[233] Compare also the notable passage, embodying a similar view, in Max Stirner's The Ego and His Own (Benjamin R. Tucker, N. Y., 1907), p. 212, beginning: “'What am I?' each of you asks himself. An abyss of lawless and unregulated impulses, desires, wishes, passions, a chaos without light or guiding star!...”
[234] A Degenerate's View of Nordau, in Liberty, July 27th, 1895.
[235] Mr. Shaw has recently pointed out that Professor A. K. Rogers, in his Mr. Bernard Shaw's Philosophy (Hibbert Journal, July, 1910), has failed to note the “trumpery (!) distinction between instinct and conscience” which Shaw had drawn in Man and Superman.
[236] It is worthy of note that Nietzsche has defined freedom as the will to be responsible for oneself. Compare also The Ego and His Own, pp. 237-238 (Benjamin R. Tucker, N. Y.), the passage beginning: “To be a man is not to realize the ideal of Man, but to realize oneself, the individual....”
[237] Who I Am, and What I Think, Part II., in The Candid Friend, May 18th, 1901.
[238] Compare Does Modern Education Ennoble? by G. Bernard Shaw; in Great Thoughts, October 7th, 1905.
[239] The substance of Shaw's philosophy—as, indeed, he once told me—is embodied in Act III. of Man and Superman.
[240] For the sake of making himself easily understood, Shaw frequently expresses his neo-theological conceptions in the familiar phraseology of orthodox religion. Shaw's practice of personifying God, when in reality he mentally identifies “God” with a mystical and impersonal “Force,” is a practice which many people quite justly condemn.
[241] Cf. Shaw's open letter to G. W. Foote, in The Freethinker, November 1st, 1908.
[242] In this connection it is interesting to read Shaw's review of Samuel Butler's Luck or Cunning? published under the heading “Darwin Denounced,” in the Pall Mall Gazette, May 31st, 1887. At this time, Shaw committed himself neither to Lamarck nor to Butler, but was content to define the issues of the controversy. Certainly his interest was aroused, and years later his support was won, by Butler's protest against natural selection as—to use Butler's own words—“a purely automatic conception of the universe as of something that will work if a penny be dropped into the box.”