Chapter V: Friedrich Nietzsche (3)

In the examples hitherto cited the insane ideas are mainly in the sphere of movement. In those that follow it is excitations of the sensorial centres that find expression. Nietzsche has all sorts of illusions of skin-sensibility (cold, warmth, being breathed upon), of sight (lustre, lightning, brightness), of hearing (rushing, roaring), and of smell, which he mixes up in his fugitive ideation. ‘I am too hot and burnt with my own thoughts.’ ‘Ah! ice surrounds me; my hand is burnt by iciness.’ ‘The sun of my love lay brooding upon me; Zarasthustra was stewing in his own juice.’ ‘Take care that there be honey ready to my hand ... good, icy-fresh, golden honeycomb.’ ‘Into the coldest water I plunged with head and heart.’ ‘There I am sitting ... lusting for a maiden’s round mouth, but still more for maidenly, icy-cold, snow-white, cutting, biting teeth.’ ‘For I deal with deep problems as with a cold bath--soon into it, soon out of it.... Ho! the great cold quickens.’ ‘Over thy surging sea I blew with the storm that is called spirit; I blew from it all clouds.’ ‘To their bodies and to their spirits our happiness would be as ice-caverns! and, like strong winds, we will live above them ... and like a wind will I once blow among them.’

‘I am light ... but this is my loneliness, that I am engirdled with light.... I live in my own light; I drink back into myself the flames that break forth from me.’

‘Mute over the roaring sea art thou this day arisen for me.’ ‘They divine nothing from the roaring of my happiness.’ ‘Sing, and riot in roaring, O Zarathustra!’ ‘Almost too fiercely for me thou dost gush forth, well-spring of joy ... too violently doth my heart gush forth to meet thee.’ ‘My desire now breaks forth from me like a fountain.’

‘There is often an odour in her wisdom, as if it came forth from a swamp.’ ‘Alas! that I should have so long lived in the midst of their noise and foul breath. O blessed stillness around me!’ ‘O pure odours around me!’ ‘That was the falsehood in my pity, that in each I saw and smelt what was mind enough for him.... With blissful nostrils again I breathed the freedom of the mountain! My nose is at length redeemed from the odour of all that is human!’ ‘Bad air! bad air!... Why must I smell the entrails of a misguided soul?’ ‘This workshop, where ideals are manufactured, meseems it stinks of nothing but lies.’ ‘We avoided the rabble ... the stink of shopkeepers ... the foul breath.’ ‘This rabble, that stinks to heaven.’ ‘O odours pure around me!... These crowds of superior men--perhaps they do not smell nice,’ etc.

As these examples show, Nietzsche’s thought receives its special colouring from his sense illusions, and from the excitation of the centres forming motor presentations, which, in consequence of a derangement of the mechanism of co-ordination, are not transformed into motor impulses, but remain as mere images, without influence on the muscles.

In respect of form, Nietzsche’s thought makes the two characteristic peculiarities of madness perceptible: the sole domination of the association of ideas, watched over and restrained by no attention, no logic, no judgment; and the giddy rapidity of the course of ideation.

As soon as any idea whatsoever springs up in Nietzsche’s mind, it immediately draws with it into consciousness all presentations related to it, and thus with flying hand he throws five, six, often eight, synonyms on paper, without noticing how overladen and turgid his literary style is thereby rendered: ‘The force of a mind measures itself ... by the degree to which it is obliged to attenuate, veil, sweeten, damp, falsify the truth.’ ‘We are of the opinion that severity, violence, slavery, danger in the street and in the heart, concealment, stoicism, the tempter’s art and devilry of every kind; that all things wicked, fearful, tyrannical, bestial, and serpent-like in man, are of as much service in the elevation of the species “man” as their opposites. He knows ... on what miserable things the loftiest Becoming has hitherto been shattered, snapped off, has fallen away, become miserable.’ ‘In man there is material, fragment, surplus, clay, mud, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, constructor, hammer-hardness, divinity-of-the-beholder, and the seventh day.... That which for this one must be formed, broken, forged, torn, burnt, made red-hot, purified.’ ‘It would sound more courteous if ... an unrestrained honesty were related, whispered, and praised (_nachsagte_, _nachraunte_, _nachrühmte_) of us.’ ‘Spit upon the town ... where swarms all that is rotten, tainted, lustful, gloomy, worm-eaten, ulcerous, seditious.’ ‘We forebode that it is ever growing downwards into the more attenuated, more debonnaire, more artful, more easy-going, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian.’ ‘All these pallid Atheists, Anti-Christians, Immoralists, Nihilists, Sceptics, Ephectics, Hectics of the mind,’ etc.

From these examples, the attentive reader must have already remarked that the tumultuous rush of words frequently results from the merest resemblance in sound. Not seldom does the riot of words degenerate into paltry quibbling, into the silliest pun, into the automatic association of words according to their sound, without regard to their meaning. ‘If this turn (_Wende_) in all the need (_Noth_) is called necessity (_Nothwendigkeit_).’ ‘Thus ye boast (_brüstet_) of yourselves--alas! even without breasts (_Brüste_).’ ‘There is much pious lick-spittle-work (_Speichel-Leckerie_), baking-of-flattery (_Schmeichel-Bäckerei_) before the Lord of Hosts.’ ‘Spit upon the great town, which is the great slum (_Abraum_), where all the scum (_Abschaum_) froths together (_zusammanschäumt_).’ ‘Here and there there is nothing to better (_bessern_), nothing to worsen (_bösern_).’ ‘What have they to do there, far-seeing (weitsichtige), far-seeking (_weit-süchtige_) eyes?’ ‘In such processions (_Zügen_) goats (_Ziegen_) and geese, and the strong-headed and the wrong-headed (_Kreuz und Querköpfe_), were always running on before.... O, Will, turn of all need (_Wende aller Noth_)! O thou my necessity (_Nothwendigkeit_)!’ ‘Thus I look afar over the creeping and swarming of little gray waves (_Wellen_) and wills (_Willen_).’ ‘This seeking (_Suchen_) for my home was the visitation (_Heimsuchung_) of me.’ ‘Did not the world become perfect, round and ripe (_reif_)? O for the golden round ring (_Reif_)!’ ‘Yawns (_Klafft_) the abyss here too? Yelps (_Kläfft_) the dog of hell here too?’ ‘It stultifies, brutalizes (_verthiert_), and transforms into a bull (_verstiert_).’ ‘Life is at least (_mindestens_), at the mildest (_mildestens_), an exploiting.’ ‘Whom I deemed transformed akin to myself (_verwandt-verwandelt_),’ etc.

Nietzsche, in the wild hurry of his thought, many a time fails to comprehend the scintillating word-images elaborated in his centres of speech; his consciousness, as it were, hears wrongly, misses its aim in interpreting, and invents wondrous neologisms, which sound like known expressions, but have no sort of fellowship in meaning with these. He speaks, for example, of _Hinterweltlern_ (inhabitants of remote worlds) from _Hinterwäldlern_ (backwoodsmen), of a _Kesselbauche_ (kettle’s belly) when he is thinking of _Kesselpauche_ (kettledrum), etc.; or he even repeats, as his centres of speech prompt, wholly incomprehensible, meaningless sounds. ‘Then I went to the door: Alpa! I cried, who is carrying his ashes to the mountain? Alpa! Alpa! who is carrying his ashes to the mountain?’

He frequently associates his ideas, not according to the sound of the word, but according to the similarity or habitual contiguity of the concepts; then there arise ‘analogous’ intellection and the fugitive ideation, in which, to use Griesinger’s expression, he ‘rambles incoherently from one topic to another.’ Speaking of the ‘ascetic ideal,’ _e.g._, he elaborates the idea that strong and noble spirits take refuge in the desert, and, without any connection, adds: ‘Of course, too, they would not want for camels there.’ The representation of the desert has irresistibly drawn after it the representation of camels, habitually associated with it. At another time he says: ‘Beasts of prey and men of prey, _e.g._, Cæsar Borgia, are radically misunderstood; Nature is misunderstood so long as a fundamental diseased condition is sought for in these healthiest of all tropical monsters and growths. It seems that there is among moralists a hatred against the primeval forest and against the tropics, and that the tropical man must, at any price, be discredited. But why? For the benefit of the temperate zone? For the benefit of the temperate (moderate) men? Of the mediocre?’ In this case the contemplation of Cæsar Borgia forces upon him the comparison with a beast of prey; this makes him think of the tropics, the torrid zone; from the torrid zone he comes to the temperate zone, from this to the ‘temperate’ man, and, through the similarity of sound, to the ‘mediocre’ man (in German, _gemässigt_ and _mittelmässig_).

‘In truth nothing remains of the world but green twilight and green lightnings. Do as it pleases ye, ye wantons ... shake your emeralds down into the deepest depth.’ The quite incomprehensible ‘emeralds’ are called up into consciousness by the representation of the ‘green’ twilight and lightnings.

In this and hundreds of other cases the course of ideation can, to a certain extent, be followed, because all the links in the chain of association are preserved. It often happens, however, that some of these links are suppressed, and then there occur leaps of thought, incomprehensible, and, consequently, bewildering to the reader: ‘It was the body who despaired of the earth, who heard the belly of being speaking to itself.’ ‘More honestly and more purely speaks the healthy body, the perfect and rectangular.’ ‘I am polite towards them as towards all petty vexation; to be prickly against pettiness seems to me wisdom for hedgehogs.’ ‘Deep yellow and hot red; so would my taste have it. This one mixes blood in all colours. He who whitewashes his house betrays to me his whitewashed soul.’ ‘We placed our seat in the midst--so their smirking tells me--and as far from dying gladiators as from contented pigs. But this is mediocrity.’ ‘Our Europe of to-day is ... sceptic ... at one time with that mobile scepticism which leaps impatiently and wantonly from branch to branch, at another gloomy as a cloud overladen with notes of interrogation.’ ‘Let us grant that he [the ‘courageous thinker’] has long enough hardened and pricked up his eye for himself.’ (Here the representation of ‘ear’ and ‘pricked-up ears’ has evidently crossed with confusing effect the associated idea of ‘eye.’) ‘It is already too much for me to keep my opinions to myself, and many a bird flies away. And sometimes I find flown into my dovecot an animal that is strange to me, and that trembles when I lay my hand on it.’ ‘What matters my justice? I do not see that I should be fire and coal.’ ‘They learned from the sea its vanity, too; is the sea not the peacock of peacocks?’ ‘How many things now go by the name of the greatest wickedness, which are only twelve feet wide and three months long! But greater dragons will one day come into the world.’ ‘And if all ladders now fail thee, then must thou understand how to mount on thine own head; how wouldst thou mount otherwise?’ ‘Here I sit, sniffing the best air, the very air of Paradise, luminous, light air, rayed with gold; as good an air as ever yet fell from the moon.’ ‘Ha! up dignity! Virtue’s dignity! European dignity! Blow, blow again, bellows of virtue! Ha! roar once more, morally roar! As a moral lion roar before the daughters of the desert! For virtue’s howl, ye dearest maidens, is more than all European fervour, European voraciousness! And here am I, already a European; I cannot otherwise, God help me! Amen! The desert grows, woe to him who hides deserts!’

The last passage is an example of complete fugitive ideation. Nietzsche often loses the clue, no longer knows what he is driving at, and finishes a sentence which began as if to develop into an argument, with a sudden stray jest. ‘Why should the world, which somewhat concerns us, not be a fiction? And to him who objects: “But a fiction must have an author,” could not the reply be roundly given: Why? Does not this “must” perhaps belong also to the fiction? Is it not permissible to be at last a little ironical towards the subject as well as towards the predicate and object? Ought not the philosopher to rise above a belief in grammar? With all respect for governesses [!], is it not time that philosophy should renounce its faith in governesses?’ ‘“One is always too many about me,” so thinks the hermit. One times one to infinity at last makes two!’ ‘What, then, do they call that which makes them proud? They name it culture; it distinguishes them from the goat-herds.’

Finally, the connection of the associated representations suddenly snaps, and he breaks off in the midst of a sentence to begin a new one: ‘For in religion the passions have once more rights of citizenship, provided that.’ ‘The psychologists of France ... have not yet enjoyed to the full their bitter and manifold pleasure in _la bêtise bourgeoise_, in a manner as if--enough; they betray something thereby.’ ‘There have been philosophers who knew how to lend yet another seductive ... expression to this admiration of the people ... instead of adducing the naked and thoroughly obvious truth, that disinterested conduct is very interesting and interested conduct, provided that---- And love?’

This is the form of Nietzsche’s intellection, sufficiently explaining why he has never set down three coherent pages, but only more or less short ‘aphorisms.’

The content of this incoherent fugitive ideation is formed by a small number of insane ideas, continually repeating themselves with exasperating monotony. We have already become acquainted with Nietzsche’s intellectual Sadism, and his mania of contradiction and doubt, or mania for questioning. In addition to these he evinces misanthropy, or anthropophobia, megalomania, and mysticism.

His anthropophobia expresses itself in numberless passages: ‘Knowledge is no longer sufficiently loved as soon as it is communicated.’ ‘Every community leads somehow, somewhen, somewhere--to vulgarity.’ ‘There are still many void places for the lonesome and twosome [!] around which wafts the odour of tranquil seas.’ ‘Flee, my friend, into thy lonesomeness!’ ‘And many a one who turned away from life, only turned away from the rabble ... and many a one who went into the desert and suffered thirst with the beasts of prey, only wished not to sit with filthy camel-drivers about the tank.’

His megalomania appears only exceptionally as monstrous self-conceit; but it is, nevertheless, clearly conceivable; as a rule it displays a strong and even predominant union of mysticism and supernaturalism. It is pure self-conceit when he says: ‘In that which concerns my “Zarathustra,” I accept no one as a connoisseur whom each of his words has not at some time deeply wounded and deeply enraptured; only then can he enjoy the privilege of reverentially participating in the halcyon element out of which every work is born, in its sunny brightness, distance, breadth, and certainty.’ Or when, after having criticised and belittled Bismarck, he cries, with transparent allusion to himself: ‘But I, in my happiness and my “beyond,” pondered how soon the stronger becomes master of the strong.’ On the other hand, the hidden, mystic, primary idea of his megalomania already distinctly comes out in this passage: ‘But at some given time ... must he nevertheless come, the redeeming man of great love and contempt, the creative spirit who his impulsive strength is ever driving away out of all that is apart and beyond, whose loneliness is misunderstood by the people as if it were flight from reality. It is only his immersion, interment, absorption [three synonyms for one concept!] into reality, in order that at some time if he again comes into the light, he may bring home the redemption of this reality.’

The nature of his megalomania is betrayed by the expressions ‘redeeming man’ and ‘redemption.’ He imagines himself a new Saviour, and plagiarizes the Gospel in form and substance. _Also Sprach Zarathustra_ is a complete stereotype of the sacred writings of Oriental nations. The book aims at an external resemblance to the Bible and Koran. It is divided into chapters and verses; the language is the archaic and prophetic language of the books of Revelation (‘And Zarathustra looked at the people, and was astonished. Then he spake and said thus:’); there frequently appear long enumerations and sermons like litanies (‘I love those who do not seek a reason only behind the stars ...; I love him who lives to know ...; I love him who labours and invents ...; I love him who loves his virtue ...; I love him who withholds for himself not one drop of mind,’ etc.), and individual paragraphs point _verbatim_ to analogous portions of the Gospel, _e.g._: ‘When Zarathustra had taken leave of the city ... there followed him many who called themselves his disciples and bore him company. Thus they came to a cross-road; then said Zarathustra unto them, that thenceforth he would go alone.’ ‘And the happiness of the spirit is this: to be anointed by tears and consecrated as a beast of sacrifice.’ ‘Verily, said he to his disciples, yet a little and there comes this long twilight. Ah! how shall I save my light?’ ‘In this manner did Zarathustra go about, sore at heart, and for three days took no food or drink.... At length it came to pass that he fell into a deep sleep. And his disciples sat around him in long night-watches,’ etc. Many of the chapters have most expressive titles: ‘On Self-Conquest;’ ‘On Immaculate Knowledge;’ ‘On Great Events;’ ‘On the Redemption;’ ‘On the Mount of Olives;’ ‘On Apostates;’ ‘The Cry of Sore Need;’ ‘The Last Supper;’ ‘The Awakening,’ etc. Sometimes, it is true, it befalls him to say, atheistically: ‘If there were gods, how could I endure to be no god? _Hence_’ (italics his) ‘there are no gods;’ but such passages vanish among the countless ones in which he refers to himself as a god. ‘Thou hast the power and thou wilt not reign.’ ‘He who is of my nature escapes not such an hour--the hour which says to him: Only now art thou going the way of thy greatness.... Thou art entering on the way of thy greatness; that which has hitherto been thy last danger has now become thy last resource. Thou art entering on the way of thy greatness; now must thy best courage be, that there is no longer any way behind thee. Thou art going on the way of thy greatness; here shall no one slink behind thee,’ etc.

Nietzsche’s mysticism and megalomania manifest themselves not only in his somewhat more coherent thought, but also in his general mode of expression. The mystic numbers, three and seven, frequently appear. He sees the external world, as he does himself--vast, distant, deep; and the words expressing these concepts are repeated on every page, almost in every line: ‘The discipline of suffering, of great suffering....’ ‘The South is a great school of healing.’ ‘These last great searchers....’ ‘With the signs of great destiny.’ ‘Where together with great compassion he has learnt great contempt--to learn, at their side, great reverence.’ ‘Guilt is all great existence.’ ‘That I may celebrate the great noon with you.’ ‘Thus speaks all great love.’ ‘Not from you is great weariness to come to me.’ ‘Men who are nothing but a great eye, or a great mouth, or a great belly, or something great....’ ‘To love with great love, to love with great contempt.’ ‘But thou, O depth, thou sufferest too deeply.’ ‘Immovable is my depth, but it gleams with floating enigmas and laughters.’ (It is to be observed how, in this sentence, all the obsessions of the maniac crowd together--depth, brilliancy, mania of doubt, hilarious excitation.) ‘All depth shall ascend to my height.’ ‘They do not think enough into the deep,’ etc. With the idea of depth is connected that of abyss, which recurs with equal constancy. The words ‘abyss’ and ‘abysmal’ are among the most frequent in Nietzsche’s writings. His words which have the prefix ‘over’ are associated with his motor images, especially those of flying and hovering: ‘Over-moral sense’; ‘over-European music’; ‘climbing monkeys and over-heated’; ‘from the species to the over-species’; ‘the over-hero’; ‘the over-human’; ‘the over-dragon’; ‘the over-urgent’ and ‘over-compassionate,’ etc.

As is general in frenzied madness, Nietzsche is conscious of his diseased interior processes, and in countless places alludes to the furiously rapid outflow of his ideation and to his insanity: ‘That true philosophic reunion of a bold, unrestrained mentality, running _presto_.... They regard thought as something slow, hesitant, almost a toil; not at all as something light, divine, and nearest of kin to the dance, to exuberance.’ ‘The bold, light, tender march and flight of his thought.’ ‘We think too rapidly.... It is as if we carried about in our head an incessantly rolling machine.’ ‘It is in impatient spirits that there breaks out a veritable pleasure in insanity, because insanity has so joyous a _tempo_.’ ‘All talking runs too slowly for me; I leap into thy chariot, Storm!... Like a cry and a huzza would I glide away over vast seas.’ ‘Eruptive insanity forever hovers above humanity as its greatest danger.’ (He is, of course, thinking of himself when speaking of ‘humanity.’) ‘In these days it sometimes happens that a gentle, temperate, self-contained man becomes suddenly frenzied, breaks plates, upsets the table, shrieks, rages, offends everyone, and finally retires in shame and anger against himself.’ (Most decidedly ‘that sometimes happens,’ not only ‘in these days,’ but in all times; but among maniacs only.) ‘Where is the insanity with which ye were forced to be inoculated? Behold, I teach you the over-man, who is ... this insanity.’ ‘All things are worth the same; each is alike. He who feels otherwise goes voluntarily [?] into a madhouse.’ ‘I put this exuberance and this foolishness in the place of that will, as I taught; in all one thing is impossible--reasonableness.’ ‘My hand is a fool’s hand; woe to all tables and walls, and wherever there is yet room for the embellishments of fools--scribbling of fools!’ (In the original there is here a play on the words _Zierrath_, _Schmierrath_.)[426] He also, in the manner of maniacs, excuses his mental disease: ‘Finally, there would remain open the great question whether we could dispense with disease even for the development of our virtue, and especially if our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge needed the sick soul as much as the healthy soul.’

Finally, he is not even wanting in the maniacal idea of his ‘primæval health.’ His soul is ‘always clearer and always healthier’; ‘we Argonauts of the ideal’ are ‘healthier than one would fain allow us to be--dangerously healthy, more and more healthy,’ etc.

The foregoing is a necessarily condensed summary of the special colour, form, and content of Nietzsche’s thought, originating in illusions of sense; and this unhappy lunatic has been earnestly treated as a ‘philosopher,’ and his drivel put forward as a ‘system’--this man whose scribbling is one single long divagation, in whose writings madness shrieks out from every line! Dr. Kirchner, a philosopher by profession, and the author of numerous philosophical writings, in a newspaper article on Nietzsche’s book, _Der Fall Wagner_, lays great stress on the fact that ‘it superabounds, as it were, in intellectual health.’ Ordinary university professors--such as G. Adler, in Freiburg, and others--extol Nietzsche as a ‘bold and original thinker,’ and with solemn seriousness take up a position in respect of his ‘philosophy’--some with avowed enthusiasm, and some with carefully considered reservations! In the face of such incurably deep mental obtuseness, it cannot excite wonder if the clear-thinking and healthy portion of the young spirits of the present generation should, with hasty generalization, extend to philosophy itself the contempt deserved by its officially-appointed teachers. These teachers undertake to introduce their students into mental philosophy, and are yet without the capacity to distinguish from rational thought the incoherent fugitive ideation of a maniac.

Dr. Hermann Türck[427] characterizes in excellent words the disciples of Nietzsche: ‘This piece of wisdom [‘nothing is true; all is permissible’] in the mouth of a morally insane man of letters has ... found ready response among persons who, in consequence of a moral defect, feel themselves to be in contradiction to the demands of society. This aforesaid intellectual proletariat of large towns is especially jubilant over the new magnificent discovery that all morality and all truth are completely superfluous and pernicious to the development of the individual. It is true that these persons have always in secret said to themselves, “Nothing is true--all is permissible,” and have also, as far as possible, acted accordingly. But now they can avow it openly, and with pride; for Friedrich Nietzsche, the new prophet, has vaunted this maxim as the most exalted truth of life.... It is not society which is right in its estimation of morality, science, and true art. Oh dear no! The individuals who follow their egoistical personal aims only--who act only as if truth were of consequence to them--they, the counterfeiters of truth, those unscrupulous penny-a-liners, lying critics, literary thieves, and manufacturers of pseudo-realistic brummagem--they are the true heroes, the masters of the situation, the truly free spirits.’

That is the truth, but not the whole truth. Without doubt, the real Nietzsche gang consists of born imbecile criminals, and of simpletons drunk with sonorous words. But besides these gallows birds without the courage and strength for criminal actions, and the imbeciles who allow themselves to be stupefied and, as it were, hypnotized by the roar and rush of fustian, the banner of the insane babbler is followed by others, who must be judged otherwise and in part more gently. In fact, Nietzsche’s ranting includes some ideas which, in part, respond to a widespread notion of the age, and in part are capable of awakening the deception that, in spite of all the exaggeration and insane distortion of exposition, they contain a germ of truth and right; and these ideas explain why many persons agree with them who can hardly be reproached with lack of clearness and critical capacity.

Nietzsche’s fundamental idea of utter disregard and brutal contempt for all the rights of others standing in the way of an egoistical desire, must please the generation reared under the Bismarckian system. Prince Bismarck is a monstrous personality, raging over a country like a tornado in the torrid zone; it crushes all in its devastating course, and leaves behind as traces, a widespread annihilation of character, destruction of notions of right, and demolition of morality. In political life the system of Bismarck is a sort of Jesuitism in cuirass. ‘The end sanctifies the means,’ and the means are not (as with the supple sons of Loyola) cunning, obstinacy, secret trickery, but open brutality, violence, the blow with the fist, and the stroke with the sword. The end which sanctifies the means of the Jesuit in cuirass may sometimes be of general utility; but it will quite as often, and oftener, be an egoistical one. In its author this system of the most primitive barbarism had ever a certain grandeur, for it had its origin in a powerful will, which with heroic boldness always placed itself at stake, and entered into every fight with the savage determination to ‘conquer or die.’ In its imitators, on the contrary, it has got stunted to ‘swaggering’ or ‘bullying,’ _i.e._, to that most abject and contemptible cowardice which crawls on its belly before the strong, but maltreats with the most extreme insolence the completely unarmed, the unconditionally harmless and weak, from whom no resistance and no danger are in any way to be apprehended. The ‘bullies’ gratefully recognise themselves in Nietzsche’s ‘over-man,’ and Nietzsche’s so-called ‘philosophy’ is in reality the philosophy of ‘bullying.’ His doctrine shows how Bismarck’s system is mirrored in the brain of a maniac. Nietzsche could not have come to the front and succeeded in any but the Bismarckian and post-Bismarckian era. He would, doubtless, have been delirious at whatever period he might have lived; but his insanity would not have assumed the special colour and tendency now perceptible in it. It is true that sometimes Nietzsche vexes himself over the fact that ‘the type of the new Germany most rich in success in all that has depth ... fails in “swagger,”’ and he then proclaims: ‘It were well for us not to exchange too cheaply our ancient renown as a people of depth for Prussian “swagger,” and the wit and sand of Berlin.’[428] But in other places he betrays what really displeases him in the ‘swagger,’ at which he directs his philosophical verse; it makes too much ado about the officer. ‘The moment he [the ‘Prussian officer’] speaks and moves, he is the most forward and tasteless figure in old Europe--unknown to himself.... And unknown also to the good Germans, who wonder at him as a man of the highest and most distinguished society, and willingly take their tone from him.’[429] Nietzsche cannot consent to that--Nietzsche, who apprehends that there can be no God, as in that case he himself must be this God. He cannot suffer the ‘good German’ to place the officer above him. But apart from this inconvenience, which is involved in the system of ‘swagger,’ he finds everything in it good and beautiful, and lauds it as ‘intrepidity of glance, courage and hardness of the cutting hand, an inflexible will for dangerous voyages of discovery, for spiritualized North-Polar expeditions under desolate and dangerous skies,’[430] and prophesies exultingly that for Europe there will soon begin an era of brass, an era of war, soldiers, arms, violence. Hence it is natural that ‘swaggerers’ should hail him as their very own peculiar philosopher.

Besides anarchists, born with incapacity for adaptation, his ‘individualism,’ _i.e._, his insane ego-mania, for which the external world is non-existent, was bound to attract those who instinctively feel that at the present day the State encroaches too deeply and too violently on the rights of the individual, and, in addition to the necessary sacrifices of strength and time, exacts from him such as he cannot undergo without destructive loss of self-esteem, viz., the sacrifice of judgment, knowledge, conviction, and human dignity. These thirsters for freedom believe that they have found in Nietzsche the spokesman of their healthy revolt against the State, as the oppressor of independent spirits, and as the crusher of strong characters. They commit the same error which I have already pointed out in the sincere adherents of the Decadents and of Ibsen; they do not see that Nietzsche confounds the conscious with the subconscious man; that the individual, for whom he demands perfect freedom, is the man, not of knowledge and judgment, but of blind craving, requiring the satisfaction of his lascivious instincts at any price; that he is not the moral, but the sensual, man.

Finally, his consequential airs have also increased the number of his followers. Many of those marching in his train reject his moral doctrine, but wax enthusiastic over such expressions as these: ‘It might some time happen that the masses should become masters.... Therefore, O my brothers, there is need of a new nobility, the adversary of all plebeians and all violent domination, and who inscribes anew on a new tablet the word “Nobility.”’[431]

There is at the present time a widespread conviction that the enthusiasm for equality was a grievous error of the great Revolution. A doctrine opposed to all natural laws is justly resisted. Humanity has need of a hierarchy. It must have leaders and models. It cannot do without an aristocracy. But the nobleman to whom the human herd may concede the most elevated place will certainly not be Nietzsche’s ‘over-man,’ the ego-maniac, the criminal, the robber, the slave of his maddened instincts, but the man of richer knowledge, higher intelligence, clearer judgment, and firmer self-discipline. The existence of humanity is a combat, which it cannot carry on without captains. As long as the combat is of men against men, the herd requires a herdsman of strong muscles and ready blow. In a more perfect state, in which all humanity fights collectively against Nature only, it chooses as its chief the man of richest brain, most disciplined will and concentrated attention. This man is the best observer, but he is also one who feels most acutely and rapidly, who can most vividly picture to himself the condition of the external world, hence the man of the liveliest sympathy and most comprehensive interest. The ‘over-man’ of the healthy development of the species is a Paraclete of knowledge and unselfish love, not a bloodthirsty ‘splendid beast of prey.’ This is not borne in mind by those who believe that in Nietzsche’s aristocratism they have found a clear expression of their own obscure views as to the need of noble natures of light and leading.

Nietzsche’s false individualism and aristocratism is capable of misleading superficial readers. Their error may be accounted a mitigating circumstance. But even taking this into consideration, it still ever remains a disgrace to the German intellectual life of the present age, that in Germany a pronounced maniac should have been regarded as a philosopher, and have founded a school.