Strange to say, his fame vanished almost as suddenly as it had come. He outlived the height of his own repute, and was saddened, in his last years, by seeing what little power his tirades had had to stop the tide of “paternalistic” legislation. He had become unpopular with almost every class. Scientific specialists whose privileged fields he had invaded damned him with faint praise, ignoring his contributions and emphasizing his errors; and bishops of all creeds united in consigning him to an eternity of punishment. Laborites who liked his denunciations of war turned from him in anger when he spoke his mind on socialism and on trade-union politics; while conservatives who like his views on socialism shunned him because of his agnosticism. “I am more Tory than any Tory and more radical than any Radical,” he said, wistfully.123 He was incorrigibly sincere, and offended every group by speaking candidly on every subject: after sympathizing with the workers as victims of their employers, he added that the workers would be as domineering if positions were reversed; and after sympathizing with women as victims of men, he did not fail to add that men were the victims of women so far as the women could manage it. He grew old alone.
As he aged he became more gentle in opposition, and more moderate in opinion. He had always laughed at England’s ornamental king, but now he expressed the view that it was no more right to deprive the people of their king than it was to deprive a child of its doll.124 So in religion he felt it absurd and unkind to disturb the traditional faith where it seemed a beneficent and cheering influence.125 He began to realize that religious beliefs and political movements are built upon needs and impulses beyond the reach of intellectual attack; and he reconciled himself to seeing the world roll on without much heeding the heavy books he hurled in its direction. Looking back over his arduous career, he thought himself foolish for having sought literary fame instead of the simpler pleasures of life.126 When he died, in 1903, he had come to think that his work had been done in vain.127
We know now, of course, that it was not so. The decay of his repute was part of the English-Hegelian reaction against positivism; the revival of liberalism will raise him again to his place as the greatest English philosopher of his century. He gave to philosophy a new contact with things, and brought to it a realism which made German philosophy seem, beside it, weakly pale and timidly abstract. He summed up his age as no man had ever summed up any age since Dante; and he accomplished so masterly a coördination of so vast an area of knowledge that criticism is almost shamed into silence by his achievement. We are standing now on heights which his struggles and his labors won for us; we seem to be above him because he has raised us on his shoulders. Some day, when the sting of his opposition is forgotten, we shall do him better justice.
CHAPTER NINE
Friedrich Nietzsche
I. The Lineage of Nietzsche
Nietzsche was the child of Darwin and the brother of Bismarck.
It does not matter that he ridiculed the English evolutionists and the German nationalists: he was accustomed to denounce those who had most influenced him; it was his unconscious way of covering up his debts.
The ethical philosophy of Spencer was not the most natural corollary of the theory of evolution. If life is a struggle for existence in which the fittest survive, then strength is the ultimate virtue, and weakness the only fault. Good is that which survives, which wins; bad is that which gives way and fails. Only the mid-Victorian cowardice of the English Darwinians, and the bourgeois respectability of French positivists and German socialists, could conceal the inevitableness of this conclusion. These men were brave enough to reject Christian theology, but they did not dare to be logical, to reject the moral ideas, the worship of meekness and gentleness and altruism, which had grown out of that theology. They ceased to be Anglicans, or Catholics, or Lutherans; but they did not dare cease to be Christians.—So argued Friedrich Nietzsche.
“The secret stimulus of the French free-thinkers from Voltaire to August Comte was not to remain behind the Christian ideal, . . . but to outbid it if possible. Comte, with his ‘Live for others,’ out-Christanizes Christianity. In Germany it was Schopenhauer, and in England John Stuart Mill, who gave the greatest fame to the theory of sympathetic affections, of pity, and of usefulness to others as the principle of action . . . . All the systems of socialism placed themselves unwittingly . . . upon the common ground of these doctrines.”1
Darwin unconsciously completed the work of the Encyclopedists: they had removed the theological basis of modern morals, but they had left that morality itself untouched and inviolate, hanging miraculously in the air; a little breath of biology was all that was needed to clear away this remnant of imposture. Men who could think clearly soon perceived what the profoundest minds of every age had known: that in this battle we call life, what we need is not goodness but strength, not humility but pride, not altruism but resolute intelligence; that equality and democracy are against the grain of selection and survival; that not masses but geniuses are the goal of evolution; that not “justice” but power is the arbiter of all differences and all destinies.—So it seemed to Friedrich Nietzsche.
Now if all this were true, nothing could be more magnificent or significant than Bismarck. Here was a man who knew the realities of life, who said bluntly that “there is no altruism among nations,” and that modern issues are to be decided not by votes and rhetoric, but by blood and iron. What a cleansing whirlwind he was for a Europe rotten with delusions and democracy and “ideals”! In a few brief months he had brought decadent Austria to accept his leadership; in a few brief months he had humbled a France drunk with the legend of Napoleon; and in those brief months had he not also forced all those little German “states,” all those petty potentates, principalities and powers to fuse themselves into a mighty empire, the very symbol of the new morality of strength? The growing military and industrial vigor of this new Germany needed a voice; the arbitrament of war needed a philosophy to justify it. Christianity would not justify it, but Darwinism could. Given a little audacity, and the thing could be done.
Nietzsche had the audacity, and became the voice.
II. Youth
Nevertheless, his father was a minister; a long line of clergymen lay behind each of his parents; and he himself remained a preacher to the end. He attacked Christianity because there was so much of its moral spirit in him; his philosophy was an attempt to balance and correct, by violent contradiction, an irresistible tendency to gentleness and kindness and peace; was it not the final insult that the good people of Genoa should call him Il Santo—“the Saint”? His mother was a pious and Puritan lady, of the same sort that had fostered Immanuel Kant; and, with perhaps one disastrous exception, Nietzsche remained pious and Puritan, chaste as a statue, to the last: therefore his assault on Puritanism and piety. How he longed to be a sinner, this incorrigible saint!