NIETZSCHE.•
" Carricism of Nietzsche is rife, understanding rare : this book is a contribution to the understanding of him." It must be admitted that Mr. Salter has amply justified the words with which his Preface opens. He has traced with the utmost distinctness the various lines along which Nietzsche's thought developed ; he has reconciled many apparent contradictions and cleared up many popular misconceptions; he has shown how some of Nietzsche's views are interpreted far more loosely and inaccurately than ho intended, and others are attributed to him which aro, in fact, the exact antithesis of those he held ; and yet the very necessity for such a book goes far to prove that there is something funda- mentally right in the current notions about its subject.. Christianity has been expounded in thousands of different ways, each differing more or lass radically from all the others. It has been popularized," and "rationalized," and " spirituafized," it has been attacked and defended, it has been explained, and explained away ; but few have thought it necessary to prove that it was not intended to exalt the powerful and depress the weak, or to demonstrate by careful detailed argument that, rightly considered, it would be seen to be a Gospel rather of Love and Peace than of Hate and War. The average man has not much turn for metaphysical subtleties ; he leaves philosophy for the most part to persons interested in such remote and unnecessary pursuits, and what little fragments happen to come his way through the versatile enterprise of his Sunday newspaper he usually manages to pick up all wrong. It is quite impossible to defend his mental slovenliness and lack of impartiality. He rushes headlong to conclusions on the scantiest of evidence. But he manages, neverthe- less, by some mysterious instinct, to got a fairly correct idea of the big movements in the world of social thought, and to separate the forces that are working on his side from the forces that are not. Ho is able to distinguish his friends from his enemies ; he knows that St. Paul is for him and that Nietzsche is against.
Mr. Salter very justly points out that Nietzsche has incurred an unfair amount of odium through his technical use of the word " slave " :— " A slave to him is any one who is not his own end, but does the will of another. .. . He speaks even of princes, business-men, officials, farmers, soldiers' as slaves, his thought being that they are all social functionaries, i.e., serve something outside them rather than themselves. . . The scholar, the purely scientific and objective man, who simply mirrors things and events, is a valuable tool, but a tool all the same, a bit of a slave,' though of a sublimated kind—and belongs in the hands of the masters in the intellectual realm, the philosophers. . . . What we particularly think of when we speak of a good man' to-day is a combination of qualities fitting to the slave. Modest, industrious, benevolent, frugal—so you wish man, the good man, to be ? But such an one appears to me only the ideal slave, the slave of the future.'
Nietzsche had, in fine, no desire to make the ordinary man a slave; he simply thought the ordinary man was a slave already. But to think in this way is to ignore the divinity in man. The very use of the term slave " implies a contemptuous aspect towards the mass of humanity impossible in any one who felt the presence of a sacred element in every human being. In Nietzsche's eyes, the few, the supermen, were alone worthy of honour ; the many, the herd, were, at best, machines more or less well adapted for expressing the will of their natural masters. Is the ordinary decent citizen who can lay no claim to being a superman not ultimately . right in his conception of Nietzsche as the evangelist of brutality • Nieirsehe the Thinker ! a Study. By William M. Salter. New York: Henry Holt and Co. [53-.30 iwt.I A similar misconception, leading to what we believe to be finally a true judgment, arises from his use of the phrase " beyond Good and Evil." Here again in a strict scientific sense he is quite justified. " The common view is that morality is something given, self-evident, at least easily made so, that the real difficulties are with practice ; or that, if there are theoretic difficulties, these are simply in finding an adequate formula or adequate ' basis ' for something, the obligation of which is unquestionable." This is the attitude of Kant, of Hegel, of Schopenhauer, of the English Utilitarians ; but Nietzsche was not unreasonable in demanding full liberty to challenge it, and to analyse morality for himself. His inquiries led him, however, to some curious conclusions. Morality, he finds, is not the thing of supreme moment in life :- " It is but a means and has been made an end. It is a means, too, to a special type of life, namely the social or gregarious, and there are other and higher types. Great individuals standing more or less apart are superior to the ' social man,' and the purely moral instinct is to suspect, look askance at them ; particularly is this so with Christian morality, which is social morality par excellence."
It has a certain value in its own place ; it does very well for tho ordinary run of humanity ; it is, in fact, as John Henry Newman ironically expresses it, " suitable for private life and useful for the lower classes " ; but it must not bo permitted to limit the will of the superman. Here, indeed, Nietzsche is inconsistently better than his creed, for he demands from his superman justice, courage, and sympathy, and it is hard to see, on his own theory, what grounds he has for expecting anything from supermen except what they choose to give. Leaving this difficulty aside, however, let us carry the argument a little further :— " Moral conduct (in the historic sense of ' moral ') is the conduct becoming to members of a social whole and in furtherance of the ends of the social whole—but it is no wider than the social whole, and where there is no social whole it has in the nature of the case no application. If some of us to-day condemn certain acts of nations and states as immoral we do so in the name of a sentiment or idea to which no reality as yet corresponds ; we imply a society, a social whole, which has no existence, but which, if it existed, would of necessity put this brand on the acts in question. It is surely inept to speak of the society of the human race at present ; it is even inept to speak of Europe as a society—it is a collection of independent societies, of separate sovereign wholes. The only way in which separate wholes can be properly amenable to morality is to cease to be separate wholes, to merge themselves in one another or in some greater unity—then the law by which the larger whole lives becomes the law for each individual one. . . . A society that breaks a treaty, that violates a common understanding, commits ipso facto an immoral act. But societies which have no treaties or understandings— inde- pendent, sovereign social groups—are in the nature of the case non-moral beings.
The statements here are Mr. Salter's own, but he maintains, and we think truly, that he is making the inevitable deductions from Nietzscho's conclusions. Apart from any religious or transcen- dental sanction, other ethical systems admit and emphasize the solidarity of the human family ; they assert that the word " ought " has just as much meaning between two groups as between two individuals ; they insist that higher races have duties towards lower races, more civilized towards less civilized, stronger towards weaker. When the ordinary man contemplates the one philosophy that denies these duties, is he far wrong in thinking that behind the evil actions of Germany there was latent an evil thought, and that the evil thought fructified first in the brain of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
On the other hand, we must allow that circumstances conspired against Nietzsche's chance of a fair hearing. The eleven years of insanity with which his gloomy life closed have cast a shadow of sinister suspicion backwards over all his work. His epigram- matic methods of statement are peculiarly liable to misconception. He spoke purposely in an exaggerated, provocative way to draw attention to what he had to communicate, and ho left his readers to make the necessary modifications. Often in his desire to be vigorous and arresting he outran his own meaning. Ill-health, insomnia, and drugs produced in him a high degree of nervous irritability, which combined with his -solitary mode of life to lead him into rash utterances. " A lonely thinker, who finds no sympathy or echo for his ideas, involuntarily . . . raises his pitch and falls easily into irritated speech." Then, again, as his thought developed, his views changed in many cases radically from those he had at first professed, so that his later sayirgs often flatly contradict his earlier. " This thinker needs no ono to confute him," says he, alluding evidently to his own position ; " he suffices to that end himself." Last of all, he lived and died, not without a certain nobility, in conscious conflict throughout with the spirit of his time. It is evident that a thinker of this type stands much in need of a careful interpreter to define the proper limits of his teaching, to eliminate discrepancies, and to present the solid ore of his thought purged of all accidental and unnecessary impurities. Tills service Mr. Salter has performed admirably for Nietzsche in the present volume.
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