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ideas of other men, but it must be confessed that his revelations scarcely revealed. He explained, in an indefinite sort of a way, why he despised Rousseau, Seneca, Plato, Schiller, Dante, Kant, Hugo, George Sand, Carlyle, Mill, Renan, Saint-Beuve, à Kempis and Spinoza, and he voiced his admiration for Goethe, Thucydides, Sallust and Horace, and his queer half-admiration, halfcontempt for Schopenhauer, Comte, Darwin and others, but his discourse was confined, in the main, to phrasemaking. Reading his chapters calmly it is evident that he failed utterly to perceive his debt to many men whose work supplied him with valuable data, if not with readymade conclusions. As he grew older, indeed, Nietzsche fell into the habit of damning utterly all who happened to disagree with his contempt for schemes of morality, of whatever sort, despite the fact that many of these men agreed with him perfectly in other things.

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Nietzsche wrote with sulphuric acid upon tablets of phosphorus and at times his criticisms descended to mere invective. He called Dante, "an hyena poetizing in a graveyard;" George Sand, "a milch cow with a grand manner;" Carlyle, "a pessimist whose thoughts arise from a bad stomach;" the Goncourts, "a pair of Ajaxes fighting Homer, with music by Offenbach; Zola, "the delight to stink;" Seneca, "the toreador of virtue;" Saint-Beuve, "an anti-man with a woman's vengefulness and a woman's sensuousness;" Schopenhauer, "a king counterfeiter;" and Plato, "a coward in the presence of reality" and a "tiresome" master of superior cheatery." There is wit upon some of these

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1" Götzendämmerung," 1889.

tags and a few have wisdom, too, but it is obvious that such studied striving after mere verbal brilliance, while it may produce prettiness, scarcely serves the cause of the critical art. Nietzsche learned a great deal from the masters of epigram he so much admired and they gave him his extraordinarily vivid and striking style, but he also got from them a tendency to seek the irreducible minimum just a bit too assiduously. He made phrases that sparkled like jewels, but now and again, in reading them, one longs for the slow, painstaking march of a Spencer or the illuminating prodigality of a Zola.

In his more contemplative moments Nietzsche saw very clearly that his own work was merely the natural development of the work of other men. In "Morgenröte" (V, § 547), and elsewhere he argued that the greatest obstacle in the path of increasing knowledge was the old notion that there was some one all-embracing secret of existence, which, on being uncovered, would answer all of humanity's questions and make all things plain. Progress, he said, was not a matter of untying a Gordian knot or of discovering a philosopher's stone: it could be thought of only as a slow, but constant accumulation of facts. It was impossible, he pointed out, for a single man, in the brief span of life allotted to human beings, to explore the whole field of knowledge. Therefore, it was necessary for every man to begin by acquiring the knowledge resulting from the explorations of those before him. Nietzsche denounced Schopenhauer and other philosophers for their insistence upon the fallacy that their schemes of thought made all things clear, and then ended by making practically the same claim for his own. The student of the mad

German will find this inconsistency throughout his work. So long as he dealt with ideas his mental processes were as exact as the movements of a machine, but when he considered human beings in the concrete

and particularly when he discussed himself - his incredible intolerance, jealousy, spitefulness and egomania, and his savage lust for bitter, useless and unmerciful strife, combined to make his conclusions unreliable, and even nonsensical.

II

NIETZSCHE AS A TEACHER

If we would seek conclusive proof that Nietzsche has left his mark upon his time we need go no further than the ubiquitous Mr. Roosevelt and the frank and sportive Mr. George Bernard Shaw. Mr. Roosevelt is, by immense odds, the most influential man in the United States today. He is the accepted spokesman and rabbi of at least 50,000,000 human beings, and he has a quite uncanny faculty for impressing them, driving them and convincing them against their will. And among other things, he has made embryo Nietzscheans of them, for in all things fundamental the Rooseveltian philosophy and the Nietzschean philosophy are identical.

It is inconceivable that Mr. Roosevelt should have formulated his present confession of faith independently of Nietzsche. As everyone knows, he is an ardent student of German literature, and has dipped, with peculiar assiduity, into the Pierian spring of the German poets and philosophers. The motto at the head of his essay on "The Strenuous Life"- the best summary of his creed that he has yet published — is a quotation from Goethe, and in the essay itself are a multitude of thoughts borrowed boldly and bodily, though perhaps unconsciously, from

none other than Friedrich Nietzsche. "The Strenuous Life," indeed, is the most eloquent and powerful statement of the dionysian philosophy ever made by anyone. "I wish to preach," it begins, "not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife: to preach the highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who, out of these, wins the splendid ultimate triumph.” How insistent sounds the voice of Zarathustra in all of this! How vividly it recalls the ancient sage's very phrases! . . . "I do not advise you to conclude peace, but to conquer! . . . What is good? ye ask. To be brave is good. Thus live your life of obedience

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and war! . . . Man is something to be surpassed! "When men fear righteous war, when women fear motherhood . . . well it is that they should vanish from the earth." So speaks the prophet of the strenuous life. "Thus would I have man and woman: fit for warfare the one, fit for giving birth the other." So speaks Zarathustra. There is no denial of the law of natural selection in this thunderous sermon of the American dionysian there is no meek acceptance of the Christian doctrine that self-effacement is noble. "The nation that has trained itself to a career of unwarlike and isolated ease is bound, in the end, to go down before other nations which have not lost the manly and adventurous qualities." There is no acceptance of the doctrine that all men are equal "before the Lord." On the contrary, 1 "The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses: " New York, 1900.

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