that we have, viz.: his instincts and senses. But in him they will be
more accurate and more acute than in us, because the whole tendency
of his scheme of things will be to fortify and develop them.[5] If
any race of Europe devoted a century to exercising its right arms,
its descendants, in the century following, would have right arms like
piston-rods. In the same way, the superman, by subordinating everything
else to his instinct to live, will make it evolve into something very
accurate and efficient. His whole concern, in brief, will be to live
as long as possible and so to avoid as much as possible all of those
things which shorten life--by injuring the body from without or by
using up energy within. As a result he will cease all effort to learn
_why_ the world exists and will devote himself to acquiring knowledge
_how_ it exists. This knowledge _how_ will be within his capacity even
more than it is within our capacity today. Our senses, as we have
seen, have given us absolute knowledge that stubbing the toe results
in swelling and pain. The superman's developed senses will give him
absolute knowledge about everything that exists on earth. He will know
exactly _how_ a tubercle bacillus attacks the lung tissue, he will know
exactly _how_ the blood fights the bacillus, and he will know exactly
_how_ to interfere in this battle in such a manner that the blood shall
be invariably victorious. In a word, he will be the possessor of exact
and complete knowledge regarding the working of all the benign and
malignant forces in the world about him, but he will not bother himself
about insoluble problems. He will waste no time speculating as to _why_
tubercle bacilli were sent into the world: his instinct to live will be
satisfied by his success in stamping them out.
The ideal superman then is merely a man in whom instinct works without
interference--a man who feels that it is right to live and that the
only knowledge worth while is that which makes life longer and more
bearable. The superman's instinct for life is so strong that its mere
exercise satisfies him, and so makes him happy. He doesn't bother
about the unknown void beyond the grave: it is sufficient for him to
know that he is alive and that being alive is pleasant. He is, in the
highest sense, a utilitarian, and he believes to the letter in Auguste
Comte's[6] dictum that the only thing living beings can ever hope to
accomplish on earth is to adapt themselves perfectly to the natural
forces around them--to the winds and the rain, the hills and the sea,
the thunderbolt and the germ of disease.
"I am a dionysian!" cries Nietzsche. "I am an immoralist!" He means
simply that his ideal is a being capable of facing the horrors of life
unafraid, of meeting great enemies and slaying them, of gazing down
upon the earth in pride and scorn, of making his own way and bearing
his own burdens. In the profane folk-philosophy of every healthy and
vigorous people, we find some trace of this dionysian idea. "Let us so
live day by day," says a distinguished American statesman, "that we can
look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell!" We get a subtle
sort of joy out of this saying because it voices our racial advance
toward individualism and away from servility and oppression. We believe
in freedom, in toleration, in moral anarchy. We have put this notion
into innumerable homely forms.
Things have come to a hell of a pass
When a man can't wallop his own jackass!
So we phrase it. The superman, did he stalk the earth, would say the
same thing.
[1] Pythagoras (B.C. 570?-500?) was a Greek who brought the doctrine of
the transmigration of souls from Asia Minor to Greece. In Magna Graecia
he founded a mystical brotherhood, half political party and half school
of philosophy. It survived him for many years and its members revered
him as the sage of sages. He was a bitter foe to democracy and took
part in wars against its spread.
[2] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_," III.
[3] _North American Review_, Dec., 1904.
[4] _Vide_ the chapter on "Truth."
[5] It is very evident, I take it, that the principal function of
all science is the widening of our perceptions. The chief argument
for idealism used to be the axiom that our power of perception was
necessarily limited and that it would be limited forever. This may
be true still, but it is now apparent that these limits are being
indefinitely extended, and may be extended, in future, almost
infinitely. A thousand years ago, if any one had laid down the
thesis that malaria was caused by minute animals, he would have been
dismissed as a lunatic, because it was evident that no one could see
these animals, and it was evident, too--that is to say, the scientists
of that time held it to be evident--that this inability to see them
would never be removed, because the human eye would always remain
substantially as it was. But now we know that the microscope may
increase the eye's power of perception a thousandfold. When we consider
the fact that the spectroscope has enabled us to make a chemical
analysis of the sun, that the telephone has enabled us to hear 2,000
miles and that the x-rays have enabled us to see through flesh and
bone, we must admit without reservation, that our power of perception,
at some future day, may be infinite. And if we admit this we must admit
the essential possibility of the superman.
[6] "_Cours de philosophie positive_," tr. by Helen Martineau; London,
1853.
VI
CHRISTIANITY
Nietzsche's astonishingly keen and fearless criticism of Christianity
has probably sent forth wider ripples than any other stone he ever
heaved into the pool of philistine contentment. He opened his attack in
"_Menschliches allzu Menschliches_," the first book of his maturity,
and he was still at it, in full fuming and fury, in "_Der Antichrist_,"
the last thing he was destined to write. The closing chapter of "_Der
Antichrist_"--his swan song--contains his famous phillipic, beginning
"I condemn." It recalls Zola's "_j'accuse_" letter in the Dreyfus case,
but it is infinitely more sweeping and infinitely more uproarious and
daring.
"I condemn Christianity," it begins. "I bring against it the most
terrible of accusations that ever an accuser put into words. It is
to me the greatest of all imaginable corruptions.... It has left
nothing untouched by its depravity. It has made a worthlessness out
of every value, a lie out of every truth, a sin out of everything
straightforward, healthy and honest. Let anyone dare to speak to me of
its humanitarian blessings! To do away with pain and woe is contrary
to its principles. It lives by pain and woe: it has created pain and
woe in order to perpetuate itself. It invented the idea of original
sin.[1] It invented 'the equality of souls before God'--that cover
for all the rancour of the useless and base.... It has bred the art
of self-violation--repugnance and contempt for all good and cleanly
instincts.... Parasitism is its praxis. It combats all good red-blood,
all love and all hope for life, with its anæmic ideal of holiness. It
sets up 'the other world' as a negation of every reality. The cross is
the rallying post for a conspiracy against health, beauty, well-being,
courage, intellect, benevolence--against life itself....
"This eternal accusation I shall write upon all walls: I call
Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity,...
for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean,
mean! I call it the one immortal shame and blemish upon the human
race!"[2]
So much for the philosopher's vociferous hurrah at the close of his
argument. In the argument itself it is apparent that his indictment of
Christianity contains two chief counts. The first is the allegation
that it is essentially untrue and unreasonable, and the second is
the theory that it is degrading. The first of these counts is not
unfamiliar to the students of religious history. It was first voiced by
that high priest who "rent his clothes" and cried "What need have we of
any further witnesses? Ye have heard the blasphemy."[3] It was voiced
again by the Romans who threw converts to the lions, and after the long
silence of the middle ages, it was piped forth again by Voltaire, Hume,
the encyclopedists and Paine. After the philosophers and scientists
who culminated in Darwin had rescued reason for all time from the
transcendental nonsense of the cobweb-spinners and metaphysicians,
Huxley came to the front with his terrific heavy artillery and those
who still maintained that Christianity was historically true--Gladstone
and the rest of the forlorn hope--were mowed down. David Strauss,
Lessing, Eichhorn, Michaelis, Bauer, Meyer, Ritschl,[4] Pfleiderer and
a host of others joined in the chorus and in Nietzsche's early manhood
the battle was practically won. By 1880 no reasonable man actually
believed that there were devils in the swine, and it was already
possible to deny the physical resurrection and still maintain a place
in respectable society. Today a literal faith in the gospel narrative
is confined to ecclesiastical reactionaries, pious old ladies and men
about to be hanged.
Therefore, Nietzsche did not spend much time examining the historical
credibility of Christianity. He did not try to prove, like Huxley,
that the witnesses to the resurrection were superstitious peasants and
hysterical women, nor did he seek to show, like Huxley again, that
Christ might have been taken down from the cross before he was dead.
He was intensely interested in all such inquiries, but he saw that,
in the last analysis, they left a multitude of problems unsolved. The
solution of these unsolved problems was the task that he took unto
himself. Tunneling down, in his characteristic way, into the very
foundations of the faith, he endeavored to prove that it was based upon
contradictions and absurdities; that its dogmas were illogical and its
precepts unworkable; and that its cardinal principles presupposed
the acceptance of propositions which, to the normal human mind, were
essentially unthinkable. This tunneling occupied much of Nietzsche's
energy in "_Menschliches allzu Menschliches_," and he returned to
it again and again, in all of the other books that preceded "_Der
Antichrist_." His method of working may be best exhibited by a few
concrete examples.
Prayer, for instance, is an exceedingly important feature of Christian
worship and any form of worship in which it had no place would be
necessarily unchristian.[5] But upon what theory is prayer based?
Examining the matter from all sides you will have to conclude that it
is reasonable only upon two assumptions: first, that it is possible to
change the infallible will and opinion of the deity, and secondly, that
the petitioner is capable of judging what he needs. Now, Christianity
maintains, as one of its main dogmas, that the deity is omniscient
and all-wise,[6] and, as another fundamental doctrine, that human
beings are absolutely unable to solve their problems without heavenly
aid[7] _i.e._ that the deity necessarily knows what is best for any
given man better than that man can ever hope to know it himself.
Therefore, Christianity, in ordaining prayer, orders, as a condition of
inclusion in its communion, an act which it holds to be useless. This
contradiction, argues Nietzsche, cannot be explained away in terms
comprehensible to the human intelligence.
Again Christianity holds that man is a mere creature of the deity's
will, and yet insists that the individual be judged and punished for
his acts. In other words, it tries to carry free will on one shoulder
and determinism on the other, and its doctors and sages have themselves
shown that they recognize the absurdity of this by their constant, but
futile efforts to decide which of the two shall be abandoned. This
contradiction is a legacy from Judaism, and Mohammedanism suffers
from it, too. Those sects which have sought to remove it by an entire
acceptance of determinism--under the name of predestination, fatalism,
or what not--have become bogged in hopeless morasses of unreason and
dogmatism. It is a cardinal doctrine of Presbyterianism, for instance,
that "by the decree of God, for the manifestation of his glory, some
men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life and others
foreordained to everlasting death ... without any foresight of faith
or good works, or perseverance in either of them, or any other thing
in the creature, as conditions...."[8] In other words, no matter
how faithfully one man tries to follow in the footsteps of Christ,
he may go to hell, and no matter how impiously another sins, he may
be foreordained for heaven. That such a belief makes all religion,
faith and morality absurd is apparent. That it is, at bottom, utterly
unthinkable to a reasoning being is also plain.
Nietzsche devoted a great deal of time during his first period of
activity to similar examinations of Christian ideas and he did a great
deal to supplement the historical investigations of those English and
German savants whose ruthless exposure of fictions and frauds gave
birth to what we now call the higher criticism. But his chief service
was neither in the field of historical criticism nor in that of the
criticism of dogmas. Toward the end of his life he left the business of
examining biblical sources to the archeologists and historians, whose
equipment for the task was necessarily greater than his own, and the
business of reducing Christian logic to contradiction and absurdity to
the logicians. Thereafter, his own work took him a step further down
and in the end he got to the very bottom of the subject. The answer of
the theologians had been that, even if you denied the miracles, the
gospels, the divinity of Christ and his very existence as an actual
man, you would have to admit that Christianity itself was sufficient
excuse for its own existence; that it had made the world better and
that it provided a workable scheme of life by which men could live and
die and rise to higher things. This answer, for awhile, staggered the
agnostics and Huxley himself evidently came near being convinced that
it was beyond rebuttal.[9] But it only made Nietzsche spring into the
arena more confident than ever. "Very well," he said, "we will argue it
out. You say that Christianity has made the world better? I say that it
has made it worse! You say that it is comforting and uplifting? I say
that it is cruel and degrading! You say that it is the best religion
mankind has ever invented? I say it is the most dangerous!"
Having thus thrown down the gage of battle, Nietzsche proceeded to
fight like a Tartar, and it is but common fairness to say that,
for a good while, he bore the weight of his opponents' onslaught
almost unaided. The world was willing enough to abandon its belief
in Christian supernaturalism and as far back as the early 80's the
dignitaries of the Church of England--to employ a blunt but expressive
metaphor--had begun to get in out of the wet. But the pietists still
argued that Christianity remained the fairest flower of civilization
and that it met a real and ever-present human want and made mankind
better. To deny this took courage of a decidedly unusual sort--courage
that was willing to face, not only ecclesiastical anathema and
denunciation, but also the almost automatic opposition of every
so-called respectable man. But Nietzsche, whatever his deficiencies
otherwise, certainly was not lacking in assurance, and so, when he
came to write "_Der Antichrist_" he made his denial thunderous and
uncompromising beyond expression. No medieval bishop ever pronounced
more appalling curses. No backwoods evangelist ever laid down the law
with more violent eloquence. The book is the shortest he ever wrote,
but it is by long odds the most compelling. Beginning _allegro_, it
proceeds from _forte_, by an uninterrupted _crescendo_ to _allegro con
moltissimo molto fortissimo_. The sentences run into mazes of italics,
dashes and asterisks. It is German that one cannot read aloud without
roaring and waving one's arm.
Christianity, says Nietzsche, is the most dangerous system of
slave-morality the world has ever known. "It has waged a deadly
war against the highest type of man. It has put a ban on all his
fundamental instincts. It has distilled evil out of these instincts.
It makes the strong and efficient man its typical outcast man. It has
taken the part of the weak and the low; it has made an ideal out of
its antagonism to the very instincts which tend to preserve life and
well-being.... It has taught men to regard their highest impulses as
sinful--as temptations."[10] In a word, it tends to rob mankind of
all those qualities which fit any living organism to survive in the
struggle for existence.
As we shall see later on, civilization obscures and even opposes this
struggle for existence, but it is in progress all the same, at all
times and under all conditions. Every one knows, for instance, that
one-third of the human beings born into the world every year die before
they are five years old. The reason for this lies in the fact that they
are, in some way or other, less fitted to meet the conditions of life
on earth than the other two-thirds. The germ of cholera infantum is
an enemy to the human race, and so long as it continues to exist upon
earth it will devote all of its activity to attacking human infants
and seeking to destroy them. It happens that some babies recover from
cholera infantum, while others die of it. This is merely another
way of saying that the former, having been born with a capacity for
resisting the attack of the germ, or having been given the capacity
artificially, are better fitted to survive, and that the latter, being
incapable of making this resistance, are unfit.
All life upon earth is nothing more than a battle with the enemies
of life. A germ is such an enemy, cold is such an enemy, lack of
food is such an enemy, and others that may be mentioned are lack of
water, ignorance of natural laws, armed foes and deficient physical
strength. The man who is able to get all of the food he wants, and
so can nourish his body until it becomes strong enough to combat the
germs of disease; who gets enough to drink, who has shelter from the
elements, who has devised means for protecting himself against the
desires of other men--who yearn, perhaps, who take for themselves some
of the things that he has acquired--such a man, it is obvious, is far
better fitted to live than a man who has none of these things. He is
far better fitted to survive, in a purely physical sense, because his
body is nourished and protected, and he is far better fitted to attain
happiness, because most of his powerful wants are satisfied.
Nietzsche maintains that Christianity urges a man to make no such
efforts to insure his personal survival in the struggle for existence.
The beatitudes require, he says, that, instead of trying to do so, the
Christian shall devote his energies to helping others and shall give
no thought to himself. Instead of exalting himself as much as possible
above the common herd and thus raising his chances of surviving, and
those of his children, above those of the average man, he is required
to lift up this average man. Now, it is plain that every time he
lifts up some one else, he must, at the same time, decrease his own
store, because his own store is the only stock from which he can draw.
Therefore, the tendency of the Christian philosophy of humility is to
make men voluntarily throw away their own chances of surviving, which
means their own sense of efficiency, which means their own "feeling of
increasing power," which means their own happiness. As a substitute for
this natural happiness, Christianity offers the happiness derived from
the belief that the deity will help those who make the sacrifice and so
restore them to their old superiority. This belief, as Nietzsche shows,
is no more borne out by known facts than the old belief in witches. It
is, in fact, proved to be an utter absurdity by all human experience.
"I call an animal, a species, an individual, depraved," he says,
"when it loses its instincts, when it selects, when it _prefers_ what
is injurious to it.... Life itself is an instinct for growth, for
continuance, for accumulation of forces, for _power:_ where the will
to power is wanting there is decline."[11] Christianity, he says,
squarely opposes this will to power in the Golden Rule, the cornerstone
of the faith. The man who confines his efforts to attain superiority
over his fellow men to those acts which he would be willing to have
them do toward him, obviously abandons all such efforts entirely.
To put it in another form, a man can't make himself superior to the
race in general without making every other man in the world, to that
extent, his inferior. Now, if he follows the Golden Rule, he must
necessarily abandon all efforts to make himself superior, because if
he didn't he would be suffering all the time from the pain of seeing
other men--whose standpoint the Rule requires him to assume--grow
inferior. Thus his activity is restricted to one of two things:
standing perfectly still or deliberately making himself inferior. The
first is impossible, but Nietzsche shows that the latter is not, and
that, in point of fact, it is but another way of describing the act
of sympathy--one of the things ordered by the fundamental dogma of
Christianity.
Sympathy, says Nietzsche, consists merely of a strong man giving up
some of his strength to a weak man. The strong man, it is evident, is
debilitated thereby, while the weak man, very often, is strengthened
but little. If you go to a hanging and sympathize with the condemned,
it is plain that your mental distress, without helping that gentleman,
weakens, to a perceptible degree, your own mind and body, just as
all other powerful emotions weaken them, by consuming energy, and so
you are handicapped in the struggle for life to the extent of this
weakness. You may get a practical proof of it an hour later by being
overcome and killed by a foot-pad whom you might have been able to
conquer, had you been feeling perfectly well, or by losing money to
some financial rival for whom, under normal conditions, you would have
been a match; and then again you may get no immediate or tangible
proof of it at all. But your organism will have been weakened to some
measurable extent, all the same, and at some time--perhaps on your
death bed--this minute drain will make itself evident, though, of
course, you may never know it.
"Sympathy," says Nietzsche, "stands in direct antithesis to the tonic
passions which elevate the energy of human beings and increase their
feeling of efficiency and power. It is a depressant. One loses force
by sympathizing and any loss of force which has been caused by other
means--personal suffering, for example--is increased and multiplied
by sympathy. Suffering itself becomes contagious through sympathy and
under certain circumstances it may lead to a total loss of life. If
a proof of that is desired, consider the case of the Nazarene, whose
sympathy for his fellow men brought him, in the end, to the cross.
"Again, sympathy thwarts the law of development, of evolution, of the
survival of the fittest. It preserves what is ripe for extinction, it
works in favor of life's condemned ones, it gives to life itself a
gloomy aspect by the number of the ill-constituted it _maintains_ in
life.... It is both a multiplier of misery and a conservator of misery.
It is the principal tool for the advancement of decadence. It leads to
nothingness, to the negation of all those instincts which are at the
basis of life.... But one does not say 'nothingness;' one says instead
'the other world' or 'the better life.'... This innocent rhetoric,
out of the domain of religio-moral fantasy, becomes far from innocent
when one realizes what tendency it conceals: the tendency _hostile to
life_."[12]
The foregoing makes it patent that Nietzsche was a thorough-going and
uncompromising biological monist. That is to say, he believed that man,
while superior to all other animals because of his greater development,
was, after all, merely an animal, like the rest of them; that the
struggle for existence went on among human beings exactly as it went
on among the lions in the jungle and the protozoa in the sea ooze, and
that the law of natural selection ruled all of animated nature--mind
and matter--alike. Indeed, it is but just to credit him with being the
pioneer among modern monists of this school, for he stated and defended
the doctrine of morphological universality at a time when practically
all the evolutionists doubted it, and had pretty well proved its truth
some years before Haeckel wrote his "Monism" and "The Riddle of the
Universe."