I NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINS An individual is never an isolated phenomenon and it is impossible to conceive any idea as existing without some cause. As Haeckel tells us, "the cell never acts; it always reacts." Therefore, it is no denial of Nietzsche to say that his philosophy could not have taken form if certain other men had not labored before him. The same thing might be said, with equal truth, of every philosophy and idea the world has ever known. As Pfleiderer has shown us, even Jesus Christ was the inevitable product of his time, just as Shakespeare, Bonaparte and Voltaire were of theirs. Without Moses there could have been no dispute in the temple and no entry into Jerusalem and no tragic journey up Calvary. Without Bacon, Comte, Schopenhauer and Darwin there could have been no Nietzsche. It would be interesting, perhaps, to trace back to their primal sources in nascent consciousness the notions which have culminated in the monistic materialism of today, but that would require a review of the entire history of the human struggle for truth: an enterprise whose very immensity is appalling. In place of this, we must content ourselves with a rapid glance at the development of ideas since the Renaissance. The ancients evolved systems of philosophy that attained speculative heights scarcely surpassed today, but it was not until the dawn of organized disbelief in Europe that human intelligence began to arm itself with weapons capable of effectually reaching the vitals of that colossal and terrible monster, supernaturalism. In the middle ages all experimental inquiry into natural phenomena was regarded as both futile and blasphemous - futile because God could never reveal his secrets without ceasing to be God, and blasphemous because any effort to unveil them was thus necessarily a blow at divinity.1 The learned men of those days contented themselves, in consequence, with interminable arguments about fanciful problems which, on their very face, were insoluble. For four hundred years, for instance, the monks of Germany debated the question whether an angel, in passing from one spot to another, had to traverse the intervening space. Any man who presumed to look into the cause of actual things was pronounced anathema. An anatomist who essayed to learn something about the human stomach by dissecting a cadaver instead of by searching for cabalistic knowledge in the scriptures, was commonly burned at the stake. A man who pointed out that the popes, despite their divine afflatus, frequently indulged in quite human offenses against decency, was regarded as a lunatic or a devil, and in either case some 'Isaiah, XL, 28: "There is no searching of his understanding." Rom. XI, 33: "How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out." Ps. XXXIX, 9: "I was dumb, I opened not my mouth, because thou didst it." See also a multitude of other passages in the Old Testament. |