"These English psychologists—what do they really mean?" Nietzsche demands. "We always find them voluntarily or involuntarily at the same task of pushing to the front the partie honteuse of our inner world, and looking for the efficient, governing and decisive principle in that precise quarter where the intellectual self-respect of the race would be the most reluctant to find it—that is to say, in slothfulness of habit, or in forgetfulness, or in blind and fortuitous mechanism and association of ideas, or in some factor that is purely passive, reflex, molecular, or fundamentally stupid,—what is the real motive power which always impels these psychologists in precisely this direction?"[50]
Not one of these advocates of mechanism, however, realized how profoundly he was degrading man, and how seriously he had therefore sullied all human achievement. In their scientific réchauffé of the Christian concept of man's depravity, they all had the most hearty faith, and, as there was little in their over-populated and industrial country to contradict their conclusions, they did not refrain from passing these conclusions into law.
We can detect nothing in this greatest scientific achievement of the last century which seriously resists or opposes our heritage in the realm of the religious spirit. In their fundamentals, the two are one; And when we take them both to task, and try to discover their influence upon the world, we wonder not so much why Art is so bad, but why Art has survived at all.
For, though for the moment we may exclude the influence of earlier English thought upon general artistic achievement, at least the degraded condition of Art at the present day cannot be divorced in this manner from more recent English speculation, for even Mr. Bosanquet counts Darwin and Lyell among those who have ushered in the new renaissance of art in England![51]
"At present," says Nietzsche, "nobody has any longer the courage for separate rights, for rights of domination, for a feeling of reverence for himself and his equals,—for pathos of distance,... and even our politics are morbid from this want of courage!"[52]
To-day, when all reverence has vanished, even before kings and gods, when to respect oneself overmuch is regarded with undisguised resentment, what can we hope from a quarter in which self-reverence and reverence in general are the first needs of all?
We can only hope to find what we actually see, and that, as we all very well know and cannot deny, is a condition of anarchy, incompetence, purposelessness and chaos.
"Culture ... has a very important function to fulfil for mankind," said Matthew Arnold. "And this function is particularly important in our modern world, of which the whole civilization is, to a much greater degree than the civilization of Greece and Rome, mechanical and external, and tends constantly to become more so. But, above all, in our own country has culture a weighty part to perform, because, here, that mechanical character, which civilization tends to take everywhere, is shown in the most eminent degree.... The idea of perfection as an inward condition of the mind and spirit is at variance with the mechanical and material civilization in esteem with us, and nowhere, as I have said, so much in esteem as with us."[53]
We may trust that it is not in vain that men like Matthew Arnold and Nietzsche raised their voices against the spirit of the age. And we may hope that it is not in vain that lesser men have taken up their cry.
In any case Nietzsche did not write in utter despair. His words do not fall like faded autumn leaves announcing the general death that is imminent. On the contrary, he saw himself approaching a new century, this century, and he drew more than half his ardour from the hope that we might now renounce this heritage of the past, the deleterious effects of which he spent his lifetime in exposing.