Chapter 30

In other places, again, we find the current of thought and almost the very words of Oscar Wilde, Huysmans, and other Diabolists and Decadents. The passage inZur Genealogie der Moral(p. 171) in which he glorifies art, because ‘in it the lie sanctifies itself, and the will to deceive has a quiet conscience on its side,’ might be in the chapter in Wilde’sIntentionson ‘The Decay of Lying,’ as, conversely, Wilde’s aphorisms:‘There is no sin except stupidity.’ ‘An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.’ And his praises of Wainwright, the poisoner, are in exact agreement with Nietzsche’s ‘morality of assassins,’ and the latter’s remarks that crime is calumniated, and that the defender of the criminal is ‘oftenest not artist enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the crime to the advantage of the doer.’ Again, by way of joke, compare these passages: ‘It is necessary to get rid of the bad taste of wishing to agree with many. Good is no longer good when a neighbour says it’s good’ (Nietzsche,Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 54), and ‘Ah! don’t say that you agree with me. When people agree with me, I always feel that I must be wrong’ (Oscar Wilde,Intentions, p. 202). This is more than a resemblance, is it not? To avoid being too diffuse, I abstain from citing passages exactly resembling these from Huysmans’A Rebours, and from Ibsen. At the same time it is unquestionable that Nietzsche could not have known the French Decadents and English Æsthetes whom he so frequently approaches, because his books are in part antecedent to those of the latter; and neither could they have drawn from him, because, perhaps with the exception of Ibsen, it is only about two years since they could have heard as much as Nietzsche’s name. The similarity, or rather identity, is not explained by plagiarism; it is explained by the identity of mental qualities in Nietzsche and the other ego-maniacal degenerates.Nietzsche presents a specially droll aspect when he confronts truth, in order to declare it unnecessary, or even to deny its existence. ‘Why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Or even ignorance?’ (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 3). ‘What, after all, are the truths of man? They are the irrefutable errors of man’ (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 193). ‘The will for truth—that might be a hidden will for death’ (Ibid., p. 263). The section of this book in which he deals with the question of truth is entitled by him, ‘We the Fearless,’ and he prefixes to it, as a motto, Turenne’s utterance: ‘Thou tremblest, carcass? Thou wouldst tremble much more if thou knewest whither I shall soon lead thee!’ And what is this terrible danger into which the fearless one runs with such heroic mien? The investigation of the essence and value of truth. But this investigation is really the A B C of all serious philosophy! The question as to whether objective truth exists at all has been also drawn up by him,[406]it is true with less blowing of trumpets, beating of drums, and shaking of locks, as its prologue, accompaniment, and conclusion. It is, moreover, highly characteristic that the same dragon-slayer who, withsuch swaggering and snorting takes up the challenge against ‘truth,’ finds submissive words of most humble apology when he ventures very gently to doubt the perfection of Goethe in all his pieces. Speaking of the ‘viscosity’ and ‘tediousness’ of the German style, he says (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 39): ‘I may be pardoned for affirming that even Goethe’s prose, with its mixture of stiffness and grace, is no exception.’ When he timidly criticises Goethe, he begs pardon; his heroic attitude of contempt for death is assumed only when he challenges morality and truth to combat. That is to say, this ‘fearless one’ possesses the cunning often observed among the insane, and comprehends that there is absolutely no danger in his babbling before the imbeciles composing his congregation, that fabulous philosophical nonsense, at which, on the contrary, they would be much enraged the instant it shocked their æsthetic convictions or prejudices.Even in the minutest details it is surprising how Nietzsche agrees, word for word, with the other ego-maniacs with whom we have become acquainted. Compare, for example, the phrase inJenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 168, where he vaunts, ‘What is really noble in works and in men, their moment of smooth sea and halcyon self-sufficiency, thegoldenand thecool,’ with Baudelaire’s praise of immobility and his enraptured description of a metallic landscape; or the remarks of Des Esseintes, and the side-thrusts at the press put by Ibsen into the mouths of his characters, with the insults continually heaped on newspapers by Nietzsche. ‘Great ascetic spirits have an abhorrence of bustle, veneration, newspaper’ (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 113). The cause of ‘the undeniably gradual and already tangible desolation of the German mind’ lies in being ‘all too exclusively nourished on newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagnerian music’ (Ibid., p. 177). ‘Behold these superfluities!... They vomit their bile, and name it a newspaper’ (Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. i., p. 67). ‘Dost thou not see the souls hanging like limp dirty rags? And they make newspapers out of those rags! Hearest thou not how the spirit has here become a play on words? He vomits a loathsome swill of words. And of this swill of words they make newspapers!’ (Ibid., pt. iii., p. 37). It would be possible to multiply these examples tenfold, for Nietzsche harks back to every idea with an obstinacy enough to make the most patient reader of sound taste go wild.Such is the appearance presented by Nietzsche’s originality. This ‘original’ and ‘audacious’ thinker, imitating the familiar practices of tradesmen at ‘sales,’ endeavours to palm off as brand new goods the most shop-worn rubbish of great philosophers. His most powerful assaults are directed againstdoors that stand open. This ‘solitary one,’ this ‘dweller on the highest mountain peaks,’ exhibits by the dozen the physiognomy of all decadents. He who is continually talking with the utmost contempt of the ‘herd’ and the ‘herd-animal’ is himself the most ordinary herd-animal of all. Only the herd to which he belongs, body and soul, is a special one; it is the flock of the mangy sheep.Upon one occasion the habitual cunning of the insane has deserted him, and he has himself revealed to us the source of his ‘original’ philosophy. The passage is so characteristic that I must quote it at length:‘The first impetus, to make known something of my hypotheses concerning the origin of morality, was given me by a clear, tidy, and clever—ay, precocious [!]—little book, in which there was for the first time presented to me an inverted and perverted kind of genealogical hypotheses, the trulyEnglishkind, and which attracted me with that attractive force possessed by everything contrary, everything antipodal. The title of this little book wasDer Ursprung der moralischen Empfindunger[“The Origin of Moral Sensations”]; its author, Dr. Paul Rée; the year of its publication, 1877. I have, perhaps, never read anything to which I have in the same measure mentally said “No” as I did to every proposition and every conclusion in this book, yet without anger or impatience. In the previously-mentioned work on which I was at that time engaged [Menschliches Allzumenschliches—“Things Human, Things all too Human”], I referred, in season and out of season, to the propositions of that book, not refuting them—what have I to do with refutations?—but, as befits a positive spirit, to substitute the more probable for the improbable, and at times one error for another’ (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 7).This gives the reader the key to Nietzsche’s ‘originality.’ It consists in simple infantile inversion of a rational train of thought. If Nietzsche imagines that his insane negations and contradictions grew spontaneously in his head, he is really the victim of a self-delusion. His rant may have existed in his mind before he had read Dr. Rée’s book. But in that case it had sprung up as a contradiction to other books without his having been so clearly conscious of its origin as after the perusal of Dr. Rée’s work. But he pushes the self-delusion to an incredible height, in terming himself a ‘positive spirit,’ after he has just frankly confessed his method of procedure, viz., that he does not ‘refute’—he would not have found that so easy, either—but that ‘to every proposition, and every conclusion he says ‘No!’This explanation of the source of his ‘original’ moralphilosophy comprehends in itself a diagnosis, which at once obtrudes on the most short-sighted eye. Nietzsche’s system is the product of the mania of contradiction, the delirious form of that mental derangement, of which the melancholic form is the mania of doubt and negation, treated of in the earlier chapters of this work. Hisfolie des négationsbetrays itself also in his peculiarities of language. There is ever in his consciousness a questioning impulse like a mark of interrogation. Of no word is he so fond as of the interrogative ‘What?’ constantly used by him in the most marvellous connection,[407]and he makes usead nauseamof the turn of expression, that one should ‘say No’ to this and that, that this one and that one is a ‘No-sayer’—an expression which suggests to him by association the same immeasurably frequent use of the contrary expression, ‘say Yes’ and ‘Yes-sayer.’ This ‘saying-No’ and ‘saying-Yes’ is in his case a veritableParaphasia vesana, or insane language opposed to usage, as the reader is shown by the examples cited in foot-note.[408]Nietzsche’s assurance that ‘without anger or impatience’ he ‘said No’ to all Rée’s assertions may be believed. Persons afflicted with the mania of doubt and of denial do not get angry when they question or contradict; they do this under the coercion of their mental derangement. But those among them who are delirious have the conscious intention of making others angry, even if they themselves are not so. On this point Nietzsche allows an avowal to escape him: ‘My mode of thought demands a warlike soul, a wish to give pain, a pleasure in saying, No’ (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 63). This confession may be compared with the passages from Ibsen: ‘You were becoming reckless! In reality that you might anger these affected beings of both sexes here in the town’; and, ‘Something shall happen which will be a slap in the face to all this decorum’ (The Pillars of Society).The origin of one of the most ‘original’ of Nietzsche’s doctrines, viz., the explanation of conscience as a satisfaction of the instinct of cruelty through inner self-rending, has already been gone into by Dr. Türck, in an excellent little work. He very justly recognises the diseased state of moral aberration at the base of this insane idea,[409]and continues thus:‘Let us now picture to ourselves a man of this kind, with innate instincts of murder, or in general with ‘Anomalies or perversion of the moral feelings’ (Mendel); at the same time highly gifted, with the best instruction and an excellent education, reared in the midst of agreeable circumstances, and under the careful ... nurture of women ... and occupying at an early age a prominent position in society. It is clear that the better moral instincts must gain such strength as to be able to drive back to the deepest inner depths the bestial instinct of destruction and completely to curb it, yet without wholly annihilating it. It may not, indeed, be able to manifest itself in deeds, but, because it is inborn, the instinct remains in existence as an unfulfilled wish, cherished in the inmost heart ... as an ardent desire ... to yield itself up to its cruel lust. But every non-satisfaction of a ... deeply imprinted instinct has as its consequence pain and inner torment. Now, we men are very much inclined to regard as naturally good and justifiable that which gives us decided pleasure, and conversely to reprobate, as bad and contrary to nature, that which produces pain. Thus, it may happen that an intellectual and highly gifted man, born with perverted instincts, and feeling as torment ... the non-satisfaction of the instinct, will hit upon the idea of justifying the passion for murder, the extremest egoism ... as something good, beautiful, and according to Nature, and to characterizeas morbid aberration the better opposing moral instincts, manifesting themselves in us as that which we call conscience.Dr. Türck is right in admitting Nietzsche’s innate moral aberration and the inversion in him of healthy instincts. Nevertheless, in the interpretation of the particular phenomena in which the aberration manifests itself, he commits an error, which is explained by the fact that Dr. Türck is seemingly not deeply conversant with mental therapeutics. He assumes that in Nietzsche’s mind the evil instincts are in severe conflict with those better notions instilled in him by education, and that he experiences as pain the suppression of his instincts by judgment. That is hardly the true state of the case. It is not necessary that Nietzsche should have the wish to commit murder and other crimes. Not every aberrant person (pervers) is subject to impulsions. The perversion may be limited exclusively to the sphere of ideation, and get its satisfaction wholly in ideas. A subject thus affected never gets the notion of transforming his ideas into deeds. His derangement does not encroach upon the centres of will and movement, but carries on its fell work within the centres of ideation. We know forms of sexual perversion in which the sufferers never experience the impulse to seek satisfaction in acts, and who revel only in thought.[410]This astonishing rupture of the natural connection between idea and movement, between thought and act, this detachment of the organs of will and movement from the organs of conception and judgment which they normally obey, is in itself a proof of deepest disorder throughout the machinery of thought. Incompetent critics eagerly point to the fact that many authors and artists live unexceptionable lives in complete contrast to their works, which may be immoral or contrary to nature, and deduce from this fact that it is unjustifiable to draw from his works conclusions as to the mental and moral Nature of their author. Those who talk in this manner do not even suspect that there are purely mental perversions which are quite as much a mental disease as the impulsions of the ‘impulsivists.’This is obviously the case with Nietzsche. His perversion is of a purely intellectual character, and has hardly ever impelled him to acts. Hence, in his mind there has been no conflict between instincts and the morality acquired byeducation. His explanation of conscience has quite another source than that assumed by Dr. Türck. It is one of those perverted interpretations of a sensation by the consciousness perceiving it which are so frequently observed. Nietzsche remarks that with him ideas of a cruel kind are accompanied by feelings of pleasure—that they are, as mental therapeutics expresses it, ‘voluptuously accentuated.’ In consequence of this accompaniment of pleasure he has the inclination to conjure up sensually sensuous representations of that kind, and to dwell on them with enjoyment.[411]Consciousness then seeks to give some sort of rational explanation of these experiences by assuming cruelty to be a powerful primordial instinct of man, that, since he may not actually commit cruel deeds, he may, at least, take pleasure in the representation of them, and that the rapturous lingering over representations of this kind, man calls his conscience. As I have shown above, it is Nietzsche’s opinion that stings of conscience are not the consequence of evil deeds, but appear in men who have never committed any evil. Hence he obviously makes use of the word in a sense quite different from that of current usage, a sense peculiar to himself; he designates by it, simply his revelling in voluptuously accentuated representations of cruelty.The alienist, however, is familiar with the perversion in which the invalid experiences voluptuous stimulation from acts or representations of a cruel nature. Science has a name for it. It is called Sadism. Sadism is the opposite form of sexual perversion to masochism.[412]Nietzsche is a sufferer from Sadism in its most pronounced form, only with him it isconfined to the intellectual sphere alone, and is satisfied by ideal debauchery. I do not wish to dwell too long on this repulsive subject, and will, therefore, quote only a few passages, showing that, in Nietzsche’s thought, images of cruelty are without exception accompanied by ideas of a sensual character, and are italicized by him: ‘The splendid beast rangingin its lustafter prey and victory’ (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 21). ‘Thefeeling of contentat being able, without scruple, to wreak his power on a powerless being, thevoluptuousness de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire, theenjoymentof vanquishing’ (Ibid., p. 51). ‘Do your pleasure, ye wantons; roar for verylustand wickedness’ (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 226). ‘The path to one’s own heaven ever leads through thevoluptuousnessof one’s own hell’ (Ibid., p. 249). ‘How comes it that I have yet met no one ... who knew morality as a problem, and this problem as his personal distress, torment,voluptuousness, passion?’ (Ibid., p. 264). ‘Hitherto he has felt most at ease on earth at the sight of tragedies, bull-fights, and crucifixions; and when he invented hell, behold, that was his heaven on earth. When the great man cries aloud, the little man runs swiftly thither, and his tongue hangs out from his throat for verylusting’ (Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. iii., p. 96), etc. I beg the unprofessional reader particularly to observe the association of the words italicized with those expressing something evil. This association is neither accidental nor arbitrary. It is a psychical necessity, for in Nietzsche’s consciousness no image of wickedness and crime can arise without exciting him sexually, and he is unable to experience any sexual stimulation without the immediate appearance in his consciousness of an image of some deed of violence and blood.Hence the real source of Nietzsche’s doctrine is his Sadism. And I will here make a general remark on which I do not desire to linger, but which I should like to recommend to the particular attention of the reader. In the success of unhealthy tendencies in art and literature, no quality of their authors has so large and determining a share as their sexual psychopathy. All persons of unbalanced minds—the neurasthenic, the hysteric, the degenerate, the insane—have the keenest scent for perversions of a sexual kind, and perceive them under all disguises. As a rule, indeed, they are ignorant of what it is in certain works and artists which pleases them, but investigation always reveals in the object of their predilection a veiled manifestation of somePsychopathia sexualis. The masochism of Wagner and Ibsen, the Skoptzism of Tolstoi, the erotomania (folie amoureuse chaste) of the Diabolists, the Decadents, and of Nietzsche, unquestionably obtain forthese authors and tendencies a large, and, at all events, the most sincere and fanatical fraction of their partisans. Works of a sexually psychopathic nature excite in abnormal subjects the corresponding perversion (till then slumbering and unconscious, perhaps also undeveloped, although present in the germ), and give them lively feelings of pleasure, which they, usually in good faith, regard as purely æsthetic or intellectual, whereas they are actually sexual. Only in the light of this explanation do the characteristic artistic tendencies of the abnormals, of which we have proof,[413]become wholly intelligible. This confounding of æsthetic with sexual feelings is not surprising, for the spheres of these two feelings are not only contiguous, but, as has been proved elsewhere, are for the most part even coincident.[414]At the base of all oddities of costume, especially that of women, there is hidden an unconscious speculation in something of a sexual-psychopathy, which finds incitation and attraction in the temporary fashion in dress. No professional person has yet viewed fashions from this standpoint. I may not here allow myself so broad a departure from my principal theme. The subject may, however, be most emphatically recommended to the consideration of experts. In the domain of fashions they will make the most remarkable psychiatrical discoveries.I have devoted very much more space to the demonstration of the senselessness of Nietzsche’s so-called philosophical system than the man and his system deserve. It would have been enough simply to refer to the all-sufficient and expressive fact that, after having been repeatedly confined in lunatic asylums, he has for some years past been living as incurably mad in the establishment of Professor Binswanger at Jena—‘the right man in the right place.’ It is true that a critic is of the opinion that ‘it is possible for mental darkness to extinguish the clearest mental light; for this reason its appearance cannot with certitude be urged against the value and accuracy of what anyone has taught before the appearance of his affliction.’ The answer to this is that Nietzsche wrote his most importantworks between two detentions in a lunatic asylum, and hence not ‘before,’ but ‘after, the appearance of his affliction,’ and that the whole question hinges on the kind of mental disease appealed to as proof of the senselessness of any doctrine. It is clear that insanity caused by an accidental lesion of the brain, by a fall, blow, etc., can prove nothing against the accuracy of that which the patient may have taught previous to his accident. But the case is different when the malady is one which has undoubtedly existed in a latent condition from birth, and can with certainty be proved from the works themselves. Then it amply suffices to establish the fact that the author is a Bedlamite, and his work the daubing of a lunatic, and all further criticism, all efforts at rational refutation of individual inanities, become superfluous, and even—at least, in the eyes of those who are competent—a little ridiculous. And this is the case with Nietzsche. He is obviously insane from birth, and his books bear on every page the imprint of insanity. It may be cruel to insist on this fact.[415]It is, however, a painful, yet unavoidable, duty to refer to it anew, because Nietzsche has become the means of raising a mental pestilence, and the only hope of checking its propagation lies in placing Nietzsche’s insanity in the clearest light, and in branding his disciples also with the marks most suited to them, viz., as hysterical and imbecile.Kaatz[416]affirms that Nietzsche’s ‘intellectual seed’ is everywhere ‘beginning to germinate. Now it is one of Nietzsche’s most incisive points which is chosen as the epigraph of a modern tragedy, now one of his pregnant turns of expression incorporated in the established usage of language.... At the present time one can ... read hardly any essay touching even lightly on the province of philosophy, without meeting with the name of Nietzsche.’ Now, that is certainly a calumniousexaggeration. Things are not quite so bad as that. The only ‘philosophers’ who have hitherto taken Nietzsche’s insane drivel seriously are those whom I have above named the ‘fops’ of philosophy. But the number of these ‘fops’ is, as a matter of fact, increasing in a disquieting way, and their effrontery surpasses anything ever witnessed.It is, of course, unnecessary to say that Georges Brandès has numbered himself among Nietzsche’s apostles. We know, indeed, that this ingenious person winds himself around every human phenomenon in whom he scents a possible primadonna, in order to draw from her profit for himself as the impresario of her fame. He gave lectures in Copenhagen on Nietzsche, ‘and declaimed in words of enthusiasm about this German prophet, for whom Mill’s morality is nothing but a diseased symptom of a degenerate age; this radical “aristocrat,” who degrades to the rank of slave-revolts all the great popular movements in history for freedom—the Reformation, the French Revolution, modern socialism—and dares to assert that the millions on millions of individuals composing the nations exist only for the purpose of producing, a few times in each century, a great personality.’[417]A series of imitators are eagerly busying themselves to make Nietzsche their model, whether in clearing the throat or in expectorating. His treatiseSchopenhauer als Erzieher(Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, 3 Stück) has found a monstrous travesty inRembrandt als Erzieher. True, the imbecile author of the latter parody could not imitate Nietzsche’s gushing redundancy of verbiage and the mad leaps of the maniac’s thought. This symptom of disease it were indeed hardly possible to simulate; but he has appropriated as his own the word-quibbling, the senseless echolalia of his model, and endeavours also stammeringly to imitate, as well as his small means allow, Nietzsche’s megalomaniacal and criminal individualism. Albert Kniepf,[418]another imbecile, has been smitten chiefly by Nietzsche’s affected superiority, and with princely mien and gestures struts about in the most diverting manner. He calls himself ‘a man of superior taste and more refined feeling’; he speaks contemptuously of the ‘profane daily bustle of the masses’; sees ‘the world beneath him’ and himself ‘exalted above the world of the multitude’; he does not wish to ‘go into the streets, and squander his wisdom on everyone,’ etc., quite in the style of Zarathustra, the dwelleron the highest peaks. The already mentioned Dr. Max Zerbst affects, like Nietzsche, to regard himself as terrible, and to believe that his opponents tremble before him. When he makes them speak he puts whimpering tones into their mouths,[419]and he enjoys with cruelly superior scorn the mortal fear with which he inspires them. In a maniac this attitude is natural and excites pity. But when a fellow like this Dr. Max Zerbst assumes it, it produces an irresistibly comic effect, and calls to remembrance the young man with the weak legs inPickwick, who ‘believes in blood alone,’ ‘will have blood.’ Zerbst dares to utter the words ‘natural science’ and ‘psycho-physiology.’ That is an agreement among Nietzsche’s disciples: they pass off the insane word-spouter whom they worship for a psycho-physiologist and a physicist! Ola Hansson speaks of Nietzsche’s ‘psycho-physiological intuition’! and in another place says: ‘With Nietzsche, that modern subtle psychologist, who possesses in the highest degree psycho-physical intuition [again], that peculiar power of the end of the nineteenth century, of listening to and spying out all the secret processes and hidden corners in itself,’ etc. ‘Psycho-physical intuition!’ ‘Listening to and spying out itself!’ Our very eyes deceive us. These men, therefore, have no suspicion of what constitutes ‘psychophysics,’ they do not suspect that it is the exact contrary of ancient psychology, which dealt with ‘intuition’ and introspection,i.e., ‘listening to one’s self’ and ‘spying out one’s self’; that it patiently counts and mixes with the apparatus in laboratories, and ‘spies and listens to,’ not itself, but its experimentists and instruments! And such babble of brainless parrots, who chatter in repetition the words they accidentally hear, without comprehending them, is able to make its way in Germany, the creator of the new science of psycho-physiology, the fatherland of Fechner, Weber, Wundt! And no professional has rapped with a ruler the knuckles of these youths, whose fabulous ignorance is surpassed only by their impudence!But worse still has befallen—something at which all jesting really ceases. Kurt Eisner, who it is true does not agree with Nietzsche’s ‘philosophy,’ is, nevertheless, of the opinion thathe has ‘bequeathed us some powerful poems,’[420]and goes so far as to make use of this unheard-of expression: ‘Nietzsche’sZarathustrais a work of art likeFaust.’ The question first of all obtruding itself is: Has Kurt Eisner at any time read a line ofFaust? This, I take it, must be answered in the affirmative, for it is hardly conceivable that at this time of day there is in Germany any adult, seemingly able to read and write, into whose handsFausthas not fallen at some time or other. Then there remains only one other question: What may Kurt Eisner have understood ofFaust? To name in the same breath the senseless spirting jet of words of aZarathustrawithFaustis such a defilement of our most precious poetical treasure that verily if a man of any greater importance than Kurt Eisner had perpetrated it there had been need of an expiatory festival to atone for the insult to Goethe, even as the Church newly consecrates a place of worship when it has been profaned by a sacrilegious act.Not only in Germany is the Nietzsche gang working mischief; it is also infesting other lands. Ola Hansson,[421]already mentioned, entertains his Swedish fellow-countrymen most enthusiastically with ‘Nietzsche’s Poetry’ and ‘Nietzsche’s Midnight Hymn’; T. de Wysewa[422]assures the French, who are not in the position to prove the accuracy of his assertions, that ‘Nietzsche is the greatest thinker and most brilliant author produced by Germany in the last generation,’ etc.It has, nevertheless, been reserved to a lady to beat the male disciples of Nietzsche, in the audacious denial of the most openly manifest truth. This feminine partisan of Nietzsche, Lou Salomé, with a cool imperturbability fit to take away the breath of the most callous spectator, turns her back on the fact that Nietzsche has for years been confined in a lunatic asylum, and proclaims with brazen brow that Nietzsche, from the aristocratic contempt of the world belonging to the ‘over-human,’ has voluntarily ceased to write, and withdrawn himself into solitude. Nietzsche is a man of science and a psycho-physiologist, and Nietzsche keeps silence, because he no longer finds it worth the trouble to speak to the men of the herd; these are the catch-words cried aloud throughout the world by the Nietzsche band. In the face of such a conspiracy against truth, honesty, sound reason, it is not enough to have proved the senselessness of Nietzsche’s system, it mustalso be shown that Nietzsche has always been insane, and that his writings are the abortions of frenzy (more exactly, of ‘maniacal exaltation’).A few followers of Nietzsche, undoubtedly not fit to hold a candle to Lou Salomé, do not contest the fact of Nietzsche’s insanity, but say that he became insane because he withdrew himself too much from men, because he lived too long in the deepest solitude, because his speed of thought was so ruinously, unnaturally rapid. This unheard-of idiocy could circulate throughout the entire German press, and yet not a single newspaper had the gumption to remark that insanity can never be the consequence of solitude and too speedy thought, but that, on the contrary, a propensity for solitude and vertiginously rapid thought are the primary and best known signs of existing insanity, and that this prattle of Nietzsche’s partisans is, perhaps, of equal force with the assertion that someone had contracted lung disease through coughing and hæmorrhage!For Nietzsche’s ‘anthropophobia’ we have the evidence of his biographers, who cite curious examples of it.[423]His rapid thought, however, is a phenomenon never absent in frenzied madness. That the unprofessional reader may know what he is to understand by this, we will present him with the clinical picture of this form of insanity traced by the hand of the most authoritative masters.‘The acceleration of the course of thought in mania,’ says Griesinger, ‘is a consequence of the facilitation of the connection between representations, where the patient humbugs, romances, declaims, sings, calls into service all the modes of exteriorizing ideas, rambles incoherently from one topic to another, the ideas hurtling against and overthrowing each other. The same acceleration of ideation is found in certain forms of dementia and in secondary psychical enfeeblement, “with activity produced by hallucinations.” The logical concatenations are not in this case intact, as in argumentation and hypochondriacal dementia; or the precipitate sequence of representations no longer follows any law; or, again, only words and sounds devoid of meaning succeed each other withimpetuous haste.... Thus there arises ... a ceaseless chase of ideas, in the torrent of which all is borne away in pell-mell flight. The latter conditions appear chiefly in raving madness; at its inception especially, a greater mental vivacity often manifests itself, and cases have been observed where the fact that the patient became witty was a sure sign of the imminence of an attack of frenzy.’[424]Still more graphic is the description given by Krafft-Ebing.[425]‘The content of consciousness is here [in ‘maniacal exaltation’] pleasure, psychical well-being. It is just as little induced by events of the external world as the opposite state of psychical pain in melancholia, and is, therefore, referable to an inner organic cause only. The patient literally revels in feelings of pleasure, and declares, after recovery, that never, when in good health, has he felt so contented, so buoyant, so happy, as during his illness. This spontaneous pleasure undergoes powerful increments ... through the perception by the patient of the facilitated processes of ideation ... through the intensive accentuation of ideas by feelings of pleasure and by agreeable cœnæstheses, especially in the domain of muscular sensation.... In this way the cheerful mood temporarily exalts itself to the height of pleasurable emotions (gay extravagance, exuberance), which find their motor exteriorization in songs, dances, leaps.... The patient becomes more plastic in his diction ... his faculties of conception act more rapidly, and, in accelerated association, he is at once more prompt in repartee, witty and humorous to the point of irony. The plethora of his consciousness supplies him with inexhaustible material for talk, and the enormous acceleration of his ideation, in which there spring up complete intermediate forms with the rapidity of thought, without undergoing exteriorization in speech, causes his current of ideas, in so far as they find expression, to seem rambling.... He continually exercises criticism in respect of his own condition, and proves that he is himself aware of his abnormal state by ... claiming, among other things, that he is only a fool, and that to such everything is permissible.... The invalid cannot find words enough to depict his maniacal well-being, his “primordial health.”’And now every individual feature of this picture of disease shall be pointed out in Nietzsche’s writings. (I repeat my previous remark, that I am compelled to limit myself in citing examples, but that literally on every page of Nietzsche’s writing examples of the same kind are to be found.)His cœnæstheses, or systemic sensations, continually inspirehim with presentations of laughter, dancing, flying, buoyancy, generally of movement of the gayest and easiest kind—of rolling, flowing, plunging. ‘Let us guard ourselves from immediately making gloomy faces at the word “torture” ... even there something remains for laughter.’ ‘We are prepared for a carnival in the grand style, for the most spiritual carnival-laughter and exuberance, for the transcendental height of the most exalted idiocy and Aristophanic derision of the universe.... Perhaps if nothing else of to-day has a future, our very laughter still has a future.’ ‘I would even permit myself to classify philosophers according to the quality of their laughter—up to those capable of golden laughter[!] ... The gods are jocular. It seems as if, even in sacred deeds, they could not forbear laughing.’ ‘Ah! what are ye then, ye written and painted thoughts of mine? It is not long since ye were so fantastic, so young and naughty ... that ye made me sneeze and laugh.’ ‘Now the world laughs, the dismal veil is rent.’ ‘It is laughter that kills, not wrath. Come, let us kill the spirit of heaviness!’ ‘Truly there are beings chaste by nature; they are milder in heart; they laugh more agreeably and copiously than ye. They laugh as well over chastity, and ask, What is chastity?’ ‘Had He [Jesus Christ] remained in the desert, perhaps He would have learned to live and to love the earth—and to laugh besides.’ ‘The tension of my cloud was too great; between the laughters of the lightnings I will cast hail-showers into the deep.’ ‘To-day my shield quivered gently and laughed at me; that is the holy laughter and tremor of beauty.’It will be seen that in all these cases the idea of laughter has no logical connection with the real thought; it is far rather an accompaniment of his intellection as a basic state, as a chronic obsession, having its explanation in the maniacal excitation of the centres of ideation. It is the same with the presentations of dancing, flying, etc. ‘I should only believe in a god who knew how to dance.’ ‘Truly, Zarathustra is no hurricane and whirlwind; and if he is a dancer, yet is he by no means a dancer of the tarantella.’ ‘And once upon a time I wished to dance, as I never yet have danced; away over the whole heaven did I wish to dance.... Only in the dance do I know of parables for the highest things.’ ‘I found this blessed security in all things also: that on the feet of chance they preferred—to dance. O thou heaven above me, O pure! O sublime! thy purity is now for me ... that thou art a dancing-floor for divine chances.’ ‘Ask of my foot ... truly after such a rhythm, such a tick-tack, it likes neither to dance nor rest.’ ‘And, above all, I learned to stand and walk and run and leap and climb and dance.’ ‘It is a fine fool’s jestthis, of speech; thanks to it, man dances over all things.’ ‘O my soul, I taught thee to say “to-day,” as well as “once” and “formerly,” and to dance thy measure over all the “here” and “there” and “yonder.” Thou castest thy glance at my foot crazy for the dance.’ ‘If my virtue is a dancer’s virtue, and I often bounded with both feet into a rapture of golden emerald,’ etc.(‘A state of mind he experienced with horror:’) ‘A perpetual movement between high and deep, and the feeling of high and deep, a constant feeling as if mounting steps, and at the same moment as if reposing on clouds.’ ‘Is there, indeed, one thing alone that remains uncomprehended by it ... that only in flight is it touched, beheld, lightened upon?’ ‘All my will would fly alone, would fly into thee.’ ‘Ready and impatient to fly, to fly away; that is now my nature.’ ‘My wise longing cried out from me, and laughed also ... my great longing, with rushing wings. And often it dragged me forth, and away in the midst of my laughter; then, indeed, I flew shuddering ... thither, where gods dance, ashamed of all clothes.’ ‘If I ever spread still heavens above me, and with my own wings flew in my own heavens.... If my malice is a laughing malice ... and if my Alpha and Omega is that all heaviness may become light, all body a dancer, all spirit a bird; and verily that is my Alpha and Omega,’ etc.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 nosort of fellowship in meaning with these. He speaks, for example, ofHinterweltlern(inhabitants of remote worlds) fromHinterwäldlern(backwoodsmen), of aKesselbauche(kettle’s belly) when he is thinking ofKesselpauche(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,gemässigtandmittelmässig).‘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 whodespaired 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 thesubject 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 inla 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 thencan 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 Zarathustrais 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 pointverbatimto 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 ofhis 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, runningpresto.... 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 atempo.’ ‘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 wordsZierrath,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 onesingle 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 offustian, 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 toocheaply 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.

In other places, again, we find the current of thought and almost the very words of Oscar Wilde, Huysmans, and other Diabolists and Decadents. The passage inZur Genealogie der Moral(p. 171) in which he glorifies art, because ‘in it the lie sanctifies itself, and the will to deceive has a quiet conscience on its side,’ might be in the chapter in Wilde’sIntentionson ‘The Decay of Lying,’ as, conversely, Wilde’s aphorisms:‘There is no sin except stupidity.’ ‘An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.’ And his praises of Wainwright, the poisoner, are in exact agreement with Nietzsche’s ‘morality of assassins,’ and the latter’s remarks that crime is calumniated, and that the defender of the criminal is ‘oftenest not artist enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the crime to the advantage of the doer.’ Again, by way of joke, compare these passages: ‘It is necessary to get rid of the bad taste of wishing to agree with many. Good is no longer good when a neighbour says it’s good’ (Nietzsche,Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 54), and ‘Ah! don’t say that you agree with me. When people agree with me, I always feel that I must be wrong’ (Oscar Wilde,Intentions, p. 202). This is more than a resemblance, is it not? To avoid being too diffuse, I abstain from citing passages exactly resembling these from Huysmans’A Rebours, and from Ibsen. At the same time it is unquestionable that Nietzsche could not have known the French Decadents and English Æsthetes whom he so frequently approaches, because his books are in part antecedent to those of the latter; and neither could they have drawn from him, because, perhaps with the exception of Ibsen, it is only about two years since they could have heard as much as Nietzsche’s name. The similarity, or rather identity, is not explained by plagiarism; it is explained by the identity of mental qualities in Nietzsche and the other ego-maniacal degenerates.Nietzsche presents a specially droll aspect when he confronts truth, in order to declare it unnecessary, or even to deny its existence. ‘Why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Or even ignorance?’ (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 3). ‘What, after all, are the truths of man? They are the irrefutable errors of man’ (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 193). ‘The will for truth—that might be a hidden will for death’ (Ibid., p. 263). The section of this book in which he deals with the question of truth is entitled by him, ‘We the Fearless,’ and he prefixes to it, as a motto, Turenne’s utterance: ‘Thou tremblest, carcass? Thou wouldst tremble much more if thou knewest whither I shall soon lead thee!’ And what is this terrible danger into which the fearless one runs with such heroic mien? The investigation of the essence and value of truth. But this investigation is really the A B C of all serious philosophy! The question as to whether objective truth exists at all has been also drawn up by him,[406]it is true with less blowing of trumpets, beating of drums, and shaking of locks, as its prologue, accompaniment, and conclusion. It is, moreover, highly characteristic that the same dragon-slayer who, withsuch swaggering and snorting takes up the challenge against ‘truth,’ finds submissive words of most humble apology when he ventures very gently to doubt the perfection of Goethe in all his pieces. Speaking of the ‘viscosity’ and ‘tediousness’ of the German style, he says (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 39): ‘I may be pardoned for affirming that even Goethe’s prose, with its mixture of stiffness and grace, is no exception.’ When he timidly criticises Goethe, he begs pardon; his heroic attitude of contempt for death is assumed only when he challenges morality and truth to combat. That is to say, this ‘fearless one’ possesses the cunning often observed among the insane, and comprehends that there is absolutely no danger in his babbling before the imbeciles composing his congregation, that fabulous philosophical nonsense, at which, on the contrary, they would be much enraged the instant it shocked their æsthetic convictions or prejudices.Even in the minutest details it is surprising how Nietzsche agrees, word for word, with the other ego-maniacs with whom we have become acquainted. Compare, for example, the phrase inJenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 168, where he vaunts, ‘What is really noble in works and in men, their moment of smooth sea and halcyon self-sufficiency, thegoldenand thecool,’ with Baudelaire’s praise of immobility and his enraptured description of a metallic landscape; or the remarks of Des Esseintes, and the side-thrusts at the press put by Ibsen into the mouths of his characters, with the insults continually heaped on newspapers by Nietzsche. ‘Great ascetic spirits have an abhorrence of bustle, veneration, newspaper’ (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 113). The cause of ‘the undeniably gradual and already tangible desolation of the German mind’ lies in being ‘all too exclusively nourished on newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagnerian music’ (Ibid., p. 177). ‘Behold these superfluities!... They vomit their bile, and name it a newspaper’ (Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. i., p. 67). ‘Dost thou not see the souls hanging like limp dirty rags? And they make newspapers out of those rags! Hearest thou not how the spirit has here become a play on words? He vomits a loathsome swill of words. And of this swill of words they make newspapers!’ (Ibid., pt. iii., p. 37). It would be possible to multiply these examples tenfold, for Nietzsche harks back to every idea with an obstinacy enough to make the most patient reader of sound taste go wild.Such is the appearance presented by Nietzsche’s originality. This ‘original’ and ‘audacious’ thinker, imitating the familiar practices of tradesmen at ‘sales,’ endeavours to palm off as brand new goods the most shop-worn rubbish of great philosophers. His most powerful assaults are directed againstdoors that stand open. This ‘solitary one,’ this ‘dweller on the highest mountain peaks,’ exhibits by the dozen the physiognomy of all decadents. He who is continually talking with the utmost contempt of the ‘herd’ and the ‘herd-animal’ is himself the most ordinary herd-animal of all. Only the herd to which he belongs, body and soul, is a special one; it is the flock of the mangy sheep.Upon one occasion the habitual cunning of the insane has deserted him, and he has himself revealed to us the source of his ‘original’ philosophy. The passage is so characteristic that I must quote it at length:‘The first impetus, to make known something of my hypotheses concerning the origin of morality, was given me by a clear, tidy, and clever—ay, precocious [!]—little book, in which there was for the first time presented to me an inverted and perverted kind of genealogical hypotheses, the trulyEnglishkind, and which attracted me with that attractive force possessed by everything contrary, everything antipodal. The title of this little book wasDer Ursprung der moralischen Empfindunger[“The Origin of Moral Sensations”]; its author, Dr. Paul Rée; the year of its publication, 1877. I have, perhaps, never read anything to which I have in the same measure mentally said “No” as I did to every proposition and every conclusion in this book, yet without anger or impatience. In the previously-mentioned work on which I was at that time engaged [Menschliches Allzumenschliches—“Things Human, Things all too Human”], I referred, in season and out of season, to the propositions of that book, not refuting them—what have I to do with refutations?—but, as befits a positive spirit, to substitute the more probable for the improbable, and at times one error for another’ (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 7).This gives the reader the key to Nietzsche’s ‘originality.’ It consists in simple infantile inversion of a rational train of thought. If Nietzsche imagines that his insane negations and contradictions grew spontaneously in his head, he is really the victim of a self-delusion. His rant may have existed in his mind before he had read Dr. Rée’s book. But in that case it had sprung up as a contradiction to other books without his having been so clearly conscious of its origin as after the perusal of Dr. Rée’s work. But he pushes the self-delusion to an incredible height, in terming himself a ‘positive spirit,’ after he has just frankly confessed his method of procedure, viz., that he does not ‘refute’—he would not have found that so easy, either—but that ‘to every proposition, and every conclusion he says ‘No!’This explanation of the source of his ‘original’ moralphilosophy comprehends in itself a diagnosis, which at once obtrudes on the most short-sighted eye. Nietzsche’s system is the product of the mania of contradiction, the delirious form of that mental derangement, of which the melancholic form is the mania of doubt and negation, treated of in the earlier chapters of this work. Hisfolie des négationsbetrays itself also in his peculiarities of language. There is ever in his consciousness a questioning impulse like a mark of interrogation. Of no word is he so fond as of the interrogative ‘What?’ constantly used by him in the most marvellous connection,[407]and he makes usead nauseamof the turn of expression, that one should ‘say No’ to this and that, that this one and that one is a ‘No-sayer’—an expression which suggests to him by association the same immeasurably frequent use of the contrary expression, ‘say Yes’ and ‘Yes-sayer.’ This ‘saying-No’ and ‘saying-Yes’ is in his case a veritableParaphasia vesana, or insane language opposed to usage, as the reader is shown by the examples cited in foot-note.[408]Nietzsche’s assurance that ‘without anger or impatience’ he ‘said No’ to all Rée’s assertions may be believed. Persons afflicted with the mania of doubt and of denial do not get angry when they question or contradict; they do this under the coercion of their mental derangement. But those among them who are delirious have the conscious intention of making others angry, even if they themselves are not so. On this point Nietzsche allows an avowal to escape him: ‘My mode of thought demands a warlike soul, a wish to give pain, a pleasure in saying, No’ (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 63). This confession may be compared with the passages from Ibsen: ‘You were becoming reckless! In reality that you might anger these affected beings of both sexes here in the town’; and, ‘Something shall happen which will be a slap in the face to all this decorum’ (The Pillars of Society).The origin of one of the most ‘original’ of Nietzsche’s doctrines, viz., the explanation of conscience as a satisfaction of the instinct of cruelty through inner self-rending, has already been gone into by Dr. Türck, in an excellent little work. He very justly recognises the diseased state of moral aberration at the base of this insane idea,[409]and continues thus:‘Let us now picture to ourselves a man of this kind, with innate instincts of murder, or in general with ‘Anomalies or perversion of the moral feelings’ (Mendel); at the same time highly gifted, with the best instruction and an excellent education, reared in the midst of agreeable circumstances, and under the careful ... nurture of women ... and occupying at an early age a prominent position in society. It is clear that the better moral instincts must gain such strength as to be able to drive back to the deepest inner depths the bestial instinct of destruction and completely to curb it, yet without wholly annihilating it. It may not, indeed, be able to manifest itself in deeds, but, because it is inborn, the instinct remains in existence as an unfulfilled wish, cherished in the inmost heart ... as an ardent desire ... to yield itself up to its cruel lust. But every non-satisfaction of a ... deeply imprinted instinct has as its consequence pain and inner torment. Now, we men are very much inclined to regard as naturally good and justifiable that which gives us decided pleasure, and conversely to reprobate, as bad and contrary to nature, that which produces pain. Thus, it may happen that an intellectual and highly gifted man, born with perverted instincts, and feeling as torment ... the non-satisfaction of the instinct, will hit upon the idea of justifying the passion for murder, the extremest egoism ... as something good, beautiful, and according to Nature, and to characterizeas morbid aberration the better opposing moral instincts, manifesting themselves in us as that which we call conscience.Dr. Türck is right in admitting Nietzsche’s innate moral aberration and the inversion in him of healthy instincts. Nevertheless, in the interpretation of the particular phenomena in which the aberration manifests itself, he commits an error, which is explained by the fact that Dr. Türck is seemingly not deeply conversant with mental therapeutics. He assumes that in Nietzsche’s mind the evil instincts are in severe conflict with those better notions instilled in him by education, and that he experiences as pain the suppression of his instincts by judgment. That is hardly the true state of the case. It is not necessary that Nietzsche should have the wish to commit murder and other crimes. Not every aberrant person (pervers) is subject to impulsions. The perversion may be limited exclusively to the sphere of ideation, and get its satisfaction wholly in ideas. A subject thus affected never gets the notion of transforming his ideas into deeds. His derangement does not encroach upon the centres of will and movement, but carries on its fell work within the centres of ideation. We know forms of sexual perversion in which the sufferers never experience the impulse to seek satisfaction in acts, and who revel only in thought.[410]This astonishing rupture of the natural connection between idea and movement, between thought and act, this detachment of the organs of will and movement from the organs of conception and judgment which they normally obey, is in itself a proof of deepest disorder throughout the machinery of thought. Incompetent critics eagerly point to the fact that many authors and artists live unexceptionable lives in complete contrast to their works, which may be immoral or contrary to nature, and deduce from this fact that it is unjustifiable to draw from his works conclusions as to the mental and moral Nature of their author. Those who talk in this manner do not even suspect that there are purely mental perversions which are quite as much a mental disease as the impulsions of the ‘impulsivists.’This is obviously the case with Nietzsche. His perversion is of a purely intellectual character, and has hardly ever impelled him to acts. Hence, in his mind there has been no conflict between instincts and the morality acquired byeducation. His explanation of conscience has quite another source than that assumed by Dr. Türck. It is one of those perverted interpretations of a sensation by the consciousness perceiving it which are so frequently observed. Nietzsche remarks that with him ideas of a cruel kind are accompanied by feelings of pleasure—that they are, as mental therapeutics expresses it, ‘voluptuously accentuated.’ In consequence of this accompaniment of pleasure he has the inclination to conjure up sensually sensuous representations of that kind, and to dwell on them with enjoyment.[411]Consciousness then seeks to give some sort of rational explanation of these experiences by assuming cruelty to be a powerful primordial instinct of man, that, since he may not actually commit cruel deeds, he may, at least, take pleasure in the representation of them, and that the rapturous lingering over representations of this kind, man calls his conscience. As I have shown above, it is Nietzsche’s opinion that stings of conscience are not the consequence of evil deeds, but appear in men who have never committed any evil. Hence he obviously makes use of the word in a sense quite different from that of current usage, a sense peculiar to himself; he designates by it, simply his revelling in voluptuously accentuated representations of cruelty.The alienist, however, is familiar with the perversion in which the invalid experiences voluptuous stimulation from acts or representations of a cruel nature. Science has a name for it. It is called Sadism. Sadism is the opposite form of sexual perversion to masochism.[412]Nietzsche is a sufferer from Sadism in its most pronounced form, only with him it isconfined to the intellectual sphere alone, and is satisfied by ideal debauchery. I do not wish to dwell too long on this repulsive subject, and will, therefore, quote only a few passages, showing that, in Nietzsche’s thought, images of cruelty are without exception accompanied by ideas of a sensual character, and are italicized by him: ‘The splendid beast rangingin its lustafter prey and victory’ (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 21). ‘Thefeeling of contentat being able, without scruple, to wreak his power on a powerless being, thevoluptuousness de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire, theenjoymentof vanquishing’ (Ibid., p. 51). ‘Do your pleasure, ye wantons; roar for verylustand wickedness’ (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 226). ‘The path to one’s own heaven ever leads through thevoluptuousnessof one’s own hell’ (Ibid., p. 249). ‘How comes it that I have yet met no one ... who knew morality as a problem, and this problem as his personal distress, torment,voluptuousness, passion?’ (Ibid., p. 264). ‘Hitherto he has felt most at ease on earth at the sight of tragedies, bull-fights, and crucifixions; and when he invented hell, behold, that was his heaven on earth. When the great man cries aloud, the little man runs swiftly thither, and his tongue hangs out from his throat for verylusting’ (Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. iii., p. 96), etc. I beg the unprofessional reader particularly to observe the association of the words italicized with those expressing something evil. This association is neither accidental nor arbitrary. It is a psychical necessity, for in Nietzsche’s consciousness no image of wickedness and crime can arise without exciting him sexually, and he is unable to experience any sexual stimulation without the immediate appearance in his consciousness of an image of some deed of violence and blood.Hence the real source of Nietzsche’s doctrine is his Sadism. And I will here make a general remark on which I do not desire to linger, but which I should like to recommend to the particular attention of the reader. In the success of unhealthy tendencies in art and literature, no quality of their authors has so large and determining a share as their sexual psychopathy. All persons of unbalanced minds—the neurasthenic, the hysteric, the degenerate, the insane—have the keenest scent for perversions of a sexual kind, and perceive them under all disguises. As a rule, indeed, they are ignorant of what it is in certain works and artists which pleases them, but investigation always reveals in the object of their predilection a veiled manifestation of somePsychopathia sexualis. The masochism of Wagner and Ibsen, the Skoptzism of Tolstoi, the erotomania (folie amoureuse chaste) of the Diabolists, the Decadents, and of Nietzsche, unquestionably obtain forthese authors and tendencies a large, and, at all events, the most sincere and fanatical fraction of their partisans. Works of a sexually psychopathic nature excite in abnormal subjects the corresponding perversion (till then slumbering and unconscious, perhaps also undeveloped, although present in the germ), and give them lively feelings of pleasure, which they, usually in good faith, regard as purely æsthetic or intellectual, whereas they are actually sexual. Only in the light of this explanation do the characteristic artistic tendencies of the abnormals, of which we have proof,[413]become wholly intelligible. This confounding of æsthetic with sexual feelings is not surprising, for the spheres of these two feelings are not only contiguous, but, as has been proved elsewhere, are for the most part even coincident.[414]At the base of all oddities of costume, especially that of women, there is hidden an unconscious speculation in something of a sexual-psychopathy, which finds incitation and attraction in the temporary fashion in dress. No professional person has yet viewed fashions from this standpoint. I may not here allow myself so broad a departure from my principal theme. The subject may, however, be most emphatically recommended to the consideration of experts. In the domain of fashions they will make the most remarkable psychiatrical discoveries.I have devoted very much more space to the demonstration of the senselessness of Nietzsche’s so-called philosophical system than the man and his system deserve. It would have been enough simply to refer to the all-sufficient and expressive fact that, after having been repeatedly confined in lunatic asylums, he has for some years past been living as incurably mad in the establishment of Professor Binswanger at Jena—‘the right man in the right place.’ It is true that a critic is of the opinion that ‘it is possible for mental darkness to extinguish the clearest mental light; for this reason its appearance cannot with certitude be urged against the value and accuracy of what anyone has taught before the appearance of his affliction.’ The answer to this is that Nietzsche wrote his most importantworks between two detentions in a lunatic asylum, and hence not ‘before,’ but ‘after, the appearance of his affliction,’ and that the whole question hinges on the kind of mental disease appealed to as proof of the senselessness of any doctrine. It is clear that insanity caused by an accidental lesion of the brain, by a fall, blow, etc., can prove nothing against the accuracy of that which the patient may have taught previous to his accident. But the case is different when the malady is one which has undoubtedly existed in a latent condition from birth, and can with certainty be proved from the works themselves. Then it amply suffices to establish the fact that the author is a Bedlamite, and his work the daubing of a lunatic, and all further criticism, all efforts at rational refutation of individual inanities, become superfluous, and even—at least, in the eyes of those who are competent—a little ridiculous. And this is the case with Nietzsche. He is obviously insane from birth, and his books bear on every page the imprint of insanity. It may be cruel to insist on this fact.[415]It is, however, a painful, yet unavoidable, duty to refer to it anew, because Nietzsche has become the means of raising a mental pestilence, and the only hope of checking its propagation lies in placing Nietzsche’s insanity in the clearest light, and in branding his disciples also with the marks most suited to them, viz., as hysterical and imbecile.Kaatz[416]affirms that Nietzsche’s ‘intellectual seed’ is everywhere ‘beginning to germinate. Now it is one of Nietzsche’s most incisive points which is chosen as the epigraph of a modern tragedy, now one of his pregnant turns of expression incorporated in the established usage of language.... At the present time one can ... read hardly any essay touching even lightly on the province of philosophy, without meeting with the name of Nietzsche.’ Now, that is certainly a calumniousexaggeration. Things are not quite so bad as that. The only ‘philosophers’ who have hitherto taken Nietzsche’s insane drivel seriously are those whom I have above named the ‘fops’ of philosophy. But the number of these ‘fops’ is, as a matter of fact, increasing in a disquieting way, and their effrontery surpasses anything ever witnessed.It is, of course, unnecessary to say that Georges Brandès has numbered himself among Nietzsche’s apostles. We know, indeed, that this ingenious person winds himself around every human phenomenon in whom he scents a possible primadonna, in order to draw from her profit for himself as the impresario of her fame. He gave lectures in Copenhagen on Nietzsche, ‘and declaimed in words of enthusiasm about this German prophet, for whom Mill’s morality is nothing but a diseased symptom of a degenerate age; this radical “aristocrat,” who degrades to the rank of slave-revolts all the great popular movements in history for freedom—the Reformation, the French Revolution, modern socialism—and dares to assert that the millions on millions of individuals composing the nations exist only for the purpose of producing, a few times in each century, a great personality.’[417]A series of imitators are eagerly busying themselves to make Nietzsche their model, whether in clearing the throat or in expectorating. His treatiseSchopenhauer als Erzieher(Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, 3 Stück) has found a monstrous travesty inRembrandt als Erzieher. True, the imbecile author of the latter parody could not imitate Nietzsche’s gushing redundancy of verbiage and the mad leaps of the maniac’s thought. This symptom of disease it were indeed hardly possible to simulate; but he has appropriated as his own the word-quibbling, the senseless echolalia of his model, and endeavours also stammeringly to imitate, as well as his small means allow, Nietzsche’s megalomaniacal and criminal individualism. Albert Kniepf,[418]another imbecile, has been smitten chiefly by Nietzsche’s affected superiority, and with princely mien and gestures struts about in the most diverting manner. He calls himself ‘a man of superior taste and more refined feeling’; he speaks contemptuously of the ‘profane daily bustle of the masses’; sees ‘the world beneath him’ and himself ‘exalted above the world of the multitude’; he does not wish to ‘go into the streets, and squander his wisdom on everyone,’ etc., quite in the style of Zarathustra, the dwelleron the highest peaks. The already mentioned Dr. Max Zerbst affects, like Nietzsche, to regard himself as terrible, and to believe that his opponents tremble before him. When he makes them speak he puts whimpering tones into their mouths,[419]and he enjoys with cruelly superior scorn the mortal fear with which he inspires them. In a maniac this attitude is natural and excites pity. But when a fellow like this Dr. Max Zerbst assumes it, it produces an irresistibly comic effect, and calls to remembrance the young man with the weak legs inPickwick, who ‘believes in blood alone,’ ‘will have blood.’ Zerbst dares to utter the words ‘natural science’ and ‘psycho-physiology.’ That is an agreement among Nietzsche’s disciples: they pass off the insane word-spouter whom they worship for a psycho-physiologist and a physicist! Ola Hansson speaks of Nietzsche’s ‘psycho-physiological intuition’! and in another place says: ‘With Nietzsche, that modern subtle psychologist, who possesses in the highest degree psycho-physical intuition [again], that peculiar power of the end of the nineteenth century, of listening to and spying out all the secret processes and hidden corners in itself,’ etc. ‘Psycho-physical intuition!’ ‘Listening to and spying out itself!’ Our very eyes deceive us. These men, therefore, have no suspicion of what constitutes ‘psychophysics,’ they do not suspect that it is the exact contrary of ancient psychology, which dealt with ‘intuition’ and introspection,i.e., ‘listening to one’s self’ and ‘spying out one’s self’; that it patiently counts and mixes with the apparatus in laboratories, and ‘spies and listens to,’ not itself, but its experimentists and instruments! And such babble of brainless parrots, who chatter in repetition the words they accidentally hear, without comprehending them, is able to make its way in Germany, the creator of the new science of psycho-physiology, the fatherland of Fechner, Weber, Wundt! And no professional has rapped with a ruler the knuckles of these youths, whose fabulous ignorance is surpassed only by their impudence!But worse still has befallen—something at which all jesting really ceases. Kurt Eisner, who it is true does not agree with Nietzsche’s ‘philosophy,’ is, nevertheless, of the opinion thathe has ‘bequeathed us some powerful poems,’[420]and goes so far as to make use of this unheard-of expression: ‘Nietzsche’sZarathustrais a work of art likeFaust.’ The question first of all obtruding itself is: Has Kurt Eisner at any time read a line ofFaust? This, I take it, must be answered in the affirmative, for it is hardly conceivable that at this time of day there is in Germany any adult, seemingly able to read and write, into whose handsFausthas not fallen at some time or other. Then there remains only one other question: What may Kurt Eisner have understood ofFaust? To name in the same breath the senseless spirting jet of words of aZarathustrawithFaustis such a defilement of our most precious poetical treasure that verily if a man of any greater importance than Kurt Eisner had perpetrated it there had been need of an expiatory festival to atone for the insult to Goethe, even as the Church newly consecrates a place of worship when it has been profaned by a sacrilegious act.Not only in Germany is the Nietzsche gang working mischief; it is also infesting other lands. Ola Hansson,[421]already mentioned, entertains his Swedish fellow-countrymen most enthusiastically with ‘Nietzsche’s Poetry’ and ‘Nietzsche’s Midnight Hymn’; T. de Wysewa[422]assures the French, who are not in the position to prove the accuracy of his assertions, that ‘Nietzsche is the greatest thinker and most brilliant author produced by Germany in the last generation,’ etc.It has, nevertheless, been reserved to a lady to beat the male disciples of Nietzsche, in the audacious denial of the most openly manifest truth. This feminine partisan of Nietzsche, Lou Salomé, with a cool imperturbability fit to take away the breath of the most callous spectator, turns her back on the fact that Nietzsche has for years been confined in a lunatic asylum, and proclaims with brazen brow that Nietzsche, from the aristocratic contempt of the world belonging to the ‘over-human,’ has voluntarily ceased to write, and withdrawn himself into solitude. Nietzsche is a man of science and a psycho-physiologist, and Nietzsche keeps silence, because he no longer finds it worth the trouble to speak to the men of the herd; these are the catch-words cried aloud throughout the world by the Nietzsche band. In the face of such a conspiracy against truth, honesty, sound reason, it is not enough to have proved the senselessness of Nietzsche’s system, it mustalso be shown that Nietzsche has always been insane, and that his writings are the abortions of frenzy (more exactly, of ‘maniacal exaltation’).A few followers of Nietzsche, undoubtedly not fit to hold a candle to Lou Salomé, do not contest the fact of Nietzsche’s insanity, but say that he became insane because he withdrew himself too much from men, because he lived too long in the deepest solitude, because his speed of thought was so ruinously, unnaturally rapid. This unheard-of idiocy could circulate throughout the entire German press, and yet not a single newspaper had the gumption to remark that insanity can never be the consequence of solitude and too speedy thought, but that, on the contrary, a propensity for solitude and vertiginously rapid thought are the primary and best known signs of existing insanity, and that this prattle of Nietzsche’s partisans is, perhaps, of equal force with the assertion that someone had contracted lung disease through coughing and hæmorrhage!For Nietzsche’s ‘anthropophobia’ we have the evidence of his biographers, who cite curious examples of it.[423]His rapid thought, however, is a phenomenon never absent in frenzied madness. That the unprofessional reader may know what he is to understand by this, we will present him with the clinical picture of this form of insanity traced by the hand of the most authoritative masters.‘The acceleration of the course of thought in mania,’ says Griesinger, ‘is a consequence of the facilitation of the connection between representations, where the patient humbugs, romances, declaims, sings, calls into service all the modes of exteriorizing ideas, rambles incoherently from one topic to another, the ideas hurtling against and overthrowing each other. The same acceleration of ideation is found in certain forms of dementia and in secondary psychical enfeeblement, “with activity produced by hallucinations.” The logical concatenations are not in this case intact, as in argumentation and hypochondriacal dementia; or the precipitate sequence of representations no longer follows any law; or, again, only words and sounds devoid of meaning succeed each other withimpetuous haste.... Thus there arises ... a ceaseless chase of ideas, in the torrent of which all is borne away in pell-mell flight. The latter conditions appear chiefly in raving madness; at its inception especially, a greater mental vivacity often manifests itself, and cases have been observed where the fact that the patient became witty was a sure sign of the imminence of an attack of frenzy.’[424]Still more graphic is the description given by Krafft-Ebing.[425]‘The content of consciousness is here [in ‘maniacal exaltation’] pleasure, psychical well-being. It is just as little induced by events of the external world as the opposite state of psychical pain in melancholia, and is, therefore, referable to an inner organic cause only. The patient literally revels in feelings of pleasure, and declares, after recovery, that never, when in good health, has he felt so contented, so buoyant, so happy, as during his illness. This spontaneous pleasure undergoes powerful increments ... through the perception by the patient of the facilitated processes of ideation ... through the intensive accentuation of ideas by feelings of pleasure and by agreeable cœnæstheses, especially in the domain of muscular sensation.... In this way the cheerful mood temporarily exalts itself to the height of pleasurable emotions (gay extravagance, exuberance), which find their motor exteriorization in songs, dances, leaps.... The patient becomes more plastic in his diction ... his faculties of conception act more rapidly, and, in accelerated association, he is at once more prompt in repartee, witty and humorous to the point of irony. The plethora of his consciousness supplies him with inexhaustible material for talk, and the enormous acceleration of his ideation, in which there spring up complete intermediate forms with the rapidity of thought, without undergoing exteriorization in speech, causes his current of ideas, in so far as they find expression, to seem rambling.... He continually exercises criticism in respect of his own condition, and proves that he is himself aware of his abnormal state by ... claiming, among other things, that he is only a fool, and that to such everything is permissible.... The invalid cannot find words enough to depict his maniacal well-being, his “primordial health.”’And now every individual feature of this picture of disease shall be pointed out in Nietzsche’s writings. (I repeat my previous remark, that I am compelled to limit myself in citing examples, but that literally on every page of Nietzsche’s writing examples of the same kind are to be found.)His cœnæstheses, or systemic sensations, continually inspirehim with presentations of laughter, dancing, flying, buoyancy, generally of movement of the gayest and easiest kind—of rolling, flowing, plunging. ‘Let us guard ourselves from immediately making gloomy faces at the word “torture” ... even there something remains for laughter.’ ‘We are prepared for a carnival in the grand style, for the most spiritual carnival-laughter and exuberance, for the transcendental height of the most exalted idiocy and Aristophanic derision of the universe.... Perhaps if nothing else of to-day has a future, our very laughter still has a future.’ ‘I would even permit myself to classify philosophers according to the quality of their laughter—up to those capable of golden laughter[!] ... The gods are jocular. It seems as if, even in sacred deeds, they could not forbear laughing.’ ‘Ah! what are ye then, ye written and painted thoughts of mine? It is not long since ye were so fantastic, so young and naughty ... that ye made me sneeze and laugh.’ ‘Now the world laughs, the dismal veil is rent.’ ‘It is laughter that kills, not wrath. Come, let us kill the spirit of heaviness!’ ‘Truly there are beings chaste by nature; they are milder in heart; they laugh more agreeably and copiously than ye. They laugh as well over chastity, and ask, What is chastity?’ ‘Had He [Jesus Christ] remained in the desert, perhaps He would have learned to live and to love the earth—and to laugh besides.’ ‘The tension of my cloud was too great; between the laughters of the lightnings I will cast hail-showers into the deep.’ ‘To-day my shield quivered gently and laughed at me; that is the holy laughter and tremor of beauty.’It will be seen that in all these cases the idea of laughter has no logical connection with the real thought; it is far rather an accompaniment of his intellection as a basic state, as a chronic obsession, having its explanation in the maniacal excitation of the centres of ideation. It is the same with the presentations of dancing, flying, etc. ‘I should only believe in a god who knew how to dance.’ ‘Truly, Zarathustra is no hurricane and whirlwind; and if he is a dancer, yet is he by no means a dancer of the tarantella.’ ‘And once upon a time I wished to dance, as I never yet have danced; away over the whole heaven did I wish to dance.... Only in the dance do I know of parables for the highest things.’ ‘I found this blessed security in all things also: that on the feet of chance they preferred—to dance. O thou heaven above me, O pure! O sublime! thy purity is now for me ... that thou art a dancing-floor for divine chances.’ ‘Ask of my foot ... truly after such a rhythm, such a tick-tack, it likes neither to dance nor rest.’ ‘And, above all, I learned to stand and walk and run and leap and climb and dance.’ ‘It is a fine fool’s jestthis, of speech; thanks to it, man dances over all things.’ ‘O my soul, I taught thee to say “to-day,” as well as “once” and “formerly,” and to dance thy measure over all the “here” and “there” and “yonder.” Thou castest thy glance at my foot crazy for the dance.’ ‘If my virtue is a dancer’s virtue, and I often bounded with both feet into a rapture of golden emerald,’ etc.(‘A state of mind he experienced with horror:’) ‘A perpetual movement between high and deep, and the feeling of high and deep, a constant feeling as if mounting steps, and at the same moment as if reposing on clouds.’ ‘Is there, indeed, one thing alone that remains uncomprehended by it ... that only in flight is it touched, beheld, lightened upon?’ ‘All my will would fly alone, would fly into thee.’ ‘Ready and impatient to fly, to fly away; that is now my nature.’ ‘My wise longing cried out from me, and laughed also ... my great longing, with rushing wings. And often it dragged me forth, and away in the midst of my laughter; then, indeed, I flew shuddering ... thither, where gods dance, ashamed of all clothes.’ ‘If I ever spread still heavens above me, and with my own wings flew in my own heavens.... If my malice is a laughing malice ... and if my Alpha and Omega is that all heaviness may become light, all body a dancer, all spirit a bird; and verily that is my Alpha and Omega,’ etc.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 nosort of fellowship in meaning with these. He speaks, for example, ofHinterweltlern(inhabitants of remote worlds) fromHinterwäldlern(backwoodsmen), of aKesselbauche(kettle’s belly) when he is thinking ofKesselpauche(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,gemässigtandmittelmässig).‘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 whodespaired 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 thesubject 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 inla 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 thencan 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 Zarathustrais 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 pointverbatimto 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 ofhis 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, runningpresto.... 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 atempo.’ ‘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 wordsZierrath,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 onesingle 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 offustian, 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 toocheaply 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.

In other places, again, we find the current of thought and almost the very words of Oscar Wilde, Huysmans, and other Diabolists and Decadents. The passage inZur Genealogie der Moral(p. 171) in which he glorifies art, because ‘in it the lie sanctifies itself, and the will to deceive has a quiet conscience on its side,’ might be in the chapter in Wilde’sIntentionson ‘The Decay of Lying,’ as, conversely, Wilde’s aphorisms:‘There is no sin except stupidity.’ ‘An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.’ And his praises of Wainwright, the poisoner, are in exact agreement with Nietzsche’s ‘morality of assassins,’ and the latter’s remarks that crime is calumniated, and that the defender of the criminal is ‘oftenest not artist enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the crime to the advantage of the doer.’ Again, by way of joke, compare these passages: ‘It is necessary to get rid of the bad taste of wishing to agree with many. Good is no longer good when a neighbour says it’s good’ (Nietzsche,Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 54), and ‘Ah! don’t say that you agree with me. When people agree with me, I always feel that I must be wrong’ (Oscar Wilde,Intentions, p. 202). This is more than a resemblance, is it not? To avoid being too diffuse, I abstain from citing passages exactly resembling these from Huysmans’A Rebours, and from Ibsen. At the same time it is unquestionable that Nietzsche could not have known the French Decadents and English Æsthetes whom he so frequently approaches, because his books are in part antecedent to those of the latter; and neither could they have drawn from him, because, perhaps with the exception of Ibsen, it is only about two years since they could have heard as much as Nietzsche’s name. The similarity, or rather identity, is not explained by plagiarism; it is explained by the identity of mental qualities in Nietzsche and the other ego-maniacal degenerates.

Nietzsche presents a specially droll aspect when he confronts truth, in order to declare it unnecessary, or even to deny its existence. ‘Why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Or even ignorance?’ (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 3). ‘What, after all, are the truths of man? They are the irrefutable errors of man’ (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 193). ‘The will for truth—that might be a hidden will for death’ (Ibid., p. 263). The section of this book in which he deals with the question of truth is entitled by him, ‘We the Fearless,’ and he prefixes to it, as a motto, Turenne’s utterance: ‘Thou tremblest, carcass? Thou wouldst tremble much more if thou knewest whither I shall soon lead thee!’ And what is this terrible danger into which the fearless one runs with such heroic mien? The investigation of the essence and value of truth. But this investigation is really the A B C of all serious philosophy! The question as to whether objective truth exists at all has been also drawn up by him,[406]it is true with less blowing of trumpets, beating of drums, and shaking of locks, as its prologue, accompaniment, and conclusion. It is, moreover, highly characteristic that the same dragon-slayer who, withsuch swaggering and snorting takes up the challenge against ‘truth,’ finds submissive words of most humble apology when he ventures very gently to doubt the perfection of Goethe in all his pieces. Speaking of the ‘viscosity’ and ‘tediousness’ of the German style, he says (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 39): ‘I may be pardoned for affirming that even Goethe’s prose, with its mixture of stiffness and grace, is no exception.’ When he timidly criticises Goethe, he begs pardon; his heroic attitude of contempt for death is assumed only when he challenges morality and truth to combat. That is to say, this ‘fearless one’ possesses the cunning often observed among the insane, and comprehends that there is absolutely no danger in his babbling before the imbeciles composing his congregation, that fabulous philosophical nonsense, at which, on the contrary, they would be much enraged the instant it shocked their æsthetic convictions or prejudices.

Even in the minutest details it is surprising how Nietzsche agrees, word for word, with the other ego-maniacs with whom we have become acquainted. Compare, for example, the phrase inJenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 168, where he vaunts, ‘What is really noble in works and in men, their moment of smooth sea and halcyon self-sufficiency, thegoldenand thecool,’ with Baudelaire’s praise of immobility and his enraptured description of a metallic landscape; or the remarks of Des Esseintes, and the side-thrusts at the press put by Ibsen into the mouths of his characters, with the insults continually heaped on newspapers by Nietzsche. ‘Great ascetic spirits have an abhorrence of bustle, veneration, newspaper’ (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 113). The cause of ‘the undeniably gradual and already tangible desolation of the German mind’ lies in being ‘all too exclusively nourished on newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagnerian music’ (Ibid., p. 177). ‘Behold these superfluities!... They vomit their bile, and name it a newspaper’ (Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. i., p. 67). ‘Dost thou not see the souls hanging like limp dirty rags? And they make newspapers out of those rags! Hearest thou not how the spirit has here become a play on words? He vomits a loathsome swill of words. And of this swill of words they make newspapers!’ (Ibid., pt. iii., p. 37). It would be possible to multiply these examples tenfold, for Nietzsche harks back to every idea with an obstinacy enough to make the most patient reader of sound taste go wild.

Such is the appearance presented by Nietzsche’s originality. This ‘original’ and ‘audacious’ thinker, imitating the familiar practices of tradesmen at ‘sales,’ endeavours to palm off as brand new goods the most shop-worn rubbish of great philosophers. His most powerful assaults are directed againstdoors that stand open. This ‘solitary one,’ this ‘dweller on the highest mountain peaks,’ exhibits by the dozen the physiognomy of all decadents. He who is continually talking with the utmost contempt of the ‘herd’ and the ‘herd-animal’ is himself the most ordinary herd-animal of all. Only the herd to which he belongs, body and soul, is a special one; it is the flock of the mangy sheep.

Upon one occasion the habitual cunning of the insane has deserted him, and he has himself revealed to us the source of his ‘original’ philosophy. The passage is so characteristic that I must quote it at length:

‘The first impetus, to make known something of my hypotheses concerning the origin of morality, was given me by a clear, tidy, and clever—ay, precocious [!]—little book, in which there was for the first time presented to me an inverted and perverted kind of genealogical hypotheses, the trulyEnglishkind, and which attracted me with that attractive force possessed by everything contrary, everything antipodal. The title of this little book wasDer Ursprung der moralischen Empfindunger[“The Origin of Moral Sensations”]; its author, Dr. Paul Rée; the year of its publication, 1877. I have, perhaps, never read anything to which I have in the same measure mentally said “No” as I did to every proposition and every conclusion in this book, yet without anger or impatience. In the previously-mentioned work on which I was at that time engaged [Menschliches Allzumenschliches—“Things Human, Things all too Human”], I referred, in season and out of season, to the propositions of that book, not refuting them—what have I to do with refutations?—but, as befits a positive spirit, to substitute the more probable for the improbable, and at times one error for another’ (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 7).

This gives the reader the key to Nietzsche’s ‘originality.’ It consists in simple infantile inversion of a rational train of thought. If Nietzsche imagines that his insane negations and contradictions grew spontaneously in his head, he is really the victim of a self-delusion. His rant may have existed in his mind before he had read Dr. Rée’s book. But in that case it had sprung up as a contradiction to other books without his having been so clearly conscious of its origin as after the perusal of Dr. Rée’s work. But he pushes the self-delusion to an incredible height, in terming himself a ‘positive spirit,’ after he has just frankly confessed his method of procedure, viz., that he does not ‘refute’—he would not have found that so easy, either—but that ‘to every proposition, and every conclusion he says ‘No!’

This explanation of the source of his ‘original’ moralphilosophy comprehends in itself a diagnosis, which at once obtrudes on the most short-sighted eye. Nietzsche’s system is the product of the mania of contradiction, the delirious form of that mental derangement, of which the melancholic form is the mania of doubt and negation, treated of in the earlier chapters of this work. Hisfolie des négationsbetrays itself also in his peculiarities of language. There is ever in his consciousness a questioning impulse like a mark of interrogation. Of no word is he so fond as of the interrogative ‘What?’ constantly used by him in the most marvellous connection,[407]and he makes usead nauseamof the turn of expression, that one should ‘say No’ to this and that, that this one and that one is a ‘No-sayer’—an expression which suggests to him by association the same immeasurably frequent use of the contrary expression, ‘say Yes’ and ‘Yes-sayer.’ This ‘saying-No’ and ‘saying-Yes’ is in his case a veritableParaphasia vesana, or insane language opposed to usage, as the reader is shown by the examples cited in foot-note.[408]

Nietzsche’s assurance that ‘without anger or impatience’ he ‘said No’ to all Rée’s assertions may be believed. Persons afflicted with the mania of doubt and of denial do not get angry when they question or contradict; they do this under the coercion of their mental derangement. But those among them who are delirious have the conscious intention of making others angry, even if they themselves are not so. On this point Nietzsche allows an avowal to escape him: ‘My mode of thought demands a warlike soul, a wish to give pain, a pleasure in saying, No’ (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 63). This confession may be compared with the passages from Ibsen: ‘You were becoming reckless! In reality that you might anger these affected beings of both sexes here in the town’; and, ‘Something shall happen which will be a slap in the face to all this decorum’ (The Pillars of Society).

The origin of one of the most ‘original’ of Nietzsche’s doctrines, viz., the explanation of conscience as a satisfaction of the instinct of cruelty through inner self-rending, has already been gone into by Dr. Türck, in an excellent little work. He very justly recognises the diseased state of moral aberration at the base of this insane idea,[409]and continues thus:

‘Let us now picture to ourselves a man of this kind, with innate instincts of murder, or in general with ‘Anomalies or perversion of the moral feelings’ (Mendel); at the same time highly gifted, with the best instruction and an excellent education, reared in the midst of agreeable circumstances, and under the careful ... nurture of women ... and occupying at an early age a prominent position in society. It is clear that the better moral instincts must gain such strength as to be able to drive back to the deepest inner depths the bestial instinct of destruction and completely to curb it, yet without wholly annihilating it. It may not, indeed, be able to manifest itself in deeds, but, because it is inborn, the instinct remains in existence as an unfulfilled wish, cherished in the inmost heart ... as an ardent desire ... to yield itself up to its cruel lust. But every non-satisfaction of a ... deeply imprinted instinct has as its consequence pain and inner torment. Now, we men are very much inclined to regard as naturally good and justifiable that which gives us decided pleasure, and conversely to reprobate, as bad and contrary to nature, that which produces pain. Thus, it may happen that an intellectual and highly gifted man, born with perverted instincts, and feeling as torment ... the non-satisfaction of the instinct, will hit upon the idea of justifying the passion for murder, the extremest egoism ... as something good, beautiful, and according to Nature, and to characterizeas morbid aberration the better opposing moral instincts, manifesting themselves in us as that which we call conscience.

Dr. Türck is right in admitting Nietzsche’s innate moral aberration and the inversion in him of healthy instincts. Nevertheless, in the interpretation of the particular phenomena in which the aberration manifests itself, he commits an error, which is explained by the fact that Dr. Türck is seemingly not deeply conversant with mental therapeutics. He assumes that in Nietzsche’s mind the evil instincts are in severe conflict with those better notions instilled in him by education, and that he experiences as pain the suppression of his instincts by judgment. That is hardly the true state of the case. It is not necessary that Nietzsche should have the wish to commit murder and other crimes. Not every aberrant person (pervers) is subject to impulsions. The perversion may be limited exclusively to the sphere of ideation, and get its satisfaction wholly in ideas. A subject thus affected never gets the notion of transforming his ideas into deeds. His derangement does not encroach upon the centres of will and movement, but carries on its fell work within the centres of ideation. We know forms of sexual perversion in which the sufferers never experience the impulse to seek satisfaction in acts, and who revel only in thought.[410]This astonishing rupture of the natural connection between idea and movement, between thought and act, this detachment of the organs of will and movement from the organs of conception and judgment which they normally obey, is in itself a proof of deepest disorder throughout the machinery of thought. Incompetent critics eagerly point to the fact that many authors and artists live unexceptionable lives in complete contrast to their works, which may be immoral or contrary to nature, and deduce from this fact that it is unjustifiable to draw from his works conclusions as to the mental and moral Nature of their author. Those who talk in this manner do not even suspect that there are purely mental perversions which are quite as much a mental disease as the impulsions of the ‘impulsivists.’

This is obviously the case with Nietzsche. His perversion is of a purely intellectual character, and has hardly ever impelled him to acts. Hence, in his mind there has been no conflict between instincts and the morality acquired byeducation. His explanation of conscience has quite another source than that assumed by Dr. Türck. It is one of those perverted interpretations of a sensation by the consciousness perceiving it which are so frequently observed. Nietzsche remarks that with him ideas of a cruel kind are accompanied by feelings of pleasure—that they are, as mental therapeutics expresses it, ‘voluptuously accentuated.’ In consequence of this accompaniment of pleasure he has the inclination to conjure up sensually sensuous representations of that kind, and to dwell on them with enjoyment.[411]Consciousness then seeks to give some sort of rational explanation of these experiences by assuming cruelty to be a powerful primordial instinct of man, that, since he may not actually commit cruel deeds, he may, at least, take pleasure in the representation of them, and that the rapturous lingering over representations of this kind, man calls his conscience. As I have shown above, it is Nietzsche’s opinion that stings of conscience are not the consequence of evil deeds, but appear in men who have never committed any evil. Hence he obviously makes use of the word in a sense quite different from that of current usage, a sense peculiar to himself; he designates by it, simply his revelling in voluptuously accentuated representations of cruelty.

The alienist, however, is familiar with the perversion in which the invalid experiences voluptuous stimulation from acts or representations of a cruel nature. Science has a name for it. It is called Sadism. Sadism is the opposite form of sexual perversion to masochism.[412]Nietzsche is a sufferer from Sadism in its most pronounced form, only with him it isconfined to the intellectual sphere alone, and is satisfied by ideal debauchery. I do not wish to dwell too long on this repulsive subject, and will, therefore, quote only a few passages, showing that, in Nietzsche’s thought, images of cruelty are without exception accompanied by ideas of a sensual character, and are italicized by him: ‘The splendid beast rangingin its lustafter prey and victory’ (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 21). ‘Thefeeling of contentat being able, without scruple, to wreak his power on a powerless being, thevoluptuousness de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire, theenjoymentof vanquishing’ (Ibid., p. 51). ‘Do your pleasure, ye wantons; roar for verylustand wickedness’ (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 226). ‘The path to one’s own heaven ever leads through thevoluptuousnessof one’s own hell’ (Ibid., p. 249). ‘How comes it that I have yet met no one ... who knew morality as a problem, and this problem as his personal distress, torment,voluptuousness, passion?’ (Ibid., p. 264). ‘Hitherto he has felt most at ease on earth at the sight of tragedies, bull-fights, and crucifixions; and when he invented hell, behold, that was his heaven on earth. When the great man cries aloud, the little man runs swiftly thither, and his tongue hangs out from his throat for verylusting’ (Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. iii., p. 96), etc. I beg the unprofessional reader particularly to observe the association of the words italicized with those expressing something evil. This association is neither accidental nor arbitrary. It is a psychical necessity, for in Nietzsche’s consciousness no image of wickedness and crime can arise without exciting him sexually, and he is unable to experience any sexual stimulation without the immediate appearance in his consciousness of an image of some deed of violence and blood.

Hence the real source of Nietzsche’s doctrine is his Sadism. And I will here make a general remark on which I do not desire to linger, but which I should like to recommend to the particular attention of the reader. In the success of unhealthy tendencies in art and literature, no quality of their authors has so large and determining a share as their sexual psychopathy. All persons of unbalanced minds—the neurasthenic, the hysteric, the degenerate, the insane—have the keenest scent for perversions of a sexual kind, and perceive them under all disguises. As a rule, indeed, they are ignorant of what it is in certain works and artists which pleases them, but investigation always reveals in the object of their predilection a veiled manifestation of somePsychopathia sexualis. The masochism of Wagner and Ibsen, the Skoptzism of Tolstoi, the erotomania (folie amoureuse chaste) of the Diabolists, the Decadents, and of Nietzsche, unquestionably obtain forthese authors and tendencies a large, and, at all events, the most sincere and fanatical fraction of their partisans. Works of a sexually psychopathic nature excite in abnormal subjects the corresponding perversion (till then slumbering and unconscious, perhaps also undeveloped, although present in the germ), and give them lively feelings of pleasure, which they, usually in good faith, regard as purely æsthetic or intellectual, whereas they are actually sexual. Only in the light of this explanation do the characteristic artistic tendencies of the abnormals, of which we have proof,[413]become wholly intelligible. This confounding of æsthetic with sexual feelings is not surprising, for the spheres of these two feelings are not only contiguous, but, as has been proved elsewhere, are for the most part even coincident.[414]At the base of all oddities of costume, especially that of women, there is hidden an unconscious speculation in something of a sexual-psychopathy, which finds incitation and attraction in the temporary fashion in dress. No professional person has yet viewed fashions from this standpoint. I may not here allow myself so broad a departure from my principal theme. The subject may, however, be most emphatically recommended to the consideration of experts. In the domain of fashions they will make the most remarkable psychiatrical discoveries.

I have devoted very much more space to the demonstration of the senselessness of Nietzsche’s so-called philosophical system than the man and his system deserve. It would have been enough simply to refer to the all-sufficient and expressive fact that, after having been repeatedly confined in lunatic asylums, he has for some years past been living as incurably mad in the establishment of Professor Binswanger at Jena—‘the right man in the right place.’ It is true that a critic is of the opinion that ‘it is possible for mental darkness to extinguish the clearest mental light; for this reason its appearance cannot with certitude be urged against the value and accuracy of what anyone has taught before the appearance of his affliction.’ The answer to this is that Nietzsche wrote his most importantworks between two detentions in a lunatic asylum, and hence not ‘before,’ but ‘after, the appearance of his affliction,’ and that the whole question hinges on the kind of mental disease appealed to as proof of the senselessness of any doctrine. It is clear that insanity caused by an accidental lesion of the brain, by a fall, blow, etc., can prove nothing against the accuracy of that which the patient may have taught previous to his accident. But the case is different when the malady is one which has undoubtedly existed in a latent condition from birth, and can with certainty be proved from the works themselves. Then it amply suffices to establish the fact that the author is a Bedlamite, and his work the daubing of a lunatic, and all further criticism, all efforts at rational refutation of individual inanities, become superfluous, and even—at least, in the eyes of those who are competent—a little ridiculous. And this is the case with Nietzsche. He is obviously insane from birth, and his books bear on every page the imprint of insanity. It may be cruel to insist on this fact.[415]It is, however, a painful, yet unavoidable, duty to refer to it anew, because Nietzsche has become the means of raising a mental pestilence, and the only hope of checking its propagation lies in placing Nietzsche’s insanity in the clearest light, and in branding his disciples also with the marks most suited to them, viz., as hysterical and imbecile.

Kaatz[416]affirms that Nietzsche’s ‘intellectual seed’ is everywhere ‘beginning to germinate. Now it is one of Nietzsche’s most incisive points which is chosen as the epigraph of a modern tragedy, now one of his pregnant turns of expression incorporated in the established usage of language.... At the present time one can ... read hardly any essay touching even lightly on the province of philosophy, without meeting with the name of Nietzsche.’ Now, that is certainly a calumniousexaggeration. Things are not quite so bad as that. The only ‘philosophers’ who have hitherto taken Nietzsche’s insane drivel seriously are those whom I have above named the ‘fops’ of philosophy. But the number of these ‘fops’ is, as a matter of fact, increasing in a disquieting way, and their effrontery surpasses anything ever witnessed.

It is, of course, unnecessary to say that Georges Brandès has numbered himself among Nietzsche’s apostles. We know, indeed, that this ingenious person winds himself around every human phenomenon in whom he scents a possible primadonna, in order to draw from her profit for himself as the impresario of her fame. He gave lectures in Copenhagen on Nietzsche, ‘and declaimed in words of enthusiasm about this German prophet, for whom Mill’s morality is nothing but a diseased symptom of a degenerate age; this radical “aristocrat,” who degrades to the rank of slave-revolts all the great popular movements in history for freedom—the Reformation, the French Revolution, modern socialism—and dares to assert that the millions on millions of individuals composing the nations exist only for the purpose of producing, a few times in each century, a great personality.’[417]

A series of imitators are eagerly busying themselves to make Nietzsche their model, whether in clearing the throat or in expectorating. His treatiseSchopenhauer als Erzieher(Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, 3 Stück) has found a monstrous travesty inRembrandt als Erzieher. True, the imbecile author of the latter parody could not imitate Nietzsche’s gushing redundancy of verbiage and the mad leaps of the maniac’s thought. This symptom of disease it were indeed hardly possible to simulate; but he has appropriated as his own the word-quibbling, the senseless echolalia of his model, and endeavours also stammeringly to imitate, as well as his small means allow, Nietzsche’s megalomaniacal and criminal individualism. Albert Kniepf,[418]another imbecile, has been smitten chiefly by Nietzsche’s affected superiority, and with princely mien and gestures struts about in the most diverting manner. He calls himself ‘a man of superior taste and more refined feeling’; he speaks contemptuously of the ‘profane daily bustle of the masses’; sees ‘the world beneath him’ and himself ‘exalted above the world of the multitude’; he does not wish to ‘go into the streets, and squander his wisdom on everyone,’ etc., quite in the style of Zarathustra, the dwelleron the highest peaks. The already mentioned Dr. Max Zerbst affects, like Nietzsche, to regard himself as terrible, and to believe that his opponents tremble before him. When he makes them speak he puts whimpering tones into their mouths,[419]and he enjoys with cruelly superior scorn the mortal fear with which he inspires them. In a maniac this attitude is natural and excites pity. But when a fellow like this Dr. Max Zerbst assumes it, it produces an irresistibly comic effect, and calls to remembrance the young man with the weak legs inPickwick, who ‘believes in blood alone,’ ‘will have blood.’ Zerbst dares to utter the words ‘natural science’ and ‘psycho-physiology.’ That is an agreement among Nietzsche’s disciples: they pass off the insane word-spouter whom they worship for a psycho-physiologist and a physicist! Ola Hansson speaks of Nietzsche’s ‘psycho-physiological intuition’! and in another place says: ‘With Nietzsche, that modern subtle psychologist, who possesses in the highest degree psycho-physical intuition [again], that peculiar power of the end of the nineteenth century, of listening to and spying out all the secret processes and hidden corners in itself,’ etc. ‘Psycho-physical intuition!’ ‘Listening to and spying out itself!’ Our very eyes deceive us. These men, therefore, have no suspicion of what constitutes ‘psychophysics,’ they do not suspect that it is the exact contrary of ancient psychology, which dealt with ‘intuition’ and introspection,i.e., ‘listening to one’s self’ and ‘spying out one’s self’; that it patiently counts and mixes with the apparatus in laboratories, and ‘spies and listens to,’ not itself, but its experimentists and instruments! And such babble of brainless parrots, who chatter in repetition the words they accidentally hear, without comprehending them, is able to make its way in Germany, the creator of the new science of psycho-physiology, the fatherland of Fechner, Weber, Wundt! And no professional has rapped with a ruler the knuckles of these youths, whose fabulous ignorance is surpassed only by their impudence!

But worse still has befallen—something at which all jesting really ceases. Kurt Eisner, who it is true does not agree with Nietzsche’s ‘philosophy,’ is, nevertheless, of the opinion thathe has ‘bequeathed us some powerful poems,’[420]and goes so far as to make use of this unheard-of expression: ‘Nietzsche’sZarathustrais a work of art likeFaust.’ The question first of all obtruding itself is: Has Kurt Eisner at any time read a line ofFaust? This, I take it, must be answered in the affirmative, for it is hardly conceivable that at this time of day there is in Germany any adult, seemingly able to read and write, into whose handsFausthas not fallen at some time or other. Then there remains only one other question: What may Kurt Eisner have understood ofFaust? To name in the same breath the senseless spirting jet of words of aZarathustrawithFaustis such a defilement of our most precious poetical treasure that verily if a man of any greater importance than Kurt Eisner had perpetrated it there had been need of an expiatory festival to atone for the insult to Goethe, even as the Church newly consecrates a place of worship when it has been profaned by a sacrilegious act.

Not only in Germany is the Nietzsche gang working mischief; it is also infesting other lands. Ola Hansson,[421]already mentioned, entertains his Swedish fellow-countrymen most enthusiastically with ‘Nietzsche’s Poetry’ and ‘Nietzsche’s Midnight Hymn’; T. de Wysewa[422]assures the French, who are not in the position to prove the accuracy of his assertions, that ‘Nietzsche is the greatest thinker and most brilliant author produced by Germany in the last generation,’ etc.

It has, nevertheless, been reserved to a lady to beat the male disciples of Nietzsche, in the audacious denial of the most openly manifest truth. This feminine partisan of Nietzsche, Lou Salomé, with a cool imperturbability fit to take away the breath of the most callous spectator, turns her back on the fact that Nietzsche has for years been confined in a lunatic asylum, and proclaims with brazen brow that Nietzsche, from the aristocratic contempt of the world belonging to the ‘over-human,’ has voluntarily ceased to write, and withdrawn himself into solitude. Nietzsche is a man of science and a psycho-physiologist, and Nietzsche keeps silence, because he no longer finds it worth the trouble to speak to the men of the herd; these are the catch-words cried aloud throughout the world by the Nietzsche band. In the face of such a conspiracy against truth, honesty, sound reason, it is not enough to have proved the senselessness of Nietzsche’s system, it mustalso be shown that Nietzsche has always been insane, and that his writings are the abortions of frenzy (more exactly, of ‘maniacal exaltation’).

A few followers of Nietzsche, undoubtedly not fit to hold a candle to Lou Salomé, do not contest the fact of Nietzsche’s insanity, but say that he became insane because he withdrew himself too much from men, because he lived too long in the deepest solitude, because his speed of thought was so ruinously, unnaturally rapid. This unheard-of idiocy could circulate throughout the entire German press, and yet not a single newspaper had the gumption to remark that insanity can never be the consequence of solitude and too speedy thought, but that, on the contrary, a propensity for solitude and vertiginously rapid thought are the primary and best known signs of existing insanity, and that this prattle of Nietzsche’s partisans is, perhaps, of equal force with the assertion that someone had contracted lung disease through coughing and hæmorrhage!

For Nietzsche’s ‘anthropophobia’ we have the evidence of his biographers, who cite curious examples of it.[423]His rapid thought, however, is a phenomenon never absent in frenzied madness. That the unprofessional reader may know what he is to understand by this, we will present him with the clinical picture of this form of insanity traced by the hand of the most authoritative masters.

‘The acceleration of the course of thought in mania,’ says Griesinger, ‘is a consequence of the facilitation of the connection between representations, where the patient humbugs, romances, declaims, sings, calls into service all the modes of exteriorizing ideas, rambles incoherently from one topic to another, the ideas hurtling against and overthrowing each other. The same acceleration of ideation is found in certain forms of dementia and in secondary psychical enfeeblement, “with activity produced by hallucinations.” The logical concatenations are not in this case intact, as in argumentation and hypochondriacal dementia; or the precipitate sequence of representations no longer follows any law; or, again, only words and sounds devoid of meaning succeed each other withimpetuous haste.... Thus there arises ... a ceaseless chase of ideas, in the torrent of which all is borne away in pell-mell flight. The latter conditions appear chiefly in raving madness; at its inception especially, a greater mental vivacity often manifests itself, and cases have been observed where the fact that the patient became witty was a sure sign of the imminence of an attack of frenzy.’[424]

Still more graphic is the description given by Krafft-Ebing.[425]‘The content of consciousness is here [in ‘maniacal exaltation’] pleasure, psychical well-being. It is just as little induced by events of the external world as the opposite state of psychical pain in melancholia, and is, therefore, referable to an inner organic cause only. The patient literally revels in feelings of pleasure, and declares, after recovery, that never, when in good health, has he felt so contented, so buoyant, so happy, as during his illness. This spontaneous pleasure undergoes powerful increments ... through the perception by the patient of the facilitated processes of ideation ... through the intensive accentuation of ideas by feelings of pleasure and by agreeable cœnæstheses, especially in the domain of muscular sensation.... In this way the cheerful mood temporarily exalts itself to the height of pleasurable emotions (gay extravagance, exuberance), which find their motor exteriorization in songs, dances, leaps.... The patient becomes more plastic in his diction ... his faculties of conception act more rapidly, and, in accelerated association, he is at once more prompt in repartee, witty and humorous to the point of irony. The plethora of his consciousness supplies him with inexhaustible material for talk, and the enormous acceleration of his ideation, in which there spring up complete intermediate forms with the rapidity of thought, without undergoing exteriorization in speech, causes his current of ideas, in so far as they find expression, to seem rambling.... He continually exercises criticism in respect of his own condition, and proves that he is himself aware of his abnormal state by ... claiming, among other things, that he is only a fool, and that to such everything is permissible.... The invalid cannot find words enough to depict his maniacal well-being, his “primordial health.”’

And now every individual feature of this picture of disease shall be pointed out in Nietzsche’s writings. (I repeat my previous remark, that I am compelled to limit myself in citing examples, but that literally on every page of Nietzsche’s writing examples of the same kind are to be found.)

His cœnæstheses, or systemic sensations, continually inspirehim with presentations of laughter, dancing, flying, buoyancy, generally of movement of the gayest and easiest kind—of rolling, flowing, plunging. ‘Let us guard ourselves from immediately making gloomy faces at the word “torture” ... even there something remains for laughter.’ ‘We are prepared for a carnival in the grand style, for the most spiritual carnival-laughter and exuberance, for the transcendental height of the most exalted idiocy and Aristophanic derision of the universe.... Perhaps if nothing else of to-day has a future, our very laughter still has a future.’ ‘I would even permit myself to classify philosophers according to the quality of their laughter—up to those capable of golden laughter[!] ... The gods are jocular. It seems as if, even in sacred deeds, they could not forbear laughing.’ ‘Ah! what are ye then, ye written and painted thoughts of mine? It is not long since ye were so fantastic, so young and naughty ... that ye made me sneeze and laugh.’ ‘Now the world laughs, the dismal veil is rent.’ ‘It is laughter that kills, not wrath. Come, let us kill the spirit of heaviness!’ ‘Truly there are beings chaste by nature; they are milder in heart; they laugh more agreeably and copiously than ye. They laugh as well over chastity, and ask, What is chastity?’ ‘Had He [Jesus Christ] remained in the desert, perhaps He would have learned to live and to love the earth—and to laugh besides.’ ‘The tension of my cloud was too great; between the laughters of the lightnings I will cast hail-showers into the deep.’ ‘To-day my shield quivered gently and laughed at me; that is the holy laughter and tremor of beauty.’

It will be seen that in all these cases the idea of laughter has no logical connection with the real thought; it is far rather an accompaniment of his intellection as a basic state, as a chronic obsession, having its explanation in the maniacal excitation of the centres of ideation. It is the same with the presentations of dancing, flying, etc. ‘I should only believe in a god who knew how to dance.’ ‘Truly, Zarathustra is no hurricane and whirlwind; and if he is a dancer, yet is he by no means a dancer of the tarantella.’ ‘And once upon a time I wished to dance, as I never yet have danced; away over the whole heaven did I wish to dance.... Only in the dance do I know of parables for the highest things.’ ‘I found this blessed security in all things also: that on the feet of chance they preferred—to dance. O thou heaven above me, O pure! O sublime! thy purity is now for me ... that thou art a dancing-floor for divine chances.’ ‘Ask of my foot ... truly after such a rhythm, such a tick-tack, it likes neither to dance nor rest.’ ‘And, above all, I learned to stand and walk and run and leap and climb and dance.’ ‘It is a fine fool’s jestthis, of speech; thanks to it, man dances over all things.’ ‘O my soul, I taught thee to say “to-day,” as well as “once” and “formerly,” and to dance thy measure over all the “here” and “there” and “yonder.” Thou castest thy glance at my foot crazy for the dance.’ ‘If my virtue is a dancer’s virtue, and I often bounded with both feet into a rapture of golden emerald,’ etc.

(‘A state of mind he experienced with horror:’) ‘A perpetual movement between high and deep, and the feeling of high and deep, a constant feeling as if mounting steps, and at the same moment as if reposing on clouds.’ ‘Is there, indeed, one thing alone that remains uncomprehended by it ... that only in flight is it touched, beheld, lightened upon?’ ‘All my will would fly alone, would fly into thee.’ ‘Ready and impatient to fly, to fly away; that is now my nature.’ ‘My wise longing cried out from me, and laughed also ... my great longing, with rushing wings. And often it dragged me forth, and away in the midst of my laughter; then, indeed, I flew shuddering ... thither, where gods dance, ashamed of all clothes.’ ‘If I ever spread still heavens above me, and with my own wings flew in my own heavens.... If my malice is a laughing malice ... and if my Alpha and Omega is that all heaviness may become light, all body a dancer, all spirit a bird; and verily that is my Alpha and Omega,’ etc.

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 nosort of fellowship in meaning with these. He speaks, for example, ofHinterweltlern(inhabitants of remote worlds) fromHinterwäldlern(backwoodsmen), of aKesselbauche(kettle’s belly) when he is thinking ofKesselpauche(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,gemässigtandmittelmässig).

‘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 whodespaired 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 thesubject 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 inla 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 thencan 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 Zarathustrais 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 pointverbatimto 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 ofhis 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, runningpresto.... 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 atempo.’ ‘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 wordsZierrath,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 onesingle 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 offustian, 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 toocheaply 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.

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