Part 3

"2. The true world unattainable at present, but promised to the wise, the pious, and the virtuous man (to the sinner who repents).

"(Progress of the idea: it becomes more refined, more insidious, more incomprehensible,--it becomes feminine, it becomes Christian.)

"3. The true world unattainable, undemonstrable, and unable to be promised; but even as conceived, a comfort, an obligation, and an imperative.

"(The old sun still, but shining only through mist and scepticism; the idea becomes sublime, pale, northerly, Koenigsbergian.)

"4. The true world--unattainable? At any rate unattained. And being unattained also unknown. Consequently also neither comforting, saving nor obligatory: what obligation could anything unknown lay upon us?

"(Gray morning. First dawning of reason. Cock-crowing of Positivism.)

"5. The 'true world'--an idea neither good for anything, nor even obligatory any longer,--an idea become useless and superfluous; consequently a refuted idea; let us do away with it!

"(Full day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato blushing for shame; infernal noise of all free intellects,)

"6. We have done away with the true world: what world is left? perhaps the seeming?... But no! in doing away with the true, we have also done away with the seeming world!

"(Noon; the moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; climax of mankind; Incipit Zarathustra!)"

The reader will ask, "What next?" Probably afternoon and evening, and then night. In the night presumably "the old sun," i. e., the idea of Plato's true world, which (according to Nietzsche) grew pale in the morning, will shine again.

Nietzsche's main desire was to live the real life and make his home not in an imaginary Utopia but in this actual world of ours. He reproached the philosophers as well as the religious leaders and ethical teachers for trying to make mankind believe that the teal world is purely phenomenal, for replacing it by the world of thought which they called "the true world" or the world of truth. To Nietzsche the typical philosopher is Plato. He and all his followers are accused of hypocrisy for making people believe that "the true world" of their own fiction is real and that man's ambition should be to attain to this "true world" (the world of philosophy, of science, of art, of ethical ideals) built above the real world. Nietzsche means to shatter all the idols of the past, and he has come to the conclusion that even the scientists were guilty of the same fault as the philosophers. They erected a world of thought, of subjective conception from the materials of the real world, and so he denounces even their attempts at constructing a "true world" as either a self-mystification or a lie. It is as imaginary as the world of the priest. In order to lead a life worthy of the "overman," we should assert ourselves and feel no longer hampered by rules of conduct or canons of logic or by any consideration for truth.

With all his hatred of religion, Nietzsche was nevertheless an intensely religious character, and knowing that he could not clearly see a connection between his so-called "real world" and his actual surroundings, he developed all the symptoms of religious fanaticism which characterizes religious leaders of all ages. He indulged in a mystic ecstacy, preaching it as the essential feature of his philosophy, and his Dionysiac enthusiasm is not the least of the intoxicants which are contained in his thought and bring so many poetical and talented but immature minds under his control.

It is obvious that "the real world" of Nietzsche is more unreal than "the true world" of philosophy and of religion which he denounces as fictitious, but he was too naive and philosophically crude to see this. Nietzsche's "real world" is a fabric of his own personal imagination, while the true world of science is at least a thought-construction of the world which pictures facts with objective exactness; it is controlled by experience and can be utilized in practical life; it is subject to criticism and its propositions are being constantly tested either to be refuted or verified. Nietzsche's "real world" is the hope (and perhaps not even a desirable hope) of a feverish brain whose action is influenced by a decadent body.

Nietzsche's so-called "real world" is one ideal among many others. It is as much subjective as the ideals of other mortals,--of men who seek happiness in wealth, or in pleasures, or in fame, or in scholarship, or in a religious life--all of them imagine that the world of their thoughts is real and the goal which they endeavor to reach is the only thing that possesses genuine worth. In Nietzsche's opinion all are dreamers catching at shadows, but the shadow of his own fancy appeared to him as real.

According to Nietzsche the universe is not a cosmos but a chaos. He says (La Gaya Scienza, German edition, p. 148):

"The astral order in which we live is an exception. This order and the relative stability which is thereby caused, made the exception' of exceptions possible,--the formation of organisms. The character-total of the world is into all eternity chaos, not in the sense of a missing necessity, but of missing order, articulation, form, beauty, wisdom, and as all our æsthetic humanities may be called."

In agreement with this conception of order, Nietzsche says of man, the rational animal:

"I fear that animals look upon man as a being of their own kind, which in a most dangerous way has lost the sound animal-sense,--as a lunatic animal, a laughing animal, a crying animal, a miserable animal." (La Gaya Scienza, German edition, p. 196.)

If reason is an aberration, the brute must be superior to man and instinct must range higher than logical thought. Man's reason, according to this consistent nominalist view, is purely subjective and has no prototype in the objective world. This is a feature common to all nominalistic philosophies. John Stuart Mill regards the theorems of logic and mathematics, not only not as truths, but as positive untruths. He says:

"The points, lines, circles, and squares, which any one has in his mind, are (I apprehend) simply copies of the points, lines, circles, and squares which he has known in his experience. Our idea of a point, I apprehend to be simply our idea of the minimum visibile, the smallest portion of surface which we can see. A line, as defined by geometers, is wholly inconceivable. We can reason about a line as if it had no breadth; because we have a power, which is the foundation of all the control we can exercise over the operations of our minds; the power, when a perception is present to our senses, or a conception to our intellects, of attending to a part only of that perception or conception, instead of the whole. But we cannot conceive a line without breadth; we can form no mental picture of such a line: all the lines which we have in our minds are lines possessing breadth."

Nietzsche shows his nominalistic tendencies by repeatedly pronouncing the same propositions in almost literally the same words, without, however, acknowledging the school in which he picked up this error.

It is quite true that mathematical lines and circles are human conceptions, but they are not purely subjective conceptions, still less untruths; they are great and important discoveries. They are not arbitrarily devised but constructed according to the laws of the uniformities that dominate existence. They represent actual features of the factors which shape the objective universe, and thus only is it possible that the astronomer through the calculation of mathematical curves can predict the motion of the stars.

Reason is the key to the universe, because it is the reflex of cosmic order, and the cosmic order, the intrinsic regularity and immanent harmony of the uniformities of nature, is not a subjective illusion but an objective reality.

When Goethe claims that all things transitory are symbols of that which is intransitory and eternal, Nietzsche answers that the idea of anything intransitory is a mere symbol, and God (the idea of anything eternal) a poet's lie.

Like a mocking-bird, the nominalist philosopher imitates the ring of Goethe's well-known lines at the conclusion of the second part of "Faust," in which the "real world" of transient things is considered as a mere symbol of the true world of eternal verities:

"Das Unvergangliche Ist nur dein Gleichniss. Gott der Verfängliche Ist Dichter-Erschleichniss. Weltspiel, das herrische, Mischt Sein und Schein:-- Das Ewig-Närrische Mischt uns--hinein."

"The non-deciduous Is a symbol of thy sense, God ever invidious, A poetical license. World-play domineeringly Mixes semblance and fact, And between them us sneeringly The Ever-Foolish has packed."