Part 16

If now this one turn to Nietzsche for an answer, he receives one certainly; but, surely, a mocking one!

“I preach,” cries Nietzsche, “the Wiederkunft.”

One day Zarathustra and his Dwarf come to a certain portal.

“Look on this portal, Dwarf. It has two faces; two ways come together here which no man has traveled to the end.

“This long road back of us measures an eternity. And that long road before us--that is another eternity.

“They are opposed, these two ways; they meet each other head-on and it is here at this portal that they come together. The name of this portal is written over it; it is the ‘Now.’

“But if one were to follow one of these roads further, and always further,--thinkest thou, Dwarf, they would always be opposed?

“Look upon this ‘Now’! From this portal there runs a long way back; behind us lies an eternity.

“Must not all things that can come to pass already have passed along this road? Must not everything that can happen already have happened and run its course?

“And if all things already have come to pass, what thinkest thou, Dwarf, of this ‘Now’? Must not this portal have been here before? And are not all things in such wise fast knotted together that this ‘Now’ drags with it all things to come? That, consequently, it drags itself back again?

“For what of all things can come to pass, must they not again pass along this endless road that stretches before us?

“And this slow spider crawling in the moonlight; aye, and this moonlight, and I and thou in the portal whispering together, whispering of eternal things, must we not all of us have been before?

“And must we not return again and again along that long road--must we not eternally return?

“So spake he, and always lower and lower; for he was afraid of his thoughts--and afterthoughts!”

Surely Nietzsche is mocking us with his Wiederkunft,--with his doctrine of the eternal returning of things! What! he teaches that the struggle has a goal, and that goal is just--tomorrow? Then, when bewildered by the vision of the infinite stretch of tomorrows we turn to him for explanation, he tells us that the stream is not even infinite but like ancient Ocean “flows in upon itself.”

“Tied to the wheel of things,” India said we were, “therefore, let us give up.”

“Tied to the wheel of things,” Nietzsche agrees we are, “therefore, let us keep on.”

“Courage is the best of them that kill. Courage kills even pity. Now, pity is the deep abyss: deep as one sees into life, just so deep does one see into pain.

“But courage is the best of them that kill; courage that lays hold on things; courage puts even Death to death, for it says to life: ‘War das das Leben? Wohlan! Noch einmal!’”

* * * * *

Noch einmal! To make one ready to cry da capo to life, that is the test of a philosophy! Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Wiederkunft has no scientific importance, but this fact is itself unimportant. It makes little difference whether the River Ocean flows in upon itself, or flows endlessly on, or falls at last into Hades. The important thing is that worth and happiness lie in playing the game of life as experience reveals it to us, no matter what that game may be.

“Thy will be my will, O Nature,” cried the Stoic Emperor. Is this will the will to conquer, is it the will to produce the higher type, is it the will to flow, is it the will wheel-like to turn in saecula saeculorum--the word of life is “That also will I”; the word of sickness and death is, “That will I not.”

There is enough of the dramatic for such as have a taste that way in the circumstance that just this lonely, pain-wracked, finally brain-sick man should have begun his philosophy with the phrase: “God is dead of pity for men,” and should have concluded it with that other: “War das das Leben? Wohlan! Noch einmal!”

VIII

PRAGMATISM

Nothing could be easier, you would say, than to distinguish the things man has made from those he has merely stumbled upon and found. The suns and their satellites, with the laws of their turning; the earth, with its seas and continents and the ways of its winds and weather--surely no man took thought on these things to make them. Whereas, from the first bit of flint chipped to serve a human need to all our world has now to show of instruments of power and works of art we have a record of human ideals wrought in material, while man, surrounded by his handiwork, has come to live more and more under laws of his own making.

Aristotle thought the difference between products of nature and works of art so plain that he need not pause to explain it. The years that have passed since then have developed no better mind than Aristotle’s, no keener wit than Plato’s, but they have brought us a wealth of experience--of an experience at once enlightening and disillusioning, until

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