FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

1844-1900

“God is dead. God is dead: He died of pity”--the phrase runs refrain-like through the “Sayings of Zarathustra.” It is the bright news that Nietzsche brings as his peculiar contribution to the cause of human hope. These are the glad tidings for whose bringing he expects that his feet shall be called beautiful upon the mountain. Therefore they dance, these feet, and bear toward us one who laughs and sings. At least Nietzsche would have us believe that truth--his truth--“comes on light feet” and that it steps to music. “Let the day be counted lost,” he cries, “in which we have not somewhat danced, and let us know that truth to be false which brings no laughter with it.” Yet, whether it was that truth--Nietzsche’s truth--had somehow not the quality of joyousness in it, or whether the poor messenger of these “glad tidings” was the victim of ironical chance, certain it is that his dance brought him to the doors of the mad-house, and that behind these melancholy doors he died.

There is however nothing but a certain strangeness of phrase that would lead one to associate this particular message of Nietzsche with his later insanity. It is no new idea that God is dead, no new expectation that the news will be grateful to all who understand its import. Xenophanes near the beginning, Epicurus and Lucretius toward the end of pagan thought had brought the same intelligence. Only, according to Xenophanes the Gods had died not of pity but of vice. “Liars, adulterers, cheats are the vaunted Lords of Olympus.” And according to Lucretius it was again not of pity but of their cruelty the Gods were dead, the gods of that religion

Quae caput a caeli regionibus ostendebat horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans.

Nor are the ancients the only ones to whom the world has appeared godless. If for Hume God was only suspiciously silent, for Schopenhauer he was conspicuously absent. Still, it was far enough from Schopenhauer’s thought that a God could die of pity. Pity was for him the one divine thing left to a Godforsaken world; it at least might soften, even if it could not cure the fundamental cruelty of life. It was rather the unreason of the world that forbade us to see in its course a divine guidance. For Schopenhauer, God had died quite mad.

Vice, cruelty, reticence, irrationality--these had been variously recognized as ills of which a God might die. It remained for Nietzsche to suggest that the most fatal of all disorders, whether in God or man, was just that gentlest of all Christian virtues--Pity or, as the German tongue has it, Mitleid: fellow-suffering. In the understanding of the motives that led Nietzsche to this utterance lies the key to his whole philosophy--if the “lightning flashes” of his thought may, somewhat against his will, be called a “philosophy.”

* * * * *

Virtues like races--perhaps I should say _with_ races--have their ascendancy and their decline. The quality of pity is not greatly admired of strong young peoples. The virtues of triumphant pagandom were made of sterner stuff: one hears much of temperance, of courage, of wisdom, of justice; little indeed of compassion. It is with Christianity that faith, hope, and charity are introduced into our culture, and throughout Christendom the greatest of these remains charity. Thus it is that Nietzsche always refers to these virtues as the “modern idea,” and since modernity is to his mind desperately sick, he seeks the cause of its disease in its “fixed idea.”

Now in imagining that charity or pity might well be a symptom of weakness, Nietzsche does not stand alone even among modern thinkers. Spinoza for one is inclined to be critical of the excellence of pity. Why pity one’s neighbor more than oneself? And Why pity oneself at all? Is not such self-pity a form of repining? But the cure for repining is understanding--the understanding that all things are of God. One might as well regret that the area of one’s field is not greater than the product of its base and side, as that the length of one’s days does not exceed three-score years and ten. And Kant again is no sympathetic witness to the virtue of pity. “There is but one thing good,” he has said, “and that is a good will”--the will, namely, to obey the command of duty. If one have this one cannot need pity; if one have it not one cannot deserve pity.

But Spinoza and Kant are in this, as in other respects, exceptions to the soft mood of modern sentiment. With Schopenhauer, the very embodiment of modernity, we have seen pity once more set on high as the unselfish virtue. It is the self-less man that becomes the holy man; it is the holy man that becomes the sage, denying the world with its pitiless Will-to-live.

Now it is against this very philosophy of Schopenhauer, against this conception of the beauty and wisdom of self-surrender that Nietzsche reacts. If to Spinoza pity is a folly, if to Kant it is a superfluity, to Nietzsche it is a vice--more than a vice, a disease, that deep sickness of modernity which spells decadence. Schopenhauer, and all that older wisdom which Schopenhauer loved, of Jesus and of Buddha, these were Nietzsche’s great denials, these were the false physicians of the soul that had made the soul sick in making it sad.

If Nietzsche reacts so violently against the teaching of Schopenhauer, it is not because he is by nature precluded from appreciating its seduction. It is rather because he had at one time in his life too deeply understood and too completely yielded to its soothing counsel of surrender that he later bends all his energies to its destruction. This complete revulsion of feeling was not a unique episode in Nietzsche’s experience. On the contrary his intellectual life is largely a history of such accepting and rejecting. Born into a clergyman’s family, passing his childhood in quiet Naumburg, Nietzsche in his last years claims the name of Antichrist. Eagerly connecting himself in his student days at Bonn with one of those corps that treasured the republican ideals of ’48, he advocates in his later years a social organization modeled on the caste-system of the East. An ardent patriot in ’70, he becomes the contemner of the organized state in general, a contemptuous critic of Germanism in particular. A trained student of history, a distinguished professor of philology at Basel, some of his most cunning and cutting analyses expose the weakness of the learned temperament. In his first important work, “The Birth of Tragedy,” we find him an apostle of Wagner; his later “Case of Wagner” is perhaps the cruelest polemic against a man and his art of which modern letters give example.

The bare enumeration of these changes is bound to leave an impression of waywardness. Yet this impression would be in so far false that it is clear each accepting was a matter of deep feeling with Nietzsche, each rejecting cost its price. At times, to be sure, he would put on a brave front before the spectacle of his thought’s inconstancy. Only those that can change can grow: “I love those that change,” he writes. But at other times there is more of melancholy in his recalling of abandoned ideals. “If thinking be thy destiny, then honor that destiny with divine honors; sacrifice to it thy best and thy dearest.” It is not without reason that he calls the progress of his thoughts a “Selbstüberwindung” and one may best understand the fierce bitterness of his attack upon those he has put behind him if one remember that nothing less than hatred could replace an old love in this too tenacious heart.

It is then of a piece with the rest, if a philosophy which in the end represented the dearest foe of his thought should have been the friend and guide of Nietzsche’s youth. How deep a meaning Schopenhauer had once possessed for him may be judged from the following extracts. The first is from a letter written in 1867 to his friend the Baron von Gersdorff on the occasion of the death of von Gersdorff’s brother:

“Perhaps this death is the greatest grief that could have come to you. And now, dear friend, you have experienced for yourself--I gather from the tenor of your letter--why our Schopenhauer esteems pain and trouble a great gift of fate, the δεύτερος πλοῦς to the resigning of the will. You too have felt and lived through the enlightening, deeply quieting and settling power of pain. It is a time in which you can yourself try out the teaching of Schopenhauer. If the fourth book of his masterpiece now make on you an ugly disturbing downweighing impression, if it have not the power to uplift you, to carry you through outer violent grief to that chastened yet serene mood that comes over us as we listen to noble music, to that mood in which one feels the earthy shell to have dropped from one,--then I too will have no more of this philosophy. Only the deeply suffering can and may speak the final word on such matters. The rest of us standing in the current of things, only longing for that denial of the will as for the blessed isles, can not judge whether the solace of such philosophy is adequate to times of deep sorrow.”[12]

And some three years later, Nietzsche invalided home from the hospital corps of the Prussian army writes to this same friend at the front: “This morning brought me the happiest surprise and a relief from much inquietude and anxiety--your letter.... Everything that you write affects me deeply, above all the sincere earnest tone with which you speak of this test by fire of our common philosophy of life. I too have been through a like experience, for me too these months have proved a time in which my beliefs have shown themselves deep-rooted. One can die with them; that means much more than saying, one can live by them.”[13]

One may die by the light of Schopenhauerian principles! To die by them--the taunt comes from an older Nietzsche--is all that one can do with them. But by this later time, dying, voluntary dying, dying with the breath still left in the body--all this has lost its charm for Nietzsche. He is now all for living; for more than living, for fighting; for conquering; for, if need be, killing.

“One who like me,” he writes in these later days, “has long busied himself with curious interest in thinking out pessimism to its bitter end ... has probably in this very pursuit--without precisely having willed it--turned his eyes toward the opposite ideal: toward the ideal of the most domineering, the most living, the most aggressive of men, toward him who has not merely reconciled and adjusted himself to things as they are and have been; but who wants more of them, just as they are and have been--more in all eternity, crying insatiably _da capo_ not to his own life only, but to the whole scene and all the play.”

The passage is not without a hint of Nietzsche’s personal psychology. No doubt he loved contrast for the sake of contrast; no doubt he loved drama--particularly the dramatic conflict of ideas--for the play’s sake; no doubt he loved paradox not a little for its noise. Yet it is not hard for the student to make out motives deeper than the personal, and more general, that impelled Nietzsche to turn his eyes from the ethics of self-sacrifice to the opposite ideal, to the ideal of “the most living, the most aggressive of men,” to the ideal of the “Caesarian Conqueror.”

* * * * *

No understanding of these motives can leave out of account the great scientific idea that had made its appearance in the nineteenth century--the idea of organic evolution. It is difficult to overestimate the suggestion that would lie in such an idea for one imbued with the thought of Schopenhauer. In its Darwinian form, the essential mechanism of evolution is seen to be a struggle, a war between race and race, between individual and individual. That such warfare is the necessary expression of the will to live, the most universal principle of that troubled phenomenon we call nature, Schopenhauer had indeed grasped, had insisted upon, had made the cornerstone of his theory of life. But then Schopenhauer had dwelt with equal insistence on the uselessness, the irrationality of the struggle. It was all cruel, then, nowhere benign, because nowhere directed toward an end. But now a purpose in the struggle is just what the evolutionary hypothesis seems to suggest. What if life’s pitiless cruelty were justified as the indispensable means to a supreme end--the end namely of producing a being higher than any of those that take part in it? By the selection of the fittest, would not this warfare result in the production of the superior? And if the superior could be produced only at the cost of the inferior, is there not in this sacrifice something more than wanton and irrational cruelty?

It is little wonder that one already impressed with the “self-contradiction” involved in a will not to live should seize upon this suggestion. “I bring you a goal,” cries Zarathustra. And this goal he calls the “Uebermensch.”

“I preach to you the Superman. Man is something to be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?

“All things before you have produced something beyond themselves, and would you be the ebb of this great flood? Would you rather go back to the animal than overcome man?

“What is the ape to man? A jest or a bitter shame. And just that shall man be to the Superman, a jest or a bitter shame.

“You have traveled the way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm....

“Lo, I preach to you the Superman.

“The Superman is the meaning of the earth.”

* * * * *

To produce the higher race! that is “the meaning of the earth,” the meaning that Schopenhauer had missed, that only one coming after Darwin could have seized; a meaning that does not mask the cruelty of life, yet takes from it its tragedy--the tragedy of senseless casual pain.

But now that we have found the goal, we may also define the worth of life and its duties. In deducing these we meet the most astonishing “Umwerthung aller Werthe,” the complete inversion of those notions of worth which we dwellers in Christendom have inherited. “I sit,” says Zarathustra, “with old shattered tables of the law around me--and with new tables, too, half made out.” We approach an understanding of Nietzsche’s meaning when he wrote that God and man dies of pity. For if with him we make whatever promotes progress toward the superman our good, whatever retards it our evil, then must it not be that a pity which spares the weak for pity’s sake is the very vice, the moral disease, which makes for decadence? Is not pity the anodyne of those who despair of life, and is not hope in the future necessarily cruel?

Before we who are of necessity touched with modernity react against a doctrine so little in accord with our profession of self-sacrifice, it would be well to ask ourselves how seriously we take this our profession. Is the quality of mercy indeed never strained for us? For example, are we citizens of a young and prosperous country eager to throw open its doors to the unhappy dregs of outworn lands and exhausted civilizations? For this would be the charitable thing to do. How many are prepared to encourage the mentally unsound or physically diseased to propagate? Yet pity must deny itself something if it would condemn misfortune to wed loneliness.

To be sure one expects at this point to hear of “the deeper pity”; to be told that such deeper pity must let some perish in their misery that more may not be made wretched. Even so, we have passed from the doctrine of the supremacy of charity to the theory of “the greatest happiness to the greatest number.” Already we must occasionally cry with Nietzsche, “Be hard!” and must at moments understand his phrase, “The will not-to-help may be higher than the sympathy that springs to aid.”

And we might carry our criticism of sympathy a step further. What sanction has the formula “the greatest happiness to the greatest number”? Obviously, the sanction of the approval of the greatest number; it is the complete expression of the egoism of the mob. But egoism for egoism, is there anything to recommend the ideal of the mob as against that of the exceptional being? Surely, if we make progress our guide, those who have done the most to bring about modern conditions are just those whom the mob has condemned and suppressed as working against its welfare. Socrates was poisoned, Jesus crucified, Caesar assassinated, Bruno burned, Napoleon isolated, for their crimes. It makes little difference whether the crime was against the state, the priestly tradition, the republic, the church, the nations; the power to punish in each case came from the masses. Each of these conquerors was and had to be a pitiless egoist, hesitating not at all to overturn the world of his day for the sake of his own ideal. Looking back on these historic figures, one is tempted to say that the glory of the world abides in its criminals, those lonely men, those egoists.

If I have included the gentle figure of Jesus in a list of the conquerors, it is not because Nietzsche would regard him as one who had made for the world’s progress, however much he may have contributed to its history. Nietzsche would, however, include the founder of the gospel of love among the master egoists. Of course, modernity will cry paradox! “Granted,” it will say, “granted he brought a sword into the world, was it not an enormous pity for the humanity that was to be that moved him to destroy the world that was, and with it, himself?”

Nietzsche’s handling of this paradox is one of the significant movements of his thought. To understand it we must go back a little. It is not the question of the personality of Jesus, of the motives that were clearly present to his own consciousness that Nietzsche would discuss. In general, he is completely indifferent to the kind of evidence furnished by self-analysis respecting the motives of conduct and the ground of opinion. Even those whose powers of analysis might be supposed to give them a right to speak--the great philosophers and lovers of truth--are to Nietzsche deceivers or self-deceived. “What tempts me to look upon all philosophers half with mistrust, half with amusement is not that one discovers again and again what innocents they are, how often and how easily mistaken and misled, not, in a word, their prattle and childishness. It is rather that, in spite of the great and virtuous noise made by the whole company the moment the question of truth is even remotely touched on, they do not deal ingenuously with us. They all pose as believing that they have arrived at their own opinions by the self-development of a cool pure and divinely impassible dialectic (in contrast with the mystics of all shades, who, honest fools, _will_ speak of Inspiration). At bottom, however, it is some idea loved at first sight, most frequently some heart’s desire made abstract and well refined that they defend with reasons found for the purpose. Advocates denying the name, cunning special pleaders for their prejudices, they christen these _The Truth_.”

If then the lover of truth cannot tell the truth about himself, if the cool thinker is unable to reveal the grounds of his thought, how much less can the man of heart tell what is at the bottom of his heart, the man of passion tell where his deepest passion lies? It remains for Nietzsche to make good these short-comings.

And Nietzsche makes them good in a way that lacks neither simplicity nor decision. He lays it down that there is one motive to which all others reduce, and to which everything that lives instinctively reacts. This motive is not the mere desire to preserve oneself, the desire that many have supposed sufficient to explain even the phenomenon of evolution. It goes beyond self-defense to strive after the maximum of aggression. Nietzsche calls it “der Wille zur Macht”--the Lust of Power. It is this that makes the world dance, that makes the brute prepare the way for man, that drives man to produce the superman. It is consequently this that compels the thinker to his thought, the meek to his resignation, the crucified to his cross.

“I am not of those of whom one asks ‘why?’” Nietzsche has once written. If you cannot accept his assurance that the deepest spring of conduct is the will to conquer, then accept the contrary doctrine: Nietzsche is prepared to trust his insight that you do this because the contrary doctrine is just the one _you_ need to work out your own scheme of conquest,--as a wolf may on occasion sincerely prefer the pelt of a lamb to his own natural coat.

It is to the lust of power in men’s hearts that the gospel of the crucified one appeals! The paradox is perhaps most completely worked out in Nietzsche’s “Genealogie der Moral.” Here history is made to reveal a long conflict between two contradictory estimates of worth. For the one standard a contrast exists between high morals and low; for the other, between holiness and sin. The code of ethics based on the first of these contrasts embodies, as the etymology of its terms indicates, the aristocratic conception of worth. “High morals” are simply the manners of the upper, the ruling class; “low morals,” the habits of the underlings. This standard of valuation is accepted by the high and low alike of a race in its youth and strength. The second standard defining the opposition between good and evil is an invention of the miserable and oppressed; it is their reaction against their conquerors, the expression of their resentment. It can only become dominant in decadent races; its triumph in Christianity is evidence that the modern world has sunk to the ideals of the lowly--that is to say, of the low.

If we place these two codes side by side, we realize how completely the acceptance of either demands the “Umwerthung aller Werthe” acknowledged by the other. The highest worth in the aristocratic morality is the pride of strength; the great wickedness to the lowly moralist is just this same pride of strength. The great virtue of the slave-morality is humility; to the aristocratic taste this humility is abject. Of the history of the warfare between the two, Nietzsche gives a sufficiently dramatic account. Characteristic is his picture of the triumph of the slaves:

“All that has been accomplished on the earth against the higher orders is as nothing compared with what the Jews have done: the Jews, that priest-led people that finally contrived to have satisfaction of its enemies by a complete upsetting of all their ethical standards, in other words, by an act of intellectual revenge. It was the Jews who with inexorable logic dared to deny the aristocratic equation (good = lofty = powerful = beautiful = fortunate = god-favored) and who with bottomless hatred--the hatred born of impotence--set their teeth in a formula: to wit, ‘only the wretched are the good; only the poor, the weak, the lowly are the good; the suffering, the sick, the unlovely are indeed the only servants of God and the only ones blessed of God--while you, O ye high and mighty, you are in all eternity the men of sin, of violence, of lust, the insatiable, the Godless, and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed, the accursed, the damned!’... With the Jews begins the slave-morality, that morality which has a struggle of two thousand years behind it, one which we fail to note to-day, just because--it is victorious.”

The master is made to accept the slave-morality, the tyrant is made afraid! Our English poet Browning has given a picture of this moment in history which surpasses even Nietzsche’s in vividness. The man-forsaken, cowering yonder in his selfless humility--tempts the tyrant to wring from him one gesture of rebellion, one word that suggests pride of self. In vain! The slave’s arm of defense is just non-resistance, just a mimicry of non-entity.

When sudden ... how think ye the end? Did I say “without friend”? Say rather, from marge to blue marge The whole sky grew his targe With the sun’s self for visible boss, While an Arm ran across Which the earth heaved beneath like a breast Where the wretch was safe prest! Do you see? Just my vengeance complete, The man sprang to his feet, Stood erect, caught at God’s skirts, and prayed! --So, _I_ was afraid!

But the psychology of this fear of the Lord that is the beginning of decadence? How is the tyrant to be made to accept the “Sklavenmoral,” to respect, even to imitate humility and to call it holy? Well, the slave has on his side two things that make for success: superior numbers and superior cunning. For “only those who have need of cunning,” Nietzsche writes, “acquire it.” And the strong has one vulnerable point--his superstition. It is this point that the instinct of slave-hatred has found; with cunning and with numbers it has managed to inculcate a belief in the God of Pity, to overthrow the aristocratic appreciation of high and low, to substitute for it a morality of the miserable that sets up the distinction between holiness and sin. It is the denial of the will to conquer implied by such a standard of conduct that makes modernity decadent, that unfits it to produce the superman. No wonder Nietzsche should have claimed the gratitude of higher men for his glad tidings, the God of Pity is dead!

* * * * *

In passing beyond the morality of decadence, every suggestion of a plan of life that might be substituted for it, must come from the past: the young races not yet fallen into decrepitude give us our models of the heroic. We cannot however turn the clock back, we cannot repeat their acts today without becoming such anachronisms as a Cervantes could make laughter of. It may be however that our own institutions, foremost of which is the well-organized state, leave ample room for the heroism that prepares the way for the superman.

“Where the state ends--there begins the man who is not superfluous....

“Where the state ends--Look, my brothers! Do you not see the rainbow and the bridges that lead to the Superman?”

Where the state ends! only there does Nietzsche’s interest begin. But would he have the state end much nearer its beginning; yes, before its beginning; would he return to the condition that has no social, no political organization? Perhaps--it is hard to say; but it is not necessary that one advocate anarchy in order that one should prepare a field for that great struggle of man against man out of which are to emerge the victors, the fathers of the superman.

Huxley suggests another solution. For him too where the state ends a new struggle begins. The state assures security of life, and of this security is born a new desire--the _aviditas vitae_, let us say the desire for the maximum of life measured in terms of power and enjoyment. With this struggle born of the _aviditas vitae_, begins Nietzsche’s theory of ethical values. Here indeed there can be no question of unselfishness, of self-sacrifice for another. Within this domain the meaning of good and bad stands out with perfect clearness.

“What is good?” Nietzsche asks. “All that heightens in man the feeling of power, the desire for power, power itself.

“What is bad? All that comes from weakness.

“What is happiness? The feeling that our strength grows, that an obstacle is overcome.

“Not contentment, but more power; not universal peace, but war; not virtue, but forcefulness.

“The weak and ineffective must go under; first principle of _our_ love of humanity. And one should even lend one’s hand to this end.

“What is more harmful than any vice? Pity for the condition of the ineffectives and weak--Christianity.”

Yet one must not imagine that this pitiless struggle of which is to be born the man of tomorrow is gloomy and hate-inspired. On the contrary it is joyous, and gives scope for a much nobler love than that which is pitiful. I know of no institution of modern life that so nearly realizes Nietzsche’s idea of this struggle together with the virtues it engenders, as does that of sport among gentlemen. Here one plays to win, and to spare one’s opponent or to be spared by him merely mars sport. Yet one does not hate one’s opponent, but loves him for his good sportsmanship. Only, this love, this friendship among strong men must not weaken the arm, must not soften the will; if it do, it destroys itself and is returned with contempt. We do not hate men because we fear them, Nietzsche makes it out, but just because we do not fear them. The hatred that leads one to shun one’s kind is born of disdain. Life that has for its joy the joy of battle, for its reward the sense of strength that grows with its exercise, for its delight the love of brother warriors, a brother that can give and take death generously! It is only the many too many, weakly looking on and trembling before the spectacle of a strength they fear and hate, that have no joy of life and cry, “Let there be peace.”

* * * * *

I would willingly describe this Homeric scene more in detail, consider the part that certain heroes, the warrior, the artist, the philosopher, play in it. But we must sweep on to larger issues, for there is a question that must have occurred to everyone as our description of the Nietzschian battle has advanced. It is the old question, Cui bono! We fight, suppose we win? Little Peterkin, who was surely brought up on Schopenhauer, is there to ask, What good has come of it? A little power more or less, what does it matter? Our brief hour is still a brief hour, our atomic selves cannot greatly swell, what after all is the use of fighting when we cannot befool ourselves as to the nature of the spoils?

For answer, we might point once more to the Superman. For him we kill pity in our hearts; for him, and not for spoils, is the battle fought. Surely the conqueror is conquered and his winnings cannot warm a grave. It is for the sake of them that come after that the costly struggle is maintained. Every fighter should know this; it should fire his heart and give him courage to be hard. “Higher than the love of thy nearest stands the love of those most remote from thee, thine offspring, the far future man. Higher than the love of thy kind is for me the love of a Shadow. This Shadow that runs before thee is more beautiful than thou; why dost thou not give him thy flesh and thy bones?”

But this Superman? Can things stop with him? Is he really a goal? Or only a transition, a bridge to the super-superman? Has evolution really changed the situation that Schopenhauer depicts? In the endless flux can one find a purpose that abides?

This phrase--the endless flux--brings us to one of the strangest phases of Nietzsche’s doctrine. One who, with Schopenhauer, has deeply questioned the evidence of purpose, the harmony of purposes in this world of ours, one who has groped in the night of things for that which might inspire one’s will to live has perhaps been caught by the great idea of evolution, has perhaps cried with Nietzsche, “I will live and struggle for to-morrow.” Then, to such an one, the old questioning spirit returns as it is bound to return to men who think. The morrow of to-morrow looms up before him; the eternal flux of to-morrows stretches itself out and loses itself in a vague “Whither?”

If now this one turn to Nietzsche for an answer, he receives one certainly; but, surely, a mocking one!

“I preach,” cries Nietzsche, “the Wiederkunft.”

One day Zarathustra and his Dwarf come to a certain portal.

“Look on this portal, Dwarf. It has two faces; two ways come together here which no man has traveled to the end.

“This long road back of us measures an eternity. And that long road before us--that is another eternity.

“They are opposed, these two ways; they meet each other head-on and it is here at this portal that they come together. The name of this portal is written over it; it is the _‘Now.’_

“But if one were to follow one of these roads further, and always further,--thinkest thou, Dwarf, they would always be opposed?

“Look upon this _‘Now’!_ From this portal there runs a long way back; behind us lies an eternity.

“Must not all things that can come to pass already have passed along this road? Must not everything that can happen already have happened and run its course?

“And if all things already have come to pass, what thinkest thou, Dwarf, of this _‘Now’?_ Must not this portal have been here before? And are not all things in such wise fast knotted together that this _‘Now’_ drags with it all things to come? That, consequently, it drags itself back again?

“For what of all things can come to pass, must they not again pass along this endless road that stretches before us?

“And this slow spider crawling in the moonlight; aye, and this moonlight, and I and thou in the portal whispering together, whispering of eternal things, must we not all of us have been before?

“And must we not return again and again along that long road--must we not eternally return?

“So spake he, and always lower and lower; for he was afraid of his thoughts--and afterthoughts!”

Surely Nietzsche is mocking us with his Wiederkunft,--with his doctrine of the eternal returning of things! What! he teaches that the struggle has a goal, and that goal is just--tomorrow? Then, when bewildered by the vision of the infinite stretch of tomorrows we turn to him for explanation, he tells us that the stream is not even infinite but like ancient Ocean “flows in upon itself.”

“Tied to the wheel of things,” India said we were, “therefore, let us give up.”

“Tied to the wheel of things,” Nietzsche agrees we are, “therefore, let us keep on.”

“Courage is the best of them that kill. Courage kills even pity. Now, pity is the deep abyss: deep as one sees into life, just so deep does one see into pain.

“But courage is the best of them that kill; courage that lays hold on things; courage puts even Death to death, for it says to life: ‘War das das Leben? Wohlan! Noch einmal!’”

* * * * *

Noch einmal! To make one ready to cry _da capo_ to life, that is the test of a philosophy! Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Wiederkunft has no scientific importance, but this fact is itself unimportant. It makes little difference whether the River Ocean flows in upon itself, or flows endlessly on, or falls at last into Hades. The important thing is that worth and happiness lie in playing the game of life as experience reveals it to us, no matter what that game may be.

“Thy will be my will, O Nature,” cried the Stoic Emperor. Is this will the will to conquer, is it the will to produce the higher type, is it the will to flow, is it the will wheel-like to turn in saecula saeculorum--the word of life is “That also will I”; the word of sickness and death is, “That will I not.”

There is enough of the dramatic for such as have a taste that way in the circumstance that just this lonely, pain-wracked, finally brain-sick man should have begun his philosophy with the phrase: “God is dead of pity for men,” and should have concluded it with that other: “War das das Leben? Wohlan! Noch einmal!”