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THE BROSS LECTURES . . 1915
THE WILL TO FREEDOM
OR
"THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE AND
THE GOSPEL OF CHRIST
BEING THE BROSS LECTURES DE LIVE RED IN
LAKE FOREST COLLEGE, ILLINOIS
BY
JOHN NEVILLE FIGGIS, D.D., LITT.D.
OF THE COMMUNITY OF THE RESURRECTION
HonoPARY FELLow of s. cATHARINE’s COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
I917
3:69
, F47
Čurt W.
CopyRIGHT, 1917, By
THE TRUSTEES OF LAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY
Published April, 1917

Undergraduate
Library
+y, he Évºl &
- 25-44
TO
JOHN ERIC SIDNEY GREEN
Rºa.
Yºs ºſ-
q-, -3°]
34%)
THE BROSS FOUNDATION
THE BROSS LIBRARY is an outgrowth of
a fund established in 1879 by the late Wil-
liam Bross, lieutenant-governor of Illinois
from 1866 to 1870. Desiring some memo-
rial of his son, Nathaniel Bross, who died
in 1856, Mr. Bross entered into an agree-
ment with the “trustees of Lake Forest
University,” whereby there was finally
transferred to them the sum of forty thou-
sand dollars, the income of which was to
accumulate in perpetuity for successive
periods of ten years, the accumulation of
one decade to be spent in the following
decade, for the purpose of stimulating
the best books or treatises “on the con-
nection, relation, and mutual bearing of
any practical science, the history of our
race, or the facts in any department of
knowledge, with and upon the Christian
Religion.” The object of the donor was
WI1
viii THE BROSS FOUNDATION
to “call out the best efforts of the highest
talent and the ripest scholarship of the
world to illustrate from science, or from
any department of knowledge, and to
demonstrate the divine origin and the
authority of the Christian scriptures; and,
further, to show how both science and
revelation coincide and prove the exis-
tence, the providence, or any or all of the
attributes of the only living and true God,
“infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his
being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice,
goodness, and truth.”
The gift contemplated in the original
agreement of 1879 was finally consum-
mated in 1890. The first decade of the
accumulation of interest having closed in
1900, the trustees of the Bross Fund be-
gan at this time to carry out the provi-
sions of the deed of gift. It was deter-
mined to give the general title of “The
Bross Library” to the series of books pur-
chased and published with the proceeds of
the Bross Fund. In accordance with the
THE BROSS FOUNDATION ix
express wish of the donor, that the “Evi-
dences of Christianity” of his “very dear
friend and teacher, Mark Hopkins, D.D.,”
be purchased and “ever numbered and
known as No. 1 of the series,” the trustees
Secured the copyright of this work, which
has been republished in a presentation
edition as Volume I of the Bross Library.
The trust agreement prescribed two
methods by which the production of books
and treatises of the nature contemplated
by the donor was to be stimulated:
1. The trustees were empowered to offer
One or more prizes during each decade,
the competition for which was to be thrown
open to “the scientific men, the Christian
philosophers, and historians of all nations.”
In accordance with this provision, a prize
of six thousand dollars was offered in 1902
for the best book fulfilling the conditions
of the deed of gift, the competing manu-
scripts to be presented on or before June
1, 1905. The prize was awarded to the
late Reverend James Orr, D.D., professor
X THE BROSS FOUNDATION
of apologetics and systematic theology in
the United Free Church College, Glasgow,
for his treatise on “The Problem of the
Old Testament,” which was published in
1906 as Volume III of the Bross Library.
The second decennial prize of six thou-
sand dollars was offered in 1913, the com-
peting manuscripts to be submitted by
January 1, 1915. The judges were Presi-
dent William Douglas Mackenzie, of Hart-
ford Theological Seminary; Professor
Rufus M. Jones, of Haverford College;
and Professor Benjamin L. Hobson, of
McCormick Theological Seminary. The
prize was awarded by the judges to a
manuscript entitled “The Mythical In-
terpretation of the Gospels,” whose author
proved to be the Reverend Thomas James
Thorburn, D.D., LL.D., St. Helen’s Down,
Hastings, England. This essay has been
issued as Volume VII of the Bross Li-
brary.
The next Bross Prize will be offered
about 1925, and will be announced in due
THE BROSS FOUNDATION xi
time by the trustees of Lake Forest Uni-
versity.
2. The trustees were also empowered to
“select and designate any particular scien-
tific man or Christian philosopher and the
subject on which he shall write,” and to
“agree with him as to the sum he shall
receive for the book or treatise to be writ-
ten.” Under this provision the trustees
have, from time to time, invited eminent
scholars to deliver courses of lectures be-
fore Lake Forest College, such courses to
be subsequently published as volumes in
the Bross Library. The first course of
lectures, on “Obligatory Morality,” was
delivered in May, 1903, by the Reverend
Francis Landey Patton, D.D., LL.D., presi-
dent of Princeton Theological Seminary.
The copyright of the lectures is now the
property of the trustees of the Bross Fund.
The second course of lectures, on “The
Bible: Its Origin and Nature,” was de-
livered in May, 1904, by the late Reverend
Marcus Dods, D.D., professor of exeget-
xii THE BROSS FOUNDATION
ical theology in New College, Edinburgh.
These lectures were published in 1905 as
Volume II of the Bross Library. The
third course of lectures, on “The Bible
of Nature,” was delivered in September
and October, 1907, by J. Arthur Thomson,
M.A., regius professor of natural history
in the University of Aberdeen. These
lectures were published in 1908 as Volume
IV of the Bross Library. The fourth
course of lectures, on “The Religions of
Modern Syria and Palestine,” was de-
livered in November and December, 1908,
by Frederick Jones Bliss, Ph.D., of Beirut,
Syria. These lectures were published in
1912 as Volume V of the Bross Library.
The fifth course of lectures, on “The
Sources of Religious Insight,” was de-
livered in November, 1911, by Professor
Josiah Royce, Ph.D., of Harvard Univer-
sity. These lectures were published in
1912 as Volume VI of the Bross Library.
The sixth course of lectures, on “The Will
to Freedom, or the Gospel of Nietzsche and
THE BROSS FOUNDATION xiii
the Gospel of Christ,” was delivered in
May, 1915, by the Reverend John Neville
Figgis, D.D., Litt.D., of the House of the
Resurrection, Mirfield, England. These
lectures are presented in this volume.
JoBN SCHOLTE NOLLEN,
President of Lake Forest College.
LAKE FoREST, ILLINOIS,
June, 1916.
PREFACE
THESE lectures were delivered at Lake
Forest College in May, 1915. Since then
I have rewritten the text and added many
notes. Even so, this book is not a com-
plete treatment of Nietzsche. So much
has been written about him that that may
not seem needful.
I would beg the reader to bear in mind
this fact: The author’s interest in Nietzsche
is not due to the war, nor does it date
from 1914. To what extent Nietzsche is a
creator as well as a prophet of the mod-
ern German mind I have not discussed.
Speaking in a neutral country, I could not
do that. Nor do I propose to discuss it
now. The reader will find much help
from Mr. Santayana’s brilliant and witty
work on Egotism in German Philosophy.
This I had not read until these lectures
XV
xvi. PREFACE
were in print. I am glad to find that Mr.
Santayana in no way identifies the views of
Nietzsche and Max Stirner. On the grounds
given in the fourth lecture and elsewhere,
I cannot agree with Doctor Rashdall in
Conscience and Christ, who treats the doc-
trine of Nietzsche as an ethic of pure self-
ishness. For the same reason I think the
refutation of what he quotes from Mr.
Moore inadequate. Both statements would
be correct as applied to Max Stirner.
Nietzsche did not teach egotism, but the
sacrifice of immediate desire to an ideal of
nobility. This may not prevent the fact
that many of his self-styled disciples preach
the baser doctrine. That was true also of
Epicurus.
On one other point misconception has
been caused. Nietzsche disliked Germans,
and was opposed to the doctrine of
“Deutschland iiber Alles.” This fact has
been employed in an incorrect argument
by certain followers of Nietzsche in this
country. Their zeal for their master is
PREFACE xvii
greater than their discernment. They write
as though the anti-Prussian sympathies of
Nietzsche's later years are conclusive evi-
dence that modern Germany was not influ-
enced by him. This is to throw dust in
the eyes of the public. Nietzsche disliked
Treitschke, yet each may have contributed
to the same result. Bernhardi heads his
book with a tag “from the master.” Last
year a German pamphlet was published
proving that Hindenburg expressed all that
was vital in the idea of the Superman. I
do not say that the author is right. Yet
he would not have written as he did, were
not Nietzsche a power in his nation. Long
before the war I heard it said that what
was driving the Germans to war was Nietz-
scheanism. The irrelevance of Nietzsche's
personal liking to the topic of his influence
on German ideals is best stated in the
preface to Doctor Stewart’s book on the
subject. The dependence of Nietzsche on
German thought and his place in “the suc-
cession” are developed by Mr. Santayana.
xviii PREFACE
Without subscribing to all that either
writer says, I can refer the inquirer to these
two books, both of them interesting, though
very different.
The text, so far as possible, is untainted.
I owe thanks to the publishers for per-
mission to use the excellent English trans-
lations. Nietzsche's letters and post-
humous works are too little known in
this country. I have, therefore, made
considerable citations from them in the
“notes.” They elucidate the argument of
my lectures better than his full-dress works.
The preparation and delivery of this
course was a joy to me. To the authori-
ties of Lake Forest College and to many
friends there I here render my thanks for
their great kindness, and for the high
honour they have done me.
To the Reverend Hubert Northcot
thanks are also due. He has been throug
all the proofs, and saved me from many
€I’TOI’S.
MIRFIELD, November 27, 1916.
II.
III.
IV.
VI.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN
THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE .
NIETzscBE AND CHRISTIANITY
CONTENTS
NIETZSCHE's ORIGINALITY
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE .
THE DANGER AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
NIETZSCHE
INDEx
IPAGE
58
102
159
213
266
317
I
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN
IT is related of Archbishop Benson that
when he first made acquaintance with Lon-
don society he asked in his bewilderment:
“What do these people believe?” If he
were alive to-day he would suffer a like
astonishment, but his question would rather
take the form: “What don’t these people
believe?” So strange is the welter of
creeds and sects, of religions and irrelig-
ions, moralists and immoralists, mystics,
rationalists, and realists, and even Chris-
tians, that it is hard to guess what nos-
trum may be dominant with your next-
door neighbour. It may be a dietetic
evangel, it may be an atheistic apocalypse.
One phenomenon, not the least notable of
our day, is the rejection by large numbers of
all the values, which even in the broadest
1
2 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
sense could be called Christian. It is not
of Christianity as a creed, but Christianity
as a way that I speak. Christianity in-
volves many other elements, but it is, as we
observe it, a way of life. It selects and sets
its value on certain kinds of character. It
is the most developed, though by no means
the only form of the philosophy of Love.
We now know that it gathered up into itself
many tendencies at work in systems pre-
viously existing. The words Homo sum,
humani nihil a me alienum puto were written
by a Pagan playwright a century and a half
before the foundation of Christianity. Yet
they found their full significance therein,
and were, like many presuppositions of the
great Roman jurists, ultimately destructive
of the slave-basis of the ancient world.
Many of these Christian values, at least the
stress laid on common fellowship and un-
selfishness, are preserved, with what degree
of legitimacy we need not inquire, by many
who reject the Christian faith. The Re-
ligion of Humanity as set forth by Auguste
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 3
Comte is agnostic in its attitude to the
other world, but its conception of duty as
between man and man is not very different
from the Christian. Adam Smith wrote a
book, less famous than the Wealth of Na-
tions, designed to show the origin of all
morality in sympathy. Modern altruism in
its varied forms may be traced not obscurely
to Christian influence, although even ethi-
cally it is not identical therewith.
A short while back it was assumed that,
apart from all questions of the supernatural,
the Christian ideal was the highest known
to man. John Stuart Mill declared in his
Essays on Religion that we have no better
criterion of conduct than that of living so
that Christ should approve our lives. So
long as that represented anything like a
general sentiment it was possible to main-
tain that the wide-spread attack on Chris-
tian dogma need have no effect on morals.
If such a charge was made by Christians it
was hotly resented. Men like Huxley or
Matthew Arnold would have scorned as
4. THE WILL TO FREEDOM
narrow-minded any one who had said that
by knocking the bottom out of faith in the
supernatural they were undermining mo-
rality. When Tennyson did say it, in “The
Promise of May,” the late Lord Queens-
berry protested at the first night and made
a scene at the Globe Theatre.
Nous avons changé tout cela. On all hands
we hear preached a revival of Paganism.
Christianity as an ethical ideal is con-
temned. Formerly Christians were charged
with hypocrisy because they fell short of
the ideal. The charge was false, although
the fact was true. We do fail, fail miser-
ably, to come up to our ideal, and always
shall, so long as it remains an ideal. Now-
adays the Christian is attacked not because
he fails, but in so far as he succeeds. Our
Lord himself is scorned, not because he is
not the revealer of Love, but because he is.
Hardly a single specifically Christian value
is left as it was. These attacks come from
many angles. In these lectures on the foun-
dation of Governor Bross I am to invite
\ FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 5
|
your attention to one such assailant. Re-
cently the name of Friedrich Nietzsche has
become widely known. For some years a
cult of him, almost like a religion, has been
proceeding. It is nearly twenty years ago
since his danger and his charm became clear
to me. For long, indeed, he was ignored
by official representatives either of apology
or philosophy. Now, however, his name is
so commonly familiar, that your complaint
is like to be of the other order. So I must
crave your pardon if the topic seems trite.
At least it is germane to the scheme of the
Governor Bross Lectures, as propounded.
This poet-prophet, so strange and beauti-
ful, has laid a spell on many in our time.
It may not be aimless toil to try to give
some notion of what he wanted; and in the
light of that blazing criticism to see how it
stands with Christianity, as a house of life
for men. The task is not easy. Nietzsche
made a virtue of inconsistency, and never
continued in one stay. Any presentment of
6 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
him may be pronounced unfair by an ad-
mirer. Moreover, the critic may even find
chapter and verse for his complaint; since
Nietzsche expressed most opinions during
the course of his life. Even of his later
Zarathustra period it is not easy to make
a harmony. Probably no two people to the
end of time will be in precise agreement as
to the significance of the Übermensch.'
For Christians yet another difficulty
arises. One is tempted to give up all effort
to understand a writer, of whom a passage
like the following is typical:
“The Christian Church is to me the
greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it
has had the will to the ultimate corrup-
tion that is possible. The Christian
Church has left nothing untouched with
its depravity, it has made a worthlessness
out of every value, a lie out of every
truth, a baseness of soul out of every
straightforwardness.”
1 One writer, Bélart, traces eight varieties in Nietzsche's own
work.
*Antichrist, § 62.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 7
Nietzsche put Voltaire's name at the head
of one book—Human, All Too Human—
and concludes his Ecce Homo with the
words Ecrase2 l’infäme. Yet we cannot
withstand Nietzsche unless we take the
trouble to understand him. Besides he is
worth it. True, madness overcame him
before he was forty-five. On this account
some would dismiss him without more ado
and say that his books are all ravings.
But this would not be wise. Even if we
do not like him, we cannot deny him an
influence—in some ways an increasing in-
fluence. I think, indeed, that they are
wrong who deny all traces of insanity in his
writings. Doubtless, too, had Nietzsche
fought on the Christian side, this insanity
would be deemed good ground for neglect-
ing his apologetic—even by those same
superior persons who are all for treating it
as irrelevant now. Still, there must be
something of importance in a writer who is
having so profound an influence on the cul-
tivated world. We must take account of
him, whether we like it or not. Nietzsche
8 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
knew this. He said in one of his letters
that the world might attack or despise, but
could not ignore him.
Besides, he had a way with him. Bitter
though he be, violent, one-sided, blasphe-
mous, perverse, vain, he never commits the
unpardonable sin—he is never dull. The
thousand and one facets in which flashes
the jewel of his mind throw light and colour
on many dark paths. The passion of his
flaming soul, his sincerity, his sense of
beauty, his eloquence, the courage of his
struggles with ill health, the pathos of that
lonely soul craving for sympathy, his deep
psychological insight and sense of pro-
phetic mission—all these give him a spell
which is hard to resist. His teaching in
some respects, not all, we may deplore.
His picture of our holy religion is a carica-
ture with hardly an element of likeness.
His system, so far as he has a system, may
seem childish. Yet Nietzsche remains. We
shall always return to him; and the Alpine
clearness of the atmosphere he breathes
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 9
braces, like his own Engadin. His opinions
may be what you will, but Friedrich Nietz-
sche, the man, we love and shall go on lov-
ing, even when he hits us hardest. He said
himself that in controversy we should be
severe towards opinions, but tender towards
the individual. That may well form our
maxim in dealing with Friedrich Nietzsche.
Friedrich Nietzsche, indeed, we must get
at. No thinker was ever more personal
than Nietzsche—not even Saint Paul.”
He said somewhere that he felt every ex-
perience more deeply than other men; and
that all the theories set forth in Zarathustra
were expressive of something in his life.
Moreover, “Nietzsche is “la sincérité
même,’” says a hostile French critic (M.
Pallarès, p. 345). These words are the more
noteworthy that M. Pallarès leans unduly
* “Auch Tolstoi, auch Björnson, auch Ibsen, Strindberg, Zola
gingen nicht so völlig auf in ihrem Werk, waren nicht so ganz wie
er, Entwicklung, Kampf, Flamme geworden.” (Meyer, Nietzsche,
sein Leben und seine Werke, 688.)
In regard to reading his book, Morgenröthe, he writes to his
sister: “Such alles heraus, was Dir verråth, was im Grunde
Dein Bruder am meisten braucht, am meisten nôthig hat, was
er will, und was er nicht will. Lies dazu namentlich das fünfte
Buch, wo vieles zwischen den Zeilen steht. Wohin alles bei mir
10 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
to the severe in dealing with Nietzsche.
Let us then to-day concern ourselves with
some attempt to picture Nietzsche the man.
Friedrich Nietzsche was born at Röcken
in 1844. He lost his reason early in 1889
and died in 1900. Thus, he was but a
child at the great age of the revolutions.
As a young man at college he saw the
dawn of Prussian predominance in 1866.
During the war that made the new German
Empire he was a youthful professor at
Basle and no longer a German subject.
The present Kaiser had begun his reign
just before the catastrophe which engulfed
Nietzsche. He had Polish blood in him."
This was a source of pride. He deemed
himself the descendant of the Polish Counts
noch strebt, ist nicht mit einem Worte zu sagen—und hātte ich
das Wort; ich wiirde es nicht sagen. ” (July, 1881. Briefe, V, 2,
458.)
Cf., also: “Mitunter ist mir, ich hätte genug erlebt für sechzig
Jahre.” (July, 1874. Briefe, V, 298.)
And again: “Jedes Wort meines Zarathustra ist ja siegreicher
Hohn und mehr als Hohn iiber die Ideale dieser Zeit; und fast
hinter jedem Wort steht ein persènliches Erlebniss, eine Selbst-
iiberwindung ersten Ranges. (Briefe, V, 540.)
* This affiliation has been doubted, but it seems now to be
established.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 11
Nietzki. Two strains of purely German
blood, that of his mother and one grand-
mother, prevented him being as much of a
Pole as he would have liked. Yet he was
often pleased when on his frequent travels
people took him for a Pole and no German.
He described himself as coming of a long
line of Lutheran pastors. That gave him
his exhaustless interest in Christianity.
He hated it too much ever to leave it alone.
We find him apologising to his friend,
Peter Gast, for the result of his Christian
ancestry."
Nietzsche's father was a distinguished
Lutheran pastor, who died when the chil-
dren were very young. Friedrich lamented
this all his life. Frau Pastorin Nietzsche
took the boy and girl, Friedrich and Eliza-
1 This was in 1881. The letter is worth citing: “Mir fielein,
lieber Freund, dass Ihnen an meinem Buche die beständige inner-
liche Auseinandersetzung mit dem Christenthume fremd, ja pein-
lich sein muss; es ist aber doch das beste Stück idealen Lebens,
welches ich wirklich kennen gelernt habe; von Kindesbeinen an
bin ich ihm machgegangen; in viele Winkel, und ich glaube, ich
bin nie in meinem Herzen gegen dasselbe gemein gewesen. Zu-
letzt bin ich der Nachkommer ganzer Geschlechter von Christ-
lichen Geistlichen—vergeben Sie mir diese Beschränktheit.”
(Briefe, IV, 69.)
12 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
beth, to Naumburg. Nietzsche was only
five years old at this time. He was brought
up by his pious and Puritan mother amid
a circle of relatives. The training of his
mother was Spartan and the mitigations
were the work of their grandmother, Frau
Oehler. The circle was pious, eminently
respectable, and of local importance.
Nietzsche had a reverence for his mother
which he never lost. When his stroke came
in 1889 the old lady hurried to Turin, and
insisted that she would tend him. There
was, however, little intimacy of thought,
and in this Friedrich missed his father's
friendship." Brother and sister were all in
all to each other. Pleasant is the picture
of their child life given in the earlier pages
of her book by Frau Förster-Nietzsche.
That biography is one of our chief means
of understanding Nietzsche. Yet it must
be read with caution. It is a very clever
piece of apologetic writing. It needs to be
* Frau Nietzsche was a violent adversary of the Wagner con-
nection.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 13
checked by Nietzsche's own letters and
other writings like that of Doctor Paul
Deussen, his schoolfellow." Naumburg was
a small provincial town, and the circle in
which the Nietzsche family moved was
eminently pious. What all this meant in
the fifties and sixties we can imagine. The
boy disliked all vulgarity. At the local
gymnasium he made few friends. But he
was passionate in his attachments. He
was an ardent scholar, and by this means
won a place at the great institution of
Pforta. Pforta was a place of renown or—
ganised apparently somewhat like an Eng-
lish public school, with the elder boys in
authority over the younger. It prided it-
self on moulding life as a whole, and not
being a mere teaching place. Many of the
most distinguished men in Germany had
been educated there. Nietzsche’s letters
and the recollections of Doctor Deussen
give the impression of a strenuous and in-
* Deussen, Erinnerungen an Nietzsche, and also Frau Lou-
Andreas-Salomé, Nietzsche in seinen Werken.
I4 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
teresting life—with the friendships and
quarrels of boyhood. Nietzsche had always
a certain distinction of manner. Yet here
and throughout his early life he was in-
tensely human. It is an error to think of
him as a recluse misanthrope. He was
praised for all things, except mathematics.
Towards the close of his time he got into
one serious scrape, drunkenness, and his
letters to his mother on the subject are
touching and natural. Like other youths
of literary tastes, he started a small essay
club—the membership began with three—
not all at the same school. The rules were
elaborate and heroic. All were to send in
essays or some other composition—music
was included. One member elected each
year was to act as critic. The ideal, as in
most such cases, was too high for mortal
schoolboys. It soon broke down. One
story tells his courage. Round the fire the
boys were talking of the story of Scaevola.
One of them said he could not under-
stand how any one could do such a thing,
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 15
knowing what he was about. Immediately
Nietzsche put his hand in the fire, and
kept it there until he was pulled off by the
monitor. Pforta left its mark on him.
He had much esprit de corps. We can
hardly be wrong in tracing to a memory
of this school that passage about the need
of a severe school at the close of The Will
to Power. Even in his last illness he fre-
quently spoke of the school."
From Pforta he proceeded to the Uni-
versity of Bonn. There he was not very
happy. True, he found one professor whom
ever after he honoured, Ritschl; and made
at least one intimate friend. He joined the
students’ union, the Franconia, and fought
the inevitable duel. But he did not enjoy
undergraduate camaraderie and complained
that many of his fellow-students were
common. Partly because he had spent too
much, he transferred himself to Leipzig,
* There seems to be no ground for supposing that Nietzsche was
unhappy at Pforta or that he did not get on. Deussen's memoirs
belie this view. There is a lifelike account of the “restoration
of the status quo.” after a quarrel.
16 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
whither had gone his revered Professor
Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl. This great
classical philologist was one chief intellec-
tual influence. But the star of Schopen-
hauer had now risen for Nietzsche. We
hear much of his enthusiasm for the master,
and of the value of redemptive pessimism.”
In Leipzig a greater intimacy began. A
sister of Wagner was living there. Nietz-
sche, a passionate lover of music and
already of Wagner, was invited to meet
the great man, who was at Leipzig incognito
for a brief visit. Wagner took to Nietzsche
at once. Thus began that friendship which
was the most important personal influence
in his life.
After Leipzig, Nietzsche went for a year's
service in the cavalry. Much as he loved
reading, Nietzsche was never a mere book-
worm. The early Nietzsche and his friend
* “Wer mir Schopenhauer durch Gründe widerlegen will, dem
raune ich in s Ohr: ‘Aber, lieber Mann, Weltanschauungen werden
weder durch Logik geschaffen noch vernichtet. Ich fühle mich
heimisch in diesem Dunstkreis, Du in jenem. Lass mir doch
meine eigne Nase, wie ich Dir die Deinige nicht nehmen werde.’”
Nietzsche to Deussen. (Deussen, Erinnerungen, 40.)
His anti-intellectualist standpoint makes itself clear thus early.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 17
Erwin Rohde had seemed to the others like
young Greek gods when they came in
flushed from a ride. Nietzsche entered
with zest into his military life, and gives
in his letters vivid pictures of it. Soon he
became noted as the best rider in the regi-
ment. Here he had a serious accident.
The muscles of his heart were injured. Af-
ter a time of severe illness he was discharged.
His year of service came to an abrupt end-
ing." His health never entirely recovered.
This event may be taken as the beginning
of that long agony which ended with his
madness. Eyesight, ill-cared for at School,
would appear to have had much to do with
his continual headaches and his subsequent
insanity. So much is clear from what his
sister says, but it is probably not correct
to follow Doctor Gould in his book, Bio-
graphic Clinics. The whole trouble is there
* “Sie glauben, lieber Freund, es nicht was für ein Uberschuss
von Leiden mir das Leben abgeworfen hat in allen Zeiten von
früher Kindheit an. Aber ich bin ein Soldat; und dieser Soldat
ist zu guter Letzt noch der Water Zarathustras geworden l’’
The impressions of that year were lasting, as this passage shews.
(Nietzsche to Peter Gast, IV, 150.)
18 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
put down to the eyes. Every other cause is
either denied or minimised.
In the year 1866 we find Nietzsche
warmly patriotic and German in his sym-
pathies, high in the praise of Bismarck and
the government. This time at least he
was pro-Prussian."
Not long after, when Nietzsche was back
at Leipzig studying for his doctorate, his
old preceptor, who had early discerned
his merit, secured him a post at Basle as
Professor Extraordinary of Philology.
Nietzsche was only twenty-five, and al-
though he said he would have preferred
to wait, signs of this are not obvious in
the hilarious, mystifying letters he wrote
to his sister, just before the announcement.
*See his letter to Freiherr von Gersdorff (Briefe, I, 17). “Aber
stolz missen wir sein eine solche Armee zu haben, ja sogar–hor-
ribile dictu–eine solehe Regierung zu besitzen, die das nationale
Programm nicht bloss auf dem Papier hat, Sondern mit der gröss-
ten Energie, mit ungeheurem Aufwand an Geld und Blut, sogar
gegeniiber dem französischen grossen Versucher Louis le diable
aufrecht erhält. . . .
“Ein Krieg gegen Frankreich muss ja eine Gesinnungseinheit in
Deutschland hervorrufen; und wenn die Bevölkerungen eins sind
dann mag sich Herr von Beust sammt allen mittelstaatlichen Für-
sten einbalsamiren lassen. Dennihre Zeit ist vorbei.”
FRIEDRICH NEETZSCHE: THE MAN 19
Nietzsche was well aware of what he owed
to Ritschl, and the correspondence between
the two is a model for an intimacy between
the pupil and the tutor, when the former
grows up and breaks away, as he must.
It is an error to think of Nietzsche as a
disagreeable rebel without reverence. His
life was spent in enthusiasms, which he
afterwards outgrew. No man ever lived
who felt more the need of worship. That
is part of the tragedy of his career. Hav-
ing given up God, he spent the rest of his
existence in making idols and then break-
ing them—Schopenhauer, Wagner, and the
rest—till he settled down at last to the
Übermensch and the Eternal return. Al-
ways naïf-he was the antithesis of Henri'
Beyle (Stendhal), his great admiration—he
was earnest and almost boyish in his en-
thusiasms. Later he found the feet of clay
in his idol, and turned in fury to smash it,
crying out against himself and his former
god, and the universe, because he had al-
lowed himself to be deceived. But he was
20 . THE WILL TO FREEDOM
not irreverent by nature. That is a super-
ficial interpretation, due to Nietzsche's
command of picturesque blasphemy.
The Basle appointment forced him to
give up his nationality and become Swiss.
Hence when the Franco-Prussian War came
in 1870 Nietzsche could offer no more
than the care of the wounded.” Full of
sympathy, he did all that he could, until
he fell ill. This period is noteworthy, for
Nietzsche received then the first impres-
sions of the principle which governs his
later teaching, the Will to Power. Busied
with the sick, driven nearly wild with sym-
pathy, he caught sight of a troop of Prus-
* The following passage shews how far removed Nietzsche was
at this time from his later dislike of all things German:
“Nun winken neue Pflichten; und wenn Eins uns auch im
Frieden bleiben mag aus jenem wilden Kriegsspiel, so ist es der
heldenmüthige und zugleich besonnene Geist den ich zu meiner
Überraschung gleichsam als eine schöne unerwartete Entdeckung,
in unserm Heere frisch und kräftig, in alter germanischer Gesund-
heit gefunden habe. Darauf lässt sich bauen; wir dürfen wieder
hoffen; unsre deutsche Mission ist noch nicht vorbei. Ich bin
muthiger als je: denn noch ist nicht Alles unter französisch-
jüdischer Verflachung und “Eleganz, und unter dem gierigen
Treiben der “Jetzzeit' zu Grunde gegangen. Es giebt noch Tap-
ferkeit, und zwar deutsche Tapferkeit, die etwas innerlich an-
deres ist als der “Elan" unserer Nachbarn.” (Letters, I, 110.)
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 21
sian horse coming thundering down a hill
into the village. Their splendour of aspect,
strong, courageous, and efficient, at once
impressed him. He saw that suffering and
sympathy with it were not, as he had
thought a la Schopenhauer, the profound-
est things in life. It was this power greater
than pain which made pain irrelevant—
that was the reality. Life began to pre-
sent itself as a struggle for power. This is
his first move away from Schopenhauer and
pessimism.
Nietzsche recovered, though not fully.
He went back to Basle and tried to go
through his duties before he was well.
From this extra strain he never really re-
covered. Yet he had much to help him.
Basle had welcomed him with open arms.
Quickly was he made an ordinary professor,
with a heightened salary. As a teacher he
had and must have had enthusiastic pupils
—they never had a better teacher, it was
said. Friends were not lacking. True,
Nietzsche was greatly bored by general
22 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
society, and found himself, as an eligible
bachelor, more pushed against than push-
ing. Gradually he withdrew, and fre-
quented only his chosen circle—Fischer and
Overbeck, the historical theologian, who was
later on to hurry to Basle on surmise of
his illness; and Burckhardt, the great his-
torian of the Renaissance. No man could
complain who lived with such men and
was loved by them. Wagner was a yet
more potent star. Nietzsche occupied
much of his spare time with visits to Trieb-
schen, where Wagner and Frau Cosima
lived. The latter is probably the only
woman who greatly influenced Nietzsche.
Even in later years he acknowledged his
debt to her. To them is owing his début
as a writer. Nietzsche came before the
world with the Birth of Tragedy. The book
is really a Wagnerite tract: it starts with
that distinction of which he afterwards
made so much, the distinction between
Apollinian and Dionysian art, the formerse-
rene, contemplative, intellectual; the latter
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 23
ecstatic, emotional, compelling. The dis-
tinction is not unlike that between classi-
cal and romantic art, if we use the terms
for two modes of art, not for definitely his-
torical movements. The conclusion of the
book points to Wagner, though it does not
name him, as the man who is to recover the
true tragic altitude. This was to Nietzsche
the valuable thing in Hellenism, not the
philosophic or Socratic development which
already he treats as decadence. The real
Nietzsche begins to shew himself in other
efforts. David Strauss, the author of the
famous Leben Jesu, had just then “taken
the town” with his book on The Old Faith
and the New. In this work Strauss gives
up every vestige of supernatural faith, ac-
cepts evolution in a materialist form, and
tries to shew that somehow or other all
things are for the best in the best of all
possible worlds, if the ideals of the present
cultivated classes remain intact, and the
movement to secure the rights of labour be
checked. Strauss's attitude in some re-
24 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
spects is not unlike that of Nietzsche, who
never could endure any attempt at improv-
ing the status of the labourer. Nietzsche
was in this case (as also in that of Hart-
mann, who comes in for a share of the
trouncing) at least as greatly irritated by
the signs of likeness as he was by those of
difference. In the first of the Essays Out
of Season he fell with fury on this book,
written, he says, solely for that contempt—
ible product of the modern world, the cul-
ture-Philistine, of which Strauss and von
Hartmann were the two capital examples.
Nietzsche's strictures are largely justified by
the smug and banal optimism with which
the book closes. Probably what excited
Nietzsche's ire most would be a passage
such as the following:
“Ever remember that thou art human,
not merely a natural production; ever
remember that all others are human also,
and with all individual differences the
same as thou, having the same needs and
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 25
claims as thyself; this is the sum and
substance of morality.
“Ever remember that thou and every-
thing thou beholdest within and around
thee, all that befalls thee and others is
no disjointed fragment, no wild chaos of
atoms or casualties, but that it all springs
according to eternal laws, from the one
primal source of all life, all reason, and
all good; this is the essence of religion.”
Doctor Richard Meyer is hardly wrong in
speaking of the danger of a cheap ideal of
culture—comfort raised to a dogma.” This
danger was not and is not confined to Ger-
many. The importance of this book and
The Birth of Tragedy is high. Nietzsche had
now declared war on the academic scholar-
ship of the day; he had asserted the superi-
ority of art and philosophy to science, the
essentially secondary position of science,
1 The Old Faith and the New, David Frederic Strauss, II, 55.
* “Diese Bibel der liberalen Bourgeoisie drohte das billige Ideal
eines gesättigten Bildungsoptimismus zum Dogma zu erheben.”
(Meyer, Nietzsche, 260.)
26 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
needful or we could not bake our bread or
heat our houses—but a slave in the house
of life, as compared with its Divine Mis-
tresses, art and philosophy and religion, so
far as that is possible. Thus he had already
begun his anti-intellectualist propaganda.
Secondly, Nietzsche had shewn the hollow-
ness of the Prussian triumph in 1870–1.
Already he has flung his cap for French cul-
ture, as opposed to German. Even during
the war he had expressed himself as fearful
of its results to Culture. Culture in the
highest sense is the one thing Nietzsche
cared for and strove all his life to forward."
Now more than ever he begins to feel that
Prussia is the supreme danger to Culture.
He mocks at the Germans for their enslave-
ment to French culture, and for their in-
ability to produce anything of their own.
His great hope in Wagner, afterwards
dashed, was just this—that he would be the
* See his letter home in December, 1870:
“Für den jetzigen deutschen Eroberungskrieg nehmen meine
Sympathien allmählich ab. Die Zukunft unsrer deutschen Cul-
tur scheint mir mehr als je gefährdet.” (Briefe, V, 196.)
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 27
herald of a new German and European
culture-epoch.
This essay created a sensation. It is
significant of Nietzsche's tenderness of
heart that a year later, when Strauss died,
he expressed a fear lest he had caused him
any pain." Thirdly, the attitude indicated
by the title Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen
(Essays Out of Season) is significant. Nietz-
sche now took up that pose which he
never relinquished, of being the prophet,
denouncing the evils of his day, antago-
nistic to all its dominating currents. This
was true only in part. Much of Nietzsche
is, as has been pointed out, merely a trans-
lation into his own idiom of the ideals of
Bismarckian success. A great deal else is
merely the last movement of the Romantic
symphony, for greatly as Nietzsche despised
* Apparently the Basle folk thought Nietzsche had done Strauss
some damage. “Gestern hat man in Ludwigsburg David Strauss
begraben. Ich hoffe sehr dass ich ihm die letzte Lebenszeit nicht
erschwert habe, und dass er ohne etwas von mir zu wissenge-
storben ist. Es greift mich etwas an.” Nietzsche to Freiherr
von Gersdorff, Briefe, I, 175. (Cf. Spitteler, Meine Beziehungen
zu Nietzsche, 14.)
28 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
the Romantics of the nineteenth century,
he was himself of that company.
High-water mark of early achievement is
reached in his next essay—on the use and
abuse of history. Rarely has he written
better. Every student of history ought to
be made to read it, lest he suffer from a
“proud stomach.” The same is true of all
whose notion of culture is largely mingled
with “the passion of the past.” Nietzsche
himself did not heed his own warnings suffi-
ciently, or he would have been a less ardent
neo-Pagan. Anyhow, his words are wise.
He points out the danger of a culture mainly
historical. It produces a race of epigoni,
“pensioners on the past,” always looking
back. As he says elsewhere, the historian
begins by looking backward, he ends by
thinking backward. Nietzsche in this es-
say is prophetic. More and more must
culture look to the future, if it is to have
any appeal. Less and less can it be made
up of mere historical sentiment. This is
true of every branch of culture, including
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 29
religion. True, the wise man will not dis-
card history, nor suppose with the vulgar
that anything beautiful and noble in life
can be reproduced afresh for every age.
We get to be more not less able to enjoy
the atmosphere of a great epoch, whether
IElizabethan England or the France of Louis
Quatorze. But we must beware—and espe-
cially so if we are sensible of their attrac-
tions—of becoming enslaved to the past, or
choked in inherited tradition, so that we
cannot move forward. Mere memory, even
when lit by imagination and taste, is no
safe guide for life—or rather it is too safe,
and leads only down ancient lanes, when we
ought to be seeking new stars. Christians,
and more especially ourselves, need to take
these warnings deeply to heart. Some of
the worst failures are due to this excess of
sentiment for one particular age.
Nietzsche projected a dozen essays in this
series. Two more were all that he wrote.
One is entitled “Schopenhauer as Educa-
although it is mainly occupied with
5
tor,”
30 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
Nietzsche. The other is on Richard Wag-
ner at Bayreuth. He had already outgrown
the theories of these two men of genius.
These essays were his last tribute to them
and were personal.
Wagner had become stronger in his reac-
tions upon Nietzsche. The latter described
vividly the scene at Triebschen before the
final departure for Bayreuth. Nietzsche
felt this removal deeply; he had been a sort
of “tame cat” about the house, always gave
presents to the children, went when he
would for Christmas, and was treated al-
most as a son of the house both by Wagner
and his cultivated consort, the daughter of
Liszt. This sort of intercourse perforce
came to an end when the Wagners went to
live so far off. Really this change coincides
with a change on Nietzsche's part. He
looked to Wagner to lead all good Euro-
peans into the promised land of a new cul-
ture. This hope grew faint. Bayreuth,
the more Nietzsche saw of it, pleased him
the less. Wagner became fashionable and
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 31
things grew worse. What he wanted,
Nietzsche said, was mere idolaters—he was
a critic. Nietzsche wrote a pamphlet to fur-
ther the cause of the music of the future,
but the Wagner committee would not print
it. Rumour said, also, that Wagner had
said hard things of a musical piece of
Nietzsche's, and that was a cause of sever-
ance." Wagner was surrounded more and
more by a sort of court, and even had both
willed it, the old easy intimacy was not pos-
sible. Triebschen was a private home in the
country; Bayreuth was the metropolis of
the kingdom of culture. Bayreuth at the
beginning had seen a small band of disci-
* Nietzsche, though a passionate musician, does not seem to
have been at the pains to learn the rules. In prose he worked at
style and knew its difficulty; not so in music. He sent one piece
to Hans von Bülow. The reply is worth quoting, for it shews
even so early an insight into those elements which brought the
great mind to ruin later on:
“Abgesehen vom psychologischen Interesse—demn in Threm
musikalischen Fieberprodukte ist ein ungewöhnlicher, bei aller
Verirrung distinguirter Geist zu spiiren—hat Ihre Meditation
vom musikalischen Standpunkte aus nur den Werth eines Ver-
brechens in der moralischen Welt. Wom apollinischen Elemente
habe ich keine Spur entaecken können, und das dionysische anian-
gend, habe ich, offen gestanden, mehr an den lendemain eines
Bacchanals als an dieses selbst denken müssen.” Hans von Bülow
to Nietzsche, 1872. (Briefe, III, 2, 350.)
32 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
ples. When it became a swell mob, and
buzzed with the compliments of Kings and
even the Emperor, officials, generals, the
aristocrats and the plutocrats, all of them
nearly as distasteful to Nietzsche as the
democrat, it was more than an artist-
prophet could stand. All of a sudden he
bolted. This was the end. Nietzsche al-
ways recognised the importance of Wagner.
His mastery in his own line he never denied
—only that line had ceased to approve it-
self to Nietzsche. Even at the end of his
working life, when he heard Parsifal,
Nietzsche wrote to Peter Gast, saying he
thought Wagner had never done anything
better. Probably his statement is true, that
the gradual adoption of at least sentimental
reverence for Christianity was what repelled
Nietzsche. Doctor Paneth relates that
Nietzsche told him he realised their entire
estrangement one day, when Wagner told
him of his increasing admiration for the
Eucharist. Nietzsche said that his early
* “Dann erzählte er mir von Richard Wagner, dem er ungemein
nahe stand, und von dem er sich dann trennte, als jener fromm.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 33
discipleship was due to this belief, that Wag-
ner was a great anti-Christian force; and
that “we Germans” are no use without a
good stock of infidel scorn.” But Nietzsche
himself had changed. In the early days of
their intimacy he was an enthusiastic fol-
lower of Schopenhauer, and he regarded
Wagner as the musical exponent of redemp-
tive pessimism. Nietzsche broke more and
more away from this and finally rejected it.
It is not quite easy to determine how far
the Wagner quarrel was a cause, and how
far a consequence, of this change. Prob-
ably it was both. Nietzsche told his sister
it had taken him six years of agony to over-
wurde, und einmal von den Entzückungen sprach in die ihn der
Genuss des Abendmahls versetzte.” (Doctor Paneth in Leben,
II, 482, Dec., 1883.)
* Also Nietzsche wrote to his sister:
“Im Gegenteil sie wird immer fanatischer, verworrener Christ-
lieberer und verdüsterter–wie das gesammte Europa. Die Wag-
nerei ist nur ein Einzelfall. Wie hat sich, alles gegen die Jahre
1869–72 verändert. Damals war ich Wagnerianer wegen des
guten Stücks Antichrist das Wagner mit seiner Kunst und Art
vertrat. Ich bin der Enttäuschteste aller Wagnerianer, denn in
dem Augenblick wo es anständiger als je war Heide zu sein,
wurde Wagner Christ. Wir Deutschen (gesetzt dass wir es je
mit ernsten Dingen ernst genommen haben) sind allesammt Spöt-
ter und Atheisten. Wagner war es auch.” (Briefe, V, 777.)
34 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
come the falsity induced by the spell of
Wagner. He also said that Frau Wagner
was the most cultivated woman he had ever
met. From about 1878 the friendship be-
came an enmity. Wagner and his friends
wrote attacks on Nietzsche. Nietzsche
treated Wagner as the last and worst of
the Romanticists—a drop back into Chris-
tianity—a corrupter and seducer—declar-
ing him essentially an actor. Wagner is the
Wizard in Zarathustra. Finally, he wrote
the two pamphlets, The Case of Wagner and
Nietzsche versus Wagner. One of these be-
gins by exalting Bizet's Carmen as the true
ideal for music. Considering the former re-
lations, the tone and taste of these produc-
tions are hardly to be excused, even by the
approach of insanity." Both were men of
genius, both were irritable, both wanted dis-
ciples—and a breach some time was inevi-
table. Nietzsche said Wagner was not of
the same rank as he. The truth is they
* “La seule chose impardonable sont les pamphlets de la fin.”
(Pallarès, Le Crépuscule d'une idole, W.)
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHIE: THE MAN 35
were too big for each other.” Meanwhile
the health of Nietzsche had become a seri-
ous question. At Basle he was a stimulat-
ing teacher and did good work. But the
place did not suit him. Digestive troubles
of great severity attacked him and he was
prostrated by frequent headaches. All this
time the sense of his mission was growing
upon him. The difficulties with Wagner
and the general perplexity about his eth-
ical and philosophical standpoint reacted
on his health.” His eyes could not stand
the strain of incessant reading. Palliatives
proved vain. He tried cures. His sister
took up her abode and kept house for him.
He took a long leave of absence and spent a
* “Ich bin damals, als ich Wagner fand, unbeschreiblich glück-
lich gewesen. Ich hatte so lange nach dem Menschen gesucht
der höher war als ich und der mich wirklich übersah. In Wagner
glaubte ich ihn gefunden zu haben. Es war ein Irrthum. Jetzt
darf ich mich nicht einmal mit ihm vergleichen–ich gehöre einem
andern Rang an. Im Übrigen habe ich meine Wagner-Schwär-
merei theurer bezahlen müssen. . . . Habe ich nicht fast sechs
Jahre gebraucht um mich von diesem Schmerz zu erholen?”
(V, 479, 1882.)
?“ So lange ich wirklich Gelehrter war, war ich auch gesund;
aber da kam die nervenzerrüttende Musik und die metaphy-
sische Philosophie und die Sorge um tausend Dinge, die mich
nichts angehen.” (To Malwida von Meysenbug, 550, 1872.)
36 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
winter with his friend, Malwida von Mey-
senbug, and two fated others, Paul Rée
and Lou-Salomé, in Sorrento. All was in
vain. In 1879 he was forced to resign his
chair. The University treated him very
generously in the matter of pension. Dur-
ing the next ten years he lived during the
winter in the Riviera, and in the summer at
Sils-Maria in the Engadin. The first few
years after his resignation saw Nietzsche at
his lowest ebb. Even to himself it seemed
doubtful whether he would live. But he was
resolved not to be beaten, and carried on
a heroic contest against all weakness. The
Joyful Wisdom was the symbol of returning
health. From 1883 onward until the final
collapse he was a good deal better. Gradu-
ally he grew more and more lonely, and
broke with all his friends except Peter Gast.
At one time he was intimate with a Jew,
Doctor Paul Rée, who is said to have in-
fluenced him in the positivist direction. The
work Human, All Too Human, written under
that influence and marking his estrange-
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 37
ment from Wagner, is the least attractive,
either in style or outlook, of Nietzsche's
works. Rée is said to have influenced this
work, and despite the denials of Madame
Förster-Nietzsche, he probably did." Dur-
ing this period there occurred an incident,
which would have been ludicrous if it were
not tragic. Malwida von Meysenbug, the
author of the Memoirs of an Idealist, a
woman of engaging charm and very bad
judgment, thought to provide for this most
fastidious of men a youthful amanuensis
disciple. A young Russian girl of brilliant
gifts, Fräulein Lou-Salomé, was to be the
mouthpiece and populariser of Nietzsche.
After a few months of enthusiasm, Nietzsche
came to see that the scheme was hopeless.
The matter was complicated by Paul Rée,
with whom Nietzsche very nearly fought a
duel. It led to an estrangement of some
length between brother and sister (for Eliza-
beth had concealed certain facts so as to
* Madame Förster had no occasion to be so contemptuous.
The book is really Nietzsche at low-water mark.
38 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
avoid a duel). Much paper has been wasted
on this topic, and we need not discuss it at
length. This much should be said. Frau
Salomé-Andreas in her book on Nietzsche is
by no means so untrustworthy a portrait-
painter as Frau Förster would have us be-
lieve. On one point, the importance at-
tached by Nietzsche to the doctrine of the
Eternal Return, Frau Lou-Salomé is de-
monstrably right, as against the sister."
This breach was short. More difficult
was the situation created by Elizabeth
Nietzsche's engagement and marriage.
Nietzsche, who felt any marriage on her
part even more deeply than Macaulay had
done in a like case, had looked for Elizabeth
to be always his nurse and companion. It
was a blow to his pride when he found
that she was betrothed, and that to an anti-
*Doctor Karl Bernoulli’s two large volumes on Franz Overbeck
wnd Friedrich Nietzsche are avowedly written to counteract in
many respects Madame Förster-Nietzsche's Life. Into all the
points he discusses it is not possible to enter, especially since
owing to an action at law some of the passages have been blacked
out. But on this Lou-Salomé incident there is an important ac-
count from the pen of Frau Overbeck. (I, 336-351.) This should
be read, especially for its criticism of Elizabeth Nietzsche.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: TEIE MAN 39
Semite. The amazing bitterness of politics
in Germany is illustrated by the fury with
which Nietzsche, no lover of the Jews,
treated this alliance with opinions which he
disliked. Nietzsche allowed himself to be
persuaded into a sort of peace, but he did
not attend the wedding. What still more
bewildered him was his sister's going off
with her husband to help found a new com-
munist colony in Paraguay. Still, he took
a share in it later.
Deeper and deeper grew his loneliness.”
At Sils-Maria he now and then met some
one whom he liked–especially an invalid
*“ Ach, wir Einsamen und Freien im Geist–wir sehen dass wir
fortwährend irgend worin anders scheinen als wir denken; wäh-
rend wir nichts als Wahrheit und Ehrlichkeit wollen, ist rings um
uns ein Netz von Missverständnissen; und unser heftiges Begeh-
ren kann es nicht verhindern, dass doch auf unserem Thun ein
Dunst von falschen Meinungen, von Anpassung von halben
Zugeständnissen, von schonendem Verschweigen, von irrthümlicher
Ausdeutung liegen bleibt. Das sammelt eine Wolke von Melan-
cholie auf unserer Stirne; denn dass das Scheinen Nothwendig-
keit ist, hassen wir mehr als den Tod; und eine solche andauernde
Erbitterung darüber macht uns vulkanisch und bedrohlich. Von
Zeit zu Zeit rächen wir uns für unser gewaltsames Verbergen, für
unsere erzwungene Zurückhaltung. Wir kommen aus unserer
Höhle heraus mit schrecklichen Mienen, unsere Worte und Thaten
sind dann Explosionen, und es ist möglich, dass wir an uns selbst
zu Grunde gehen. So gefährlich lebe ich.” (Briefe, V, 309.)
40 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
Englishwoman. Doctor Paneth has left a
valuable account in his letters of visits and
talks with Nietzsche in the Riviera. Very
early he discerned that Nietzsche worked
always from his feelings outward. . Nietzsche
welcomed his loneliness. Glimpses of this
are seen again and again in Zarathustra. It
was to him the sign and seal of his greatness.
He declares that he cannot expect friends
any more, for friendship is only for equals."
Yet all along he resented the neglect of his
books in Germany and the lack of disciples.
Injured partly by sleeping drugs, Nietzsche
became more and more difficult of ap-
proach. When he met his old friend, Erwin
Rohde, in Leipzig, neither was gratified.
Later on they quarrelled finally, owing to a
* This was written in 1884. “Lassen sie mich nur in meiner
Einsamkeit.
“Es war zuletzt eine Eselei von mir mich ‘unter die Menschen’
zu begeben; ich musstees ja voraus wissen, was mir da begegnen
wiirde.
“Die Hauptsache aber ist die: ich habe Dinge auf meiner
Seele, die hundertmal schwerer zu tragen sind, als La bêtise
humaine. Es ist mêglich, dass ich für alle kommenden Menschen
ein Verhängnis, das Verhängnis bin,_und es ist folglich sehr
möglich, dass ich eines Tages stumm werde, aus Menschenliebe.”
(To Malwida von Meysenbug, Briefe, III, 61.1.)
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 41
difference over the merits of Hippolyte
Taine. Paul Deussen and his wife went to
see him two years before the catastrophe.
They were shocked at the change in his ap-
pearance; Nietzsche spoke of his fears of
what would befall him, and as they parted
they saw the tears in his eyes." All the
while there grew in him the sense of mission.
“I am at the summit of all moralist think-
ing in Europe,” he wrote to his sister.
His sense of Apocalyptic vision appears in
such titles as The Dawn of Day, and domi-
nates Zarathustra. He believes himself in-
spired as no one has been for thousands of
years.
The aphoristic form which he had begun
to adopt in Human, All Too Human, was
doubtless an imitation of La Rochefoucauld.
* “Hier sprach er nochmals die diistern Ahnungen aus, welche
sich leider so bald erfüllen sollten. Als wir Abschied nahmen,
standen ihm die Thränen in den Augen, was ich früher nie an
ihm gesehen hatte.” (Deussen, 93, 1887.)
* “Glaube mir; bei mir ist jetzt die Spitze alles moralischen
Nachdenkens und Arbeitens in Europa und noch von manchem
Anderen. Es wird vielleicht einmal noch die Zeit kommen, wo
auch die Adler scheu zu mir aufblicken müssen, wie auf jenem
Bilde des heiligen Johannes, das wirals Kinder so sehr liebten.”
(Briefe, V, 469.)
42 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
But it did not sell his books. Finally, he
was forced to publish at his own expense,
or even to print privately. His life was pos-
sible only by the severest economy. From
1883 onward come his last and most im-
portant works. They express his conquest
over all impeding forces, over earlier mas-
ters, and above all over his own weakness.
He thinks that his illness even has helped
him, and his whole philosophy rests on the
acceptance of what comes to man—amor
fati. Zarathustra puts all in a poetic dra-
matic form. The other books, The Geneal-
ogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil, The
Case of Wagner, are to be read as commen-
taries on Zarathustra. The same is true of
those works which appeared after Nietzsche
had ceased all writing. The Antichrist, Ecce
Homo, and the Will to Power.
Nietzsche seemed almost well. When
better he worked with feverish haste. Signs
of insanity are not hard to discern in his
later works, and increasing megalomania.
In sending Taine one of his works, he de-
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 43
scribes it as the most marvellous book ever
written, and declares in Ecce Homo, “I am
not a man, I am dynamite.” He discovers
Turin, and wonders why he ever spent a
winter elsewhere. His power of boyish en-
thusiasm grows greater, if possible. He
went on working with appalling energy.
What he produced in the final year and a
half is prodigious. The last publication,
The Case of Wagner, was his ruin. Wagner
was dead, and his friends resented, not un-
naturally, this ruthless attack on an old
friend. The anti-Semites attacked him
also. Finally, he was given to understand
that his brother-in-law, Doctor Förster, had
turned Elizabeth against him. This was
“ Diese Wochen in Turin, wo ich noch bis zum 5. Juni bleibe,
sind mir besser gerathen als irgend welche Wochen seit Jahren,
vor allem philosophischer. Ich habe fast jeden Tag eine, zwei
Stunden jene Energie erreicht um meine Gesammt-Conception
von Oben nach Unten sehen zu können: wo die ungeheure Vielheit
von Problemen, wie in Relief und klar in den Linien unter mir
ausgebreitet lag. Dazu gehört ein Maximum von Kraft, auf
welches ich kaum mehr bei mir gehofft hatte.” (N. to Brandes,
May, 1888, III, 305.)
“ Das Buch das in Ihre Hände zu legen ich mir den Muth
nehme, ist vielleicht das wunderlichste Buch das bisher geschrie-
ben wurde–und in Hinsicht auf das was es vorbereitet, beinahe
ein Stück Schicksal.” (N. to Taine, III, 204.)
44 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
not true, but Nietzsche could not know
that. He wrote a letter attacking his
brother-in-law. It was not sent, but was
found among his papers. He said that he
was taking more and more chloral without
being able to sleep; and would ere long take
so much that he would lose his reason. He
did. Shortly after this he had a stroke.
Living in poor rooms among strangers,
means were not taken to guard him. He
began writing letters of which the insanity
was patent. Fortunately Professor Over-
beck saw what was the matter and hurried
to Turin, just in time to save him. He had
been found bereft of reason in the streets.
His mother, strong-minded and tender, was
resolved to keep him with her, but it was
needful for him first to go to an asylum at
Jena. He became well enough to be moved
home, and Frau Nietzsche tended him till
her death in 1897. It is a pathetic picture,
the pious Christian lady, old-fashioned and
tender, spending her last years as nurse of
the son, who had attacked with a violence
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 45
before unknown everything she held dear.
It is the irony of fate that such care as he
enjoyed had been condemned by Nietzsche
as a cockering up of the weak and useless.
Madame Förster-Nietzsche had returned to
Europe on her husband's death, and was
able to have her brother with her at Weimar
in 1897. He was occasionally conscious,
and not unhappy. He died in 1900, nearly
seventy years after the death, under condi-
tions so different but in the same place, of
Goethe. Now the Nietzsche-Archiv is one of
the treasures of that city, which means
more to culture than the millionaire-haunted
hovels of modernity.
Nietzsche's story is full of pathos. No
one had deeper feelings than Nietzsche."
Much of his barbarity in philosophy is due
to his fear of falling a prey to them. All
who met him knew him as amiable and very
gentle, and he had a distinction in all his
ways. He is afraid of his own tenderness.
“Il fut au fond du coeur un tendre et’un pitoyable en dépit de
ses affectations de rondeur militaire et de ses préférences martiales
affichées.” (Seillières, 360.)
46 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
“Never give way” is his motto. All his
teaching is a self-conquest. He could never
be quiet. No single view could ever hold
him. When he has embraced a doctrine or
a teacher, he begins at once to pass beyond.
His loneliness is a cross, and he profits by
it like a cross. This innate sense of mar-
tyrdom must be the true ground of his
signing one of his last letters—The Crucified
One. It is not mere satire. Paul Deussen,
who knew him from a boy, says he would
never continue in one stay—his preference
for becoming over being as a philosophic
category he fulfilled all his life." Nietzsche
creates because he is ever destroying. He is
one of those natures which always react
against their surroundings. He was indeed
less hostile to his own age than he supposed,
* “Nietzsche war und blieb eine im tiefsten Innern unruhige,
bestandlose Natur, welche es nichtertrug lange bei einer Sache zu
bleiben. Sein “Menschliches, Allzumenschliches’ nebst den ver-
Schiedenen Fortsetzungen bis zum ‘Zarathustra’ hin geben ein
deutliches Bild dieses rastlosen, quâlenden Fortgetriebenwerdens,
und ich weiss nicht ob nicht, wenn ihm Leben und Kraft ver-
gönnt gewesen wäre, die Umwertung aller Werthe eine noch-
malige Umwertung wiirde erfahren haben.” (Deussen, I, 80.)
Cf. also Salomé, 54.
"FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 47
for in some ways he is but an element in the
Romantic movement, in others a part of the
reaction against the Revolution; and his
Will to Power expresses in some sort the
Bismarckian triumph; and that in spite of
himself, for Nietzsche thought the Prussians
the supreme danger to culture.” But in the
main Nietzsche's ambition was to be unzeit-
gemässe. So far as the prevailing currents
of society were concerned, he fulfilled it.
He had been a pious little boy. At his
confirmation at School he was greatly im-
pressed. But he gave up Christianity ap-
parently without any sense of trouble.” He
* “In both these authors [Nietzsche and Hartmann], compara-
tively independent as they are, the one a mystical natural phi-
losopher, the other a mystical immoralist, is reflected the all-
dominating militarism of the new German Empire. Hartmann
approaches on many points the German snobbish national feel-
ing. Nietzsche is opposed to it on principle, as he is to the states-
man who has piled up for the Germans a new tower of Babel, a
monster in extent of territory and power and for that reason
called great, but something of Bismarck's spirit broods, never-
theless, over the works of both.” (Brandes, 53.)
* 1870. “Ich halte das jetzige Preussen für eine der Cultur
höchst gefährliche Macht.” (Breife, I, 105.)
“Möge vor und ganz allen die staatliche Machtentfaltung
Deutschlands nicht mit zu erheblichen Opfern der Kulturerkauft
werden.” (N. to Ritschl, ibid., III, 122.)
* The suggestion of such trouble may be seen here:
“Hier scheiden sich nun die Wege der Menschen; willst Du
48 THE WILL TO FREEDOMI
read as a student Strauss's Leben Jesu and
asked, if one gave up Christ, how should a
belief in God be retained? Religion dropped
away from him very early. That cry,
“God is dead! God is dead!” which rings
through the pages of Zarathustra is the as-
sumption of all Nietzsche's writing. Yet
all his life was occupied with attempts to
found a new religion. One critic declares
his whole doctrine to rest on a kind of meta-
physical Divinity–Power.” Another who
Seelenruhe und Glück erstehen, nun so glaube; willst Du ein Jünger
der Wahrheit sein, so forsche.” (To his sister, Briefe, V, 114.)
“ Ist es wirklich so schwer, dass alles worin man erzogen ist,
was allmählich sich tief eingewurzelt hat, was in den Kreisen
der Verwandten und vieler guten Menschen als Wahrheit gilt,
was ausserdem auch wirklich den Menschen tröstet und erhebt,
das alles einfach anzunehmen, ist das schwerer, als in Kampf mit
Gewöhnung, in der Unsicherheit des selbstständigen Gehens,
unter häufigen Schwankungen des Gemüths, ja des Gewissens,
oft trostlos, aber immer mit dem einigen Ziel des Wahren, des
Schönen, des Guten neue Bahnen zu gehen?” (1865, Briefe,
V, 113.)
*“ Um diese Zeit war das neue Leben Jesu von Strauss erschie-
nen. Nietzsche schaffte es sich an und ich folgte seinem Beispiele.
In unseren Gesprächen konnte ich nicht umhin, meine Zustim-
mung auszudrücken. Nietzsche erwiderte: "Die Sache hat eine
ernste Konsequenz; wenn Du Christus aufgiebst, wirst Du auch
Gott aufgeben müssen.” ” (Deussen, Erinnerungen an Friedrich
Nietzsche, 20.)
?“ Seine ganze Lehre beruht auf einer Art metaphysicher
Gottheit: der Macht.” (Caffi, Nietzsches Stellung zu Machia-
vellis Lehre, 28.)
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 49
knew him says that the history alike of his
mind, his works, and his illness is the result
of an effort to find in the different forms of
apotheosis of self a substitute for the loss of
God." Nietzsche himself makes Zarathus-
tra ask: “If there be a God, how could I
bear not to be one? Therefore there is no
God.” Probably his early religion was
mere sentiment and fell away almost with-
out his knowing it. Not that his attitude
was determined by personal bad habits.
Nietzsche's life shewed not only great hero-
ism in its struggle with ill health, but was,
in its noble simplicity and poverty and un-
wearied interest in high things, an example
to an age sunk in vulgar money-making.
Many causes combined in his passion of
recoil from Christianity. These can be left
till the topic is definitely before us. One,
however, and not the least important, may
be noted here: the atmosphere of Naum-
* “Die Möglichkeit einen Ersatz für den verlorenen Gott in
den verschiedensten Formen der Selbstvergöttung zu finden, das
ist die Geschichte seines Geistes, seiner Werke, seiner Erkrān-
kung.” (Salomé, 39.)
50 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
burg. He writes to his sister, that it is his
pet aversion, the little town and its petty in-
terests, adding that they two did not really
belong there." Still more illuminating is a
letter written to his mother. It was des-
patched in a fit of irritation. Many like
letters he would appear to have posted in
the waste-paper basket. Presumably, it is
a reply to something that had been said
about religion. Nietzsche tells his mother
he cannot stand the atmosphere; these good
Christians, these uncles and aunts, whether
in Naumburg or not. (Briefe, V, 534–6.)
We can imagine the situation. The circle
of respectable old ladies; the horror, when
the young man from college takes a walk
instead of going to church. The whisper-
ings, the inquiries as to whether he reads
Voltaire, the offer of “good books,” the at-
tempts to interest him in missions or relig-
“Naumburg ist leider meine Abneigung par eaccellence. Die
kleine Stadt, undgedrückte Seelen. Du und ich sind nicht Naum-
burgisch gerathen, viel zu unabhängig und vielleicht auch zu
leicht zufrieden, und in uns zufrieden, was diesen Raths- und
Staatsmenschen nicht so leicht begegnet.” (To his sister, Briefe,
V, 725.)
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 51
ious gossip—all this probably among people
who lived as though comfort were their
main object and had little interest in
things beyond the local horizon. Nietz-
sche's whole life was in reaction. His con-
ception of Christianity was compounded
of certain errors of Schopenhauer and the
domestic pettiness of a small provincial
town. He was in reaction against his
aunts."
Secondly, we find him in strong reaction
against the conventions of the academic
world. The narrow second-hand culture,
priding itself on heterodoxy, the complacent
belief that by the multiplication of research
and professorial activities the progress of
mankind is assured, the easy-going middle-
class ideals of a rationalist millennium, all
this revolted him. We see its beginning in
the essay on Strauss; but the attitude is un-
changed throughout his life, except in so far
*Perhaps this passage has a note of the same feeling: “Wer hat
nicht Seine Mutter getödtet, seine Frau verrathen, wenn es auf
Gedanken ankommt P Man wiirde in einer artigen Einsamkeit
leben, wenn Gedanken tēdten könnten.”
52 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
as he seemed partly to have receded in the
period of Rée's influence. Because he had
been a professor, he is thoroughly alive to
the defects of the professorial view of the
universe."
In the same way, after submitting to the
influence of Schopenhauer, he turned round,
and in regard to the fundamental thesis of
the evil of life, and of salvation through
denial of the will to live, he became the
strongest opponent of what he once adored.
It is needless to point out how the same is
true of his relations to Wagner. It is not
really so much these adversaries whom he
attacks, as it is himself in his former state of
mind. Half the bitterest things in contro-
versy are those said in all sincerity by men
who have changed their view, and are for
ever lashing themselves in punishment of
their peccadilloes in opinion. It would
have been the same with the Superman.
Had the Superman or the ruling caste of
* “Reine erbärmlichere Gesellschaft giebtes, als die von Gelehr-
ten: jene wenigen abgerechnet die militärische Gelūste im Leibe
und Kopfe haben.” (Nietzsche, Werke, XI, 249.)
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 53
Nietzsche's prophetic dreams ever been
made manifest to his sight, no critic would
have been more contemptuous. Nietzsche
would have broken his ancient idol into a
thousand splinters.
Nietzsche had the temper of detachment.
His words about loneliness, as a means not
of withdrawal from reality but of deeper im-
mersion therein, might have been used by
any mystic and many monks. His affinities
were by no means what he supposed them.
Could the two have met, Henri Beyle, with
his real cynicism, would have repelled the
poet-soul of Nietzsche, who tried all his life to
be a cynic and could achieve only the mood
of “the great love and the great contempt.”
Many of his inconsistencies we can under-
stand. Very few writers but feel to some
degree the need and the value of that lone-
liness which was to Nietzsche at once his
cross and his crown. Yet few men, how-
ever much they feel the need to be by them-
selves, but feel, like Nietzsche, the need of
a little love in regard to their creations.
54 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
Mere friendship without this seems some-
thing outside. Vanity may seem the name
for some of Nietzsche's imaginings, such as
his desire for a few disciples, who would
keep the rest of the world in respect. But
there was something deeper.
That loneliness helped Nietzsche as an
artist." Maybe without it we could not
have his most splendid passages, or the
mystic beauty and apocalyptic of Zara-
thustra. As a thinker he lost by it.
Nietzsche always seems to discern some
truth in whatever topic he discusses. His
psychological insight is deep and real. But
he sees it out of proportion, and having seen
it, he magnifies all into a unity of feeling by
shutting off all other sides and refusing to
listen to any criticism. Dialectic would
have saved him. Doubtless it would not
have altered his fundamental view, but it
* “Zuletzt hat mir die Krankheit den allergróssten Nutzen
gebracht: sie hat mich herausgelöst, sie hat mir den Muth zu mir
Selbst zurückgegeben. . . . Auch bin ich, meinen Instinkten
nach, ein tapferes Thier, selbst ein militärisches. Der lange
Widerstand hat meinen Stolz ein wenig exasperirt.” (N. to
Brandes, Briefe, III, 302.)
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN 55
would have shewn him the limits of its ap-
plication, and made him less attractive but
more enduring. Nothing could be less like
the moderation of the classics and their bal-
ance and harmony than the febrile energy,
always a little hectic, of the hermit of Sils-
Maria. Nietzsche jeers at Wagner for his
incessant eacpressivo. Yet nothing is more
characteristic of his own style.
This is but an instance of the same fact
—all his ideals express disgust at his own
character and limitations. An incurable
Romanticist, he is all for the classics. Pro-
foundly naturalistic in his fundamental
view, he is for ever chafing against the
thought, and denies materialism in favour
of some doctrine of spirit, which he is careful
not to define. His dislike of sympathy is
due to his being naturally full of it and
afraid of giving way. His adoration of
force is partly the expression of physical
weakness." Lonely, he longed for friends,
“Malgrado le immagini e le allegorie, malgrado gli ampi oriz-
zonti scenografici ed i crescendi delle sinfonie, il segreto di Nietz-
sche é stato scoperto. In una parola-in una sola e piccola
56 TEIE WILL TO FREEDOMI
and cries out pathetically at the neglect of
him in his native land. Even his dislike of
the Germans is partly due to his conscious-
ness of being one. Despite all'assertions to
the contrary, some of his characteristics are
eminently German-notably his violence of
language. Urbanity in controversy is a
quality of French culture.
Rays of light came to him at the last.
He heard that Georg Brandes at Copen-
hagen was giving a course of lectures on
his philosophy and that it drew crowded
parola-sta il secreto di Nietzsche, nella parola debolezza.” (Il
Crepuscolo dei Filosofi. Papini. 225.)
º “Toute sa vie cet Allemand pur sangs'enorgueillit de ne pas
ètre Allemand. Fils d'un pasteur de campagne prussien, il
s'imagine qu'il descend d'une vieille famille noble polonaise du
nom de Nietzky, alors que (sa soeur elle même en fait la remarque)
il n'a pas une goutte de sang polonais dans les veines; dès lors son
slavisme imaginaire devient une idée fixe et une idée-force; il
finit par penser et agir sous l'empire de cette idée. Le noble polo-
mais, dit-il, avait le droit d'annuler avec son seul veto la délibé-
ration d'une assemblée tout entière; lui aussi héroiquement à
tout ce qu'a décidé la grande assemblée humaine il dira: veto.
“Copernic était Polonais et Copernic a changé le systeme du
monde. Nietzsche renversera le système des idées et des va-
leurs; il fera tourner l'humanité autour de ce qu'elle avait méprise
et honnie. Chopin le Polonais . . . a “délivré la musique des
influences tudesques”; Nietzsche délivrera la philosophie des in-
fluences allemandes; il s'en flatte, il le croit; et il développe en une
direction nouvelle la philosophie de Schopenhauer.” (Fouillée,
Nietzsche et l'Immoralisme, VI.)
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, THE MAN 57
audiences. One or two signs latterly at Tu-
rin and Sils-Maria made him feel he was
getting known. But it was too late. Dur-
ing the last years one day he heard talk of
books, and his face lit up. “Ah,” said
Nietzsche, “I also have written some good
books.”
One quality he had—a terrific pride. He
said that he was too proud to make friends,
for none alive were of the same rank." All
loneliness of spirit easily becomes arrogance.
This Nietzsche does not react against.” It
is his constant quality. Of that pride he
proceeded to make an ideal. In the next
lecture I shall try to shew what it was.
* 1885. “Ich bin viel zu stolz um je zu glauben dass ein
Menschen mich lieben könne. Dies wiirde nämlich voraussetzen
dass er wisse wer ich bin. Ebensowenig glaube ich daran dass
ich je Jemanden lieben werde; dies wiirde voraussetzen dass ich
einmal—Wunder über Wunder—einem Menschen meines Ranges
finde.” (Briefe, V, 596.)
“Ich selbst den Stifter des Christenthums in mancher Hinsicht
als oberflächlich empfinde.”
Cf. also: 685. His pathetic account of loneliness: “Ein
tiefer Mensch braucht Freunde; es wire denn dass er seinen
Gott noch hätte. Und Gott ich habe weder Gott noch Freunde.”
* “On chercherait en vain dans l'histoire des lettres, des philo-
sophies, voire des religions depuis les temps les plus reculés,
jusqu'à nos jours un autre exemple d'orgueuil aussi prodigieuse-
ment ingénu, de narcissime intellectuel à ce point exalté.” (Pal-
larès, Le Crépuscule d’une idole, 125.)
II
THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE
Courage, mon ami, le diable est vif, might
be taken as the motto for the Gospel ac-
cording to Nietzsche, heralded with the
call, Repent ye of your virtues, for the
kingdom of earth is at hand. For it is an
Evangel that Nietzsche sets forth with, on
it the title marked, “the rich have the Gos-
pel preached to them”; save that by the
rich Nietzsche would mean rich in faculty
and not goods. Nietzsche is no less con-
vinced than any Moses that he is to lead
his people into a promised land. As he
says in Ecce Homo:
“My life-task is to prepare for human-
ity one Supreme moment in which it can
come to its senses, a great noon in which
it will turn its gaze backward and for-
ward, in which it will step from under
the yoke of accident and of priests, and
58
THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 59
for the first set the question of the why
and wherefore of humanity as a whole—
this life-task naturally follows out of the
conviction that mankind does not get on
the right road of its own accord."
“For such a task there is requisite a
different kind of spirits than our age is
likely to produce; spirits strengthened by
wars and victories; to whom conquest,
adventure, danger, even pain have be-
come a need; for it an accustoming to
thin, Alpine air, to winterly wanderings,
to ice and mountains in every sense; nay,
even a kind of sublime maliciousness, an
ultimate and most self-assured sprightli-
ness of knowledge, indispensable for the
great health: to say a bad thing in one
word, even this great health is requisite
But is just this even so much as possible
to-day ? But at some time and in a
stronger time than this tottering, self-
doubting age of ours he is to arise, the
redeeming man of the great love and con-
1 Ecce Homo, 93, I.
60
THE WILL TO FREEDOM
tempt, the creative spirit who by his
thronging power is ever again driven
away from every corner and other world;
whose loneliness is misunderstood by the
people, as though it were a flight from
reality, whereas it is but his sinking,
burying, and deepening into reality, in
order that when he rises again into light,
he may bring home with him the redemp-
tion of reality, its redemption from the
curse which the old ideal has laid upon it.
This man of the future who will redeem
us from the old ideal, as also from that
which had to grow out of that ideal, from
great surfeit from the will to nothing,
from Nihilism, this bell-stroke of noon-
day and the great decision which restores
freedom to the will, which restores to
the earth its goal and to man his hope;
this Anti-Christ and Anti-Nihilist, this
conqueror of God and of the Nothing—
he must come some day. . . .
“But what say I here? Enough
Enough At this place but one thing
THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 61
befits me—silence: lest I should infringe
on that which only one younger than I
am, only one more futurous than I am,
one stronger than I am is free to do—on
that which my Zarathustra is free to do
—Zarathustra the ungodly. . . .”
Nietzsche is an apostle preaching a new
religion of redemption.” For the doctrine
of Nietzsche, no less than that of Christ or
of Buddha, is a doctrine of redemption and
deliverance. Nietzsche believes that man,
especially European man, is in evil case.
He preaches that he must be delivered from
this. He holds that this needs a radical
change of nature. It is a “new creature”
that is needed.” This will be reached not by
1 The Genealogy of Morals, 121.
* “Tiefes, feindseliges Schweigen über das Christenthum im
ganzen Buche, es ist weder apollinisch noch dionysisch; es negirt
alle àsthetischen Werthe (die einzigen Werthe die “Die Geburth
der Tragödie’ anerkennt); es ist im tiefsten Sinne nihilistisch,
während im dionysischen Symbol die àusserste Grenze der Bejah-
ung erreichtist.” (Leben, II, 103.)
This is his summing up of his attitude to Christianity in the
account he wrote later on of his first book.
* “Tutto quello che gli resto di energia lo speso per gridare in
belle forti parole il suo desiderio di Salute e di forza trasformato in
teoria redentrice e per Suonare e risuonare alcuni arguti motivi
con unsas porticcio flauto di antico saggio.” (Papini, 260.)
62 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
education or intellect, but by raising a por-
tion of man, the ruling class, into a higher
order of life, a new society. It is a religion,
even more than a philosophy or even an
ethic that Nietzsche preached. His atti-
tude to the Universe is in one respect re-
ligious. True, he does not in the strict
sense believe in a universe at all, but only.
a chaos of forces. Yet his doctrine of the
eternal recurrence makes up for this, and,
justifies a certain reverence. It is life that
he worships; and his adoration is so whole-
hearted, that he requires every second of
the tale of life to be told again, like children
who never tire. Not without justice does
one who knew him say:
“In Nietzsche there dwelt in continual
warfare, side by side of one another and
in turn tyrannising over one another, a
musician of high talent, a thinker with a
free orientation, a religious genius, and a
>> 1
born poet.
1 Nietzsche in seimen Werken, 23.
“In Nietzsche lebten in stetem. Unfrieden, neben einander und
THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 63
But we must not forget that of this new
religion the presupposition is the non-
existence of other-worldly values. Not
once do these occur to Nietzsche, except
as a target for attacks. The possibility
that they have any basis in reality he does
not consider. Rather his whole philosophy
starts from the attempt to make people
think out the consequences of those denials
which he says they have already made. It
is no use to give up God, and yet remain in
the prison-house of an ethical system, which
resulted from faith in God. See what your
denial involves, and be bold enough to carry
it to its logical conclusion. “Thorough” is
his motto. A passage in the Joyful Wisdom
puts this very well:
“Have you ever heard of the madman
who on a bright morning lighted a lantern
and ran to the market-place, calling out
unceasingly: ‘I seek God . I seek God!’
sich gegenseitig tyrannisierend, ein Musiker von hoher Begabung,
ein Denker von freigeisterischer Richtung, ein religiöses Genie,
und ein geborener Dichter.” (Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Wer-
ken, Lou Andreas-Salomé, II, 23.)
f
64
THE WILL TO FREEDOM
As there were many people standing about
who did not believe in God, he caused a
great deal of amusement. “Why is he
lost?” said one. ‘Has he strayed away
like a child?” said another. ‘Or does he
keep himself hidden P’ ‘Is he afraid of
us?’ ‘Has he taken a sea-voyage?’
*Has he emigrated P’ the people cried out
laughingly, all in a hubbub. The insane
man jumped into their midst and trans-
fixed them with his glances. “Where is
God gone?’ he called out. ‘I mean to
tell you ! We have killed him—you and I.
We are all his murderers. But how have
we done it? How were we able to drink
up the sea 2 Who gave us the sponge to
wipe away the whole horizon? What did
we do when we loosened this earth from
its sun ? Whither does it now move?
Whither do we move? Away from all
Suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly P
Backward, sideways, forward, in all di-
rections? Is there still an above and
below P Do we not stray, as through in-
THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 65
finite nothingness? Does not empty
space breathe upon us? Has it not be-
come colder? Does not night come on
continually, darker and darker? Shall
we not have to light lanterns in the morn-
ing? Do we not hear the noise of the
grave-diggers, who are burying God?
Do we not smell the divine putrefaction ?
For even Gods putrefy. God is dead |
God remains dead ' And we have killed
him How shall we console ourselves,
the most murderous of all murderers?
The holiest and the mightiest that the
world has hitherto possessed, has bled to
death under our knife—who will wipe
the blood from us? With what water
could we cleanse ourselves? What lus-
trums? What sacred games shall we
have to devise? Is not the magnitude of
this deed too great for us? Shall we not
ourselves have to become Gods, merely to
seem worthy of it. There never was a
greater event—and on account of it, all
who are born after us belong to a higher
66
THE WILL TO FREEDOM
history than any history hitherto.” Here
the madman was silent, and looked again
at his hearers. They also were silent, and
looked at him in surprise. At last he
threw his lantern on the ground, so that
it broke in pieces and was extinguished.
‘I came too early,” he then said. “I am
not yet at the right time. This prodig-
ious event is still on its way, and is trav-
elling—it has not yet reached men’s ears.
Lightning and thunder need time, the
light of the stars needs time, deeds need
time, even after they are done, to be seen
and heard. This deed is as yet farther
from them than the farthest star—and
yet they have done it !” It is further
stated that the madman made his way
into different churches on the same day
and there intoned his Requiem asternam
deo. When led out and called to account,
he always gave the reply: ‘What are
these churches now, if they are not the
tombs and monuments of God?”
* Joyful Wisdom, 167.
THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 67
What, then, is the nature of this religion ?
Has it no object of worship P It has—Life.
The yea-saying to the whole of life is the
sum and substance of it all. Nietzsche him-
self had suffered so much and profited by his
suffering so deeply that he could not feel
with Schopenhauer that existen&Tsevil, be-
cause of the suffering which it involves. No
less deeply than any Christian was Nietz-
sche persuaded that what makes life noble is
richness of experience, and that suffering i
irrelevant. No less than any Christian does
he repudiate the stoic ideal of apathy. We
are not to train ourselves to impassibility,
but to endure and even to embrace the
Cross, on account of the strength and beauty
that can be won thereby." Fulness of life is
* Nietzsche, Werke, XIII, 89, § 226: “Wer das Leidentals Argu-
ment gegen das Leben fühlt gilt mir als oberflächlich, mitten
unsrer Pessimisten.”
§ 227: “Mit der nårrischen und unbescheidnen Frage, ob in
der Welt Lust oder Unlust tiberwiegt, steht man inmitten der
philosophischen Dilettanterei: dergleichen sollte man sehnsiich-
tigen Dichtern und Weibern tiberlassen.”
Ibid., XIV, 81, § 162: “Leiden verringern und sich selber dem
Leiden (d. h. dem Leben) entziehn—das sei moralisch P Leiden
schaffen—sich selber und Anderen—und sie zum hôchsten Leben,
dem des Siegers, zu befähigen—wire mein Ziel.”
Ibid., XIV, 102, § 222: “Es ist Nichts hart sein wie ein Stoiker;
68 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
the end, and topics of joy and suffering are
as irrelevant; just as fatigue is irrelevant to
an athlete or losses in battle to a com-
Amander, if victory be the one end." He had
learned to welcome all that befel him—just
as Madame Guyon declared that whatever
has happened to one is the Will of God after
it has happened; or as St. Paul—“All things
work together for good to them that love
God.” As he says in The Will to Power:
“The kind of eacperimental philosophy
which I am living, even anticipates the
possibility of the most fundamental Ni-
hilism, on principle; but by this I do not
mean that it remains standing at a nega-
tion, at a no, or at a will to negation. It
would rather attain to the very reverse—
mit der Unempfindlichkeit hat man sich losgelöst. Man muss
den Gegensatz in sich haben—die zarte Empfindung und die
Gegenmacht, nicht zu verbluten, sondern jedes Ungliick wieder
plastisch zum Besten zu wenden.”
1 (Leben, II, 838.) “Und später schreibt er: “Ich habe langst
bei mir beschlossen, meine eigenen Wünsche und Pläne nicht
so wichtig zu nehmen. Gelingt mir das nicht, gelingt mir jenes:
und im Ganzen weiss ich nicht,"ob ich nicht allen Misslingen so
gut zu Dank verpflichtet bin, wie irgend welchem Gelingen. Das
was mir Werth und Ertrag des Lebens ausmacht, liegt wo an-
ders.’”
THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 69
to a Dionysian affirmation of the world, as
it is, without subtraction, exception, or
choice—it would have eternal circular
motion: the same things, the same reason-
ing, and the same illogical concatenation.
The highest state to which a philosopher
can attain: to maintain a Dionysian atti-
tude to Life—my formula for this is amor
fati.” "
Nietzsche will go farther. Affirmation of
life carried to its logical extreme means not
only the acceptance of the moment. It in-
volves also the desire for its recurrence, pre-
cisely in all particularity as it took place.
It is to recur again and again. To this
end courage is needed. The doctrine is
probably the expression of Nietzsche's own
resolution in his darkest hours no less than
in bright ones. “No, I will not give way.
No weakness; none of your pity. It won’t
last for ever. As the schoolboy says: It
will be all the same a hundred years hence.”
* Will to Power, II, 412.
70 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
Then a further access of courage. “No, I
don’t care if it does go on. I will still bear
it, bear it if it lasts for ever; bear it if it
repeats itself ad infinitum.” Some such
experience nightly when he had toothache
is partly at the bottom of the Eternal Recur-
rence. On the other side there is the more
obvious desire for the recurrence of joyful
moments. This is expressed in his refrain:
“Eternity is sought by all delight.” We
have Nietzsche's own word for it, that all
his doctrines represent experience lived and
aflame. Courage is the one virtue which
Nietzsche leaves untouched. His disciples
are to have the courage of their sufferings
and of their sins. They are to risk the
> depths that they may win the heights. Far
from seeking serenity and the pensioned dull
existence of the safely insured, they must
court danger and adventure, ever driven by
One thought, the newness of the moment
and the self-affirmation of life. No weak
sympathy for themselves is to deter them.
What they need not for themselves, they
TEIE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 71
are not to dishonour their fellows by offering
to them.” “I recko –the–evercoming of

pity as noble."_Life-ifeTamcHmore abun-
dant life is his–Gry.–This-is“the need of
every soul=life–aeteomfort nor happiness
nor riches–Some of his words are not un-
like those of another Master: “In the world
ye shall have tribulation, but be of good
cheer, I have overcome the world." Or
again: “Blessed are ye when men shall hate
you and persecute you and revile, and say
all manner of things falsely against you, for
my sake. Rejoice and be exceeding glad.“
1 See the letter to Peter Gast on the value of Vornehmheit, IV,
219. “In allen meinen Krankheits-Zuständen fühle ich mit
Schrecken, eine Art Herabziehung zu pöbelhaften Schwächen,
pöbelhaften Milden, sogar pöbelhaften Tugenden.
“Vornehm ist z. B. der festgehaltene frivole Anschein mit dem
eine stoische Härte und Selbstbezwingung maskirt wird. Vor-
nehm ist das Langsamgehen in allen Stücken, auch das langsame
Auge. Wir bewundern schwer. Es giebt nicht zu viel werthvol-
ler Dinge; und diese kommen von selben und wollen zu uns.”
? “Dass man diese Lehre für einen frivolen Egoismus, eine Heilig-
sprechung epikureischer Zügellosigkeit angesehen hat, gehört zu
den wunderlichsten Augentäuschungen in der Geschichte der
Moral. . . .
“Nietzsche hat den Personalismus zu einem objektiven Ideal
gemacht und ihn damit von dem eigentlichen Egoismus der immer
auf das Subjekt zurücksieht, aufs Entschiedenste abgetrennt.
Der Egoismus will etwas haben, der Personalismus will etwas
sein.” (Simmel, Schopenhauer und Nietzsche, 245.)
W
J
72 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
One of the most wholesome elements in
Nietzsche is his contempt for the vulgar
eudaemonism of the Manchester school, “the
bagman's paradise” of Cobdenism, the tea-
grocer's philosophy of Spencer, as he calls
it. To all who know England it is strange
to find Nietzsche identifying Benthamite
utilitarianism with English civilisation, as
though that were anything more than a
particular phase. But it is true to say with
Meyer: No philosophy was ever less eudae-
monistic than that of Nietzsche, despite the
fact that some have thought of him as
teaching sheer hedonism." Mere money-
getting on the part of those who have
enough is the ugliest of all the idols of
human worship. Nietzsche deserves all
honour in that he sets his face against this,
no less than any daring Hebrew prophet.
Not that he is justified in doing so on
his own theory. A man struggling for
financial triumph, say, to be a “Bun-Em-
* “Weniger eudámonistisch ist keine Philosophie als die
Nietzsches, den man einen Genussphilosophen Zu nennen gewagt
hat.” (Meyer, 689.)
THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 73
peror” as in Mr. London's tale, may plausi-
bly argue that he incarnates the will to
power in a modern pacific and industrial
society, and is preparing the way for the
superman. None the less is it true that
what revolted Nietzsche above all things
was the millennium of the utilitarian com-
fort-idolater, whether individualist or so-
cialist.
The religion of valour is no bad name for
this side of Nietzsche's teaching. No one
need be at pains to quarrel with his inculca-
tion of heroism. As he says of his disciples:
“The type of my disciples—to such
men as concern me in any way I wish
suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treat-
ment, indignities of all kinds. I wish
them to be acquainted with profound
self-contempt, with the martyrdom of
self-distrust, with the misery of the de-
feated: I have no pity for them; be-
cause I wish them to have the only thing
which to-day proves whether a man has
74 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
}
any value or not, namely, the capacity of
sticking to his guns.” "
The ground of all this is, that the fulness
of life is won only this way. Risk and pain
are needful for the tempering of the steel of
spirit. In this he preaches a doctrine pre-
cisely similar to that of our Lord: “Whoso
loseth his life shall save it.” It is, in fact,
the doctrine of the Cross, little as Nietzsche
seems aware of this.
To Nietzsche Life, development, is the
one fact. IIdvta fief oi8év uévet.” There is
neither being nor spirit nor matter nor
individual nor universe—all is becoming.”
rººt *-*…*,x*g,
sº
Every conception involving substance is a
mere illusion of language created by our
1 Will to Power, II, p. 333, § 910.
* (Simmel, op. cit., 262.) “So ruht seine ganze Lehre auf dem
dogmatischen Imperativ: das Leben soll sein.”
* “Es giebt weder Geist, noch Vernunft, noch Denken, noch
Bewusstsein, noch Seele, noch Wille, noch Wahrheit. Alles Fik-
tionen die unbrauchbar sind. Es handelt sich nicht um ‘Subjekt
und Objekt,” sondern um eine bestimmie Thierart, welche nur
unter einer gewissen relativen Richtigkeit, vor allem Regelmäs-
sigkeit ihrer Wahrnehmungen (so dass sie Erfahrung kapitalisieren
kann) gedeiht.
“Die Erkenntniss arbeitet als Werkzeug der Macht. So liegt.
es auf der Hand, dass sie wachst mit jedem Mehr von Macht.”
(II, 770.)
THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 75
habit of chopping up the world, so as to con-
trol it. Strictly speaking, there is no world,
only a perpetual flow of becoming. That
becoming, that energy (you will at once
recall the élan vital of M. Bergson, and the
eternal flux of Heraclitus)—is wrongly
conceived if it is thought of as the will
to live. There cannot be a will to live.

**********~~~~...~s
That would be supposing something ante
rior to life. Life is. What does it mean?
VA will for more and more and ever more; in
one reality. Every other picture of the
world, every other living piece of the world,
ourselves included, is merely a distorted
image of this reality. As he puts it in an
eloquent passage at the close of the Will to
Power:

“Do ye know what ‘the universe’ is to
my mind? Shall I show it to you in my
mirror P This universe is a monster of
energy, without beginning or end; a fixed
and brazen quantity of energy which
t-A
76
THE WILL TO FREEDOM
grows neither bigger nor smaller, which
does not consume itself, but only alters
its face; as a whole its bulk is immutable,
it is a household without either losses or
gains, but likewise without increase and
without sources of revenue, surrounded by
nonentity as by a frontier. It is nothing
vague or wasteful, it does not stretch into
infinity, but is a definite quantum of
energy located in a limited space, and not
in space which would be anywhere empty.
It is rather energy everywhere, the play
of forces and force-waves, at the same
time one and many, agglomerating here
and diminishing there, a sea of forces
storming and raging in itself, for ever
changing, for ever rolling back over incal-
culable ages to recurrence, with an ebb
and flow of its forms, producing the most
complicated things out of the most simple
structures; producing the most ardent,
most savage, and most contradictory
things out of the quietest, most rigid, and
most frozen material, and then returning
THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 77
from multifariousness to uniformity, from
the play of contradictions back into the
delight of consonance, saying yea unto
itself, even in this homogeneity of its
courses and ages, for ever blessing itself as
something which recurs for all eternity—
a becoming which knows not satiety, or
disgust, or weariness: this, my Dionysian
world of eternal self-creation, of eternal
self-destruction, this mysterious world of
twofold voluptuousness; this, my ‘Be-
yond Good and Evil,” without aim, un-
less there is an aim in the bliss of the cir-
cle; without will, unless a ring must by
nature keep good-will to itself—would
you have a name for my world? A solu-
tion of all your riddles? Do ye also want.
a light, ye most concealed, strongest, and
most undaunted men of the blackest mid-
night? This world is the Will-to-Power
—and nothing else ! And even ye your-
selves are this will to power—and nothing
besides 1’’’
º
1 Will to Power, II, 431, 2.
78 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
This will to power is everything; the goal
and development of spirit no less than of
matter. In truth, there is neither one nor
the other, but only this chaos of warring
forces, all with the one end. The will to
power determines the “law” of gravitation,
the process of the planets, the origin of
species, the course of human history. It is
the reality behind all science, all art, and all
religion. Every act which seems to deny it
is nothing but a mäsk to insure its deeper
predominance. Since this will to power is
the one reality, and since, also, it has no
meaning, for there-is-no-goal of evolution, no
“far-off divine event.” “The world is not
all organism, it is a chaos,” blind and with-
Out purpose or meaning, with neither end
nor beginning, after passing through every
possible combination it must ultimately re-
peat itself. The world is thus a clock run-
ning down, and then self-winding to an ex-
actly similar course. Since all this is the
one will to power, individuality can be no
more than an appearance of it. Individuals

/
THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 79
do not in any real sense exist—any more
than they do on the system of Schopen-
hauer." Nietzsche lays stress on personal-
ity. His object is to secure strong individ-
uals. Yet I do not see how on his system
they have any reality; they are the mere
soap-bubbles blown for the nonce by the
will to power; the superman is only the
largest and most highly coloured soap-bub-
ble.
Since the will to power is all, and since
moral value is denied to it, to talk of wrong-
doing is absurd. All actions, after they
have taken place, are holy. Will, however,
which can make all things new, finds one
obstacle. It cannot reverse the past. In
revenge for this impotence, it invents the
torment of evil conscience. In theory
Nietzsche Fejects all moral valuations. In
practice hereasserts them. Otherwise there
is no meaning in his attacks on decadence,
and all forms of decadent ethics, whether
* “Egoismus ist ebenso wie ‘Selbstlosigkeit’ eine populäre Fic-
tion; insgleichen das ‘Individuum' die “Seele.’” (Werke, XIII,
148.)
80 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
philosophic pessimism like that of Schopen-
hauer, or a religion like Christianity, or
any formal adoption of the golden rule.
All these in Nietzsche's view are equally
a no-saying to life; they are a crushing of
the will to power, a forcing down of the
strong and adventurous in favour of the
anaemic (in whose interest commonly the
rules were framed). Every form of self-
denial and humility is thus to be con-
demned, except on one condition. These
qualities are the note of all those who are by
nature slaves. Among such they are to be
fostered, not for any good they do to the
slaves, but because they make them more
ready of service to their masters.
Everything is power; the world is always
in flux; it never is. Supermen are life repre-
sented by its highest moments of power, its
concentrations in a classical epoch, an im-
perial race, a triumphant personality. Spe-
cies is but a name. Mankind is in no sense
real or ideal, a unity. To talk of homo sum,
humani nihil a me alienum puto is to talk
THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 81
nonsense. That maxim is the low-water
mark of development, a symbol of the mon-
grel world over which Rome ruled, the
mishmash of the mob. The problem is to
realise the highest type of man. This will
be produced not by raising the people, but
by producing a select caste of born com-
manders. The only sense of moral virtue
is command, whether inside the individ-
ual or in relation to others." A state, says
Nietzsche, is simply “nature's roundabout
way of making a few great individuals.”
At the moment under the influence of ideals,
which are Christian in essence if not in
name, the mob is too powerful for the strong
personalities. That is why Napoleon failed
—and Cesare Borgia. Our object should be
to bring about conditions in which such men
are the rule and no longer the exception. So
1 “Das Nachdenken über Freiheit und Unfreiheit des Willens,
hat mich zu einer Lösung dieses Problems geführt, die man sich
gründlicher und abschliessender gar nicht denken kann–nám-
lich zur Beseitigung des Problems vermöge der erlangten Ein-
sicht: es giebt gar keinen Willen, weder einen freien noch einen
unfreien.” (Nietzsche, Werke, XIII, 263.)
“Der freie Mensch ist ein Staat und eine Gesellschaft von
Individuen.” (Nietzsche, Werke, XII, 116.)
82 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
far from the weak needing protection against
the strong, it is the strong who need protec-
tion against the unified jealousy of the weak,
powerful only by numbers. The end can be
reached only by Securing a ruling race or
class, and by such subordination and breed-
ing as will keep individualities strong. To
such an end the rest of mankind are only
tools. In themselves they have no value.
To take an instance, in art a genius gives
value to his epoch, he is not the mere resul-
tant of the other individuals in his milieu.
The aristocrat exists for himself and for his
order, not to serve the community. Yet
even the aristocracy does not, like a body of
voluptuaries, exist for itself alone. Its pur-
pose (often unknown to its members) is to
produce a higher type of man. Therefore it
must have experience both of the heights
and the depths. Its training must be
Spartan, only more severe. It must shrink
from nothing. All the old rules of morals
vanish before it. The Übermensch is beyond
good and evil. Morality exists for the
THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 83
mediocre, the herd, the inhabitants of the
world, in which you and I are alive. Europe
is becoming more and more one; mediocrity
is becoming more and more and more medi-
ocre. As against this background of com-
mon people, united by a slave morality,
there is at the same time gradually defining
itself, at present dimly seen, a master caste
of free, adventurous spirits. They prepare
the way for the superman. He is not yet
here. The succeeding ages, even at their
highest, are but the forerunners of the
supermen of the future. To that far goal
they must sacrifice themselves. This new
nobility exists for itself alone. No sym-
pathy or fellow-feeling with the slaves who
are its instruments is to stain its sense of
distinction.
Distinction, indeed, the “pathos of dis-
tance,” must increase, until it reaches a
higher point than that between a Roman
Senator and his slaves. No existing aris-
tocracy has enough of it. Nietzsche ad-
mired the Prussian officer corps with its
84. THE WILL TO FREEDOMI
exclusive claims and discipline.” Not, how-
ever, from the Germans does he hope for
much; he treats them as more hostile to cul-
ture than even the English, and declares
that the presence of a German retards his
digestion.” It is the “good Europeans” who
are the beginning of the master race of the
future. This does not mean the intellec-
tuals in the university sense. All his life
* (Leben, II, 617.) “Man hat behauptet, dass mein Bruder
stets eine starke Vorliebe für den Adel und das deutsche Offizier-
corps ausgesprochen habe. Mit vollem Recht–nur darf man den
Begriff “Adel' nicht zu eng fassen. In unserm demokratischen
Zeitalter empfand er es als eine Wohlthat, dass es noch gesell-
schaftliche Klassen gab, die den Muth hatten, sich abzusondern,
die männlichsten Tugenden allen andern voranzustellen, und
welche Befehlen und Gehorchen in der Vollkommenheit kennen
und lernen. Allerdings wünschte er, dass der Adel und das Offi-
ziercorps strenger in der Forderung guter Herkunft bei der Ehe
sei, schärfer in dem Sich-Abheben von dem Andern, tapferer und
kräftiger in dem sich-selbst Ziel-setzen.”
Cf. Nietzsche's own words:
“Die Zukunft der deutschen Kultur ruht auf den Söhnen der
preussischen Offiziere.” (Nietzsche Nachlass, Taschen-Ausgabe,
VIII, 494.)
* “So ergiebt sich die seltsame Verbindung, dass ein durchaus
international-gesinnter Mensch, ein Verkenner und Verächter des
Deutschtums, das Geheimniss und den "Geist der er ausspricht, die
als specifisch-typische Deutsche sich am lautesten gebärden . . .
werden." (Tönnies, Der Nietzsche Kultus, 10.)
“England's Klein-Geisterei ist die grosse Gefahr jetzt auf der
Erde. Ich sehe mehr Hang zu Grösse in den Gefühlen der rus-
sischen Nihilisten: als in denen der englischen Utilitarier.”
(Nachlass, 8, 495.)
THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 85
Nietzsche was tilting at the culture-Philis-
tines. He declares that it is not intellect
that ennobles blood, but blood that enno-
bles intellect, while a sedentary life is the
sin against the Holy Ghost. What he wants
is a more highly educated chivalry without
the strong Christian element in the chival-
rous ideal—a race of Alcibiades, and Borgia,
freer, less bookish, less second-hand than
the modern men of culture. Neither the
Almanach de Gotha nor Minerva will give
him what he wants. The peasantry has
some of the qualities better developed than
the modern culture of the newspaper and
the café. This class, when it is established,
will achieve a transvaluation of all values.
It will retranslate the word good into its
older and more pagan equivalents, noble,
proud, self-centred, courageous, barbarous.
Some have debated as to how far Nietz-
sche was looking to a new development
of man, as a species. Did he think that
evolution would produce a new species, dif-
fering from man as much as man differs
86 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
from the ape? This is denied by his sister.
But we must treat her statements with
reserve. She writes apologetic. Nietzsche
is ever saying that man is not a goal but a
bridge—that man is something that must be
surpassed.
Nietzsche, despite his dislike of Darwin
and contempt for the Darwinians, was much
under the influence of Darwin. Probably
at times he dallied with the notion that the
Ubermensch expressed a physiological devel-
opment." But it cannot be said to be a rul-
ing thought. The Ubermensch is a vague
term: it must be taken to express Nietzsche's
dissatisfaction with man as he now is, and
his belief that it is only by a radical height-
ening of what to him are the noble elements
in his nature, that things can be bettered.”
It means a higher type of man, something
* “Auch der höchste bleibt ein Mensch. . . . Der Übermensch
kann nicht das Endziel der Menschen sein; denn was wāre
dann das Endziel der Úbermenschen selber?” (Riehl, Friedrich
Nietzsche, der Künstler und der Denker, 132.)
*“Der Übermenschist nichts als die Kristallform des Gedankens,
dass der Mensch sich iiber sein Gegenwartsstadium hinausent-
wickeln kann und also soll.” (Simmel, 253.)
THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 87
better in the Nietzschean sense of better
than we have now; a new kind of superior
persons or race of persons. The superman
is a new creature, not merely the race as it
now is better educated."
That raises a more important question:”
Is the superman an individual or a class?
Here once more Nietzsche is not consistent.
Much of his language favours the view that
the superman is an individual, or a number
of individuals; the strong man with intellect
and no restraint. Much points that way in
his taking of individuals such as Napoleon,
Cesare Borgia, the individual man of virtà
in Machiavelli’s sense, the need of freedom
from all morals, the nullity of communal
claims, the statement that all fellowship
is degrading, the value set upon solitude.
1 Werke, XIV, § 281: “Das Christenthum hat darin Recht:
man kann einen neuen Menschen anziehen.”
* On the question whether the Superman is an order or an indi-
vidual, cf. especially Simmel, Schopenhauer und Nietzsche, and
Dorner, Pessimismus, Nietzsche und Naturalismus ; Simmel be-
lieves it to be a race; Dorner takes the new Herren-Order as pre-
paratory to the superman. Bélart in his book on Wagners und
Nietzsches Freundschafts-Tragödie quotes eight varieties of the
Superman.
88 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
Yet, on the other hand, we have his definite
statement that what he looks for is a new
hierarchy of ranks, that his works are di-
rected to the new master class and the often-
repeated injunction that the higher man is
to endure discipline and suffer. The truth
is, that in view of Nietzsche's repudiation of
sheer egoism, the problem is immaterial.
We may say, perhaps, that his supermen
will be separate individuals, arising out of
but not identical with the master class,
form, d by discipline to severity; or we may
say that they are a set of individuals. But
in any case he allows them no absolute free-
dom. They are to be governed by the
ideal of distinction, “Vornehmheit,” gentle-
manliness, as we might say. They are to be
free of morals in the sympathetic sense, but
more than others are they to be bound by
the morality of courage. The superman is
to incarnate personality at its highest, in-
volving self-control, adventure, fine man-
ners, and powers of command. If it is a
superclass of which Nietzsche is thinking,
THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 89
he would not allow mere heredity apart
from discipline and fitness to be a claim to
membership. If it is an individual or indi-
viduals, clearly again they will not be super-
men merely by pleasing themselves, but
must incarnate certain qualities of ascend-
ing life." The social element is never en-
tirely absent from Nietzsche's thought,
however much some of his followers may
repudiate it. Nothing is farther from his
intention than to pander to mere unbridled
egoism in the individual, although, despite
his intention, that is very often the result of
his teaching. At any rate, there can be no
doubt that Nietzsche looked forward to a
new aristocracy. It is to be a society re-
cruited upon blood and training, resting
upon a slave system, kept pure by eugenic
methods.” It will develop in common the
* “Zarathustra glücklich darüber, dass der Kampf der Stände
vortiber ist, und jetzt endlich Zeit ist für eine Rangordnung der
Individuen. Hass auf das demokratische Nivellirungs-System ist
nur im Vordergrund: eigentlich ist er sehr froh, dass dies so weit
ist. Nun kann er seine Aufgabe lösen.” (Nietzsche, Werke, XI,
417.)
* On Nietzsche's relation to eugenics and biology see Richter,
Nietzsche et les théories biologiques contemporaines.
90 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
virtues characteristic of an aristocracy, and
it is to produce forms of culture higher than
anything hitherto known—to carry forward
the work of the Romans, as they might have
developed, had not they been attacked by
the corrupting virus of Christianity. This
aristocracy is not the servant of society, but,
on the other hand, it is not its own master;
it exists for the raising of the type man.
Rome, Nietzsche says often, offered the
nearest approach to his ideal. The new
rulers will no more regard themselves as
servants of the mob than a Roman would
think of duties towards his slaves. Rather
they will incarnate the ideal of Dionysos;
this in one place he seems to identify with
barbarism and sensuality. On Nietzsche's
principles we might look forward a millen-
nium or two and see in a vision a race of
masters, seated in a grander Colosseum,
once more urging on torturers to whip their
slave-gladiators into courage by white-hot
electric rods, in order that their aesthetic
sensibilities may be stimulated. We need
THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 91
not suppose that Nietzsche desired this.
But it would be a natural result of the ac-
ceptance of his principles. Clearly, he says
that he wants more barbarism, that un-
counted sufferings are needed to produce his
new lords; to this end all other men are
mere tools. Nietzsche is not to be blamed
for asserting that higher powers in life are
worth having at the cost of suffering; or
that if culture is to reach a higher Stage
much must be gone through for it. Where
he is wrong is in his attempt to purchase
these goods, not only apart from the world
at large, but deliberately at its cost. His
system, if it is to be called a system, is a
new return to Nature; less idyllic than that
of the eighteenth century with its cry:
“I am as free as Nature first made man
Ere the base laws of servitude began
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.” +
Sick of the stuffy atmosphere of academic
lecture-halls, Nietzsche cries for the free and
* Dryden, Conquest of Granada.
92 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
open air. Wearied with domestic virtues
and morality in petto, he hails barbaric
grandeur. From the mean streets of mod-
ern civilisation he calls men to Alpine
heights of danger and triumph, despising
above all things utilitarian democracy and
the optimism of inevitable progress, with its
gospel of the sofa-millennium. Nietzsche
boldly proclaims life to be immoral and
preaches a gospel for the few. “Pulchrum
est paucorum hominum” is one of his favour-
ite tags. His desire is to herald a new Re-
naissance when man “free from moralic acid”
shall display the splendours of individual-
ity, and a brighter Borgia shall win a more
enduring triumph. Nietzsche was angry
at being compared with Carlyle. Yet in
some respects the superman is curiously
like Carlyle’s strong man. Nor need we
forget that while Carlyle bade men fall
down and worship Frederick the Great,
Nietzsche declared that the present Kaiser
would be able to understand the Will to
Power. Maybe he was right.
THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 93
This Will to Power is the expression of
life. The yea-saying to life, i.e., to all
reality and not merely to a part of it is
the fundamental maxim of Nietzsche. But,
he argues, if we are to say yes to any mo-
ment, we ought logically to desire that
moment to recur. Besides, the energy in
the world is limited in amount. Had there
been any goal of all this-striving it would
long ago have been manifest. Since no
such goal has been seen, and since the num-
ber of combinations is limited, Nietzsche
deems it certain that the whole universe is
turning for ever on its axis. Every event
even in its minute detail is repeated in-
finitely. This doctrine of the eternal re-
currence is not much dwelt upon by Nietz-
sche's disciples. Yet it is integral to his
thought. He himself declares it to be the
central doctrine of Zarathustra. Early in
his life in the second of the Essays Out of
Season Nietzsche had adumbrated the idea.
Not until later did it become one of his
chief articles of faith. The notion is the
94 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
ancient one of the Annus Platonicus.
First of all, the thought that he would
have to go through everything over again
filled Nietzsche with unutterable repul-
sion. Afterwards he contemplated it with
a certain mystic awe. Vainly does his
sister, Frau Förster-Nietzsche, endeavour
to minimise its importance to him. The
despised Frau Lou Andreas-Salomé is more
trustworthy on this point. One or two
passages will serve to set it forth:
“‘Behold,” I continued, “this moment
From this gateway called moment a
long, eternal lane runneth backward :
behind us lieth an eternity.
“‘Must not all that can run of things
have run already through this lane?
Must not what can happen of things
have happened, have been done and
have run past here?
“‘And if all things have happened al-
ready: what dost thou dwarf think of
this moment? Must not this gateway
have existed previously also P
THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 95
“‘And are not thus all things knotted
fast together that this moment draweth
behind it all future things? Conse-
quently—draweth itself as well?
“‘For what can run of things—in that
long lane out there, it must run once more
“‘And this slow spider creeping in the
moonshine, and this moonshine itself,
and I and thou in the gateway whisper-
ing together, whispering of eternal things,
must not we all have existed once in
the past?
“‘And must not we recur and run in
that other lane, out there, before us,
in that long, haunted lane—must we
not recur eternally P’
“Thus, I spake and ever more gently.
For I was afraid of mine own thoughts
and back-thoughts.” "
Here is a more prosaic expression of the
same idea:
“If the universe may be conceived as
a definite quantity of energy, as a def-
1 Zarathustra, 230.
96
THE WILL TO FREEDOM
inite number of centres of energy—and
every other concept remains indefinite
and therefore useless—it follows there-
from that the universe must go through a
calculable number of combinations in the
great game of chance which constitutes its
existence. In infinity at some moment
or other, every possible combination
must once have been realised; not only
this, but it must have been realised an
infinite number of times. And inas-
much as between every one of these
combinations and its next recurrence
every other possible combination would
necessarily have been undergone, and
since every one of these combinations
would determine the whole series in the
same order, a circular movement of
absolutely identical series is thus demon-
strated: the universe is thus shown to
be a circular movement which has al-
ready repeated itself an infinite num-
ber of times, and which plays its game
for all eternity. This conception is not
THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 97
simply materialistic; for if it were this,
it would not involve an infinite recur-
rence of identical cases, but a finite
state. Owing to the fact that the uni-
verse has not reached this finite state,
materialism shows itself to be but an
imperfect and provisional hypothesis.” "
The doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence
served three purposes:
1. It justified a certain mystical at-
titude of reverence by giving an element
of eternity to every act. This would other-
wise have been lacking in a system accord-
ing to which all things are for ever in rapid
movement. Nietzsche said that it marks
the nearest possible approach of the ideas of
Being and Becoming. His frequent phrase,
“Eternity is sought by all delight,” is a ne-
cessity of the artist-nature.
2. It supplied the place of a faith in
immortality. Nietzsche was a forward-
looking spirit. He could not face the
1 The Will to Power, II, 430.
98 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
thought of extinction. Disbelieving in
any transcendent world, he had no hope
of any individual life beyond, no resur-
rection, not even its pale philosophic coun-
terpart, the immortality of the soul. Nor
is absorption in the All of any attraction,
if there be no unity in things. The eternal
recurrence does assure a sort of immortal-
ity, although purely unconscious. It pro-
vides the only form in which Nietzsche
could preserve something of the values
of immortality, while keeping clear of all
faith in an unseen world.
3. This doctrine, as Professor Simmel
points out, gave Nietzsche the right to
formulate a new canon of ethics, akin to
that of Kant. Kant had said: “Act so
that the principle of thy action may be a
universal law.” Nietzsche would say, or
might say: “Act as though your action
were to be eternaſſy repeated.” Such a

canon gives digiiity to the moment and
* “Meine Lehre sagt: so leben dass du wiinschen musst, wieder
zu leben, ist die Aufgabe-du wirst es jedenfalls.” (Nietzsche,
Werke, XII, 64, § 116.)
THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 99
preserves the doer from what is base.

Such words as base-and-robie-may-seem-
strange in a writer who professedly repu-
diates all moral responsibility. Nietzsche
tº e tº © © ..— .
is radically inconsistent. His yea-saying__
*...*-e-r sº-ºº:
to life might mean only that we accept
whatever happens after the event. But
since Nietzsche regards all remorse as due
to illusion, and repudiates freedom of
2-a-a-a--" "
choice, he can have no right to rank acts.
** -º- ºr
*º sº. 2 ºr -r-º-º-º-º-º-e sº-º-º-º-º- * * *
* * * *
Yet he does so. His whole system is based
--~~~~~~~~~-"
* = assºrºrºkas -º-º-º-º: sº

on selection, on the notion that some kind
of actions are of worth and some are not,
although these differ for different classes."
On no other hypothesis can his violence of.
abuse of Christian ethics be justified, even
on Nietzsche's own showing. Briefly, the
morals of Nietzsche consist in an exalta-
* The following passage gives Nietzsche's own account of his
first perception of the Will to Power, and shows how it arose to
counteract the plethora of sympathy aroused by the sufferings
of the wounded:
“So vollständig der Ausdruck einer Rasse die siegen, herrschen
oder untergehen will—‘da fühlte ich wohl, meine Schwester,’
fügte mein Bruder hinzu, ‘dass der stårkste und höchste Wille
zum Leben nicht in einem elenden Ringen um's Dasein zum Aus-
druck kommt, sondern als Wille zum Kampf, als Wille zur
Macht und Úbermacht.” (Leben, II, 683.)
100 THE WILL TO FREEDOMI
tion of courage and a rejection of all other
moral values, and a sense of the value of
distinction and individuality. “Live dan-
gerously,” is his motto, and live differently
from others.”
The romantic expression of sheer nat-
uralism is, perhaps, the best account that
can be given of this gospel. Nietzsche
had discarded all supernatural values. He
was not unnaturally disgusted with the
* The barrenness of the mere empty notion of power is well
stated here:
“ Kurz: in Nietzsche verbindet sich der Naturalismus mit der
Romantik. . . .
“Aber sein oberstes Prinzip ist widerspruchsvoll; der Wille zur
Macht oder besser die Machtaktionen die eo ipso Anderes brau-
chen, um sich auszubreiten. Je mächtiger eine Aktionsgruppe, ein
Selbst, um so ohnmächtiger macht sie die Anderen. Das Leben
ist irrational an sich, Kampf mit sich selbst. Von einem Ganzen
der Welt kann eigentlich. Keiner reden, und doch redet er von dem
Ganzen.” (Dorner, Pessimismus, Nietzsche und Naturalismus,
189.)
“Die formale Macht wird wie ein Selbstzweck behandelt.
Aber die Macht ist kein Selbstzweck. Es kommt darauf an, wozu
die Macht verwendet wird. Weil Kultur da ist, ist Kampf um
die Kultur. Aber die Kultur ist nicht bloss Mittel für die for-
male Macht. Wenn die Macht nur auf der Ausbeutung des
Fremden beruht, was ist sie an sich selbst? Was hat diese Aus-
beutung für einen Wert? Nietzsche redet von der Vergeistigung
der Macht; aber woher der Geist bei seinem ausschliesslich physi-
ologischen Standpunkte? Was versteht er unter Geist? Er hat
ihn in die metaphysische Rumpelkammer verwiesen und will ihn
nun doch wieder zitieren.” (Ibid., 191.)
THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE 101
prevailing Pantheistic idealism of the Uni-
versities. His romantic tendency combined
with the relics of the system of Schopen-
hauer to produce the doctrine of the Will
to Power. Essentially he accepts the stand-
point of naturalism; and grafts on to it
a religious attitude in the maxims of yea-
saying to Life, and the Eternal Return.
It is described by Papini as a dithyrambic
transfiguration of evolutionary naturalism."
* “Io credo per conto mio che la più espressiva definizione che si
possa dare della filosofia de Nietzsche sia questa—una transfi-
gurazione ditirambica del naturalismo evoluzionista.” (Papini,
op. cit., 238.)
III
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY
NIETZSCHE regarded it as one of his
greatest achievements in originality, that
he was the first to perceive the true na-
ture of Christianity.” As we saw, it is
with Christianity as a way of life that he
is concerned. So far as it is a doctrine
of the other world, Nietzsche always as-
sumes without argument that it is a sys-
tem of lies. The only question for him is
what person or group of persons developed
his will to power through these lies. Chris-
*“ Man hat bisher das Christenthum immer auf eine falsche,
und nicht bloss schüchterne Weise angegriffen. So lange man
nicht die Moral des Christenthums als Kapitalverbrechen am
Leben empfindet, haben dessen Vertheidiger gutes Spiel. Die
Frage der blossen “Wahrheit des Christenthums–sei es in
Hinsicht auf die Existenz seines Gottes, oder die Geschicht-
lichkeit seiner Entstehungslegende, gar nicht zu reden von der
christlichen Astronomie und Naturwissenschaft–ist eine ganz
nebensächliche Angelegenheit so lange die Werthfrage der christ-
lichen Moral nicht berührt ist. Taugt die Moral des Christen-
thums etwas, oder ist sie eine Schändung und Schmach trotz aller
Heiligkeit der Verführungskünste?” (Leben, I, 30.)
102
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 103
tianity is a system of ethics, and it must
be judged alongside of all other systems
of ethics, which have the same or similar
principles. In Ecce Homo he recounts
his services to posterity:”
“No one hitherto has felt Christian
morality beneath him; to that end there
were needed light and remoteness of vi-
sion, and an abysmal psychological depth,
not believed to be possible hitherto. Up
to the present, Christian morality has
been the Circe of all thinkers–they stood
at her service. What man before my
time had descended into the underground
caverns from out of which the poisonous
!“ Ich habe jetzt mit einem Cynismus der welthistorisch
werden wird, mich selbst erzählt. Das Buch heisst Ecce Homo,
und ist ein Attentat ohne die geringste Rücksicht auf den Ge-
kreuzigten; es endet in Donnern und Wetterschlägen gegen Alles
was christlich oder christlich-infekt ist, bei denen Einem Sehen
und Hören vergeht. Ich bin zuletzt der erste Psychologe des
Christenthums und kann, als alter Artillerist der ich bin, schweres
Geschütz vorfahren, von dem kein Gegner des Christenthums
auch nur die Existenz vermuthet hat. . . . Ich schwöre Ihnen
zu dass wir in zwei Jahren die ganze Erde in Convulsionen haben
werden. Ich bin ein Verhängniss.” (Nietzsche to Brandes, Briefe,
III, 321.) Nietzsche must have been thinking of Antichrist, not
of Ecce Homo.
104 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
fumes of this ideal—of this slandering of
the world—burst forth P”
“What separates us, is not that we
do not rediscover any God, either in
history or in nature or behind nature—
but that we recognise what was wor-
shipped as God not as ‘divine,’ but as
pitiable, as absurd, as injurious—not only
as an error, but as a crime against life.
We deny God as God. If this God of the
Christians were proved to us, we should
still less know how to believe in him.
In a formula: Deus qualem Paulus creavit,
Dei negatio.””
“I call Christianity the one great
curse, the one great intrinsic depravity,
the one great instinct of revenge, for
which no expedient is sufficiently poison-
ous, secret, subterranean, mean—I call
it the one immortal blemish of man-
kind.” 8
“That which deifies me, that which
1 Ecce Homo, 138. * Antichrist, 3.16. * Ibid., 354.
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 105
makes me stand apart from the whole
of the rest of humanity is the fact that
I have unmasked Christian morality.
Christian morality is the most
malignant form of all falsehood, the
actual Circe of humanity, that which
has corrupted mankind.”
One or two passages from the many
which express Nietzsche's attitude may
be taken as samples. They might be
multiplied almost to any extent. No one
familiar with Nietzsche's writings in his
last period will deny their representative
quality.
His point is that all merely theoretical
and historical criticism is worthless, so
long as the Christian values are retained.
Moreover, supposing the Christian values
are in themselves unobjectionable, such
criticism would be needless, and even
harmful. Nietzsche considered truth to
be merely the illusion that was useful.
1 Ecce Homo, 139.
106 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
“Wherever the will to power declines
in any way, there is always also a physio-
logical retrogression, a décadence. The
Deity of décadence, pruned of his man-
liest virtues and impulses, henceforth,
becomes necessarily the God of the
physiologically retrograde, the weak.
They do not call themselves the weak,
they call themselves the ‘good.” . . .
It is obvious (without a further hint
being necessary) in what moments of
history only, the dualistic fiction of a
good and a bad God became possible.
Through the same instinct by which
the subjugated lower their God to the
‘good in itself,” they obliterate the
good qualities out of the God of their
conquerors; they take revenge on their
masters by bedevilling their God. The
good God, just like a devil; both are
abortions of décadence. How can one
defer so much to the simplicity of Chris-
tián theologians as to decree with them
that the continuous development of God
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 107
from the ‘God of Israel,” from the na-
tional God to the Christian God, to
the essence of everything good, is a
progress? But so does even Renan. . .
It is just the very opposite that strikes
the eye. When the presuppositions of
ascending life, when everything strong,
brave, domineering and proud has been
eliminated out of the concept of God,
when he sinks step by step to the sym-
bol of a staff for the fatigued, a sheet-
anchor for all drowning ones, when he
becomes the poor people's God, the
sinners’ God, the God of the sick par
eaccellence, and when the predicate of
Saviour, Redeemer, is left as the sole
divine predicate, what does such a change
speak of P such a reduction of the divine?
To be sure, the kingdom of God has
thereby become greater. Formerly, he
had only his people, his “chosen’ people.
Since then he has gone abroad in his
travels, quite like his people itself; since
then he has never again settled down
108 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
quietly in any place, until he has finally
become at home everywhere, the great
‘cosmopolitan’—till he has gained over
the “great number,’ and the half of
earth to his side. But the God of the
‘great number,’ the democrat among
Gods, became, nevertheless, no proud
pagan God; he remained a Jew, he re-
mained the God of the woods, the God
of all dark corners and places, of all
unhealthy quarters throughout the world.
His world empire is still, as for-
merly, an underworld empire, a hos-
pital, a subterranean empire, a Ghetto-
empire. . . . And he himself so pale,
so weak, so décadent. Even the palest of
the pale still became master over him—
the Metaphysicians, the conceptual Al-
binos. They spun round about him
so long, until hypnotised by their move-
ments he became a cobweb-spinner, a
metaphysician himself. Henceforth, he
spun the world anew out of himself—
sub specie Spinozae—henceforth he trans-
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 109
figured himself always into the thinner
and the paler, he became ‘ideal,” he be-
came ‘pure spirit,” he became ‘absolu-
tum,’ he became ‘thing in itself,’ Ruin
of a God . . . God became thing in
itself. . . .
“The Christian concept of God—God as
God of the sick, God as cobweb-spinner,
God as spirit—is one of the most cor-
rupt concepts of God ever arrived at
on earth; it represents perhaps the gauge
of low water in the descending develop-
ment of the God type. God degenerated
to the contradiction of life, instead of
being its transfiguration and its eternal
geal In God hostility announced to life,
to nature, to the will to life. God as the
formula for every calumny of ‘this world,”
for every lie of ‘another world.” In God
nothingness deified, the will to nothing-
ness declared holy . . .
“This hybrid image of ruin derived
* We may compare with this Mark Pattison's dictum that the
“idea of God had been defecated to a Qure transparency.”
110 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
from nullity, concept, and contradic-
tion, in which all décadence instincts, all
cowardices, and lassitudes of soul have
their sanction.” "
This is strong language. But it is not
mere extravagance. Nietzsche does not set
out only to épater le bourgeois. He is not
amused with things, he is passionate in
his sense of the value of life, and in hatred
of all that he thought opposed to fulness
of life. To appreciate his purpose, we must
recur to the fundamental doctrine of the
Will to Power, as the one reality. All
other-worldly values are false coin. The
problem is to determine what kind of man
finds his account in uttering this coinage.
Briefly, the answer is that Christianity is
the boomerang-throw of the slave races
by which they have taken captive their
conquerors. The theory is simple.
What, first of all, is the origin of con-
science? According to Nietzsche, con-
1 Antichrist, 260–2.
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 111
science arises from the taming of man by
civilisation. As society settles down, fight-
-ing ceases to be the main work of man;
cruelty, moreover, in private life has less
free scope. Consequently, man turns his
need of inflicting pain upon his inner
being, and suffering results. This un-
pleasantness inside is a fact. The priest
and all who share his instincts proceed
to exploit it. They invent the doctrine
of moral freedom and responsibility. By
this means, man is led to feel that the pain
is his own fault. The conception of guilt
is introduced. With the sense of burden
self-created but irremovable by his own
efforts, man develops the need of redemp-
tion. Ascetic morality of all kinds is due
to the belief that, if man will but add a
little self-inflicted pain, the ill conscience
will be removed. Man is willing to suffer,
and indeed to increase his suffering, if
only he can be persuaded that the pair,
has an object. That object, the negation
of the will, is the aim of morality. Chris-
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112 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
tianity is little more than the most trium-
phant form of this tendency, which arises
from the instinct of priests (men of no
real personal force, but great ingenuity)
to secure power for themselves. In this
way they get power which the weakness
of their personality would otherwise pre-
vent. Among priests he includes moralists
and most philosophers. He starts from
the true notion that right and wrong 3.I’e
fundamental values. He will have noth-
ing to do with the English utilitarian
moralists and associationists, who teach
that the idea of right is merely the com-
munal sanction of what is useful to men
in general. Good and evil are original
value-judgments. Like all our ideas, they
come from the will to power. Power,
satisfied, triumphant, embodied in a con-
quering race, “the splendid blond beast”
calls all its own characteristics good. Good
meant in the first instance the qualities
of a ruling class. It is the same as noble
and implies courage and an enduring will,
t
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NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 113
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pride, and self-sufficiency. Its opposite
is the character of the enslaved people,
base, mean, villainous. Thus, goodness
has nothing to do with love, humility,
justice, or self-denial. These qualities are
displayed by the down-trodden, or at
least admired by them. Do unto others as
ge would that they should do to you is the
maxim of the herd, the helot, the outcast,
the chandala. For the slave world, since
it goes on living, has its own will to power.
It is ever seeking to turn the tables on its
masters. To do this subtlety is needed.
Victory in the field is not to be thought
of. If, however, the slaves can instil
into their masters a belief that the highest
moral values are those qualities which
slaves are forced to display, gentleness,
meekness, self-sacrifice, industry, obedience,
pity, they may gradually reverse the order
and once more rule their masters. The
superior culture of Greece took captive the
Romans. Christian morality is a similar
effort, only it is exercised not by a real
114 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
culture, like that of Greece, but by a
spurious set of moral values, the so-called
Christian virtues. The terrain of the con-
flict has been changed before the masters
were aware of the fact. The herd will
treat as good—and by their numbers and
cunning will ultimately make even their
rulers think good—those qualities which
unite people in herds and keep them in
subjection. In this way they have achieved
a transvaluation of all values. The new
values thus grow upward from below,
until at last the masters begin to have a
bad conscience for pride and self-sufficiency.
They will even stoop so low as to pretend
that their sole claim to rule is based on
service of the community. The maxim:
“I am among you, as a slave” has raised
Jesus of Nazareth to be Lord in name of
the world. “He that is greatest among
you let him be your minister” is the ex-
pression of the same principle by one
who believed it. Its real import is that
by affecting to minister to others, a weak
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 115
man or race will win greatness. In this
revolution, which began in early times,
priests are the leaders. They are, as they
claim, not rulers but shepherds. They
symbolise and heighten the power of the
herd as against the unique, the rare, the
distinguished. Priesthood represents the
success of the mob, the chandala, the herd
morality. By this means a mental empire
is established vested in them, and polit-
ical dependence is avenged.
Morals, i. e., all morals based on any
doctrine of humanity, are due to the in-
stinct of revenge. They are the will to
power of impotent, decaying folk. “Moral-
ity is the idiosyncrasy of the decadent
revenging themselves upon Life.” The
Jews are the most outstanding instance.
That race, mean and ignoble like all
cowards, was willing to sacrifice every-
thing to its desire to live. It went on
despite political annihilation. The will
to power, was only dormant and began
to reassert itself. Firstly, its priests turned
II6 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
all its history topsyturvy, and changed
every. moral value. The Old Testament
contains ample evidence that originally
the Hebrews were as other nations, and
their God a prince of power. This, how-
ever, has been changed by the priestly
caste, and the conception of Jehovah as
a loving Father, and of holiness and all
the mean virtues of “fellowship” have
been introduced and suffered to corrupt
the ancient story. In Jesus of Nazareth
the Jewish race produced a man who car-
ried still further this philosophy of re-
sentment. Our Lord was consumed with
Love and led a revolt inside the Jewish
nation of the poor and outcast against
the aristocracy of Jerusalem. He died
for his own guilt, and in modern days
would have been sent to Siberia; for he
asserted the superiority before God of
the “poor, the maimed, the halt, and the
blind,” and denied the claims of the rulers.
In bringing our Lord to the Cross, the
Jewish spirit performed its master-stroke.
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 117
By crucifying him as a criminal (which
he was), and then proclaiming the King-
dom of the Crucified and Risen Saviour,
it secured for a couple of thousand years
the triumph of Hebrew, i. e., slave valua-
tions. The Incarnation is the apotheosis of
slave morality.
The world at large was in a state which
enabled the movement to win success.
Multitudes of slaves filled the Roman
Empire. These were eager to fall in with
any system which would restore their
dignity. The mixture of races all through
the Empire brought with it a physiological
depression, which, disguised as the sense
of sin, made men eager for a salvation
cult." Add to this that Socrates and Plato,
the great Greek decadents, had long cor-
rupted the pagan mind with notions of
goodness, justice, and the Eternal world.”
* “Alle unsere Religionen und Philosophien sind Symptome
unseres leiblichen Befindens: dass das Christenthum zum Sieg
kam, war die Folge eines allgemeinen Unlust-Gefühls, und einer
Rassen-Vermischung.” (Nietzsche, Werke, XVI, 250.)
* It is easily seen how this notion of the genesis of the Catholic
Christianity underlies the whole work of Houston Stewart Cham-
\berlin—The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century,
II8 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
The persecution of Christians by the state
was foolish, for it gave them precisely the
leverage which they needed, as Apostles
of the Cross, and enabled them in very
deed to make their strength “perfect in
weakness.” Even the Roman Law and
the stoic moralists prepared the way; for
although in regard to slaves, the ruling
order kept its hand on the whip, in theory
it was admitted that men were by nature
free, that man as man deserves to be con-
sidered, that justice, not force, is the end
of social institutions. All these tendencies
united to help on the march of the Chris-
tian Church from the catacombs to the
chair of St. Peter; and transformed the
fisherman of Galilee into the prince of the
Apostles, the slave of the slaves of God
into the Vicar-General of the Universe.
The Church was able to clothe it all in
a philosophic or semiphilosophic garb, and
to provide a symbol which for a time en-
slaved alike the intellect and the heart of
man. At last, through its leadership of
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 119
the slave races and lower orders, the Church
of Christ was able to triumph over the
Pagan Empire, the proudest and most
valuable organisation of the Will to Power,
which the world has hitherto seen.
All this is the victory of decadence.
All morality is decadence. Ascending life
is ever pitiless and proud. Christianity,
it is true, is nowadays out of fashion as
a creed. Yet men deceive themselves.
Its poison lurks in all the idealisms of
the day, in the generally accepted code of
moral values, in democratic equality, in
nearly every notion of the so-called free-
thinkers." Nietzsche with his band of
free spirits will topple over the house of
* George Eliot. “They have got rid of the Christian God, and
now think themselves obliged to cling firmer than ever to Chris-
tian morality, that is English consistency; we shall not lay the
blame of it on ethical girls à la Eliot. In England for every
little emancipation from divinity, people have to reacquire
respectability by becoming moral fanatics in an awe-inspiring
manner. That is the penalty they have to pay there. With
us it is different. When we give up Christian belief, we there-
by deprive ourselves of the right to maintain a stand on Chris-
tian morality. This is not at all obvious of itself, we have again
and again to make this point clear, in defiance of English shallow-
pates. Christianity is a system, a view of things, consistently
thought out and complete. If we break out of it a fundamental
idea, the belief in God, we thereby break the whole in pieces.”
(Twilight of the Idols, 167.)
120 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
cards. The old pagan valuation will be
restored. The transvaluation will be ef-
fected. So important is this aim of
Nietzsche, that his final period is some-
times spoken of as his Umwerthungszeit.
Meanwhile, Christian, moralist, humani-
tarian ideals are not to be allowed to
drop. They are to be retained, as the
most useful for the mass of men, the
herd. With the general tendency of the
world to become more mediocre, with the
ever-growing clamour of the triumphant
middle-class, Nietzsche would not inter-
fere. Against this and out of it as a back-
ground will the new ruling order define
itself. Herein a few spirits, courageous,
intellectual, and highly tempered as steel,
the philosophers of the superman world,
will rule. They are the first order. Of
the second order are the warrior class,
Rings and statesmen. Both these are priv-
ileged, beyond good and evil, free from
the herd morality. Curious it is to no-
tice how like is Nietzsche's conception to
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 121
the mediaeval doctrine of the two swords,
with the spiritual first and the ruler govern-
ing in his interest.
Let us now consider in detail Nietzsche’s
account of Christianity.
1. It is based upon an essential mis-
understanding. Nietzsche has identified
the pessimistic ethic of Schopenhauer with
the ideals of Christianity. Both agree in
this. They teach self-denial, and this in
some sense is a principle of every system,
which selects between actions. If any
actions are selected, there must be self-
denial, or in times of stress we shall choose
the opposite course. This ascetic quality
ought to have been no objection to
Nietzsche, for Nietzsche's whole notion
of the superman involves severe discipline,
w
i. e., self-denial. He even goes so far as
to say that he wanted a natural asceticism.
All that Nietzsche said in favour of an
enduring will, his attitude to suffering
as the condition of insight, is in fact very
I22 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
£
|
similar to the Christian. Creighton said
that suffering gives an insight denied to
thought, and Hort declared that power of
life means power of suffering. Both of
these maxims are in full accordance with
the teaching of Nietzsche. Nietzsche in
no way taught a doctrine of voluptuous
enjoyment. No man whose vision is of
the far future would do that. He has
indeed been blamed for this ascetic side,
but unfairly."
All asceticism, from the training of the
athlete to that of the scholar, from the
discipline of the child to the experience
of a St. John of the Cross, may direct
similar acts, or abstinences—a fact which
is too often forgotten, when people either
attack or defend the morality of the Cross.
The question is in regard to every act of ap-
parent and immediate self-denial; whether
it be to abstain from alcohol, or to face
an almost certain death in the trenches
—to what purpose is this waste? Is the
* E. g., by Seillières, Apollon ou Dionysos.
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY I23
ointment of man’s tears to be poured
out, and the alabaster of his gifts to be
broken for a noble or an ignoble pur-
pose? Is the result to be the development
or the annihilation of the personality ?
The latter is the teaching of Schopen-
hauer, of Buddhism, and of the various
forms of Oriental pessimism. To them the
individual being is the supreme evil, or else
the curse of existence. Christianity and
Nietzsche also might commend the same
ascetic practices as the Buddhist; but the
object is different. Always it is the devel-
opment of the personality—not its extinc-
tion. It is a negative means to reach a
positive end. “I am come that they might
have life, and might have it more abun-
dantly” is the principle of Christian asceti-
cism; every whit as much as the expansion
of Life is the maxim of Nietzsche. It may
be that now and then the means are unwise,
in which case they are analogous to over-
training a crew for a race. Sometimes,
also, Christian teachers with too little
124 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
hold on the sacramental principle, or with
Pantheistic leanings, may have taught a
doctrine of Christian self-denial which is
truly negative and Oriental. That does
not affect the main issue. Christianity is
essentially sacramental in the doctrine of
the Incarnate Lord and the Risen Body.
It does not teach the neglect of the body,
except in so far as any act of discipline in-
volves the postponement of immediate
ease for some greater good. Moreover,
as Nietzsche knew, even for bodily health
a too meticulous thoughtfulness will de-
feat its own ends. A little carelessness is
essential. The risks it involves are less
, than those which it avoids. Now and then
Nietzsche admits and even deplores the
effect of Christianity exercised in height-
ening the sense of individual worth; for
it did this for all, whereas it is only the
few whose personality is worth develop-
ing. On the whole, however, Nietzsche .
never freed himself from the doctrine of
Schopenhauer, that all morality is in the
:
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j
}
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY I25
literal sense self-abnegation, and is to culmi-
nate in the destruction of the will to live.
Thus he is ever repeating the charge,
that Christianity is the supremely deca-
dent religion, nihilism. He might have
been undeceived, had he read a little more
Church history, or even studied the New
Testament which he so heartily despised.
He could hardly then have ignored the
words about abundant life and fulness of
joy—while St. Paul’s frequent references
to joy in suffering would seem almost de-
signed to meet Nietzsche's own experience.
It is not the sense of weakness, but of t
power that is the most obvious thing in
the psychology of the early Christians.
Two great facts about the Church impress
themselves upon the reader of the New
Testament: (1) it was possessed by a
spirit of power; (2) it was a separating,
distinguishing force, adding to dignity:
“Ye are a holy nation, a royal priesthood,
a peculiar people.” True, Nietzsche might
counter this by saying it was power for
I26 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
the wrong sort of people, and distinction
for those by nature undistinguished.
The truth is that the Church of God
so far from being a denial of life has been
and now is the greatest yea-saying force
in the world." That does not mean that
it refuses to select between actions or to
forbid those which are less admirable.
Neither does Nietzsche. Any yea-saying
which involves courage, involves also no-
saying. Nietzsche is right, when he says
that education should be directed rather
to make the will taut than to convey
information. That, however, cannot be
done without a no-saying, which is equally
important, perhaps more so than yea-say-
ing.
|Nietzsche never discerns power except
* “Nietzsche ist aber in historischem Irrtum von grober Art
befangen, wenn er dem Christentum die Wirkung zuschreibt
dass es die mannliche Tüchtigkeit untergrabe, dass es aus dem
Menschen ein Zahmes Haustier und Herdentier gemacht
habe. . . .
“Aber auch wenn man das Barbarische ausser Acht låsst, so
hat sich das christliche Ideal mit dem einer edlen Männlichkeit,
mit dem ritterlichen Ideal, nicht allein vertragen, Sondern aufs
Innigste vermählt.” (Tönnies, Der Nietzsche-Kultus, 91.)
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 127
J
} as explosion. Yet it is equally great as
, containing. The first lesson of courage is
doubtless yea-saying to life; not to shrink;
not to stop development because of dan-
gers or fatigues; to face the unknown;
to be adventurous, and so forth. Equally
needful and harder to teach is the lesson
of no-saying, i.e., to concentrate, to limit
oneself, to hold oneself in; to control the
desire to be always on the move. Even
Napoleon, Nietzsche's great idol, used to
talk of the importance of savoir se borner.
Nietzsche introduced an opposition where
none really exists between yea-saying and
no-saying to impulses. Every yielding to
impulses presents itself to the mind as
yea-saying. Yet no one would be quicker
than Nietzsche to assert that mere yield-
ing to impulse would produce not the
superman but the decadent. The point
is whether or no we are to select between
acts, some which we commend, others
which we contemn. Both Christianity
and Nietzsche say that we are. It is true
128 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
that to the strong character the element
of no-saying will be harder than to the
weak. Most of us know men of strong
character, the beauty of which consists
not in the hardness which they have by
an inherited gift, but in the refinement and
self-denial by which it is tempered to
noble ends. ) “Be hard,” as Nietzsches
preached, is by no means bad advice to
people naturally soft. Tendencies in our
age there are which such words might at-
tack. But the opposite maxim, Be gentle,
is even more needful, or civilisation will
lose its most delicate blooms. Nietzsche
himself would be the first to deplore this.
The sentimentalism of “beautiful souls” .
against which Nietzsche protested may
have been evil, but Nietzsche, who felt
in himself the dangers of sentimentalism,
is entirely one-sided in the way in which
he preaches force and nothing but force.
Nor can any process of interpretation rid
him of this violence of overemphasis.”
* “La sua filosofia è stata da capo a fondo la confessione e la
proiezione della debolezza della sua vita.” (Giovanni Papini, Il
Crepuscolo dei Filosoft, 233.)
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 129
f
;
{
y 2. Nietzsche made a second error in
/regard to Christianity. He treated it as
inculcating pure altruism. This the Chris-
tian ethic never was and never will be.
It teaches us to love our neighbour as our-
self. It does not teach that the individual
is entirely to be merged in the group. From
this it is saved by its doctrine of individual-
ity," which asserts that every man has a
special value and meaning of his own:
“One star differeth from another star in
giory—so also is it in the resurrection of
the dead.” Nietzsche saw that it was
vain to expect to maintain the Christian
values, after Christian supernaturalism is
surrendered. He failed to see that Comtism
and other purely humanitarian schemes,
although Christian in their provenance,
are only partially Christian in their ethics
and omit certain indispensable elements
of the Christian canons of conduct. Nor
1 “Nietzsche tibersieht im Christenthum völlig diese Zustützung
zu dem Eigenwerte der Seele, in dem er das Christliche Wertgefühl
ausschliesslich in den Altruismus verlegt. Nicht auf den, dem
gegeben wird, sondern auf den, der gibt, nicht auf den, für den
gelebt wird, sondern auf den, der lebt, kommt es Jesus an.”
(Simmel, Schopenhauer und Nietzsche, 200.)
\‘.
130 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
| again does Christianity make all Love
consist in sympathy. That is another
\ºme due to Schopenhauer, alles Lieb
, ist Mitleid. Nietzsche somewhere com-
plains that religion nowadays means noth-
\ ing more nor less than sympathy with
suffering. Naturally enough he attacked
the habit of making material comfort the
one idol and the only test of development.
But Christians do not do this. Often,
indeed, they are blamed because they seem
callous to much unmerited suffering (as
even at this moment they are blamed be-
cause they refuse to assert that all war is
always to be condemned). Christianity
must be judged by its own ideals, not by
the dreams of sentimental rationalists, who
deck themselves out in Christian colours.
In matters like the marriage law and
the limits of the Christian society, and
the need of principle, Churchmen are
frequently attacked because they refuse
to allow sentimental sympathy to be the
sole arbiter, and decline to identify the
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY H31
Holiness of God with the weak good
nature of a parent who spoils his sons. It
is hard to understand how any one not
wholly ignorant of Christian life could
have made such a charge.
23. The same may be said of the attack
on Christianity as hostile to culture. Like
many other classical scholars, Nietzsche
was ignorant of the Middle Ages. Yet
he was familiar with Venice, and must
have seen the great pictures of Italy, al-
though it does not appear that he cared
for painting." How could a man who had
once seen St. Mark’s at Venice or St.
Ambrogio at Milan declare with any sin- )
cerity that Christianity was always, and
through its whole course of set purpose, ,-
hostile to culture? Doubtless he might
say that the great painters of the Renais-
sance were not truly Christians. He does
say so of Raphael. That may be true
* “ Selten habe ich Vergnügen an einer bildnerischen Darstel-
lung, aber dieses Bild, ‘Ritter, Tod und Teufel,” steht mir nahe,
ich kann kaum sagen wie.” Nietzsche to Malwida von Meysen-
bug. (Briefe, III, 2,491.)
}
I32 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
partially of the later or high Renaissance.
It is not true of Fra Angelico or Giotto
or the primitives. Even Nietzsche could
not have believed it to be true of Michel-
angelo. Probably the noblest material
treasure of mankind is the great Gothic
cathedrals. That will to power, that ascend-
ing energy of which he makes so much,
has had nowhere larger expression than in
Romanesque and Gothic architecture. Re-
cently, Mr. March Phillips in the Works
of Man has taught us to see in the Gothic
essentially the expression of energy. He
omits, indeed, a certain spiritual aspira-
tion, yet it is none the less true that we
have a spirit of power."
Once more. The Christian Church does
not accord any especial honour to the tame
anaemic virtues. No truer typical Chris-
tians can be found in history than Alfred
the Great and St. Louis—or, though on a
* One of Nietzsche's more unbalanced admirers, Mr. A. M.
Ludovici, is good enough to inform us that Gothic is no true art.
Was this the notion of the Germans when they gave us the Kultur-
lesson of the bonfire of Louvain?
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 133
lower grade of character, Charlemagne. Or
taking Churchmen in the technical sense,
Gregory the Great, St. Bernard, Bishop
Grossetête were not weaklings. Were the
English to make a formal canonisation for
the nineteenth century, it is almost cer-
tain that their choice would fall on General
Gordon.
It is true that cowardice and indolence
may keep certain natures of low vitality
from active sins, while the greater a man’s
powers, the more chances he has of going
wrong. Yet outside a few specialised
circles, the Church cannot be said to
honour the one-horse-power type of char-
acter. Great characters, if they do more
wrong, will do more right. The true type
of active Christian is our King Edward I,
with his motto Pactum serva, not ashamed
to burst into tears before his people and
own himself in the wrong. Our Lord him-
self was blamed because he liked the society
of harlots and collectors. Do we suppose,
that these people were tame cats? I cannot
134 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
help thinking that Nietzsche was in this
ſº respect led astray by the social antipathies
of his highly respectable relatives at Naum-
burg. The lay figure against which he tilts,
| in the character of the Christian ideal, is
\
|
|
|
|
'Judicrously untrue to reality.
Tastly, it must be said that Nietzsche
misconceived the Christian doctrine of
equality before God. That doctrine as-
iserts that every soul has an eternal value,
none is merely a thing, a tool. Nietzsche,
it is true, would deny this, except for the
few. But when he goes on to say that
Christianity makes all souls equal, in the
sense that it denies the aristocracy of
: character, he is asserting the direct con-
trary of the fact. This alleged over-
democratic character of Christianity is
not there. In its doctrine of the saints, it
asserts clearly definite degrees and carries
them beyond this life. Further, it goes on,
to say that what matters is the whole per-
sonality. That, indeed, sometimes under-
goes a cataclysmic change in the process
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 135
we call conversion. But this is not uni-
versal. The point is that neither on
earth nor beyond it does Christianity
deny the “aristocracy of character”—al-
though it has never, like Nietzsche, as-
serted its right to tyrannise in virtue of
superiority.
Nietzsche charges against the Christian
Church all the developments of the modern
democratic ideal. I would that more of
these developments were chargeable there-
to. Yet even socialism he appears to have
misunderstood." Socialism is a means to
an end: it demands no more than equality of
opportunity; it does not assert identity of
gifts for every man. Nietzsche, doubtless, is
opposed alike to socialism and to individual-
ism, because they each assert the worth of
every individual and merely differ in the
means whereby they promote it. But it
is not true to assert, as Nietzsche does,
that either asserts or even implies that all
* “Nietzsche probably misunderstood the inmost meaning of
democracy.” (Wolf, The Philosophy of Nietzsche.)
136 THE WILL to FREEDOM
men are of equal power. A few extreme
democrats may do this, just as a few ex-
tremists may deny any select moments
or epochs in history. But such a charge
is contrary to fact in regard to nearly all
believers in democracy, whether Chris-
tian or not. Moreover, the Christian
Church, in its sense of the sanctity of
marriage and the unity of family life, has
been and remains, sometimes almost in
spite of itself, a chief barrier to that un-
regulated individualism, “the mishmash of
the mob,” which Nietzsche condemns.
Nietzsche says a great deal about “the
pathos of distance,” and is very anxious
that the sense of difference, of distinction,
between men shall increase. He would
base all this upon a radical difference of
nature, and, in so far as this is the case,
Christianity would be opposed thereto.
Once, however, admit the common human
quality, i. e., capacity for choice and for God
of every “even-Christian,” and the Church
will really operate, is operating now, in
*
NTETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 137
the direction which Nietzsche desired. This
happens in more ways than one. First,
the modern world is religiously hetero-
geneous. Christians are but a part of
it. More and more will the Christian
tend to be separated by the fact of his
Christianity—the words “a royal nation,
a peculiar people” are bound to have a
more immediate application, as the pres-
sure of religious competition increases.
Secondly, in the Christian ideal there is
latent a certain Vornehmheit. Nietzsche
never realised that it is the sinner who is
always commonplace, the real saint who
is the distinguished person. Nietzsche's
beloved Borgia were vulgar enough; it
was Michelangelo and Savonarola, Con-
tarini and Pole who had true distinction.
Most of us know some in whom the per-
fection of Christian saintliness has reached
that miracle of refinement. A certain
dignity and detachment, a certain grace
of holiness seems to attach to such natures,
and they attain a charm given by nothing
138 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
else; neither by high birth nor by high
culture. Thirdly, Christianity asserts for
every man a definite idea, a place in the
Ringdom. None, it declares, there is, how-
ever lowly, who has not in him something
that is a beauty all his own. Nietzsche
denies this, and asserts it only of the few;
although he gives no criterion to distin-
guish the classes.
True, Christianity is a fellowship, a
common life. It teaches that no one can
reach his end in isolation. So did Nietzsche,
however high the value he set upon lone-
liness. The qualities he desiderates—power
to command, a certain proud obedience,
refinement, distinction of manner—can
none of them be won except at the cost of
a strong social discipline. His idea of
Vornehmheit has no meaning whatever out
of society. What he says of the need of
severe schooling shews how well aware he
is of the social element, even in the making
of the superman. True, he appears to
teach that, once his superman is made, he is
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 139
free from all social restraints. Even this is
doubtful; he would be restrained in his
dealings with his peers, though not with
the herd.
Modern knowledge has shown that after
all there is something in the idea of race,
of good breeding, of family. This eugenic
notion of a carefully prepared birth-issue,
is what Nietzsche rested upon at the last.
Nor is there anything in this (provided cer-
tain safeguards are taken) which Chris-
tianity need object to. The multiplication
of the unfit—provided we know what are
truly unfit—it is no concern of the Church
to preserve; although it is concerned (un-
like Nietzsche) for their proper treatment
when once they are here.
Even in politics the aspirations of the
most ardent social reformers have passed
away from that vast state, the “all too
many,” as fairy godmother, and are all
in favour of groups as the only effective
method of securing good conditions on a
large scale. Such groups (even in a sys-
140 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
tem of guild-socialism) will not be equal—
a group of doctors or artists would be
different in all its requirements from a
group of engineers. Each will have its
own place. The honour and austerity of
its life and its dignity will be enhanced
by the fact that hereditary influences are
bound to have much influence in helping
towards membership, as they do now.
Even Nietzsche once admits that there
is something common running through all
men. Christianity teaches that the lowest
of us is not too low to be redeemed by the
blood of Christ, and that the noblest is
not so high that he needs no forgiveness.
In this we are diametrically opposed to
Nietzsche, who would divide the world
at birth into those who are and those
who are not capable of rising above the
herd; although even for the former dis-
cipline is needed. We have seen, more-
over, that Nietzsche was unconsciously
Christian in his conception of the tragic na-
ture of existence as against the facile opti-
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY I41
mism of Strauss and the Hegelians, in his
sense that redemption is needed, and that
this can come only by a “new creature.”
Further, there is something analogous to
Christian thought even in Nietzsche's Be-
gond Good and Evil. What that book at-
tacks is the ethics of Kant and all other
codifiers of the Categorical Imperative.
Christianity is not a code, but a spirit.
Love to God and to our neighbour is the
principle. The ordinary rules of morals are
merely formulae, which express the ap-
plication of this principle under normal
conditions. There are cases when they
do not apply. That is the excuse for
casuistry, which discusses all these cases
on the edge. It is true, for instance, that
necessity knows no law. Salus populi su-
perma lea:—is the motto for certain rare con-
ditions which justify the disregard of all
normal rules. The error of Machiavelli
and all who follow him is that they raise $º
cases of necessity into the normal rule of
action. They are an instance of the mis-
I42 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
take of trying to legislate for hard cases."
Nietzsche discerns the truth of the matter
when he says that acts “done for love
are beyond good and evil.” Nietzsche's
system, as practically applied, is wrong,
for it would make normal what is meant
to be exceptional. But it must be pointed
out, that his polemic against conventional
morality is less anti-Christian than he sup-
poses, and that his error springs from the
fallacy frequent in Germany of identify-
ing Christian morality with the systems of
some philosophers who are either not
Christian at all, or else very partially so.
It has appeared, then, that much of the
attack of Nietzsche is due to misconcep-
tion. Is it, then, the case that Nietzsche
was, after all, only a Christian who had
lost his way,” that his own system was,
1 On the relation of Nietzsche to Machiavelli, cf. Caffi's Nietzsches
Stellung zu Machiavellis Lehre.
I have said something on this topic in From Gerson to Grotius,
chap. III.
* “Il Nietzsche, invece, era nel fondo un’ anima assai cristiana
e non ingiustamente è stato chiamato da qualcuno un ‘prete de-
cadente.” L'ideale del superuomo corrisponde un poco a quello
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 143
had he but understood it better, the same
thing so far as rules of conduct went?
No. True, some like Mr. Stephen Graham
may say that Nietzsche was on his way to
become a transcendent Christian. That
may be, for he was always changing. But
it is unlikely, unless his view of the non-
existence of the supernatural had altered.
We must take him as he wrote. Had he
not gone mad, he might have become
saner. It is true, also, that Nietzsche's
ideas have very much more affinity with
the truly Christian conception of life
than had the moral ideas of Strauss or of
any other of the Pantheistic philosophers
whom he superseded. It is true, also,
that his attitude to life is at bottom mys-
tical. He sees that man as he is is not a
beautiful sight. He sees the wickedness
del Cristo—l'accettazione del male corresponde all cristiana
accettazione del dolore—il sacrifizio degli inferiori alla futura
vita superiore, al sacrifizio della vita attuale per la beatitudine
della vita futura. I superuomini somigliano oltre che ai guardiani
della repubblica platonica, anche ai monaci soldati, ai Templari
o ai cavalieri di Malta, e il Nietzsche é arrivato a scrivere che
‘chi vuol impiegare il suo denaro da spirito libero deve fondare
istituti sultipo dei conventi.” (Papini, 254.)
144 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
\
l
of pessimism. Pessimism, the nay-saying
to life, is ten thousand times more wicked
than all the variegated blasphemies of
Nietzsche. Man can be saved only by
i
becoming changed in his nature. That is ,
the Christian doctrine of grace. Nietzsche
is nearer to this than are those who preach
a dogma of inevitable progress or those who
deny sin. Sin Nietzsche admits practically,
though not theoretically; it is the instinct
of decadence. Also, when Nietzsche talks
of the rarity of the higher man, he is more
like Christianity than those who teach
the contrary. Christians are, and are
likely to be, a minority. Only persecution
or its results have obscured that fact. We
are not yet rid of the confusion between
Christianity and citizenship. Distinction,
further, is the outward and visible sign of
an invisible grace, the sacrament of per-
sonality—it depends on a consecrated will.
It is a will consecrated to God that marks
the Christian, not emotion or knowledge.
In his insistence on the will and its train-
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 145
ing Nietzsche is in harmony with Chris-
tianity and with the characteristic Eng-
lish conception of education. Even the
ideal of the superman enshrines the truth
that individuality or group distinction has
its own quality, and that man is of worth,
through something inherent and inalien-
able in himself." All forms of Christianity
admit this, except the heresies which are
toppling into Pantheism. Nietzsche's ha-
tred of equality in the sense in which he gives
it is not belied by Christian sentiment.
His idealisation of heroism—his use of
suffering, the religion of valour—is only
the ancient doctrine of the Cross taught
by Jesus Christ, palpitating in St. Paul
and the whole New Testament. Even
1 “Der christliche Altruismus, so fern er dem Kraft- und Ent-
wicklungsideal Nietzsches steht, teilt mit ihm doch den Gegen-
satz gegen alle in engerem Sinne bloss moralische und soziale
Idealbildung; nicht in der altruistischen Handlung als soleher,
sondern in der Heiligung und Seligkeit der Seele, die deren Innen-
seite bildet, liegt der abschliessende Wert.” (Simmel, 202.) Cf.
also a little earlier.
“Wenn der reiche Jüngling sein Gut an die Armen verschen-
ken soll, so ist das keine Anweisung zum Almosengeben, sondern
ein Mittel und Zeichen der Vollendung und Befreiung der Seele.”
(Simmel, 201.)
$
146 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
what he says of the barbaric virtues, his
new commandment, “Be hard,” might per-
haps be interpreted as little more than a
warning against that pity which is born
of cowardice, or that sympathy which is
a form of luxury. All this may be said.
Also it is added that Nietzsche is care-
ful to distinguish Christianity from its
Founder. He is the author of the saying
that there has been only one Christian,
and he died upon the Cross. This quali-
fication, however, is but a slight one.
All that can be said is that the venom
which we note in his attack on St. Paul
and the New Testament is less apparent
in his words about Jesus of Nazareth.
One or two places show a certain rever-
ence. In the main, however, he treats
Him with contempt. Jesus is to him a
decadent, a madman (curiously enough,
Nietzsche attacks others for the idiosyn-
crasies of his own temperament). He had
the melancholy of an ill-nourished person:
was the most ill-natured of all men, suf-
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 147
fering from a lunatic pride, which took
delight in humility.” He died for His own
guilt. He led an indefensible revolt. The
sermon on the mount is not spoken from
an elevated standpoint, The distinctive
note of Jesus is His hatred of all actuality.
Nietzsche wishes Dostoieffsky could have
described the world of morbid unreality in
which Jesus lived, and written the life “of
this most interesting decadent.” He sums
up at the close of Ecce Homo: “Have you
understood me, Dionysos or Christ?”
Had Nietzsche corrected those miscon-
ceptions of which I spoke, his ideal of con-
duct would still remain fundamentally an-
tagonistic to the Christian. Nor need one
be so cruel as to tear from his melancholy
* “Jesus mit der Melancholie der schlechten Ernährung.
“Jesus: will dass man an ihn glaubt, und schickt. Alles in die
Hölle was widerstrebt. Arme, Dumme, Kranke, Weiber, Kinder,
eingerechnet Huren und Gesindel von ihm bevorzugt: unter ihnen
fühlt er sich wohl. Das Gefühl des Richtens gegen alles Schöne,
Reiche, Mächtige, der Hass gegen die Lachenden. Die Güte
mit ihrem grössten Contrast in einer Seele; es war der böseste
aller Menschen. Ohne irgend welche psychologische Billigkeit.
Der wahnsinnige Stolz, welcher die feinste Lust an der Demuth
hat.” (Werke, XIII, 305.)
“Man verkenne doch ja nicht den tiefen Mangel an Noblesse
des Gefühls in Christus.”
148 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
brows that laurel-wreath which he himself
had placed thereon—the title of Antichrist."
The cardinal objection is this: Nietzsche
sets before us the ideal of redemption by
the superman. The whole point, then, is
what content he pours into this vague
and plastic conception. Nietzsche's ideal {{
is essentially anti-Christian. It is based |
on the notion of pride. Not only is it |
anti-Christian; the superman, as Nietzsche"
preaches him, is inexpressibly vulgar. The
notion of force without any direction—
for he says repeatedly that life has no
meaning or goal—would ultimately be no
less destructive of the culture which
Nietzsche desired. As Doctor Tönnies
points out in his little book Der Nietzsche-
Kultus, all the highest culture in the world
comes from treating men as bound in
fellowship, not from mere tyrannic pride.”
\
}i
* “Wollen Sie einen neuen Namen für mich P Die Kirchen-
sprache hat einen: ich bin . . . der Antichrist.” Nietzsche to
Malwida von Meysenbug. (Briefe, III, 603.)
* “Alle edlere, geistige Kultur, alles ‘höhere’ Menschensein
hat bisher noch—auch im ‘klassischen Altertum'—auf der breiten
Basis gesunden Bauer- und Bürgertums sich erhoben. Die sys-
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 149
The Renaissance was noble, in so far as
it worked upon the heritage of the Middle
Ages. When it became purely pagan, it
ceased to be interesting and lost refinement.
It may be said that Nietzsche qualifies
his cult of power with his cult of what is
distinguished. True—but what does he
mean by that? We can judge from the
persons he cites with most frequent admira-
tion. The Roman Empire, of which the
very essence is “that river of cruelty”
which according to Mommsen ran through
it in its relations to slavery: and that in
contradistinction to the Christian Church,
which would assuredly suffer a worse per-
secution, if Nietzsche's ideals were ever to
be really triumphant. He takes names:
Napoleon, and above all Cesare Borgia.
Now, we know pretty well the kind of man
Cesare was. The murder of the generals
at Sinigaglia under a safe-conduct, of his
tematische und massenhafte Sklavenwirtschaft war für die antike
Kultur ebenso ein Ende wie für die moderne die systematische
und massenhafte Proletarisierung des Volkes.” (Tönnies, Der
Nietzsche-Kultus, 105.)
I50 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
brother the Duke of Gandía, his mixture
of vulgarity and skill are familiar to all. It
is vain to say that Nietzsche did not want
these people now. They are the kind he
admired. His private letters to Peter Gast
and Georg Brandes make it even more
patent. Did Cesare Borgia advance culture
as much as a contemporary like Dean Colet?
Nietzsche's theory is at bottom a denial
of rights to the mass of men. It is a pro-
test carried to its utmost limits against the
maxim: “Homo sum, humani nihil a me
alienum puto.” Cicero's constant appeal
to humanitas would be anathema to
Nietzsche. The will to power, if that be
all reality, must perforce treat all else as
tools. The will to freedom is in essence
Christian, for it recognises in others what
it claims for itself. To Nietzsche, with all
outlook on the other world denied, men in
the mass are no more than living beings,
to be the instrument of the strong man’s
lust. The Putumayo atrocities, and others
more recent which we need not cite, are
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 151
in accord with his teaching. An author
must be judged, not by the actions which he
directly enjoins, but by the kind of spirit
which will naturally come of following
on his lines. Nietzsche need not be held
to have wished many of the things which
have happened. Yet they may be the nat-
ural outcome of his prophecies.
The system of Nietzsche is shattered
upon the rock of facts, just as ultimately
were the great slave empires of the past.
All are founded on a lie. Mr. Paterson
in his Nemesis of Nations has shown how
one after another empires have risen and
decayed through this very cause, that
they treated the vast mass as mere tools,
“chattels,” as the law said. This is a lie.
Treat human beings as machines as much
as you will, the fact remains that they are
incurably personal. Ultimately this truth
is destructive of the proudest tyranny,
though it may last a thousand years.
The passion and the pride of man are
for ever trying to loose all bonds, and to
152 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
enslave others to their will. It is a grave
Question whether that is not the real pur-
pose of modern capitalism. Those who
are forward to condemn Nietzsche should
ask themselves how far they allow them-
selves to be ruled by a like idea, how far
they are content to build their own devel-
opment, their culture and high tastes, and
even their religion upon the services of
masses of men—of whom they think as so
much machinery. We cannot in this or
any other form of society be free of using
the services of others. The point is, how do
we regard those who help us? The culture,
which is founded even in theory on the
denial of all share in it to the common
people, may for a time be brilliant; but it
lacks that freedom which is of the essence
of all living art. A society whose root-
notion is pride, which looks on the rest as
though in the slang phrase they “do not
really exist,” will in the long run develop
grosser corruptions. This is said to be the
cause of the decadence of Greece. Its art
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 153
became hedonist, and thereupon sensuality
ruled. Or else its aristocrats will become so
highly refined that the sight of the ugli-
ness of the life of the masses fills them with
horror, and they seek to remedy it. This
will be the case, even if “the pathos of dis-
tance” be mainly intellectual.
Some defenders of Nietzsche have argued
that in no real sense does he desire a tyranny
of masters, like that of the ancient world,
that his words about war refer only to
warfare of ideas, and that he had no sym-
pathy with the present plutocratic oli-
garchy. This may be true. It is irrele-
vant to the consideration of the meaning
of his substitute for the good tidings
preached to the poor. Nietzsche's moral
system is the apotheosis of pride. His
own feeling that he was of a different
rank to other men, that Zarathustra was
more wonderful than Faust or the Divina
Commedia;' his words about Wagner and
* “If all the spirit and goodness of every great soul were collected
together, the whole could not create a single one of Zarathustra’s
discourses.” (Ecce Homo, 106.)
154 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
many other expressions are evidence for
this megalomania. This was the oncoming
of disease. Yet it translates itself into
his ethical doctrine. As he claimed him-
self, his philosophy is eminently personal.
However much Nietzsche's wildness be
trimmed, his effect would be to endow the
5
“superior person,” out of whose loins the
superman shall come, with a sense of cold
aloofness from the rest of mankind, and
to destroy all sense of duty towards them.
Nietzsche admits this.
Nietzsche's gentle and delicate nature
is often pleaded in extenuation. The
truth remains that his doctrine is, what
it professes to be, a philosophy of force and
nothing but force, that it is certain to
stimulate that pride from which tyranny
comes in its disciples, and that it ministers
to the worst prejudice of cultivated men,
that other people are of no account.
\ Striking resemblances are to be found
between the doctrine of the Will to Power
of Nietzsche and the Elan vital of Berg-
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 155
son." But there is all the difference in that
one makes freedom the aim of development,
and the other power. For faith in freedom
means ultimately the belief in the reality of
spiritual forces other than oneself, and the
will to power means its denial.” Nietzsche
rejoices in that his superman will seem to
Christian moralists a devil. That must
be so, if pride and force be the only ideal—
even if one exclude physical force. The
great noon of the world will come, if it
ever comes, not when a modern Borgia
wreaks his will upon the weak; but when
pride itself becomes humble, when the lofty
looks are cast low, not from without but
from within, when real freedom is recog-
nised for all.
That Nietzsche's antagonism to Chris-
tian ideals was more radical than any
theological hostility was his boast in a
letter to his mother. His dubbing the
* This is seen in certain arguments, e.g., the Calvinistic, drawn
from the Omnipotence of God when he is conceived as earthly
autocrat.
* Cf. on this point Caffi, op. cit.
156 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
\
three graces, Faith, Hope, and Charity,
as the three Christian dodges is evidence of
this. His view of the primitive Christian
community as described in the New Testa-
ment goes farther. Let me quote what
he says:
“One does well to put on gloves when
reading the New Testament. The prox-
imity of so much uncleanliness almost
compels one to do so. We should as
little choose ‘first Christians’ for com-
panionship as Polish Jews. . . . Neither
of them have a good smell. I have
searched in vain in the New Testament
for even a single sympathetic tract.
There is nothing in it free, gracious,
open-hearted, upright. Humanity has
not yet made its beginning here—the
instincts of cleanliness are lacking. . .”.
There are only bad instincts in the New
Testament, there is no courage even
for those bad instincts. All in it is
cowardice, all is shutting of the eyes
NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY 157
and self-deception. Every book becomes
cleanly, when one has just read the New
Testament. To give an example, imme-
diately after Paul, I read with delight
Petronius, that most charming and wan-
ton scoffer. . . .
“Every expression in the mouth of
a ‘first Christian’ is a lie, every action
he does is an instinctive falsehood—all
his values, all his aims are injurious,
but he whom he hates, that which he
hates, has value. . . . The Christian, the
priestly Christian especially, is a crite-
rion of values. Have I yet to say that
in the whole New Testament only a single
figure appears, which one is obliged to
honour—Pilate, the Roman governor. To
take a Jewish affair seriously, he will
not be persuaded to do so. A Jew more
or less—what does that matter? The
noble scorn of a Roman before whom a
shameless misuse of the word truth was
carried on has enriched the New Testa-
ment with the sole expression which
158 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
has value—which is itself its criticism,
its annihilation. What is truth?” +
Zarathustra is a “strong, spontaneous,
adventurous individual.” So, also, were
St. Paul and St. Francis. High-hearted
courage has always been a Christian vir-
tue—the eagle's pride and the serpent’s
cunning with which Zarathustra conquers
may win an audience in days when old
bonds are broken. What is Nietzsche at
his noblest as compared with that ideal
which he contemns: “God is Love: and
whoso dwelleth in Love, dwelleth in God.
If a man love not his brother whom he
hath seen, how can he love God whom he
hath not seen P”
1 Antichrist, 314, 316.
IV
NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY
NOTHING is more characteristic of
Nietzsche than his claim to be original.
It is the creator of new values who is the
real revolutionary, he says. He is essen-
tially apocalyptic, and believes his power
to be that of inspiration. He gives us an
account of this, marred in its self-admira-
tion by no false modesty. Even the titles
of his books betray this apocalyptic spirit,
The Dawn of Day, The Twilight of the
Idols. It is well to have before us some
of these passages. For Nietzsche can
be judged only by himself. Books about
him crystallise into death the flaming
soul, which speaks in them:
“Has any one at the end of the nine-
teenth century any distinct notion of
what poets of a stronger age understood
159
160 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
by the word inspiration ? If not, I
will describe it. If one had the smallest
vestige of superstition left in one, it
would hardly be possible completely to
set aside the idea that one is the mere
incarnation, mouthpiece, or medium of
an almighty power. The idea of rev-
elation in the sense that something
which profoundly convulses and upsets
one becomes suddenly visible and audi-
ble with indescribable certainty and
accuracy describes the simple fact. One
hears—one does not seek—one takes—
one does not ask who gives: a thought
suddenly flashes up like lightning, it
comes with necessity, without faltering.
I have never had any choice in the mat-
ter. There is an ecstasy so great that
the universe strains, it is sometimes re-
laxed by a flood of tears, during which
one’s steps now involuntarily rush and
now involuntarily lag. There is the
feeling that one is utterly out of hand
with the very distinct consciousness of
NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY I61
an endless number of fine thrills and
titillations descending to one's very toes;
there is a depth of happiness in which
the most painful and gloomy parts do
not act as antitheses to the rest, but
are produced and acquired as necessary
shades of colour in such an overflow of
light. There is an instinct for rhythmic
relations which embraces a whole world
of forms (length, the need of a wide-
embracing rhythm, is almost the mea-
sure of the force of an inspiration, a sort
of counterpart to its pressure and ten-
sion). Everything happens quite invol-
untarily, as if in a tempestuous outburst
of freedom, of absoluteness of power
and divinity. The involuntary nature
of the figures and similes is the most
remarkable thing; one loses all percep-
tion of what is imagery and metaphor;
everything seems to present itself as
the readiest, truest, and simplest means
of expression. It actually seems, to use
one of Zarathustra's own phrases, as if
162 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
all things came to one and offered them-
selves as similes. (‘Here do all things
come caressingly to thy discourse and
flatter thee, for they would fain ride
upon thy back. On every simile thou
ridest here into every truth. Here fly
open unto thee all the speech and word
shrines of the world, here would all
existence become speech, here would all
Becoming learn of thee how to speak.')
This is my experience of Inspiration. I
do not doubt that I should have to go back
thousands of years before I could find an-
other, who could say truly, It is mine al-
so.” 1
“This work stands alone. Do not let
us mention the poets in the same breath.
Nothing perhaps has ever been produced
out of such a superabundance of strength.
My concept ‘Dionysian” here becomes
the highest deed; compared with it,
everything that other men have done
seems poor and limited. The fact that
* Ecce Homo, 101.
NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 163
a Goethe or a Shakespeare would not
for an instant have known how to take
breath in this atmosphere of poison and
the heights, the fact that by the side of
Zarathustra, Dante is no more than a
believer, and not one who first creates
the truth—that is to say not a world-
ruling spirit, a fate; the fact that the
poets of the Veda were priests and not
even fit to unfasten Zarathustra’s san-
dal—all this is the least of things and
gives no idea of the distance, of the
azure solitude in which this work dwells.
If all the spirit and goodness of
every great soul were collated together,
the whole could not create a single one
of Zarathustra’s discourses. . . . Until
his coming no one knew what was height
or depth and still less what was truth.
There is not a single passage in this
revelation of truth which had already
been anticipated and divined by even
the greatest of men. Before Zarathus-
tra there was no wisdom, no prov-
164: THE WILL TO FREEDOM
ing of the soul, no art of speech; in
his book, the most familiar and most
vulgar thing utters unheard-of words.
The sentence quivers with passion. Elo-
quence has become music. Forks of
lightning are hurled towards futures of
which no one has ever dreamed before.
The most powerful use of parables that
has yet existed is poor beside it, and
mere child’s play compared with this
return of language to the nature of
imagery.” ". .
One more passage, and that from Zara-
thustra, must be cited. This will give a
good notion of Nietzsche in his apocalyptic
robes of ceremony:
“False shores and false securities ye
were taught by the good. In the lies
of the good ye were born and hidden.
Through the good everything hath be-
come deceitful and crooked from the
bottom.
& 1 Ibid., 106.
NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 165
“But he who discovered the land ‘man,’
discovered also the land “human future.”
Now ye shall be unto me sailors, brave,
patient ones'
“Walk upright in time, O my brethren,
learn how to walk upright ! The sea
stormeth. Many wish to raise them-
selves with your help.
“The sea stormeth. Everything is in
the sea. Up! Upward | Ye old sailor
hearts 1
“What? A fatherland? Thither striv-
eth our rudder, where our children’s
land is. Out thither, stormier than the
sea, our great longing stormeth !
“‘Why so hard P’ said once the char-
coal unto the diamond, “are we not near
relations?”
“Why so soft? O my brethren, thus
I ask you. Are ye not—my brethren?
“Why, so soft, so unresisting, and
yielding? ºr Why is there so much dis-
avowal and abnegation in your hearts?
Why is there so little fate in your looks?
166 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
“And if ye are unwilling to be fates,
and inexorable, how could ye conquer
with me some day?
“And if your hardness would not
glance, and cut, and chip into pieces—
how could ye create with me some day ?
“For all creators are hard. And it
must seem blessedness unto you to press
your hand upon millenniums as upon
Wax
“Blessedness to write upon the will
of millenniums as upon brass—harder
than brass, nobler than brass. The
noblest only is perfectly hard.
“This new table, O my brethren, I
put over you: “Become hard l’.”
“But what say I where no one hath
mine ears Here it is still an hour too
early for me.
“Mine own forerunner I am among
these folk, mine own cockcrow through
dark lanes.
“But their hour will come ! And mine
will come also ! Every hour they be-
1 Zarathustra, 318–319.
NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 167
come smaller, poorer, less fertile. Poor
pot-herbs Poor soil
“And soon shall they stand there like
dry grass and prairie, and, verily, wearied
of themselves—and longing for fire more
than for water | *
“Oh, blessed hour of lightning ! Oh,
secret of the forenoon Running fires
shall I one day make out of them and
announcers with fiery tongues.
“Announce shall they one day with
fiery tongues: ‘It cometh, it is nigh, the
great noon l’”
“But I and my fate, we speak not
unto To-day. Nor do we speak unto
Never. For speaking we have patience
and time and too much time. For one
day it must come and will not be allowed
to pass by.
“Who must come one day and will
not be allowed to pass by ? Our great
Hazar, i.e., our great far-off kingdom of
man, the Zarathustra-kingdom of a thou-
sand years.”
1 Ibid., 252–253. * Ibid., 353.
168 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
The dithyrambic style of Nietzsche dis-
guises the fact that this revelation is not
really so new as he claims. The intensity
and vividness with which he felt his own
experience of this vision often blinded him
to the amount of his indebtedness to others.
His ever-present desire to be in reaction
against his environment led him to sup-
pose that his essays were more entirely
wnzeitgemässe than they were. Much of
his effort is merely towards a revival—an
anti-Gothic revival; classical, Pagan, Med-
iterranean. Even despite his attack on
the decadent Romanticism of the nineteenth
century, Nietzsche is essentially a Roman-
ticist. Much of his cult of the superman is
the romantic cult of the genius. Signor
Papini regards it as the chief sign of weak-
ness in Nietzsche that he is unable ever
to be authentically original." Curious it
is and worthy of note how much there is
of recollection in his writing. Part of its
* “La prova più inaspettata di questa fiachezza consiste, secondo
me, nella sua incapacità ad essere veramente ed autenticamente
originale.” (Papini, op. cit., 232.)
NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 169
charm lies in its power to call up memories.
His works are a veritable whispering gal-
lery of literary echoes. Nietzsche, who
condemns all second-hand culture, is em-
inently literary. Machiavelli certainly and
Gobineau probably have a good deal to
do with his cult of Cesare Borgia. Doctor
Thiele discerns in So Spake Zarathustra
the strains of influence of many kinds of
German literature in the nineteenth cen-
tury. Great, also, is Nietzsche's debt to
those Scriptures which he abhorred. The
title of his autobiography Ecce Homo af-
fords a striking instance of this. La Roche-
foucauld is not obscurely his chosen model
in his aphoristic vein—although for the
main part his aphorisms have not the
rapier-point of the great aristocrat. It
would be a good exercise in literary culture
to trace through Nietzsche's writings all
the various influences which moulded him
and are reflected in his style. What Herr
von Bülow said of his music and its rela-
tion to Wagner might be said of many
170 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
others of his productions in their literary
provenance."
All this does not seriously detract from
the greatness of Nietzsche. Long since
have we learned that the greatest literary
genius may borrow as much as he likes,
so long as he makes his takings his own,
and transfuses all with the alembic of his
own personality. Nietzsche does this in
an eminent degree. No writer is more per-
sonal. But he is not independent, despite
all his dithyrambic praise of solitude. In
spite of his hatred of sentimentalism, he
is above all things a “man of feeling,”
and is moved not so much by a positive
inherent power, as by irritation against
some other person or writer. His relation
* Dorner in his work Pessimismus, Nietzsche und Naturalismus
has avery acute summary of Nietzsche's position as a Romanticist.
I quote a couple of passages:
“Er spielt die antike Weltanschauung in mancher Beziehung
gegen die Christliche aus. Auch daist er Romantiker, er schaut
Seine Gedanken in die Vergangenheit, er nimmt was ihm passt
aus der Antiken, vor allem nicht ihr Mass” (p. 112).
“Kurz, Nietzsche verteilt eine Romantik des Lebensdranges,
des Machteffektes, die auf der Herrschaft des Naturalismus der
Zeit fusst und den Machttrieb vergöttert, der die Zeit bestimmt”
(p. 116).
NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 171
.**
to Wagner is typical. He begins with
friendship and adoration. These find lit-
erary expression in The Birth of Tragedy
and the Essays out of Season. When the
friendship has become enmity, he cannot
get the thought of Wagner out of his head,
and develops his new principles in oppo-
sition to him. Wagner and his wife, who
is probably “Ariadne,” count for a great
deal in Nietzsche's later writing, even
apart from those pages devoted to that
topic. The same is true of his attitude to
Christianity.”
Even his heroic moral attitude has at
times something rhetorical. Nietzsche be-
trays himself when, in order to prepare
his readers for an attack on the New Testa-
ment, he is forced to drag in a tag: “I
can’t help it. Like Luther, I say: ‘Here
I stand, I can do no other l’” This is
1. Cf. Bernoulli, Overbeck und Nietzsche, and also Bélart's re-
mark in Nietzsches Freundschafts-Tragödie.
* “Originalité disions-nous en parlant de l’animosité de notre
penseur à l'égard de la morale chrétienne; il faut s'empresser
d’ajouter qu'il n'est guère original ici que par ses excés.” (Seil-
lières, 210.)
172 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
eminently unspontaneous; very unlike
Luther.
The literary affinities of Nietzsche form
too multifarious a topic to be treated here.
Rather it is with his philosophic back-
ground that this lecture will try to deal.
Even then it will not be complete. In
an interesting essay in the International
Journal of Ethics, written some dozen years
ago, M. Fouillée writes as follows:
“Nietzsche has not that supreme orig-
inality which he claims for himself.
Mix Greek sophistry and Greek scep-
ticism with the naturalism of Hobbes
and the monism of Schopenhauer cor-
rected with the paradoxes of Rousseau
and of Diderot, and the result will be
the philosophy of Zarathustra.” "
And again:
“He fancies himself secure from the
prejudices which emanate from the “herd’
1 “The Ethics of Nietzsche and Guyau,” A. Fouillée, Interna-
tional Journal of Ethics, 1903, p. 13.
NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 173
or are due to environment, and yet no
one more than this singer of the praises
of force and of war has gathered together
into a single heap all the gregarious
prejudices from Germany still feudal in
the midst of the nineteenth century, all
those dominant ideas which spring from
the race, the environment, and the mo-
ment, and combined them with corre-
sponding ideas from antiquity, the Mid-
dle Ages, and the Renaissance.” "
We shall not be able to enter into all
the questions aroused by this passage.
But it may be worth while to take in turn
Nietzsche's relation to certain writers, from
whom he believed himself to be wide apart
as the poles.” In many cases that differ-
ence was real, yet he owed more to them
than he suspected. Having considered these
cases, we will pass to another writer, who
1 Ibid., p. 17.
* The extraordinary originality which enthusiastic Nietzscheites
found in his writings is mainly due to their own unfamiliarity
with the history of philosophy. (Wolf, The Philosophy of Nietzsche,
28.)
174: THE WILL TO FREEDOM
is usually credited with having been partly
the inspirer of Nietzsche, or if not that, a
more logical and thoroughgoing exponent
of the same doctrine, Max Stirner, the
author of Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum.
In this case I believe that the opinion is
not justified, and that Nietzsche, even if
he had read Stirner, derived little or noth-
ing from him. Nor would either have ap-
proved the other.
It may be well to say a few words about
the course which is best to take in order
to arrive at a comprehension of Nietzsche.
For the purposes of literary appreciation
some of his earliest books, such as the
Birth of Tragedy and the Future of our
Educational Institutions; for a complete
study all or nearly all must be read. For
obtaining illuminating critical views about
European culture, he may be opened al-
most anywhere. But for those who desire
quickly to know something of the Gospel
of One Superman, his third or last period
is alone of supreme importance. Nietzsche's
NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 175
course may be divided into three: the
Schopenhauer-Wagner period, The Birth
of Tragedy, and the Essays out of Season,
etc. Then comes a period of intellectual-
ism of which Human, All Too Human is
the most important work; although the
Joyful Wisdom and the Dawn of Day must
be assigned rather to that than the suc-
ceeding time. In Human, All Too Human
Nietzsche wrote on the side of intellec-
tualist, scientific methods, and was much
under the influence of Paul Rée (although
he did not admit this). In this time he
was more purely sceptical than at any
other; in his reaction against Wagner he
sets the relation of art to science in pre-
cisely the opposite light to that in which
his earlier and his later works regard it.
His sympathy for the English Darwinian
school and the English psychologists is
great, and is unlike his later (or earlier)
attitude. The most misleading of all ways
of reading Nietzsche is to regard anything
said in Human, All Too Human as author-
f
!
176 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
itative for his later and most characteristic
stage. For instance, he uses expressions
here which imply an attitude to war—
which is at variance with all he says later.
Wagner, to whom this book was sent,
regarded it as a proof of mental weakness,
declaring that he and his wife had already
noticed traces of this during his visits to
Triebschen. Had Nietzsche continued in
the line of this book, there would have
been little beyond his literary brilliance to
distinguish him from many other posi-
tivists. Nietzsche, as the apostle of the
superman is to be read primarily in Also
Sprach Zarathustra. This cryptic work
needs a commentary, as Nietzsche him-
self was aware. All the later works, Be-
gyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of
Morals, The Wagner Tracts, and above
all the posthumous Will to Power and
Ecce Homo and The Antichrist are to be
used for this end. When we speak of the
Nietzschean doctrine, it is of the Nietzsche
of this last period that we speak. Nor
NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 177
can it be disproved by citations from the
second period." Books about Nietzsche
are legion. Simmel’s Schopenhauer und
Nietzsche is very illuminating. As a guide
to the ordinary reader Doctor Mügge’s
work is of value. It contains an account
of the life, an analysis of his works in order,
and an attempt at appraisement which is
neither partisan nor hostile.
Emmanuel Kant, the philosopher of
Königsberg, is one of Nietzsche's most
common targets. Nietzsche is never weary
of mocking him. He makes puns on the
name to his discredit. He treats the doc-
trine of the Categorical Imperative as
hypocrisy. He is contemptuous of Kant's
Christian or semi-Christian attitude, of the
value he sets on each individual, and so
forth. He quarrels with his distinction be-
tween phenomena and noumena. Nietzsche's
phenomenalism is so radical that he denies
1 This seems to me an error in Doctor Wolf on The Philosophy
of Nietzsche. He cites passages from Human, All Too Human, as
though they were decisive evidence in regard to Nietzsche's final
doctrine. Mügge, Friedrich Nietzsche, describes the three periods.
I78 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
it to be phenomenalism, for that word im-
plies a reality of which it is the appearance.
These things and others in Kant are a target
not merely for the general scorn in which
Nietzsche holds German writing and Ger-
man philosophy, but for special and pecu-
liar mockery. Yet, Nietzsche not only
owed a great deal to Kant, but in some
respects he actually developed his doc-
trine." Kant is really the critic and the
destroyer of rationalism. He shews rather
the limits than the powers of the human
reason. Further in his doctrine of the
practical reason, he shews the regulative
value of those ideas, God, Freedom, and
Immortality, of which he denied the possi-
bility of demonstration. The modern anti-
intellectualist pragmatist movement in all
its forms owes much to Kant.
Nietzsche, it is needless to say, did not
believe in the three great ideas of the
Practical Reason as propounded by Kant.
1 Waihinger, Die Philosophie des Als Ob, 772, admits that Nietz-
sche took much from Kant, though not from the Kant of the
text-books.
NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 179
Yet the best and most influential part of
his purely philosophic writing is his acute
criticism of the rationalistic habit of mind.
As he said in a letter to Brandes, he had
arrived at a state in which he disliked
dialectic and even the sense of grounds for
an opinion. This is due not to his making
up his mind apart from all reasoning, but
to the way in which long brooding affects
one. Arguments are considered on either
side, but eventually there arises a unity,
in which all seems clear. Then it seems
silly and degrading to grope about for
reasons now forgotten, when, besides, the
conviction is so much more solid than the
mere conclusion of an argument.
To return to Nietzsche and his attack on
logicians. The philosopher's trust in dia-
lectic is, like everything else, merely a
form of the will to power. His desire is
to rule. So he asserts the superiority of
that in which he is an adept. More than
that, logic in itself, the whole method of
the reasoning faculty, is without any ref-
180 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
erence to reality. It is merely the outcome
of the instinct to control.
The object of science is to enslave na-
ture. Truth is merely that form of il-
lusion which enables one best to live.
Logic, the cutting of the world into little
bits, and treating it as machinery, is not
even an elementary guide to reality. Even
its ultimate principle, the necessity of in-
ference, given certain premises, is dictated
only by the will to power; e.g., it is fatigue,
not love of knowledge, that drives us to
seek unity—and reason is the principle of
unity. Let me cite what Nietzsche says:
“Logic is the attempt on our part to
understand the actual world according
to a scheme of Being devised by our-
selves; or, more exactly, it is our at-
tempt at making the actual world more
calculable and more susceptible to for-
mulation, for our own purposes. . . .
“In order to be able to think and to
draw conclusions, it is necessary to
NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 181
acknowledge that which eaſists: logic only
deals with formulae for things which are
constant. That is why this acknowl-
edgment would not in the least prove
reality: “that which is is part of our
optics. The “ego” regarded as Being
(not affected by either Becoming or
evolution.)
“The assumed world of subject, sub-
stance, ‘reason, etc., is necessary: an
adjusting, simplifying, falsifying, arti-
ficially separating power resides in us.
“Truth’ is the will to be master over the
manifold sensations that reach conscious-
ness; it is the will to classify phenomena
according to definite categories. In this
way we start out with a belief in the
‘true nature’ of things (we regard phe-
nomena as real.) *
“Thus it is the highest degrees of ac-
tivity which awaken belief in regard to
the object, in regard to its ‘reality.’ The
sensations of strength, struggle, and re-
1 The Will to Power, II, p. 33.
182 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
sistance convince the subject that there
is something which is being resisted.
“The criterion of truth lies in the
enhancement of the feeling of power.
“According to my way of thinking,
“truth” does not necessarily mean the
opposite of error, but, in the most fun-
damental cases, merely the relation of
different errors to each other; thus one
error might be older, deeper than an-
other, perhaps altogether ineradicable,
one without which organic creatures
like ourselves could not exist; whereas
other errors might not tyrannise over
us to that extent as conditions of ex-
istence, but when measured according
to the standard of those other ‘tyrants,’
could even be laid aside and ‘refuted.’
“Why should an irrefutable assump-
tion necessarily be “true’? This ques-
tion may exasperate the logicians who
limit things according to the limitations
they find in themselves: but I have
long since declared war with this lo-
gician’s optimism.
NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 183
“Everything simple is simply imag-
inary, but not ‘true.” That which is
real and true is, however, neither a
unity nor reducible to a unity."
“Life is based on the hypothesis of a
belief in stable and regularly recurring
things; the mightier it is, the more vast
must be the world of knowledge and
the world called being. Logicising, ra-
tionalising, and systematising are of as-
sistance as means of existence.
“Man projects his instinct of truth,
his “aim,” to a certain extent beyond
himself, in the form of a metaphysical
world of Being, a ‘thing in itself,” a
world already to hand. His requirements
as a creator make him invent the world
in which he works in advance; he antic-
ipates it: this anticipation (this faith in
truth) is his mainstay.
“All phenomena, movement, Becom-
ing, regarded as the establishment of
relations of degree and of force, as a
COntest. . . .
1 Ibid., p. 49.
184 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
“As soon as we fancy that some one
is responsible for the fact that we are
thus and thus, etc. (God, Nature), and
that we ascribe our existence, our hap-
piness, our misery, our destiny, to that
Some one, we corrupt the innocence of
Becoming for ourselves. We then have
some one who wishes to attain to some-
thing by means of us and with us.
“The ‘welfare of the individual” is
just as fanciful as the ‘welfare of the
species’: the first is not sacrificed to
the last; seen from afar, the species is
just as fluid as the individual. ‘The
preservation of the species’ is only a
result of the growth of the species—that
is to say, of the overcoming of the species
on the road to a stronger kind.” "
This psychological attempt to explain
the growth of intellect as a development of
the will to power is not indeed conducted
on the same lines as Kant’s critique. It
* Ibid., p. 61.
NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 185
is more akin to those of Bergson and some
of the Pragmatists. Like theirs, it is largely
due to the notion of biological evolution, and
the sense that intellect is itself a product of
those physical forces which we see in nat-
ural development.
For all that, Nietzsche owed a great
deal more to the work of Kant as a critic
of intellectualism than he would have cared
to admit. As Doctor Wolf puts it: “The
main point of his theory of knowledge, I
take it, was to bring out the human per-
spective involved in all human knowledge
–somewhat as Kant and others had done
»» 1
before him, only more so.
"The following passage is also pertinent:
(Werke, XIII, 85, § 214): “Die wissenschaftliche Genauigkeit ist
bei den oberflächlichsten Erscheinungen am ersten zu erreichen,
also wo gezählt, gerechnet, getastet, gesehen werden kann, wo
Quantitäten constatiert werden können. Also die armseligsten
Bereiche des Daseins sind zuerst fruchtbar angebaut worden.
Die Forderung, Alles müsse mechanistisch erklärt werden, ist
der Instinct, als ob die werthvollsten und fundamentalsten Er-
kenntnisse gerade am ersten gelungen wären: was eine Naivetät
ist. Thatsächlich ist uns Alles, was gezählt und begriffen werden
kann, wenig werth; wo man nicht hinkommt mit dem “Begreifen“
das gilt uns als “höher.” Logik und Mechanik sind nur auf das
oberflächlichste anwendbar: eigentlich nur eine Schematisir- und
Abkürzungs-Kunst, eine Bewältigung der Vielheit durch eine
Kunst des Ausdrucks-kein “Verstehen sondern ein Bezeichnen
186 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
Lastly, the “thing in itself,” which
Nietzsche so stoutly denied, was to a large
extent restored by him. In one aspect,
indeed, he is purely naturalistic. But like
Schopenhauer, he believed in a force be-
hind all phenomena, that “infinite and
eternal energy” (in the words of another
philosopher whom Nietzsche disliked),
which he calls the will to power. Kuno
Fischer long since gave grounds for sup-
posing that Kant’s “thing in itself” means
and was intended by him to mean no less
than Will. This view, if not precisely
established, has much to say for itself.
Nietzsche denied all metaphysical reality,
yet it is not difficult to see that his will to
power, if it is to have any meaning at-
tached to it at all (and he always repudi-
ated sheer materialism), is of the nature of
a spiritual force—The will that can,
Eacistent behind all laws, that made them and lo
they are.
zum Zweck der Verständigung. Die Welt auf die Oberfläche
reducirt denken heisst: sie zunichst “begreiflich’ machen.
“Logic und Mechanik beriihren nie die Ursächlichkeit.”
NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 187
To take one instance in detail. Kant
had pointed out that the uniformity of
nature, natural laws, etc., were not eternal
realities, properties of things in themselves;
they merely depend on our way of seeing
nature, they are the a priori condition of
our eacperience. After saying that cosmo-
logical proofs of God are purely regulative,
he goes On:
“All phenomena depend in the same
way a priori on the understanding, and
receive their formal possibility from it,
as when looked upon as mere intuitions,
they depend on sensibility and become
possible through it, so far as their form
is concerned. However exaggerated
therefore and absurd it may sound, that
the understanding is the source of the
laws of nature, and of its formal unity,
such a statement is nevertheless correct
and in accordance with experience. . . .
“The pure understanding is therefore
the law of the synthetical unity of all
phenomena, and this makes experience,
188 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
as far as its form is concerned, for the
first time possible.” Kant, Critique of
the Pure Reason, Max Müller’s transla-
tion, pp. 111, 112.
Nietzsche's criticism of science is analo-
gous, though different. Kant asks, how
knowledge is possible, assuming that we
have knowledge, at least of phenomena.
Nietzsche asks, what does knowledge mean?
His answer is that knowledge has nothing
to do with any so-called truth, but is
merely the complex of intellectual formulae,
by which that resourceful animal Man is
able to increase his power. Scientific
knowledge is not only not truth, but every
single instrument of so-called knowledge
is merely a convenient lie—i.e., it begins
by treating as static what is essentially
dynamic and splitting up the continuum
of life in flux into imaginary substances.
We are ever driven in the terrific whirl of
becoming. The very beginnings of scientific
method, which assumes a hard-and-fast
multiplicity of beings, are a fiction. Truth
NIETZSCEIE’S ORIGINALITY 189
is in Nietzsche's view that body of conve-
nient lies that helps us to live more power-
fully." The object of science is to enslave
the outward world, just as morals is that
other body of lies necessary for the will to
power of the majority, the oppressed classes,
to move towards reconquest.
Nietzsche gives us, then, a psychological
account of scientific knowledge which is
to set us free from fatalism. Kant gave
a deductive account of the origin of knowl-
edge, also designed to set us free. Both
taught the regulative rather than the
absolute value of the laws of nature and
of the whole body of so-called knowledge.”
Let us pass to another case in which
the disagreement was more violent, and
the dependence even more obvious—that
* Nietzsche, Werke, XIII, 102, § 239: “Das Leben bejahen—
das selber heisst die Lüge bejahen. Also man kann nur mit
einer absolut unmoralischen Denkweise leben.”
*Fatalism in another sense is inherent in Nietzsche's system.
How can there be freedom if the one force moving all reality is
blind will to power P No real choice is possible in Nietzsche's
system, and he himself denies all moral responsibility, but it is
freedom which he desires.
190 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
of Schopenhauer. Nietzsche's relation to
Schopenhauer is of capital importance in
any study of him. The question of his
debt to Kant is more academic. Nietzsche
had, as we know, for a long time been an
ardent disciple of Schopenhauer, and after-
wards turned against him. As against any
form of facile optimism he remained of
the same opinion; but from the “tragic”
standpoint, which is his final one, he as-
serts, as we saw in the second lecture,
that although the universe is a chaos, al-
though life has no purpose—moral, intel-
lectual, or artistic—although a blind will
to power is the sole reality and involves
suffering infinite, yet Life is still to be ac-
cepted in its entirety, that any form of
self-denial is a blasphemy against exis-
tence, and that the notion of redemption
from suffering, and therefore from exis-
tence, is radically false." Nietzsche does
1 Nietzsche, Werke, XIII, 90, § 228: “Die eigentliche grosse
Angst ist: die Welt hat keinen Sinn mehr. Inwiefern mit ‘Gott’
auch die bisherige Moral weggefallenist: sie hielten sich gegen-
seitig.” º
NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 191
not teach that suffering as such is an end.
Like Christianity, he asserts that pain and
pleasure are alike irrelevant in pursuit of
the main end, which is life and more
abundant life, and that whichever we
encounter, alike pain or pleasure, can be
made the basis, if accepted, of a richer
development. This doctrine is in direct
opposition to that of Schopenhauer. The
latter taught that the one reality is will,
that the restlessness of will produces life,
and with this as an inevitable consequence,
suffering; that the only means of redemp-
tion is by the will to love, i.e., pity—all love
is pity—overcoming the will to live. Self-
denial, therefore, in its literal sense, is the
sole virtue. Ultimately, the whole conscious
universe, which is the expression of the will
to live, will sink back into an eternal
Nothingness, after realising the mistake of
existence. This doctrine appears an unre-
lieved pessimism—although it may be to
some extent counteracted by the fact that
Schopenhauer did not approve suicide, and
}
-**-ºſ-
192 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
that he speaks with approval of the “mys-
tical” death of Quietists like Madame Guy-
on, and seems to leave a loophole for sup-
posing that Nirvana means something other
than actual annihilation. Still, Nietzsche is
justified in treating the redemption by
negation of Schopenhauer, as a no-saying
to life. His opposition to this is radical,
and it is justified.
Yet Nietzsche was in error when he sup-
posed that he had come out of the circle
of Schopenhauer’s influence. Both Scho-
penhauer and Nietzsche teach a phi-
losophy of the will. Along with Hart-
mann, whom Nietzsche so deeply despised,
they really rest on the unconscious and
subconscious to the depreciation of the
articulate elements in man. All three are
alike anti-intellectualist, although in very
different ways. Nietzsche is always psy-
chological, the others are metaphysicians.
Even allowing for the difference between
the will to live and the will to power, it is
not true to say that the systems are iden-
NTETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 193
tical. As Simmel points out, for Schopen-
hauer Will is the reality behind the world,
and will produces life. For Nietzsche life is
the ultimate reality of which will to power is
the expression. Schopenhauer would say:
“I live, because I will”; Nietzsche: “I will,
because I live.” Practically, however, it
remains true that both Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche, and Hartmann along with them,
teach a monism of Will, just as Hegel
teaches a monism of thought. Both Hegel
and Schopenhauer teach that the individual
is an illusion, the manifestation under
forms of time and space of an Absolute.
Only Schopenhauer’s Absolute is Will,
Hegel’s is the Idea, and is called Absolute.
Nietzsche would deny that he believed in
any Absolute. Now and then it would
appear that his life force is so highly con-
centrated in individuals, his theory of the
world as a chaos is so thorough, that his
individuals have more reality than those
of either Schopenhauer or Hegel. Yet on
the whole his philosophy is a monism with
194 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
the individual as the mere bubble on the
stream of the Will to Power.
Nietzsche is not a pessimist in Schopen-
hauer’s sense; yet neither is he an optimist.
His Amor Fati is a counsel of despair. In
Schopenhauer’s view the world is evil by
the very fact of its existence. Will is in-
satiable and restless. In producing the
multifarious world in order to satisfy it-
self, it is attempting the impossible. No
peace for it is possible, until it sinks into
Nirvana. On the whole, then, life is bad
and redemption is possible only by its
extinction. Nietzsche says that life has
no meaning nor moral. Therefore we are
to worship its ever-recurring monstrosity.
Let us pass to another influence, which
can be considered but briefly. Darwin
comes in for much of Nietzsche's contempt
(except in the Human, All Too Human
period). The Darwinian hypothesis of a
struggle for existence he regards as ab-
surd, arising out of the phenomenon of
an overpopulated island like England,
NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 195
where Darwin and Malthus were reared.
Yet few writers owed more to Darwin.
The influence of Darwin is the watershed
that divides Schopenhauer’s system from
that of Nietzsche, which is essentially one
of becoming. Nietzsche's conception of the
world as physiological development only—
his never-ceasing belief in evolution—even
his belief in the struggle for power, as the
key-word to all development, are really only
Darwin with a difference." Nietzsche's con-
ception of the Will to Power does give a
more plausible account of natural evolution
than that of the struggle for existence. Yet
clearly he got the former to a large extent
out of the latter. Moreover, it is doubtful
whether Nietzsche would have hit on the
symbol Superman, had not his imagination
been fired by the Origin of Species.” We can
* “Toutes les conséquences habituellement tirées du dar-
winisme par les partisans de la force, Surtout en Allemagne, nous
les avons vues se développer chez Nietzsche. Il est aristocrate
et ennemi de la democratie comme tous les darwinistes qui veulent
appliquer purement et simplement la loi darwinienne à la société
humaine.” (Fouillée, 253.)
* Nietzcshe, Werke, XIV, 261: “Meine Forderung: Wesen
hervorzubringen, welche tiber der ganzen Geltung “Mensch’ er-
haben dastehn; und diesem Ziele sich und “die Nächsten’ zu
opfern.”
196 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
see how much at one time this school at-
tracted him by looking at the writings of
his second period. M. Claire Richter has
written an interesting book on Nietzsche
et les théories biologiques contemporaines,
in which he seeks to show that Nietzsche
was unconsciously a disciple of Lamarck
rather than Darwin in certain important
aspects of the doctrine of the transmuta-
tion of species. This may be so, without
it affecting the other fact, especially since
M. Richter admits that Nietzsche was un-
conscious of his debt to Lamarck. The
truth is that, in regard to Darwin, Nietz-
sche went through his usual process. He
read him, was strongly influenced, then be-
gan to turn round and criticise. Finally he
poured scorn on the whole school, and
would have denied all affinity thereto. Dar-
win’s English quality was another draw-
back. Nietzsche might despise German
culture-Philistines, and go so far as to say
that even the presence of a German retarded
his digestion. Yet he despised the English
NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 197
even more heartily, and identified them
with a narrow utilitarian commercialism
and an equally pedestrial view in ethics.
In this, as in many other ways, Nietzsche
merely represented his own day in Ger-
many. He was more German than he sup-
posed. Doctor Georg Brandes, who has
been called l’inventeur de Nietzsche, considers
|his whole system the translation into terms
(of ethics of the Bismarckian era. Bismarck,
indeed, in his later years Nietzsche disliked
and thought him corrupted by the struggle
for power; while he declared that wherever
Germany extended her sway she ruined
culture." Yet it is the Prussian officer-
corps which had his admiration. We
know this on the authority alike of his
friend Deussen and also his sister. It
is militarism which is the best counter-
poison to democracy. The next century,
1 Nietzsche, Werke, XIII, 350: “‘Deutschland, Deutschland
iiber alles’ ist vielleicht die blódsinnigste Parole, die je gegeben
worden ist. Warum iiberhaupt Deutschland, frage ich, wenn es
nicht Etwas will, vertritt, darstellt, das mehr Werth hat, als
irgend eine andere bisherige Macht vertritt. An sich nur ein
grosser Staat mehr, eine Albernheit mehr in der Welt.”
198 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
he prophesied, would be the era of the
great wars, wars for the conquest of the
world, and he hints not obscurely in one
of the passages of the posthumous works
that England must be relieved of her
colonies, or at least that Europe must
come to an “understanding with her.“
by which he seems to mean subjugation.
Nietzsche's dislike of any kind of national-
ism has blinded some people to the fact
that his conception of the hierarchy of
society was more like that of the Prus-
sian monarchy than of any other part of
Europe.” It was not entirely that, for
* Werke, XIII, 352: “Englands Kleingeisterei ist die grösste
Gefahr jetzt auf der Erde.”
He appears to have wished Russia to have the hegemony of
Europe. The whole passage discussed is so important that I cite
it in full.
Werke, XIII, 358, § 881: “Um aber mit guten Aussichten in den
Kampf um die Regierung der Erde einzutreten–es liegt auf dem
Stand, gegen wen sich dieser Kampf richten wird–hat Europa,
wahrscheinlich nöthig, sich ernsthaft mit England zu ver-
ständigen; es bedarf der Colonien Englands zu jenem Kampfe
ebenso, wie das jetzige Deutschland, zur Einübung in seine neue
Vermittler- und Makler-Rolle, der Colonien Hollands bedarf.
Niemand nämlich glaubt mehr daran, dass England selber stark
genug sei, seine alte Rolle nur noch fünfzig Jahre fortzuspielen;
es geht an der Unmöglichkeit, die homines novi von der Regie-
rung auszuschliessen, zu Grunde, und man muss keinen solchen
NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 199
he did not put the soldiers first. Nietzsche,
like Bismarck, is one of the leaders of the .
reaction against the ideals of the French
Revolution. That reaction has had many
aspects. In some ways Nietzsche's is the
most radical, for it is based on a notion
independent of wealth or political rank
and regards the masses as mere means to
the man of true power. Nietzsche's new
order of rulers are not to claim, as in an-
cient aristocracies, that they are privileged
in virtue of their services to the com-
munity. Rather the community exists
to make them possible. Their raison d'être,
however, is far beyond themselves and
involves immediate sacrifice. They exist
to raise the type man, and with it to in-
augurate a higher culture.
This latter function it is which indicates
Wechsel der Parteien haben, um solche langwierige Dinge vorzu-
bereiten; man muss heute vorerst Soldat sein um als Kaufmann
nicht seinen Kredit zu verlieren. Genug: hierin, wie in anderen
Dingen, wird das nächste Jahrhundert in den Fusstapfen Napo–
leons zu finden sein, des ersten und vorwegnehmendsten Men-
schen neuerer Zeit. Für die Aufgaben der nåchsten Jahrhunderte
sind die Arten Öffentlichkeit und Parliamentarismus die un-
Zweckmässigsten Organisationen.”
200 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
the essential difference between Nietzsche
and a writer by whom it has been alleged
he was deeply influenced, Max Stirner.
Max Stirner is the nom de guerre of a cer-
tain Karl Schmidt who lived in the first
half of the nineteenth century, dying in
1856. He wrote a book on the History of
the Reaction, i. e., the reaction against the
French Revolution. It is, however, his
single work Der Einzige und sein Eigen-
thum, by which he is best known. This
book was not very well known at the
time, 1848. Perhaps it would never have
been dug out, had it not been for the
vogue of Nietzsche. Now it has been
published in an American translation with
a laudatory preface by Doctor Walker,
who proclaims its difference from, and,
in his view, superiority to, Nietzsche. I
believe that Doctor Walker is right in the
fact, although wrong in his estimate. It
must be said that the debt of Nietzsche
to Max Stirner is believed by many to be
great. Much is made of it by M. Fouillée
NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 201
in his interesting book on Nietzsche et
l’Immoralisme. One writer, Doctor Paul
Carus, in Nietzsche and other Ea:ponents of
Individualism, goes farther. Not only in
his words on Nietzsche's predecessor (pp.
74–92) does he assert the very strong
direct connection of the two, but he goes
on to say that Nietzsche's omission to
mention the fact that he had pillaged Max
Stirner for his characteristic ideas is not
to be wondered at. It is no more than
Nietzsche's application in his own person
of the doctrine that the superman is be-
yond good and evil, relieved of the ordinary
obligations of decent behaviour. Nothing
seems to me less fair than this judgment.
Nietzsche's non-mention of Stirner is cer-
tainly not decisive against his having read
him. Even if he had not read him, he
might have learned his drift from some-
body else. He must have known about
him, for Hartmann discusses him. That
he should have deliberately refrained from
mentioning Stirner in order to win a
202 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
spurious reputation for originality is not
in keeping with Nietzsche's character. Be-
sides, if that were so, traces of Max Stirner
would be found in the posthumous works.
The reason why I think that Nietzsche
could not have been influenced by Max
Stirner, except in certain non-essential mat-
ters, such as dislike of the democratic
ideals of the French Revolution, is that the
two systems are in reality antagonistic,
and only in appearance at all similar.
Stirner’s doctrine is briefly this: The one
reality is the ego, and he should aim at
treating the world as mere material for
his amusement. Max Stirner tries to
shew that Christianity did a service to
mankind in so far as it set them free from
the gods of this world and proclaimed its
nothingness in comparison with real satis-
faction. Unfortunately, it did this only
in order to introduce a deeper slavery to
abstractions concerning the other world.
All supernaturalism he condemns just as
Nietzsche does. But he goes on to say
NIETZSCHE’S ORIGINALITY 203
that every kind of moral ideal is only a
form of Supernaturalism, a ghost or bogie-
man with which we are terrified. The real
nature of religion is contained in this.
fact—it enslaves man to a principle. It
does not matter what the principle is. So
long as we allow ourselves to be directed
by it, we are not independent. The one
thing we know is ourselves—and we are
fools if we allow ourselves to be enslaved
to any form of authority, church or state
or class or tradition or morals. All these
things are dodges invented by other people,
in order that with their help they may
tyrannise over us. Not merely this. A
man is equally a slave when he is the
follower of an ideal, even though that
ideal be self-chosen. Justice is absurd,
for that is a social principle; and our sole
business is to use the universe for our-
selves. Truth, as an end, is no less silly,
for it prevents us doing what we want at
the moment. All ideals which look to
the future are of the nature of religion
|
204 TELE WILL TO FREEDOM
and are merely vain imaginations, bogies.
The ghostly world of our dreams is the
factory out of which men have invented
the supernatural. Afterwards this became
the ideal world of moral purposes. Then,
with the positivist gonception annihilat-
ing the supernatural and all idealist ethics,
there has come the idea of Humanity. All
these in turn are worshipped, and the last,
Humanity, the principle of the French Rev-
olution, is not the less dangerous, because
it comes in the form of enlightenment. At
bottom those who hold it are bogie-worship-
pers, no better than Christians. Even Free-
dom as an ideal is ridiculous, because it sets
forth a principle, which will interfere with
the ego.
The doctrine may be called radical
egoism. It is an unrelieved individualism
which would set the ego to work his will
in the world, treating everything else as
mere force, and might do good in pro-
tecting a man from the conventions of
his own past. Nothing but a calculation
NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 205
of probability could prevent his yielding
to his immediate impulses at any moment.
Nero appears to be admired by the author,
although one passage gives a hint that he
does not set forward a pure hedonism. If
this be so, we can only save his heart at
the expense of his head. On his own
theory, absolutely nothing ought to hinder
the ego at any moment, and self-realisa-
tion is interfered with when every imme-
diate pleasure is foregone in the name of a
future good.
Max Stirner's protest against the sen-
timental idealism of his day—the day of
Mazzini—is stringent enough in all con-
science, and for the most part unattrac-
tive. As a criticism it is acute. Like
Nietzsche, Max Stirner detests democracy,
and even more obviously than Nietzsche
does he express the movement of reaction
against the French Revolution and the
watchwords Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.
Like Nietzsche, Max Stirner disliked utilita-
rians, and, like Nietzsche, he scorned all
206 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
those new codes of ethics which are in
the eyes of their propounders to contain
all the essence of Christianity, divorced
from its dogmas. Like Nietzsche, he sees
the futility of expecting to retain the Chris-
tian values in human life, if the Christian
faith has gone by the board. Like Nietzsche
also, he saw that, apart from a Christian,
or at least an idealist, doctrine of the in-
dividual soul, there are no real grounds
for preaching a doctrine of fellowship or
humanity or the golden rule, or whatever
you call it. Here are a few passages:
“As long as you believe in the truth,
you do not believe in yourself, and you
are a servant, a religious man. You
alone are the truth, or rather, you are
more than the truth, which is nothing
at all before you.” "
“One has a prospect of extirpating
religion down to the ground only when
one antiquates Society and everything
that flows from this principle.
1 Stirner, 472. * Ibid., 413.
>> 2
NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 207
“The religious consists in discontent
with the present man, i. e., in the setting
up of a perfection to be striven for, in
man wrestling for his completion” (Ye
therefore should be perfect as your father
in heaven is perfect). It consists in the
fixation of an ideal, an absolute. Per-
fection is the ‘supreme good,’ the finis
bonorum ; everyone’s ideal is the perfect
man, the true, the free man, etc.
“The efforts of modern times aim to
set the ideal of the ‘free man.” If one
could find it, there would be a new relig-
ion, because a new ideal; there would
be a new longing, a new torment, a new
devotion, a new deity, a new contri-
tion.” +
The question is, is this doctrine of
unbridled egoism the same as that of
Nietzsche? I cannot think it. It may
plausibly be argued that if it is not what
Nietzsche meant, it is what he ought to
1 Ibid., The Ego and His Own, 321.
208 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
have meant. Or it may be said that ulti-
mately this is what Nietzsche's principle
would work out to, if accepted by the mass
of men. It may be so. My point is that
it is not what Nietzsche meant, nor any-
thing like what he meant: that it is in
direct opposition to some of Nietzsche's
most important principles, such as natural
asceticism, the sacrifice of ages in order
to speed the superman, the raising of the
type of man. Stirner protests against the
whole idea of the type of man. Nietzsche,
it is true, dislikes Humanity, and will
have nothing to do with equality; that is
because he wants to prepare the way for
something better, the reign of the super-
man—who would to Max Stirner have
been only a new bogie, worse than the old.
Here and there Nietzsche has a remark
which might have been suggested by Max
Stirner; even that is by no means certain,
although we are not concerned to deny it.
The essay of Max Stirner on The Untrue
Principle in Our Education in the volume
NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 209
selections by Mackay might have influenced
Nietzsche a little. In the main, Nietzsche’s
manner of presentment is so different, and
his doctrine so much more complex, that it
is hard to believe in any connection—unless
there be some direct evidence. That there
is not. Nietzsche's superman is an ideal.
It is the quality of a new aristocracy; no
one living now incarnates this higher man.
Good Europeans are to undergo severe
discipline in order that their descendants
may be supermen. The superman is sub-
ject to certain principles, which Stirner
would dub ghosts—courage and a high
heart, heroic endeavour, great sufferings,
great health, the refusal ever to say no to
experience. Nietzsche desired a body of
self-controlled rulers with distinguished
manners—every one of these qualities em-
bodies a principle, and requires discipline
and some kind of faith. Max Stirner’s
system may have some affinity with that
of Nietzsche. It embodies every one of
his worst faults with vulgarity added, and
210 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
would produce a world of pretentious
egoists. The superman, as the creator of
a high culture, is a very different ideal
from the ego with all the world for his
box of toys. Whatever Nietzsche may
have thought of Max Stirner, there can
hardly be much doubt as to what Max
Stirner would have thought of Nietzsche.
“Bah!” he would have said, “free air,
pure air. Get out of my sight with your
Gespenster, your will to power, your life
with a capital L, and your superman—
superghost you should have said. You
call yourself Zarathustra the ungodly, the
Antichrist, the creator of new values, the
destroyer, the immoralist. Go away ! You
are no better than the cobweb spinner of
Königsberg and his great-aunt the Cate-
gorical Imperative. Your eternal recur-
rence, and all your talk of eternity, the
aim of all delight, your belief in the genii
of the ring, your finding eternity in the mo-
ment recalls to me that hoary old humbug
of Jena, who found the Absolute Idea
NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINALITY 211
objectified in the Prussian state. As to
your superman, he is a ghost—like all
other ghosts, and your disciples will be
slaves like the rest of their crowd. Ideal-
ists, Comtists, Liberty-loving atheists—all
of you are no better than the Christians
you despise.
“Yes, I tell you you are a Christian, like
all the others, no better except that you
have added self-deception to their vices.
You think you are new, yet you are as much
a preacher of duty as Lycurgus. Your
Dionysos cult is religion back one more,
whether you call it Dionysos or Christ,
it is all the same, if you are to fall down in
reverence. Capital letters are all idola-
try. You even make an idol out of Life.
What is Life, pray, that I am to fall down
and worship it? I reject the monstrous
slavery of your amor fati. Besides, I know
nothing about it. I know only that I am
here.
“Poor fellow ! You have tried hard to
be shocking, and have succeeded only in
212 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
being silly. You actually talk of redemp-
tion, of the salvation of man. Go back
to your Frau Pastorin and to Church.”
V
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE
WHAT is the secret of Nietzsche's vogue 2
Even if we were to adopt the view of Signor
Papini, that the secret of Nietzsche, veiled
from us by a lofty eloquence, is weakness,
we should still be far from explaining the
spell which he exerts. That spell is a
fact. Nietzsche has some conquering
charm in him. By this he attracts not
only Nietzscheans pure and simple, whose
reading of his doctrine might not always
be acceptable to their master, but many
others. Superior persons, or those liking
the pose of aristocracy without its obliga-
tions, young men and even more young
women glad to be free of tradition find in
him a new-born hope;" Some philosophers
who disagree with him profoundly, and
1 Nietzsche made himself the exponent of a tendency, and as
such he has his followers among large masses of people whom he
despised as belonging to the herd.
213
214 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
Christians who are opposed to his central
doctrine may be found to admire and al-
most to love the hermit of Sils-Maria, the
prophet of Zarathustra, the singer of the
Eternal Recurrence. Musicians and educa-
tionists prize him for much that he says
about positive as against negative virtue,
and for the wide horizons of culture he
sets before his “higher men.” “Every
idiot fancies himself an Übermensch” was
a remark made once to me by an erudite
Bavarian. The pocket edition of Also
sprach Zarathustra marks a circulation of
close on 140,000. In the British Museum
there are to be found about one hundred
books and pamphlets on him in German
alone; many in other languages. M.
Bernoulli devotes two immense volumes
to the friendship between Nietzsche and
the Swiss historical theologian Overbeck.
Even his personal affairs are the subject
of almost a wide literature. What is the
meaning of this?
Not entirely, not mainly, his message.
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 215
Some people there have been who are for
treating Nietzsche as negligible and dis-
missing his criticisms as the ravings of a
lunatic. That is not a wise proceeding, as
M. Seillières points out at the close of a
work devoted to severe criticism, Apollon ou
Dionysos. Mere insanity would not have
given him such a vogue. Nowadays, at
least, his wide-spread prevalence makes
it impossible to leave him aside. Let us
take his influence as a fact, and in this
lecture try to gain some notion of his
charm. In the next we can consider his
importance. How much of enduring fame
he will win no one can prophesy.
First of all comes the fact of the ex-
traordinary personal character of all his
writings. We see in Nietzsche, no less
than we do in Newman, the literary ex-
pression of a soul on fire. Nietzsche will
not write until he has fused his brooding
thought into a unity of feeling. When he
does write, that unity of feeling is so deeply
concentrated that his very force tends to
216 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
take captive the reader, almost irrespective
of what he says. Schellwien" in his little
book on Stirner and Nietzsche pronounces
that he is so entirely a dogmatist in his
writing that one must always take him or
leave him, according as his ideas appeal
intuitively. Nietzsche felt this himself.
In a letter to Georg Brandes he said
that he had come to distrust dialectic and
even all grounds at all, i. e., he must go
by pure intuition.” This does not mean
that he took up notions at random;” rather
that he went through the long psychical
process of weighing and reconsidering, and
then, when the whole seemed clear, he
1 “Da sonach Nietzsche's Denken durch und durch dogmatisch
ist, so ist es kein Gegenstand für Diskussion. Werebenso glaubt
mages annehmen; wer es nicht glaubt, braucht sich nicht weiter
darüber zu beunruhigen.” (Robert Schellwien, Maa. Stirner und
F. Nietzsche, 27.)
* “In der Skala meiner Erlebnisse und Zustände, ist das Úber-
gewicht auf Seiten der seltneren, ferneren, diinneren Tonlagen
gegen die normaleren, mittleren. . . . Endlich—und das wohl
am meisten macht meine Bücher dunkel—es gibt in mir ein
Misstrauen gegen Dialektik, selbst gegen Gründe.” Nietzsche
to Brandes. (Briefe, III, 274.)
* Doctor Wolf points this out; although he rather underrates
the inconsistencies in Nietzsche—not the difference between the
three periods, but inconsistency at any moment.
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 217
kicked away the ladder, ending by think-
ing it a bore, a waste of time, to discuss
the grounds. If a person could not see
what he saw, Nietzsche would not convert
him by argument.
It is this power to write with blood of
which he boasts. Nietzsche, in his own
view, lived more deeply than other people,
and therefore, having mastered the art
of expression, he was able to write with
such compelling force. The certainty, the
prophetic conviction with which he writes
have in them something as of a vision, a
thing seen." More and more this note of
dogmatism has become effective in our
day. It is notable alike in philosophy, in
literature, in politics. The note of ab-
soluteness may do no more than express
1 Nietzsche in his later period laments the fanaticism of his
earlier writings. Yet in truth he grew more violent as he grew
older.
“Als ich jüngst den Versuch machte, meine àlteren Schriften,
die ich vergessen hatte, kennen zu lernen, erschrack ich tiber ein
gemeinsames Merkmal derselben: sie sprechen die Sprache des
Fanatismus. . . . Der Fanatismus verdirbt den Charakter, den
Geschmack, und zuletzt auch die Gesundheit.” (Werke, XII,
179.)
218 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
a strong personal idiosyncrasy. In this
age, however, unlike some others, this is
an advantage; the tentative scientific un-
derstatement is apt to repel. We can see
this in our political and artistic contro-
versies; in most of our popular essays and
in nearly all modern criticism. It may be
a consequence of the weakness of an age
which wants to be secured against its own
timidity. But it is a fact.
Secondly—but this is largely the conse-
quence of that personal quality—Nietzsche
strikes the imagination. This is what is
needed now to secure any man an empire.
Whether in politics or philosophy or busi-
ness, it is not intellect but imaginative
authority that wins a spell. Even if those
were right who identified the teaching of
Nietzsche with that of Max Stirner, they
would never be able to secure for the
latter one tithe of the popularity of Nietz-
sche.
Max Stirner lacks these qualities of style
and imagination. It may be said that all
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 219
this is briefly summed in the statement that
Nietzsche is a poet. That is true. “Art,”
we are told, “is the expression of sincere
emotion,” and judged by that canon
Nietzsche is an artist of no mean order.
His genius is essentially lyrical." That is
to say, it is his personal, individual feeling
which breaks into the “lyrical cry,” and
this feeling is always or nearly always
measured by some criticism of life. Thus,
his poetic quality embodies the two strands.
It is not mere singing, in some enchanted
garden, away from the drab dulness of
the world; it is not mere philosophy un-Z
informed by experience; it is the fusion
of the two by the alembic of a vivid per-
1 “When we read him, we are moved not by classic, but by
romantic art, he transfers us to the rococo world, not to that of
the Renaissance; he incites in us dramatic tension and lyric stress,
while he lacks epic calm and exuberance. But he is a master
of his art, and we might call him in a certain sense the Richard
Wagner of German prose.
“Long after his unjust warfare against Christianity, his con-
tradictory theories, which do violence to facts, his clumsy re-
constructions and exaggerations have been forgotten he will
be remembered as one of the greatest German stylists—as a
poet of powerful diction, as a master of language and of musical
declamation in words.” (Külpe, The Philosophy of the Present
in Germany, translated by M. and O. Patrick, p. 129.)
220 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
sonality, which gives Nietzsche his charm,
and will probably continue to give it.
Take, for instance, the Night-Song in
Zarathustra. This was one of Nietzsche’s
own favourites:
“‘Night it is: now talk louder all
springing wells. And my soul is a
Springing well.
“‘Night it is: only now all songs of
the loving awake. And my soul is the
song of a loving one.
“‘Something never stilled, something
never to be stilled is within me. It
longeth to give forth sound. A longing
for love is within me, that itself speaketh
the language of love.
“‘Light I am: would that I were
night ! But it is my loneliness, to be
girded round by light.
“‘Oh, that I were dark and like the
night ! How would I suck at the breasts
of light !
“‘And I would bless even you, ye
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 221
small, sparkling stars and glowworms
on high—and be blessed by your gifts
of light !
“‘But in mine own light I live, back
into myself I drink the flames that
break forth from me.
“‘I know not the happiness of the
receiver. And often I dreamt that steal-
ing was needs much sweeter than receiv-
ing.
“‘It is my poverty that my hand
never resteth from giving; it is mine
envy that I see waiting eyes and the il-
luminated nights of longing.
“‘Oh, unblessedness of all givers
Oh, obscuration of my sun Oh, long-
ing for longing ! Oh, famished voracity
in the midst of satisfaction 1
“‘They take things from me; but do
I touch their soul? There is a gulf be-
tween giving and taking, and the small-
est gulf is the most difficult to bridge
OVer.
“‘A hunger waxeth out of my beauty:
222 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
I would cause pain unto those whom I
bring light; I would fain bereave those
I gave my gifts to. Thus am I hungry
for wickedness.
“‘Taking back my hand when an-
other hand/stretcheth out for it; hesitat-
ing like %. waterfall that hesitateth
when-raging down—thus am I hungry
or wickedness.
“‘Such revenge is invented by mine
abundance; such insidiousness springeth
from my loneliness.”
“‘My happiness of giving died from
giving; my virtue became weary of it-
self from its abundance
“‘He who always giveth is in danger
to lose his sense of shame; he who al-
ways distributeth getteth hard swel-
lings on his hand and heart from dis-
tributing.
“‘Mine eye no longer floweth over
from the shame of the begging ones;
my hand hath become too hard to feel
the trembling of full hands.
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 223
“‘Whither went the tear of mine eye,
and the down of my heart? Oh, soli-
tude of all givers' Oh, silence of all
lighters'
“‘Many suns circle round in empty
space: unto all that is dark they speak
with their light—unto me they are silent.
“‘Oh, that is the enmity of light
against what shineth ! Without pity it
wandereth on its course.
“‘Unfair towards what shineth in
the heart of its heart, cold towards
suns, thus walketh every sun.
“‘Like the storm the suns fly on their
courses; that is their walking. They
follow their inexorable will; that is
their coldness.
“‘Oh, it is only ye, ye dark ones, ye
of the night who create warmth out of
what shineth ! Oh, it is only ye who
drink milk and refreshment from the
udders of light !
“‘Alas, there is ice round me; my
hand burneth itself when touching what
*
*
}
224 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
is icy Alas, there is thirst within me
that is thirsty for your thirst !
“‘Night it is: alas, that I must be
a light ! And a thirst for what is of the
night ! And solitude 1
“‘Night it is: now, like a well, my
longing breaketh forth from me. I am
longing for speech.
“‘Night it is: now talk louder all
springing wells. And my soul is a
springing well.
“‘Night it is: only now all songs of
the loving awake. And my soul is the
song of a loving one.’
“Thus sang Zarathustra.”
Nietzsche's sense of his own inspiration
finds vent in a highly charged passage of
Ecce Homo,” quoted in the last lecture.
The megalomania of that piece is repul-
sive. Yet, some of the analysis is acute.
Zarathustra—and that is Nietzsche at his
highest—has that quality of inevitableness
1 Thus Spake Zarathustra, II, The Night-Song, pp. 149–151.
* Ecce Homo, pp. 101, 106.
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 225
in the writing which belongs to the highest
art. The sense of far distances, of a trans-
lucent atmosphere as though the Alps
had made themselves into music, is with
us very frequently; also a certain irides-
cence of changing colours. One of the
minor merits of Nietzsche is the multi-
plicity of fresh landscapes and kaleido-
scopic variety of his pictures. As M.
Fouillée remarks :
* Sa poésie est un lyrisme puissant : sa
philosophie a je ne sais quoi de pittoresque
qui réduit l'imagination; c'est une série
de tableaux, de paysages, de visions et de
rêves, un voyage romantique en un pays
enchanté, où les scènes terribles succèdent
aux scènes joyeuses, où le burlesque s'in-
tercale au milieu du sublime. Nietzsche
est sympathique par les grands côtés. La
seule chose antipathique en cette belle
âme c'est la superbe de la pensée. Toute
doctrine d'aristocratie exclusive est d'ail-
leurs une doctrine d'orgueil, et tout or-
226 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
gueil n'est-il pas un commencement de
folie? Chez Nietzsche le sentiment aris-
tocratique a quelque chose de maladif.” "
Probably not a little of his attraction
for many is owing to this. This is the day
of flash-light and electric movement.
Nietzsche is like a motor, whirling the
occupant through many countries, giving
at once the sense of rapid movement and
of changeful beauty. His very inconsis-
tencies and the aphoristic habit are a
help in this respect.” Many of his books—
though not the best—can be opened and
read for a minute or two and convey in
this way both light and artistic pleasure.
*Fouillée, Avant-Propos, WI. The following passage is a good
instance of this.
“Wir sind die ersten Aristokraten in der Geschichte der Geister
—der historische Sinn beginnterstjetzt.” (Nietzsche, XI, 217.)
* “Les aphorismes conviennent à un public qui n'a ni le temps
ni les moyens de rien approfondir et qui s'en fie volontiers aux
feuilles sibyllines, surtout si elles sont poétiques au point de lui
paraître inspirées. L'absence même de raisonnement et depreuve
regulière préte au dogmatisme négateur un air d'autorité qui
impose à la foule des demi-instruits, littérateurs, poètes, musi-
ciens, amateurs de tous genres. Des paradoxes en apparence
originaux donnent à qui les accepte l’illusion flatteuse de l'ori-
ginalité.” (Fouillée, Avant-Propos, IV.)
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 227
This must be the case with a genius so
essentially pyrotechnic, with rockets and
Roman candles, and then the more elabo-
rate set pieces, to attract the deep “Oh''
of the crowd. For, although he despised
the crowd, it is to the crowd and to some
of the characteristics of an age of vulgar
machinery that Nietzsche owes part of
his popularity.
Not that he does not deserve it as a writer.
He worked at style. Early in his life he
declared that he was mastered by the
Categorical Imperative: Thou must write."
Nor must we call him a spontaneous artist.
That note of the inevitable, of inspiration,
is the end, not the beginning—it is the
flash of insight that comes at the end of
long, almost hopeless toil, the brilliant vi-
sion that is the reward of torments both
of body and spirit. Plainly he declares
that none but fools can suppose that writ-
* “Der Kategorische Imperativ, “Du Sollst und musst schrei-
ben,” hat mich aufgeweckt. . . .
“Es sei schwer gut zu Schreiben, von Natur habe kein Mensch
ein guten Stil, man miisse arbeiten und hartes Holz bohren, ihn
zu erwerben.” (Briefe, I, 52.)
228 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
ing is easy. He is right; what a pity they
do not abstain from publishing ! Countless
gibes he casts at the Germans for their
heavy feet in literature. Their clumsy and
awkward notion of style is a source to
him of frequent merriment. No one who
had so high a regard for French culture
would be likely to underrate the value of
polish. Nietzsche, moreover, is well aware
that great style is an imaginative quality,
not mere statement. Mr. Bernard Shaw
has done much to popularise Nietzsche
by “Man and Superman.” Yet the two
writers are poles apart. Mr. Shaw may
seem a poet to the German Chancellor.
That is akin to his other “errors.” Some-
where or other Mr. Shaw declared that
“effectiveness of statement is the one qual-
ity of good writing.” Were this true,
we ought all to go to school to that new
genre in literature—advertisement. Nietz-
sche saw just the opposite. Writing is akin
to music. It is an appeal to the subsconcious
more than to the logical faculty. Other-
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 229
wise mathematical treatises would be the
noblest literature, and the writer of an
index or a synopsis superior in many cases
to his original. Language is used some-
times, and Mr. Shaw lends colour to this
view, if he does not reach it, which would
imply that there would be little lost if,
instead of the thirteenth chapter of First
Corinthians, we had some such abstract
as the following:
Love, described by St. Paul, characteristics of,
more excellent than other gifts;
superior to (a) eloquence,
(b) martyrdom,
(c) faith,
(d) giving charity,
their worthlessness without love, as illus-
trated by (a) brass (b) cymbals;
its enduring quality;
self-emptying;
faith, hope, in what way inferior;
illustrated by author's own growth from
child to adult.
This dilemma, or something like it, is
what lies before the numerous people who
regard themselves as superior to the style
230 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
prejudice and condemn a work in propor-
tion as it is well written. Nietzsche, who
made so much of the rhythmic element,
the dance, knew very well that language is
a sacrament of the soul, and that style is
good or bad in proportion as it is able to
communicate this. He declares it in his
love of musical terms to be the communica-
tion by means of the rhythm and colour of
words of a certain tempo-i. e., the creation
of a condition in the reader—emotional,
imaginative, and intellectual. In another
place he says: “My style is a dance.”
In the degree in which this is done we
have really great writing. Most writing
fails in this, because it is too conventional,
not always because the writers do not feel
greatly. In early days all writing tends
to become a cento of conventional phrases,
e.g., children’s letters. Only later on does
self-expression in any degree become pos-
sible. That other ideal of Mr. Shaw means
self-expression of a kind, but only of one
kind—it assumes that all of us are per-
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 231
petually in debate, and that some form or
other of platform speaking is the end.
Even here, when platform speaking reaches
a high point, it passes with an orator into
something like poetic communication.
Nietzsche's interest as a writer comes
partly from this power of placing discus-
sions, apparently academic, in a setting
of beauty and imagination. This is mani-
fest in one of Nietzsche's earliest works,
a course of lectures delivered at Basle on
The Future of Our Educational Institutions.
The picture of the meeting of the two
students with the old professor and his
friend, and the overhearing of their con-
versation provides at once a scene into
which the reader can enter with sym-
pathy. Akin to this is another quality,
which comes of Nietzsche's passionate one-
sidedness. Not only has he come to see
everything in a unity, but he forces the
reader to do so, and persuades him before
he is aware. Some dialecticians will quietly
assume premises which cut off nearly all
232 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
the objections of their interlocutor. Not
by dialectic, but through the force of their
personality they prevent him remembering
these objections by driving all his energies
to defend what is really some side-issue.
Thus they win an easy victory. In the
field, thus artificially limited, they are right.
Some of Nietzsche's charm is due to this
method. In the Genealogy of Morals or
Antichrist he commonly discerns some
motive really operative among certain
people, e.g., resentment at weakness. Then
by his own chosen one-sidedness he isolates
this factor and by the force of his personal-
ity prevents the casual reader from seeing
any other. To a mind at all trained, his
early history of the Jewish people and of
early Christianity is a travesty of the
facts, no less than the attempt to make
our Lord the preacher of a Tolstoyan
Gospel of Quietism. Nietzsche owed to
Tolstoy and to Schopenhauer more than
he supposed. His account of the personal-
ity of Christ is merely a work of imagina-
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 233
tion; it ignores all the sterner side and
takes him as a preacher of non-resistance
pure and simple.
To take another instance. The Will to
Power truly expresses an important ele-
ment in all life; nor is it by a process of
far-fetched interpretation altogether im-
possible to reduce everything to scale.
The attempt, on the whole, is no whit
different from that of the hedonist, whom
Nietzsche despised, to explain all human
action by the motive of pleasure-seeking.
The process of interpretation in each case
has to be so elaborate as to deprive it of
all value. In The Will to Power the skill
of Nietzsche is shown not so much in the
expression of his principle, as in the pas-
sion of personal faith which possessed
him, and in his very contempt of demons-
trative reasoning. The reader who sees
a little and says, “That is true; I had not
seen it before,” is carried forward on a
sea of criticism, epigram, eloquence, and
passionate prophecy. Long before his crit-
234 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
ical faculty is awakened he may be swept
into the current.
All this springs from the fact we spoke
of earlier. Nietzsche is a dogmatist and
a preacher. In one place he said that any
one born with an ancestry of preachers
will tend to be dogmatic, to a “thus said
the Lord” method of discourse. In an-
other he alludes to his being descended
from a line of Lutheran pastors. Cer-
tainly his writings afford evidence of his
own theory. The closing passage of his
early piece on Wagner reads like the
peroration of a sermon.
While he is dogmatic and abusive, he
does not claim to be final. Superpapal
almost in his notion of infallibility, he re-
gards even the uttering of truth as an
adventure, and disclaims all idea of sys-
tem. The desire for proof, the anxiety of
scientific or statistical men for mathemat-
ical certainty he declares to be a sign of
counting-house blood. Science is the crea-
tion of fear, while art comes from courage.
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 235
People whose fathers and grandfathers
were clerks must always be coming to
conclusions. This is the foundation, this
and timidity, of the passion for certitude
and for the mechanical card-catalogue
method of knowledge. In truth nothing
is certain; all our theories are thoughts
thrown out at a great subject; we must
go on always creators, ever ready for fresh
adventures, “never resting in a facile
orthodoxy of Comte or Hegel or of our
own.” You remember the famous epilogue
in which Walter Pater, writing from the
opposite standpoint, that of pure hedonism,
declared that “one must ever go on court-
ing new impressions, testing new opinions.”
So Nietzsche disclaimed all idea of dis-
ciples, merely repeating his catchwords;
what he wants is a new spirit, fresh and
creative minds.
That, perhaps, is his greatest charm.
He set men free. The last age was over-
come by the tyranny of determinism.
What is known as scientific fatalism had
236 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
hold of it. A method which in natural
science was fruitful was thought sufficient
for a philosophy of life. Freedom was
denied, and all history and even individual
life was made to consist of links in a chain
of inevitable development. Evolution was
treated as a process entirely mechanical.
Nietsche's own words are worth citing:
“The belief in willing. To believe
that a thought may be the cause of a
mechanical movement is to believe in
miracles. The consistency of science de-
mands that, once we have made the
world thinkable for ourselves by means
of pictures, we should also make the
emotions, the desires, the will, etc.,
thinkable—that is to say, we should
deny them, and treat them as errors of
the intellect.”
It was hoped to explain all events
mathematically and to deduce the whole
history of the world, including man, from
1 The Will to Power, II, 143.
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 237
the inevitable clash of physical forces.
This, I suppose, was the faith of Herbert
Spencer, and was expounded in the famous
words of Tyndall about the genius of a
Shakespeare being potential in the fires of
the sun. It found classical expression in
the words of Du Bois-Reymond, about
getting an abstract account of the course
of things in a few differential equations.
Nowadays, M. Bergson and many others,
including some men of science, have pro-
pounded a theory of evolution radically
different. We are told that it is essentially
creative; that freedom is the aim. Freedom
in some degree pervades the world. Its
growth is neither inevitable nor mechan-
ical. As to the future, we can be nowhere
assured of aught but a high probability.
Nietzsche is one of the influences which
have helped in this direction, and minis-
tered to the self-criticism of science." Prac-
1 Werke, XIII, 85, § 213: “Die Entwicklung der mechanistisch-
atomistischen Denkweise ist sich heute ihres nothwendigen Ziels
immer noch nicht bewusst—das ist mein Eindruck nachdem ich
lange genug ihren Anhängern zwischen die Finger gesehen habe.
238 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
tically, though not theoretically, his philos-
ophy is a doctrine of freedom. Doctor
Wolf holds that Nietzsche allows a small
degree of freedom to all. But this is doubt-
ful. If everything be driven by a blind
will to power, how can there be any real
freedom P. It is the same with materialism.
Nietzsche not only denies any metaphys-
ical entity, but he speaks of the soul as
the companion and echo of the body.
This seems like pure materialism. Yet
Nietzsche denies alike materialism and
determinism. He does profess an uncom-
promising naturalism, and it is difficult to
see how he can escape from either of these
tWO.
Yet it is freedom he cares for. His
assertion of the reality of life leads right
away from determinism, and his perpetual
imperative is: Act as though thou art
free. Since Nietzsche in his Genealogy of
Morals throws scorn on the notion of
Sie wird mit der Schaffung eines Systems von Zeichen endigen:
sie wird auf Erklären verzichten, sie wird den Begriff, ‘Ursache
und Wirkung,' aufgeben.”
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 239
moral responsibility, it is hard to see how
any freedom which he teaches amounts
to much. It is always conceived as mere
animal energy, the butting against his
fellows by the splendid blond beast. Yet
it remains the fact that, whether con-
sistently or the reverse, Nietzsche has had
to many the charm of an apostle of free-
dom as against a mechanical conception
of development. At bottom, as M. Berg-
son has pointed out, a world in which there
is no freedom, but everything proceeds
necessarily out of the chain of events, is
a dead world—a clock running down.
Now, the Eternal Recurrence may seem to
favour such a view even on the part of
Nietzsche. But at least its effect is op-
posite—it is a sense of creative activity
in art, in life, and in thought. Whatever
be the defects of a doctrine of mere power,
there is no question that to convinced
adherents of the naturalistic view of the
world, Nietzsche comes as preaching a
gospel of hope and deliverance, whereas
240 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
in its more common form that doctrine
leads to a chilling fatalism. Just as
Nietzsche forward a positive instead of
a negative sense of moral duty, so he
ministers to a positive as against a negative
and depressed atheism. His charm, then,
is this: without any taint of orthodoxy,
free, as he claims, not only of all Christian
but of all idealist or moralist tradition,
realist to the core, he delivers his disciple
from the tyranny not only of the Heaven
above, but also of the earth beneath. He
is to live as though nothing were in-
evitable, as master, not slave, of the uni-
verse, finding in it, even if he is worsted, a
noble foe, ready for the new, the unknown,
the exceptional, climbing daily fresh Alpine
heights of danger—enslaved neither to
priest nor to philosopher, nor even to scien-
tific dogmatist. Jacob earned his royal
title by wrestling with a supernatural
being; Nietzsche, who denies the super-
natural, would win for his pupils a like
principality by teaching them to wrestle
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 241
with natural reality. Rightly or wrongly,
many have won this way a sense of freedom,
of the worth of life, and of trying.
All this is bound up with his attack on
logic. Nietzsche was by no means the
first of the modern protesters against
hyperintellectualism. The vogue of Wil-
liam James, of Henri Bergson, and of
many others is proof that he is far from
the last. The common sense of the man
in the street has never indeed believed in
the claim of mere logic to decide all things.
He has always protested in the name of
reality against rationalism, has believed
with Lotze that reality is richer than
thought, and with Pascal that the heart
has its reasons which the intellect cannot
penetrate. Or, to put it in ordinary lan-
guage, the instinct of the normal man
or woman tells him how much greater a
force is to be found in the subconscious
and inarticulate elements of life than in
those which can be docketed and defined.
Nietzsche's contribution to this was real.
242 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
He attempted to discover the origin of
logic, and to get behind the mystery of
language. Probably the most useful piece
in all his psychological work is this effort
to shew how language originates in the
attempt to control the flux of becoming.
(This is found largely in the later works,
especially The Will to Power, and also in
the thirteenth and fourteenth volumes,
which give collected fragments.) After this
men begin to hypostatise divisions in-
vented with an object entirely practical.
Then they go on to assume that to be
fixed which is eternally changing, and un-
consciously to invent a whole world of
substance-Being. Nietzsche marks that
revolution which man’s attitude to think-
ing would assume the moment people
began seriously to apply the notion of
evolution to the inner world of thought
and its outcome in language.
Nor indeed will in future even orthodox
theology decline to admit some of the
results of this change. The crystalline
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 243
idea of God as an impassible Absolute
is largely responsible for the popular be-
lief in a dead God. Christianity, by its
doctrine of the Trinity, is a denial of this,
and pictures God much more in the way
suggested by the phrase of Aristotle: as
évépyeta à clumoſas.' The changeless life of
God is Love; but in the Christian view
this is compatible with racing activity
and postulates variety. Christianity at
least has nothing to fear from the super-
session of the static conception of God to
one which is dynamic.”
This tendency may be just now exag-
gerated, and too much stress laid on the
element of becoming. Yet it cannot be
denied that in this matter Nietzsche, so
far from being unzeitgemässe, was eminently
in accord with the evolutionary tendencies
of this age. Some of what he says about
the trend of science seems to herald much
of what we hear of in connection with the
* Cf. C. P. S. Schiller's essay on this topic in Humanism and
Other Essays.
* Cf. Baron von Hügel's criticism of Bergson.
244 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
electronic theory of matter, with the split-
ting up of the molecules into the infinitely
smaller ions, with the theory that all
matter is ultimately electricity. Also his
general standpoint seems to favour the
claim nowadays put forward, that science
does not explain, but merely describes.
The following passage affords an illustra-
tion of this:
“Of all the interpretations of the
world attempted heretofore the mechan-
*cal one seems to-day to stand most
prominently in the front. Apparently it
has a clean conscience on its side, for no
science believes inwardly in progress and
success unless it be with the help of me-
chanical procedures. Every one knows
these procedures: ‘reason’ and ‘purpose’
are allowed to remain out of considera-
tion as far as possible; it is shown that,
provided a sufficient amount of time be
allowed to elapse, everything can evolve
out of everything else, and no one at-
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 245
tempts to suppress his malicious satis-
faction when the “apparent design in the
fate’ of a plan or of the yolk of an egg
may be traced to stress and thrust—in
short, people are heartily glad to pay
respect to this principle of profoundest
stupidity, if I may be allowed to pass a
playful remark concerning these serious
matters. Meanwhile, among the most
select intellects to be found in this
movement, some presentiment of evil,
some anxiety is noticeable, as if the
theory had a rent in it, which sooner or
later might be its last: I mean the sort
of rent which denotes the end of all bal-
loons inflated with such theories.
“Stress and thrust themselves can-
not be ‘explained’; one cannot get rid
of the actio in distans. The belief even
in the ability to explain is now lost,
and people peevishly admit that one
can only describe, not explain, that the
dynamic interpretation of the world,
with its denial of ‘empty space,’ and its
246 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
little agglomerations of atoms, will soon
get the better of physicists: although
in this way Dynamic is certainly granted
>> 1.
an inner quality.
Other factors in Nietzsche's success are
to be considered. With the decay of
rhetoric and the period, men have come
to like the electric style. Nietzsche knew
this, and is for ever switching on bright
lights. There is no repose in it, no majesty,
little balance. A French critic” is hardly
unjust when he declares:
“En Somme, un style mêlé, baroque,
inégal, riche et même somptueux en
images, passionné hors de mesure dans
l’expression, toujours courant après l’ex-
cessif, l’inédit, l’inéprouvé, toujours par
delà, un style merveilleusement “ondoyant
et divers’ comme l’homme même dont il
nous restitut la singulière et vivante
image.”
1 The Will to Power, II, 109. * Pallarès, 151.
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 247
This style recalls the Greeks as little
as it does Cicero. It is an amalgam of
thrills, of sudden changes, of strange fire—
all as in a very pure air. There is little or
no humour, unless we think this is humor-
OUIS:
“Once Spirit was God; then it be-
came man, now it is mob.”
“Concubinage has been corrupted by
marriage.”
“It is a curious thing that God learned
Greek when He wished to turn author,
and that he did not learn it better.”
“The great moments of our life are
at the points when we gain courage to
rebaptise our badness as the best in
55
UIS.
He has a great gift of epigram. But his
style, though brilliant, has no repose, and
is fatiguing to read for long. Strings of
aphorisms are rarely attractive. La Roche-
foucauld had an ill influence on Nietzsche.
He hoped to be a sort of super-Roche-
248 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
foucauld. But he lacked the essential
quality. He was not a man of the world.
That is what distinguishes him alike from
La Rochefoucauld and from Stendhal. His
paradoxes and even his blasphemies are
the difficult effort of a child trying to be
naughty. He is not selfish enough to be
profoundly cynical. There is always some-
thing of the eternal undergraduate about
Nietzsche. The undergraduate is not in-
sincere. But he honestly believes himself
more shocking than he is. He is astounded
alike at his cleverness, his melancholy,
and his profundity. A little later he
learns that all clever young men go through
this phase. But as compared with his
French models Nietzsche is always too
much of a preacher, too profoundly moral
even in his immoralism.
Yet he has great qualities. He lights
up the bypaths of history and criticism.
To glance through a volume of Nietzsche
is to obtain a number of aperçus on ev-
erything under the sun, for nothing in
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 249
heaven or earth but bears somehow upon
the main theme—the future of culture.
“Europe is necessary to me as a culture-
museum,” he said to his sister, when she
wanted him to go and live in Paraguay.
Nietzsche himself was a culture-museum.
All peoples, nations, and languages he lays
under contribution. In a few pages we
come upon bits of criticism about music,
about philosophy, from Buddha to Avena-
rius, about poetry from the Vedas to
Leopardi, about the theory of art, the
goal of world politics, or the bearing of
digestion upon authorship. His books are
bright with many memories. Reading
Nietzsche conveys a pleasing sense of
familiarity with all that can be called cul-
ture. That is as far as many people want
to go.
Probably it is the apocalyptic prophecy
of a new age that wins him disciples, as
distinct from admirers. He is, as we saw,
essentially a prophet, a seer. People had
got tired of the nineteenth century before
250 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
it closed. At the outset of the twentieth
they wanted not so much to be as to feel
new. Nietzsche gave them this feeling.
He is the John of the Baptism of the new
kingdom.
“Repent,” he might cry, “of your absurd
morality. Rend all your garments, and
live naked to the real wind. Rid your-
self of shams; away with your conven-
tional lies, your worship of comfort, your
domestic pettiness, and above all your
wallowing in pity. Be something. Look
down, down on the herd, which you dis-
own. Kill all this sentimental culture,
this passion of the past, and join in the
great gamble for the future, when every
valley shall be a gulf, and every hill a
Himalaya; when the crooked shall be
twisted round, and the rough places be-
come rocks. For Man, Man alone, shall
be exalted in that day—for the Superman
cometh, he cometh to judge the world,
and with violence shall he rule the world
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 251
and reprove with terror for the proud of
the earth.”
This note of appeal to the will, this
sense that mankind is in the making,
ushered in the twentieth century. The
spirit of scepticism, of decadence had
hold of many, or else a mere conservatism.
Nietzsche was like the wild northeaster,
and he was, in his own words, “the voice
of the day after to-morrow.”
On one side of its culture, the nineteenth
century was pre-eminently the age of his-
torical sentiment. This sentiment, the
passion of the past, is a noble thing. It is
not really a hopeful thing to try to throw
away the achievements of the race. Yet
historical interest may be overdone. Either
it becomes mere sentimentalism, or culture
becomes a jumble of memories. This is
indicated by Nietzsche in a passage of
Beyond Good and Evil:
1 “Ich wiirde den härtesten Despotismus (als Schule für die
Geschmeidigkeit des Geistes) noch eher gut heissen, als die
feuchte, laue Luft eines ‘pressfreien" Zeitalters, in dem aller
Geist bequen und dumm wird, und die Glieder streckt.”
(Nietzsche, Werke, XIV, 397.)
252 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
“This historical sense which we Euro-
peans claim as our speciality has come
to us in the train of the enchanting and
mad semibarbarity into which Europe has
been plunged by the democratic mingling
of classes and races—it is only the nine-
teenth century that has recognised this
faculty as its sixth sense. Owing to this
mingling, the past of every form and
mode of life, and of cultures which were
formerly closely contiguous and superim-
posed on one another, flows forth into us
modern souls; our instincts now run back
in all directions, we ourselves are a kind
of chaos; in the end, as we have said, the
spirit perceives its advantage therein.
By means of our semibarbarity in body
and in desire we have secret access every-
where, such as a noble age never had; we
have access, above all, to the labyrinth
of imperfect civilisations and to every
form of semibarbarity that has at any
time existed on earth; and in so far as
the most considerable part of human
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 253
civilisation hitherto has just been “semi-
barbarity,” the historical sense implies
almost the sense and instinct for every-
thing, the taste and tongue for every-
thing; whereby it immediately proves it-
self to be an ignoble sense. . . . Let us
finally confess it, that what is most diffi-
cult for us men of the ‘historical sense”
to grasp, feel, taste, and love, what finds
us fundamentally prejudiced and almost
hostile, is precisely the perfection and
ultimate maturity in every culture and
art, the essentially noble in works and
men, their moment of smooth sea and
halcyon self-sufficiency, the goldenness
and coldness which all things show which
have perfected themselves.” "
This ministers to the turning away from
first-hand experience, and applies to all
who look on life merely as spectators, like
the Lady of Shalott, Seeing only shadows
in the mirror. The sense of this danger
1 Beyond Good and Evil, 167, 169.
254 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
was ever present with Nietzsche. It is
expressed in the finest of the Essays Out
of Season, and may be found also in the
chapter of Zarathustra on “The Country
of Culture.” Further, an overgrowth of
historical sentiment may lead to a throt-
tling conservatism, and a refusal to cut
new lines when they are needed, the at-
tempt to solve problems essentially new
by an appeal to precedent. Nietzsche re-
fused, and by refusing strengthened the
tendency to resist this. The present gen-
eration is nervously anxious not to re-
semble its parents. Thus it has found
refreshment in Nietzsche's call to new
adventure, and his effort to sum up the
religion and culture of several millenniums.
He gives the impression that we are now
done with the era that began with Socrates,
flowered into Christianity, and culminated
in the French Revolution; that a new age
of human culture is to begin, and that it
is ours to make.
To this end courage is needed, and a
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 255
great soul; the sense that will is omnip-
otent, that pain is irrelevant and indeed
a tonic, and that we are tied to nothing.
This appeal to the heroic, taking a thousand
forms, and proclaimed with prophetic ur-
gency came with force to an age, which
believed itself only at the beginning of
the conquest of the material world and
sighed for the open air. It is an appeal
essentially romantic, nor, if properly ex-
plained, is it other than wholesome.
Yet though it be romantic, it is or
claims to be realist. That gives its force
to Nietzsche's call to recognise morality
for what it is, to look below the screen of
language which conceals reality, to blow
off with the wind of criticism the haze of
sentiment, in which men disguise their
egotism, to take account of force. This
call came like a trumpet-call to an age
dominated by Realpolitik, or else by an
economic struggle, which is the same thing
under the protection of the police. The
fact that Nietzsche repudiated alike the
256 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
economist’s ideal and the statesman’s only
gave him a greater leverage. The Will to
Power in its natural meaning has the sim-
plicity and also the demerits of all purely
cynical estimates. But it came as a re-
lief to the languor induced by the moral
scepticism of the fin de siècle. It assured
many of the worth of life and courage
without any taint of other-worldly idealism.
Nietzsche appealed to a very powerful mo-
tive, the sense of distinction. He addresses
himself to the Higher Men.
“Here is little of man; therefore women
try to make themselves manly. For only
he who is enough of a man will save the
>> 1.
woman in woman.
As we saw earlier, this notion of dis-
tinction, so far from being denied, is in
reality enhanced by the Christian doctrine
of individual worth. Any writer is sure of
a hearing who claims for his adherents
the few, the rare spirits—just as a hotel
1 Thus Spake Zarathustra, 248.
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 257
may win the multitude by calling itself
“the select hotel.” Browning and Mere-
dith owed something of their vogue to this
form of snobbishness, and it frequently
makes the fortune of some outrageous
artist. Many people bought Browning
not because to them he was delightful,
but because to others he was difficult.
Nietzsche owed much of his vogue to this
desire to be thought superior, although
neit! er in his nor in the other cases is it
any measure of real worth. Most of his
more clamorous disciples would disgust
him, no less than the Browning Society
disgusted the poet. For all that, intellec-
tual and aesthetic coxcombry has found
much on which to preen itself in Zarathus-
tra. Neither riches nor birth in the usual
sense are needed for Nietzsche's Higher
Man. Any one, therefore, who feels so
disposed, can claim that he has the char-
acteristics of the future lords of the world.
The following passages serve to illustrate
this:
258 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
“Such accusers of life—they are over-
come by life with a blinking of the eye.
‘Thou lovest me?” saith the impudent one.
“Wait a little; I have no time yet for thee.’
“Man is the cruellest animal towards
himself. And in all who call themselves
‘sinners’ and ‘bearers of the cross’ and
‘penitents, ye shall not fail to hear the
lust contained in that complaining and
accusing !
“And myself?—will I thereby be the
accuser of man? Alas, mine animals,
that alone I have learnt hitherto, that
the wickedest in man is necessary for
the best in him; that all that is wicked,
is his best power and the hardest stone
unto the highest creator; and that man
must become better and more wicked.
“Not unto that stake of torture was
I fixed, that I know: man is wicked.
But I cried, as no one hath ever cried:
‘Alas, that his wickedest is so very small !
Alas, that his best is so very small !’
“The great loathing of man—it choked
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 259
me, it had crept into my throat, and
what the fortune-teller foretold: “All is
equal, nothing is worth while, knowledge
choketh.’
“A long dawn limped in front of me,
a sadness weary unto death, drunken
from death, and speaking with a yawn-
ing mouth.
“Eternally he recurreth, man, of whom
thou weariest, the small man. Thus
yawned my sadness and dragged its
foot and could not fall asleep.” "
“‘Of the convicts guilty of riches,
who collect their profit out of all rub-
bish heaps, with cool eyes and volup-
tuous thoughts—of that rabble that
stinketh unto heaven,
“‘Of that gilded-over, falsified mob,
whose fathers were thieves or birds of
carrion, or rag-gatherers with wives com-
plaisant, voluptuous, and forgetful (for
none of them hath a far way to go to
become a whore);
* Ibid., p. 326.
260 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
“‘Mob at the top, mob below ! What
are to-day “poor” and “rich.”? This
distinction have I unlearnt. Then I
fled away, further, ever further, until
I came unto these cows.”
“Thus spake the peaceful one, and
Snuffed himself, and perspired over his
words, so that the cows wondered again.
But Zarathustra, all the time the man
was speaking so bitterly, gazed with a
Smile into his face, and silently shook
his head.
“‘Thou dost violence unto thyself,
thou mount-preacher, in using such bitter
words. For such bitterness neither thy
mouth nor thine eye was made.
“‘Nor, methinketh, even thy stomach.
Unto it all such anger and hatred and
overflowing are repugnant. Thy stomach
desireth gentler things. Thou art not a
butcher.
“‘Thou rather seemest unto me to
be an eater of plants and roots. Perhaps
thou grindest corn. But certainly thou
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 261
art averse from the pleasures of the
flesh and thou lovest honey.’”
Immoralism is always attractive. Free-
dom from dependence on any kind of au-
thority has charm for many. The Nietzsche
worshipper is peculiarly happy. Not only
is he at liberty to bait Christians”—a com-
mon pastime for the intellectual—but he
can pour scorn on the solemn academic
moralists who have often supposed them-
selves to be new, because they are infidels.
Nietzsche laughs at them and says that
they are Christians without the excuse of
faith, and condemns all under the rubric
of the spirit of gravity. What he says
about the spirit of gravity is true. Pious
folk would do well to note this.
That charm as of naughtiness, the toy-
smashing child, stands for much. But it
1 Ibid., p. 401.
* “Il est permis de penser que son antichristianisme en morale
fut l’un des auxiliaires les plus précieux de la renommée tardive
du philosophe qui intitule à l'antichrétien sa dernière production
littéraire. La morale chrétienne comme les choses très anciennes
et très mêlées à la vie a tant d'ennemis conscients ou inconscients.
Les tendances ne furent pas Étrangères sans doute à l’interven-
tion de M. Brandes.” (Seillières, Apollon ou Dionysos, 210.)
262 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
is not all. Many persons had been direct-
ing their lives to ends deliberately anti-
Christian. Such men were rejoiced when
a writer of power and passion expressed
their feelings. Others were pleased with
his attacks on priests. They have a pleasur-
able malice in this superior form of amuse-
ment known in Paris as épater le bourgeois.
Others, without sharing their convictions
are stimulated. Indeed, the thrill of
Nietzsche is possible to many who have
no mind for his philosophy.
What that thrill precisely is it is hard
to say. It is not mere poetry; nor proph-
ecy; nor his terrific sincerity; nor his vi-
sion; nor his acuteness of criticism, his
amazing variety; nor his iridescent epi-
gram. Probably it is something personal.
His bewildering changes, the kaleidoscopic
quality adds to that sense of exhilaration,
as of drinking champagne, with which he
is read. True, his nerves are naked. But
nowadays people like naked nerves.
Dionysos is his own word for it—the
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 263
spirit of the dancer. I could not believe,
he said, in a God who could not dance.
In this once more he is nearer to Chris-
tianity than he knew. There is an interest-
ing mediaeval poem in which the whole
plan of salvation is entitled “The general
dance.” It is as the tight-rope dancer
living dangerously on a line strung be-
tween precipices amid eternal snows that
Nietzsche is so much of a “wonder, a
beauty, and a terror.” In a new age, very
childlike, he calls to all with the spirit of
youth, to try all experiments, to shrink
back neither for fear nor for love, neither
for God nor for man, neither for good nor
for evil. This call, together with his
strange, mystical sense of the eternal in
the transient and, therefore, the value of
the moment; this paradox of the ungodly
who yet worships, of the immoralist who
preaches self-control, of the Antichrist
who could mount the Cross, the icono-
clast who could yet set up a religion, this
it is which gives to Friedrich Nietzsche a
264 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
charm that will outlast all the febrile
puerilities of his attack on Christianity
and all the superficial snobbery of his
contempt for the common man. One of
the best illustrations will be found in the
“Song of the Seven Seals”:
“If I myself am a grain of that re-
deeming salt that maketh all things mix
well in the vessel of mixture;
“(For there is a salt that bringeth
together what is good and what is evil;
and even the wickedest is worthy of
serving as seasoning and as a means for
the last foaming-over.)
“Oh ! how could I fail to be eager for
eternity and for the marriage ring of
rings, the ring of recurrence?
“Never yet have I found the woman
by whom I should have liked to have
children, unless it be this woman I love.
For I love thee, O Eternity
“For I love thee, O Eternity /
“If I am fond of the sea, and of all
THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE 265
that is of the sea's kin, and if I am
fondest if it contradicteth me angrily;
“If that seeking lust is within me
that driveth the sails after the undis-
covered; if there is a sailor's lust in my
lust;
“If my rejoicing hath ever cried: “The
shore hath disappeared l Now the last
chain hath fallen down from me !
“‘The limitless roareth round me! Far,
far away shine unto me space and time !
Up ! upward, old heart l’
“Oh ! how could I fail to be eager for
eternity and for the marriage ring of
rings, the ring of recurrence?
“Never yet have I found the woman
by whom I should have liked to have
children, unless it be this woman I love.
For I love thee, O Eternity
“For I love thee, O Eternity!”
*Ibid., p. 344.
VI
THE DANGER AND THE SIGNIFICANCE
OF NIETZSCHE
CERTAIN dangers attach to the doctrine
of Nietzsche. Whether or no the writer
intended them is irrelevant. They arise
naturally out of his teaching, provided
men are found to take in earnest his claim
to be a moral revolutionary. Every teacher
must be held responsible for the natural
consequences of his teaching, however
little he intended all of them. Some of
these consequences Nietzsche did intend.
Others he did not. In any case Nietzsche
is guilty of them unless he took pains to
avoid them. Moreover it is not certain
that the more extreme interpretation of
his doctrine is wrong. In his work on
The Quintessence of Nietzsche, Mr. J. M.
Rennedy propounds the following genial
suggestion for the treatment of the poor:
266
THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 267
“It will in time inevitably be recog-
nised that the distinction between mas-
ters and slaves must be made more
apparent, must be more generally ad-
mitted than it now is. Instead of the
lowest classes in society receiving wages
and keeping up their pseudo-indepen-
dence, they must be trained to submit
themselves as property.”
The two completed plays of the late
John Davidson’s Mammon Trilogy are even
surer evidence. Mr. Davidson thought that
Nietzsche did not go far enough. Still,
of the source of his doctrine of triumphant
power reintroducing the rack there can be
no question. Much of Nietzsche can be
interpreted in a less barbarous way. But
his own professed disciples afford evi-
dence that for the most part this interpre-
tation is non-natural. A German, Doctor
Brahm, has written this year a pamphlet
to prove that the Germans, and more espe-
* Kennedy, The Quintessence of Nietzsche, 347.
268 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
cially Hindenburg, have full right to the
privileges of the superman."
Some of the dangers lurking in his doc-
trine Nietzsche seems to have felt. Hence
* ...A.”*
(in the final period) are directed solely to
** ** ~~
the master class of the future. That
proviso cannot help him. Since this class
is to be recruited from all higher men
irrespective of existing social arrangements,
any one may deem himself a higher man,
“beyond good and evil.”
The first danger is an unbridled in-
dividualism. Nietzsche's assertion that
morality is due to the herd instinct is
coupled with the view that the higher
man, and still more the superman of the
future, is by the law of his being released
* “Wie der Genius alle Kultur rechtfertigt, so ist es dennschliess-
lich auch die letzte Form der Heiligung der Kriegesclasse ohne
die der militärische Genius nicht geschaffen wurde. Wenn ge-
rade in den Zeiten des Krieges so haufig auffällt dass ein Mann
wie Hindenburg dahin gegangen wäre, ohne seine letzten Quali-
täten zum Ausdruck gebracht zu haben, wäre der Krieg nicht
gekommen, so meint Nietzsche genau das Gleiche wenn er den
Krieg schon daraus rechtfertigt, dass er dem militärischen Genius
die Möglichkeit der Entfaltung gibt.” (Brahm, Friedrich
Nietzsches Meinungen.)
THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 269
from all these restrictions. This doctrine
forms and is bound to form an incentive
to oppression. Every little poetaster may
fancy himself one of the select. An able
man may justify almost any breach of
social obligation by an appeal to Nietzsche.
Speaking once of a certain course of con-
duct pursued by an able man as base, I
was met by the rejoinder: “I think
Nietzsche would have approved of it.”
The temptations to men of talent to win
success by crooked-methods are strong.
In all ages many give way to them.
Hitherto such lapses have been blamed.
Now they can be justified by the authority
of a great name. Nietzsche admitted that
according to all existing standards his su-
perman is a criminal.
True, Nietzsche made clear that he did
not teach what in the narrower sense is
called license. Yet the Christian ideal
of chastity he treats with scorn. His
disciples may claim to be excused, if they
go somewhat farther than their master.
270 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
Once teach that all moral restraints are
without meaning save for the herd, and
it is no wonder if men place upon this a
sinister application. Gabriele d’Annunzio
is a professed follower of Nietzsche. The
ideal which is stated or implied in his
works needs no description. Nietzsche
may not himself be guilty of affirming such
perversity. Yet he can hardly be acquitted
of having furthered it.
Let us pass on to consequences, which
are more direct. Egoism he admits to
be a quality of greatness. Even this is
susceptible of a decent meaning, if we
understand by it that an individual has
his own end and is something more than
a cog in the social machine. Altruism with-
out qualification is ultimately destruc-
tive of individuality. Yet this minimis-
ing interpretation is far from obvious.
Nietzsche's own admiration of Napoleon,"
* The author of the pamphlet mentioned before makes a not
unfair use of this fact to justify his identification of Hindenburg
with the superman:
“Alexander den Grossen, Cäsar, Napoleon, später auch Bis-
marck, zitiert er wohl 6fter als Shakespeare und Goethe.”
(Brahm, Friedrich Nietzsches Meinungen über Staate und Kriege.)
THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 271
and still more of Machiavelli’s hero, Cesare
Borgia, does not favour such a gloss. His
teaching appears to justify the utmost
ruthlessness and treachery, if only it be
displayed by the strong. Nietzsche de-
spised the Philistine ideal of riches. Yet
the question as to who is the superman or
the forerunner of the Superman is a ques-
tion of fact, Even the Pope does not
claim to be infallible in mattſ rs of fact.
The point is not, who is the superman? but
what may the person do who has reason
to think himself such Once Nietzsche's
moral of the exploitation of the weak by
the strong is accepted as a principle, any
individual or group of individuals may
Say: “I, or at least my children, will be
supermen. We therefore are beyond good
and evil. Greatness, according to our
Master, always goes along with social
wickedness. Any means are right, if they
lead to the Supreme end. Therefore we
are benefiting society, or at least ages to
come, if we treat the mass of men with
272 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
contempt and throw to the winds all
thoughts of pity or honesty.” The non-
moral company promoter, who achieves
eminence in riches, by eminence in lying,
the organisers of the slave trade, the op-
pressors of native races, the promoters of
the Putumayo atrocities, all these might
be condemned by Nietzsche himself. Yet
they would find excuse in his principles:
“The way in which one has to treat
raw savages and the impossibility of
dispensing with barbarous methods be-
comes obvious in practice when one
is transplanted, with all one’s European
pampering, to a spot such as the Congo,
or anywhere else where it is necessary
to maintain one’s mastery over bar-
barians.
“Warlike and peaceful people.—Art
thou a man who has the instincts of a
warrior in thy blood? If this be so,
another question must be put. Do thy
instincts impel thee to attack or to
THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 273
defend ? The rest of mankind, all those
whose instincts are not warlike, desire
peace, concord, ‘freedom,’ ‘equal rights’:
these things are but names and steps
for one and the same thing. Such men
only wish to go where it is not neces-
sary for them to defend themselves—
such men become discontented with them-
selves when they are obliged to offer
resistance; they would fain create cir-
cumstances in which war is no longer
necessary. If the worst came to the
worst, they would resign themselves,
obey, and submit; all these things are
better than waging war—thus does the
Christian's instinct, for instance, whisper
to him. In the born warrior's character
there is something of armour, likewise
in the choice of his circumstances and
in the development of every one of his
qualities: weapons are best evolved by
the latter type, shields are best devised
by the former.
“What expedients and what virtues
274 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
do the unarmed and the undefended
require in order to survive, and even to
conquer?” "
Instead of the humanisation of society,
the getting rid of the habit of treating men
as tools, “hands,” we shall have all these
evils enhanced a thousandfold—except in
So far as they reduce the quantum of
production. That this is so is shewn by
the passage quoted above about the lower
classes becoming mere property—perhaps
the basest of all political ideals. It ipso
facto denies them the quality of men.
Worse dangers attach to Nietzsche's doc-
trine. It may seem commonplace to quote
his words to warriors. But his words about
loving peace “as a means to new wars”
and “a good war justifying any cause”
are not so easily susceptible of a spiritual
1 The Will to Power, II, 342.
* “Ye shall love peace as a means to new wars, and the short
peace better than the long.
“I do not advise you to work, but to fight. I do not advise you
to conclude peace, but to conquer. Let your work be a fight and
your peace a victory.
“Ye say a good cause will hallow even war? I say unto you a
good war halloweth every cause.” Zarathustra, p. 60.
THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 275
interpretation as the defenders of Nietzsche
suppose. Even if they do refer to war-
fare of ideas, it is fair to say that when
ideas get embodied in societies this war-
fare will be something more barbaric than
mere debate." Moreover, we must take
also into account what he says elsewhere:
“Our psychologists, whose glance
dwells involuntarily upon the symptoms
of decadence, lead us to mistrust in-
tellect ever more and more. People
persist in seeing only the weakening,
pampering, and sickening effects of in-
tellect, but there are now going to ap-
pear:
"The union of
ſ Cynics intellectual
New Experimen- superiority
barbarians talists, and of an
Conquerors: overflow of
strength.
*The following passage seems to favour the view that Nietz-
sche might be referring to the warfare of ideas:
“Neue Form der Gemeinschaft: sich kriegerisch behauptend.
Sonst wird der Geist matt. Keine ‘Gärten” und blosses Aus-
276 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
“I point to something new: certainly
for such a democratic community there
is a danger of barbarians; but these
are sought only down below. There is
also another kind of barbarians who come
from the heights: a kind of conquering
and ruling natures, which are in search
of material that they can mould. Prome-
theus was a barbarian of this stamp.
“Principal standpoint: one should not
suppose the mission of a higher species
to be the leading of inferior men (as
Comte does, for instance); but the in-
ferior should be regarded as the founda-
tion upon which a higher species may
live their higher life—upon which alone
they can stand.”"
“We must understand the fundamental
artistic phenomenon which is called ‘Life”
—the formative spirit, which contracts
weichen vor den Massen. Krieg (aber ohne Pulver) l zwischen
verschiedenen Gedanken und deren Heeren.
“Neuer Adel, durch Zuchtung. Die Gründungs-Feste von
Familien.
“Der Tag neueingetheilt: die körperlichen Ubungen für aller
Lebensalter. Der Wettkampf als Princip.” (Werke, XII, 368.)
1 The Will to Power, 329.
THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 277
under the most unfavourable circum-
stances: and in the slowest manner
possible. The proof of all its combina-
tions must first be given afresh: it main-
tains itself.
“Sexuality, lust of dominion, the plea-
sure derived from appearance and decep-
tion, great and joyful gratitude to Life
and its typical conditions—these things
are essential to all Paganism, and it
has a good conscience on its side. That
which is hostile to Nature (already in
Greek antiquity) combats Paganism in
the form of morality and dialectics.
“An antimetaphysical view of the
world—yes, but an artistic one.
“Apollo’s misapprehension: the eter-
nity of beautiful forms, the aristocratic
prescription, ‘Thus shall it ever be '’
“Dionysos: Sensuality and cruelty.
The perishable nature of existence might
be interpreted as the joy of procreative
and destructive force, as unremitting
creation.”
1 Ibid., 415.
278 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
“Such men as Napoleon must always
return and always settle our belief in
the self-glory of the individual afresh:
he himself, however, was corrupted by
the means he had to stoop to, and had
lost noblesse of character. If he had had
to prevail among another kind of men,
he could have availed himself of other
means; and thus it would not seem
necessary that a Caesar must become bad.
“Man is a combination of the beast
and the superbeast; higher man a com-
bination of the monster and the super- J
man;" these opposites belong to each
other. With every degree of a man’s
growth towards greatness and loftiness
he also grows downward into the depths
and into the terrible: we should not
desire the one without the other; or,
better still, the more fundamentally we
desire the one, the more completely we
shall achieve the other.
1 The play on the German words, “Unthier” and “Úberthier,”
“Unmensch” and “Úbermensch,” is unfortunately not translat-
able.—Tr.
THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 279
“Terribleness belongs to greatness: let
us not deceive ourselves.
“I have taught the knowledge of such
terrible things that all “Epicurean con-
tentment’ is impossible concerning them.
Dionysian pleasure is the only adequate
kind here: I was the first to discover the
tragic. Thanks to their superficiality
in ethics, the Greeks misunderstood it.
Resignation is not the lesson of tragedy,
but only the misunderstanding of it !
The yearning for nonentity is the denial
of tragic wisdom, its opposite l’’’
If we add to this that he seems to at-
tribute to this new, or rather old, god Diony-
sos the qualities of barbarism and sensual-
ity, we may anticipate a fine crop of hor-
rors if any persons or group of persons gets
hold of the notion that he is Übermensch,
or Úberwolk. Si monumentum quaris, cir-
cumspice. That person or group might,
in Nietzsche's own judgment, be far from
1 Ibid., 405.
280 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
qualifying for the title. None the less
could he excuse on Nietzsche's principles
any ruse and every ruthless act.
Nietzsche said, when attacking Christian-
ity, that its evil quality was not of necessity
tied to that other worldly faith which he
denied. That might be harmless enough,
if only Christianity had not reversed the
natural order of values and denied rank.
Nietzsche's own principles should be ap-
plied here. Nominal Christians may be
found who try to adapt their faith to the
notion of a conquering race, which is in
all but name the same as that of Nietzsche.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain in the Foun-
dations of the Nineteenth Century affords a
cardinal instance of this. That work de-
nies that humanity means anything at
all, declaring all truth to lie in race-tyranny.
He prophesies a new triumph for a reju-
venated Christianity, embodying the idea
of a race-superiority. The import of Cham-
berlain's Nietzscheanised Christianity has
recently become plain. Chamberlain is
THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 281
not himself an admirer of Nietzsche. That
does not affect the argument.
To take one more instance. Nietzsche
i was no lover of any existing state; still
! less of any form of nationalism. He de-
clared the modern state to be that in which
the slow suicide of all is called life. He
º regarded it as the refuge of the much too
many, a dangerous means for helping the
weak at the expense of the strong, thereby
retarding that cosmopolitan Paradise in
which the good European should be master,
supported in a life of virtue, free from
moralic acid, resting on a pyramid of
slaves. What he says of the state in Zara-
thustra may be cited.
“What I call the state is where all
are poison-drinkers, the good and the
evil alike. What I call the state is where
all lose themselves, the good and the
evil alike. What I call the state is where
the slow suicide of all is called ‘life.’”
* Zarathustra, 64.
282 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
Yet, on the other hand, his root principle
is the will to power. Elsewhere he defines
the state.
“The state, or unmorality organised,
is from within—the police, the penal
code, status, commerce, and the family;
and from without, the will to war, to
power, to conquest, and revenge.
“A multitude will do things an in-
dividual will not, because of the division
of responsibility, of command, and exe-
cution; because the virtues of obedience,
duty, patriotism, and local sentiment
are all introduced; because feelings of
pride, severity, strength, hate, and re-
venge—in short, all typical traits are
upheld, and these are characteristics
utterly alien to the herd-man.” "
“The maintenance of the military
state is the last means of adhering to
the great tradition of the past, or, where
it has been lost, to revive it. By means
of it the superior or strong type of man
t 1 The Will to Power, 184.
THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 283
is preserved, and all institutions and
ideas which perpetuate enmity and order
of rank in states, such as national feel-
ing, protective tariffs, etc., may on that
account seem justified.”"
Further, in politics, according to Nietz-
sche, perfection is to be found only on purely
Machiavellian principles. He definitely
prophesied the coming of that savagery
so well named by M. Cambon “La barbarie
pédante.””
Is it not, then, obvious what is likely to
happen if any state or nation adopts his
views? It can assert that the State is
Power, nothing else but Power. It can
believe with Nietzsche that power is the
one end of life. It may go on to proclaim
itself free from all restraints in dealing
with enemies and from every kind of
limitation in dealing with its subjects or
1 Ibid., 189. “Die allgemeine Militärpflichtigkeit ist schon
heute das sonderbare Gegengift gegen die Weichlichkeit der de-
mokratischen Ideen.” (Nietzsche. Nachtrag, 8, 497.)
* “Ein Zeitalter der Barbarei beginnt, die Wissenschaften wer-
den ihm dienen.” (Werke, XII, 384.)
284 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
with religious and economic groups. Such
was the inspiring motive of Napoleon,
Nietzsche's ideal, the most gigantic egotist
whom the world has ever known.
What we need to bear in mind is this:
The question of fact as to where the germ
of supermanity resides is one thing, and
will be decided by each individual or
group in accordance with its own wishes.
If that question be decided in the affirma-
tive, Nietzsche's ethic gives him a right to
despise any kind of restraint, to claim
everything as his due; to perpetrate bar-
barities and treacheries; to exploit the rest
of the world as tools. On this ground it is
hardly unfair to say that Nietzsche's doc-
trine is one of grave practical danger,
however deeply Nietzsche might have
despised those who would put it to the
proof. Nietzsche's doctrine is a spirit
rather than a code. Despite all qualifica-
tions, it is the spirit of pride in mere power,
which believes that for powerful individuals
or classes, and for these alone, “nothing is
THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 285
ſ true, all things are permitted”; which would
| deny all inherent reality to other persons
\ or groups, treating them as things, as in-
\deed on the naturalistic hypothesis they are.
Barbarism, however, is not the greatest
danger of Nietzsche. His attack on mere
peaceful domesticity is a reaction against
à, sophisticated culture. It may be claimed,
even if it cannot be proved, that he is
merely advocating a tragic view of life,
with its due place for austerity. Alike in
education and the state, a certain process
of hardening is needful to manhood. His
fear lest Europe should become a sort of
China is not ignoble. How dull and
Philistine appear to us the ideals of the
mid-century utilitarians with their “bag-
man’s Paradise”! Nietzsche represents the
reaction against that. We need not alto-
gether blame him if he expressed himself
with misleading violence. Even his at-
tack on pity is intended mainly as a rebuke
to that sentimentalism in regard to pain
which has tended to ruin discipline in
286 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
f
home, school, and state and to produce
certain propaganda, such as vegetarianism
on humanitarian grounds, or the more dan-
gerous forms of Pacifism. Nietzsche, as
we have said, agrees with Christianity in
holding that fulness of life is the true aim,
and that is never reached without suffering
and, indeed, is sometimes stimulated by
pain.
Nietzsche's danger is deeper than any
apparent barbarism. It lies in the cult of
pride, which he tends to stimulate. The
young gentleman at college who prides
himself on true culture will easily believe
himself to be of the “artist-rulers.” Among
all men of gifts—there is a tendency, only
with difficulty kept down, to despise the
mass of men. This tendency can be re-
strained only by much intercourse with
those whose gifts are real but different.
As life goes on, men tend more and more
to associate with those of a like calling,
artists, the professions, politics, writing,
warfare, and so forth. This check is then
THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 287
removed. The real danger of a philosophy
of pride becomes apparent, and it can be
seen to-day in the tone of contempt adopted
by many modern critics towards any
fashion in art and literature and philosophy
which they do not happen to like. Nietzsche
has stimulated all this by encouraging the
individual with gifts to set himself against
all authority. Probably he did not in-
tend it, yet the undoubted effect of his
influence is to stimulate excessive individ-
ualism in regard to all the higher things of
the mind. Indeed, to many Nietzsche
stands for such individualism, and for noth-
ing else. Yet it was French culture with its
genius for order which he admired most.
The main evil is, as was said in an earlier
lecture, that Nietzsche, Prussian' most cer-
tainly in this respect, insists on concen-
trating attention on Power. However
much of interpretation we may put upon
1 “Diese Härte gegen sich, diese Unterordnung unter die Auf-
gabe, ist sie nicht preussisch-deutscher Geist? Hat man nicht
Nietzsches geistiges Milieurecht das geistige Potsdam genannt?”
(Brahm, 26.)
288 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
his writings, we cannot do away with the
radical distinction between a gospel of
Power and a gospel of Freedom. The fact
that some think Nietzsche's gospel is to
be understood “in a spiritual sense,” so
far from mitigating, only deepens the evil.
A gospel of Power must lead on the part
either of the individual or the class to a
theory of egoism, of pride, and of tyranny.
It is in its essence exclusive. A gospel of
Freedom, must equally of course lead to
a doctrine of tolerance, of humility; for
freedom implies the recognition of others—
power pure and simple is satisfied to use
them as tools. The ideal of the one is
embodied in the Roman conception of the
Imperium in the head of the state, and of
the absolute power over life and limb of
the individual master over his “familia.”
The ideal of the other is for ever incarnate
in the Christian doctrine of the State,
as made up of more than one authority,
of which each must respect the other be-
cause each is Divine, and in the Christian
THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 289
conception of the individual, as having a
limited freedom and bound by the golden
rule, because “one is your Father and all
The one doctrine sepa-
5
ye are brethren.’
rates the man or class or state in whom Power
is vested from all others, and superimposes
it on the rest. The other recognises head-
ship and inequality and rule, but all as
a part of the membership “one of an-
other,” which is the essence alike of true
citizenship and real churchmanship. Noth-
ing can relieve Nietzsche from the stain
of having stimulated the tendencies, al-
ready sufficiently strong, towards that es-
sential evil of Paganism which we see
at its worst in Nero and at its best in
Diocletian. The Italian tyrants of the
Renaissance, refined and cruel, are the
true comment on this doctrine. It is not
an otiose point that it is in such men that
Nietzsche found the nearest approach to
his ideal." It is no defence to say that he
* He does in one place seem to imply that his master-class may
live as careless Epicurean gods: *
“Es ist durchaus nicht das Ziel die letzteren als die Herren
290 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
did not approve the material tortures, and
that the “splendid blond beast” he only
honoured in the past. For it is clear that, if
he honoured the qualities displayed by
these, he was deeper in his worship of them
than one who only admired their power.
The Mammon of John Davidson gives us
the measure.
/ Nietzsche is a good tonic, but a bad
(food. Let us, finally, try to estimate the
significance of Nietzsche. What will be
his place in the history of European culture
we cannot at this date predict. Some
things, however, are certain. His im-
portance lies in the fact that he heralded
the break-up of the nineteenth century.
He prophesied and partly produced the
shattering of those ideals which seemed
almost self-evident in that great move-
ment which culminated in the Exhibition
of 1851; Tennyson was the creature of
his age, and spoke of the time:
der ersteren aufzufassen, sondern es sollte zwei Arten neben-
eimander bestehen—moglichst getrennt, die eine wie die epi-
kurischen Götter sich um die andre nicht kümmernd.”
THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 291
When the war-drum throbbed no longer, and
the battle-flag was furled
In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of
the world.
Tennyson, himself (and many others) be-
came disillusioned. In “Locksley Hall,”
sixty years after, he left the record of
this. All those ideals have exhibited their
emptiness. Men have seen, as Carlyle
and Ruskin said they would, that mere
competition for money is no security for
the higher goods of human culture. The
problem of the poor, so far from being
solved by the grant of the vote, is seen to
be more terrific than ever. We contrast
with the modern proletariat the happier
lot of the feudal serf of the Middle Ages,
who had his land, and by Magna Charta
was secured in his “wainage.” This dis-
illusion has taken in many the form of
socialism. In others it has become a sad
conservatism, quite unlike the joyous tory-
ism of old, which harked back to feudal
ideals:–we see this sceptical disillusion
in writers like Sir Henry Maine. Nietzsche
292 THE WILL TO FREEDOMI
expressed this disillusion, but he went
beyond it. His gift to the world is a gospel
of hope.” He allows many people to hope,
who, having given up the supernatural,
would otherwise have sunk into gloom.
War, also, it has been thought, would be
shown to be a chimera, because it is so
expensive. A rationalist world would settle
down to eternal mutton-chops. Nietzsche
saw through this falsity. So far from all
grounds of quarrel coming to an end with
the growth of great aggregations, they have
increased. Now there has dawned upon
men’s minds the prospect of world-domin-
ion. Here Nietzsche was prophetic.”
- “The time for petty politics is past; the
next century will bring the struggle for the
\
“-
“--- ------ --
!“ Und nun nachdem wir lange dergestalt unterwege waren,
wir Argonauten des Ideals, muthiger vielleicht als klug ist, und
oft genug schiffbrüchig und zu Schaden gekommen, aber wie
gesagt, gesünder als man es uns erlauben möchte, gefährlich-
gesund–immer wieder gesund-will es uns scheinen, als ob wir,
zum Lohn dafür, ein noch unentdecktes Land vor uns haben,
dessen Grenzen noch Niemand abgesehen hat, ein Jenseits aller
bisherigen Länder und Winkel des Ideals, eine Welt so überreich
an Schönem, Fremdem, Fragwürdigem, Furchtbarem und Gött-
lichem, dass unsere Neugierde, sowohl als unser Besitzdurst
ausser sich gerathen sind–ach, dass wir nun durch Nichts mehr
zu ersättigen sind.” (Leben, II, 450.)
? Beyond Good and Evil, 146.
THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 293
dominion of the world—the compulsion to
great politics.”
Nor is it easy to suppose, that words
like this have been without effect in stim-
ulating this desire for world-hegemony.
Nietzsche will occupy a place in the
history of political ideals. Mr. Carlyle
in the first chapter of his History of Political
Theory in the West, describes the change
that came over political thought between
Aristotle and Cicero. Partly as a result
of the conquests of Alexander and the
Hellenisation of Asia and Egypt, partly
from the beginnings of the Roman Empire,
men had begun to believe in a cosmopoli-
tan world-citizenship, based on that funda-
mental likeness between man and man of
which Stoic and Christian ideals were the
expression. This notion was at the back of
the minds of the great Roman lawyers, who
always asserted that slavery was a thing
of convention and opposed to the law of
nature. That belief held Europe until
the French Revolution. It had much to
294 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
do with the feudal system, for in theory
the serf differs toto coelo from the slave.
The church, which was opposed to slavery,
had no objection to serfdom. There was
nothing un-Christian in the feudal theory
of the peasant. With the revived study
of Roman law in the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance, the old evil reappeared,
for lawyers began to work out logically
the statements of the Code and the Digest.
Since the serf was unfree, he was to be
denied personality and treated as purely
a chattel. That condition was partly
the cause of the Peasants’ Revolt in Eng-
land, and later on of the Peasant War in
Germany. There, as a result of Luther’s
influence, the lot of the peasant became
worse for three centuries. Yet he was
not denied altogether the rights of human-
ity. “Eh, Nangis, ce sont des hommes,”
was the reply even of an autocrat like
Louis XIV when one of his dukes asked
him why he did not execute all deserters.
Despite many inconsistencies, that senti-
ment remained unchanged. It helped to
THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 295
produce the French Revolution; it ended
the slave-trade, and ultimately slavery.
Precisely at the moment of its triumph,
this movement suffered a setback. Mod-
ern capitalism shewed the evils of an ex-
ploited proletariat. Men began to ask
in what way, save the name of freedom,
the modern wage-slave was better off than
his predecessor, the chattel. Some would
end this by a revolution. Others were
willing to accept its essential fact, the
exploitation of the many for the higher
life of the few. Possibilities of Empire
over black and yellow races raised once
more the problem of racial differences.
Darwin, too, and belief in heredity helped
in the same direction. It was seen that
nations could not be held together without
authority, and that breed was a fact.
Democracy in so far as it implies an ab-
solute individualism, irrespective of blood,
is not justified on the principles of evolu-
tion and heredity. The political fact of
the consolidation of modern Germany by a
military monarchy was a further stimulus.
296 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
Nietzsche is important in that he ex-
presses and sums up a new critical atti-
tude and calls men back to doctrines of
the natural inequality of man. Doubt-
less, he owed much to his admired Gobi-
neau and his work on The Inequality of
Races. The tendency nowadays is to re-
gard not the individual, but the group, as
the social unit. This in itself is not con-
trary to Christianity, which never taught
an absolute individualism and lays stress
on the family. Nor is it even contrary to
the present direction of social reform,
which more and more tends to pay regard
to the numerous groups which make up
the nation, and to treat men as members of
such bodies. It is easy to connect it with
eugenics and the effort to limit the multi-
plication of those whom Nietzsche ridicules
as “the botched and bungled.” This
may be done without that violence of
pride and selfishness which Nietzsche ap-
plauds. Whether this tendency be right
or wrong, it exists. Nietzsche is among
THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 297
the most important influences which have
developed it.
Another point is of even more note,
although it is less obvious. Mere freedom
without any restrictions is not possible
in any society. The anarchy of the purely
individualist ideal of the last century is
becoming apparent in moral, intellectual,
and artistic matters, and in social and
political spheres it affords no pleasing
prospect. Nietzsche's task, we must ever
remember, was not ignoble, The raising ...
of the type man, the winning of the highest
~ *****~s a “**~xº~. As J
culture, is an inspiring aim. Nietzsche
saw that this would never be under the
ideals then prevalent of comfort, money-
getting, Christianity sunk into mere eu-
daemonism, elementary education, and the
rule of the newspapers. He places in con-
trast the aristocratic ideals of courage and
distinction. He asks the question, Who is
to rule P. As he points out, “Society seeks
a commander.”
Once more, in fact, he raises the ques-
298 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
tion, “What is the nature of Authority?”
This question is one of increasing im-
portance. People will be forced to an-
swer it with more care than they have
done recently. In all practical affairs,
the common answer is: “Authority is
what I like.” Nietzsche's answer is that
in the rare person: “Authority is what I
command.” He moves right away from
the prevailing notion that every one’s
opinion is equally valuable. Creighton
used to complain of “the appalling levity”
with which people pronounced judgments
on topics they have never studied. This
evil is real. It is well that we should
recognise it, while avoiding the opposite
danger of the tyranny of the expert who
cannot see the wood for the trees. In any
case, the question which Nietzsche puts,
or rather the problem which determined
the direction of his thoughts, is one of
capital importance. In the intellectual
and religious no less than in political and
artistic realms it will have its influence.
THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 299
Whatever be the true answer, it must
take into account the imaginative and
subconscious elements in human nature,
no less than the logical and articulate.
The least reasonable of all replies is that
negation of authority which we call ab-
solute individualism. Hardly less so is
that concentration of authority which in
the State we call despotism, in the Church
Infallibilism. Mankind has nowhere yet
achieved success in this matter. Nowhere
has it arrived at that form of political or
even ecclesiastical development which shall
secure a perfect balance, which shall allow
to each individual his true place as a
creator, i. e., as an authority-making per-
son, while, on the other hand, it insures to
him the discipline from outside in the
form of group-authority which shall guard
against his own caprice. Nietzsche hoped
that he had effected this by his new as-
ceticism, by his Jesuitry of the new order
for his race of ruling philosophers. Un-
luckily, he ended there. For the vast
300 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
majority of men he leaves no place at all,
except to obey, to display the herd-virtues,
while he assigns to them the part of mere
tools to the higher man.
No system can endure that does that.
It rests on a lie. Owing to existing dif-
ferences, it may last for a time, like slavery.
Here only would I emphasise this fact.
Nietzsche's criticism of democracy, as he
understood it, i. e., as a theory of com-
fortable Philistines idealising sympathy and
devoid of the austere virtues, was indeed
one-sided and violent; but it had this
merit—it posed the problem of the pres-
ent age: How is society to be held to-
gether without rule P What are the true
grounds of such rule? In other words,
what is the basis of political and still
more of intellectual and artistic obliga-
tion? Despite many volumes and much
talk, this problem still exists. Nietzsche
was right in saying, that it could not be
solved merely by an appeal to logic or by
giving free hand to the scientific expert.
THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 301
We need not discuss again Nietzsche's
criticism of rationalist ideals. His im-
portance in this respect is obvious. In
an age in which M. Bergson's is a name to
conjure with, the connection of Nietzsche
with a genuine movement away from the
Aufklärung need not further be emphasised.
Lastly, it remains to ask, what lessons
we can draw from Nietzsche in the domain
of Christian apologetics.
First of all, we must recognise the re-
crudescence of pagan morality. No longer
is there any excuse for saying that moral-
ity can be taken for granted, or that it
does not matter what a man believes.
Very early Nietzsche saw that it was
hopeless to maintain the Christian stand-
ards apart from the Christian Faith. The
novels of George Eliot were remarkable
for one such attempt. Acton thought
that their distinctive merit was this that,
while the writer's standpoint was that of
pure atheism, she yet maintained the
302 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
Christian ideal of human life. Nietzsche
observed the same fact, but regarded it
as a demerit.
Nietzsche has for ever shattered the
old claim of the infidel that he waged no
war against Christian ideals of living, but
was concerned only to deny the puerilities
of a supernatural creed. Whereas Gam-
betta said, “Le cléricalisme c’est l'ennemi,”
Nietzsche says: “Le moralisme c’est l'en-
nemi.” Nietzsche knew very well how
vain was the hope of the Tübingen school
to destroy Christianity by criticism. So
long as people went on admiring Christ,
they would find means of remaining Chris-
tians. A few might give up the creed.
The majority, however, seeing that creeds
were integral to the moral ideal, would in-
sist on keeping both. Nietzsche has proved
right. People who want to believe are
no longer disturbed by the presuppositions
of intellectualism. Nietzsche himself helped
to break them down. He did more service
to the faith than he knew. Confident that
THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 303
the Christian Spirit is the truth, many
are content to wait even in the quagmire
juntil criticism and thought have sifted
ithe grain from the chaff.
~ Secondly, Nietzsche forces us to face one
great fact—hatred. We have now before
us the enmity of many men who give up
the Christian Faith, not because they
cannot believe it, but because they hate
Christ. This hostility, though more bitter,
is less hopeless than the cold contempt of
the superior person. Nietzsche is a nobler
foe, and his blows are direct, not like those
of certain nominal Christians who under
the dominion of ideas essentially natural-
istic would have us surrender all that
makes Christianity attractive. Christian
morality is on its trial. More and more
will it be openly attacked by those who
worship “the lust of the flesh, the lust of
the eyes, and the pride of life.” Should
these elements attain predominance as an
ideal, a new outbreak of persecution is
certain, and it will be as much more fiendish
304 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
than the old as the present war is more
barbarous than those of the eighteenth
century. Anything like tolerance is ab-
sent from these people. When his friend
Romundt thought of becoming a priest,
Nietzsche took it as a personal insult, the
end of all friendship. Nietzsche himself
deprecated persecution. Were his disciples,
who have none of his charm, to get hold of
the tiller, nothing can be more certain than
that they would persecute. Nietzsche's
philosophy is a repetition of the old com-
plaint that Christians are hostes humani
generis. Any general belief in it would
produce the old cry, Christiani ad leones.
His dislike of Christianity is indeed to
\many people his chief recommendation.
In another respect, Nietzsche is fruitful.
Many amiable persons, some of them
erudite, seem to discuss the problem of
Christianity as though it were merely an
intellectual amusement." To others, again,
\
Leben, II, 183: “Bis heute ist mir nichts fremder und unver-
wandter als die ganze europäische und amerikanische Spezies
von ‘libres penseurs’ . . . sie glauben allesammt noch ans
Ideal—“Ich bin der erste Immoralist.’”
THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 305
the whole matter seems capable of solu-
tion on grounds of historical criticism, in
which are inherent presuppositions which
they accept without inquiry. Before people
begin to discuss the historical problem, they
must have answered the old question,
What is the chief end of Man? Much
even of ultra-modernist or liberal writing
seems to take for granted the Christian
ideal, and merely to ask how to commend
it. The real question is: “What think
ye of Christ?” Is the Christian ideal
decadent or is it noble? Is it true, as St.
Paul said in one of Creighton’s favourite
texts to ordinands, “that the weakness of
God is stronger than men,” or is Nietzsche’s
apotheosis of force the only truth? Many
books are written now which ignore the
fact that there can be any doubt about
ethical ideals. The writer is occupied with
the question as to which bit of the Creed
he can throw as a Sop to Cerberus, hoping
thus to win the educated man. Nietzsche
is a standing witness that, even if you
\
306 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
throw over the whole Creed, you are no
nearer to your end; you will have made
ridiculous what was always hateful. That
is all. L’homme moyen sensuel is not and
never will be Christian in his aims; now
that he is educated and free he will say
so. The very last thing that will attract
is a Christianity with the supernatural
left out, and all the old moral ideals intact.
Such a man needs a change of heart be-
fore he wants Christ. When he does,
except for one or two details, he will not
be troubled by the Creed. “Except ye
repent, and become as little children, ye
cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
Nietzsche's call to reality is a lesson to
all Christians. He saw that many men
disguise their egotism under the mask of
a high moral ideal; that even sympathy
may be a cloak of self-indulgence and the
love of power, and that pity in some matters
is but the expression of cowardice. He
summoned men to go out into the wilder-
ness away from all hothouses, and predicted
THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 307
treasures for all who treat life as a great
adventure. Christians profess to do that.
Via Crucis via lucis is their motto. In
face of Nietzsche's attacks and those of
others, a Christianity which is what Mr.
Wells called “muffled” will have no ap-
peal. Are there not many who act as
though St. Paul had said that the love of
money was a root of all good, instead of
evil? Few Christians attain so high a
standard as did Nietzsche.
'Christians, again, in contradistinction
to Nietzsche assert the will to freedom.
They believe that we are all “members
one of another.” Yet do all of them live,
or even try to live, as though they be-
lieved this? Christians may agree with
Nietzsche in the doctrine of differences be-
tween men conditioned by natural gifts and
inheritance. They are bound to differ
from him when he bids them to treat
large classes of men as mere things, the
conditions of the higher life for themselves.
But do they not sometimes live as though
308 THE WILL TO rarrºw
that were the truth? No baser cynicism,
as William Morris once said, can exist
than that of the man of culture content
to enjoy all the treasures of humanity
without contributing anything. Yet with-
out precisely intending it, many devout
Christians are little better. They look upon
the great mass of men as of a different
order, and at every attempt to better
their condition they set up a panic outcry
that their dividends are in danger. That
cry will nowadays unite many who differ
in every other belief. Nietzsche is signif-
icant, not because he does not, but because
he does, express the spirit of his time.
All he did was to make it more articulate
and to accept without glozing the fact,
all too patent, of the servitude of the many
for the comfort of the few. The tempta-
tion—expressed in the extreme in the
culte du moi—to treat the whole crowd
as mere instruments of my pleasure is
a temptation as old as human nature.
It is better indeed, for the most part,
THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 309
that, even if men do these things, they
should acknowledge a higher standard.
Nietzsche has at least the merit of honesty.
``The more his writings are read, the more
difficult will it be for Christians to go on
trying to serve both God and Mammon.
They cannot go on for ever halting be-
J
tween two opinions, directing their lives
by one standard and professing lip service
to another. They will have to come out
and no longer be of those Limbo-spirits,
“neither for God nor for his enemies.”
Nietzsche is one of the many influences
that will deepen the cleavage between
the Church and the world in the future.
All compromises will be less and less to
the taste of the succeeding age. Much of
Nietzsche is, indeed, of direct service to
the Christian, and is far less antagonistic
than he supposed. Even, however, with
these reservations, there is a gulf fixed.
Nietzsche is a portent, as he said. His
attitude of neo-pagan revolt against Chris-
310 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
tian and humane values is a symptom.
Nietzsche claimed to be reviving the heroic
prephilosophic spirit of Greece and Rome.
The use to which he put classical culture is
not new. We see it in some of the Renais-
sance princes or in our own Tiptoft.
Classical antiquity had many aspects.
One such can be seen in that movement
which steered by Plato's star. This move-
ment developed ethical doctrines which
resembled the Christian, and a sense of
religious need which was fulfilled only in
the Catholic Church. Friends and foes
alike now recognise the greatness of this
praparatio evangelica, not only in strictly
philosophical thought, but also in ethics.
Nietzsche was well aware of it, but he hated
it, and Socrates to him spelled decadence.
In later ages classical studies have often
formed a propaedeutic to Christian theol-
ogy. Works like Fénélon’s Télémaque, and
indeed all the most characteristic literature
of the seventeenth century shew the blend-
ing of the two streams of classical tradition
THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 311
º
f
j
f
;
and Christian feeling. One eminent critic
holds that the special note of the French
genius is this blending of the two antiqui-
ties, and for that reason he sets Bossuet at
its summit. Until recently this has been
the spirit of classical culture in England.
Nietzsche also drew his inspiration from
the classics, but it was an inspiration to-
tally contrary. He went back to the pa-
gan prephilosophic side of Hellenism, to
Rome conquering and proud, not humane,
as in Cicero. To him the Greek spirit was
essentially this-worldly, outward, and bar-
baric. In Christianity he found the most
dangerous enemy, for it had sucked the
sap from the ancient tree and supplanted
this grand, aristocratic immoralism.
There can be little doubt that Nietzsche
was right in his facts. True Paganism is
seen in the spirit of the Melian dialogue or
of the Roman slave system, not in the re-
fined ethics of Cicero or the meditative
melancholy of Marcus Aurelius. This real
Paganism is the sworn foe of Christianity
312 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
and of all ideals which believe in human
| brotherhood. Nietzsche drank deeply of
I this spirit and helped to make it operative.
Many traces of this baleful side in classical
culture may be seen to-day. We must face
it. Christians have to meet an attack
which owes its origin not to scientific in-
quiry or philosophic scepticism, but to the
glamour of Athens and to the grandeur of
Rome.
If in this respect Nietzsche is a foe, in
another he is a friend. Nietzsche knew the
tragedy of things. He never thought that
evil was only an appearance, nor was suf-
fering to him merely the creases in the
eternal smile of the Absolute. No facile
optimism, whether of Hegel or of Rousseau,
no blind faith in the idol of automatic
progress, no romantic idealisation of nine-
teenth-century enlightenment marred the
clearness of his vision. He knew that life
is tragic, and that man needs redemption.
He knew, too, that the cost of any redemp-
tion that is worth having must be terrific.
THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 313
The price for the world’s ransom must be
paid in blood. The world would not be?
worth redeeming could it be paid in any
lower coinage. In this sense Nietzsche is
at one with all that is best in Christianity,
although he was opposed to much that
masqueraded under that august title. '
Modern civilisation is the apotheosis of
vulgarity—or was. In its gaudy and clam-
orous prosperity, with every shop-window
shouting, men have mistaken all their
values and mixed the colours of the world.
In religion an idol has been made of easy
amiability, and for the enthralling specta-
cle of God as Father men have substituted
a pretty picture of the eternal grandmother.
The “splendour of God” had become a
tawdry oleograph, and a milk-and-water
sentimentalism had usurped the once aus-
tere name of Christian piety. The reac-
tion against Puritanism had led to a reli-
gion of weak good nature and the refusal
of all austerity. It was against this that
Nietzsche tilted when he attacked Strauss
314 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
and denounced the shallowness of free-
thinking optimists. He was right. This,
at least, we in our generation may learn.
We learn it at the cost either of our own
service or the loss of many friends—of
whom we only dare hope that we may be
not all unworthy. The world is once more
revealed to us as a place “of true, marvel-
lous, inextricable courage and power, a
Question-chamber of torture by rack and
fire, with no sleep among the demon ques-
tioners, none among the angel watchers,
none among the men who stand or fall be-
side these hosts of God.” This does not
make faith easy. It makes it strong.
Deafened by the thunder of the guns and
dazed by the spectacle of a world in ruins,
many a man and woman have lost all faith
in a God who is Love. Those who keep
their faith keep it with a difference. No
more will they cavil at the Master’s like-
ness of His Father to an austere landowner.
No more will they find it hard to believe
that Love, because it is perfect, will send
THE DANGER OF NIETZSCHE 315
not peace but a sword. Love is known
for what it is, no sentimental wish for
another’s pleasure, which will be changed
by a show of tears, but a resolute will for
his true good—ready to purchase that good
at any cost in pain, not only to himself but
also to the loved one. “There is nothing
so merciless as the mercy of God.” Not all
men will have religion now or at any time.
But one great quality will come back to
all religion that is real—the awe of God.
Men have dreamed that they could love
God yet cease altogether to fear Him.
They have found that to love God without
a holy fear is not possible. In the long
run Love goes, too, and self reigns alone.
Nietzsche felt this in a dim way. He got
out of the difficulty by denying God alto-
gether. But he kept the sense of the tragic
and tremendous greatness of life. This, he
said, we are to recognise, to embrace, and
even to adore—if we would rise to the
height of freedom. Courage and a face
always smiling, with pain not merely braved
316 THE WILL TO FREEDOM
but transmuted, joy amid a universe which
is a chamber of horrors, and life best felt
as life with death lurking at every footfall,
these were the maxims which he preached.
All honour to him that he preached them
with no hope of any reward, no gleam from
any light behind the hill. We shall do well
if we take from this bitter tonic its good-
ness, the sense of the greatness of things,
the need of courage and a free soul, the
worth of discipline, the futility of mere
comfort-worship, and the vanity of all
security that has any other anchor than
our own soul. We Christians are the hap-
pier that we can see a reason for all this
where Nietzsche saw none, and can say
with the ancient sage: “The fear of the
Lord is the beginning of wisdom; and to
depart from evil, that is understanding.”
sº-
INDEX
Adam Smith, 3.
Antichrist, 6, 42, 106–110, 176,
232.
Apollinian art, 22, 277.
Asceticism, 306–7; Oriental
and Christian, 122–4.
Authority, Nietzsche's view of,
297-300.
Basle, 10, 18, 20, 21, 35, 231.
Bayreuth, 30, 31.
Benthamism, Nietzche's atti-
tude to, 72, 112, 197, 285.
Bergson, 75, 154, 185, 237,
239, 241.
Bernard Shaw, 228.
Beyle (Henri), 19, 53.
Beyond Good and Evil, 42, 141,
I76, 252, 292.
Birth of Tragedy, 22, 25, 171,
174, 175,
Bismarck, 18, 27, 197.
Bonn (University of), 15.
Brahm, Dr., 267.
Brandes, Georg, 56, 150, 197,
216.
Burckhardt, 22.
Carlyle, 92.
Carus, Dr. Paul, 201.
Case of Wagner, The, 42,43, 176.
Cesare Borgia, 81, 87, 187,
149—150, 169, 271.
Chamberlain, Houston Stew-
art, 117, 280.
Christ, Nietzche's estimate of,
116, 146–7, 303, 305–6.
Comtism, 2, 129, 211, 235.
Conscience, origin according
to Nietzsche, 110–1, 144.
Critique of the Pure Reason,
188.
Culture, 24, 113, 199, 249, 254,
310; and history, 28, 251;
and Christianity, 131;
Nietzsche's contribution to,
290 ft.
Darwin, 86, 175, 295; influence
on Nietzsche, 194–6.
Davidson, John, 267, 290.
Dawn of Day, The, 41, 159, 175.
Democracy, 293–5; Nietzsche
a reaction from, 296, 300.
Determinism, 235–8.
Deussen, Dr. Paul, 13, 15, 41,
197.
Dionysian, art, 22; “Affirma-
tion of World,” 69; ideal,
90, 162, 211, 262, 277, 279.
“Distinction,” 88, 136, 138,
144, 256; of Christian
Church, 125–6, 135, 137.
Ecce Homo, 7,42, 43, 58, 103–5,
I59–162, 169, 176, 224.
Einzige wrºd sein Eigenth wºm,
Der, 174, 200, 206, 207.
Essays Out of Season, 24, 27,
93, 171, 175, 254.
317
3.18
INDEX
t
Eternal Recurrence, 19, 62,
69–70, 93–101; place of in
Nietzsche's philosophy, 97–8;
and freedom, 239.
Fischer, 22.
Förster-Nietzsche, Frau. See
Elizabeth Nietzsche.
Fouillée, 172, 195, 200;
Nietzsche's style, 225.
Foundations of 19th Century,
117, 280.
Freedom, 235–8; Nietzsche's
doctrine of, 238; gospel of,
288.
Future of Our Educational
Institutions, 174, 231.
OIl
Gabriele d’Annunzio, 270.
Gast, Peter, II, 32, 36, 150.
Genealogy of Morals, 42, 176,
232, 238.
George Eliot, 301.
Gobineau, 296.
Gould, Dr., 17.
Hartmann, 24, 192, 201.
Hodonism, 72, 233, 235.
Hegel, 193, 235, 312.
Human, All Too Human, 41,
175, 194.
Joyful Wisdom, The, 36, 63,
175.
Rant, 141, 184; Nietzsche's
contempt for, 177; Nietz-
sche's debt to, 178, 185–9.
La Rochefoucauld, Nietzsche's
imitation of, 41, 169, 247.
Leben Jesu, 48.
Leipzig, 15, 40.
Lou-Salomé, Fräulein, 36, 37,
63, 94.
Lower classes, Neitzsche's atti-
tude towards, 24, 259; re-
lation to superman, 81 ff.;
character of, 113.
Machiavelli, 141, 169, 283.
Malwida von Meysenburg, 35,
36, 37.
Meyer, Dr. Richard, 25, 72.
Middle classes, 120, 153.
Mill, J. S., 3.
Morality, 3, 4; inconsistency
of Nietzsche's attacks on, 79;
slave, 83, 113; Nietzsche
and ascetic, 111; the “idi-
osyncrasy of the decadent,”
115, 119; of Nietzsche’s
followers, 266 ft.; Christian,
on trial, 303.
Napoleon, 81, 87, 127, 149,
270, 284.
Naumburg, 12, 13; its influ-
ence on Nietzsche, 51, 52,
134.
Nemesis of Nations, 151.
Nietzsche, Elizabeth, 11, 12,
37; marriage, 38; goes to
Paraguay, 39; returns to
Nietzsche, 45.
Nietzsche's father, 11; mother,
11, 12, 44; grandmother, 11,
12.
Old Faith and the New, The, 23,
24–5.
Paganism, 4, 23, 28, 85, 289;
“corrupted” by Socrates
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