Part 14

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, 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." 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.

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." 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."

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.

J. W. Draper, "A History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science;" New York, 1874.

Richard Falckenberg: "A History of Modern Philosophy," tr. by A. C. Armstrong, Jr.; New York, 1897; Chap. I.

T. H. Huxley: "Hume," preface; London, 1879.

Comte and Kant, for example.

"Der Antichrist," § 55.

"Jenseits von Gut und Böse," VII.

"Der Antichrist," § 54.

"Menschliches allzu Menschliches," § 483.

"Götzendämmerung," VI.

"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."

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.