Undoubtedly Nietzsche’s intensity of thought consumed him prematurely. His battle against his time unbalanced his mind; “it has always been found a terrible thing to war with the moral system of one’s age; it will have its revenge . . . from within and from without.”122 Towards the end Nietzsche’s work grew in bitterness; he attacked persons as well as ideas,—Wagner, Christ, etc. “Growth in wisdom,” he wrote, “may be exactly measured by decrease in bitterness”:123 but he could not convince his pen. Even his laughter became neurotic as his mind broke down; nothing could better reveal the poison that was corroding him than the reflection: “Perhaps I know best why man is the only animal that laughs: he alone suffers so excruciatingly that he was compelled to invent laughter.”124 Disease and increasing blindness were the physiological side of his breakdown.125 He began to give way to paranoiac delusions of grandeur and persecution; he sent one of his books to Taine with a note assuring the great critic that it was the most marvelous book ever written;126 and he filled his last book, Ecce Homo, with such mad self-praise as we have seen.127 Ecce homo!—alas, we behold the man here only too well!
Perhaps a little more appreciation by others would have forestalled this compensatory egotism, and given Nietzsche a better hold upon perspective and sanity. But appreciation came too late. Taine sent him a generous word of praise when almost all others ignored or reviled him; Brandes wrote to tell him that he was giving a course of lectures on the “aristocratic radicalism” of Nietzsche at the University of Copenhagen; Strindberg wrote to say that he was turning Nietzsche’s ideas to dramatic use; perhaps best of all, an anonymous admirer sent a check for $400. But when these bits of light came, Nietzsche was almost blind in sight and soul; and he had abandoned hope. “My time is not yet,” he wrote; “only the day after tomorrow belongs to me.”128
The last blow came at Turin in January, 1889, in the form of a stroke of apoplexy. He stumbled blindly back to his attic room, and dashed off mad letters: to Cosima Wagner four words—“Ariadne, I love you”; to Brandes a longer message, signed “The Crucified”; and to Burckhardt and Overbeck such fantastic missives that the latter hurried to his aid. He found Nietzsche ploughing the piano with his elbows, singing and crying his Dionysian ecstasy.
They took him at first to an asylum,129 but soon his old mother came to claim him and take him under her own forgiving care. What a picture!—the pious woman who had borne sensitively but patiently the shock of her son’s apostasy from all that she held dear, and who, loving him none the less, received him now into her arms, like another Pietà. She died in 1897, and Nietzsche was taken by his sister to live in Weimar. There a statue of him was made by Kramer—a pitiful thing, showing the once powerful mind broken, helpless, and resigned. Yet he was not all unhappy: the peace and quiet which he had never had when sane were his now; Nature had had mercy on him when she made him mad. He caught his sister once weeping as she looked at him, and he could not understand her tears: “Lisbeth,” he asked, “why do you cry? Are we not happy?” On one occasion he heard talk of books; his pale face lit up; “Ah!” he said, brightening, “I too have written some good books”—and the lucid moment passed.
He died in 1900. Seldom has a man paid so great a price for genius.
CHAPTER TEN
Contemporary European Philosophers: Bergson, Croce and Bertrand Russell
I. Henri Bergson
1. THE REVOLT AGAINST MATERIALISM
The history of modern philosophy might be written in terms of the warfare of physics and psychology. Thought may begin with its object, and at last, in consistency, try to bring its own mystic reality within the circle of material phenomena and mechanical law; or it may begin with itself, and be driven, by the apparent necessities of logic, to conceive all things as forms and creatures of mind. The priority of mathematics and mechanics in the development of modern science, and the reciprocal stimulation of industry and physics under the common pressure of expanding needs, gave to speculation a materialistic impulsion; and the most successful of the sciences became the models of philosophy. Despite Descartes’ insistence that philosophy should begin with the self and travel outward, the industrialization of Western Europe drove thought away from thought and in the direction of material things.
Spencer’s system was the culminating expression of this mechanical point of view. Hailed though he was as “the philosopher of Darwinism,” he was more truly the reflex and exponent of industrialism; he endowed industry with glories and virtues which to our hind-sight seem ridiculous; and his outlook was rather that of a mechanician and an engineer absorbed in the motions of matter, than that of a biologist feeling the élan of life. The rapid obsolescence of his philosophy is due largely to the replacement of the physical by the biological stand-point in recent thought; by the growing disposition to see the essence and secret of the world in the movement of life rather than in the inertia of things. And indeed, matter itself has in our days almost taken on life: the study of electricity, magnetism, and the electron has given a vitalistic tinge to physics; so that instead of a reduction of psychology to physics—which was the more or less conscious ambition of English thought—we approach a vitalized physics and an almost spiritualized matter. It was Schopenhauer who first, in modern thought, emphasized the possibility of making the concept of life more fundamental and inclusive than that of force; it is Bergson who in our own generation has taken up this idea, and has almost converted a sceptical world to it by the force of his sincerity and his eloquence.
Bergson was born in Paris, in 1859, of French and Jewish parentage. He was an eager student, and seems to have taken every prize that turned up. He did homage to the traditions of modern science by specializing at first in mathematics and physics, but his faculty for analysis soon brought him face to face with the metaphysical problems that lurk behind every science; and he turned spontaneously to philosophy. In 1878 he entered the École Normale Supèrieure, and on graduating, was appointed to teach philosophy at the Lycée of Clermont-Ferrand. There, in 1888, he wrote his first major work—the Essai sur les données immèdiates de la conscience, translated as Time and Free-will. Eight quiet years intervened before the appearance of his next (and his most difficult) book—Matière et mémoire. In 1898 he became professor at the École Normale, and in 1900 at the Collège de France, where he remained until his death in 1941. In 1907 he won international fame with his masterpiece—L’Évolution créatrice (Creative Evolution); he became almost overnight the most popular figure in the philosophic world; and all that was needed for his success was the placing of his books upon the Index Expurgatorius in 1914. In that same year he was elected to the French Academy.
It is a remarkable thing that Bergson, the David destined to stay the Goliath of materialism, was in youth a devotee of Spencer. But too much knowledge leads to scepticism; early devotees are the likeliest apostates, as early sinners are senile saints. The more he studied Spencer, the more keenly conscious Bergson became of the three rheumatic joints of the materialist mechanism: between matter and life, between body and mind, and between determinism and choice. The patience of Pasteur had discredited the belief in abiogenesis (the generation of life by non-living matter); and after a hundred years of theory, and a thousand vain experiments, the materialists were no nearer than before to solving the problem of the origin of life. Again, though thought and brain were obviously connected, the mode of connection was as far from obvious as it had ever been. If mind was matter, and every mental act a mechanical resultant of neutral states, of what use was consciousness? Why could not the material mechanism of the brain dispense with this “epiphenomenon,” as the honest and logical Huxley called it, this apparently useless flame thrown up by the heat of cerebral commotion? Finally, was determinism any more intelligible than free will? If the present moment contains no living and creative choice, and is totally and mechanically the product of the matter and motion of the moment before, then so was that moment the mechanical effect of the moment that preceded it, and that again of the one before . . . and so on, until we arrive at the primeval nebula as the total cause of every later event, of every line of Shakespeare’s plays, and every suffering of his soul; so that the sombre rhetoric of Hamlet and Othello, of Macbeth and Lear, in every clause and every phrase, was written far off there in the distant skies and the distant æons, by the structure and content of that legendary cloud. What a draft upon credulity! What an exercise of faith such a theory must demand in this unbelieving generation! What mystery or miracle, of Old Testament or New, could be half so incredible as this monstrous fatalistic myth, this nebula composing tragedies? There was matter enough for rebellion here; and if Bergson rose so rapidly to fame it was because he had the courage to doubt where all the doubters piously believed.