much the same side. That is to say, they endeavor to controvert his
criticism of humility and self-sacrifice and to show that the law of
natural selection, with its insistence that only the fittest shall
survive, is insufficient to insure human progress. Miss Paget, for
example,[2] argues that if there were no belief in every man's duty to
yield something to his weaker brother the race would soon become a herd
of mere wild beasts. She sees humility as a sort of brake or governor,
placed upon humanity to keep it from running amuck. A human being is
so constituted, she says, that he necessarily looms in his own view
as large as all the rest of the world put together. This distortion
of values is met with in the consciousness of every individual, and
if there were nothing to oppose it, it would lead to a hopeless
conflict between exaggerated egos. Humility, says Miss Paget, tempers
the conflict, without wholly ending it. A man's inherent tendency to
magnify his own importance and to invite death by trying to force that
view upon others is held in check by the idea that it is his duty to
consider the welfare of those others. The objection to all this is that
the picture of humility Miss Paget draws is not at all a picture of
self-sacrifice, of something founded upon an unselfish idea of duty,
but a picture of highly intelligent egoism. Whatever his pharisaical
account of his motives, it must be obvious that her Christian gentleman
is merely a man who throws bones to the dogs about him. Between such
wise prudence and the immolation of the Beatitudes a wide gulf is
fixed. As a matter of fact, that prudence is certainly not opposed by
Nietzsche. The higher man of his visions is far from a mere brawler. He
is not afraid of an open fight, and he is never held back by fear of
hurting his antagonist, but he also understands that there are times
for truce and guile. In brief, his self-seeking is conducted, not alone
by his fists, but also by his head. He knows when to pounce upon his
foes and rivals, but he also knows when to keep them from pouncing upon
him. Thus Miss Paget's somewhat elaborate refutation, though it leads
to an undoubtedly sound conclusion, by no means disposes of Nietzsche.
The other branches of the argument that self-sacrifice is beneficial
open an endless field of debate, in which the same set of facts is
often susceptible of diametrically opposite interpretations. We have
already glanced at the alleged effects of Christian charity upon
progress, and observed the enormous difference between sentimental
efforts to preserve the unfit and intelligent efforts to make them fit,
and we have seen how practical Christianity, whatever its theoretical
effects, has had the actual effect of furthering the former and
hindering the latter. It is often argued that there is unfairness
in thus burdening the creed with the crimes of the church, but how
the two are to be separated is never explained. What sounder test of
a creed's essential value can we imagine than that of its visible
influence upon the men who subscribe to it? And what sounder test of
its terms than the statement of its ordained teachers and interpreters,
supported by the unanimous approval of all who profess it? We are here
dealing, let it be remembered, not with esoteric doctrines, but with
practical doctrines--that is to say, with working policies. If the
Christian ideal of charity is to be defended as a working policy, then
it is certainly fair to examine it at work. And when that is done the
reflective observer is almost certain to conclude that it is opposed
to true progress, that it acts as a sentimental shield to the unfit
without helping them in the slightest to shake off their unfitness.
What is more, it stands contrary to that wise forethought which
sacrifices one man today that ten may be saved tomorrow. Nothing could
be more patent, indeed, than the high cost to humanity of the Christian
teaching that it is immoral to seek the truth outside the Word of God,
or to take thought of an earthly tomorrow, or to draw distinctions in
value between beings who all possess souls of infinite, and therefore
of exactly equal preciousness.
But setting aside the doctrine that self-sacrifice is a religious
duty, there remains the doctrine that it is a measure of expediency,
that when the strong help the weak they also help themselves. Let it
be said at once that this second doctrine, provided only it be applied
intelligently and without any admixture of sentimentality, is not in
opposition to anything in Nietzsche's philosophy. On the contrary,
he is at pains to point out the value of exploiting the inefficient
masses, and obviously that exploitation is impossible without some
concession to their habits and desires, some offer, however fraudulent,
of a _quid pro quo_--and unprofitable unless they can be made to yield
more than they absorb. For one thing, there is the business of keeping
the lower castes in health. They themselves are too ignorant and lazy
to manage it, and therefore it must be managed by their betters. When
we appropriate money from the public funds to pay for vaccinating a
horde of negroes, we do not do it because we have any sympathy for them
or because we crave their blessings, but simply because we don't want
them to be falling ill of smallpox in our kitchens and stables, to the
peril of our own health and the neglect of our necessary drudgery.[3]
In so far as the negroes have any voice in the matter at all, they
protest against vaccination, for they can't understand its theory and
so they see only its tyranny, but we vaccinate them nevertheless,
and thus increase their mass efficiency in spite of them. It costs
something to do the work, but we see a profit in it. Here we have a
good example of self-sacrifice based frankly upon expediency, and
Nietzsche has nothing to say against it.
But what he does insist upon is that we must beware of mixing
sentimentality with the business, that we must keep the idea of
expediency clear of any idea of altruism. The trouble with the world,
as he describes it, is that such a corruption almost always takes
place. That is to say, we too often practise charity, not because it is
worth while, but merely because it is pleasant. The Christian ideal,
he says, "knows how to enrapture." Starting out from the safe premise,
approved by human experience, that it is sometimes a virtue--_i.e._, a
measure of intelligent prudence--to help the weak, we proceed to the
illogical conclusion that it is _always_ a virtue. Hence our wholesale
coddling of the unfit, our enormous expenditure upon vain schemes of
amelioration, our vain efforts to combat the laws of nature. We nurse
the defective children of the lower classes into some appearance of
health, and then turn them out to beget their kind. We parole the
pickpocket, launch him upon society with a tract in his hand--and
lose our pocket-books next day. We send missionaries to the heathen,
build hospitals for them, civilize and educate them--and later on have
to fight them. We save a pauper consumptive today, on the ostensible
theory that he is more valuable saved than dead--and so open the way
for saving his innumerable grandchildren in the future. In brief, our
self-sacrifice of expediency seldom remains undefiled. Nine times out
of ten a sentimental color quickly overcomes it, and soon or late
there is apt to be more sentimentality in it than expediency.
What is worse, this sentimentalism results in attaching a sort of
romantic glamour to its objects. Just as the Sunday-school teaching
virgin, beginning by trying to save the Chinese laundryman's soul,
commonly ends by falling in love with him, so the virtuoso of any
other sort of charity commonly ends by endowing its beneficiary with
a variety of imaginary virtues. Sympathy, by some subtle alchemy, is
converted into a sneaking admiration. "Blessed are the poor in spirit"
becomes "Blessed are the poor." This exaltation of inefficiency, it
must be manifest, is a dangerous error. There is, in fact, nothing
at all honorable about unfitness, considered in the mass. On the
contrary, it is invariably a symptom of actual dishonor--of neglect,
laziness, ignorance and depravity--if not primarily in the individual
himself, then at least in his forebears, whose weakness he carries on.
It is highly important that this fact should be kept in mind by the
human race, that the essential inferiority of the inefficient should
be insisted upon, that the penalties of deliberate slackness should
be swift and merciless. But as it is, those penalties are too often
reduced to nothing by charity, while the offense they should punish
is elevated to a fictitious martyrdom. Thus we have charity converted
into an instrument of debauchery. Thus we have it playing the part of
an active agent of decay, and so increasing the hazards of life on
earth. "We may compare civilized man," says Sir Ray Lankester,[4] "to
a successful rebel against nature, who by every step forward renders
himself liable to greater and greater penalties." No need to offer
cases in point. Every one of us knows what the Poor Laws of England
have accomplished in a hundred years--how they have multiplied misery
enormously and created a caste of professional paupers--how they have
seduced that caste downward into depths of degradation untouched by
any other civilized race in history--and how, by hanging the crushing
burden of that caste about the necks of the English people, they have
helped to weaken and sicken the whole stock and to imperil the future
of the nation.
So much for the utility of self-sacrifice--undeniable, perhaps, so long
as a wise and ruthless foresight rules, but immediately questionable
when sentimentality enters into the matter. There remains the answer
in rebuttal that sentimentality, after all, is native to the soul of
man, that we couldn't get rid of it if we tried. Herein, if we look
closely, we will observe tracks of an idea that has colored the whole
stream of human thought since the dawn of Western philosophy, and is
accepted today, as irrefutably true, by all who pound pulpits and wave
their arms and call upon their fellow men to repent. It has clogged
all ethical inquiry for two thousand years, it has been a premise in
a million moral syllogisms, it has survived the assaults of all the
iconoclasts that ever lived. It is taught in all our schools today and
lies at the bottom of all our laws, prophecies and revelations. It is
the foundation and cornerstone, not only of Christianity, but also of
every other compound of theology and morality known in the world. And
what is this king of all axioms and emperor of all fallacies? Simply
the idea that there are rules of "natural morality" engraven indelibly
upon the hearts of man--that all men, at all times and everywhere, have
ever agreed, do now agree and will agree forevermore, unanimously and
without reservation, that certain things are right and certain other
things are wrong, that certain things are nice and certain other things
are not nice, that certain things are pleasing to God and certain other
things are offensive to God.
In every treatise upon Christian ethics and "natural theology," so
called, you will find these rules of "natural morality" in the first
chapter. Thomas Aquinas called them "the eternal law." Even the Greeks
and Romans, for all their skepticism in morals, had a sneaking belief
in them. Aristotle tried to formulate them and the Latin lawyers
constantly assumed their existence. Most of them are held in firm faith
today by all save a small minority of the folk of Christendom. The
most familiar of them, perhaps, is the rule against murder--the sixth
commandment. Another is the rule against the violation of property
in goods, wives and cattle--the eighth and tenth commandments. A
third is the rule upon which the solidity of the family is based, and
with it the solidity of the tribe--the fifth commandment. The theory
behind these rules is, not only that they are wise, but that they are
innate and sempiternal, that every truly enlightened man recognizes
their validity intuitively, and is conscious of sin when he breaks
them. To them Christianity added an eleventh commandment, a sort of
infinite extension of the fifth, "that ye love one another"[5]--and
in two thousand years it has been converted from a novelty into a
universality. That is to say, its point of definite origin has been
lost sight of, and it has been moved over into the group of "natural
virtues," of "eternal laws." When Christ first voiced it, in his
discourse at the Last Supper, it was so far from general acceptance
that he named a belief in it as one of the distinguishing marks of his
disciples, but now our moralists tell us that it is in the blood of
all of us, and that we couldn't repudiate it if we would. Brotherhood,
indeed, is the very soul of Christianity, and the only effort of the
pious today is to raise it from a universal theory to a universal fact.
But the truth is, of course, that it is not universal at all, and that
nothing in the so-called soul of man prompts him to subscribe to it.
We cling to it today, not because it is inherent in us, but simply
because it is the moral fashion of our age. When the disciples first
heard it put into terms, it probably struck them as a revolutionary
novelty, and on some dim tomorrow our descendants may regard it as an
archaic absurdity. In brief, rules of morality are wholly temporal and
temporary, for the good and sufficient reason that there is no "natural
morality" in man--and the sentimental rule that the strong shall give
of their strength to the weak is no exception. There have been times in
the history of the race when few, if any intelligent men subscribed to
it, and there are thousands of intelligent men who refuse to subscribe
to it today, and no doubt there will come a time when those who are
against it will once more greatly outnumber those who are in favor of
it. So with all other "eternal laws." Their eternality exists only in
the imagination of those who seek to glorify them. Nietzsche himself
spent his best years demonstrating this, and we have seen how he set
about the task--how he showed that the "good" of one race and age was
the "bad" of some other race and age--how the "natural morality" of the
Periclean Greeks, for example, differed diametrically from the "natural
morality" of the captive Jews. All history bears him out. Mankind is
ever revising and abandoning its "inherent" ideas. We say today that
the human mind instinctively revolts against cruel punishments, and yet
a moment's reflection recalls the fact that the world is, and always
has been peopled by millions to whom cruelty, not only to enemies
but to the weak in general, seems and has seemed wholly natural and
agreeable. We say that man has an "innate" impulse to be fair and
just, and yet it is a commonplace observation that multitudes of men,
in the midst of our most civilized societies, have little more sense
of justice than so many jackals. Therefore, we may safely set aside
the argument that a "natural" instinct for sentimental self-sacrifice
stands as an impassable barrier to Nietzsche's dionysian philosophy.
There is no such barrier. There is no such instinct. It is an idea
merely--an idea powerful and persistent, but still mutable and mortal.
Certainly, it is absurd to plead it in proof against the one man who
did most to establish its mutability.
We come now to the final argument against Nietzsche--the argument, to
wit, that, even admitting his criticism of Christian morality to be
well-founded, he offers nothing in place of it that would serve the
world as well. The principal spokesman of this objection, perhaps,
is Paul Elmer More, who sets it forth at some length in his hostile
but very ingenious little study of Nietzsche.[6] Mr. More goes back
to Locke to show the growth of the two ideas which stand opposed as
Socialism and individualism, Christianity and Nietzscheism today. So
long, he says, as man believed in revelation, there was no genuine
effort to get at the springs of human action, for every impulse that
was ratified by the Scriptures was believed to be natural and moral,
and every impulse that went counter to the Scriptures was believed
to be sinful, even by those who yielded to it habitually. But when
that idea was cleared away, there arose a need for something to take
its place, and Locke came forward with his theory that the notion of
good was founded upon sensations of pleasure and that of bad upon
sensations of pain. There followed Hume, with his elaborate effort
to prove that sympathy was a source of pleasure, by reason of its
grateful tickling of the sense of virtue, and so the new conception of
good finally stood erect, with one foot on frank self-interest and the
other on sympathy. Mr. More shows how, during the century following,
the importance of the second of these factors began to be accentuated,
under the influence of Rousseau and his followers, and how, in the end,
the first was forgotten almost entirely and there arose a non-Christian
sentimentality which was worse, if anything, than the sentimentality
of the Beatitudes. In England, France and Germany it colored almost the
whole of philosophy, literature and politics. Stray men, true enough,
raised their voices against it, but its sweep was irresistible. Its
fruits were diverse and memorable--the romantic movement in Germany,
humanitarianism in England, the Kantian note in ethics, and, most
important of all, Socialism.
That this exaltation of sympathy was imprudent, and that its effects,
in our own time, are far from satisfactory, Mr. More is disposed
to grant freely. It is perfectly true, as Nietzsche argues, that
humanitarianism has been guilty of gross excesses, that there is a
"danger that threatens true progress in any system of education and
government which makes the advantage of the average rather than the
distinguished man its chief object." But Mr. More holds that the
danger thus inherent in sympathy is matched by a danger inherent in
selfishness, that we are no worse off on one horn of Hume's dual ethic
than we should be on the other. Sympathy unbalanced by self-seeking
leads us into maudlin futilities and crimes against efficiency;
self-seeking unchecked by sympathy would lead us into sheer savagery.
If there is any choice between the two, that choice is probably in
favor of sympathy, for the reason that it is happily impossible of
realization. The most lachrymose of the romantics, in the midst of
their sentimentalizing, were yet careful of their own welfare. Many of
them, indeed, displayed a quite extraordinary egoism, and there was
some justice in Byron's sneer that Sterne, for one, preferred weeping
over a dead ass to relieving the want (at cost to himself) of a living
mother.
But in urging all this against Nietzsche, Mr. More and the other
destructive critics of the superman make a serious error, and that
is the error of assuming that Nietzsche hoped to abolish Christian
morality completely, that he proposed a unanimous desertion of the
idea of sympathy for the idea of intelligent self-seeking. As a matter
of fact, he had no such hope and made no such proposal. Nothing was
more firmly fixed in his mind, indeed, than the notion that the vast
majority of men would cling indefinitely, and perhaps for all time,
to some system of morality more or less resembling the Christian
morality of today. Not only did he have no expectation of winning that
majority from its idols, but he bitterly resented any suggestion that
such a result might follow from his work. The whole of his preaching
was addressed, not to men in the mass, but to the small minority of
exceptional men--not to those who live by obeying, but to those who
live by commanding--not to the race as a race, but only to its masters.
It would seem to be impossible that any reader of Nietzsche should
overlook this important fact, and yet it is constantly overlooked by
most of his critics. They proceed to prove, elaborately and, it must
be said, quite convincingly, that if his transvaluation of values were
made by all men, the world would be no better off than it is today,
and perhaps a good deal worse, but all they accomplish thereby is to
demolish a hobgoblin of straw. Nietzsche himself sensed the essential
value of Hume's dualism. What he sought to do was not to destroy it,
but to restore it, and, restoring it, to raise it to a state of active
conflict--to dignify self-interest as sympathy has been dignified,
and so to put the two in perpetual opposition. He believed that the
former was by long odds the safer impulse for the higher castes of
men to follow, if only because of its obviously closer kinship to the
natural laws which make for progress upward, but by the same token
he saw that these higher castes could gain nothing by disturbing the
narcotic contentment of the castes lower down. Therefore, he was, to
that extent, an actual apologist for the thing he elsewhere so bitterly
attacked. Sympathy, self-sacrifice, charity--these ideas lulled and
satisfied the chandala, and so he was content to have the chandala
hold to them. "Whom do I hate most among the rabble of today? The
Socialist who undermines the workingman's instincts, who destroys his
satisfaction with his insignificant existence, who makes him envious
and teaches him revenge."[7] In brief, Nietzsche dreamed no dream of
all mankind converted into a race of supermen: the only vision he saw
was one of supermen at the top.
To make an end, his philosophy was wholly aristocratic, in aim as well
as in terms. He believed that superior men, by which he meant alert
and restless men, were held in chains by the illusions and inertia of
the mass--that their impulse to move forward and upward, at whatever
cost to those below, was restrained by false notions of duty and
responsibility. It was his effort to break down those false notions,
to show that the progress of the race was more important than the
comfort of the herd, to combat and destroy the lingering spectre of
sin--in his own phrase, to make man innocent. But when he said man he
always meant the higher man, the man of tomorrow, and not mere men. For
the latter he had only contempt: he sneered at their heroes, at their
ideals, at their definitions of good and evil. "There are only three
ways," he said, "in which the masses appear to me to deserve a glance:
first, as blurred copies of their betters, printed on bad paper and
from worn-out plates; secondly, as a necessary opposition; and thirdly,
as tools. Further than that I hand them over to statistics--and the
devil.[8] ... I am writing for a race of men which does not yet exist.
I am writing for the lords of the earth."[9]
[1] Author of "_Nietzsche et l'Immoralisme_" and other books. The
argument discussed appears in an article in the _International Monthly_
for March, 1901, pp. 134-165.
[2] In the _North American Review_ for Dec., 1904.
[3] A more extended treatment of this point will be found in "Men _vs._
the Man," by Robert Rives La Monte and the present author: New York,
1910.
[4] In "The Kingdom of Man," London, 1907.
[5] John XIII, 34.
[6] "Nietzsche," Boston, 1912. Reprinted in "The Drift of Romanticism,"
pp. 147-190, Boston, 1913.
[7] "_Der Antichrist_," 57.
[8] "_Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben_," IX.
[9] "_Der Wille zur Macht_", 958.
HOW TO STUDY NIETZSCHE
Through the diligence and enthusiasm of Dr. Oscar Levy, author of "The
Revival of Aristocracy," a German by birth but for some time a resident
of London, the whole canon of Nietzsche's writings is now to be had in
English translation. So long ago as 1896 a complete edition in eleven
volumes was projected, and Dr. Alexander Tille, lecturer on German in
the University of Glasgow, and author of "_Von Darwin bis Nietzsche_,"
was engaged to edit it. But though it started fairly with a volume
including "The Case of Wagner" and "The Antichrist," and four more
volumes followed after a year or so, it got no further than that. Ten
years later came Dr. Levy. He met with little encouragement when he
began, but by dint of unfailing perseverance he finally gathered about
him a corps of competent translators, made arrangements with publishers
in Great Britain and the United States, and got the work under way. His
eighteenth and last volume was published early in 1913.
These translations, in the main, are excellent, and explanatory
prefaces and notes are added wherever needed. The contents of the
various volumes are as follows:
I. "The Birth of Tragedy," translated by Wm. A. Haussmann, Ph. D., with
a biographical introduction by Frau Förster-Nietzsche, a portrait of
Nietzsche, and a facsimile of his manuscript.