Chapter 4

[8]"Zur Genealogie der Moral," I, § 14.

Despite the divine authority which gives permanence to all moral codes, this permanence is constantly opposed by the changing conditions of existence, and very often the opposition is successful. The slave-morality of the ancient Jews has come down to us, with its outlines little changed, as ideal Christianity, but such tenacious persistence of a moral scheme is comparatively rare. As a general rule, in truth, races change their gods very much oftener than we have changed ours, and have less faith than we in the independence of intelligence. In consequence they constantly revamp and modify their moral concepts. The same process of evolution affects even our own code, despite the extraordinary tendency to permanence just noted. Our scheme of things, in its fundamentals, has persisted for 2,500 years, but in matters of detail it is constantly in a state of flux. We still call ourselves Christians, but we have evolved many moral ideas that are not to be found in the scriptures and we have sometimes denied others that are plainly there. Indeed, as will be shown later on, the beatitudes would have wiped us from the face of the earth centuries ago had not our forefathers devised means of circumventing them withoutopenly questioning them. Our progress has been made, not as a result of our moral code, but as a result of our success in dodging its inevitable blight.

All morality, in fact, is colored and modified by opportunism, even when its basic principles are held sacred and kept more or less intact. The thing that is a sin in one age becomes a virtue in the next. The ancient Persians, who were Zoroastrians, regarded murder and suicide, under any circumstances, as crimes. The modern Persians, who are Mohammedans, think that ferocity and foolhardiness are virtues. The ancient Japanese, to whom the state appeared more important than the man, threw themselves joyously upon the spears of the state's enemies. The modern Japanese, who are fledgling individualists, armor their ships with nickel steel and fight on land from behind bastions of earth and masonry. And in the same way the moral ideas that have grown out of Christianity, and even some of its important original doctrines, are being constantly modified and revised, despite the persistence of the fundamental notion of self-sacrifice at the bottom of them. In Dr. Andrew D. White's monumental treatise "On the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom" there are ten thousand proofs of it. Things that were crimes in the middle ages are quite respectable at present. Actions that are punishable by excommunication and ostracism in Catholic Spain today, are sufficient to make a man honorable in freethinking England. In France, where the church once stood above the king, it is now stripped of all rights not inherent in the most inconsequential social club. In Germany it is a penal offense to poke fun at the head of the state; in theUnited States it is looked upon by many as an evidence of independence and patriotism. In some of the American states a violation of the seventh commandment, in any form, is a felony; in Maryland, it is, in one form, a mere misdemeanor, and another form, no crime at all.

"Many lands did I see," says Zarathustra, "and many peoples, and so I discovered the good and bad of many peoples.... Much that was regarded as good by one people was held in scorn and contempt by another. I found many things called bad here and adorned with purple honors there.... A catalogue of blessings is posted up for every people. Lo! it is the catalogue of their triumphs—the voice of their will to power!... Whatever enables them to rule and conquer and dazzle, to the dismay and envy of their neighbors, is regarded by them as the summit, the head, the standard of all things.... Verily, men have made for themselves all their good and bad. Verily they did not find it so: it did not come to them as a voice from heaven.... It is only through valuing that there comes value."[1]

To proceed from the concrete to the general, and to risk a repetition, it is evident that all morality, as Nietzsche pointed out, is nothing more than an expression of expediency.[2]A thing is called wrong solely because a definite group of people, at some specific stage of their career, have found it injurious to them. The fact thatthey have discovered grounds for condemning it in some pronunciamento of their god signifies nothing, for the reason that the god of a people is never anything more than a reflection of their ideas for the time being. As Prof. Otto Pfleiderer has shown,[3]Jesus Christ was a product of his age, mentally and spiritually as well as physically. Had there been no Jewish theology before him, he could not have sought or obtained recognition as a messiah, and the doctrines that he expressed—had he ever expressed them at all—would have fallen upon unheeding and uncomprehending ears.

Therefore it is plain that the Ten Commandments are no more immortal and immutable, in the last analysis, than the acts of Parliament. They have lasted longer, it is true, and they will probably continue in force for many years, but this permanence is only relative. Fundamentally they are merely expressions of expedience, like the rules of some great game, and it is easily conceivable that there may arise upon the earth, at some future day, a race to whom they will appear injurious, unreasonable and utterly immoral. "The time may come, indeed, when we will prefer theMemorabiliaof Socrates to the Bible."[4]

Admitting this, we must admit the inevitable corollary that morality in the absolute sense has nothing to do with truth, and that it is, in fact, truth's exact antithesis. Absolute truth necessarily implies eternal truth. The statement that a man and a woman are unlike was true on the day the first man and woman walked the earthand it will be true so long as there are men and women. Such a statement approaches very near our ideal of an absolute truth. But the theory that humility is a virtue is not an absolute truth, for while it was undoubtedly true in ancient Judea, it was not true in ancient Greece and is debatable, to say the least, in modern Europe and America. The Western Catholic Church, despite its extraordinarily successful efforts at permanence, has given us innumerable proofs that laws, in the long run, always turn upon themselves. The popes were infallible when they held that the earth was flat and they were infallible when they decided that it was round—and so we reach a palpable absurdity. Therefore, we may lay it down as an axiom that morality, in itself, is the enemy of truth, and that, for at least half of the time, by the mathematical doctrine of probabilities, it is necessarily untrue.

If this is so, why should any man bother about moral rules and regulations? Why should any man conform to laws formulated by a people whose outlook on the universe probably differed diametrically from his own? Why should any man obey a regulation which is denounced, by his common-sense, as a hodge-podge of absurdities, and why should he model his whole life upon ideals invented to serve the temporary needs of a forgotten race of some past age? These questions Nietzsche asked himself. His conclusion was a complete rejection of all fixed codes of morality, and with them of all gods, messiahs, prophets, saints, popes, bishops, priests, and rulers.

The proper thing for a man to do, he decided, was to formulate his own morality as he progressed from lowerto higher things. He should reject the old conceptions of good and evil and substitute for them the human valuations, good and bad. In a word, he should put behind him the morality invented by some dead race to make its own progress easy and pleasant, and credited to some man-made god to give it authority, and put in the place of this a workable personal morality based upon his own power of distinguishing between the things which benefit him and the things which injure him. He should (to make the idea clearer) judge a given action solely by its effect upon his own welfare; his own desire or will to live; and that of his children after him. All notions of sin and virtue should be banished from his mind. He should weigh everything in the scales of individual expedience.

Such a frank wielding of a razor-edged sword in the struggle for existence is frowned upon by our Jewish slave-morality. We are taught to believe that the only true happiness lies in self-effacement; that it is wrong to profit by the misfortune or weakness of another. But against this Nietzsche brings the undeniable answer that all life, no matter how much we idealize it, is, at bottom, nothing more or less than exploitation. The gain of one man is inevitably the loss of some other man. That the emperor may die of a surfeit the peasant must die of starvation. Among human beings, as well as among the bacilli in the hanging drop and the lions in the jungle, there is ever in progress this ancient struggle for existence. It is waged decently, perhaps, but it is none the less savage and unmerciful, and the devil always takes the hindmost.

"Life," says Nietzsche, "is essentially the appropriation, the injury, the vanquishing of the unadapted and weak. Its object is to obtrude its own forms and insure its own unobstructed functioning. Even an organization whose individuals forbear in their dealings with one another (a healthy aristocracy, for example) must, if it would live and not die, act hostilely toward all other organizations. It must endeavor to gain ground, to obtain advantages, to acquire ascendancy. And this is not because it isimmoral, but because it lives, and all life is will to power."[5]

Nietzsche argues from this that it is absurd to put the stigma of evil upon the mere symptoms of the great struggle. "In itself," he says, "an act of injury, violation, exploitation or annihilation cannot be wrong, for life operates, essentially and fundamentally, by injuring, violating, exploiting and annihilating, and cannot even be conceived of out of this character. One must admit, indeed, that, from the highest biological standpoint, conditions under which the so-called rights of others are recognized must ever be regarded as exceptional conditions—that is to say, as partial restrictions of the instinctive power-seeking will-to-live of the individual, made to satisfy the more powerful will-to-live of the mass. Thus small units of power are sacrificed to create large units of power. To regard the rights of others as being inherent in them, and not as mere compromises for the benefit of the mass-unit, would be to enunciate a principle hostile to life itself."[6]

Nietzsche holds that the rights of an individual maybe divided into two classes: those things he is able to do despite the opposition of his fellow men, and those things he is enabled to do by the grace and permission of his fellow men. The second class of rights may be divided again into two groups: those granted through fear and foresight, and those granted as free gifts. But how do fear and foresight operate to make one man concede rights to another man? It is easy enough to discern two ways. In the first place, the grantor may fear the risks of a combat with the grantee, and so give him what he wants without a struggle. In the second place, the grantor, while confident of his ability to overcome the grantee, may forbear because he sees in the struggle a certain diminution of strength on both sides, and in consequence, an impaired capacity for joining forces in effective opposition to some hostile third power.

And now for the rights obtained under the second head—by bestowal and concession. "In this case," says Nietzsche, "one man or race has enough power, and more than enough, to be able to bestow some of it on another man or race."[7]The king appoints one subject viceroy of a province, and so gives him almost regal power, and makes another cup-bearer and so gives him a perpetual right to bear the royal cup. When the power of the grantee, through his inefficiency, decreases, the grantor either restores it to him or takes it away from him altogether. When the power of the grantee, on the contrary, increases, the grantor, in alarm, commonly seeks to undermine it and encroach upon it. When the power of the grantee remains at a level for a considerable time, his rights become"vested" and he begins to believe that they are inherent in him—that they constitute a gift from the gods and are beyond the will and disposal of his fellow men. As Nietzsche points out, this last happens comparatively seldom. More often, the grantor himself begins to lose power and so comes into conflict with the grantee, and not infrequently they exchange places. "National rights," says Nietzsche, "demonstrate this fact by their constant lapse and regenesis."[8]

Nietzsche believed that a realization of all this would greatly benefit the human race, by ridding it of some of its most costly delusions. He held that so long as it sought to make the struggle for existence a parlor game, with rules laid down by some blundering god—that so long as it regarded its ideas of morality, its aspirations and its hopes as notions implanted by the creator in the mind of Father Adam—that so long as it insisted upon calling things by fanciful names and upon frowning down all effort to reach the ultimate verities—that just so long its progress would be fitful and slow. It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism.

Nietzsche called himself an immoralist. He believed that all progress depended upon the truth and that the truth could not prevail while men yet enmeshed themselves in a web of gratuitous and senseless laws fashioned bytheir own hands. He was fond of picturing the ideal immoralist as "a magnificent blond beast"—innocent of "virtue" and "sin" and knowing only "good" and "bad." Instead of a god to guide him, with commandments and the fear of hell, this immoralist would have his own instincts and intelligence. Instead of doing a given thing because the church called it a virtue or the current moral code required it, he would do it because he knew that it would benefit him or his descendants after him. Instead of refraining from a given action because the church denounced it as a sin and the law as a crime, he would avoid it only if he were convinced that the action itself, or its consequences, might work him or his an injury.

Such a man, were he set down in the world today, would bear an outward resemblance, perhaps, to the most pious and virtuous of his fellow-citizens, but it is apparent that his life would have more of truth in it and less of hypocrisy and cant and pretense than theirs. He would obey the laws of the land frankly and solely because he was afraid of incurring their penalties, and for no other reason, and he would not try to delude his neighbors and himself into believing that he saw anything sacred in them. He would have no need of a god to teach him the difference between right and wrong and no need of priests to remind him of this god's teachings. He would look upon the woes and ills of life as inevitable and necessary results of life's conflict, and he would make no effort to read into them the wrath of a peevish and irrational deity at his own or his ancestors' sins. His mind would be absolutely free of thoughts of sin and hell, and in consequence, he would be vastly happier than the majority of persons about him.All in all, he would be a powerful influence for truth in his community, and as such, would occupy himself with the most noble and sublime task possible to mere human beings: the overthrow of superstition and unreasoning faith, with their long train of fears, horrors, doubts, frauds, injustice and suffering.[9]

Under an ideal government—which Herbert Spencer defines as a government in which the number of laws has reached an irreducible minimum—such a man would prosper a great deal more than the priest-ridden, creed-barnacled masses about him.[10]In a state wherein communistic society, with its levelling usages and customs, had ceased to exist, and wherein each individual of the master class was permitted to live his life as much as possible in accordance with his own notions of good and bad, such a man would stand forth from the herd in proportion as his instincts were more nearly healthy and infallible than the instincts of the herd. Ideal anarchy, in brief, would insure the success of those men who were wisest mentally and strongest physically, and the race would make rapid progress.

It is evident that the communistic and socialistic forms of government at present in fashion in the world oppose such a consummation as often as they facilitate it. Civilization, as we know it, makes more paupers than millionaires,and more cripples than Sandows. Its most conspicuous products, the church and the king, stand unalterably opposed to all progress. Like the frog of the fable, which essayed to climb out of a well, it slips back quite as often as it goes ahead.

And for these reasons Nietzsche was an anarchist—in the true meaning of that much-bespattered word—just as Herbert Spencer and Arthur Schopenhauer were anarchists before him.

[1]"Also sprach Zarathustra" I.

[2]"The wordmos, from signifying what is customary, has come to signify what is right." Sir Wm. Markby: "Elements of Law Considered with Reference to General Principles of Jurisprudence:" pp. 118, 5th ed., London, 1896.

[3]In his masterly treatise, "Christian Origins," tr. by David A. Huebsch: New York, 1906.

[4]"Menschliches allzu Menschliches" III.

[5]"Jenseits von Gut und Böse" § 259.

[6]"Zur Genealogie der Moral" II, § 11.

[7]"Morgenröte," § 112.

[8]"Morgenröte," § 112.

[9]"It is my experience," said Thomas H. Huxley, "that, aside from a few human affections, the only thing that gives lasting and untainted pleasure in the world, is the pursuit of truth and the destruction of error." See "The Life and Letters of T. H. Huxley," by Leonard Huxley; London, 1900.

[10]"Read the suicide tables and see how many despairing men, hope less of keeping their homes together, pay with their lives the toil imposed upon them by squanderers of the public money." Helen Mathers inP. T. O., Feb. 9 1907, p. 180. This is one of Tolstoi's chief arguments against all government.

No doubt the reader who has followed the argument in the preceding chapters will have happened, before now, upon the thought that Nietzsche's chain of reasoning, so far, still has a gap in it. We have seen how he started by investigating Greek art in the light of the Schopenhauerean philosophy, how this led him to look into morality, how he revealed the origin of morality in transitory manifestations of the will to power, and how he came to the conclusion that it was best for a man to reject all ready-made moral ideas and to so order his life that his every action would be undertaken with some notion of making it subserve his own welfare or that of his children or children's children. But a gap remains and it may be expressed in the question: How is a man to define and determine his own welfare and that of the race after him?

Here, indeed, our dionysian immoralist is confronted by a very serious problem, and Nietzsche himself well understood its seriousness. Unless we have in mind some definite ideal of happiness and some definite goal of progress we had better sing the doxology and dismiss our congregation. Christianity has such an ideal and such a goal. The one is a Christ-like life on earth and the otheris a place at the right hand of Jehovah in the hereafter. Mohammedanism, a tinsel form of Christianity, paints pictures of the same sort. Buddhism holds out the tempting bait of a race set free from the thrall of earthly desires, with an eternity of blissful nothingness.[1]The other oriental faiths lead in the same direction and Schopenhauer, in his philosophy, laid down the doctrine that humanity would attain perfect happiness only when it had overcome its instinct of self-preservation—that is to say, when it had ceased to desire to live. Even Christian Science—that most grotesque child of credulous faith and incredible denial—offers us the double ideal of a mortal life entirely free from mortal pain and a harp in the heavenly band for all eternity.

What had Nietzsche to offer in place of these things? By what standard was his immoralist to separate the good—or beneficial—things of the world from the bad—or damaging—things? And what was the goal that the philosopher had in mind for his immoralist? The answer to the first question is to be found in Nietzsche's definition of the terms "good" and "bad." "All that elevates the sense of power, the will to power, and power itself"—this is how he defined "good." "All that proceeds from weakness"—this is how he defined "bad." Happiness, he held, is "the feeling that power increases—that resistance is being overcome." "I preach not contentedness," he said, "but more power; not peace, but war; not virtue, but efficiency. The weakand defective must go to the wall: that is the first principle of the dionysian charity. And we must help them to go."[2]

To put it more simply, Nietzsche offers the gospel of prudent and intelligent selfishness, of absolute and utter individualism. "One must learn," sang Zarathustra, "how to love oneself, with a whole and hearty love, that one may find life with oneself endurable, and not go gadding about. This gadding about is familiar: it is called loving one's neighbor.'"[3]His ideal was an aristocracy which regarded the proletariat merely as a conglomeration of draft animals made to be driven, enslaved and exploited. "A good and healthy aristocracy," he said, "must acquiesce, with a good conscience, in the sacrifice of a legion of individuals, who, for its benefit, must be reduced to slaves and tools. The masses have no right to exist on their own account: their sole excuse for living lies in their usefulness as a sort of superstructure or scaffolding, upon which a more select race of beings may be elevated."[4]Rejecting all permanent rules of good and evil and all notions of brotherhood, Nietzsche held that the aristocratic individualist—and it was to the aristocrat only that he gave, unreservedly, the name of human being—must seek every possible opportunity to increase and exalt his own sense of efficiency, of success, of mastery, of power. Whatever tended to impair him, or to decrease his efficiency, was bad. Whatever tended to increase it—at no matter what cost to others—was good. There must be a complete surrender to the law of natural selection—that invariable natural law which ordains that the fit shall survive and the unfit shall perish. All growth must occur at the top. The strong must grow stronger, and that they may do so, they must waste no strength in the vain task of trying to lift up the weak.

The reader may interrupt here with the question we encountered at the start: how is the dionysian individualist to know whether a given action will benefit him or injure him? The answer, of course, lies in the obvious fact that, in every healthy man, instinct supplies a very reliable guide, and that, when instinct fails or is uncertain, experiment must solve the problem. As a general thing, nothing is more patent than the feeling of power—the sense of efficiency, of capacity, of mastery. Every man is constantly and unconsciously measuring himself with his neighbors, and so becoming acutely aware of those things in which he is their superior. Let two men clash in the stock market and it becomes instantly apparent that one is richer, or more resourceful or more cunning than the other. Let two men run after an omnibus and it becomes instantly apparent that one is swifter than the other. Let two men come together as rivals in love, war, drinking or holiness, and one is bound to feel that he has bested the other. Such contests are infinite in variety and in number, and all life, in fact, is made up of them. Therefore, it is plain that every man is conscious of his power, and aware of it when this power is successfully exerted against some other man. In such exertions, argues Nietzsche, lies happiness, and so his prescription for happiness consists in unrestrained yielding to the will to power. That all men worth discussing so yield, despitethe moral demand for humility, is so plain that it scarcely needs statement. It is the desire to attain and manifest efficiency and superiority which makes one man explore the wilds of Africa and another pile up vast wealth and another write books of philosophy and another submit to pain and mutilation in the prize ring. It is this yearning which makes men take chances and risk their lives and limbs for glory. Everybody knows, indeed, that in the absence of such a primordial and universal emulation the world would stand still and the race would die. Nietzsche asks nothing more than that the fact be openly recognized and admitted; that every man yield to the yearning unashamed, without hypocrisy and without wasteful efforts to feed and satisfy the yearning of other men at the expense of his own.

It is evident, of course, that the feeling of superiority has a complement in the feeling of inferiority. Every man, in other words, sees himself, in respect to some talent possessed in common by himself and a rival, in one of three ways: he knows that he is superior, he knows that he is inferior, or he is in doubt. In the first case, says Nietzsche, the thing for him to do is to make his superiority still greater by yielding to its stimulation: to make the gap between himself and his rival wider and wider. In the second case, the thing for him to do is to try to make the gap smaller: to lift himself up or to pull his rival down until they are equal or the old disproportion is reversed. In the third case, it is his duty to plunge into a contest and risk his all upon the cast of the die. "I do not exhort you to peace," says Zarathustra, "but to victory!"[5]If victory comes not, let it be defeat, death and annihilation—but, in any event, let there be a fair fight. Without this constant strife—this constant testing—this constant elimination of the unfit—there can be no progress. "As the smaller surrenders himself to the greater, so the greater must surrender himself to the will to power and stake life upon the issue. It is the mission of the greatest to run risk and danger—to cast dice with death."[6]Power, in a word, is never infinite: it is always becoming.

Practically and in plain language, what does all this mean? Simply that Nietzsche preaches a mighty crusade against all those ethical ideas which teach a man to sacrifice himself for the theoretical good of his inferiors. A culture which tends to equalize, he says, is necessarily a culture which tends to rob the strong and so drag them down, for the strong cannot give of their strength to the weak without decreasing their store. There must be an unending effort to widen the gap; there must be a constant search for advantage, an infinite alertness. The strong man must rid himself of all idea that it is disgraceful to yield to his acute and ever present yearning for still more strength. There must be an abandonment of the old slave-morality and a transvaluation of moral values. The will to power must be emancipated from the bonds of that system of ethics which brands it with infamy, and so makes the one all-powerful instinct of every sentient creature loathsome and abominable.

It is only the under-dog, he says, that believes in equality. It is only the groveling and inefficient mob that seeks to reduce all humanity to one dead level, for it is only themob that would gain by such leveling. "'There are no higher men,' says the crowd in the market place. 'We are all equal; man is man; in the presence of God we are all equal!' In the presence of God, indeed! But I tell you that God is dead!" So thunders Zarathustra.[7]That is to say, our idea of brotherhood is part of the mob-morality of the ancient Jews, who evolved it out of their own helplessness and credited it to their god. We have inherited their morality with their god and so we find it difficult—in the mass—to rid ourselves of their point of view. Nietzsche himself rejected utterly the Judaic god and he believed that the great majority of intelligent men of his time were of his mind. That he was not far wrong in this assumption is evident to everyone. At the present time, indeed, it is next to impossible to find a sane man in all the world who believes in the actual existence of the deity described in the old testament. All theology is now an effort to explain away this god. Therefore, argues Nietzsche, it is useless to profess an insincere concurrence in a theistic idea at which our common sense revolts, and ridiculous to maintain the inviolability of an ethical scheme grounded upon this idea.

It may be urged here that, even if the god of Judea is dead, the idea of brotherhood still fives, and that, as a matter of fact, it is an idea inherent in the nature of man, and one that owes nothing to the rejected supernaturalism which once fortified and enforced it. That is to say, it may be argued that the impulse to self-sacrifice and mutual help is itself an instinct. The answer to this lies in the very patent fact that it is not. Nothing, indeed, is moreapparent than the essential selfishness of man. In so far as they are able to defy or evade the moral code without shame or damage, the strong always exploit the weak. The rich man puts up the price of the necessities of life and so makes himself richer and the poor poorer. The emperor combats democracy. The political boss opposes the will of the people for his own advantage. The inventor patents his inventions and so increases his relative superiority to the common run of men. The ecclesiastic leaves a small parish for a larger one—because the pay is better or "the field offers wider opportunities,"i.e.gives him a better chance to "save souls" and so increases his feeling of efficiency. The philanthropist gives away millions because the giving visualizes and makes evident to all men his virtue and power. It is ever the same in this weary old world: every slave would be a master if he could. Therefore, why deny it? Why make it a crime to do what every man's instincts prompt him to do? Why call it a sin to do what every man does, insofar as he can? The man who throws away his money or cripples himself with drink, or turns away from his opportunities—we call him a lunatic or a fool. And yet, wherein does he differ from the ideal holy man of our slave-morality—the holy man who tortures himself, neglects his body, starves his mind and reduces himself to parasitism, that the weak, the useless and unfit may have, through his ministrations, some measure of ease? Such is the argument of the dionysian philosophy. It is an argument for the actual facts of existence—however unrighteous and ugly those facts may be.

That the lifting up of the weak, in the long run, is anunprofitable and useless business is evident on very brief reflection. Philanthropy, considered largely, is inevitably a failure. Now and then we may transform an individual pauper or drunkard into a useful, producing citizen, but this happens very seldom. Nothing is more patent, indeed, than the fact that charity merely converts the unfit—who, in the course of nature, would soon die out and so cease to encumber the earth—into parasites—who live on indefinitely, a nuisance and a burden to their betters. The "reformed" drunkard always goes back to his cups: drunkardness, as every physician knows, is as essentially incurable as congenital insanity. And it is the same with poverty. We may help a pauper to survive by giving him food and drink, but we cannot thereby make an efficient man of him—we cannot rid him of the unfitness which made him a pauper. There are, of course, exceptions to this, as to other rules, but the validity of the rule itself will not be questioned by any observant man. It goes unquestioned, indeed, by those who preach the doctrine of charity the loudest. They know it would be absurd to argue that helping the unfit is profitable to the race, and so they fall back, soon or late, upon the argument that charity is ordained of God and that the impulse to it is implanted in every decent man. Nietzsche flatly denies this. Charity, he says, is a man-made idea, with which the gods have nothing to do. Its sole effect is to maintain the useless at the expense of the strong. In the mass, the helped can never hope to discharge in full their debt to the helpers. The result upon the race is thus retrogression.

And now for our second question. What was the goalNietzsche had in mind for his immoralist? What was to be the final outcome of his overturning of all morality? Did he believe the human race would progress until men became gods and controlled the sun and stars as they now control the flow of great rivers? Or did he believe that the end of it all would be annihilation? After the publication of Nietzsche's earlier books, with their ruthless tearing down of the old morality, these questions were asked by critics innumerable in all the countries of Europe. The philosopher was laughed at as a crazy iconoclast who destroyed without rebuilding. He was called a visionary and a lunatic, and it was reported and believed that he had no answer: that his philosophy was doomed to bear itself to the earth, like an arch without a keystone. But in April, 1883, he began the publication of "Also sprach Zarathustra" and therein his reply was written large.

"I teach you," cries Zarathustra, "the superman! Man is something that shall be surpassed. What, to man, is the ape? A joke or a shame. Man shall be the same to the superman: a joke or shame.... Man is a bridge connecting ape and superman.... The superman will be the final flower and ultimate expression of the earth. I conjure you to be faithful to the earth ... to cease looking beyond the stars for your hopes and rewards. You must sacrifice yourself to the earth that one day it may bring forth the superman."[8]

Here we hearken unto the materialist, the empiricist, the monistpar excellence.And herein we perceive dimly the outlines of the superman. He will be rid of all delusionsthat hamper and oppress the will to power. He will be perfect in body and perfect in mind. He will know everything worth knowing and have strength and skill and cunning to defend himself against any conceivable foe. Because the prospect of victory will feed his will to power he will delight in combat, and his increasing capacity for combat will decrease his sensitiveness to pain. Conscious of his efficiency, he will be happy; having no illusions regarding a heaven and a hell, he will be content. He will see life as something pleasant—something to be faced gladly and with a laugh. He will say "yes" alike to its pleasures and to its ills. Rid of the notion that there is anything filthy in living—that the flesh is abominable[9]and life an affliction[10]—he will grow better and better fitted to meet the conditions of actual existence. He will be scornful, merciless and supremely fit. He will be set free from man's fear of gods and of laws, just as man has been set free from the ape's fear of lions and of open places.

To put it simply, the superman's thesis will be this: that he has been put into the world without his consent, that he must live in the world, that he owes nothing to the other people there, and that he knows nothing whatever of existence beyond the grave. Therefore, it will be his effort to attain the highest possible measure of satisfaction for the only unmistakable and genuinely healthy instinct within him: the yearning to live—to attain power—to meet and overcome the influences which would weaken or destroy him. "Keep yourselves up, my brethren,"cautions Zarathustra, "learn to keep yourselves up! The sea is stormy and many seek to keep afloat by your aid. The sea is stormy and all are overboard. Well, cheer up and save yourselves, ye old seamen!... What is your fatherland? The land wherein your children will dwell.... Thus does your love to these remote ones speak: 'Disregard your neighbors! Man is something to be surpassed!' Surpass yourself at the expense of your neighbor. What you cannot seize, let no mangiveyou.... Let him who can command, obey!"[11]The idea, by this time, should be plain. The superman, in the struggle for existence, asks and gives no quarter. He believes that it is the destiny of sentient beings to progress upward, and he is willing to sacrifice himself that his race may do so. But his sacrifice must benefit, not his neighbor—not the man who should and must look out for himself—but the generations yet unborn.

It must be borne in mind that the superman will make a broad distinction between instinct and passion—that he will not mistake the complex thing we call love, with its costly and constant hurricanes of emotion, for the instinct of reproduction—that he will not mistake mere anger for war—that he will not mistake patriotism, with all its absurdities and illusions, for the homing instinct. The superman, in brief, will know how to renounce as well as how to possess, but his renunciation will be the child, not of faith or of charity, but of expediency. "Will nothing beyond your capacity," says Zarathustra. "Demand nothing of yourself that is beyond achievement!... The higher a thing is, the less often does it succeed.Be of good cheer! What matter! Learn to laugh at yourselves!... Suppose you have failed? Has not the future gained by your failure?"[12]The superman, as Nietzsche was fond of putting it, must play at dice with death. He must have ever in mind no other goal but the good of the generations after him. He must be willing to battle with his fellows, as with illusions, that those who came after may not be afflicted by these enemies. He must be supremely unmoral and unscrupulous. His must be the gospel of eternal defiance.

Nietzsche, it will be observed, was unable to give any very definite picture of this proud, heaven-kissing superman. It is only in Zarathustra's preachments to "the higher man," a sort of bridge between man and superman, that we may discern the philosophy of the latter. On one occasion Nietzsche penned a passage which seemed to compare the superman to "the great blond beasts" which ranged Europe in the days of the mammoth, and from this fact many commentators have drawn the conclusion that he had in mind a mere two-legged brute, with none of the higher traits that we now speak of as distinctly human. But, as a matter of fact, he harbored no such idea. In another place, wherein he speaks of three metamorphoses of the race, under the allegorical names of the camel, the lion and the child, he makes this plain. The camel, a hopeless beast of burden, is man. But when the camel goes into the solitary desert, it throws off its burden and becomes a lion. That is to say, the heavy and hampering load of artificial dead-weight called morality is cast aside and the instinct to live—or, as Nietzsche insists uponregarding it, the will to power—is given free rein. The lion is the "higher man"—the intermediate stage between man and superman. The latter appears neither as camel nor lion, but as a little child. He knows a little child's peace. He has a little child's calm. Like a babein uterohe is ideally adapted to his environment.

Zarathustra sees man "like a camel kneeling down to be heavy laden." What are his burdens? One is "to humiliate oneself." Another is "to love those who despise us." In the desert comes the first metamorphosis, and the "thou shalt" of the camel becomes the "I will" of the lion. And what is the mission of the lion? "To create for itself freedom for new creating." After the lion comes the child. It is "innocence and oblivion, a new starting, a play, a wheel rolling by itself, a prime motor, a holy asserting." The thought here is cast in the heightened language of mystic poetry, but its meaning, I take it, is not lost.[13]

Nietzsche, even more than Schopenhauer, recognized the fact that great mental progress—in the sense that mental progress means an increased capacity for grappling with the conditions of existence—necessarily has to depend upon physical efficiency. In exceptional cases a great mind may inhabit a diseased body, but it is obvious that this is not the rule. A nation in which the average man had but one hand and the duration of life was but 20 years could not hope to cope with even the weakest nation of modern Europe. So it is plain that the first step in the improvement of the race must be the improvement of the body. Jesus Christ gave expression to this needby healing the sick, and the chief end and aim of all modern science is that of making life more and more bearable. Every labor-saving machine ever invented by man has no other purpose than that of saving bodily wear and tear. Every religion aims to rescue man from the racking fear of hell and the strain of trying to solve the great problems of existence for himself. Every scheme of government that we know is, at bottom, a mere device for protecting human beings from injury and death.

Thus it will be seen that Nietzsche's program of progress does not differ from other programs quite so much as, at first sight, it may seem to do. He laid down the principle that, before anything else could be accomplished, we must have first looked to the human machine. As we have seen, the intellect is a mere symptom of the will to live. Therefore whatever removes obstacles to the free exercise of this will to live, necessarily promotes and increases intelligence. A race that was never incapacitated by illness would be better fitted than any other race for any conceivable intellectual pursuit: from making money to conjugating Greek verbs. Nietzsche merely states this obvious fact in an unaccustomed form.

His superman is to give his will to live—or will to power, as you please—perfect freedom. As a result, those individuals in whom this instinct most accurately meets the conditions of life on earth will survive, and in their offspring, by natural laws, the instinct itself will become more and more accurate. That is to say, there will appear in future generations individuals in whom this instinct will tend more and more to order the performance of acts of positive benefit and to forbid the performanceof acts likely to result in injury. This injury, it is plain, may take the form of unsatisfied wants as well as of broken skulls. Therefore, the man—or superman—in whom the instinct reaches perfection will unconsciously steer clear of all the things which harass and batter mankind today—exhausting self-denials as well as exhausting passions. Whatever seems likely to benefit him, he will do; whatever seems likely to injure him he will avoid. When he is in doubt, he will dare—and accept defeat or victory with equal calm. His attitude, in brief, will be that of a being who faces life as he finds it, defiantly and unafraid—who knows how to fight and how to forbear—who sees things as they actually are, and not as they might or should be, and so wastes no energy yearning for the moon or in butting his head against stone walls. "This new table, O my brethren, I put over you:Be hard!"[14]

Such was the goal that Nietzsche held before the human race. Other philosophers before him had attempted the same thing. Schopenhauer had put forward his idea of a race that had found happiness in putting away its desire to live. Comte had seen a vision of a race whose every member sought the good of all. The humanitarians of all countries had drawn pictures of Utopias peopled by beings who had outgrown all human instincts—who had outgrown theonefundamental, unquenchable and eternal instinct of every living thing: the desire to conquer, to live, to remain alive. Nietzsche cast out all these fine ideals as essentially impossible. Man was of the earth, earthy, and his heavens and hells were creatures of hisown vaporings. Only after he had ceased dreaming of them and thrown off his crushing burden of transcendental morality—only thus and then could he hope to rise out of the slough of despond in which he wallowed.

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