jews to revenge themselves
upon their masters. The Jews were helpless and inefficient and thus
evolved a slave-morality. Naturally, as slaves, they hated their
masters, while realizing, all the while, the unmanliness of the ideals
they themselves had to hold to in order to survive. So they crucified
Christ, who voiced these same ideals, and the result was that the
outside world, which despised the Jews, accepted Christ as a martyr and
prophet and thus swallowed the Jewish ideals without realizing it. In a
word, the Jews detested the slave-morality which circumstances thrust
upon them, and got their revenge by foisting it, in a sugar-coated
pill, upon their masters.

It is obvious that this idea is sheer lunacy. That the Jews ever
realized the degenerating effect of their own slave-morality is
unlikely, and that they should take counsel together and plan such
an elaborate and complicated revenge, is impossible. The reader of
Nietzsche must expect to encounter such absurdities now and then.
The mad German was ordinarily a most logical and orderly thinker,
but sometimes the traditional German tendency to indulge in wild and
imbecile flights of speculation cropped up in him.


[1] _Vide_ the chapter on "Crime and Punishment."

[2] "_Der Antichrist_," § 62.

[3] St. Mark XIV, 63, 64.

[4] Albrecht Ritschl (1822-89), who is not to be confused with
Nietzsche's teacher at Bonn and Leipsic. Ritschl founded what is
called the Ritschlian movement in theology. This has for its object
the abandonment of supernaturalism and the defence of Christianity as
a mere scheme of living. It admits that the miracle stories are fables
and even concedes that Christ was not divine, but maintains that his
teachings represent the best wisdom of the human race. See Denny:
"Studies in Theology," New York, 1894.

[5] Ph. IV, 6: "Be careful for nothing; but in everything by prayer and
supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to
God."

[6] Deut. XXXII, 4: "He is the rock, his work is perfect." See also a
hundred similar passages in the Old and New Testaments.

[7] Isaiah XLIV, 8: "Now, O Lord, thou art our Father; we are the clay
and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand."

[8] "The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church in the United States,"
pp. 16 to 20: Philadelphia, 1841.

[9] To the end of his days Huxley believed that, to the average human
being, even of the highest class, some sort of faith would always be
necessary. "My work in the London hospitals," he said, "taught me
that the preacher often does as much good as the doctor." It would be
interesting to show how this notion has been abandoned in recent years.
The trained nurse, who was unknown in Huxley's hospital days, now takes
the place of the confessor, and as Dr. Osler has shown us in "Science
and Immortality," men die just as comfortably as before.

[10] "_Der Antichrist_," § 5.

[11] "_Der Antichrist_," § 6.

[12] "_Der Antichrist_," § 7.

[13] Alfred Russell Wallace: "Darwinism," London, 1889.

[14] Alexander Tille, introduction to the Eng. tr. of "The Works of
Friedrich Nietzsche," vol. XI; New York, 1896.

[15] John Fiske: "The Destiny of Man;" London, 1884.

[16] Romanes Lecture on "Evolution and Ethics," 1893.

[17] As a matter of fact this dualism still lives. Thus it was lately
defended by a correspondent of the New York _Sun:_ "If there can be
such a thing as an essential difference there surely is one between the
animal evolution discovered by Darwin and the self-culture, progress
and spiritual aspiration of man." Many other writers on the subject
take the same position.

[18] See the article on "Monism" in the New International Encyclopedia.

[19] A. J. Balfour: "Fragment on Progress;" London, 1891.

[20] He was a monist, indeed, as early as 1873, at which time he had
apparently not yet noticed Darwin's notion that the human race could
successfully defy the law of natural selection. "The absence of any
cardinal distinction between man and beast," he said, "is a doctrine
which I consider true." ("_Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen_," I, 189.)
Nevertheless, in a moment of sophistry, late in life, he undertook to
criticize the law of natural selection and even to deny its effects
(_vide_ "Roving Expeditions of an Inopportune Philosopher," § 14, in
"The Twilight of the Idols"). It is sufficient to say, in answer, that
the law itself is inassailable and that all of Nietzsche's work, saving
this single unaccountable paragraph, helps support it. His frequent
sneers at Darwin, in other places, need not be taken too seriously.
Everything English, toward the close of his life, excited his ire, but
the fact remains that he was a thorough Darwinian and that, without
Darwin's work, his own philosophy would have been impossible.

[21] This observation is as old as Montaigne, who said: "After all, the
stoics were actually stoical, but where in all Christendom will you
find a Christian?"




VII


TRUTH


At the bottom of all philosophy, of all science and of all thinking,
you will find the one all-inclusive question: How is man to tell truth
from error? The ignorant man solves this problem in a very simple
manner: he holds that whatever he believes, he _knows;_ and that
whatever he knows is true. This is the attitude of all amateur and
professional theologians, politicians and other numbskulls of that
sort. The pious old maid, for example, who believes in the doctrine of
the immaculate conception looks upon her faith as proof, and holds that
all who disagree with her will suffer torments in hell. Opposed to this
childish theory of knowledge is the chronic doubt of the educated man.
He sees daily evidence that many things held to be true by nine-tenths
of all men are, in reality, false, and he is thereby apt to acquire a
doubt of everything, including his own beliefs.

At different times in the history of man, various methods of solving
or evading the riddle have been proposed. In the age of faith it was
held that, by his own efforts alone, man was unable, even partly, to
distinguish between truth and error, but that he could always go for
enlightenment to an infallible encyclopedia: the word of god, as set
forth, through the instrumentality of inspired scribes, in the holy
scriptures. If these scriptures said that a certain proposition was
true, it _was_ true, and any man who doubted it was either a lunatic
or a criminal.[1] This doctrine prevailed in Europe for many years and
all who ventured to oppose it were in danger of being killed, but in
the course of time the number of doubters grew so large that it was
inconvenient or impossible to kill all of them, and so, in the end,
they had to be permitted to voice their doubts unharmed.

The first man of this new era to inflict any real damage upon the
ancient churchly idea of revealed wisdom was Nicolas of Cusa, a
cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, who lived in the early part of
the fifteenth century.[2] Despite his office and his time, Nicolas was
an independent and intelligent man, and it became apparent to him,
after long reflection, that mere belief in a thing was by no means
a proof of its truth. Man, he decided was prone to err, but in the
worst of his errors, there was always some kernel of truth, else he
would revolt against it as inconceivable. Therefore, he decided, the
best thing for man to do was to hold all of his beliefs lightly and to
reject them whenever they began to appear as errors. The real danger,
he said, was not in making mistakes, but in clinging to them after they
were known to be mistakes.

It seems well nigh impossible that a man of Nicolas' age and training
should have reasoned so clearly, but the fact remains that he did, and
that all of modern philosophy is built upon the foundations he laid.
Since his time a great many other theories of knowledge have been put
forward, but all have worked, in a sort of circle, back to Nicolas.
It would be interesting, perhaps, to trace the course and history of
these variations and denials, but such an enterprise is beyond the
scope of the present inquiry. Nicolas by no means gave the world a
complete and wholly credible system of philosophy. Until the day of
his death scholasticism was dominant in the world that he knew, and
it retained its old hold upon human thought, in fact, for nearly two
hundred years thereafter. Not until Descartes, in 1619, made his famous
resolution "to take nothing for the truth without clear knowledge
that it is such," did humanity in general begin to realize, as Huxley
says, that there was sanctity in doubt. And even Descartes could not
shake himself free of the supernaturalism and other balderdash which
yet colored philosophy. He laid down, for all time, the emancipating
doctrine that "the profession of belief in propositions, of the truth
of which there is no sufficient evidence, is immoral"--a doctrine
that might well be called the Magna Charta of human thought[3]--but
it should not be forgotten that he also laid down other doctrines and
that many of them were visionary and silly. The philosophers after him
rid their minds of the old ideas but slowly and there were frequent
reversions to the ancient delusion that a man's mind is a function of
his soul--whatever that may be--and not of his body. It was common,
indeed, for a philosopher to set out with sane, debatable, conceivable
ideas--and then to go soaring into the idealistic clouds.[4] Only in
our own time have men come to understand that the ego, for all its
seeming independence, is nothing more than the sum of inherited race
experience--that a man's soul, his conscience and his attitude of
mind are things he has inherited from his ancestors, just as he has
inherited his two eyes, his ten toes and his firm belief in signs,
portents and immortality. Only in our own time have men ceased seeking
a golden key to all riddles, and sat themselves down to solve one
riddle at a time.

Those metaphysicians who fared farthest from the philosopher of Cusa
evolved the doctrine that, in themselves, things have no existence at
all, and that we can think of them only in terms of our impressions
of them. The color green, for example, may be nothing but a delusion,
for all we can possibly know of it is that, under certain conditions,
our optic nerves experience a sensation of greenness. Whether this
sensation of greenness is a mere figment of our imagination or the
reflection of an actual physical state, is something that we cannot
tell. It is impossible, in a word, to determine whether there are
actual things around us, which produce real impressions upon us, or
whether our idea of these things is the mere result of subjective
impressions or conditions. We know that a blow on the eyes may cause us
to see a flash of light which does not exist and that a nervous person
may feel the touch of hands and hear noises which are purely imaginary.
May it not be possible, also, that all other sensations have their rise
within us instead of without, and that in saying that objects give us
impressions we have been confusing cause and effect?

Such is the argument of those metaphysicians who doubt, not only the
accuracy of human knowledge, but also the very capacity of human beings
to acquire knowledge. It is apparent, on brief reflection, that this
attitude, while theoretically admissible, is entirely impracticable,
and that, as a matter of fact, it gives us no more substantial
basis for intelligent speculation than the old device of referring
all questions to revelation. To say that nothing exists save in the
imagination of living beings is to say that this imagination itself
does not exist. This, of course, is an absurdity, because every man
is absolutely certain that he himself is a real thing and that his
mind is a real thing, too, and capable of thought. In place of such
cob-web spinning, modern philosophers--driven to it, it may be said,
in parenthesis, by the scientists--have gone back to the doctrine
that, inasmuch as we can know nothing of anything save through the
impressions it makes upon us, these impressions must be accepted
provisionally as accurate, so long as they are evidently normal and
harmonize one with the other.

That is to say, our perceptions, corrected by our experience and our
common sense, must serve as guides for us, and we must seize every
opportunity to widen their range and increase their accuracy. For
millions of years they have been steadily augmenting our store of
knowledge. We know, for instance, that when fire touches us it causes
an impression which we call pain and that this impression is invariably
the same, and always leads to the same results, in all normal human
beings. Therefore, we accept it as an axiom that fire causes pain.
There are many other ideas that may be and have been established in the
same manner: by the fact that they are universal among sane men. But
there is also a multitude of things which produce different impressions
upon different men, and here we encounter the problem of determining
which of these impressions is right and which is wrong. One man,
observing the rising and setting of the sun, concludes that it is a
ball of fire revolving about the earth. Another man, in the face of
the same phenomena, concludes that the earth revolves around the sun.
How, then, are we to determine which of these men has drawn the proper
conclusion?

As a matter of fact, it is impossible in such a case, to come to any
decision which can be accepted as utterly and absolutely true. But
all the same the scientific empiric method enables us to push the
percentage of error nearer and nearer to the irreducible minimum. We
can observe the phenomenon under examination from a multitude of sides
and compare the impression it produces with the impressions produced
by kindred phenomena regarding which we know more. Again, we can put
this examination into the hands of men specially trained and fitted
for such work--men whose conclusions we know, by previous experience,
to be above the average of accuracy. And so, after a long time, we can
formulate some idea of the thing under inspection which violates few
or none of the other ideas held by us. When we have accomplished this,
we have come as near to the absolute truth as it is possible for human
beings to come.

I need not point out that this method does not contemplate a mere
acceptance of the majority vote. Its actual effect, indeed, is quite
the contrary, for it is only a small minority of human beings who may
be said, with any truth, to be capable of thought. It is probable, for
example, that nine-tenths of the people in Christendom today believe
that Friday is an unlucky day, while only the remaining tenth hold that
one day is exactly like another. But despite this, it is apparent
that the idea of the latter will survive and that, by slow degrees, it
will be forced upon the former. We know that it is true, not because
it is accepted by all men or by the majority of men--for, as a matter
of fact, we have seen that it isn't--but because we realize that the
few who hold to it are best capable of distinguishing between actual
impressions and mere delusions.

Again, the scientific method tends to increase our knowledge by the
very fact that it discourages unreasoning faith. The scientist realizes
that most of his so-called facts are probably errors and so he is
willing to harbor doubts of their truth and to seek for something
better. Like Socrates he boldly says "I know that I am ignorant." He
realizes, in fact, that error, when it is constantly under fire, is
bound to be resolved in the long run into something approximating the
truth. As Nicolas pointed out 500 years ago, nothing is utterly and
absolutely true and nothing is utterly and absolutely false. There
is always a germ of truth in the worst error, and there is always a
residuum of error in the soundest truth. Therefore, an error is fatal
only when it is hidden from the white light of investigation. Herein
lies the difference between the modern scientist and the moralist. The
former holds nothing sacred, not even his own axioms; the latter lays
things down as law and then makes it a crime to doubt them.

It is in this way--by submitting every idea to a searching, pitiless,
unending examination--that the world is increasing its store of what
may be called, for the sake of clearness, absolute knowledge. Error
always precedes truth, and it is extremely probable that the vast
majority of ideas held by men of today--even the sanest and wisest
men--are delusions, but with the passing of the years our stock of
truth grows larger and larger. "A conviction," says Nietzsche, "always
has its history--its previous forms, its tentative forms, its states of
error. It becomes a conviction, indeed, only after having been _not_
a conviction, and then _hardly_ a conviction. No doubt falsehood is
one of these embryonic forms of conviction. Sometimes only a change
of persons is needed to transform one into the other. That which, in
the son, is a conviction, was, in the father, still a falsehood."[5]
The tendency of intelligent men, in a word, is to approach nearer
and nearer the truth, by the processes of rejection, revision and
invention. Many old ideas are rejected by each new generation, but
there always remain a few that survive. We no longer believe with
the cave-men that the thunder is the voice of an angry god and the
lightning the flash of his sword, but we still believe, as they did,
that wood floats upon water, that seeds sprout and give forth plants,
that a roof keeps off the rain and that a child, if it lives long
enough, will inevitably grow into a man or a woman. Such ideas may be
called truths. If we deny them we must deny at once that the world
exists and that we exist ourselves.

Nietzsche's discussion of these problems is so abstruse and so much
complicated by changes in view that it would be impossible to make an
understandable summary of it in the space available here. In his first
important book, "_Menschliches allzu Menschliches_" he devoted himself,
in the main, to pointing out errors made in the past, without laying
down any very definite scheme of thought for the future. In the early
stages of human progress, he said, men made the mistake of regarding
everything that was momentarily pleasant or beneficial as absolutely
and eternally true. Herein they manifested the very familiar human
weakness for rash and hasty generalization, and the equally familiar
tendency to render the ideas of a given time and place perpetual and
permanent by erecting them into codes of morality and putting them
into the mouths of gods. This, he pointed out, was harmful, for a
thing might be beneficial to the men of today and fatal to the men of
tomorrow. Therefore, he argued that while a certain idea's effect was a
good criterion, humanly speaking, of its present or current truth, it
was dangerous to assume that this effect would be always the same, and
that, in consequence, the idea itself would remain true forever.

Not until the days of Socrates, said Nietzsche, did men begin to notice
this difference between imminent truth and eternal truth. The notion
that such a distinction existed made its way very slowly, even after
great teachers began to teach it, but in the end it was accepted by
enough men to give it genuine weight. Since that day philosophy and
science, which were once merely different names for the same thing,
have signified two separate things. It is the object of philosophy
to analyze happiness, and by means of the knowledge thus gained, to
devise means for safeguarding and increasing it. In consequence, it is
necessary for philosophy to generalize--to assume that the thing which
makes men happy today will make them happy tomorrow. Science, on the
contrary, concerns itself, not with things of the uncertain future, but
with things of the certain present. Its object is to examine the world
as it exists today, to uncover as many of its secrets as possible, and
to study their effect upon human happiness. In other words, philosophy
first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world
to it, while science studies the world with no other object in view
than the increase of knowledge, and with full confidence that, in the
long run, this increase of knowledge will increase efficiency and in
consequence happiness.

It is evident, then, that science, for all its contempt for fixed
schemes of happiness, will eventually accomplish with certainty what
philosophy--which most commonly swims into the ken of the average man
as morality--is now trying to do in a manner that is not only crude
and unreasonable, but also necessarily unsuccessful. In a word, just
so soon as man's store of knowledge grows so large that he becomes
complete master of the natural forces which work toward his undoing,
he will be perfectly happy. Now, Nietzsche believed, as we have seen
in past chapters, that man's instinctive will to power had this same
complete mastery over his environment as its ultimate object, and so
he concluded that the will to power might be relied upon to lead man
to the truth. That is to say, he believed that there was, in every
man of the higher type (the only type he thought worth discussing) an
instinctive tendency to seek the true as opposed to the false, that
this instinct, as the race progressed, grew more and more accurate,
and that its growing accuracy explained the fact that, despite the
opposition of codes of morality and of the iron hand of authority, man
constantly increased his store of knowledge. A thought, he said, arose
in a man without his initiative or volition, and was nothing more or
less than an expression of his innate will to obtain power over his
environment by accurately observing and interpreting it. It was just
as reasonable, he said, to say _It_ thinks as to say _I_ think,[6]
because every intelligent person knew that a man couldn't control his
thoughts. Therefore, the fact that these thoughts, in the long run
and considering the human race as a whole, tended to uncover more
and more truths proved that the will to power, despite the danger of
generalizing from its manifestations, grew more and more accurate and
so worked in the direction of absolute truth. Nietzsche believed that
mankind was ever the slave of errors, but he held that the number of
errors tended to decrease. When, at last, truth reigned supreme and
there were no more errors, the superman would walk the earth.

Now it is impossible for any man to note the workings of the will to
power save as it is manifested in his own instincts and thoughts, and
therefore Nietzsche, in his later books, urges that every man should be
willing, at all times, to pit his own feelings against the laws laid
down by the majority. A man should steer clear of rash generalization
from his own experience, but he should be doubly careful to steer
clear of the generalizations of others. The greatest of all dangers
lies in subscribing to a thesis without being certain of its truth.
"This not-wishing-to-see what one sees ... is a primary requisite
for membership in a party, in any sense whatsoever. Therefore, the
party man becomes a liar by necessity." The proper attitude for a
human being, indeed, is chronic dissent and skepticism. "Zarathustra
is a skeptic.... Convictions are prisons.... The freedom from every
kind of permanent conviction, the ability to search freely, belong to
strength.... The need of a belief, of something that is unconditioned
is a sign of weakness. The man of belief is necessarily a dependent
man.... His instinct gives the highest honor to self-abnegation.
He does not belong to himself, but to the author of the idea he
believes."[7] It is only by skepticism, argues Nietzsche, that we can
hope to make any progress. If all men accepted without question, the
_dicta_ of some one supreme sage, it is plain that there could be no
further increase of knowledge. It is only by constant turmoil and
conflict and exchange of views that the minute granules of truth can
be separated from the vast muck heap of superstition and error. Fixed
truths, in the long run, are probably more dangerous to intelligence
than falsehoods.[8]

This argument, I take it, scarcely needs greater elucidation. Every
intelligent man knows that if there had been no brave agnostics to defy
the wrath of the church in the middle ages, the whole of Christendom
would still wallow in the unspeakably foul morass of ignorance which
had its center, during that black time, in an infallible sovereign of
sovereigns. Authority, at all times and everywhere, means sloth and
degeneration. It is only doubt that creates. It is only the minority
that counts.

The fact that the great majority of human beings are utterly incapable
of original thought, and so must, perforce, borrow their ideas or
submit tamely to some authority, explains Nietzsche's violent loathing
and contempt for the masses. The average, self-satisfied, conservative,
orthodox, law-abiding citizen appeared to him to be a being but little
raised above the cattle in the barn-yard. So violent was this feeling
that every idea accepted by the majority excited, for that very reason,
his suspicion and opposition. "What everybody believes," he once said,
"is never true." This may seem like a mere voicing of brobdingnagian
egotism, but as a matter of fact, the same view is held by every man
who has spent any time investigating the history of ideas. "Truth,"
said Dr. Osler a while ago, "scarcely ever carries the struggle for
acceptance at its first appearance." The masses are always a century
or two behind. They have made a virtue of their obtuseness and call
it by various fine names: conservatism, piety, respectability, faith.
The nineteenth century witnessed greater human progress than all the
centuries before it saw or even imagined, but the majority of white men
of today still believe in ghosts, still fear the devil, still hold that
the number 13 is unlucky and still picture the deity as a patriarch in
a white beard, surrounded by a choir of resplendent amateur musicians.
"We think a thing," says Prof. Henry Sedgwick, "because all other
people think so; or because, after all, we _do_ think so; or because we
are told so, and think we must think so; or because we once thought so,
and think we still think so; or because, having thought so, we think we
_will_ think so."

Naturally enough, Nietzsche was an earnest opponent of the theological
doctrine of free will. He held, as we have seen, that every human
act was merely the effect of the will to power reacting against
environment, and in consequence he had to reject absolutely the notion
of volition and responsibility. A man, he argued, was not an object
_in vacuo_ and his acts, thoughts, impulses and motives could not be
imagined without imagining some cause for them. If this cause came from
without, it was clearly beyond his control, and if it came from within
it was no less so, for his whole attitude of mind, his instinctive
habits of thoughts, his very soul, so-called, were merely attributes
that had been handed down to him, like the shape of his nose and the
color of his eyes, from his ancestors. Nietzsche held that the idea
of responsibility was the product and not the cause of the idea of
punishment, and that the latter was nothing more than a manifestation
of primitive man's will to power--to triumph over his fellows by
making them suffer the handicap and humiliation of pain. "Men were
called free," he said, "in order that they might be condemned and
punished.... When we immoralists try to cleanse psychology, history,
nature and sociology of these notions, we find that our chief enemies
are the theologians, who, with their preposterous idea of 'a moral
order of the world,' go on tainting the innocence of man's struggle
upward with talk of punishment and guilt. Christianity is, indeed, a
hangman's metaphysic."[9] As a necessary corollary of this, Nietzsche
denied the existence of any plan in the cosmos. Like Haeckel, he
believed that but two things existed--energy and matter; and that all
the phenomena which made us conscious of the universe were nothing more
than symptoms of the constant action of the one upon the other. Nothing
ever happened without a cause, he said, and no cause was anything
other than the effect of some previous cause. "The destiny of man," he
said, "cannot be disentangled from the destiny of everything else in
existence, past, present and future.... We are a part of the whole, we
exist in the whole.... There is nothing which could judge, measure or
condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure and condemn the
whole.... But there is nothing outside of the whole.... The concept of
God has hitherto made our existence a crime.... We deny God, we deny
responsibility by denying God: it is only thereby that we save man."[10]

Herein, unluckily, Nietzsche fell into the trap which has snapped upon
Haeckel and every other supporter of atheistic determinism. He denied
that the human will was free and argued that every human action was
inevitable, and yet he spent his whole life trying to convince his
fellow men that they should do otherwise than as they did in fact. In
a word, he held that they had no control whatever over their actions,
and yet, like Moses, Mohammed and St. Francis, he thundered at them
uproariously and urged them to turn from their errors and repent.


[1] J. W. Draper, "A History of the Conflict Between Religion and
Science;" New York, 1874.

[2] Richard Falckenberg: "A History of Modern Philosophy," tr. by A. C.
Armstrong, Jr.; New York, 1897; Chap. I.

[3] T. H. Huxley: "Hume," preface; London, 1879.

[4] Comte and Kant, for example.

[5] "_Der Antichrist_," § 55.

[6] "_Jenseits von Gut und Böse_," VII.

[7] "_Der Antichrist_," § 54.

[8] "_Menschliches allzu Menschliches_," § 483.

[9] "_Götzendämmerung_," VI.

[10] "_Götzendämmerung_," VI.




VIII


CIVILIZATION


On the surface, at least, the civilization of today seems to be moving
slowly toward two goals. One is the eternal renunciation of war and
the other is universal brotherhood: one is "peace on earth" and the
other is "good will to men." Five hundred years ago a statesman's fame
rested frankly and solely upon the victories of his armies; today
we profess to measure him by his skill at keeping these armies in
barracks. And in the internal economy of all civilized states we find
today some pretence at unrestricted and equal suffrage. In times past
it was the chief concern of all logicians and wiseacres to maintain
the proposition that God reigned. At present, the dominant platitude
of Christendom--the cornerstone of practically every political party
and the stock-in-trade of every politician--is the proposition that the
people rule.

Nietzsche opposed squarely both the demand for peace and the demand for
equality, and his opposition was grounded upon two arguments. In the
first place, he said, both demands were rhetorical and insincere and
all intelligent men knew that neither would ever be fully satisfied.
In the second place, he said, it would be ruinous to the race if they
were. That is to say, he believed that war was not only necessary, but
also beneficial, and that the natural system of castes was not only
beneficent, but also inevitable. In the demand for universal peace he
saw only the yearning of the weak and useless for protection against
the righteous exploitation of the useful and strong. In the demand
for equality he saw only the same thing. Both demands, he argued,
controverted and combated that upward tendency which finds expression
in the law of natural selection.

"The order of castes," said Nietzsche, "is the dominating law of
nature, against which no merely human agency may prevail. In every
healthy society there are three broad classes, each of which has its
own morality, its own work, its own notion of perfection and its own
sense of mastery. The first class comprises those who are obviously
superior to the mass intellectually; the second includes those whose
eminence is chiefly muscular, and the third is made up of the mediocre.
The third class, very naturally, is the most numerous, but the first is
the most powerful.

"To this highest caste belongs the privilege of representing beauty,
happiness and goodness on earth.... Its members accept the world as
they find it and make the best of it.... They find their happiness in
those things which, to lesser men, would spell ruin--in the labyrinth,
in severity toward themselves and others, in effort. Their delight is
self-governing: with them asceticism becomes naturalness, necessity,
instinct. A difficult task is regarded by them as a privilege; to play
with burdens which would crush others to death is their recreation.
They are the most venerable species of men. They are the most cheerful,
the most amiable. They rule because they are what they are. They are
not at liberty to be second in rank.

"The second caste includes the guardians and keepers of order and
security--the warriors, the nobles, the king--above all, as the
highest types of warrior, the judges and defenders of the law. They
execute the mandates of the first caste, relieving the latter of all
that is coarse and menial in the work of ruling.

"At the bottom are the workers--the men of handicraft, trade,
agriculture and the greater part of art and science. It is the law of
nature that they should be public utilities--that they should be wheels
and functions. The only kind of happiness of which they are capable
makes intelligent machines of them. For the mediocre, it is happiness
to be mediocre. In them the mastery of one thing--_i.e._ specialism--is
an instinct.

"It is unworthy of a profound intellect to see in mediocrity itself
an objection. It is, indeed, a necessity of human existence, for only
in the presence of a horde of average men is the exceptional man a
possibility....

"Whom do I hate most among the men of today? The socialist who
undermines the workingman's healthy instincts, who takes from him his
feeling of contentedness with his existence, who makes him envious, who
teaches him revenge.... There is no wrong in unequal rights: it lies in
the vain pretension to equal rights."[1]

It is obvious from this that Nietzsche was an ardent believer in
aristocracy, but it is also obvious that he was not a believer in the
thing which passes for aristocracy in the world today. The nobility of
Europe belongs, not to his first class, but to his second class. It is
essentially military and legal, for in themselves its members are puny
and inefficient, and it is only the force of law that maintains them in
their inheritance.

The fundamental doctrine of civilized law, as we know it today, is the
proposition that what a man has once acquired shall belong to him and
his heirs forever, without need on his part or theirs to defend it
personally against predatory rivals. This transfer of the function of
defense from the individual to the state naturally exalts the state's
professional defenders--that is, her soldiers and judges--and so it is
not unnatural to find the members of this class, and their parasites,
in control of most of the world's governments and in possession of a
large share of the world's wealth, power and honors.[2] To Nietzsche
this seemed grotesquely illogical and unfair. He saw that this ruling
class expended its entire energy in combating experiment and change
and that the aristocracy it begot and protected--an aristocracy often
identical, very naturally, with itself--tended to become more and more
unfit and helpless and more and more a bar to the ready recognition
and unrestrained functioning of the only true aristocracy--that of
efficiency.

Nietzsche pointed out that one of the essential absurdities of a
constitutional aristocracy was to be found in the fact that it hedged
itself about with purely artificial barriers. Next only to its desire
to maintain itself without actual personal effort was its jealous
endeavor to prevent accessions to its ranks. Nothing, indeed, disgusts
the traditional belted earl quite so much as the ennobling of some
upstart brewer or iron-master. This exclusiveness, from Nietzsche's
point of view, seemed ridiculous and pernicious, for a true aristocracy
must be ever willing and eager to welcome to its ranks--and to enroll
in fact, automatically--all who display those qualities which make
a man extraordinarily fit and efficient. There should always be, he
said, a free and constant interchange of individuals between the three
natural castes of men. It should be always possible for an abnormally
efficient man of the slave class to enter the master class, and, by
the same token, accidental degeneration or incapacity in the master
class should be followed by swift and merciless reduction to the ranks
of slaves. Thus, those aristocracies which presented the incongruous
spectacle of imbeciles being intrusted with the affairs of government
seemed to him utterly abhorrent, and those schemes of caste which made
a mean birth an offset to high intelligence seemed no less so.

So long as man's mastery of the forces of nature is incomplete, said
Nietzsche, it will be necessary for the vast majority of human beings
to spend their lives in either supplementing those natural forces
which are partly under control or in opposing those which are still
unleashed. The business of tilling the soil, for example, is still
largely a matter of muscular exertion, despite the vast improvement
in farm implements, and it will probably remain so for centuries to
come. Since such labor is necessarily mere drudgery, and in consequence
unpleasant, it is plain that it should be given over to men whose
realization of its unpleasantness is least acute. Going further, it is
plain that this work will be done with less and less revolt and less
and less driving, as we evolve a class whose ambition to engage in
more inviting pursuits grows smaller and smaller. In a word, the ideal
ploughman is one who has no thought of anything higher and better than
ploughing. Therefore, argued Nietzsche, the proper performance of the
manual labor of the world makes it necessary that we have a laboring
class, which means a class content to obey without fear or question.

This doctrine brought down upon Nietzsche's head the pious wrath
of all the world's humanitarians, but empiric experiment has more
than once proved its truth. The history of the hopelessly futile and
fatuous effort to improve the negroes of the Southern United States by
education affords one such proof. It is apparent, on brief reflection,
that the negro, no matter how much he is educated, must remain, as a
race, in a condition of subservience; that he must remain the inferior
of the stronger and more intelligent white man so long as he retains
racial differentiation. Therefore, the effort to educate him has
awakened in his mind ambitions and aspirations which, in the very
nature of things, must go unrealized, and so, while gaining nothing
whatever materially, he has lost all his old contentment, peace of mind
and happiness. Indeed, it is a commonplace of observation in the United
States that the educated and refined negro is invariably a hopeless,
melancholy, embittered and despairing man.

Nietzsche, to resume, regarded it as absolutely essential that there
be a class of laborers or slaves--his "third caste"--and was of the
opinion that such a class would exist upon earth so long as the human
race survived. Its condition, compared to that of the ruling class,
would vary but slightly, he thought, with the progress of the years. As
man's mastery of nature increased, the laborer would find his task less
and less painful, but he would always remain a fixed distance behind
those who ruled him. Therefore, Nietzsche, in his philosophy, gave no
thought to the desires and aspirations of the laboring class, because,
as we have just seen, he held that a man could not properly belong to
this class unless his desires and aspirations were so faint or so well
under the control of the ruling class that they might be neglected.
All of the Nietzschean doctrines and ideas apply only to the ruling
class. It was at the top, he argued, that mankind grew. It was only in
the ideas of those capable of original thought that progress had its
source. William the Conqueror was of far more importance, though he was
but a single man, than all the other Normans of his generation taken
together.

Nietzsche was well aware that his "first caste" was necessarily small
in numbers and that there was a strong tendency for its members to drop
out of it and seek ease and peace in the castes lower down. "Life,"
he said, "is always hardest toward the summit--the cold increases,
the responsibility increases."[3] But to the truly efficient man
these hardships are but spurs to effort. His joy is in combating and
in overcoming--in pitting his will to power against the laws and
desires of the rest of humanity. "I do not advise you to labor," says
Zarathustra, "but to fight. I do not advise you to compromise and
make peace, but to conquer. Let your labor be fighting and your peace
victory.... You say that a good cause will hallow even war? I tell you
that a good war hallows every cause. War and courage have done more
great things than charity. Not your pity, but your bravery lifts up
those about you. Let the little girlies tell you that 'good' means
'sweet' and 'touching.' I tell you that 'good' means 'brave.'... The
slave rebels against hardships and calls his rebellion superiority. Let
your superiority be an acceptance of hardships. Let your commanding be
an obeying.... Let your highest thought be: 'Man is something to be
surpassed.'... I do not advise you to love your neighbor--the nearest
human being. I advise you rather to flee from the nearest and love the
furthest human being. Higher than love to your neighbor is love to the
higher man that is to come in the future.... Propagate yourself upward.
Thus live your life. What are many years worth? I do not spare you....
Die at the right time!"[4]

The average man, said Nietzsche, is almost entirely lacking in this
gorgeous, fatalistic courage and sublime egotism. He is ever reluctant
to pit his private convictions and yearnings against those of the mass
of men. He is either afraid to risk the consequences of originality or
fearful that, since the majority of his fellows disagree with him, he
must be wrong. Therefore, no matter how strongly an unconventional idea
may possess a man, he commonly seeks to combat it and throttle it, and
the ability to do this with the least possible expenditure of effort we
call self-control. The average man, said Nietzsche, has the power of
self-control well developed, and in consequence he seldom contributes
anything positive to the thought of his age and almost never attempts
to oppose it.

We have seen in the preceding chapter that if every man, without
exception, were of this sort, all human progress would cease, because
the ideas of one generation would be handed down unchanged to the
next and there would be no effort whatever to improve the conditions
of existence by the only possible method--constant experiment with
new ideas. Therefore, it follows that the world must depend for its
advancement upon those revolutionists who, instead of overcoming their
impulse to go counter to convention, give it free rein. Of such is
Nietzsche's "first caste" composed. It is plain that among the two
lower castes, courage of this sort is regarded, not as an evidence of
strength, but as a proof of weakness. The man who outrages conventions
is a man who lacks self-control, and the majority, by a process we
have examined in our consideration of slave-morality, has exalted
self-control, which, at bottom, is the antithesis of courage, into a
place of honor higher than that belonging, by right, to courage itself.

But Nietzsche pointed out that the act of denying or combating accepted
ideas is a thing which always tends to inspire other acts of the same
sort. It is true enough that a revolutionary idea, so soon as it
replaces an old convention and obtains the sanction of the majority,
ceases to be revolutionary and becomes itself conventional, but all the
same the mere fact that it has succeeded gives courage to those who
harbor other revolutionary ideas and inspires them to give these ideas
voice. Thus, it happens that courage breeds itself, and that, in times
of great conflict, of no matter what sort, the world produces more than
an average output of originality, or, as we more commonly denominate
it, genius. In this manner Nietzsche accounted for a fact that had been
noticed by many men before him: that such tremendous struggles as the
French Revolution and the American Civil War are invariably followed by
eras of diligent inquiry, of bold overturning of existing institutions
and of marked progress. People become accustomed to unrestrained combat
and so the desirability of self-control becomes less insistent.

Nietzsche had a vast contempt for what he called "the green-grazing
happiness of the herd." Its strong morality and its insistence upon
the doctrine that whatever is, is right--that "God's in his heaven;
all's well with the world"--revolted him. He held that the so-called
rights of the masses had no justifiable existence, since everything
they asserted as a right was an assertion, more or less disguised, of
the doctrine that the unfit should survive. "There are," he said, "only
three ways in which the masses appear to me to deserve a glance: first,
as blurred copies of their betters, printed on bad paper and from worn
out plates; secondly, as a necessary opposition to stimulate the master
class, and thirdly, as instruments in the hands of the master class.
Further than this I hand them over to statistics--and the devil."[5]
Kant's proposal that the morality of every contemplated action be
tested by the question, "Suppose everyone did as I propose to do?"
seemed utterly ridiculous to Nietzsche because he saw that "everyone"
always opposed the very things which meant progress; and Kant's
corollary that the sense of duty contemplated in this dictum was "the
obligation to act in reverence for law," proved to Nietzsche merely
that both duty and law were absurdities. "Contumely," he said, "always
falls upon those who break through some custom or convention. Such men,
in fact, are called criminals. Everyone who overthrows an existing law
is, at the start, regarded as a wicked man. Long afterward, when it
is found that this law was bad and so cannot be re-established, the
epithet is changed. All history treats almost exclusively of wicked men
who, in the course of time, have come to be looked upon as good men.
All progress is the result of successful crimes."[6]

Dr. Turck,[7] Miss Paget, M. Nordau and other critics see in all this
good evidence that Nietzsche was a criminal at heart. At the bottom of
all philosophies, says Miss Paget,[8] there is always one supreme idea.
Sometimes it is a conception of nature, sometimes it is a religious
faith and sometimes it is a theory of truth. In Nietzsche's case it is
"my taste." He is always irritated: "_I_ dislike," "_I_ hate," "_I_
want to get rid of" appear on every page of his writings. He delights
in ruthlessness, his fellow men disgust him, his physical senses are
acute, he has a sick ego. For that reason he likes singularity, the
lonely Alps, classic literature and Bizet's "clear yellow" music.
Turck argues that Nietzsche was a criminal because he got pleasure out
of things which outraged the majority of his fellow men, and Nordau, in
supporting this idea, shows that it is possible for a man to experience
and approve criminal impulses and still never act them: that there are
criminals of the chair as well as of the dark lantern and sandbag. The
answer to all of this, of course, is the fact that the same method of
reasoning would convict every original thinker the world has ever known
of black felony: that it would make Martin Luther a criminal as well
as Jack Sheppard, John the Baptist as well as the Borgias, and Galileo
as well as Judas Iscariot; that it would justify the execution of all
the sublime company of heroes who have been done to death for their
opinions, from Jesus Christ down the long line.


[1] "_Der Antichrist_," § 57.

[2] In "The Governance of England," (London: 1904) Sidney Low points
out (chap. X) that, despite the rise of democracy, the government of
Great Britain is still entirely in the hands of the landed gentry
and nobility. The members of this class plainly owe their power to
the military prowess of their ancestors, and their identity with the
present military and judicial class is obvious. The typical M.P., in
fact, also writes "J.P." after his name and "Capt." or "Col." before
it. The examples of Russia, Germany, Japan, Austria, Italy, Spain and
the Latin-American republics scarcely need be mentioned. In China the
military, judicial and legislative-executive functions are always
combined, and in the United States, while the military branch of the
second caste is apparently impotent, it is plain that the balance of
legislative power in every state and in the national legislature is
held by lawyers, just as the final determination of all laws rests with
judges.

[3] "_Der Antichrist_," § 55.

[4] The quotations are from various chapters in the first part of
"_Also sprach Zarathustra_."

[5] "_Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben_."

[6] "_Morgenröte_," § 20.

[7] "_Friedrich Nietzsche und seine philosophische Irrwege_," Leipsic,
1891.

[8] _North American Review_, Dec., 1904.




IX


WOMEN AND MARRIAGE


Nietzsche's faithful sister, with almost comical and essentially
feminine disgust, bewails the fact that, as a very young man, the
philosopher became acquainted with the baleful truths set forth in
Schopenhauer's immortal essay "On Women." That this daring work greatly
influenced him is true, and that he subscribed to its chief arguments
all the rest of his days is also true, but it is far from true to say
that his view of the fair sex was borrowed bodily from Schopenhauer or
that he would have written otherwise than as he did if Schopenhauer
had never lived. Nietzsche's conclusions regarding women were the
inevitable result, indeed, of his own philosophical system. It is
impossible to conceive a man who held his opinions of morality and
society laying down any other doctrines of femininity and matrimony
than those he scattered through his books.

Nietzsche believed that there was a radical difference between the
mind of man and the mind of woman and that the two sexes reacted in
diametrically different ways to those stimuli which make up what might
be called the clinical picture of human society. It is the function of
man, he said, to wield a sword in humanity's battle with everything
that makes life on earth painful or precarious. It is the function of
woman, not to fight herself, but to provide fresh warriors for the
fray. Thus the exercise of the will to exist is divided between the
two: the man seeking the welfare of the race as he actually sees it and
the woman seeking the welfare of generations yet unborn. Of course, it
is obvious that this division is by no means clearly marked, because
the man, in struggling for power over his environment, necessarily
improves the conditions under which his children live, and the woman,
working for her children, often benefits herself. But all the same the
distinction is a good one and empiric observation bears it out. As
everyone who has given a moment's thought to the subject well knows,
a man's first concern in the world is to provide food and shelter for
himself and his family, while a woman's foremost duty is to bear and
rear children. "Thus," said Nietzsche, "would I have man and woman: the
one fit for warfare, the other fit for giving birth; and both fit for
dancing with head and legs"[1]--that is to say: both capable of doing
their share of the race's work, mental and physical, with conscious and
superabundant efficiency.

Nietzsche points out that, in the racial economy, the place of woman
may be compared to that of a slave-nation, while the position of man
resembles that of a master-nation. We have seen how a weak nation,
unable, on account of its weakness, to satisfy its will to survive and
thirst for power by forcing its authority upon other nations, turns
to the task of keeping these other nations, as much as possible, from
enforcing their authority upon it. Realizing that it cannot rule, but
must serve, it endeavors to make the conditions of its servitude as
bearable as possible. This effort is commonly made in two ways: first
by ostensibly renouncing its desire to rule, and secondly, by attempts
to inoculate its powerful neighbors with its ideas in subterranean
and round-about ways, so as to avoid arousing their suspicion and
opposition. It becomes, in brief, humble and cunning, and with its
humility as a cloak, it seeks to pit its cunning against the sheer
might of those it fears.

The position of women in the world is much the same. The business
of bearing and rearing children is destructive to their physical
strength, and in consequence makes it impossible for them to prevail
by force when their ideas and those of men happen to differ. To take
away the sting of this incapacity, they make a virtue of it, and it
becomes modesty, humility, self-sacrifice and fidelity; to win in
spite of it they cultivate cunning, which commonly takes the form of
hypocrisy, cajolery, dissimulation and more or less masked appeals to
the masculine sexual instinct. All of this is so often observed in
every-day life that it has become commonplace. A woman is physically
unable to force a man to do as she desires, but her very inability to
do so becomes a sentimental weapon against him, and her blandishments
do the rest. The spectacle of a strong man ruled by a weak woman is no
rare one certainly, and Samson was neither the first nor last giant to
fall before a Delilah. There is scarcely a household in all the world,
in truth, in which the familiar drama is not being acted and reacted
day after day.

Now, it is plain from the foregoing that, though women's business in
the world is of such a character that it inevitably leads to physical
degeneration, her constant need to overcome the effects of this
degeneration by cunning produces constant mental activity, which, by
the law of exercise, should produce, in turn, great mental efficiency.
This conclusion, in part, is perfectly correct, for women, as a sex,
are shrewd, resourceful and acute; but the very fact that they are
always concerned with imminent problems and that, in consequence, they
are unaccustomed to dealing with the larger riddles of life, makes
their mental attitude essentially petty. This explains the circumstance
that despite their mental suppleness, they are not genuinely strong
intellectually. Indeed, the very contrary is true. Women's constant
thought is, not to lay down broad principles of right and wrong; not to
place the whole world in harmony with some great scheme of justice; not
to consider the future of nations; not to make two blades of grass grow
where one grew before; but to deceive, influence, sway and please men.
Normally, their weakness makes masculine protection necessary to their
existence and to the exercise of their overpowering maternal instinct,
and so their whole effort is to obtain this protection in the easiest
way possible. The net result is that feminine morality is a morality
of opportunism and imminent expediency, and that the normal woman has
no respect for, and scarcely any conception of abstract truth. Thus is
proved the fact noted by Schopenhauer and many other observers: that a
woman seldom manifests any true sense of justice or of honor.

It is unnecessary to set forth this idea in greater detail, because
everyone is familiar with it and proofs of its accuracy are supplied
in infinite abundance by common observation. Nietzsche accepted it
as demonstrated. When he set out to pursue the subject further, he
rejected entirely the Schopenhauerean corollary that man should ever
regard woman as his enemy, and should seek, by all means within his
power, to escape her insidious influence. Such a notion naturally
outraged the philosopher of the superman. He was never an advocate
of running away: to all the facts of existence he said "yes." His
ideal was not resignation or flight, but an intelligent defiance and
opposition. Therefore, he argued that man should accept woman as a
natural opponent arrayed against him for the benevolent purpose of
stimulating him to constant efficiency. Opposition, he pointed out,
was a necessary forerunner of function, and in consequence the fact
that woman spent her entire effort in a ceaseless endeavor to undermine
and change the will of man, merely served to make this will alert and
strong, and so increased man's capacity for meeting and overcoming the
enemies of his existence.

A man conscious of his strength, observes Nietzsche, need have no
fear of women. It is only the man who finds himself utterly helpless
in the face of feminine cajolery that must cry, "Get thee behind me,
Satan!" and flee. "It is only the most sensual men," he says, "who
have to shun women and torture their bodies." The normal, healthy man,
despite the strong appeal which women make to him by their subtle
putting forward of the sexual idea--visually as dress, coquetry and
what not--still keeps a level head. He is strong enough to weather the
sexual storm. But the man who cannot do this, who experiences no normal
reaction in the direction of guardedness and caution and reason, must
either abandon himself utterly as a helpless slave to woman's instinct
of race-preservation, and so become a bestial voluptuary, or avoid
temptation altogether and so become a celibate.[2]

There is nothing essentially evil in woman's effort to combat and
control man's will by constantly suggesting the sexual idea to him,
because it is necessary, for the permanence of the race, that this
idea be presented frequently and powerfully. Therefore, the conflict
between masculine and feminine ideals is to be regarded, not as a
lamentable battle, in which one side is right and the other wrong, but
a convenient means of providing that stimulation-by-opposition without
which all function, and in consequence all progress, would cease. "The
man who regards women as an enemy to be avoided," says Nietzsche,
"betrays an unbridled lust which loathes not only itself, but also its
means."[3]

There are, of course, occasions when the feminine influence, by
its very subtlety, works harm to the higher sort of men. It is
dangerous for a man to love too violently and it is dangerous, too,
for him to be loved too much.' "The natural inclination of women
to a quiet, uniform and peaceful existence "--that is to say, to a
slave-morality--"operates adversely to the heroic impulse of the
masculine free spirit. Without being aware of it, women act like a
person who would remove stones from the path of a mineralogist, lest
his feet should come in contact with them--forgetting entirely that he
is faring forth for the very purpose of coming in contact with them....
The wives of men with lofty aspirations cannot resign themselves to
seeing their husbands suffering, impoverished and slighted, even
though it is apparent that this suffering proves, not only that its
victim has chosen his attitude aright, but also that his aims--some
day, at least--will be realized. Women always intrigue in secret
against the higher souls of their husbands. They seek to cheat the
future for the sake of a painless and agreeable present."[4] In other
words, the feminine vision is ever limited in range. Your typical woman
cannot see far ahead; she cannot reason out the ultimate effect of a
complicated series of causes; her eye is always upon the present or
the very near future. Thus Nietzsche reaches, by a circuitous route,
a conclusion supported by the almost unanimous verdict of the entire
masculine sex, at all times and everywhere.

Nietzsche quite agrees with Schopenhauer (and with nearly everyone
else who has given the matter thought) that the thing we call love is
grounded upon physical desire, and that all of those arts of dress
and manner in which women excel are mere devices for arousing this
desire in man, but he points out, very justly, that a great many other
considerations also enter into the matter. Love necessarily presupposes
a yearning to mate, and mating is its logical consequence, but the
human imagination has made it more than that. The man in love sees
in his charmer, not only an attractive instrument for satisfying his
comparatively rare and necessarily brief impulses to dalliance, but
also a worthy companion, guide, counsellor and friend. The essence of
love is confidence--confidence in the loved one's judgment, honesty
and fidelity and in the persistence of her charm. So large do
these considerations loom among the higher classes of men that they
frequently obscure the fundamental sexual impulse entirely. It is a
commonplace, indeed, that in the ecstasies of amorous idealization, the
notion of the function itself becomes obnoxious. It may be impossible
to imagine a man loving a woman without having had, at some time,
conscious desire for her, but all the same it is undoubtedly true that
the wish for marriage is very often a wish for close and constant
association with the one respected, admired and trusted rather than a
yearning for the satisfaction of desire.

All of this admiration, respect and trust, as we have seen, may be
interpreted as confidence, which, in turn, is faith. Now, faith is
essentially unreasonable, and in the great majority of cases, is
the very antithesis of reason. Therefore, a man in love commonly
endows the object of his affection with merits which, to the eye of
a disinterested person, she obviously lacks. "Love ... has a secret
craving to discover in the loved one as many beautiful qualities as
possible and to raise her as high as possible." "Whoever idolizes a
person tries to justify himself by idealizing; and thus becomes an
artist (or self-deceiver) in order to have a clear conscience." Again
there is a tendency to illogical generalization. "Everything which
pleases me once, or several times, is pleasing of and in itself." The
result of this, of course, is quick and painful disillusion. The loved
one is necessarily merely human and when the ideal gives way to the
real, reaction necessarily follows. "Many a married man awakens one
morning to the consciousness that his wife is far from attractive."[5]
And it is only fair to note that the same awakening is probably the
bitter portion of most married women, too.

In addition, it is plain that the purely physical desire which lies
at the bottom of all human love, no matter how much sentimental
considerations may obscure it, is merely a passion and so, in the very
nature of things, is intermittent and evanescent. There are moments
when it is overpowering, but there are hours, days, weeks and months
when it is dormant. Therefore, we must conclude with Nietzsche, that
the thing we call love, whether considered from its physical or
psychical aspect, is fragile and short-lived.

Now, inasmuch as marriage, in the majority of cases, is a permanent
institution (as it is, according to the theory of our moral code, in
_all_ cases), it follows that, in order to make the relation bearable,
something must arise to take the place of love. This something, as we
know, is ordinarily tolerance, respect, _camaraderie_, or a common
interest in the well-being of the matrimonial firm or in the offspring
of the marriage. In other words, the discovery that many of the ideal
qualities seen in the life-companion through the rosy glasses of love
do not exist is succeeded by a common-sense and unsentimental decision
to make the best of those real ones which actually do exist.

From this it is apparent that a marriage is most apt to be successful
when the qualities imagined in the beloved are all, or nearly all,
real: that is to say, when the possibility of disillusion is at an
irreducible minimum. This occurs sometimes by accident, but Nietzsche
points out that such accidents are comparatively rare. A man in love,
indeed, is the worst possible judge of his _inamorata's_ possession
of those traits which will make her a satisfactory wife, for, as we
have noted, he observes her through an ideal haze and sees in her
innumerable merits which, to the eye of an unprejudiced and accurate
observer, she does not possess. Nietzsche, at different times, pointed
out two remedies for this. His first plan proposed that marriages for
love be discouraged, and that we endeavor to insure the permanence of
the relation by putting the selection of mates into the hands of third
persons likely to be dispassionate and far-seeing: a plan followed
with great success, it may be recalled, by most ancient peoples and in
vogue, in a more or less disguised form, in many European countries
today. "It is impossible," he said, "to found a permanent institution
upon an idiosyncrasy. Marriage, if it is to stand as the bulwark of
civilization, cannot be founded upon the temporary and unreasonable
thing called love. To fulfil its mission, it must be founded upon the
impulse to reproduction, or race permanence; the impulse to possess
property (women and children are property); and the impulse to rule,
which constantly organizes for itself the smallest unit of sovereignty,
the family, and which needs children and heirs to maintain, by physical
force, whatever measure of power, riches and influence it attains."

Nietzsche's second proposal was nothing more or less than the
institution of trial marriage, which, when it was proposed years
later by an American sociologist,[6] caused all the uproar which
invariably rises in the United States whenever an attempt is made
to seek absolute truth. "Give us a term," said Zarathustra, "and a
small marriage, that we may see whether we are fit for the great
marriage."[7] The idea here, of course, is simply this: that, when a
man and a woman find it utterly impossible to live in harmony, it is
better for them to separate at once than to live on together, making
a mock of the institution they profess to respect, and begetting
children who, in Nietzsche's phrase, cannot be regarded other than as
mere "scapegoats of matrimony." Nietzsche saw that this notion was so
utterly opposed to all current ideals and hypocrisies that it would
be useless to argue it, and so he veered toward his first proposal.
The latter, despite its violation of one of the most sacred illusions
of the Anglo-Saxon race, is by no means a mere fantasy of the chair.
Marriages in which love is subordinated to mutual fitness and material
considerations are the rule in many countries today, and have been so
for thousands of years, and if it be urged that, in France, their fruit
has been adultery, unfruitfulness and degeneration, it may be answered
that, in Turkey, Japan and India, they have become the cornerstones of
quite respectable civilizations.

Nietzsche believed that the ultimate mission and function of human
marriage was the breeding of a race of supermen and he saw very clearly
that fortuitous pairing would never bring this about. "Thou shalt not
only propagate thyself," said Zarathustra, "but propagate thyself
upward. Marriage should be the will of two to create that which is
greater than either. But that which the many call marriage--alas! what
call I that? Alas I that soul-poverty of two! Alas! that soul-filth
of two! Alas! that miserable dalliance of two! Marriage they call
it--and they say that marriages are made in heaven. I like them not:
these animals caught in heavenly nets.... Laugh not at such marriages!
What child has not reason to weep over its parents?" It is the old
argument against haphazard breeding. We select the sires and dams of
our race-horses with most elaborate care, but the strains that mingle
in our children's veins get there by chance. "Worthy and ripe for
begetting the superman this man appeared to me, but when I saw his
wife earth seemed a madhouse. Yea, I wish the earth would tremble in
convulsions when such a saint and such a goose mate! This one fought
for truth like a hero--and then took to heart a little dressed-up
lie. He calls it his marriage. That one was reserved in intercourse
and chose his associates fastidiously--and then spoiled his company
forever. He calls it his marriage. A third sought for a servant with
an angel's virtues. Now he is the servant of a woman. Even the most
cunning buys his wife in a sack."[8]

As has been noted, Nietzsche was by no means a declaimer against women.
A bachelor himself and constitutionally suspicious of all who walked
in skirts, he nevertheless avoided the error of damning the whole sex
as a dangerous and malignant excrescence upon the face of humanity. He
saw that woman's mind was the natural complement of man's mind; that
womanly guile was as useful, in its place, as masculine truth; that
man, to retain those faculties which made him master of the earth,
needed a persistent and resourceful opponent to stimulate them and so
preserve and develop them. So long as the institution of the family
remained a premise in every sociological syllogism, so long as mere
fruitfulness remained as much a merit among intelligent human beings
as it was among peasants and cattle--so long, he saw, it would be
necessary for the stronger sex to submit to the parasitic opportunism
of the weaker.

But he was far from exalting mere women into goddesses, after the
sentimental fashion of those virtuosi of illusion who pass for
law-givers in the United States, and particularly in the southern
part thereof. Chivalry, with its ridiculous denial of obvious facts,
seemed to him unspeakable and the good old sub-Potomac doctrines that
a woman who loses her virtue is, _ipso facto_, a victim and not a
criminal or _particeps criminis_, and that a "lady," by virtue of being
a "lady," is necessarily a reluctant and helpless quarry in the hunt
of love--these ancient and venerable fallacies would have made him
laugh. He admitted the great and noble part that woman had to play in
the world-drama, but he saw clearly that her methods were essentially
deceptive, insincere and pernicious, and so he held that she should be
confined to her proper role and that any effort she made to take a hand
in other matters should be regarded with suspicion, and when necessary,
violently opposed. Thus Nietzsche detested the idea of women's suffrage
almost as much as he detested the idea of chivalry. The participation
of women in large affairs, he argued, could lead to but one result:
the contamination of the masculine ideals of justice, honor and truth
by the feminine ideals of dissimulation, equivocation and intrigue.
In women, he believed, there was an entire absence of that instinctive
liking for a square deal and a fair fight which one finds in all
men--even the worst.

Hence, Nietzsche believed that, in his dealings with women, man should
be wary and cautious. "Let men fear women when she loveth: for she
sacrificeth all for love and nothing else hath value to her.... Man
is for woman a means: the end is always the child.... Two things are
wanted by the true man: danger and play. Therefore he seeketh woman as
the most dangerous toy within his reach.... Thou goest to women? _Don't
forget thy whip!_"[9] This last sentence has helped to make Nietzsche
a stench in the nostrils of the orthodox, but the context makes his
argument far more than a mere effort at sensational epigram. He is
pointing out the utter unscrupulousness which lies at the foundation of
the maternal instinct: an unscrupulousness familiar to every observer
of humanity.[10] Indeed, it is so potent a factor in the affairs of the
world that we have, by our ancient device of labelling the inevitable
the good, exalted it to the dignity and estate of a virtue. But all
the same, we are instinctively conscious of its inherent opposition
to truth and justice, and so our law books provide that a woman who
commits a crime in her husband's presence is presumed to have been led
to it by her desire to work what she regards as his good, which means
her desire to retain his protection and good will. "Man's happiness
is: 'I will.' Woman's happiness is: 'He will.'"[11]

Maternity, thought Nietzsche, was a thing even more sublime
than paternity, because it produced a more keen sense of race
responsibility. "Is there a state more blessed," he asked, "than that
of a woman with child?... Even worldly justice does not allow the
judge and hangman to lay hold on her."[12] He saw, too, that woman's
insincere masochism[13] spurred man to heroic efforts and gave vigor
and direction to his work by the very fact that it bore the outward
aspect of helplessness. He saw that the resultant stimulation of the
will to power was responsible for many of the world's great deeds,
and that, if woman served no other purpose, she would still take an
honorable place as the most splendid reward--greater than honors or
treasures--that humanity could bestow upon its victors. The winning
of a beautiful and much-sought woman, indeed, will remain as great an
incentive to endeavor as the conquest of a principality so long as
humanity remains substantially as it is today.

It is unfortunate that Nietzsche left us no record of his notions
regarding the probable future of matrimony as an institution. We have
reason to believe that he agreed with Schopenhauer's analysis of the
"lady," _i.e._ the woman elevated to splendid, but complete parasitism.
Schopenhauer showed that this pitiful creature was the product of
the monogamous ideal, just as the prostitute was the product of the
monogamous actuality. In the United States and England, unfortunately,
it is impossible to discuss such matters with frankness, or to apply to
them the standards of absolute truth, on account of the absurd axiom
that monogamy is ordained of God,--with which maxim there appears
the equally absurd corollary: that the civilization of a people is
to be measured by the degree of dependence of its women. Luckily for
posterity this last revolting doctrine is fast dying, though its
decadence is scarcely noticed and wholly misunderstood. We see about us
that women are becoming more and more independent and self-sufficient
and that, as individuals, they have less and less need to seek and
retain the good will and protection of individual men, but we overlook
the fact that this tendency is fast undermining the ancient theory
that the family is a necessary and impeccable institution and that
without it progress would be impossible. As a matter of fact, the idea
of the family, as it exists today, is based entirely upon the idea of
feminine helplessness. So soon as women are capable of making a living
for themselves and their children, without the aid of the fathers of
the latter, the old cornerstone of the family--the masculine defender
and bread-winner--will find his occupation gone, and it will become
ridiculous to force him, by law or custom, to discharge duties for
which there is no longer need. Wipe out your masculine defender, and
your feminine parasite-_haus-frau_--and where is your family?

This tendency is exhibited empirically by the rising revolt against
those fetters which the family idea has imposed upon humanity: by
the growing feeling that divorce should be a matter of individual
expedience; by the successful war of cosmopolitanism upon insularity
and clannishness and upon all other costly outgrowths of the old idea
that because men are of the same blood they must necessarily love
one another; and by the increasing reluctance among civilized human
beings to become parents without some reason more logical than the
notion that parenthood, in itself, is praiseworthy. It seems plain,
in a word, that so soon as any considerable portion of the women of
the world become capable of doing men's work and of thus earning a
living for themselves and their children without the aid of men, there
will be in full progress a dangerous, if unconscious, war upon the
institution of marriage. It may be urged in reply that this will never
happen, because of the fact that women are physically unequal to men,
and that in consequence of their duty of child-bearing, they will ever
remain so, but it may be answered to this that use will probably vastly
increase their physical fitness; that science will rob child-bearing
of most of its terrors within a comparatively few years; and that the
woman who seeks to go it alone will have only herself and her child to
maintain, whereas, the man of today has not only himself and his child,
but also the woman. Again, it is plain that the economic handicap
of child-bearing is greatly overestimated. At most, the business of
maternity makes a woman utterly helpless for no longer than three
months, and in the case of a woman who has three children, this means
nine months in a life time. It is entirely probable that alcohol
alone, not to speak of other enemies of efficiency, robs the average
man of quite that much productive activity during his three score years
and ten.


[1] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_," III.

[2] Nietzsche saw, of course ("The Genealogy of Morals," III), that
temporary celibacy was frequently necessary to men with peculiarly
difficult and vitiating tasks ahead of them. The philosopher who sought
to solve world riddles, he said, had need to steer clear of women, for
reasons which appealed, with equal force, to the athlete who sought to
perform great feats of physical strength. It is obvious, however, that
this desire to escape distraction and drain differs vastly from ethical
celibacy.

[3] "_Morgenröte_," § 346.

[4] "_Menschliches allzu Menschliches_," § 431, 434.

[5] All of these quotations are from "_Morgenröte_."

[6] Elsie Clews Parsons: "The Family," New York, 1906. Mrs. Parsons is
a doctor of philosophy, a Hartley house fellow and was for six years a
lecturer on sociology at Barnard College.

[7] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_," III.

[8] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_," I.

[9] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_," I.

[10] Until quite recently it was considered indecent and indefensible
to mention this fact, despite its obviousness. But it is now discussed
freely enough and in Henry Arthur Jones' play, "The Hypocrites," it is
presented admirably in the character of the mother whose instinctive
effort to protect her son makes her a scoundrel and the son a cad.

[11] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_," I.

[12] "_Morgenröte_," § 552.

[13] Prof. Dr. R. von Krafft Ebing: "Masochism is ... a peculiar
perversion ... consisting in this, that the individual seized with
it is dominated by the idea that he is wholly and unconditionally
subjected to the will of a person of the opposite sex, who treats him
imperiously and humiliates and maltreats him."




X


GOVERNMENT


Like Spencer before him, Nietzsche believed, as we have seen,
that the best possible system of government was that which least
interfered with the desires and enterprises of the efficient and
intelligent individual. That is to say, he held that it would be well
to establish, among the members of his first caste of human beings,
a sort of glorified anarchy. Each member of this caste should be at
liberty to work out his own destiny for himself. There should be no
laws regulating and circumscribing his relations to other members of
his caste, except the easily-recognizable and often-changing laws of
common interest, and above all, there should be no laws forcing him
to submit to, or even to consider, the wishes and behests of the two
lower castes. The higher man, in a word, should admit no responsibility
whatever to the lower castes. The lowest of all he should look upon
solely as a race of slaves bred to work his welfare in the most
efficient and uncomplaining manner possible, and the military caste
should seem to him a race designed only to carry out his orders and so
prevent the slave caste marching against him.

It is plain from this that Nietzsche stood squarely opposed to both of
the two schemes of government which, on the surface, at least, seem
to prevail in the western world today. For the monarchial ideal and
for the democratic ideal he had the same words of contempt. Under an
absolute monarchy, he believed, the military or law-enforcing caste was
unduly exalted, and so its natural tendency to permanence was increased
and its natural opposition to all experiment and progress was made well
nigh irresistible. Under a communistic democracy, on the other hand,
the mistake was made of putting power into the hands of the great,
inert herd, which was necessarily and inevitably ignorant, credulous,
superstitious, corrupt and wrong. The natural tendency of this herd,
said Nietzsche, was to combat change and progress as bitterly and as
ceaselessly as the military-judicial caste, and when, by some accident,
it rose out of its rut and attempted experiments, it nearly always
made mistakes, both in its premises and its conclusions and so got
hopelessly bogged in error and imbecility. Its feeling for truth seemed
to him to be almost _nil_; its mind could never see beneath misleading
exteriors. "In the market place," said Zarathustra, "one convinces by
gestures, but real reasons make the populace distrustful."[1]

That this natural incompetence of the masses is an actual fact was
observed by a hundred philosophers before Nietzsche, and fresh proofs
of it are spread copiously before the world every day. Wherever
universal suffrage, or some close approach to it, is the primary
axiom of government, the thing known in the United States as "freak
legislation" is a constant evil. On the statute books of the great
majority of American states there are laws so plainly opposed to all
common-sense that they bear an air of almost pathetic humor. One
state legislature,[2] in an effort to prevent the corrupt employment
of insurance funds, passes laws so stringent that, in the face of
them, it is utterly impossible for an insurance company to transact
a profitable business. Another considers an act contravening rights
guaranteed specifically by the state and national constitutions;[3]
yet another[4] passes a law prohibiting divorce under any circumstances
whatever. And the spectacle is by no means confined to the American
states. In the Australian Commonwealth, mob-rule has burdened the
statutes with regulations which make difficult, if not impossible,
the natural development of the country's resources and trade. If, in
England and Germany, the effect of universal suffrage has been less
apparent, it is because in these countries the two upper castes have
solved the problem of keeping the proletariat, despite its theoretical
sovereignty, in proper leash and bounds.

The possibility of exercising this control seemed to Nietzsche to
be the saving grace of all modern forms of government, just as
their essential impossibility appeared as the saving grace alike of
Christianity and of communistic civilization. In England, as we have
seen,[5] the military-judicial caste, despite the Reform Act of 1867,
has retained its old dominance, and in Germany, despite the occasional
success of the socialists, it is always possible for the military
aristocracy, by appealing to the vanity of the _bourgeoisie_, to win in
a stand-up fight. In America, the proletariat, when it is not engaged
in functioning in its own extraordinary manner, is commonly the tool,
either of the first of Nietzsche's castes or of the second. That is to
say, the average legislature has its price, and this price is often
paid by those who believe that old laws, no matter how imperfect they
may be, are better than harum-scarum new ones. Naturally enough, the
most intelligent and efficient of Americans--members of the first
caste--do not often go to a state capital with corruption funds and
openly buy legislation, but nevertheless their influence is frequently
felt. President Roosevelt, for one, has more than once forced his
views upon a reluctant proletariat and even enlisted it under his
banner--as in his advocacy of centralization, a truly dionysian idea,
for example--and in the southern states the educated white class--which
there represents, though in a melancholy fashion, the Nietzschean first
caste--has found it easy to take from the black masses their very right
to vote, despite the fact that they are everywhere in a great majority
numerically, and so, by the theory of democracy, represent whatever
power lies in the state. Thus it is apparent that Nietzsche's argument
against democracy, like his argument against brotherhood, is based upon
the thesis that both are rejected instinctively by all those men whose
activity works for the progress of the human race.[6]

It is obvious, of course, that the sort of anarchy preached by
Nietzsche differs vastly from the beery, collarless anarchy preached
by Herr Most and his unwashed followers. The latter contemplates a
suspension of all laws in order that the unfit may escape the natural
and rightful exploitation of the fit, whereas the former reduces
the unfit to _de facto_ slavery and makes them subject to the laws
of a master class, which, in so far as the relations of its own
members, one to the other, are concerned, recognizes no law but that
of natural selection. To the average American or Englishman the very
name of anarchy causes a shudder, because it invariably conjures up
a picture of a land terrorized by low-browed assassins with matted
beards, carrying bombs in one hand and mugs of beer in the other. But
as a matter of fact, there is no reason whatever to believe that, if
all laws were abolished tomorrow, such swine would survive the day.
They are incompetents under our present paternalism and they would be
incompetents under dionysian anarchy. The only difference between the
two states is that the former, by its laws, protects men of this sort,
whereas the latter would work their speedy annihilation. In a word,
the dionysian state would see the triumph, not of drunken loafers, but
of the very men whose efforts are making for progress today: those
strong, free, self-reliant, resourceful men whose capacities are so
much greater than the mob's that they are often able to force their
ideas upon it despite its theoretical right to rule them and its actual
endeavor so to do. Nietzschean anarchy would create an aristocracy of
efficiency. The strong man--which means the intelligent, ingenious and
far-seeing man--would acknowledge no authority but his own will and no
morality but his own advantage. As we have seen in previous chapters,
this would re-establish the law of natural selection firmly upon its
disputed throne, and so the strong would grow ever stronger and more
efficient, and the weak would grow ever more obedient and tractile.

It may be well at this place to glance briefly at an objection that
has been urged against Nietzsche's argument by many critics, and
particularly by those in the socialistic camp. Led to it, no doubt,
by their too literal acceptance of Marx's materialistic conception of
history, they have assumed that Nietzsche's higher man must necessarily
belong to the class denominated, by our after-dinner speakers and
leader writers, "captains of industry," and to this class alone.
That is to say, they have regarded the higher man as identical with
the pushing, grasping buccaneer of finance, because this buccaneer
has seemed to them to be the only man of today who is truly "strong,
free, self-reliant and resourceful" and the only one who actually
"acknowledges no authority but his own will." As a matter of fact,
all of these assumptions are in error. For one thing, the "captain of
industry" is not uncommonly the reverse of a dionysian, and without
the artificial aid of our permanent laws, he might often perish in
the struggle for existence. For another thing, it is an obvious fact
that the men who go most violently counter to the view of the herd,
and who battle most strenuously to prevail against it--our true
criminals and transvaluers and breakers of the law--are not such men
as Rockefeller, but men such as Pasteur; not such men as Morgan and
Hooley, but sham-smashers and truth-tellers and mob-fighters after the
type of Huxley, Lincoln, Bismarck, Darwin, Virchow, Haeckel, Hobbes,
Macchiavelli, Harvey and Jenner, the father of vaccination.

Jenner, to choose one from the long list, was a real dionysian, because
he boldly pitted his own opinion against the practically unanimous
opinion of all the rest of the human race. Among those members of
the ruling class in England who came after him--those men, that is,
who made vaccination compulsory--the dionysian spirit was still more
apparent. The masses themselves did not want to be vaccinated, because
they were too ignorant to understand the theory of inoculation and
too stupid to be much impressed by its unvisualized and--for years,
at least--impalpable benefits. Yet their rulers forced them, against
their will, to bare their arms. And why was this done? Was it because
the ruling class was possessed by a boundless love for humanity and
so yearned to lavish upon it a wealth of Christian devotion? Not
at all. The real motive of the law makers was to be found in two
considerations. In the first place, a proletariat which suffered
from epidemics of small-pox was a crippled mob whose capacity for
serving its betters, in the fields and factories of England, was sadly
decreased. In the second place experience proved that when smallpox
raged in the slums, it had an unhappy habit of stretching out its arms
in the direction of mansion and castle, too. Therefore, the proletariat
was vaccinated and small-pox was stamped out--not because the ruling
class loved the workers, but because it wanted to make them work for
it as continuously as possible and to remove or reduce their constant
menace to its life and welfare. In so far as it took the initiative in
these proceedings, the military ruling-class of England raised itself
to the eminence of Nietzsche's first caste. That Jenner himself, when
he put forward his idea and led the military caste to carry it into
execution, was an ideal member of the first caste, is plain. The goal
before him was fame everlasting--and he gained it.

I have made this rather long digression because the opponents of
Nietzsche have voiced their error a thousand times and have well-nigh
convinced a great many persons of its truth. It is apparent enough,
of course, that a great many men whose energy is devoted to the
accumulation of money are truly dionysian in their methods and aims,
but it is apparent, too, that a great many others are not. Nietzsche
himself was well aware of the dangers which beset a race enthralled
by commercialism, and he sounded his warning against them. Trade,
being grounded upon security, tends to work for permanence in laws and
customs, even after the actual utility of these laws and customs is
openly questioned. This is shown by the persistence of free trade in
England and of protectionism in the United States, despite the fact
that the conditions of existence, in both countries, have materially
changed since the two systems were adopted, and there is now good
ground, in each, for demanding reform. So it is plain that Nietzsche
did not cast his higher man in the mold of a mere millionaire. It
is conceivable that a careful analysis might prove Mr. Morgan to be
a dionysian, but it is certain that his character as such would not
be grounded upon his well-known and oft-repeated plea that existing
institutions be permitted to remain as they are.

Yet again, a great many critics of Nietzsche mistake his criticism of
existing governmental institutions for an argument in favor of their
immediate and violent abolition. When he inveighs against monarchy or
democracy, for instance, it is concluded that he wants to assassinate
all the existing rulers of the world, overturn all existing governments
and put chaos, carnage, rapine and anarchy in their place. Such a
conclusion, of course, is a grievous error. Nietzsche by no means
believed that reforms could be instituted in a moment or that the
characters and habits of thought of human beings could be altered
by a lightning stroke. His whole philosophy, in truth, was based
upon the idea of slow evolution, through infinitely laborious and
infinitely protracted stages. All he attempted to do was to indicate
the errors that were being made in his own time and to point out the
probable character of the truths that would be accepted in the future.
He believed that it was only by constant skepticism, criticism and
opposition that progress could be made, and that the greatest of all
dangers was inanition. Therefore, when he condemned all existing
schemes of government, it meant no more than that he regarded them as
based upon fundamental errors, and that he hoped and believed that, in
the course of time, these errors would be observed, admitted and swept
away, to make room for other errors measurably less dangerous, and in
the end for truths. Such was his mission, as he conceived it: to attack
error wherever he saw it and to proclaim truth whenever he found it.
It is only by such iconoclasm and proselyting that humanity can be
helped. It is only after a mistake is perceived and admitted that it
can be rectified.

Nietzsche's argument for the "free spirit" by no means denies the
efficacy of co-operation in the struggle upward, but neither does
it support that blind fetishism which sees in co-operation the sole
instrument of human progress. In one of his characteristic thumb-nail
notes upon evolution he says: "The most important result of progress in
the past is the fact that we no longer live in constant fear of wild
beasts, barbarians, gods and our own dreams."[7] It may be argued, in
reference to this, that organized government is to be thanked for our
deliverance, but a moment's thought will show the error of the notion.
Humanity's war upon wild beasts was fought and won by individualists,
who had in mind no end but their personal safety and that of their
children, and the subsequent war upon barbarians would have been
impossible, or at least unsuccessful, had it not been for the weapons
invented and employed during the older fight against beasts. Again, it
is apparent that our emancipation from the race's old superstitions
regarding gods and omens has been achieved, not by communal effort,
but by individual effort. Knowledge and not government brought us the
truth that made us free. Government, in its very essence, is opposed
to all increase of knowledge. Its tendency is always toward permanence
and against change. It is unthinkable without some accepted scheme of
law or morality, and such schemes, as we have seen, stand in direct
antithesis to every effort to find the absolute truth. Therefore, it
is plain that the progress of humanity, far from being the result of
government, has been made entirely without its aid and in the face of
its constant and bitter opposition. The code of Hammurabi, the laws
of the Medes and Persians, the Code Napoleon and the English common
law have retarded the search for the ultimate verities almost as much,
indeed, as the Ten Commandments.

Nietzsche denies absolutely that there is inherent in mankind a
yearning to gather into communities. There is, he says, but one primal
instinct in human beings (as there is in all other animals), and that
is the desire to remain alive. All those systems of thought which
assume the existence of a "natural morality" are wrong. Even the
tendency to tell the truth, which seems to be inborn in every civilized
white man, is not "natural," for there have been--and are today--races
in which it is, to all intents and purposes, entirely absent.[8] And so
it is with the so-called social instinct. Man, say the communists, is
a gregarious animal and can be happy only in company with his fellows,
and in proof of it they cite the fact that loneliness is everywhere
regarded as painful and that, even among the lower animals, there is an
impulse toward association. The facts set forth in the last sentence
are indisputable, but they by no means prove the existence of an
elemental social feeling sufficiently strong to make its satisfaction
an end in itself. In other words, while it is plain that men flock
together, just as birds flock together, it is going too far to say
that the mere joy of flocking--the mere desire to be with others--is
at the bottom of the tendency. On the contrary, it is quite possible
to show that men gather in communities for the same reason that deer
gather in herds: because each individual realizes (unconsciously,
perhaps) that such a combination materially aids him in the business of
self-protection. One deer is no match for a lion, but fifty deer make
him impotent.[9]

Nietzsche shows that, even after communities are formed, the strong
desire of every individual to look out for himself, regardless of
the desires of others, persists, and that, in every herd there are
strong members and weak members. The former, whenever the occasion
arises, sacrifice the latter: by forcing the heavy, killing drudgery
of the community upon them or by putting them, in time of war, into
the forefront of the fray. The result is that the weakest are being
constantly weeded out and the strongest are always becoming stronger
and stronger. "Hence," says Nietzsche, "the first 'state' made its
appearance in the form of a terrible tyranny, a violent and unpitying
machine, which kept grinding away until the primary raw material, the
man-ape, was kneaded and fashioned into alert, efficient man."

Now, when a given state becomes appreciably more efficient than the
states about it, it invariably sets about enslaving them. Thus larger
and larger states are formed, but always there is a ruling master-class
and a serving slave-class. "This," says Nietzsche, "is the origin of
the state on earth, despite the fantastic theory which would found it
upon some general agreement among its members. He who can command,
he who is a master by nature, he who, in deed and gesture, behaves
violently--what need has he for agreements? Such beings come as fate
comes, without reason or pretext.... Their work is the instinctive
creation of forms: they are the most unconscious of all artists;
wherever they appear, something new is at once created--a governmental
organism which lives; in which the individual parts and functions are
differentiated and brought into correlation, and in which nothing at
all is tolerable unless some utility with respect to the whole is
implanted in it. They are innocent of guilt, of responsibility, of
charity--these born rulers. They are ruled by that terrible art-egotism
which knows itself to be justified by its work, as the mother knows
herself to be justified by her child."

Nietzsche points out that, even after nations have attained some
degree of permanence and have introduced ethical concepts into their
relations with one another, they still give evidence of that same
primary will to power which is responsible, at bottom, for every act
of the individual man. "The masses, in any nation," he says, "are ready
to sacrifice their lives, their goods and chattels, their consciences
and their virtue, to obtain that highest of pleasures: the feeling that
they rule, either in reality or in imagination, over others. On these
occasions they make virtues of their instinctive yearnings, and so they
enable an ambitious or wisely provident prince to rush into a war with
the good conscience of his people as his excuse. The great conquerors
have always had the language of virtue on their lips: they have always
had crowds of people around them who felt exalted and would not listen
to any but the most exalted sentiments.... When man feels the sense
of power, he feels and calls himself good, and at the same time those
who have to endure the weight of his power call him evil. Such is the
curious mutability of moral judgments!... Hesiod, in his fable of the
world's ages, twice pictured the age of the Homeric heroes and made
two out of one. To those whose ancestors were under the iron heel of
the Homeric despots, it appeared evil; while to the grandchildren of
these despots it appeared good. Hence the poet had no alternative but
to do as he did: his audience was composed of the descendants of both
classes."[10]

Nietzsche saw naught but decadence and illusion in humanitarianism
and nationalism. To profess a love for the masses seemed to him to
be ridiculous and to profess a love for one race or tribe of men, in
preference to all others, seemed to him no less so. Thus he denied the
validity of two ideals which lie at the base of all civilized systems
of government, and constitute, in fact, the very conception of the
state. He called himself, not a German, but "a good European."

"We good Europeans," he said, "are not French enough to 'love mankind.'
A man must be afflicted by an excess of Gallic eroticism to approach
mankind with ardour. Mankind! Was there ever a more hideous old woman
among all the old women? No, we do not love mankind!... On the other
hand, we are not German enough to advocate nationalism and race-hatred,
or to take delight in that national blood-poisoning which sets up
quarantines between the nations of Europe. We are too unprejudiced
for that--too perverse, too fastidious, too well-informed, too much
travelled. We prefer to live on mountains--apart, unseasonable.... We
are too diverse and mixed in race to be patriots. We are, in a word,
good Europeans--the rich heirs of millenniums of European thought....

"We rejoice in everything, which like ourselves, loves danger, war and
adventure--which does not make compromises, nor let itself be captured,
conciliated or faced.... We ponder over the need of a new order of
things--even of a new slavery, for the strengthening and elevation of
the human race always involves the existence of slaves...."[11]

"The horizon is unobstructed.... Our ships can start on their voyage
once more in the face of danger.... The sea--our sea!--lies before
us!"[12]


[1] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_," IV.

[2] That of Wisconsin at the 1907 session.

[3] This has been done, time and again, by the legislature of every
state in the Union, and the overturning of such legislation occupies
part of the time of all the state courts of final judicature year after
year.

[4] That of South Carolina.

[5] _Vide_ the chapter on "Civilization."

[6] Said the Chicago _Tribune_, "the best all-round newspaper in the
United States," in a leading article, June 10, 1907: "Jeremy Bentham
speaks of 'an incoherent and undigested mass of law, shot down, as
from a rubbish cart, upon the heads of the people.' This is a fairly
accurate summary of the work of the average American legislature,
from New York to Texas.... Bad, crude and unnecessary laws make up
a large part of the output of every session.... Roughly speaking,
the governor who vetoes the most bills is the best governor. When a
governor vetoes none the legitimate presumption is, not that the work
of the legislature was flawless, but that he was timid, not daring to
oppose ignorant popular sentiment ... or that he had not sense enough
to recognize a bad measure when he saw it."

[7] "_Morgenröte_," § 5.

[8] "The word 'honesty' is not to be found in the code of either the
Socratic or the Christian virtues. It represents a new virtue, not
quite ripened, frequently misunderstood and hardly conscious of itself.
It is yet something in embryo, which we are at liberty either to foster
or to check."--"_Morgenröte_," § 456.

[9] An excellent discussion of this subject, by Prof. Warner Fite, of
Indiana University, appeared in _The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology
and Scientific Methods_ of July 18, 1907. Prof. Fite's article is
called "The Exaggeration of the Social," and is a keen and sound
criticism of "the now popular tendency to regard the individual as
the product of society." As he points out, "any consciousness of
belonging to one group rather than another must involve some sense of
individuality." In other words, gregariousness is nothing more than an
instinctive yearning to profit personally by the possibility of putting
others, to some measurable extent, in the attitude of slaves.

[10] "_Morgenröte_," § 189.

[11] "_Die fröhliche Wissenschaft_," § 377.

[12] "_Die fröhliche Wissenschaft_," § 343.




XI


CRIME AND PUNISHMENT


Nietzsche says that the thing which best differentiates man from the
other animals is his capacity for making and keeping a promise. That
is to say, man has a trained and efficient memory and it enables him
to project an impression of today into the future. Of the millions of
impressions which impinge upon his consciousness every day, he is able
to save a chosen number from the oblivion of forgetfulness. An animal
lacks this capacity almost entirely. The things that it remembers are
far from numerous and it is devoid of any means of reinforcing its
memory. But man has such a means and it is commonly called conscience.
At bottom it is based upon the principle that pain is always more
enduring than pleasure. Therefore, "in order to make an idea stay
it must be burned into the memory; only that which never ceases to
hurt remains fixed."[1] Hence all the world's store of tortures and
sacrifices. At one time they were nothing more than devices to make man
remember his pledges to his gods. Today they survive in the form of
legal punishments, which are nothing more, at bottom, than devices to
make a man remember his pledges to his fellow men.

From all this Nietzsche argues that our modern law is the outgrowth
of the primitive idea of barter--of the idea that everything has an
equivalent and can be paid for--that when a man forgets or fails
to discharge an obligation in one way he may wipe out his sin by
discharging it in some other way. "The earliest relationship that ever
existed," he says, "was the relationship between buyer and seller,
creditor and debtor. On this ground man first stood face to face
with man. No stage of civilization, however inferior, is without the
institution of bartering. To fix prices, to adjust values, to invent
equivalents, to exchange things--all this has to such an extent
preoccupied the first and earliest thought of man, that it may be said
to constitute thinking itself. Out of it sagacity arose, and out of
it, again, arose man's first pride--his first feeling of superiority
over the animal world. Perhaps, our very word man (_manus_) expresses
something of this.[2] Man calls himself the being who weighs and
measures."[3]

Now besides the contract between man and man, there is also a contract
between man and the community. The community agrees to give the
individual protection and the individual promises to pay for it in
labor and obedience. Whenever he fails to do so, he violates his
promise, and the community regards the contract as broken. Then "the
anger of the outraged creditor--or community--withdraws its protection
from the debtor--or law-breaker--and he is laid open to all the dangers
and disadvantages of life in a state of barbarism. Punishment, at this
stage of civilization, is simply the image of a man's normal conduct
toward a hated, disarmed and cast-down enemy, who has forfeited not
only all claims to protection, but also all claims to mercy. This
accounts for the fact that war (including the sacrificial cult of war)
has furnished all the forms in which punishment appears in history."[4]

It will be observed that this theory grounds all ideas of justice and
punishment upon ideas of expedience. The primeval creditor forced his
debtor to pay because he knew that if the latter didn't pay he (the
creditor) would suffer. In itself, the debtor's effort to get something
for nothing was not wrong, because, as we have seen in previous
chapters, this is the ceaseless and unconscious endeavor of every
living being, and is, in fact, the most familiar of all manifestations
of the primary will to live, or more understandably, of the will to
acquire power over environment. But when the machinery of justice
was placed in the hands of the state, there came a transvaluation of
values. Things that were manifestly costly to the state were called
wrong, and the old individualistic standards of good and bad--_i.e._
beneficial and harmful--became the standards of good and evil--_i.e._
right and wrong.

In this way, says Nietzsche, the original purpose of punishment
has become obscured and forgotten. Starting out as a mere means of
adjusting debts, it has become a machine for enforcing moral concepts.
Moral ideas came into the world comparatively late, and it was not
until man had begun to be a speculative being that he invented gods,
commandments and beatitudes. But the institution of punishment was in
existence from a much earlier day. Therefore, it is apparent that the
moral idea,--the notion that there is such a thing as good and such
a thing as evil,--far from being the inspiration of punishment, was
engrafted upon it at a comparatively late period. Nietzsche says that
man, in considering things as they are today, is very apt to make this
mistake about their origins. He is apt to conclude, because the human
eye is used for seeing, that it was created for that purpose, whereas
it is obvious that it may have been created for some other purpose
and that the function of seeing may have arisen later on. In the same
way, man believes that punishment was invented for the purpose of
enforcing moral ideas, whereas, as a matter of fact, it was originally
an instrument of expediency only, and did not become a moral machine
until a code of moral laws was evolved.[5]

To show that the institution of punishment itself is older than the
ideas which now seem to lie at the base of it, Nietzsche cites the fact
that these ideas themselves are constantly varying. That is to say, the
aim and purpose of punishment are conceived differently by different
races and individuals. One authority calls it a means of rendering
the criminal helpless and harmless and so preventing further mischief
in future. Another says that it is a means of inspiring others with
fear of the law and its agents. Another says that it is a device for
destroying the unfit. Another holds it to be a fee exacted by society
from the evil-doer for protecting him against the excesses of private
revenge. Still another looks upon it as society's declaration of war
against its enemies. Yet another says that it is a scheme for making
the criminal realize his guilt and repent. Nietzsche shows that all
of these ideas, while true, perhaps, in some part, are fallacies at
bottom. It is ridiculous, for instance, to believe that punishment
makes the law-breaker acquire a feeling of guilt and sinfulness. He
sees that he was indiscreet in committing his crime, but he sees,
too, that society's method of punishing his indiscretion consists in
committing a crime of the same sort against _him_. In other words, he
cannot hold his own crime a sin without also holding his punishment a
sin--which leads to an obvious absurdity. As a matter of fact, says
Nietzsche, punishment really does nothing more than "augment fear,
intensify prudence and subjugate the passions." And in so doing it
_tames_ man, but does not make him better. If he refrains from crime in
future, it is because he has become more prudent and not because he has
become more moral. If he regrets his crimes of the past, it is because
his punishment, and not his so-called conscience, hurts him.

But what, then, is conscience? That there is such a thing every
reasonable man knows. But what is its nature and what is its origin? If
it is not the regret which follows punishment, what is it? Nietzsche
answers that it is nothing more than the old will to power, turned
inward. In the days of the cave men, a man gave his will to power free
exercise. Any act which increased his power over his environment, no
matter how much it damaged other men, seemed to him good. He knew
nothing of morality. Things appeared to him, not as good or evil,
but as good or bad--beneficial or harmful. But when civilization was
born, there arose a necessity for controlling and regulating this will
power. The individual had to submit to the desire of the majority and
to conform to nascent codes of morality. The result was that his will
to power, which once spent itself in battles with other individuals,
had to be turned upon himself. Instead of torturing others, he began
to torture his own body and mind. His ancient delight in cruelty and
persecution (a characteristic of all healthy animals) remained, but he
could not longer satisfy it upon his fellow men and so he turned it
upon himself, and straightway became a prey to the feeling of guilt, of
sinfulness, of wrong-doing--with all its attendant horrors.

Now, one of the first forms that this self-torture took was primitive
man's accusation against himself that he was not properly grateful for
the favors of his god. He saw that many natural phenomena benefited
him, and he thought that these phenomena occurred in direct obedience
to the deity's command. Therefore, he regarded himself as the debtor of
the deity, and constantly accused himself of neglecting to discharge
this debt, because he felt that, by so accusing, he would be most apt
to discharge it in full, and thus escape the righteous consequences
of insufficient payment. This led him to make sacrifices--to place
food and drink upon his god's altar, and in the end, to sacrifice much
more valuable things, such, for instance, as his first born child.
The more vivid the idea of the deity became and the more terrible he
appeared, the more man tried to satisfy and appease him. In the early
days, it was sufficient to sacrifice a square meal or a baby. But when
Christianity--with its elaborate and certain theology--arose, it became
necessary for a man to sacrifice himself.

Thus arose the Christian idea of sin. Man began to feel that he was
in debt to his creator hopelessly and irretrievably, and that, like a
true bankrupt, he should offer all he had in partial payment. So he
renounced everything that made life on earth bearable and desirable and
built up an ideal of poverty and suffering. Sometimes he hid himself in
a cave and lived like an outcast dog--and then he was called a saint.
Sometimes he tortured himself with whips and poured vinegar into his
wounds--and then he was a flagellant of the middle ages. Sometimes,
he killed his sexual instinct and his inborn desire for property and
power--and then he became a penniless celibate in a cloister.

Nietzsche shows that this idea of sin, which lies at the bottom of all
religions, was and is an absurdity; that nothing, in itself, is sinful,
and that no man is, or can be a sinner. If we could rid ourselves of
the notion that there is a God in Heaven, to whom we owe a debt, we
would rid ourselves of the idea of sin. Therefore, argues Nietzsche,
it is evident that skepticism, while it makes no actual change in man,
always makes him feel better. It makes him lose his fear of hell and
his consciousness of sin. It rids him of that most horrible instrument
of useless, senseless and costly torture--his conscience. "Atheism,"
says Nietzsche, "will make a man innocent."


[1] "_Zur Genealogie der Moral_," II, § 3.

[2] In the ancient Sanskrit the word from which "man" comes meant "to
think, to weigh, to value, to reckon, to estimate."

[3] "_Zur Genealogie der Moral_," II, § 8.

[4] "_Zur Genealogie der Moral_," II, § 9.

[5] A familiar example of this superimposition of morality is afforded
by the history of costume. It is commonly assumed that garments were
originally designed to hide nakedness as much as to afford warmth and
adorn the person, whereas, as a matter of fact, the idea of modesty
probably did not appear until man had been clothed for ages.




XII


EDUCATION


Education, as everyone knows, has two main objects: to impart
knowledge and to implant culture. It is the object of a teacher,
first of all, to bring before his pupil as many concrete facts about
the universe--the fruit of long ages of inquiry and experience--as
the latter may be capable of absorbing in the time available. After
that, it is the teacher's aim to make his pupil's habits of mind sane,
healthy and manly, and his whole outlook upon life that of a being
conscious of his efficiency and eager and able to solve new problems
as they arise. The educated man, in a word, is one who knows a great
deal more than the average man and is constantly increasing his area of
knowledge, in a sensible, orderly logical fashion; one who is wary of
sophistry and leans automatically and almost instinctively toward clear
thinking.

Such is the purpose of education, in its ideal aspect. As we observe
the science of teaching in actual practice, we find that it often fails
utterly to attain this end. The concrete facts that a student learns at
the average school are few and unconnected, and instead of being led
into habits of independent thinking he is trained to accept authority.
When he takes his degree it is usually no more than a sign that he has
joined the herd. His opinion of Napoleon is merely a reflection of the
opinion expressed in the books he has studied; his philosophy of life
is simply the philosophy of his teacher--tinctured a bit, perhaps, by
that of his particular youthful idols. He knows how to spell a great
many long words and he is familiar with the table of logarithms, but
in the readiness and accuracy of his mental processes he has made
comparatively little progress. If he was illogical and credulous and
a respecter of authority as a freshman he remains much the same as a
graduate. In consequence, his usefulness to humanity has been increased
but little, if at all, for, as we have seen in previous chapters, the
only man whose life is appreciably more valuable than that of a good
cow is the man who thinks for himself, clearly and logically, and lends
some sort of hand, during his life-time, in the eternal search for the
ultimate verities.

The cause for all this lies, no doubt, in the fact that school
teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and
stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers. Imitativeness
being the dominant impulse in youth, their pupils acquire some measure
of their stupidity, and the result is that the influence of the whole
teaching tribe is against everything included in genuine education and
culture.

That this is true is evident on the surface and a moment's analysis
furnishes a multitude of additional proofs. For one thing, a teacher,
before he may begin work, must sacrifice whatever independence may
survive within him upon the altar of authority. He becomes a cog in
the school wheel and must teach only the things countenanced and
approved by the powers above him, whether those powers be visible in
the minister of education, as in Germany; in the traditions of the
school, as in England, or in the private convictions of the millionaire
who provides the cash, as in the United States. As Nietzsche points
out, the schoolman's thirst for the truth is always conditioned by
his yearning for food and drink and a comfortable bed. His archetype
is the university philosopher, who accepts the state's pay[1] and so
surrenders that liberty to inquire freely which alone makes philosophy
worth while.

"No state," says Nietzsche, "would ever dare to patronize such men as
Plato and Schopenhauer. And why? Simply because the state is always
afraid of them. They tell the truth.... Consequently, the man who
submits to be a philosopher in the pay of the state must also submit
to being looked upon by the state as one who has waived his claim to
pursue the truth into all its fastnesses. So long as he holds his
place, he must acknowledge something still higher than the truth--and
that is the state....

"The sole criticism of a philosophy which is possible and the only one
which proves anything--namely, an attempt to live according to it--is
never put forward in the universities. There the only thing one hears
of is a wordy criticism of words. And so the youthful mind, without
much experience in life, is confronted by fifty verbal systems and
fifty criticisms of them, thrown together and hopelessly jumbled. What
demoralization! What a mockery of education! It is openly acknowledged,
in fact, that the object of education is not the acquirement of
learning, but the successful meeting of examinations. No wonder then,
that the examined student says to himself 'Thank God, I am not a
philosopher, but a Christian and a citizen!...'

"Therefore, I regard it as necessary to progress that we withdraw from
philosophy all governmental and academic recognition and support....
Let philosophers spring up naturally, deny them every prospect of
appointment, tickle them no longer with salaries--yea, persecute them!
Then you will see marvels! They will then flee afar and seek a roof
anywhere. Here a parsonage will open its doors; there a schoolhouse.
One will appear upon the staff of a newspaper, another will write
manuals for young ladies' schools. The most rational of them will put
his hand to the plough and the vainest will seek favor at court. Thus
we shall get rid of bad philosophers."[2]

The argument here is plain enough. The professional teacher must
keep to his rut. The moment he combats the existing order of things
he loses his place. Therefore he is wary, and his chief effort is
to transmit the words of authority to his pupils unchanged. Whether
he be a philosopher, properly so-called, or something else matters
not. In a medical school wherein Chauveau's theory of immunity was
still maintained it would be hazardous for a professor of pathology
to teach the theory of Ehrlich. In a Methodist college in Indiana it
would be foolhardy to dally with the doctrine of apostolic succession.
Everywhere the teacher must fashion his teachings according to the
creed and regulations of his school and he must even submit to
authority in such matters as text books and pedagogic methods. Again,
his very work itself makes him an unconscious partisan of authority, as
against free inquiry. During the majority of his waking hours he is in
close association with his pupils, who are admittedly his inferiors,
and so he rapidly acquires the familiar, self-satisfied professorial
attitude of mind. Other forces tend to push him in the same direction
and the net result is that all his mental processes are based upon
ideas of authority. He believes and teaches a thing, not because he is
convinced by free reasoning that it is true, but because it is laid
down as an axiom in some book or was laid down at some past time, by
himself.

In all this, of course, I am speaking of the teacher properly
so-called--of the teacher, that is, whose sole aim and function is
teaching. The university professor whose main purpose in life is
original research and whose pupils are confined to graduate students
engaged in much the same work, is scarcely a professional teacher, in
the customary meaning of the word. The man I have been discussing is he
who spends all or the greater part of his time in actual instruction.
Whether his work be done in a primary school, a secondary school or in
the undergraduate department of a college or university does not matter
In all that relates to it, he is essentially and almost invariably a
mere perpetuator of doctrines. In some cases, naturally enough, these
doctrines are truths, but in a great many other cases they are errors.
An examination of the physiology, history and "English" books used in
the public schools of America will convince anyone that the latter
proposition is amply true.

Nietzsche's familiarity with these facts is demonstrated by numerous
passages in his writings. "Never," he says, "is either real proficiency
or genuine ability the result of toilsome years at school." The study
of the classics, he says, can never lead to more than a superficial
acquaintance with them, because the very modes of thought of the
ancients, in many cases, are unintelligible to men of today. But the
student who has acquired what is looked upon in our colleges as a
mastery of the humanities is acutely conscious of his knowledge, and
so the things that he cannot understand are ascribed by him to the
dulness, ignorance or imbecility of the ancient authors. As a result
he harbors a sort of sub-conscious contempt for the learning they
represent and concludes that learning cannot make real men happy, but
is only fit for the futile enthusiasm of "honest, poor and foolish old
book-worms."

Nietzsche's own notion of an ideal curriculum is substantially that of
Spencer. He holds that before anything is put forward as a thing worth
teaching it should be tested by two questions: Is it a fact? and, Is
the presentation of it likely to make the pupil measurably more capable
of discovering other facts? In consequences, he holds the old so-called
"liberal" education in abomination, and argues in favor of a system
of instruction based upon the inculcation of facts of imminent value
and designed to instill into the pupil orderly and logical habits of
mind and a clear and accurate view of the universe. The educated man,
as he understands the term, is one who is above the mass, both in his
thirst for knowledge and in his capacity for differentiating between
truth and its reverse. It is obvious that a man who has studied biology
and physics, with their insistent dwelling upon demonstrable facts,
has proceeded further in this direction than the man who has studied
Greek mythology and metaphysics, with their constant trend toward
unsupported and gratuitous assumption and their essential foundation
upon undebatable authority.

Nietzsche points out, in his early essay upon the study of history,
that humanity is much too prone to consider itself historically.
That is to say, there is too much tendency to consider man as he
has seemed rather than man as he has been--to dwell upon creeds
and manifestoes rather than upon individual and racial motives,
characters and instincts.[3] The result is that history piles up
misleading and useless records and draws erroneous conclusions from
them. As a science in itself, it bears but three useful aspects--the
monumental, the antiquarian and the critical. Its true monuments are
not the constitutions and creeds of the past--for these, as we have
seen, are always artificial and unnatural--but the great men of the
past--those fearless free spirits who achieved immortality by their
courage and success in pitting their own instincts against the morality
of the majority. Such men, he says, are the only human beings whose
existence is of interest to posterity. "They live together as timeless
contemporaries:" they are the landmarks along the weary road the human
race has traversed. In its antiquarian aspect, history affords us proof
that the world is progressing, and so gives the men of the present a
definite purpose and justifiable enthusiasm. In its critical aspect,
history enables us to avoid the delusions of the past, and indicates to
us the broad lines of evolution. Unless we have in mind some definite
program of advancement, he says, all learning is useless. History,
which merely accumulates records, without "an ideal of humanistic
culture" always in mind, is mere pedantry and scholasticism.

All education, says Nietzsche, may be regarded as a continuation of
the process of breeding.[4] The two have the same object: that of
producing beings capable of surviving in the struggle for existence. A
great many critics of Nietzsche have insisted that since the struggle
for existence means a purely physical contest, he is in error, for
education does not visibly increase a man's chest expansion or his
capacity for lifting heavy weights. But it is obvious none the less
that a man who sees things as they are, and properly estimates the
world about him, is far better fitted to achieve some measure of
mastery over his environment than the man who is a slave to delusions.
Of two men, one of whom believes that the moon is made of green cheese
and that it is possible to cure smallpox by merely denying that it
exists, and the other of whom harbors no such superstitions, it is
plain that the latter is more apt to live long and acquire power.

A further purpose of education is that of affording individuals a
means of lifting themselves out of the slave class and into the master
class. That this purpose is accomplished--except accidently--by the
brand of education ladled out in the colleges of today is far from
true. To transform a slave into a master we must make him intelligent,
self-reliant, resourceful, independent and courageous. It is evident
enough, I take it, that a college directed by an ecclesiastic and
manned by a faculty of asses--a very fair, and even charitable,
picture of the average small college in the United States--is not
apt to accomplish this transformation very often. Indeed, it is a
commonplace observation that a truly intelligent youth is aided but
little by the average college education, and that a truly stupid one is
made, not less, but more stupid. The fact that many graduates of such
institutions exhibit dionysian qualities in later life merely proves
that they are strong enough to weather the blight they have suffered.
Every sane man knows that, after a youth leaves college, he must devote
most of his energies during three or four years, to ridding himself
of the fallacies, delusions and imbecilities inflicted upon him by
messieurs, his professors.

The intelligent man, in the course of his life, nearly always acquires
a vast store of learning, because his mind is constantly active
and receptive, but intelligence and mere learning are by no means
synonymous, despite the popular notion that they are. Disregarding the
element of sheer good luck--which is necessarily a small factor--it is
evident that the man who, in the struggle for wealth and power, seizes
a million dollars for himself, is appreciably more intelligent than the
man who starves. That this achievement, which is admittedly difficult,
requires more intelligence again, than the achievement of mastering the
Latin language, which presents so few difficulties that it is possible
to any healthy human being with sufficient leisure and patience, is
also evident. In a word, the illiterate contractor, who says, "I seen"
and "I done" and yet manages to build great bridges and to acquire
a great fortune, is immeasurably more vigorous intellectually, and
immeasurably more efficient and respectable, as a man, than the college
professor who laughs at him and presumes to look down upon him. A
man's mental powers are to be judged, not by his ability to accomplish
things that are possible to every man foolish enough to attempt them,
but by his capacity for doing things beyond the power of other men.
Education, as we commonly observe it today, works toward the former,
rather than toward the latter end.


[1] Nietzsche is considering, of course, the condition of affairs
in Germany, where all teaching is controlled by the state. But his
arguments apply to other countries as well and to teachers of other
things besides philosophy.

[2] "_Schopenhauer als Erzieher_," § 8.

[3] An excellent discussion of this error will be found in Dr. Alex.
Tille's introduction to William Haussmann's translation of "_Zur
Genealogie der Moral_," pp. xi _et seq._; London, 1907.

[4] "_Morgenröte_," § 397.




XIII


SUNDRY IDEAS


_Death_.--It is Schopenhauer's argument in his essay "On Suicide,"
that the possibility of easy and painless self-destruction is the
only thing that constantly and considerably ameliorates the horror
of human life. Suicide is a means of escape from the world and its
tortures--and therefore it is good. It is an ever-present refuge for
the weak, the weary and the hopeless. It is, in Pliny's phrase, "the
greatest of all blessings which Nature gives to man," and one which
even God himself lacks, for "he could not compass his own death, if
he willed to die." In all of this exaltation of surrender, of course,
there is nothing whatever in common with the dionysian philosophy of
defiance. Nietzsche's teaching is all in the other direction. He urges,
not surrender, but battle; not flight, but war to the end. His curse
falls upon those "preachers of death" who counsel "an abandonment
of life"--whether this abandonment be partial, as in asceticism, or
actual, as in suicide. And yet Zarathustra sings the song of "free
death" and says that the higher man must learn "to die at the right
time." Herein an inconsistency appears, but it is on the surface only.
Schopenhauer regards suicide as a means of escape, Nietzsche sees in
it a means of good riddance. It is time to die, says Zarathustra,
when the purpose of life ceases to be attainable--when the fighter
breaks his sword arm or falls into his enemy's hands. And it is time
to die, too, when the purpose of life is attained--when the fighter
triumphs and sees before him no more worlds to conquer. "He who hath
a goal and an heir wisheth death to come at the right time for goal
and heir." One who has "waxed too old for victories," one who is
"yellow and wrinkled," one with a "toothless mouth"--for such an one
a certain and speedy death. The earth has no room for cumberers and
pensioners. For them the highest of duties is the payment of nature's
debt, that there may be more room for those still able to wield a
sword and bear a burden in the heat of the day. The best death is that
which comes in battle "at the moment of victory;" the second best is
death in battle in the hour of defeat. "Would that a storm came,"
sings Zarathustra, "to shake from the tree of life all those apples
that are putrid and gnawed by worms. It is cowardice that maketh them
stick to their branches"--cowardice which makes them afraid to die.
But there is another cowardice which makes men afraid to live, and
this is the cowardice of the Schopenhauerean pessimist. Nietzsche has
no patience with it. To him a too early death seems as abominable as a
death postponed too long. "Too early died that Jew whom the preachers
of slow death revere. Would that he had remained in the desert and far
away from the good and just! Perhaps he would have learned how to live
and how to love the earth--and even how to laugh. He died too early. He
himself would have revoked his doctrine, had he reached mine age!"[1]
Therefore Nietzsche pleads for an intelligent regulation of death. One
must not die too soon and one must not die too late. "Natural death,"
he says, "is destitute of rationality. It is really _ir_rational death,
for the pitiable substance of the shell determines how long the kernel
shall exist. The pining, sottish prison-warder decides the hour at
which his noble prisoner is to die.... The enlightened regulation and
control of death belongs to the morality of the future. At present
religion makes it seem immoral, for religion presupposes that when the
time for death comes, God gives the command."[2]

_The Attitude at Death._--Nietzsche rejects entirely that pious
belief in signs and portents which sees a significance in death-bed
confessions and "dying words." The average man, he says, dies pretty
much as he has lived, and in this Dr. Osler[3] and other unusually
competent and accurate observers agree with him. When the dying man
exhibits unusual emotions or expresses ideas out of tune with his known
creed, the explanation is to be found in the fact that, toward the time
of death the mind commonly gives way and the customary processes of
thought are disordered. "The way in which a man thinks of death, in the
full bloom of his life and strength, is certainly a good index of his
general character and habits of mind, but at the hour of death itself
his attitude is of little importance or significance. The exhaustion
of the last hours--especially when an old man is dying--the irregular
or insufficient nourishment of the brain, the occasional spasms of
severe physical pain, the horror and novelty of the whole situation,
the atavistic return of early impressions and superstitions, and the
feeling that death is a thing unutterably vast and important and that
bridges of an awful kind are about to be crossed--all of these things
make it irrational to accept a man's attitude at death as an indication
of his character during life. Moreover, it is not true that a dying
man is more honest than a man in full vigor. On the contrary, almost
every dying man is led, by the solemnity of those at his bedside,
and by their restrained or flowing torrents of tears, to conscious or
unconscious conceit and make-believe. He becomes, in brief, an actor
in a comedy.... No doubt the seriousness with which every dying man is
treated has given many a poor devil his only moment of real triumph
and enjoyment. He is, _ipso facto_, the star of the play, and so he is
indemnified for a life of privation and subservience."[4]

_The Origin of Philosophy._--Nietzsche believed that introspection
and self-analysis, as they were ordinarily manifested, were signs of
disease, and that the higher man and superman would waste little time
upon them. The first thinkers, he said, were necessarily sufferers,
for it was only suffering that made a man think and only disability
that gave him leisure to do so. "Under primitive conditions," he
said, "the individual, fully conscious of his power, is ever intent
upon transforming it into action. Sometimes this action takes the
form of hunting, robbery, ambuscade, maltreatment or murder, and
at other times it appears as those feebler imitations of these
things which alone are countenanced by the community. But when the
individual's power declines--when he feels fatigued, ill, melancholy
or satiated, and in consequence, temporarily lacks the yearning to
function--he is a comparatively better and less dangerous man." That
is to say, he contents himself with thinking instead of doing, and so
puts into thought and words "his impressions and feelings regarding
his companions, his wife or his gods." Naturally enough, since his
efficiency is lowered and his mood is gloomy his judgments are evil
ones. He finds fault and ponders revenges. He gloats over enemies or
envies his friends. "In such a state of mind he turns prophet and so
adds to his store of superstitions or devises new acts of devotion
or prophesies the downfall of his enemies. Whatever he thinks, his
thoughts reflect his state of mind: his fear and weariness are more
than normal; his tendency to action and enjoyment are less than normal.
Herein we see the genesis of the poetic, thoughtful, priestly mood.
Evil thoughts must rule supreme therein.... In later stages of culture,
there arose a caste of poets, thinkers, priests and medicine men who
all acted the same as, in earlier years, individuals used to act in
their comparatively rare hours of illness and depression. These persons
led sad, inactive lives and judged maliciously.... The masses, perhaps,
yearned to turn them out of the community, because they were parasites,
but in this enterprise there was great risk, because these men were on
terms of familiarity with the gods and so possessed vast and mysterious
power. Thus the most ancient philosophers were viewed. The masses
hearkened unto them in proportion to the amount of dread they inspired.
In such a way contemplation made its appearance in the world, with an
evil heart and a troubled head. It was both weak and terrible, and both
secretly abhorred and openly worshipped.... _Pudenda origo!_"[5]

_Priestcraft._--So long as man feels capable of taking care of himself
he has no need of priests to intercede for him with the deity.
Efficiency is proverbially identified with impiety: it is only when the
devil is sick that the devil a monk would be. Therefore "the priest
must be regarded as the saviour, shepherd and advocate of the sick....
It is his providence to rule over the sufferers...." In order that
he may understand them and appeal to them he must be sick himself,
and to attain this end there is the device of asceticism. The purpose
of asceticism, as we have seen, is to make a man voluntarily destroy
his own efficiency. But the priest must have a certain strength,
nevertheless, for he must inspire both confidence and dread in his
charges, and must be able to defend them--against whom? "Undoubtedly
against the sound and strong.... He must be the natural adversary and
despiser of all barbarous, impetuous, unbridled, fierce, violent,
beast-of-prey healthiness and power."[6] Thus he must fashion himself
into a new sort of fighter--"a new zoological terror, in which the
polar bear, the nimble and cool tiger and the fox are blended into a
unity as attractive as it is awe-inspiring." He appears in the midst
of the strong as "the herald and mouthpiece of mysterious powers, with
the determination to sow upon the soil, whenever and wherever possible,
the seeds of suffering, dissension and contradiction.... Undoubtedly
he brings balms and balsams with him, but he must first inflict the
wound, before he may act as physician.... It is only the unpleasantness
of disease that is combated by him--not the cause, not the disease
itself!" He dispenses, not specifics, but narcotics. He brings surcease
from sorrow, not by showing men how to attain the happiness of
efficiency, but by teaching them that their sufferings have been laid
upon them by a god who will one day repay them with bliss illimitable.

_God._--"A god who is omniscient and omnipotent and yet neglects
to make his wishes and intentions certainly known to his
creatures--certainly this is not a god of goodness. One who for
thousands of years has allowed the countless scruples and doubts
of men to afflict them and yet holds out terrible consequences for
involuntary errors--certainly this is not a god of justice. Is he not
a cruel god if he knows the truth and yet looks down upon millions
miserably searching for it? Perhaps he is good, but is unable to
communicate with his creatures more intelligibly. Perhaps he is wanting
in intelligence--or in eloquence. So much the worse! For, in that
case, he may be mistaken in what he calls the truth. He may, indeed,
be a brother to the 'poor, duped devils' below him. If so, must he not
suffer agonies on seeing his creatures, in their struggle for knowledge
of him, submit to tortures for all eternity? Must it not strike him
with grief to realize that he cannot advise them or help them, except
by uncertain and ambiguous signs?... All religions bear traces of the
fact that they arose during the intellectual immaturity of the human
race--before it had learned the obligation to speak the truth. Not one
of them makes it the duty of its god to be truthful and understandable
in his communications with man."[7]

_Self-Control._--Self-control, says Nietzsche, consists merely in
combating a given desire with a stronger one. Thus the yearning to
commit a murder may be combated and overcome by the yearning to escape
the gallows and to retain the name and dignity of a law-abiding
citizen. The second yearning is as much unconscious and instinctive
as the first, and in the battle between them the intellect plays but
a small part. In general there are but six ways in which a given
craving may be overcome. First, we may avoid opportunities for its
gratification and so, by a long disuse, weaken and destroy it.
Secondly, we may regulate its gratification, and by thus encompassing
its flux and reflux within fixed limits, gain intervals during which
it is faint. Thirdly, we may intentionally give ourselves over to it
and so wear it out by excess--provided we do not act like the rider
who lets a runaway horse gallop itself to death and, in so doing,
breaks his own neck,--which unluckily is the rule in this method.
Fourthly, by an intellectual trick, we may associate gratification with
an unpleasant idea, as we have associated sexual gratification, for
example, with the idea of indecency. Fifthly, we may find a substitute
in some other craving that is measurably less dangerous, Sixthly,
we may find safety in a general war upon all cravings, good and bad
alike, after the manner of the ascetic, who, in seeking to destroy his
sensuality, at the same time destroys his physical strength, his reason
and, not infrequently, his life.

_The Beautiful._--Man's notion of beauty is the fruit of his delight
in his own continued existence. Whatever makes this existence easy,
or is associated, in any manner, with life or vigor, seems to him to
be beautiful. "Man mirrors himself in things. He counts everything
beautiful which reflects his likeness. The word 'beautiful' represents
the conceit of his species.... Nothing is truly ugly except the
degenerating man. But other things are called ugly, too, when they
happen to weaken or trouble man. They remind him of impotence,
deterioration and danger: in their presence he actually suffers a
loss of power. Therefore he calls them ugly. Whenever man is at all
depressed he has an intuition of the proximity of something 'ugly.'
His sense of power, his will to power, his feeling of pride and
efficiency--all sink with the ugly and rise with the beautiful.
The ugly is instinctively understood to be a sign and symptom of
degeneration. That which reminds one, in the remotest degree, of
degeneracy seems ugly. Every indication of exhaustion, heaviness,
age, or lassitude, every constraint--such as cramp or paralysis--and
above all, every odor, color or counterfeit of decomposition--though
it may be no more than a far-fetched symbol--calls forth the idea of
ugliness. Aversion is thereby excited--man's aversion to the decline
of his type."[8] The phrase "art for art's sake" voices a protest
against subordinating art to morality--that is, against making it a
device for preaching sermons--but as a matter of fact, all art must
praise and glorify and so must lay down values. It is the function of
the artist, indeed, to select, to choose, to bring into prominence. The
very fact that he is able to do this makes us call him an artist. And
when do we approve his choice? Only when it agrees with our fundamental
instinct--only when it exhibits "the desirableness of life." "Therefore
art is the great stimulus to life. We cannot conceive it as being
purposeless or aimless. 'Art for art's sake' is a phrase without
meaning."[9]

_Liberty._--The worth of a thing often lies, not in what one attains by
it, but in the difficulty one experiences in getting it. The struggle
for political liberty, for example, has done more than any other one
thing to develop strength, courage and resourcefulness in the human
race, and yet liberty itself, as we know it today, is nothing more or
less than organized morality, and as such, is necessarily degrading and
degenerating. "It undermines the will to power, it levels the racial
mountains and valleys, it makes man small, cowardly and voluptuous.
Under political liberty the herd-animal always triumphs." But the very
fight to attain this burdensome equality develops the self-reliance
and unconformity which stand opposed to it, and these qualities often
persist. Warfare, in brief, makes men fit for real, as opposed to
political freedom. "And what is freedom? The will to be responsible for
one's self. The will to keep that distance which separates man from
man. The will to become indifferent to hardship, severity, privation
and even to life. The will to sacrifice men to one's cause and to
sacrifice one's self, too.... The man who is truly free tramples under
foot the contemptible species of well-being dreamt of by shop-keepers,
Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats. The free man
is a warrior.... How is freedom to be measured? By the resistance
it has to overcome--by the effort required to maintain it. We must
seek the highest type of freemen where the highest resistance must be
constantly overcome: five paces from tyranny, close to the threshold of
thraldom.... Those peoples who were worth something, who became worth
something, never acquired their greatness under political liberty.
Great danger made something of them--danger of that sort which first
teaches us to know our resources, our virtues, our shields and swords,
our genius--which compels us to be strong."[10]

_Science_--The object of all science is to keep us from drawing wrong
inferences--from jumping to conclusions. Thus it stands utterly opposed
to all faith and is essentially iconoclastic and skeptical. "The
wonderful in science is the reverse of the wonderful in juggling. The
juggler tries to make us see a very simple relation between things
which, in point of fact, have no relation at all. The scientist, on
the contrary, compels us to abandon our belief in simple casualities
and to see the enormous complexity of phenomena. The simplest things,
indeed, are extremely complex--a fact which will never cease to make us
wonder." The effect of science is to show the absurdity of attempting
to reach perfect happiness and the impossibility of experiencing utter
woe. "The gulf between the highest pitch of happiness and the lowest
depth of misery has been created by imaginary things."[11] That is to
say, the heights of religious exaltation and the depths of religious
fear and trembling are alike creatures of our own myth-making. There
is no such thing as perfect and infinite bliss in heaven and there
is no such thing as eternal damnation in hell. Hereafter our highest
happiness must be less than that of the martyrs who saw the heavenly
gates opening for them, and our worst woe must be less than that of
those medieval sinners who died shrieking and trembling and with the
scent of brimstone in their noses. "This space is being reduced further
and further by science, just as through science we have learned to make
the earth occupy less and less space in the universe, until it now
seems infinitely small and our whole solar system appears as a mere
point."[12]

_The Jews._--For the Jewish slave-morality which prevails in the
western world today, under the label of Christianity, Nietzsche had,
as we know, the most violent aversion and contempt, but he saw very
clearly that this same morality admirably served and fitted the Jews
themselves; that it had preserved them through long ages and against
powerful enemies, and that its very persistence proved alike its own
ingenuity and the vitality of its inventors as a race. "The Jews," said
Nietzsche, "will either become the masters of Europe or lose Europe,
as they once lost Egypt, And it seems to be improbable that they
will lose again. In Europe, for eighteen centuries; they have passed
through a school more terrible than that known to any other nation,
and the experiences of this time of stress and storm have benefited
the individual even more than the community. In consequence, the
resourcefulness and alertness of the modern Jew are extraordinary....
In times of extremity, the people of Israel less often sought refuge
in drink or suicide than any other race of Europe. Today, every Jew
finds in the history of his forebears a voluminous record of coolness
and perseverance in terrible predicaments--of artful cunning and clever
fencing with chance and misfortune. The Jews have hid their bravery
under the cloak of submissiveness; their heroism in facing contempt
surpasses that of the saints. People tried to make them contemptible
for twenty centuries by refusing them all honors and dignities and
by pushing them down into the mean trades. The process did not make
them cleaner, alas! but neither did it make them contemptible. They
have never ceased to believe themselves qualified for the highest
of activities. They have never failed to show the virtues of all
suffering peoples. Their manner of honoring their parents and their
children and the reasonableness of their marriage customs make them
conspicuous among Europeans. Besides, they have learned how to derive
a sense of power from the very trades forced upon them. We cannot help
observing, in excuse for their usury, that without this pleasant means
of inflicting torture upon their oppressors, they might have lost their
self-respect ages ago, for self-respect depends upon being able to
make reprisals. Moreover, their vengeance has never carried them too
far, for they have that liberality which comes from frequent changes
of place, climate, customs and neighbors. They have more experience
of men than any other race and even in their passions there appears
a caution born of this experience. They are so sure of themselves
that, even in their bitterest straits, they never earn their bread by
manual labor as common workmen, porters or peasants.... Their manners,
it may be admitted, teach us that they have never been inspired by
chivalrous, noble feelings, nor their bodies girt with beautiful arms:
a certain vulgarity always alternates with their submissiveness. But
now they are intermarrying with the gentlest blood of Europe, and
in another hundred years they will have enough good manners to save
them from making themselves ridiculous, as masters, in the sight of
those they have subdued." It was Nietzsche's belief that the Jews
would take the lead before long, in the intellectual progress of the
world. He thought that their training, as a race, fitted them for this
leadership. "Where," he asked, "shall the accumulated wealth of great
impressions which forms the history of every Jewish family--that great
wealth of passions, virtues, resolutions, resignations, struggles and
victories of all sorts--where shall it find an outlet, if not in great
intellectual functioning?" The Jews, he thought, would be safe guides
for mankind, once they were set free from their slave-morality and all
need of it. "Then again," he said, "the old God of the Jews may rejoice
in Himself, in His creation and in His chosen people--and all of us
will rejoice with Him."[13]

_The Gentleman._--A million sages and diagnosticians, in all ages of
the world, have sought to define the gentleman, and their definitions
have been as varied as their own minds. Nietzsche's definition is based
upon the obvious fact that the gentleman is ever a man of more than
average influence and power, and the further fact that this superiority
is admitted by all. The vulgarian may boast of his bluff honesty, but
at heart he looks up to the gentleman, who goes through life serene and
imperturbable. There is in the flatter, in truth, an unmistakable air
of fitness and efficiency, and it is this which makes it possible for
him to be gentle and to regard those below him with tolerance. "The
demeanor of high-born persons," says Nietzsche, "shows plainly that
in their minds the consciousness of power is ever-present. Above all
things, they strive to avoid a show of weakness, whether it takes the
form of inefficiency or of a too-easy yielding to passion or emotion.
They never sink exhausted into a chair. On the train, when the vulgar
try to make themselves comfortable, these higher folk avoid reclining.
They do not seem to get tired after hours of standing at court. They
do not furnish their houses in a comfortable, but in a spacious and
dignified manner, as if they were the abodes of a greater and taller
race of beings. To a provoking speech, they reply with politeness and
self-possession--and not as if horrified, crushed, abashed, enraged or
out of breath, after the manner of plebeians. The aristocrat knows how
to preserve the appearance of ever-present physical strength, and he
knows, too, how to convey the impression that his soul and intellect
are a match to all dangers and surprises, by keeping up an unchanging
serenity and civility, even under the most trying circumstances."[14]

_Dreams._--Dreams are symptoms of the eternal law of compensation. In
our waking hours we develop a countless horde of yearnings, cravings
and desires, and by the very nature of things, the majority of them
must go ungratified. The feeling that something is wanting, thus left
within us, is met and satisfied by our imaginary functionings during
sleep. That is to say, dreams represent the reaction of our yearnings
upon the phenomena actually encountered during sleep--the motions of
our blood and intestines, the pressure of the bedclothes, the sounds of
church-bells, domestic animals, etc., and the state of the atmosphere.
These phenomena are fairly constant, but our dreams vary widely on
successive nights. Therefore, the variable factor is represented by the
yearnings we harbor as we go to bed. Thus, the man who loves music and
must go without it all day, hears celestial harmonies in his sleep.
Thus the slave dreams of soaring like an eagle. Thus the prisoner
dreams that he is free and the sailor that he is safely at home.
Inasmuch as the number of our conscious and unconscious desires, each
day, is infinite, there is an infinite variety in dreams. But always
the relation set forth may be predicated.


[1] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_," I.

[2] "_Menschliches allzu Menschliches_," III, § 185.

[3] "_Science and Immortality_," New York, 1904.

[4] "_Menschliches allzu Menschliches_," II, § 88.

[5] "_Morgenröte_," § 42.

[6] "_Zur Genealogie der Moral_," III, 11 to 17.

[7] "_Morgenröte_," § 91.

[8] "_Götzendämmerung_," IX, § 19.

[9] "_Götzendämmerung_," IX, § 24.

[10] "_Götzendämmerung_," IX, § 38.

[11] "_Morgenröte_," § 6.

[12] "_Morgenröte_," § 7.

[13] "_Morgenröte_," § 205.

[14] "_Morgenröte_," § 201.




XIV


NIETZSCHE VS. WAGNER


Nietzsche believed in heroes and, in his youth, was a hero worshipper.
First Arthur Schopenhauer's bespectacled visage stared from his shrine
and after that the place of sacredness and honor was held by Richard
Wagner. When the Wagner of the philosopher's dreams turned into a
Wagner of very prosaic flesh and blood, there came a time of doubt and
stress and suffering for poor Nietzsche. But he had courage as well as
loyalty, and in the end he dashed his idol to pieces and crunched the
bits underfoot. Faith, doubt, anguish, disillusion--it is not a rare
sequence in this pitiless and weary old world.

Those sapient critics who hold that Nietzsche discredited his own
philosophy by constantly writing against himself, find their chief
ammunition in his attitude toward the composer of "_Tristan und
Isolde_" In the decade from 1869 to 1878 the philosopher was the king
of German Wagnerians. In the decade from 1879 to 1889, he was the most
bitter, the most violent, the most resourceful and the most effective
of Wagner's enemies. On their face these things seem to indicate a
complete change of front and a careful examination bears out the
thought. But the same careful examination reveals another fact: that
the change of front was made, not by Nietzsche, but by Wagner.

As we have seen, the philosopher was an ardent musician from
boyhood and so it was not unnatural that he should be among the
first to recognize Wagner's genius. The sheer musicianship of the
man overwhelmed him and he tells us that from the moment the piano
transcription of "_Tristan und Isolde_" was printed he was a Wagnerian.
The music was bold and daring: it struck out into regions that the
_süsslich_ sentimentality of Donizetti and Bellini and the pallid
classicism of Beethoven and Bach had never even approached. In Wagner
Nietzsche saw a man of colossal originality and sublime courage, who
thought for himself and had skill at making his ideas comprehensible
to others. The opera of the past had been a mere _potpourri_ of songs,
strung together upon a filament of banal recitative. The opera of
Wagner was a symmetrical and homogeneous whole, in which the music was
unthinkable without the poetry and the poetry impossible without the
music.

Nietzsche, at the time, was saturated with Schopenhauer's brand of
individualism, and intensely eager to apply it to realities. In Wagner
he saw a living, breathing individualist--a man who scorned the laws
and customs of his craft and dared to work out his own salvation in
his own way. And when fate made it possible for him to meet Wagner,
he found the composer preaching as well as practising individualism.
In a word, Wagner was well nigh as enthusiastic a Schopenhauerean as
Nietzsche himself. His individualism almost touched the boundary of
anarchy. He had invented a new art of music and he was engaged in the
exciting task of smashing the old one to make room for it.

Nietzsche met Wagner in Leipsic and was invited to visit the composer
at his home near Tribschen, a suburb of Lucerne. He accepted, and
on May 15, 1869, got his first glimpse of that queer household in
which the erratic Richard, the ingenious Cosima and little Siegfried
lived and had their being. When he moved to Basel, he was not far
from Tribschen and so he fell into the habit of going there often
and staying long. He came, indeed, to occupy the position of an
adopted son, and spent the Christmas of 1869 and that of 1870 under
the Wagner rooftree. This last fact alone is sufficient to show the
intimate footing upon which he stood. Christmas, among the Germans,
is essentially a family festival and mere friends are seldom asked to
share its joys.

Nietzsche and Wagner had long and riotous disputations at Tribschen,
but in all things fundamental they agreed. Together they accepted
Schopenhauer's data and together they began to diverge from his
conclusions. Nietzsche saw in Wagner that old dionysian spirit
which had saved Greek art. The music of the day was colorless and
coldblooded. A too rigid formalism stood in the way of all expression
of actual life. Wagner proposed to batter this formalism to pieces and
Nietzsche was his prophet and _claque_.

It was this enthusiasm, indeed, which determined the plan of "_Die
Geburt der Tragödie_". Nietzsche had conceived it as a mere treatise
upon the philosophy of the Greek drama. His ardor as an apostle,
his yearning to convert the stolid Germans, his wild desire to do
something practical and effective for Wagner, made him turn it into a
gospel of the new art. To him Wagner was Dionysus, and the whole of
his argument against Apollo was nothing more than an argument against
classicism and for the Wagnerian romanticism. It was a bomb-shell and
its explosion made Germany stare, but another--perhaps many more--were
needed to shake the foundations of philistinism. Nietzsche loaded the
next one carefully and hurled it at him who stood at the very head of
that self-satisfied conservatism which lay upon all Germany. This
man was David Strauss. Strauss was the prophet of the good-enough. He
taught that German art was sound, that German culture was perfect.
Nietzsche saw in him the foe of Dionysus and made an example of him.
In every word of that scintillating philippic there was a plea for the
independence and individualism and outlawry that the philosopher saw in
Wagner.[1]

Unluckily the disciple here ran ahead of the master and before long
Nietzsche began to realize that he and Wagner were drifting apart.
So long as they met upon the safe ground of Schopenhauer's data, the
two agreed, but after Nietzsche began to work out his inevitable
conclusions, Wagner abandoned him. To put it plainly, Wagner was the
artist before he was the philosopher, and when philosophy began to
grow ugly he turned from it without regret or qualm of conscience.
Theoretically, he saw things as Nietzsche saw them, but as an artist he
could not afford to be too literal. It was true enough, perhaps, that
self-sacrifice was a medieval superstition, but all the same it made
effective heroes on the stage.

Nietzsche was utterly unable, throughout his life, to acknowledge
anything but hypocrisy or ignorance in those who descended to such
compromises. When he wrote "_Richard Wagner in Bayreuth_" he was
already the prey of doubts, but it is probable that he still saw the
"ifs" and "buts" in Wagner's individualism but dimly. He could not
realize, in brief, that a composer who fought beneath the banner of
truth, against custom and convention, could ever turn aside from
the battle. Wagner agreed with Nietzsche, perhaps, that European
civilization and its child, the European art of the day, were founded
upon lies, but he was artist enough to see that, without these lies,
it would be impossible to make art understandable to the public. So in
his librettos he employed all of the old fallacies--that love has the
supernatural power of making a bad man good, that one man may save the
soul of another, that humility is a virtue.[2]

It is obvious from this, that the apostate was not Nietzsche, but
Wagner. Nietzsche started out in life as a seeker after truth, and
he sought the truth his whole life long, without regarding for an
instant the risks and dangers and consequences of the quest. Wagner,
so long as it remained a mere matter of philosophical disputation,
was equally radical and courageous, but he saw very clearly that it
was necessary to compromise with tradition in his operas. He was an
atheist and a mocker of the gods, but the mystery and beauty of the
Roman Catholic ritual appealed to his artistic sense, and so, instead
of penning an opera in which the hero spouted aphorisms by Huxley,
he wrote "_Parsifal_" And in the same way, in his other music dramas,
he made artistic use of all the ancient fallacies and devices in
the lumber room of chivalry. He was, indeed, a philosopher in his
hours of leisure only. When he was at work over his music paper, he
saw that St. Ignatius was a far more effective and appealing figure
than Herbert Spencer and that the conventional notion that marriage
was a union of two immortal souls was far more picturesque than the
Schopenhauer-Nietzschean idea that it was a mere symptom of the primary
will to live.

In 1876 Nietzsche began to realize that he had left Wagner far behind
and that thereafter he could expect no support from the composer. They
had not met since 1874, but Nietzsche went to Bayreuth for the first
opera season. A single conversation convinced him that his doubts were
well-founded--that Wagner was a mere dionysian of the chair and had
no intention of pushing the ideas they had discussed to their bitter
and revolutionary conclusion. Most other men would have seen in this
nothing more than an evidence of a common-sense decision to sacrifice
the whole truth for half the truth, but Nietzsche was a rabid hater of
compromise. To make terms with the philistines seemed to him to be even
worse than joining their ranks. He saw in Wagner only a traitor who
knew the truth and yet denied it.

Nietzsche was so much disgusted that he left Bayreuth and set out upon
a walking tour, but before the end of the season he returned and heard
some of the operas. But he was no longer a Wagnerian and the music of
the "Ring" did not delight him. It was impossible, indeed, for him
to separate the music from the philosophy set forth in the librettos.
He believed, with Wagner, that the two were indissolubly welded, and
so, after awhile, he came to condemn the whole fabric--harmonies and
melodies as well as heroes and dramatic situations.

When Wagner passed out of his life Nietzsche sought to cure his
loneliness by hard work and "_Menschliches allzu Menschliches_" was the
result. He sent a copy of the first volume to Wagner and on the way it
crossed a copy of "_Parsifal_." In this circumstance is well exhibited
the width of the breach between the two men. To Wagner "_Menschliches
allzu Menschliches_" seemed impossibly and insanely radical; to
Nietzsche "_Parsifal_", with all its exaltation of ritualism, was
unspeakable. Neither deigned to write to the other, but we have it from
reliable testimony that Wagner was disgusted and Nietzsche's sister
tells us how much the music-drama of the grail enraged him.

A German, when indignation seizes him, rises straightway to make a loud
and vociferous protest. And so, although Nietzsche retained, to the end
of his life, a pleasant memory of the happy days he spent at Tribschen
and almost his last words voiced his loyal love for Wagner the man,
he conceived it to be his sacred duty to combat what he regarded as
the treason of Wagner the philosopher. This notion was doubtlessly
strengthened by his belief that he himself had done much to launch
Wagner's bark. He had praised, and now it was his duty to blame. He had
been enthusiastic at the first task, and he determined to be pitiless
at the second.

But he hesitated for ten years, because, as has been said, he could not
kill his affection for Wagner, the man. It takes courage to wound one's
nearest and dearest, and Nietzsche, for all his lack of sentiment, was
still no more than human. In the end, however, he brought himself to
the heroic surgery that confronted him, and the result was "_Der Fall
Wagner_". In this book all friendship and pleasant memories were put
aside. Wagner was his friend of old? Very well: that was a reason for
him to be all the more exact and all the more unpitying.

"What does a philosopher firstly and lastly require of himself?" he
asks. "To overcome his age in himself; to become timeless! With what,
then, has he to fight his hardest fight? With those characteristics and
ideas which most plainly stamp him as the child of his age." Herein we
perceive Nietzsche's fundamental error. Deceived by Wagner's enthusiasm
for Schopenhauer and his early, amateurish dabbling in philosophy, he
regarded; the composer as a philosopher. But Wagner, of course, was
first of all an artist, and it is the function of an artist, not to
reform humanity, but to depict it as he sees it, or as his age sees
it--fallacies, delusions and all. George Bernard Shaw, in his famous
criticism of Shakespeare, shows us how the Bard of Avon made just such
a compromise with the prevailing opinion of his time. Shakespeare,
he says, was too intelligent a man to regard Rosalind as a plausible
woman, but the theatre-goers of his day so regarded her and he drew
her to their taste.[3] An artist who failed to make such a concession
to convention would be an artist without an audience. Wagner was no
Christian, but he knew that the quest of the holy grail was an idea
which made a powerful appeal to nine-tenths of civilized humanity,
and so he turned it into a drama. This was not conscious lack of
sincerity, but merely a manifestation of the sub-conscious artistic
feeling for effectiveness.[4]

Therefore, it is plain that Nietzsche's whole case against Wagner is
based upon a fallacy and that, in consequence, it is not to be taken
too seriously. It is true enough that his book contains some remarkably
acute and searching observations upon art, and that, granting his
premises, his general conclusions would be correct, but we are by no
means granting his premises. Wagner may have been a traitor to his
philosophy, but if he had remained loyal to it, his art would have been
impossible. And in view of the sublime beauty of that art we may well
pardon him for not keeping the faith.

"_Der Fall Wagner_" caused a horde of stupid critics to maintain
that Nietzsche, and not Wagner, was the apostate, and that the mad
philosopher had begun to argue against himself. As an answer to this
ridiculous charge, Nietzsche published a little book called "_Nietzsche
contra Wagner_." It was made up entirely of passages from his earlier
books and these proved conclusively that, ever since his initial
divergence from Schopenhauer's conclusions, he had hoed a straight
row. He was a dionysian in "_Die Geburt der Tragödie_" and he was a
dionysian still in "_Also Sprach Zarathustra._"


[1] That Wagner gave Nietzsche good reason to credit him with these
qualities is amply proved. "I have never read anything better than your
book," wrote the composer in 1872. "It is masterly." And Frau Cosima
and Liszt, who were certainly familiar with Wagner's ideas, supported
Nietzsche's assumption, too. "Oh, how fine is your book," wrote the
former, "how fine and how deep--how deep and how keen!" Liszt sent from
Prague (Feb. 29, 1872) a pompous, patronizing letter. "I have read your
book twice," he said. In all of this correspondence there is no hint
that Nietzsche had misunderstood Wagner's position or had laid down any
propositions from which the composer dissented.

[2] There is an interesting discussion of this in James Huneker's book,
"Mezzotints in Modern Music," page 285 _et. seq._, New York, 1899.

[3] See "George Bernard Shaw: His Plays;" page 102 _et seq._, Boston,
1905.

[4] "Wagner's creative instinct gave the lie to his theoretical
system:" R. A. Streatfield, "Modern Music and Musicians," p. 272; New
York, 1906.




NIETZSCHE THE PROPHET




I


NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINS


The construction of philosophical family trees for Nietzsche has ever
been one of the favorite pastimes of his critics and interpreters.
Thus Dr. Oscar Levy, editor of the English translation of his works,
makes him the heir of Goethe and Stendhal, and the culminating figure
of the "Second Renaissance" launched by the latter, who was "the
first man to cry halt to the Kantian philosophy which had flooded
all Europe."[1] Dr. M. A. Mügge agrees with this genealogy so far
as it goes, but points out that Nietzsche was also the intellectual
descendant of certain pre-Socratic Greeks, particularly Heracleitus,
and of Spinoza and Stirner.[2] Alfred Fouillée, the Frenchman, is
another who gives him Greek blood, but in seeking his later forebears
Fouillée passes over the four named by Levy and Mügge and puts Hobbes,
Schopenhauer, Darwin, Rousseau and Diderot in place of them.[3] Again,
Thomas Common says that "perhaps Nietzsche is most indebted to Chamfort
and Schopenhauer," but also allows a considerable influence to Hobbes,
and endeavors to show how Nietzsche carried on, consciously and
unconsciously, certain ideas originating with Darwin and developed by
Huxley, Spencer and the other evolutionists.[4] Dr. Alexander Tille has
written a whole volume upon this latter relationship.[5] Finally, Paul
Elmer More, the American, taking the cue from Fouillée, finds the germs
of many of Nietzsche's doctrines in Hobbes, and then proceeds to a
somewhat elaborate discussion of the mutations of ethical theory during
the past two centuries, showing how Hume superimposed the idea of
sympathy as a motive upon Hobbes' idea of self-interest, and how this
sympathy theory prevailed over that of self-interest, and degenerated
into sentimentalism, and so opened the way for Socialism and other such
delusions, and how Nietzsche instituted a sort of Hobbesian revival.[6]
Many more speculations of that sort, some of them very ingenious and
some merely ingenuous, might be rehearsed. By one critic or another
Nietzsche has been accused of more or less frank borrowings from
Xenophanes, Democritus, Pythagoras, Callicles, Parmenides, Arcelaus,
Empedocles, Pyrrho, Hegesippus, the Eleatic Zeno, Machiavelli, Comte,
Montaigne, Mandeville, La Bruyère, Fontenelle, Voltaire, Kant, La
Rochefoucauld, Helvétius, Adam Smith, Malthus, Butler, Blake, Proudhon,
Paul Rée, Flaubert, Taine, Gobineau, Renan, and even from Karl
Marx!--a long catalogue of meaningless names, an exhaustive roster
of pathfinders and protestants. A Frenchman, Jules de Gaultier, has
devoted a whole book to the fascinating subject.[7]

But if we turn from this laborious and often irrelevant search for
common ideas and parallel passages to the actual facts of Nietzsche's
intellectual development, we shall find, perhaps, that his ancestry
ran in two streams, the one coming down from the Greeks whom he
studied as school-boy and undergraduate, and the other having its
source in Schopenhauer, the great discovery of his early manhood and
the most powerful single influence of his life. No need to argue the
essentially Greek color of Nietzsche's apprentice thinking. It was,
indeed, his interest in Greek literature and life that made him a
philologist by profession, and the same interest that converted him
from a philologist into a philosopher. The foundation of his system
was laid when he arrived at his conception of the conflict between
the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus, and all that followed belonged
naturally to the working out of that idea. But what he got from the
Greeks of his early adoration was more than a single idea and more
than the body of miscellaneous ideas listed by the commentators: it
was the Greek outlook, the Greek spirit, the Greek attitude toward God
and man. In brief, he ceased to be a German pastor's son, brought up
in the fear of the Lord, and became a citizen of those gorgeous and
enchanted isles, much as Shelley had before him. The sentimentality of
Christianity dropped from him like an old garment; he stood forth, as
it were, bare and unashamed, a pagan in the springtime of the world, a
_ja-sager_. More than the reading of books, of course, was needed to
work that transformation--the blood that leaped had to be blood capable
of leaping--but it was out of books that the stimulus came, and the
feeling of surety, and the beginnings of a workable philosophy of life.
It is not a German that speaks in "The Antichrist," nor even the Polish
noble that Nietzsche liked to think himself, but a Greek of the brave
days before Socrates, a spokesman of Hellenic innocence and youth.

No doubt it was the unmistakably Greek note in Schopenhauer--the
delivery of instinct, so long condemned to the ethical dungeons--that
engendered Nietzsche's first wild enthusiasm for the Frankfort sage.
The atmosphere of Leipsic in 1865 was heavy with moral vapors, and the
daring dissent of Schopenhauer must have seemed to blow through it like
a sharp wind from the sea. And Nietzsche, being young and passionate,
was carried away by the ecstasy of discovery, and so accepted the whole
Schopenhauerean philosophy without examining it too critically--the
bitter with the sweet, its pessimism no less than its rebellion. He,
too, had to go through the green-sickness of youth, particularly of
German youth. The Greek was yet but half way from Naumburg to Attica,
and he now stopped a moment to look backward. "Every line," he tells us
somewhere, "cried out renunciation, denial, resignation.... Evidences
of this sudden change are still to be found in the restless melancholy
of the leaves of my diary at that period, with all their useless
self-reproach and their desperate gazing upward for recovery and for
the transformation of the whole spirit of mankind. By drawing all my
qualities and my aspirations before the forum of gloomy self-contempt
I became bitter, unjust and unbridled in my hatred of myself. I even
practised bodily penance. For instance, I forced myself for a fortnight
at a stretch to go to bed at two o'clock in the morning and to rise
punctually at six." But not for long. The fortnight of self-accusing
and hair-shirts was soon over. The green-sickness vanished.[8] The
Greek emerged anew, more Hellenic than ever. And so, almost from the
start, Nietzsche rejected quite as much of Schopenhauer as he accepted.
The Schopenhauerean premise entered into his system--the will to live
was destined to become the father, in a few years, of the will to
power--but the Schopenhauerean conclusion held him no longer than it
took him to inspect it calmly. Thus he gained doubly--first, by the
acquisition of a definite theory of human conduct, one giving clarity
to his own vague feelings, and secondly, by the reaction against an
abject theory of human destiny, the very antithesis of that which rose
within him.

And yet, for all his dissent, for all his instinctive revolt against
the resignationism which overwhelmed him for an hour, Nietzsche
nevertheless carried away with him, and kept throughout his life, some
touch of Schopenhauer's distrust of the search for happiness. Nine
years after his great discovery we find him quoting and approving his
teacher's words: "A happy life is impossible; the highest thing that
man can aspire to is a _heroic_ life." And still later we find him
thundering against "the green-grazing happiness of the herd." What is
more, he gave his assent later on, though always more by fascination
than by conviction, to the doctrine of eternal recurrence, the most
hopeless idea, perhaps, ever formulated by man. But in all this a
certain distinction is to be noted: Schopenhauer, despairing of the
happy life, renounced even the heroic life, but Nietzsche never did
anything of the sort. On the contrary, his whole philosophy is a
protest against that very despair. The heroic life may not bring
happiness, and it may even fail to bring good, but at all events it
will shine gloriously in the light of its own heroism. In brief,
high endeavor is an end in itself--nay, the noblest of all ends. The
higher man does not work for a wage, not even for the wage of bliss:
his reward is in the struggle, the danger, the aspiration. As for the
happiness born of peace and love, of prosperity and tranquillity, that
is for "shopkeepers, women, Englishmen and cows." The man who seeks
it thereby confesses his incapacity for the loftier joys and hazards
of the free spirit, and the man who wails because he cannot find it
thereby confesses his unfitness to live in the world. "My formula for
greatness," said Nietzsche toward the end of his life, "is _amor fati_
... not only to bear up under necessity, but to _love_ it." Thus,
borrowing Schopenhauer's pessimism, he turned it, in the end, into a
defiant and irreconcilable optimism--not the slave optimism of hope,
with its vain courting of gods, but the master optimism of courage.

So much for the larger of the direct influences upon Nietzsche's
thinking. Scarcely less was the influence of that great revolution in
man's view of man, that genuine "transvaluation of all values," set in
motion by the publication of Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species,"
in 1859. In the chapter on Christianity I have sketched briefly the
part that Nietzsche played in the matter, and have shown how it rested
squarely upon the parts played by those who went before him. He himself
was fond of attacking Darwin, whom he disliked as he disliked all
Englishmen, and of denying that he had gotten anything of value out
of Darwin's work, but it is not well to take such denunciations and
denials too seriously. Like Ibsen, Nietzsche was often an unreliable
witness as to his own intellectual obligations. So long as he dealt
with ideas his thinking was frank and clear, but when he turned to the
human beings behind them, and particularly when he discussed those who
had presumed to approach the problems he undertook to solve himself,
his incredible intolerance, jealousy, spitefulness and egomania, and
his savage lust for bitter, useless and unmerciful strife, combined
to make his statements dubious, and sometimes even absurd. Thus with
his sneers at Darwin and the other evolutionists, especially Spencer.
If he did not actually follow them, then he at least walked side by
side with them, and every time they cleared another bit of the path he
profited by it too. One thing, at all events, they gave to the world
that entered into Nietzsche's final philosophy, and without which it
would have stopped short of its ultimate development, and that was the
conception of man as a mammal. Their great service to human knowledge
was precisely this. They found man a loiterer at the gates of heaven, a
courtier in the ante-chambers of gods. They brought him back to earth
and bade him help himself.

Meanwhile, the reader who cares to go into the matter further will
find Nietzsche elbowing other sages in a multitude of places. He
himself has testified to his debt to Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle), that
great apologist for Napoleon Bonaparte and exponent of the Napoleonic
philosophy. "Stendhal," he says, "was one of the happiest accidents of
my life.... He is quite priceless, with his penetrating psychologist's
eye and his grip upon facts, recalling that of the greatest of all
masters of facts (_ex ungue Napoleon_--); and last, but not least,
as an _honest_ atheist--one of a species rare and hard to find in
France.... Maybe I myself am jealous of Stendhal? He took from me the
best of atheistic jokes, that I might best have made: 'the only excuse
for God is that He doesn't exist.'"[9] Of his debt to Max Stirner the
evidence is less clear, but it has been frequently alleged, and, as
Dr. Mügge says, "quite a literature has grown up around the question."
Stirner's chief work, "_Der Einzige und sein Eigentum_,"[10] was first
published in 1844, the year of Nietzsche's birth, and in its strong
plea for the emancipation of the individual there are many ideas and
even phrases that were later voiced by Nietzsche. Dr. Mügge quotes a
few of them: "What is good and what is evil? I myself am my own rule,
and I am neither good nor evil. Neither word means anything to me....
Between the two vicissitudes of victory and defeat swings the fate
of the struggle--master or slave!... Egoism, not love, must decide."
Others will greet the reader of Stirner's book: "As long as you believe
in the truth, you do not believe in yourself; you are a servant, a
religious man. You alone are the truth.... Whether what I think and do
is Christian, what do I care? Whether it is human, liberal, humane,
whether unhuman, illiberal, unhumane, what do I ask about that? If
only it accomplishes what I want, if only I satisfy myself in it, then
overlay it with predicates if you will: it is all one to me...." But,
as Dr. J. L. Walker well says, in his introduction to Mr. Byington's
English translation, there is a considerable gulf between Stirner and
Nietzsche, even here. The former's plea is for absolute liberty for
all men, great and small. The latter is for liberty only in the higher
castes: the chandala he would keep in chains. Therefore, if Nietzsche
actually got anything from Stirner, it certainly did not enter
unchanged into the ultimate structure of his system.

The other attempts to convict him of appropriating ideas come to little
more. Dr. Mügge, for example, quotes these pre-Nietzschean passages
from Heracleitus: "War is universal and right, and by strife all things
arise and are made use of ... Good and evil are the same.... To me,
one is worth ten thousand, if he be the best." And Mr. More quotes
this from Hobbes: "In the first place, I put forth, for a general
inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power
after power, that ceaseth only with death"--to which the reader may
add, "Whatsoever is the object of any man's appetite or desire, that
is it which he for his part calleth good ... for these words of good,
evil and contemptible are ever used with relation to the person that
useth them; there being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any
common rule of good and evil, to be taken for the nature of objects
themselves."[11] But all these passages prove no more than that men of
past ages saw the mutability of criteria, and their origin in human
aspiration and striving. Not only Heracleitus, but many other Greeks,
voiced that ethical scepticism. It was for many years, indeed, one of
the dominant influences in Greek philosophy, and so, if Nietzsche
is accused of borrowing it, that is no more than saying what I have
already said: that he ate Greek grapes in his youth and became, to all
intellectual intents and purposes, a Greek himself. A man must needs
have a point of view, a manner of approach to life, and that point of
view is no less authentic when he reaches it through his reading and by
the exercise of a certain degree of free choice than when he accepts
it unthinkingly from the folk about him. The service of Heracleitus
and the other Greeks to Nietzsche was not that they gave him his
philosophy, but that they made him a philosopher. It was the questions
they asked rather than the answers they made that interested and
stimulated him, and if, at times, he answered much as they had done,
that was only proof of his genuine kinship with them.

On the artistic, as opposed to the analytical side, Nietzsche's most
influential teacher, perhaps, was Goethe, the noblest intellectual
figure of modern Germany, the common _stammvater_ of all the warring
schools of today--in Nietzsche's own phrase, "not only a good and
great man, but a culture itself." His writings are full of praises
of his hero, whom he began to read as a boy of eight or ten years.
His grandmother, Frau Erdmuthe Nietzsche, was a sister to Dr. Krause,
professor of divinity at Weimar in Goethe's day, and she lived in the
town while the poet held his court there, and undoubtedly came into
contact with him. Her mother, Frau Pastor Krause, was probably the
Muthgen of Goethe's diary. But despite all this, she thought that
"Faust" and "Elective Affinities" were "not fit for little boys" and so
it remained for Judge Pindar, the father of one of young Nietzsche's
Naumburg playmates, to conduct the initiation.[12] Thirty years
afterward, Nietzsche gratefully acknowledged his debt to Herr Pindar,
and his vastly greater debt to Goethe--"a thorough-going realist in
the midst of an unreal age.... He did not sever himself from life, but
entered into it. Undaunted, he took as much as possible to himself....
What he sought was _totality_."[13]

Nietzsche was also an extravagant admirer of Heinrich Heine, and
tried to imitate that poet's "sweet and passionate music." "People
will say some day," he declared, "that Heine and I were the greatest
artists, by far, that ever wrote in German, and that we left the best
any mere German[14] could do an incalculable distance behind us."[15]
Another poet he greatly revered was Friedrich Hölderlin, a South
German rhapsodist of the Goethe-Schiller period, who wrote odes in
free rhythms and philosophical novels in gorgeous prose, and died the
year before Nietzsche was born, after forty years of insanity. Karl
Joel,[16] Dr. Mügge and other critics have sought to connect Nietzsche,
through Hölderlin, with the romantic movement in Germany, but the
truth is that both Nietzsche and Hölderlin, if they were romantics
at all, were of the Greek school rather than the German. Certainly,
nothing could be further from genuine German romanticism, with its
sentimentality, its begging of questions and its booming patriotism,
than the gospel of the superman. What Nietzsche undoubtedly got from
the romantics was a feeling of ease in the German language, a disregard
for the artificial bonds of the schools, a sense of hospitality to
the gipsy phrase. In brief, they taught him how to write. But they
certainly did not teach him what to write.

Even so, it is probable that he was as much influenced by certain
Frenchmen as he ever was by Germans--particularly by Montaigne, La
Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld, Fontenelle, Vauvenargues and Chamfort, his
constant companions on his wanderings. He borrowed from them, not only
the somewhat obvious device of putting his argument into the form of
apothegms and epigrams, but also their conception of the dialectic as
one of the fine arts--in other words, their striving after style. "It
is to a small number of French authors," he once said, "that I return
again and again. I believe only in French culture, and regard all that
is called culture elsewhere in Europe, especially in Germany, as mere
misunderstanding.... The few persons of higher culture that I have met
in Germany have had French training--above all, Frau Cosima Wagner,
by long odds the best authority on questions of taste I ever heard
of."[17] This preference carried him so far, indeed, that he usually
wrote more like a Frenchman than like a German, toying with words,
experimenting with their combinations, matching them as carefully as
pearls for a necklace. "Nietzsche," says one critic,[18] "whether for
good or evil, introduced Romance (not romantic!) qualities of terseness
and clearness into German prose; it was his endeavor to free it from
those elements which he described as _deutsch und schwer_." (German and
heavy.)

For the rest, he denounced Klopstock, Herder, Wieland, Lessing and
Schiller, the remaining gods in Germany's literary valhalla, even more
bitterly than he denounced Kant and Hegel, the giants of orthodox
German philosophy.


[1] "The Revival of Aristocracy," London, 1906, pp. 14-59.

[2] "Friedrich Nietzsche: His Life and Work," New York, 1909, pp.
315-320.

[3] "_Nietzsche et l'Immoralisme_," Paris, 1902, p. 294.

[4] "Nietzsche as Critic, Philosopher, Poet and Prophet," London, 1901,
pp. xi-xxiii.

[5] "_Von Darwin bis Nietzsche_," Leipsic, 1895.

[6] "Nietzsche," Boston, 1912, pp. 18-45.

[7] "_De Kant à Nietzsche,_" Paris, 1900.

[8] Nietzsche himself, in after years, viewed this attack humorously,
and was wont to say that it was caused, not by Schopenhauer alone, but
also (and chiefly) by the bad cooking of Leipsic. See "_Ecce Homo_,"
II, i.

[9] "_Ecce Homo_," II, 3.

[10] Eng. tr. by Steven T. Byington, "The Ego and His Own," New York,
1907.

[11] The Leviathan, I, vi; London, 1651.

[12] Frau Förster-Nietzsche: "The Life of Nietzsche" (Eng. tr.), Vol.
I, p. 31.

[13] "_Götzendämmerung_," IX, 49.

[14] Heine was a Jew--and Nietzsche, as we know, liked to think himself
a Pole.

[15] "_Ecce Homo_," II, 4.

[16] "_Nietzsche und die Romantik_," Jena, 1905.

[17] "_Ecce Homo_," II, 3.

[18] J. G. Robertson: "A History of German Literature," Edinburgh,
1902, pp. 611-615.




II


NIETZSCHE AND HIS CRITICS


Let us set aside at the start that great host of critics whose chief
objection to Nietzsche is that he is blasphemous, that his philosophy
and his manner outrage the piety and prudery of the world. Of such
sort are the pale parsons who arise in suburban pulpits to dispose of
him in the half hour between the first and second lessons, as their
predecessors of the 70's and 80's disposed of Darwin, Huxley and
Spencer. Let them read their indictments and bring in their verdicts
and pronounce their bitter sentences! The student of Nietzsche must
perceive at once the irrelevance of that sort of criticism. It was the
deliberate effort of the philosopher, from the very start of what he
calls his tunnelling period, to provoke and deserve the accusation of
sacrilege. In framing his accusations against Christian morality he
tried to make them, not only persuasive and just, but also as offensive
as possible. No man ever had more belief in the propagandist value of a
_succès de scandale._ He tried his best to shock the guardians of the
sacred vessels, to force upon them the burdens of an active defense,
to bring them out into the open, to attract attention to the combat by
accentuating its mere fuming and fury. If he succeeded in the effort,
if he really outraged Christendom, then it is certainly absurd to bring
forward that deliberate achievement as an exhibit against itself.

The more pertinent and plausible criticisms of Nietzsche, launched
against him in Europe and America by many industrious foes, may be
reduced for convenience to five fundamental propositions, to wit:

(_a_) He was a decadent and a lunatic, and in consequence his
philosophy is not worthy of attention.

(_b_) His writings are chaotic and contradictory and it is impossible
to find in them any connected philosophical system.

(_c_) His argument that self-sacrifice costs more than it yields, and
that it thus reduces the average fitness of a race practising it, is
contradicted by human experience.

(_d_) The scheme of things proposed by him is opposed by ideas inherent
in all civilized men.

(_e_) Even admitting that his criticism of Christian morality is
well-founded, he offers nothing in place of it that would work as well.

It is scarcely worth while to linger over the first and second of
these propositions. The first has been defended most speciously by Max
Nordau, in "Degeneration," a book which made as much noise, when it was
first published in 1893, as any of Nietzsche's own. Nordau's argument
is based upon a theory of degeneration borrowed quite frankly from
Cesare Lombroso, an Italian quasi-scientist whose modest contributions
to psychiatry were offset by many volumes of rubbish about spooks,
table-tapping, mental telepathy, spirit photography and the alleged
stigmata of criminals and men of genius. Degeneracy and decadence
were terms that filled the public imagination in the 80's and 90's,
and even Nietzsche himself seemed to think, at times, that they had
definite meanings and that his own type of mind was degenerate. As
Nordau defines degeneracy it is "a morbid deviation from the original
type"--_i.e._ from the physical and mental norm of the species--and
he lays stress upon the fact that by "morbid" he means "infirm" or
"incapable of fulfilling normal functions." But straightway he begins
to regard _any_ deviation as morbid and degenerate, despite the obvious
fact that it may be quite the reverse. He says, for example, that a man
with web toes is a degenerate, and then proceeds to argue elaborately
from that premise, entirely overlooking the fact that web toes, under
easily imaginable circumstances, might be an advantage instead of a
handicap, and that, under the ordinary conditions of life, we are
unable to determine with any accuracy whether they are the one thing
or the other. So with the symptoms of degeneracy that he discovers in
Nietzsche. He shows that Nietzsche differed vastly from the average,
every-day German of his time, and even from the average German of
superior culture--that he thought differently, wrote differently,
admired different heroes and believed in different gods--but he by no
means proves thereby that Nietzsche's processes of thought were morbid
or infirm, or that the conclusions he reached were invalid _a priori._
Since Nordau startled the world with his book, the Lombrosan theory of
degeneracy has lost ground among psychologists and pathologists, but it
is still launched against Nietzsche by an occasional critic, and so it
deserves to be noticed.

Nordau's discussion of Nietzsche's insanity is rather more intelligent
than his discussion of the philosopher's alleged degeneracy, if only
because his facts are less open to dispute, but here, too, he forgets
that the proof of an idea is not to be sought in the soundness of the
man fathering it, but in the soundness of the idea itself. One asks of
a pudding, not if the cook who offers it is a good woman, but if the
pudding itself is good. Nordau, in attempting to dispose of Nietzsche's
philosophy on the ground that the author died a madman, succeeds only
in piling up a mass of uncontroverted but irrelevant accusations. He
shows that Nietzsche was an utter believer in his own wisdom, that he
had a fondness for repeating certain favorite arguments _ad nauseam_,
that he was violently impatient of criticism, that he chronically
underestimated the man opposed to him, that he sometimes indulged in
blasphemy for the sheer joy of shocking folks, and that he was often
hypnotized by the exuberance of his own verbosity, but it must be plain
that this indictment has its effective answer in the fact that it might
be found with equal justice against almost any revolutionary enthusiast
one selected at random--for example, Savonarola, Tolstoi, Luther,
Ibsen, Garrison, Phillips, Wilkes, Bakúnin, Marx, or Nordau himself.
That Nietzsche died insane is undoubted, and that his insanity was not
sudden in its onset is also plain, and one may even admit frankly that
it is visible, here and there, in his writings, particularly those of
his last year or two; but that his principal doctrines, the ideas upon
which his fame are based, are the fantasies of a maniac is certainly
wholly false. Had he sought to prove that cows had wings, it might be
fair today to dismiss him as Nordau attempts to dismiss him. But when
he essayed to prove that Christianity impeded progress, he laid down a
proposition that, whatever its novelty and daring, was obviously not
irrational, and neither was there anything irrational in the reasoning
whereby he supported it. One need go no further for proof of this than
the fact that multitudes of sane men, while he lived and since his
death, have debated that proposition in all seriousness and found a
plentiful food for sober thought in Nietzsche's statement and defense
of it. Ibsen also passed out of life in mental darkness, and so did
Schumann, but no reasonable critic would seek thereby to deny all
intelligibility to "Peer Gynt" or to the piano quintet in E flat.

Again, it is Nordau who chiefly voices the second of the objections
noted at the beginning of this chapter, though here many another
self-confessed serpent of wisdom follows him. Nietzsche, he says,
tore down without building up, and died without having formulated any
workable substitute for the Christian morality he denounced. Even to
the reader who has got no further into Nietzsche than the preceding
chapters of this book, the absurdity of such a charge must be manifest
without argument. No man, indeed, ever left a more comprehensive
system of ethics, not even Comte or Herbert Spencer, and if it be true
that he scattered it through a dozen books and that he occasionally
modified it in some of its details, it is equally true that his
fundamental principles were always stated with perfect clearness and
that they remained substantially unchanged from first to last. But
even supposing that he had died before he had arranged his ideas in a
connected and coherent form, and that it had remained for his disciples
to deduce and group his final conclusions, and to rid the whole of
inconsistency--even then it would have been possible to study those
conclusions seriously and to accept them for what they were worth.
Nordau lays it down as an axiom that a man cannot be a reformer unless
he proposes some ready-made and perfectly symmetrical scheme of things
to take the place of the notions he seeks to overturn, that if he does
not do this he is a mere hurler of bricks and shouter of blasphemies.
But all of us know that this is not true. Nearly every considerable
reform the world knows has been accomplished, not by one man, but by
many men working in series. It seldom happens, indeed, that the man who
first points out the necessity for change lives long enough to see that
change accomplished, or even to define its precise manner and terms.
Nietzsche himself was not the first critic of Christian morality,
nor did he so far dispose of the question that he left no room for
successors. But he made a larger contribution to it than any man had
ever made before him, and the ideas he contributed were so acute and so
convincing that they must needs be taken into account by every critic
who comes after him.

So much for the first two arguments against the prophet of the
superman. Both raise immaterial objections and the second makes an
allegation that is grotesquely untrue. The other three are founded upon
sounder logic, and, when maintained skillfully, afford more reasonable
ground for objecting to the Nietzschean system, either as a whole or in
part. It would be interesting, perhaps, to attempt a complete review
of the literature embodying them, but that would take a great deal
more space than is here available, and so we must be content with a
glance at a few typical efforts at refutation. One of the most familiar
of these appears in the argument that the messianic obligation of
self-sacrifice, whatever its cost, has yet yielded the race a large
profit--that we are the better for our Christian charity and that
we owe it entirely to Christianity. This argument has been best put
forward, perhaps, by Bennett Hume, an Englishman. If it were not for
Christian charity, says Mr. Hume, there would be no hospitals and
asylums for the sick and insane, and in consequence, no concerted and
effective effort to make man more healthy and efficient. Therefore, he
maintains, it must be admitted that the influence of Christianity, as a
moral system, has been for the good of the race. But this argument, in
inspection, quickly goes to pieces, and for two reasons. In the first
place, it must be obvious that the advantages of preserving the unfit,
few of whom ever become wholly fit again, are more than dubious; and
in the second place, it must be plain that modern humanitarianism, in
so far as it is scientific and unsentimental and hence profitable, is
so little a purely Christian idea that the Christian church, even down
to our own time, has actually opposed it. No man, indeed, can read Dr.
Andrew D. White's great history of the warfare between science and
the church without carrying away the conviction that such great boons
as the conquest of smallpox and malaria, the development of surgery,
the improved treatment of the insane, and the general lowering of the
death rate have been brought about, not by the maudlin alms-giving of
Christian priests, but by the intelligent meliorism of rebels against
a blind faith, ruthless in their ways and means but stupendously
successful in their achievement.

Another critic, this time a Frenchman, Alfred Fouillée by name,[1]
chooses as his point of attack the Nietzschean doctrine that a struggle
is welcome and beneficial to the strong, that intelligent self-seeking,
accompanied by a certain willingness to take risks, is the road of
progress. A struggle, argues M. Fouillée, always means an expenditure
of strength, and strength, when so expended, is further weakened by
the opposing strength it arouses and stimulates. Darwin is summoned
from his tomb to substantiate this argument, but its exponent seems to
forget (while actually stating it!) the familiar physiological axiom,
so often turned to by Darwin, that strength is one of the effects of
use, and the Darwinian corollary that disuse, whether produced by
organized protection or in some other way, leads inevitably to weakness
and atrophy. In other words, the ideal strong man of M. Fouillée's
dream is one who seeks, with great enthusiasm, the readiest possible
way of ridding himself of his strength.

Nordau, Violet Paget and various other critics attack Nietzsche from
much the same side. That is to say, they endeavor to controvert his
criticism of humility and self-sacrifice and to show that the law of
natural selection, with its insistence that only the fittest shall
survive, is insufficient to insure human progress. Miss Paget, for
example,[2] argues that if there were no belief in every man's duty to
yield something to his weaker brother the race would soon become a herd
of mere wild beasts. She sees humility as a sort of brake or governor,
placed upon humanity to keep it from running amuck. A human being is
so constituted, she says, that he necessarily looms in his own view
as large as all the rest of the world put together. This distortion
of values is met with in the consciousness of every individual, and
if there were nothing to oppose it, it would lead to a hopeless
conflict between exaggerated egos. Humility, says Miss Paget, tempers
the conflict, without wholly ending it. A man's inherent tendency to
magnify his own importance and to invite death by trying to force that
view upon others is held in check by the idea that it is his duty to
consider the welfare of those others. The objection to all this is that
the picture of humility Miss Paget draws is not at all a picture of
self-sacrifice, of something founded upon an unselfish idea of duty,
but a picture of highly intelligent egoism. Whatever his pharisaical
account of his motives, it must be obvious that her Christian gentleman
is merely a man who throws bones to the dogs about him. Between such
wise prudence and the immolation of the Beatitudes a wide gulf is
fixed. As a matter of fact, that prudence is certainly not opposed by
Nietzsche. The higher man of his visions is far from a mere brawler. He
is not afraid of an open fight, and he is never held back by fear of
hurting his antagonist, but he also understands that there are times
for truce and guile. In brief, his self-seeking is conducted, not alone
by his fists, but also by his head. He knows when to pounce upon his
foes and rivals, but he also knows when to keep them from pouncing upon
him. Thus Miss Paget's somewhat elaborate refutation, though it leads
to an undoubtedly sound conclusion, by no means disposes of Nietzsche.

The other branches of the argument that self-sacrifice is beneficial
open an endless field of debate, in which the same set of facts is
often susceptible of diametrically opposite interpretations. We have
already glanced at the alleged effects of Christian charity upon
progress, and observed the enormous difference between sentimental
efforts to preserve the unfit and intelligent efforts to make them fit,
and we have seen how practical Christianity, whatever its theoretical
effects, has had the actual effect of furthering the former and
hindering the latter. It is often argued that there is unfairness
in thus burdening the creed with the crimes of the church, but how
the two are to be separated is never explained. What sounder test of
a creed's essential value can we imagine than that of its visible
influence upon the men who subscribe to it? And what sounder test of
its terms than the statement of its ordained teachers and interpreters,
supported by the unanimous approval of all who profess it? We are here
dealing, let it be remembered, not with esoteric doctrines, but with
practical doctrines--that is to say, with working policies. If the
Christian ideal of charity is to be defended as a working policy, then
it is certainly fair to examine it at work. And when that is done the
reflective observer is almost certain to conclude that it is opposed
to true progress, that it acts as a sentimental shield to the unfit
without helping them in the slightest to shake off their unfitness.
What is more, it stands contrary to that wise forethought which
sacrifices one man today that ten may be saved tomorrow. Nothing could
be more patent, indeed, than the high cost to humanity of the Christian
teaching that it is immoral to seek the truth outside the Word of God,
or to take thought of an earthly tomorrow, or to draw distinctions in
value between beings who all possess souls of infinite, and therefore
of exactly equal preciousness.

But setting aside the doctrine that self-sacrifice is a religious
duty, there remains the doctrine that it is a measure of expediency,
that when the strong help the weak they also help themselves. Let it
be said at once that this second doctrine, provided only it be applied
intelligently and without any admixture of sentimentality, is not in
opposition to anything in Nietzsche's philosophy. On the contrary,
he is at pains to point out the value of exploiting the inefficient
masses, and obviously that exploitation is impossible without some
concession to their habits and desires, some offer, however fraudulent,
of a _quid pro quo_--and unprofitable unless they can be made to yield
more than they absorb. For one thing, there is the business of keeping
the lower castes in health. They themselves are too ignorant and lazy
to manage it, and therefore it must be managed by their betters. When
we appropriate money from the public funds to pay for vaccinating a
horde of negroes, we do not do it because we have any sympathy for them
or because we crave their blessings, but simply because we don't want
them to be falling ill of smallpox in our kitchens and stables, to the
peril of our own health and the neglect of our necessary drudgery.[3]
In so far as the negroes have any voice in the matter at all, they
protest against vaccination, for they can't understand its theory and
so they see only its tyranny, but we vaccinate them nevertheless,
and thus increase their mass efficiency in spite of them. It costs
something to do the work, but we see a profit in it. Here we have a
good example of self-sacrifice based frankly upon expediency, and
Nietzsche has nothing to say against it.

But what he does insist upon is that we must beware of mixing
sentimentality with the business, that we must keep the idea of
expediency clear of any idea of altruism. The trouble with the world,
as he describes it, is that such a corruption almost always takes
place. That is to say, we too often practise charity, not because it is
worth while, but merely because it is pleasant. The Christian ideal,
he says, "knows how to enrapture." Starting out from the safe premise,
approved by human experience, that it is sometimes a virtue--_i.e._, a
measure of intelligent prudence--to help the weak, we proceed to the
illogical conclusion that it is _always_ a virtue. Hence our wholesale
coddling of the unfit, our enormous expenditure upon vain schemes of
amelioration, our vain efforts to combat the laws of nature. We nurse
the defective children of the lower classes into some appearance of
health, and then turn them out to beget their kind. We parole the
pickpocket, launch him upon society with a tract in his hand--and
lose our pocket-books next day. We send missionaries to the heathen,
build hospitals for them, civilize and educate them--and later on have
to fight them. We save a pauper consumptive today, on the ostensible
theory that he is more valuable saved than dead--and so open the way
for saving his innumerable grandchildren in the future. In brief, our
self-sacrifice of expediency seldom remains undefiled. Nine times out
of ten a sentimental color quickly overcomes it, and soon or late
there is apt to be more sentimentality in it than expediency.

What is worse, this sentimentalism results in attaching a sort of
romantic glamour to its objects. Just as the Sunday-school teaching
virgin, beginning by trying to save the Chinese laundryman's soul,
commonly ends by falling in love with him, so the virtuoso of any
other sort of charity commonly ends by endowing its beneficiary with
a variety of imaginary virtues. Sympathy, by some subtle alchemy, is
converted into a sneaking admiration. "Blessed are the poor in spirit"
becomes "Blessed are the poor." This exaltation of inefficiency, it
must be manifest, is a dangerous error. There is, in fact, nothing
at all honorable about unfitness, considered in the mass. On the
contrary, it is invariably a symptom of actual dishonor--of neglect,
laziness, ignorance and depravity--if not primarily in the individual
himself, then at least in his forebears, whose weakness he carries on.
It is highly important that this fact should be kept in mind by the
human race, that the essential inferiority of the inefficient should
be insisted upon, that the penalties of deliberate slackness should
be swift and merciless. But as it is, those penalties are too often
reduced to nothing by charity, while the offense they should punish
is elevated to a fictitious martyrdom. Thus we have charity converted
into an instrument of debauchery. Thus we have it playing the part of
an active agent of decay, and so increasing the hazards of life on
earth. "We may compare civilized man," says Sir Ray Lankester,[4] "to
a successful rebel against nature, who by every step forward renders
himself liable to greater and greater penalties." No need to offer
cases in point. Every one of us knows what the Poor Laws of England
have accomplished in a hundred years--how they have multiplied misery
enormously and created a caste of professional paupers--how they have
seduced that caste downward into depths of degradation untouched by
any other civilized race in history--and how, by hanging the crushing
burden of that caste about the necks of the English people, they have
helped to weaken and sicken the whole stock and to imperil the future
of the nation.

So much for the utility of self-sacrifice--undeniable, perhaps, so long
as a wise and ruthless foresight rules, but immediately questionable
when sentimentality enters into the matter. There remains the answer
in rebuttal that sentimentality, after all, is native to the soul of
man, that we couldn't get rid of it if we tried. Herein, if we look
closely, we will observe tracks of an idea that has colored the whole
stream of human thought since the dawn of Western philosophy, and is
accepted today, as irrefutably true, by all who pound pulpits and wave
their arms and call upon their fellow men to repent. It has clogged
all ethical inquiry for two thousand years, it has been a premise in
a million moral syllogisms, it has survived the assaults of all the
iconoclasts that ever lived. It is taught in all our schools today and
lies at the bottom of all our laws, prophecies and revelations. It is
the foundation and cornerstone, not only of Christianity, but also of
every other compound of theology and morality known in the world. And
what is this king of all axioms and emperor of all fallacies? Simply
the idea that there are rules of "natural morality" engraven indelibly
upon the hearts of man--that all men, at all times and everywhere, have
ever agreed, do now agree and will agree forevermore, unanimously and
without reservation, that certain things are right and certain other
things are wrong, that certain things are nice and certain other things
are not nice, that certain things are pleasing to God and certain other
things are offensive to God.

In every treatise upon Christian ethics and "natural theology," so
called, you will find these rules of "natural morality" in the first
chapter. Thomas Aquinas called them "the eternal law." Even the Greeks
and Romans, for all their skepticism in morals, had a sneaking belief
in them. Aristotle tried to formulate them and the Latin lawyers
constantly assumed their existence. Most of them are held in firm faith
today by all save a small minority of the folk of Christendom. The
most familiar of them, perhaps, is the rule against murder--the sixth
commandment. Another is the rule against the violation of property
in goods, wives and cattle--the eighth and tenth commandments. A
third is the rule upon which the solidity of the family is based, and
with it the solidity of the tribe--the fifth commandment. The theory
behind these rules is, not only that they are wise, but that they are
innate and sempiternal, that every truly enlightened man recognizes
their validity intuitively, and is conscious of sin when he breaks
them. To them Christianity added an eleventh commandment, a sort of
infinite extension of the fifth, "that ye love one another"[5]--and
in two thousand years it has been converted from a novelty into a
universality. That is to say, its point of definite origin has been
lost sight of, and it has been moved over into the group of "natural
virtues," of "eternal laws." When Christ first voiced it, in his
discourse at the Last Supper, it was so far from general acceptance
that he named a belief in it as one of the distinguishing marks of his
disciples, but now our moralists tell us that it is in the blood of
all of us, and that we couldn't repudiate it if we would. Brotherhood,
indeed, is the very soul of Christianity, and the only effort of the
pious today is to raise it from a universal theory to a universal fact.

But the truth is, of course, that it is not universal at all, and that
nothing in the so-called soul of man prompts him to subscribe to it.
We cling to it today, not because it is inherent in us, but simply
because it is the moral fashion of our age. When the disciples first
heard it put into terms, it probably struck them as a revolutionary
novelty, and on some dim tomorrow our descendants may regard it as an
archaic absurdity. In brief, rules of morality are wholly temporal and
temporary, for the good and sufficient reason that there is no "natural
morality" in man--and the sentimental rule that the strong shall give
of their strength to the weak is no exception. There have been times in
the history of the race when few, if any intelligent men subscribed to
it, and there are thousands of intelligent men who refuse to subscribe
to it today, and no doubt there will come a time when those who are
against it will once more greatly outnumber those who are in favor of
it. So with all other "eternal laws." Their eternality exists only in
the imagination of those who seek to glorify them. Nietzsche himself
spent his best years demonstrating this, and we have seen how he set
about the task--how he showed that the "good" of one race and age was
the "bad" of some other race and age--how the "natural morality" of the
Periclean Greeks, for example, differed diametrically from the "natural
morality" of the captive Jews. All history bears him out. Mankind is
ever revising and abandoning its "inherent" ideas. We say today that
the human mind instinctively revolts against cruel punishments, and yet
a moment's reflection recalls the fact that the world is, and always
has been peopled by millions to whom cruelty, not only to enemies
but to the weak in general, seems and has seemed wholly natural and
agreeable. We say that man has an "innate" impulse to be fair and
just, and yet it is a commonplace observation that multitudes of men,
in the midst of our most civilized societies, have little more sense
of justice than so many jackals. Therefore, we may safely set aside
the argument that a "natural" instinct for sentimental self-sacrifice
stands as an impassable barrier to Nietzsche's dionysian philosophy.
There is no such barrier. There is no such instinct. It is an idea
merely--an idea powerful and persistent, but still mutable and mortal.
Certainly, it is absurd to plead it in proof against the one man who
did most to establish its mutability.

We come now to the final argument against Nietzsche--the argument, to
wit, that, even admitting his criticism of Christian morality to be
well-founded, he offers nothing in place of it that would serve the
world as well. The principal spokesman of this objection, perhaps,
is Paul Elmer More, who sets it forth at some length in his hostile
but very ingenious little study of Nietzsche.[6] Mr. More goes back
to Locke to show the growth of the two ideas which stand opposed as
Socialism and individualism, Christianity and Nietzscheism today. So
long, he says, as man believed in revelation, there was no genuine
effort to get at the springs of human action, for every impulse that
was ratified by the Scriptures was believed to be natural and moral,
and every impulse that went counter to the Scriptures was believed
to be sinful, even by those who yielded to it habitually. But when
that idea was cleared away, there arose a need for something to take
its place, and Locke came forward with his theory that the notion of
good was founded upon sensations of pleasure and that of bad upon
sensations of pain. There followed Hume, with his elaborate effort
to prove that sympathy was a source of pleasure, by reason of its
grateful tickling of the sense of virtue, and so the new conception of
good finally stood erect, with one foot on frank self-interest and the
other on sympathy. Mr. More shows how, during the century following,
the importance of the second of these factors began to be accentuated,
under the influence of Rousseau and his followers, and how, in the end,
the first was forgotten almost entirely and there arose a non-Christian
sentimentality which was worse, if anything, than the sentimentality
of the Beatitudes. In England, France and Germany it colored almost the
whole of philosophy, literature and politics. Stray men, true enough,
raised their voices against it, but its sweep was irresistible. Its
fruits were diverse and memorable--the romantic movement in Germany,
humanitarianism in England, the Kantian note in ethics, and, most
important of all, Socialism.

That this exaltation of sympathy was imprudent, and that its effects,
in our own time, are far from satisfactory, Mr. More is disposed
to grant freely. It is perfectly true, as Nietzsche argues, that
humanitarianism has been guilty of gross excesses, that there is a
"danger that threatens true progress in any system of education and
government which makes the advantage of the average rather than the
distinguished man its chief object." But Mr. More holds that the
danger thus inherent in sympathy is matched by a danger inherent in
selfishness, that we are no worse off on one horn of Hume's dual ethic
than we should be on the other. Sympathy unbalanced by self-seeking
leads us into maudlin futilities and crimes against efficiency;
self-seeking unchecked by sympathy would lead us into sheer savagery.
If there is any choice between the two, that choice is probably in
favor of sympathy, for the reason that it is happily impossible of
realization. The most lachrymose of the romantics, in the midst of
their sentimentalizing, were yet careful of their own welfare. Many of
them, indeed, displayed a quite extraordinary egoism, and there was
some justice in Byron's sneer that Sterne, for one, preferred weeping
over a dead ass to relieving the want (at cost to himself) of a living
mother.

But in urging all this against Nietzsche, Mr. More and the other
destructive critics of the superman make a serious error, and that
is the error of assuming that Nietzsche hoped to abolish Christian
morality completely, that he proposed a unanimous desertion of the
idea of sympathy for the idea of intelligent self-seeking. As a matter
of fact, he had no such hope and made no such proposal. Nothing was
more firmly fixed in his mind, indeed, than the notion that the vast
majority of men would cling indefinitely, and perhaps for all time,
to some system of morality more or less resembling the Christian
morality of today. Not only did he have no expectation of winning that
majority from its idols, but he bitterly resented any suggestion that
such a result might follow from his work. The whole of his preaching
was addressed, not to men in the mass, but to the small minority of
exceptional men--not to those who live by obeying, but to those who
live by commanding--not to the race as a race, but only to its masters.
It would seem to be impossible that any reader of Nietzsche should
overlook this important fact, and yet it is constantly overlooked by
most of his critics. They proceed to prove, elaborately and, it must
be said, quite convincingly, that if his transvaluation of values were
made by all men, the world would be no better off than it is today,
and perhaps a good deal worse, but all they accomplish thereby is to
demolish a hobgoblin of straw. Nietzsche himself sensed the essential
value of Hume's dualism. What he sought to do was not to destroy it,
but to restore it, and, restoring it, to raise it to a state of active
conflict--to dignify self-interest as sympathy has been dignified,
and so to put the two in perpetual opposition. He believed that the
former was by long odds the safer impulse for the higher castes of
men to follow, if only because of its obviously closer kinship to the
natural laws which make for progress upward, but by the same token
he saw that these higher castes could gain nothing by disturbing the
narcotic contentment of the castes lower down. Therefore, he was, to
that extent, an actual apologist for the thing he elsewhere so bitterly
attacked. Sympathy, self-sacrifice, charity--these ideas lulled and
satisfied the chandala, and so he was content to have the chandala
hold to them. "Whom do I hate most among the rabble of today? The
Socialist who undermines the workingman's instincts, who destroys his
satisfaction with his insignificant existence, who makes him envious
and teaches him revenge."[7] In brief, Nietzsche dreamed no dream of
all mankind converted into a race of supermen: the only vision he saw
was one of supermen at the top.

To make an end, his philosophy was wholly aristocratic, in aim as well
as in terms. He believed that superior men, by which he meant alert
and restless men, were held in chains by the illusions and inertia of
the mass--that their impulse to move forward and upward, at whatever
cost to those below, was restrained by false notions of duty and
responsibility. It was his effort to break down those false notions,
to show that the progress of the race was more important than the
comfort of the herd, to combat and destroy the lingering spectre of
sin--in his own phrase, to make man innocent. But when he said man he
always meant the higher man, the man of tomorrow, and not mere men. For
the latter he had only contempt: he sneered at their heroes, at their
ideals, at their definitions of good and evil. "There are only three
ways," he said, "in which the masses appear to me to deserve a glance:
first, as blurred copies of their betters, printed on bad paper and
from worn-out plates; secondly, as a necessary opposition; and thirdly,
as tools. Further than that I hand them over to statistics--and the
devil.[8] ... I am writing for a race of men which does not yet exist.
I am writing for the lords of the earth."[9]


[1] Author of "_Nietzsche et l'Immoralisme_" and other books. The
argument discussed appears in an article in the _International Monthly_
for March, 1901, pp. 134-165.

[2] In the _North American Review_ for Dec., 1904.

[3] A more extended treatment of this point will be found in "Men _vs._
the Man," by Robert Rives La Monte and the present author: New York,
1910.

[4] In "The Kingdom of Man," London, 1907.

[5] John XIII, 34.

[6] "Nietzsche," Boston, 1912. Reprinted in "The Drift of Romanticism,"
pp. 147-190, Boston, 1913.

[7] "_Der Antichrist_," 57.

[8] "_Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben_," IX.

[9] "_Der Wille zur Macht_", 958.




HOW TO STUDY NIETZSCHE


Through the diligence and enthusiasm of Dr. Oscar Levy, author of "The
Revival of Aristocracy," a German by birth but for some time a resident
of London, the whole canon of Nietzsche's writings is now to be had in
English translation. So long ago as 1896 a complete edition in eleven
volumes was projected, and Dr. Alexander Tille, lecturer on German in
the University of Glasgow, and author of "_Von Darwin bis Nietzsche_,"
was engaged to edit it. But though it started fairly with a volume
including "The Case of Wagner" and "The Antichrist," and four more
volumes followed after a year or so, it got no further than that. Ten
years later came Dr. Levy. He met with little encouragement when he
began, but by dint of unfailing perseverance he finally gathered about
him a corps of competent translators, made arrangements with publishers
in Great Britain and the United States, and got the work under way. His
eighteenth and last volume was published early in 1913.

These translations, in the main, are excellent, and explanatory
prefaces and notes are added wherever needed. The contents of the
various volumes are as follows:

I. "The Birth of Tragedy," translated by Wm. A. Haussmann, Ph. D., with
a biographical introduction by Frau Förster-Nietzsche, a portrait of
Nietzsche, and a facsimile of his manuscript.

II. "Early Greek Philosophy and Other Essays," translated by Maximilian
A. Mügge, Ph. D., author of "Friedrich Nietzsche: His Life and Work."
Contents: "The Greek Woman," "On Music and Words," "Homer's Contest,"
"The Relation of Schopenhauer's Philosophy to a German Culture,"
"Philosophy During the Tragic Age of the Greeks," and "On Truth and
Falsity in Their Ultramoral Sense."

III. "On the Future of Our Educational Institutions" and "Homer and
Classical Philology," translated by J. M. Kennedy, author of "The
Quintessence of Nietzsche," with an introduction by the translator.

IV. "Thoughts Out of Season," I ("David Strauss, the Confessor and the
Writer" and "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth"), translated by Anthony M.
Ludovici, author of "Nietzsche: His Life and Works," "Nietzsche and
Art," and "Who is to be Master of the World?" with an introduction by
Dr. Levy and a preface by the translator.

V. "Thoughts Out of Season," II ("The Use and Abuse of History" and
"Schopenhauer as Educator"), translated by Adrian Collins, M. A., with
an introduction by the translator.

VI. "Human All-Too Human," I, translated by Helen Zimmern, with an
introduction by J. M. Kennedy.

VII. "Human All-Too Human," II, translated by Paul V. Cohn, B. A., with
an introduction by the translator.

VIII. "The Case of Wagner" (including "Nietzsche _contra_ Wagner"
and selected aphorisms), translated by A. M. Ludovici, and "We
Philologists," translated by J. M. Kennedy, with prefaces by the
translators.

IX. "The Dawn of Day," translated by J. M. Kennedy, with an
introduction by the translator.

X. "The Joyful Wisdom," translated by Thomas Common, author of
"Nietzsche as Critic, Philosopher, Poet and Prophet" (including "Songs
of Prince Free-as-a-Bird," translated by Paul V. Cohn and Maude D.
Petre).

XI. "Thus Spake Zarathustra," translated by Thomas Common, with an
introduction by Frau Förster-Nietzsche and explanatory notes by A. M.
Ludovici.

XII. "Beyond Good and Evil," translated by Helen Zimmern, with an
introduction by Thomas Common.

XIII. "The Genealogy of Morals," translated by Horace B. Samuel, M.
A., and "People and Countries," translated by J. M. Kennedy, with an
editor's note by Dr. Levy.

XIV. "The Will to Power," I, translated by A. M. Ludovici, with a
preface by the translator.

XV. "The Will to Power," II, translated by A. M. Ludovici, with a
preface by the translator.

XVI. "The Twilight of the Idols" (including "The Antichrist," "Eternal
Recurrence" and explanatory notes to "Thus Spake Zarathustra"),
translated by A. M. Ludovici, with a preface by the translator.

XVII. "Ecce Homo," translated by A. M. Ludovici; various songs,
epigrams and dithyrambs, translated by Paul V. Cohn, Herman Scheffauer,
Francis Bickley and Dr. G. T. Wrench; and the music of Nietzsche's
"Hymn to Life" (words by Lou Salomé), with an introduction by Mr.
Ludovici, a note to the poetry by Dr. Levy, and a reproduction of Karl
Donndorf's bust of Nietzsche.

XVIII. Index.

The student who would read Nietzsche had better begin with one of
the aphoristic books, preferably "The Dawn of Day." From that let
him proceed to "Beyond Good and Evil," "The Genealogy of Morals" and
"The Antichrist." He will then be ready to understand "Thus Spake
Zarathustra." Later on he may read "Ecce Homo" and dip into "The Joyful
Wisdom," "Human All-Too Human" and "The Will to Power," as his fancy
suggests. The Wagner pamphlets are of more importance to Wagnerians
than to students of Nietzsche's ideas, and the early philological and
critical essays have lost much of their interest by the passage of
time. Nietzsche's poetry had better be avoided by all who cannot read
it in the original German. The English translations are mostly very
free and seldom satisfactory.

Of the larger Nietzschean commentaries in English the best is
"Friedrich Nietzsche: His Life and Work," by M. A. Mügge. Appended to
it is a bibliography of 850 titles--striking evidence of the attention
that Nietzsche's ideas have gained in the world. Other books that will
be found useful are "The Quintessence of Nietzsche," by J. M. Kennedy;
"Nietzsche: His Life and Works," by Anthony M. Ludovici; "The Gospel
of Superman," by Henri Lichtenberger, translated from the French by J.
M. Kennedy; "The Philosophy of Nietzsche," by Georges Chatterton-Hill,
and "The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche," by Grace Neal Dolson, Ph.
D., this last a pioneer work of permanent value. Lesser studies are
to be found in "Friedrich Nietzsche," by A. R. Orage; "Nietzsche as
Critic, Philosopher, Poet and Prophet," by Thomas Common; "Friedrich
Nietzsche and His New Gospel," by Emily S. Hamblen, and "Nietzsche,"
by Paul Elmer More. Interesting discussions of various Nietzschean
ideas are in "The Revival of Aristocracy," by Dr. Oscar Levy; "Who
is to be Master of the World?" by A. M. Ludovici; "On the Tracks of
Life," by Leo G. Sera, translated from the Italian by J. M. Kennedy;
"Nietzsche and Art," by A. M. Ludovici, and "The Mastery of Life," by
G. T. Wrench. Selections from Nietzsche's writings are put together
under subject headings in "Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism," by A.
R. Orage; "Nietzsche: His Maxims," by J. M. Kennedy, and "The Gist
of Nietzsche," by H. L. Mencken. An elaborate and invaluable summary
of all Nietzsche's writings, book by book, is to be found in "What
Nietzsche Taught," by Willard H. Wright. This volume, the fruit of
very diligent labor, is admirably concise and well-ordered.

The standard biography of Nietzsche is "_Das Leben Friedrich
Nietzsches_" by Frau Förster-Nietzsche, a large work in three volumes.
In 1911 Frau Förster-Nietzsche prepared a shorter version and this
has since been done into English by A. M. Ludovici, and published in
two volumes, under the title of "The Life of Nietzsche." Unluckily,
so devoted a sister was not the best person to deal with certain
episodes in the life of her brother and hero. The gaps she left and
the ameliorations she attempted are filled and corrected in "The Life
of Friedrich Nietzsche," by Daniel Halévy, translated from the French
by J. M. Hone, with an extraordinarily brilliant introduction by T. M.
Kettle, M. P.

Small but suggestive studies of Nietzsche and his ideas are to be
found in "Egoists," "Mezzotints in Modern Music," and "The Pathos
of Distance," by James Huneker; "Degeneration," by Max Nordau;
"Affirmations," by Havelock Ellis; "Aristocracy and Evolution," by W.
H. Mallock; "Heretics" and "Orthodoxy," by G. K. Chesterton; "Lectures
and Essays on Natural Theology," by William Wallace; "Heralds of
Revolt," by William Barry, D. D.; "Essays in Sociology," by J. M.
Robertson; "The Larger Aspects of Socialism," by William English
Walling; "Three Modern Seers," by Mrs. Havelock Ellis; "Slaves to
Duty," by J. Badcock; "In Peril of Change," by C. F. G. Masterman;
"Man's Place in the Cosmos," by A. Seth Pringle Pattison; and "Gospels
of Anarchy," by Vernon Lee (Violet Paget). George Bernard Shaw's
variations upon Nietzschean themes are in "The Revolutionist's
Handbook," appended to "Man and Superman." Of magazine articles dealing
with the prophet of the superman there has been no end of late. Most
of them are worthless, but any bearing the name of Grace Neal Dolson,
Thomas Common, Thomas Stockham Baker or Maude D. Petre may be read
with profit. One of the best discussions of Nietzsche I have ever
encountered was contributed to the _Catholic World_ during December,
1905, and January, February, March, May and June, 1906, by Miss Petre.
It is to be regretted that these excellent papers, which sought to
rescue Nietzsche from the misunderstandings of Christian critics, have
not been re-printed in book-form.



INDEX


Adieu, I Must Go!, patriotic song
_Amor fati_
Anarchism
Andreas-Salomé, _see_ Salomé.
Antichrist, The--
  Publication of
  Quotations from
  Style of
  English translation of
Apollo--
  First conception of
  God of music and poetry
  Influence of
  Conflict with Dionysus
Aquinas, Thomas
Arcelaus
Aristocracy
Art for art's sake
Asceticism, 21 _footnote_
Atheism

Bacchus Dionysus--
  First conception of
  Imported into Greece
  God of strenuous life
  Conflict with Apollo
  Nietzsche a Dionysian
Bad, definition of
Badcock, J.
Baker, Thomas Stockham
Balfour, A. J.
Barry, Wm.
Basel, University of--
  Nietzsche appointed prof.
  Lectures on Greek drama
  In academic society
  Leave of absence
  Resigns professorship
  In asylum at
  Income at
Beauty, the idea of
Beer, Nietzsche's dislike of
Beyle, Marie Henri, _see_ Stendhal.
Beyond Good and Evil--
  Publication of
  Quotations from
  Argument of
  English translation of
Beyond-man, _see_ Higher man.
Bible, Nietzsche's knowledge of
Bible, quotations from
Bickley, Francis
Birth of Tragedy, The--
  Its genesis and publication
  Doctrine of
  Quotation from
  Revised
  English translation of
Bizet's music
Blake, William
Blond beast
Bonn, Nietzsche's career at
Bradley, Henry
Brandes, Georg
Buddhism
Burkhardt, Prof.
Butler, Samuel
Callicles
Castes
_Catholic World_
Celibacy
Chamfort
Chandala, _see_ Masses.
Charity
Chatterton-Hill, Georges
Chesterton, G. K.
Chivalry
Chloral, Nietzsche's use of
Christian Science
Christianity--
  Nietzsche's indictment of
  Scientific revolt against
  Its dogmas examined
  Free will vs. determinism
  Its slave-morality
  Charity
  Opposition to natural selection
  Nietzsche's attack on self-sacrifice
  Origin of Christianity
Cohn, Paul V.
College, American
Collins, Adrian
Commercialism
Common, Thomas
Comte, Auguste
Conscience, the nature of
Costume
Cron, Bernard, _see_ Gast.
Crucifixion, the
Culture, German

Dancing
Darwin, Charles
David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer--
  Publication of
  Quotation from
  English translation of
  _See also_ Strauss, David.
Dawn of Day, The--
  Publication of
  Quotations from
  English translation of
Death--
  The right to die
  Regulation of
  Attitude at
Death of Nietzsche
Decalogue
Degeneracy, Nietzsche's alleged
Degeneration, Nordau's book
Democracy
Descartes
Desire
Determinism
Diderot
Diogenes Laërtius, early essay on
Dionysus, _see_ Bacchus.
Dionysus, the Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence, plan of proposed book
Doctor of philosophy
Dolson, Grace Neal
Donndorf, Karl
Drama, Greek
Draper, J. W.
Dreams
Dualism

Ecce Homo--
  Publication of
  Quotations from
  English translation of
Education, perils of State aid
Egoism, Stirner's
Elective Affinities
Ellis, Havelock
Ellis, Mrs. Havelock
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Empedocles
Encyclopedists, French
Engadine, summers in
English translation of Nietzsche
Englishmen
Eternal recurrence--
  Origin of the idea
  Its fascinations for Nietzsche
  Effect on superman
European, the good
Eusebius, Pamphilius
Evil, definition of; _see also_ Bad.
Falckenberg, Richard
Faust
Fiske, John
Fite, Warner
Flaubert, Gustav
Fontenelle
Förster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth, Nietzsche's sister--
  Her biography of her brother
  Editor of his works
  Marriage and widowhood
  Relations with Nietzsche
Fouillée, Alfred
Franco-Prussian war, service in
Free spirit
Free Spirit, The, plan of proposed book
Free will
Freedom
Friedrich Wilhelm IV.

Gast, Peter
Gaultier, Jules de
Genealogy of Morals, The--
  Publication of
  Quotations from
  English translation of
Genoa
Gentleman, the
Gobineau
God, the idea of
Goethe
Golden Rule
Good, definition of
Gould, Dr. George M.
Grave of My Father, The, early poem
Greatness, definition of
Greek art, Nietzsche's theory of
Greek drama, early essays on
Greek Philosophy and Other Essays
Greek Woman, The, essay
Greeks, influence on Nietzsche
Greeley, Horace

Haeckel, Ernst
Halévy, Daniel
Hamblen, Emily S.
Happiness, definitions of
Happiness, unattainable
Haussmann, William A.
Headaches, Nietzsche's
Hegel
Hegesippus
Heine, Heinrich
Hellen, E. von der
Helvétius
Heracleitus
Herder
_Herrenmoral, see_ Master-morality.
Hesiod
Higher man
History, function of
History, On the Good and Bad Effects of upon Human Life--
  Publication of
  Quotations from
  English translation of
Hobbes, Thomas
Hölderlin, Friedrich
Homer and Classical Philology, essay
Hone, J. M.
Human, All-too Human--
  Publication of first volume
  Effect of upon friends and public
  Quotations from
  Second and third volumes
  English translation of
Hume, Bennett
Hume, David
Humility
Huneker, James
Huxley, Thomas H.
Hymn to Life
Hypochondria, Nietzsche's

Ibsen, Henrik
_Ideen_
Immoralist, The, plan of proposed book
Income, Nietzsche's
Inopportune Speculations--
  First volume
  Plan of
  Quotation from
  English translation of
Insanity, Nietzsche's

Jenner
Jews
Joel, Karl
Jones, Henry Arthur
Joyful Science, The--
  Publication of
  Quotation from
  English translation of

Kant, Immanuel
Kennedy, J. M.
Kettle, T. M.
Kipling, Rudyard
Klopstock
Koegel, Fritz
Krafft-Ebing, R. von
Krause, Dr., Nietzsche's great-uncle
Krause, Frau, Nietzsche's great-grandmother

La Bruyère
Lady, the
La Monte, Robert Rives
Lankester, E. Ray
La Rochefoucauld
Law, origin of
Legislation, freak
Leipsic, student days at
Lessing
Levy, Oscar
Liberty, the worth of
Lichtenberger, Henri
Liszt, Franz
_Litterarischen Vereinigung mania, Der_
Locke, John
Lombroso, Cesare
_L'Origine de la famille de Nietzsche_
Love, nature of
Low, Sidney
Ludovici, Anthony M.

Machiavelli
Maggiore, Lake
Mallock, W. H.
Malthus
Mammal, man as a
Man, meaning of the word
Mandeville
Marienbad
Markby, William
Marriage, _see_ Women.
Marx, Karl
Masochism
Masses, the
Masterman, C. F. G.
Master-morality
Maternity
Mencken, H. L.
Mentone
Messiah, The, Handel oratorio
Meysenbug, Fräulein von
Military service
Miscellaneous Opinions and Aphorisms
Mohammedanism
Monarchy
Monism
Montaigne
Moonlight on the Pussta, composition
Moral order of the world
Morality--
  Definitions of
  Expression of expedience
  How it becomes fixed
  Master and slave morality
  Nietzsche's criticism of
More, Paul Elmer
Mügge, M. A.
Music, Nietzsche's compositions
Music, Nietzsche's love of

Natural morality
Natural selection, _see_ Struggle for existence.
Naumann, C. G.
Naumburg, Nietzsche at
New Thought
Nice
Nicholas of Cusa
Nietzsche, Ermentrude, Nietzsche's grandmother
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, his characteristics--
  As a boy
  Pride in his Polish descent
  Love of music
  A brilliant pupil
  His dislike of _biergemüthlichkeit_
  Drug-taking
  As a professor
  Method of writing
  His intolerance
  Personal appearance
  Illnesses
  Insanity
  Literary style
  Women
  Relations to his sister
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, his life--
  Birth
  Boyhood at Naumburg
  First writings
  At Pforta
  Matriculates at Bonn
  Student of Ritschl
  Removes to Leipsic
  Military service
  First philological work
  Discovery of Schopenhauer
  Takes his degree
  Professor at Basel
  First breakdown
  Publishes "The Birth of Tragedy"
  Other early essays
  Meeting with Wagner
  Meeting with Rée
  Human, All-too Human
  Affair with Lou Salomé
  Failing health
  Income
  Breakdown at Turin
  Death
Nietzsche, Josef, Nietzsche's brother
Nietzsche, Karl Ludwig, Nietzsche's father
Nietzsche, Therese Elisabeth Alexandra, Nietzsche's sister,
  _see_ Förster-Nietzsche.
Nietzsche versus Wagner--
  Publication of
  English translation of
Nietzschy
Nirvana
Nobility
Nordau, Max

Orage, A. R.
Osler, William
Overbeck, Franz

Paganism, Nietzsche's
Paget, Violet (Vernon Lee)
Paine, Thomas
Parmenides
Parsons, Elsie Clews
Pasteur, Louis
Pattison, A. Seth Pringle
Peace, universal
Petre, Maude D.
Pfleiderer, Otto
Pforta
Philologists, We, essay
Philosophy
Pindar, Judge, of Naumburg
Pleasure and pain
Plowshare, The
Poetry, Nietzsche's
Polish origin of Nietzsche family
Poor Laws, effect of English
Prayer
Predestination
Priestcraft
Professor at Basel
Progress, Nietzsche's program of
Property rights
Proudhon
Pussta
Pyrrho
Pythagoras


Rée, Paul--
  Nietzsche's meeting with
  Rivals in love
  Influence on Nietzsche
Renaissance, Second
Richard Wagner in Bayreuth--
  Publication of
  English translation of
  _See also_ Wagner.
Ritschl, Albrecht
Ritschl, Frau
Ritschl, Friedrich Wilhelm
Robertson, J. M.
Röcken
Romantic movement in Germany
Roosevelt, Theodore
Rousseau

St. Austin
Sallust
Salomé, Lou--
  Meeting with Nietzsche
  Book on Nietzsche
  Marriage
  Nietzsche's affair with
  Hymn to Life
Samuel, Horace B.
Science, its aims
Scheffauer, Hermann
Schiller
Schooldays at Naumburg
Schopenhauer, Arthur--
  Nietzsche's discovery of
  The will-to-live
  Nietzsche's divergence
  Essay on
  Influence on Nietzsche
Schopenhauer as a Teacher--
  Publication of
  Quotations from
  English translation of
Schumann, Robert
Self-control
Sera, Leo G.
Seydlitz, Baron von
Shaw, G. Bernard
_Silberblick_
Sils Maria
Sin, the Christian idea of
Skepticism
_Sklavmoral, see_ Slave-morality.
Slave-morality
Smith, Adam
Social contract
Socialism
Socrates
Sorrento
Spencer, Herbert
Spinoza
State, origin of
Stendhal
Stirner, Max
Strauss, David Friedrich
  _see also_ David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer.
Strauss, Richard, 55.
Struggle for existence
Style, Nietzsche's German
Suicide
Superman--
  Described
  His purposes
  His characteristics
Sympathy

Taine
Teacher, Nietzsche as a
Teachers, their characteristics
Thoughts Out of Season, _see_ Inopportune Speculations.
Tille, Alexander
Tobacco, Nietzsche's dislike of
Tr----, Fräulein, Nietzsche's proposal to
Tragedy, its origin
Tribschen
Truth--
  Definitions of
  Its origin in error
  The scientific method
Turck, Dr.
Turin, breakdown at
Twilight of the Idols, The--
  Publication of
  Quotations from
  English translation of

Vauvenarges
Venice
Voltaire

Wagner, The Case of--
  Publication of
  Quotation from
  English translation of
Wagner, Cosima
Wagner, Richard--
  Meeting with Nietzsche
  Nietzsche visits at Tribschen
  Richard Wagner in Bayreuth
  Burlesqued in Thus Spake Zarathustra
  The Case of Wagner
  Nietzsche vs. Wagner
  Nietzsche as a Wagnerian
  Wagner and Schopenhauer
  Parsifal
  Bayreuth opening
  Break with Nietzsche
  Nietzsche's last words on
Walker, J. L.
Wallace, Alfred Russell
Wallace, William
Walling, William English
Wanderer and His Shadow, The
War, benefits of
War, Heracleitus on
Weimar
White, Andrew D.
Wieland
Wife
Will-to-live
Will-to-power
Will-to-Power, The--
  Plan of proposed work
  Notes published
  Quotation from
  English translation of
Windelband, Wilhelm
Women--
  Nietzsche's personal attitude
  Their chief duty
  Their slave-morality
  Sources of their weakness
  Their guile
  Man's attitude toward them
  Marriage
  "Don't forget thy whip!"
  Schopenhauer on
  The lady
Wrench, G. T.
Wright, Willard H.

Zarathustra, Thus Spake--
  Publication of
  Plan of
  Quotations from
  Richard Strauss' tone-poem
  English translation of
Zeno
Zimmern, Helen
Zoroaster, _see_ Zarathustra.