the great majority of those who violated these rules, were influenced
into believing them--or at least into professing to believe
them--utterly and unchangeably correct, and that it was the main
function of all religions to enforce and support them by making them
appear as laws laid down, at the beginning of the world, by the lord
of the universe himself, or at some later period, by his son, messiah
or spokesman. "Morality," he said, "not only commands innumerable
terrible means for preventing critical hands being laid upon her: her
security depends still more upon a sort of enchantment at which she is
phenomenally skilled. That is to say, she knows how to _enrapture_.
She appeals to the emotions; her glance paralyzes the reason and
the will.... Ever since there has been talking and persuading on
earth, she has been the supreme mistress of seduction."[2] Thus "a
double wall is put up against the continued testing, selection and
criticism of values. On one hand is revelation, and on the other,
veneration and tradition. The authority of the law is based upon two
assumptions--first, that God gave it, and secondly, that the wise
men of the past obeyed it."[3] Nietzsche came to the conclusion that
this universal tendency to submit to moral codes--this unreasonable,
emotional faith in the invariable truth of moral regulations--was
a curse to the human race and the chief cause of its degeneration,
inefficiency and unhappiness. And then he threw down the gauntlet by
denying that an ever-present deity had anything to do with framing such
codes and by endeavoring to prove that, far from being eternally true,
they commonly became false with the passing of the years. Starting out
as expressions of the primary life-instinct's effort to adapt some
individual or race to certain given conditions of existence, they took
no account of the fact that these conditions were constantly changing,
and that the thing which was advantageous at one time and to one race
was frequently injurious at some other time and to another race.
This reduction of all morality to mere expressions of expedience
engaged the philosopher during what he calls his "tunneling" period. To
exhibit his precise method of "tunneling" let us examine, for example,
a moral idea which is found in the code of every civilized country.
This is the notion that there is something inherently and fundamentally
wrong in the act of taking human life. We have good reason to believe
that murder was as much a crime 5,000 years ago as it is today and that
it took rank at the head of all conceivable outrages against humankind
at the very dawn of civilization. And why? Simply because the man
who took his neighbor's life made the life of everyone else in his
neighborhood precarious and uncomfortable. It was plain that what he
had done once he could do again, and so the peace and security of the
whole district were broken.
Now, it is apparent that the average human being desires peace and
security beyond all things, because it is only when he has them that
he may satisfy his will to live--by procuring food and shelter for
himself and by becoming the father of children. He is ill-fitted to
fight for his existence; the mere business of living and begetting
his kind consumes all of his energies: "the world, as a world," as
Horace Greeley said, "barely makes a living." Therefore, it came to
be recognized at the very beginning of civilization, that the man
who killed other men was a foe to those conditions which the average
man had to seek in order to exist--to peace and order and quiet and
security. Out of this grew the doctrine that it was immoral to commit
murder, and as soon as mankind became imaginative enough to invent
personal gods, this doctrine was put into their mouths and so attained
the force and authority of divine wisdom. In some such manner, said
Nietzsche, the majority of our present moral concepts were evolved. At
the start they were mere echoes of a protest against actions which made
existence difficult and so outraged and opposed the will to live.
As a rule, said Nietzsche, such familiar protests as that against
murder, which laid down the maxim that the community had rights
superior to those of the individual, were voiced by the weak, who found
it difficult to protect themselves, as individuals, against the strong.
One strong man, perhaps, was more than a match, in the struggle for
existence, for ten weak men and so the latter were at a disadvantage.
But fortunately for them they could overcome this by combination, for
they were always in an overwhelming majority, numerically, and in
consequence they were stronger, taken together, than the phalanx of
the strong. Thus it gradually became possible for them to enforce the
rules that they laid down for their own protection--which rules always
operated against the wishes--and, as an obvious corollary, against the
best interests of--the strong.[4] When the time arrived for fashioning
religious systems, these rules were credited to the gods, and again the
weak triumphed. Thus the desire of the weak among the world's early
races of men, to protect their crops and wives against the forays of
the strong, by general laws and divine decrees instead of by each man
fighting for his own, has come down to us in the form of the Christian
commandments: "Thou shalt not steal.... Thou shalt not covet thy
neighbor's house.... Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his
manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything
that is thy neighbor's."
Nietzsche shows that the device of putting man-made rules of morality
into the mouths of the gods--a device practiced by every nation in
history--has vastly increased the respectability and force of all
moral ideas. This is well exhibited by the fact that, even today and
among thinking men, offenses which happen to be included in the scope
of the Ten Commandments, either actually or by interpretation, are
regarded with a horror which seldom, if ever, attaches to offenses
obviously defined and delimited by merely human agencies. Thus, theft
is everywhere looked upon as dishonorable, but cheating at elections,
which is fully as dangerous to the body politic, is commonly pardoned
by public opinion as a normal consequence of enthusiasm, and in some
quarters is even regarded as an evidence of courage, not to say of a
high and noble sense of gratitude and honor.
Nietzsche does not deny that human beings have a right to construct
moral codes for themselves, and neither does he deny that they are
justified, from their immediate standpoint, at least, in giving these
codes the authority and force of divine commands. But he points out
that this procedure is bound to cause trouble in the long run, for the
reason that divine commands are fixed and invariable, and do not change
as fast as the instincts and needs of the race. Suppose, for instance,
that all acts of Parliament and Congress were declared to be the
will of God, and that, as a natural consequence, the power to repeal
or modify them were abandoned. It is apparent that the world would
outgrow them as fast as it does today, but it is also apparent that the
notion that they were infallible would paralyze and block all efforts,
by atheistic reformers, to overturn or amend them. As a result, the
British and American people would be compelled to live in obedience to
rules which, on their very face, would often seem illogical and absurd.
Yet the same thing happens to notions of morality. They are devised, at
the start, as measures of expediency, and then given divine sanction in
order to lend them authority. In the course of time, perhaps, the race
outgrows them, but none the less, they continue in force--at least so
long as the old gods are worshipped. Thus human laws become divine--and
inhuman. Thus morality itself becomes immoral. Thus the old instinct
whereby society differentiates between good things and bad, grows
muddled and uncertain, and the fundamental purpose of morality--that
of producing a workable scheme of living--is defeated. Thereafter it
is next to impossible to distinguish between the laws that are still
useful and those that have outlived their usefulness, and the man who
makes the attempt--the philosopher who endeavors to show humanity
how it is condemning as bad a thing that, in itself, is now good, or
exalting as good a thing that, for all its former goodness, is now
bad--this man is damned as a heretic and anarchist, and according as
fortune serves him, is burned at the stake or merely read out of the
human race.[5]
Nietzsche found that all existing moral ideas might be divided into
two broad classes, corresponding to the two broad varieties of human
beings--the masters and the slaves. Every man is either a master or
a slave, and the same is true of every race. Either it rules some
other race or it is itself ruled by some other race. It is impossible
to think of a man or of a people as being utterly isolated, and even
were this last possible, it is obvious that the community would be
divided into those who ruled and those who obeyed. The masters are
strong and are capable of doing as they please; the slaves are weak
and must obtain whatever rights they crave by deceiving, cajoling or
collectively intimidating their masters. Now, since all moral codes,
as we have seen, are merely collections of the rules laid down by some
definite group of human beings for their comfort and protection, it is
evident that the morality of the master class has for its main object
the preservation of the authority and kingship of that class, while
the morality of the slave class seeks to make slavery as bearable as
possible and to exalt and dignify those things in which the slave can
hope to become the apparent equal or superior of his master.
The civilization which existed in Europe before the dawn of
Christianity was a culture based upon master-morality, and so we find
that the theologians and moralists of those days esteemed a certain
action as right only when it plainly subserved the best interests of
strong, resourceful men. The ideal man of that time was not a meek and
lowly sufferer, bearing his cross uncomplainingly, but an alert, proud
and combative being who knew his rights and dared maintain them. In
consequence we find that in many ancient languages, the words "good"
and "aristocratic" were synonymous. Whatever served to make a man a
nobleman--cunning, wealth, physical strength, eagerness to resent and
punish injuries--was considered virtuous, praiseworthy and moral,[6]
and on the other hand, whatever tended to make a man sink to the level
of the great masses--humility, lack of ambition, modest desires, lavish
liberality and a spirit of ready forgiveness--was regarded as immoral
and wrong.
"Among these master races," says Nietzsche, "the antithesis 'good and
bad' signified practically the same as 'noble and contemptible!' The
despised ones were the cowards, the timid, the insignificant, the
self-abasing--the dog-species of men who allowed themselves to be
misused--the flatterers and, above all, the liars. It is a fundamental
belief of all true aristocrats that the common people are deceitful.
'We true ones,' the ancient Greek nobles called themselves.
"It is obvious that the designations of moral worth were at first
applied to individual men, and not to actions or ideas in the abstract.
The master type of man regards himself as a sufficient judge of worth.
He does not seek approval: his own feelings determine his conduct.
'What is injurious to me,' he reasons, 'is injurious in itself.' This
type of man honors whatever qualities he recognizes in himself: his
morality is self-glorification. He has a feeling of plentitude and
power and the happiness of high tension. He helps the unfortunate,
perhaps, but it is not out of sympathy. The impulse, when it comes
at all, rises out of his superabundance of power--his thirst to
function. He honors his own power, and he knows how to keep it in hand.
He joyfully exercises strictness and severity over himself and he
reverences all that is strict and severe. 'Wotan has put a hard heart
in my breast,' says an old Scandinavian saga. There could be no better
expression of the spirit of a proud viking....
"The morality of the master class is irritating to the taste of the
present day because of its fundamental principle that a man has
obligations only to his equals; that he may act to all of lower rank
and to all that are foreign as he pleases.... The man of the master
class has a capacity for prolonged gratitude and prolonged revenge,
but it is only among his equals. He has, too, great resourcefulness
in retaliation; great capacity for friendship, and a strong need for
enemies, that there may be an outlet for his envy, quarrelsomeness and
arrogance, and that by spending these passions in this manner, he may
be gentle towards his friends."[7]
By this ancient _herrenmoral_, or master-morality, Napoleon Bonaparte
would have been esteemed a god and the Man of Sorrows an enemy to
society. It was the ethical scheme, indeed, of peoples who were sure
of themselves and who had no need to make terms with rivals or to seek
the good will or forbearance of anyone. In its light, such things as
mercy and charity seemed pernicious and immoral, because they meant
a transfer of power from strong men, whose proper business it was to
grow stronger and stronger, to weak men, whose proper business it was
to serve the strong. In a word, this master-morality was the morality
of peoples who knew, by experience, that it was pleasant to rule and
be strong. They knew that the nobleman was to be envied and the slave
to be despised, and so they came to believe that everything which
helped to make a man noble was good and everything which helped to
make him a slave was evil. The idea of nobility and the idea of good
were expressed by the same word, and this verbal identity survives in
the English language today, despite the fact that our present system
of morality, as we shall see, differs vastly from that of the ancient
master races.
In opposition to this master-morality of the strong, healthy nations
there was the _sklavmoral_, or slave-morality, of the weak nations.
The Jews of the four or five centuries preceding the birth of Christ
belonged to the latter class. Compared to the races around them, they
were weak and helpless. It was out of the question for them to conquer
the Greeks or Romans and it was equally impossible for them to force
their laws, their customs or their religion upon their neighbors on
other sides. They were, indeed, in the position of an army surrounded
by a horde of irresistible enemies. The general of such an army, with
the instinct of self-preservation strong within him, does not attempt
to cut his way out. Instead he tries to make the best terms he can, and
if the leader of the enemy insists upon making him and his vanquished
force prisoners, he endeavors to obtain concessions which will make
this imprisonment as bearable as possible. The strong man's object is
to take as much as he can from his victim; the weak man's is to save as
much as he can from his conqueror.
The fruit of this yearning of weak nations to preserve as much of their
national unity as possible is the thing Nietzsche calls slave-morality.
Its first and foremost purpose is to discourage, and if possible, blot
out, all those traits and actions which are apt to excite the ire, the
envy, or the cupidity of the menacing enemies round about. Revenge,
pride and ambition are condemned as evils. Humility, forgiveness,
contentment and resignation are esteemed virtues. The moral man
is the man who has lost all desire to triumph and exult over his
fellow-men--the man of mercy, of charity, of self-sacrifice.
"The impotence which does not retaliate for injuries," says Nietzsche,
"is falsified into 'goodness;' timorous abjectness becomes 'humility;'
subjection to those one hates is called 'obedience,' and the one who
desires and commands this impotence, abjectness and subjection is
called God. The inoffensiveness of the weak, their cowardice (of which
they have ample store); their standing at the door, their unavoidable
time-serving and waiting--all these things get good names. The
inability to get revenge is translated into an _unwillingness_ to get
revenge, and becomes forgiveness, a virtue.
"They are wretched--these mutterers and forgers--but they say that
their wretchedness is of God's choosing and even call it a distinction
that he confers upon them. The dogs which are liked best, they say,
are beaten most. Their wretchedness is a test, a preparation, a
schooling--something which will be paid for, one day, in happiness.
They call that 'bliss.'"[8]
By the laws of this slave-morality the immoral man is he who seeks
power and eminence and riches--the millionaire, the robber, the
fighter, the schemer. The act of acquiring property by conquest--which
is looked upon as a matter of course by master-morality--becomes a
crime and is called theft. The act of mating in obedience to natural
impulses, without considering the desire of others, becomes adultery;
the quite natural act of destroying one's enemies becomes murder.
[1] II Thess. II, 15: "Hold the tradition which ye have been taught."
Eusebius Pamphilus: "Those things which are written believe; those
things which are not written, neither think upon nor inquire after."
St. Austin: "Whatever ye hear from the holy scriptures let it favor
well with you; whatever is without them refuse." See also St. Basil,
Tertullian and every other professional moralist since, down to John
Alexander Dowie and Emperor William of Germany.
[2] "_Morgenröte_," preface, § 3.
[3] "_Der Antichrist_," § 57.
[4] The fact that the state is founded, not upon a mysterious "social
impulse" in man, but upon each individual's regard for his own
interest, was first pointed out by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), in his
argument against Aristotle and Grotius.
[5] The risk of such idol-smashing is well set forth at length by G.
Bernard Shaw in the preface to "The Quintessence of Ibsenism;" London,
1904.
[6] Henry Bradley, in a lecture at the London Institution, in Jan 1907,
showed that this was true of the ancient Britons, as is demonstrated by
their liking for bestowing such names as Wolf and Bear upon themselves.
It was true, also, of the North American Indians and of all primitive
races conscious of their efficiency.
[7] "_Jenseits von Gut und Böse_," § 260.
[8] "_Zur Genealogie der Moral_," I, § 14.
III
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
Despite the divine authority which gives permanence to all moral codes,
this permanence is constantly opposed by the changing conditions
of existence, and very often the opposition is successful. The
slave-morality of the ancient Jews has come down to us, with its
outlines little changed, as ideal Christianity, but such tenacious
persistence of a moral scheme is comparatively rare. As a general
rule, in truth, races change their gods very much oftener than we
have changed ours, and have less faith than we in the independence of
intelligence. In consequence they constantly revamp and modify their
moral concepts. The same process of evolution affects even our own
code, despite the extraordinary tendency to permanence just noted. Our
scheme of things, in its fundamentals, has persisted for 2,500 years,
but in matters of detail it is constantly in a state of flux. We still
call ourselves Christians, but we have evolved many moral ideas that
are not to be found in the scriptures and we have sometimes denied
others that are plainly there. Indeed, as will be shown later on, the
beatitudes would have wiped us from the face of the earth centuries ago
had not our forefathers devised means of circumventing them without
openly questioning them. Our progress has been made, not as a result
of our moral code, but as a result of our success in dodging its
inevitable blight.
All morality, in fact, is colored and modified by opportunism, even
when its basic principles are held sacred and kept more or less intact.
The thing that is a sin in one age becomes a virtue in the next. The
ancient Persians, who were Zoroastrians, regarded murder and suicide,
under any circumstances, as crimes. The modern Persians, who are
Mohammedans, think that ferocity and foolhardiness are virtues. The
ancient Japanese, to whom the state appeared more important than the
man, threw themselves joyously upon the spears of the state's enemies.
The modern Japanese, who are fledgling individualists, armor their
ships with nickel steel and fight on land from behind bastions of earth
and masonry. And in the same way the moral ideas that have grown out
of Christianity, and even some of its important original doctrines,
are being constantly modified and revised, despite the persistence of
the fundamental notion of self-sacrifice at the bottom of them. In
Dr. Andrew D. White's monumental treatise "On the Warfare of Science
with Theology in Christendom" there are ten thousand proofs of it.
Things that were crimes in the middle ages are quite respectable at
present. Actions that are punishable by excommunication and ostracism
in Catholic Spain today, are sufficient to make a man honorable in
freethinking England. In France, where the church once stood above
the king, it is now stripped of all rights not inherent in the most
inconsequential social club. In Germany it is a penal offense to poke
fun at the head of the state; in the United States it is looked upon
by many as an evidence of independence and patriotism. In some of the
American states a violation of the seventh commandment, in any form,
is a felony; in Maryland, it is, in one form, a mere misdemeanor, and
another form, no crime at all.
"Many lands did I see," says Zarathustra, "and many peoples, and so I
discovered the good and bad of many peoples.... Much that was regarded
as good by one people was held in scorn and contempt by another. I
found many things called bad here and adorned with purple honors
there.... A catalogue of blessings is posted up for every people. Lo!
it is the catalogue of their triumphs--the voice of their will to
power!... Whatever enables them to rule and conquer and dazzle, to the
dismay and envy of their neighbors, is regarded by them as the summit,
the head, the standard of all things.... Verily, men have made for
themselves all their good and bad. Verily they did not find it so: it
did not come to them as a voice from heaven.... It is only through
valuing that there comes value."[1]
To proceed from the concrete to the general, and to risk a repetition,
it is evident that all morality, as Nietzsche pointed out, is nothing
more than an expression of expediency.[2] A thing is called wrong
solely because a definite group of people, at some specific stage of
their career, have found it injurious to them. The fact that they have
discovered grounds for condemning it in some pronunciamento of their
god signifies nothing, for the reason that the god of a people is never
anything more than a reflection of their ideas for the time being. As
Prof. Otto Pfleiderer has shown,[3] Jesus Christ was a product of his
age, mentally and spiritually as well as physically. Had there been
no Jewish theology before him, he could not have sought or obtained
recognition as a messiah, and the doctrines that he expressed--had
he ever expressed them at all--would have fallen upon unheeding and
uncomprehending ears.
Therefore it is plain that the Ten Commandments are no more immortal
and immutable, in the last analysis, than the acts of Parliament.
They have lasted longer, it is true, and they will probably continue
in force for many years, but this permanence is only relative.
Fundamentally they are merely expressions of expedience, like the
rules of some great game, and it is easily conceivable that there may
arise upon the earth, at some future day, a race to whom they will
appear injurious, unreasonable and utterly immoral. "The time may
come, indeed, when we will prefer the _Memorabilia_ of Socrates to the
Bible."[4]