acceptance of the majority vote. Its actual effect, indeed, is quite
the contrary, for it is only a small minority of human beings who may
be said, with any truth, to be capable of thought. It is probable, for
example, that nine-tenths of the people in Christendom today believe
that Friday is an unlucky day, while only the remaining tenth hold that
one day is exactly like another. But despite this, it is apparent
that the idea of the latter will survive and that, by slow degrees, it
will be forced upon the former. We know that it is true, not because
it is accepted by all men or by the majority of men--for, as a matter
of fact, we have seen that it isn't--but because we realize that the
few who hold to it are best capable of distinguishing between actual
impressions and mere delusions.
Again, the scientific method tends to increase our knowledge by the
very fact that it discourages unreasoning faith. The scientist realizes
that most of his so-called facts are probably errors and so he is
willing to harbor doubts of their truth and to seek for something
better. Like Socrates he boldly says "I know that I am ignorant." He
realizes, in fact, that error, when it is constantly under fire, is
bound to be resolved in the long run into something approximating the
truth. As Nicolas pointed out 500 years ago, nothing is utterly and
absolutely true and nothing is utterly and absolutely false. There
is always a germ of truth in the worst error, and there is always a
residuum of error in the soundest truth. Therefore, an error is fatal
only when it is hidden from the white light of investigation. Herein
lies the difference between the modern scientist and the moralist. The
former holds nothing sacred, not even his own axioms; the latter lays
things down as law and then makes it a crime to doubt them.
It is in this way--by submitting every idea to a searching, pitiless,
unending examination--that the world is increasing its store of what
may be called, for the sake of clearness, absolute knowledge. Error
always precedes truth, and it is extremely probable that the vast
majority of ideas held by men of today--even the sanest and wisest
men--are delusions, but with the passing of the years our stock of
truth grows larger and larger. "A conviction," says Nietzsche, "always
has its history--its previous forms, its tentative forms, its states of
error. It becomes a conviction, indeed, only after having been _not_
a conviction, and then _hardly_ a conviction. No doubt falsehood is
one of these embryonic forms of conviction. Sometimes only a change
of persons is needed to transform one into the other. That which, in
the son, is a conviction, was, in the father, still a falsehood."[5]
The tendency of intelligent men, in a word, is to approach nearer
and nearer the truth, by the processes of rejection, revision and
invention. Many old ideas are rejected by each new generation, but
there always remain a few that survive. We no longer believe with
the cave-men that the thunder is the voice of an angry god and the
lightning the flash of his sword, but we still believe, as they did,
that wood floats upon water, that seeds sprout and give forth plants,
that a roof keeps off the rain and that a child, if it lives long
enough, will inevitably grow into a man or a woman. Such ideas may be
called truths. If we deny them we must deny at once that the world
exists and that we exist ourselves.
Nietzsche's discussion of these problems is so abstruse and so much
complicated by changes in view that it would be impossible to make an
understandable summary of it in the space available here. In his first
important book, "_Menschliches allzu Menschliches_" he devoted himself,
in the main, to pointing out errors made in the past, without laying
down any very definite scheme of thought for the future. In the early
stages of human progress, he said, men made the mistake of regarding
everything that was momentarily pleasant or beneficial as absolutely
and eternally true. Herein they manifested the very familiar human
weakness for rash and hasty generalization, and the equally familiar
tendency to render the ideas of a given time and place perpetual and
permanent by erecting them into codes of morality and putting them
into the mouths of gods. This, he pointed out, was harmful, for a
thing might be beneficial to the men of today and fatal to the men of
tomorrow. Therefore, he argued that while a certain idea's effect was a
good criterion, humanly speaking, of its present or current truth, it
was dangerous to assume that this effect would be always the same, and
that, in consequence, the idea itself would remain true forever.
Not until the days of Socrates, said Nietzsche, did men begin to notice
this difference between imminent truth and eternal truth. The notion
that such a distinction existed made its way very slowly, even after
great teachers began to teach it, but in the end it was accepted by
enough men to give it genuine weight. Since that day philosophy and
science, which were once merely different names for the same thing,
have signified two separate things. It is the object of philosophy
to analyze happiness, and by means of the knowledge thus gained, to
devise means for safeguarding and increasing it. In consequence, it is
necessary for philosophy to generalize--to assume that the thing which
makes men happy today will make them happy tomorrow. Science, on the
contrary, concerns itself, not with things of the uncertain future, but
with things of the certain present. Its object is to examine the world
as it exists today, to uncover as many of its secrets as possible, and
to study their effect upon human happiness. In other words, philosophy
first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world
to it, while science studies the world with no other object in view
than the increase of knowledge, and with full confidence that, in the
long run, this increase of knowledge will increase efficiency and in
consequence happiness.
It is evident, then, that science, for all its contempt for fixed
schemes of happiness, will eventually accomplish with certainty what
philosophy--which most commonly swims into the ken of the average man
as morality--is now trying to do in a manner that is not only crude
and unreasonable, but also necessarily unsuccessful. In a word, just
so soon as man's store of knowledge grows so large that he becomes
complete master of the natural forces which work toward his undoing,
he will be perfectly happy. Now, Nietzsche believed, as we have seen
in past chapters, that man's instinctive will to power had this same
complete mastery over his environment as its ultimate object, and so
he concluded that the will to power might be relied upon to lead man
to the truth. That is to say, he believed that there was, in every
man of the higher type (the only type he thought worth discussing) an
instinctive tendency to seek the true as opposed to the false, that
this instinct, as the race progressed, grew more and more accurate,
and that its growing accuracy explained the fact that, despite the
opposition of codes of morality and of the iron hand of authority, man
constantly increased his store of knowledge. A thought, he said, arose
in a man without his initiative or volition, and was nothing more or
less than an expression of his innate will to obtain power over his
environment by accurately observing and interpreting it. It was just
as reasonable, he said, to say _It_ thinks as to say _I_ think,[6]
because every intelligent person knew that a man couldn't control his
thoughts. Therefore, the fact that these thoughts, in the long run
and considering the human race as a whole, tended to uncover more
and more truths proved that the will to power, despite the danger of
generalizing from its manifestations, grew more and more accurate and
so worked in the direction of absolute truth. Nietzsche believed that
mankind was ever the slave of errors, but he held that the number of
errors tended to decrease. When, at last, truth reigned supreme and
there were no more errors, the superman would walk the earth.
Now it is impossible for any man to note the workings of the will to
power save as it is manifested in his own instincts and thoughts, and
therefore Nietzsche, in his later books, urges that every man should be
willing, at all times, to pit his own feelings against the laws laid
down by the majority. A man should steer clear of rash generalization
from his own experience, but he should be doubly careful to steer
clear of the generalizations of others. The greatest of all dangers
lies in subscribing to a thesis without being certain of its truth.
"This not-wishing-to-see what one sees ... is a primary requisite
for membership in a party, in any sense whatsoever. Therefore, the
party man becomes a liar by necessity." The proper attitude for a
human being, indeed, is chronic dissent and skepticism. "Zarathustra
is a skeptic.... Convictions are prisons.... The freedom from every
kind of permanent conviction, the ability to search freely, belong to
strength.... The need of a belief, of something that is unconditioned
is a sign of weakness. The man of belief is necessarily a dependent
man.... His instinct gives the highest honor to self-abnegation.
He does not belong to himself, but to the author of the idea he
believes."[7] It is only by skepticism, argues Nietzsche, that we can
hope to make any progress. If all men accepted without question, the
_dicta_ of some one supreme sage, it is plain that there could be no
further increase of knowledge. It is only by constant turmoil and
conflict and exchange of views that the minute granules of truth can
be separated from the vast muck heap of superstition and error. Fixed
truths, in the long run, are probably more dangerous to intelligence
than falsehoods.[8]
This argument, I take it, scarcely needs greater elucidation. Every
intelligent man knows that if there had been no brave agnostics to defy
the wrath of the church in the middle ages, the whole of Christendom
would still wallow in the unspeakably foul morass of ignorance which
had its center, during that black time, in an infallible sovereign of
sovereigns. Authority, at all times and everywhere, means sloth and
degeneration. It is only doubt that creates. It is only the minority
that counts.
The fact that the great majority of human beings are utterly incapable
of original thought, and so must, perforce, borrow their ideas or
submit tamely to some authority, explains Nietzsche's violent loathing
and contempt for the masses. The average, self-satisfied, conservative,
orthodox, law-abiding citizen appeared to him to be a being but little
raised above the cattle in the barn-yard. So violent was this feeling
that every idea accepted by the majority excited, for that very reason,
his suspicion and opposition. "What everybody believes," he once said,
"is never true." This may seem like a mere voicing of brobdingnagian
egotism, but as a matter of fact, the same view is held by every man
who has spent any time investigating the history of ideas. "Truth,"
said Dr. Osler a while ago, "scarcely ever carries the struggle for
acceptance at its first appearance." The masses are always a century
or two behind. They have made a virtue of their obtuseness and call
it by various fine names: conservatism, piety, respectability, faith.
The nineteenth century witnessed greater human progress than all the
centuries before it saw or even imagined, but the majority of white men
of today still believe in ghosts, still fear the devil, still hold that
the number 13 is unlucky and still picture the deity as a patriarch in
a white beard, surrounded by a choir of resplendent amateur musicians.
"We think a thing," says Prof. Henry Sedgwick, "because all other
people think so; or because, after all, we _do_ think so; or because we
are told so, and think we must think so; or because we once thought so,
and think we still think so; or because, having thought so, we think we
_will_ think so."
Naturally enough, Nietzsche was an earnest opponent of the theological
doctrine of free will. He held, as we have seen, that every human
act was merely the effect of the will to power reacting against
environment, and in consequence he had to reject absolutely the notion
of volition and responsibility. A man, he argued, was not an object
_in vacuo_ and his acts, thoughts, impulses and motives could not be
imagined without imagining some cause for them. If this cause came from
without, it was clearly beyond his control, and if it came from within
it was no less so, for his whole attitude of mind, his instinctive
habits of thoughts, his very soul, so-called, were merely attributes
that had been handed down to him, like the shape of his nose and the
color of his eyes, from his ancestors. Nietzsche held that the idea
of responsibility was the product and not the cause of the idea of
punishment, and that the latter was nothing more than a manifestation
of primitive man's will to power--to triumph over his fellows by
making them suffer the handicap and humiliation of pain. "Men were
called free," he said, "in order that they might be condemned and
punished.... When we immoralists try to cleanse psychology, history,
nature and sociology of these notions, we find that our chief enemies
are the theologians, who, with their preposterous idea of 'a moral
order of the world,' go on tainting the innocence of man's struggle
upward with talk of punishment and guilt. Christianity is, indeed, a
hangman's metaphysic."[9] As a necessary corollary of this, Nietzsche
denied the existence of any plan in the cosmos. Like Haeckel, he
believed that but two things existed--energy and matter; and that all
the phenomena which made us conscious of the universe were nothing more
than symptoms of the constant action of the one upon the other. Nothing
ever happened without a cause, he said, and no cause was anything
other than the effect of some previous cause. "The destiny of man," he
said, "cannot be disentangled from the destiny of everything else in
existence, past, present and future.... We are a part of the whole, we
exist in the whole.... There is nothing which could judge, measure or
condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure and condemn the
whole.... But there is nothing outside of the whole.... The concept of
God has hitherto made our existence a crime.... We deny God, we deny
responsibility by denying God: it is only thereby that we save man."[10]
Herein, unluckily, Nietzsche fell into the trap which has snapped upon
Haeckel and every other supporter of atheistic determinism. He denied
that the human will was free and argued that every human action was
inevitable, and yet he spent his whole life trying to convince his
fellow men that they should do otherwise than as they did in fact. In
a word, he held that they had no control whatever over their actions,
and yet, like Moses, Mohammed and St. Francis, he thundered at them
uproariously and urged them to turn from their errors and repent.
[1] J. W. Draper, "A History of the Conflict Between Religion and
Science;" New York, 1874.
[2] Richard Falckenberg: "A History of Modern Philosophy," tr. by A. C.
Armstrong, Jr.; New York, 1897; Chap. I.
[3] T. H. Huxley: "Hume," preface; London, 1879.
[4] Comte and Kant, for example.
[5] "_Der Antichrist_," § 55.
[6] "_Jenseits von Gut und Böse_," VII.
[7] "_Der Antichrist_," § 54.
[8] "_Menschliches allzu Menschliches_," § 483.
[9] "_Götzendämmerung_," VI.
[10] "_Götzendämmerung_," VI.
VIII
CIVILIZATION
On the surface, at least, the civilization of today seems to be moving
slowly toward two goals. One is the eternal renunciation of war and
the other is universal brotherhood: one is "peace on earth" and the
other is "good will to men." Five hundred years ago a statesman's fame
rested frankly and solely upon the victories of his armies; today
we profess to measure him by his skill at keeping these armies in
barracks. And in the internal economy of all civilized states we find
today some pretence at unrestricted and equal suffrage. In times past
it was the chief concern of all logicians and wiseacres to maintain
the proposition that God reigned. At present, the dominant platitude
of Christendom--the cornerstone of practically every political party
and the stock-in-trade of every politician--is the proposition that the
people rule.
Nietzsche opposed squarely both the demand for peace and the demand for
equality, and his opposition was grounded upon two arguments. In the
first place, he said, both demands were rhetorical and insincere and
all intelligent men knew that neither would ever be fully satisfied.
In the second place, he said, it would be ruinous to the race if they
were. That is to say, he believed that war was not only necessary, but
also beneficial, and that the natural system of castes was not only
beneficent, but also inevitable. In the demand for universal peace he
saw only the yearning of the weak and useless for protection against
the righteous exploitation of the useful and strong. In the demand
for equality he saw only the same thing. Both demands, he argued,
controverted and combated that upward tendency which finds expression
in the law of natural selection.
"The order of castes," said Nietzsche, "is the dominating law of
nature, against which no merely human agency may prevail. In every
healthy society there are three broad classes, each of which has its
own morality, its own work, its own notion of perfection and its own
sense of mastery. The first class comprises those who are obviously
superior to the mass intellectually; the second includes those whose
eminence is chiefly muscular, and the third is made up of the mediocre.
The third class, very naturally, is the most numerous, but the first is
the most powerful.
"To this highest caste belongs the privilege of representing beauty,
happiness and goodness on earth.... Its members accept the world as
they find it and make the best of it.... They find their happiness in
those things which, to lesser men, would spell ruin--in the labyrinth,
in severity toward themselves and others, in effort. Their delight is
self-governing: with them asceticism becomes naturalness, necessity,
instinct. A difficult task is regarded by them as a privilege; to play
with burdens which would crush others to death is their recreation.
They are the most venerable species of men. They are the most cheerful,
the most amiable. They rule because they are what they are. They are
not at liberty to be second in rank.
"The second caste includes the guardians and keepers of order and
security--the warriors, the nobles, the king--above all, as the
highest types of warrior, the judges and defenders of the law. They
execute the mandates of the first caste, relieving the latter of all
that is coarse and menial in the work of ruling.
"At the bottom are the workers--the men of handicraft, trade,
agriculture and the greater part of art and science. It is the law of
nature that they should be public utilities--that they should be wheels
and functions. The only kind of happiness of which they are capable
makes intelligent machines of them. For the mediocre, it is happiness
to be mediocre. In them the mastery of one thing--_i.e._ specialism--is
an instinct.
"It is unworthy of a profound intellect to see in mediocrity itself
an objection. It is, indeed, a necessity of human existence, for only
in the presence of a horde of average men is the exceptional man a
possibility....
"Whom do I hate most among the men of today? The socialist who
undermines the workingman's healthy instincts, who takes from him his
feeling of contentedness with his existence, who makes him envious, who
teaches him revenge.... There is no wrong in unequal rights: it lies in
the vain pretension to equal rights."[1]
It is obvious from this that Nietzsche was an ardent believer in
aristocracy, but it is also obvious that he was not a believer in the
thing which passes for aristocracy in the world today. The nobility of
Europe belongs, not to his first class, but to his second class. It is
essentially military and legal, for in themselves its members are puny
and inefficient, and it is only the force of law that maintains them in
their inheritance.
The fundamental doctrine of civilized law, as we know it today, is the
proposition that what a man has once acquired shall belong to him and
his heirs forever, without need on his part or theirs to defend it
personally against predatory rivals. This transfer of the function of
defense from the individual to the state naturally exalts the state's
professional defenders--that is, her soldiers and judges--and so it is
not unnatural to find the members of this class, and their parasites,
in control of most of the world's governments and in possession of a
large share of the world's wealth, power and honors.[2] To Nietzsche
this seemed grotesquely illogical and unfair. He saw that this ruling
class expended its entire energy in combating experiment and change
and that the aristocracy it begot and protected--an aristocracy often
identical, very naturally, with itself--tended to become more and more
unfit and helpless and more and more a bar to the ready recognition
and unrestrained functioning of the only true aristocracy--that of
efficiency.
Nietzsche pointed out that one of the essential absurdities of a
constitutional aristocracy was to be found in the fact that it hedged
itself about with purely artificial barriers. Next only to its desire
to maintain itself without actual personal effort was its jealous
endeavor to prevent accessions to its ranks. Nothing, indeed, disgusts
the traditional belted earl quite so much as the ennobling of some
upstart brewer or iron-master. This exclusiveness, from Nietzsche's
point of view, seemed ridiculous and pernicious, for a true aristocracy
must be ever willing and eager to welcome to its ranks--and to enroll
in fact, automatically--all who display those qualities which make
a man extraordinarily fit and efficient. There should always be, he
said, a free and constant interchange of individuals between the three
natural castes of men. It should be always possible for an abnormally
efficient man of the slave class to enter the master class, and, by
the same token, accidental degeneration or incapacity in the master
class should be followed by swift and merciless reduction to the ranks
of slaves. Thus, those aristocracies which presented the incongruous
spectacle of imbeciles being intrusted with the affairs of government
seemed to him utterly abhorrent, and those schemes of caste which made
a mean birth an offset to high intelligence seemed no less so.
So long as man's mastery of the forces of nature is incomplete, said
Nietzsche, it will be necessary for the vast majority of human beings
to spend their lives in either supplementing those natural forces
which are partly under control or in opposing those which are still
unleashed. The business of tilling the soil, for example, is still
largely a matter of muscular exertion, despite the vast improvement
in farm implements, and it will probably remain so for centuries to
come. Since such labor is necessarily mere drudgery, and in consequence
unpleasant, it is plain that it should be given over to men whose
realization of its unpleasantness is least acute. Going further, it is
plain that this work will be done with less and less revolt and less
and less driving, as we evolve a class whose ambition to engage in
more inviting pursuits grows smaller and smaller. In a word, the ideal
ploughman is one who has no thought of anything higher and better than
ploughing. Therefore, argued Nietzsche, the proper performance of the
manual labor of the world makes it necessary that we have a laboring
class, which means a class content to obey without fear or question.