But the truth is, of course, that it is not universal at all, and that nothing in the so-called soul of man prompts him to subscribe to it. We cling to it today, not because it is inherent in us, but simply because it is the moral fashion of our age. When the disciples first heard it put into terms, it probably struck them as a revolutionary novelty, and on some dim tomorrow our descendants may regard it as an archaic absurdity. In brief, rules of morality are wholly temporal and temporary, for the good and sufficient reason that there is no "natural morality" in man—and the sentimental rule that the strong shall give of their strength to the weak is no exception. There have been times in the history of the race when few, if any intelligent men subscribed to it, and there are thousands of intelligent men who refuse to subscribe to it today, and no doubt there will come a time when those who are against it will once more greatly outnumber those who are in favor of it. So with all other "eternal laws." Their eternality exists only in the imagination of those who seek to glorify them. Nietzsche himself spent his best years demonstrating this, and we have seen how he set about the task—how he showed that the "good" of one race and age was the "bad" of some other race and age—how the "natural morality" of the Periclean Greeks, for example, differed diametrically from the "natural morality" of the captive Jews. All history bears him out. Mankind is ever revising and abandoning its "inherent" ideas. We say today that the human mind instinctively revolts against cruel punishments, and yet a moment's reflection recalls the fact that the world is, and always has been peopled by millions to whom cruelty, not only to enemies but to the weak in general, seems and has seemed wholly natural and agreeable. We say that man has an "innate" impulse to be fair and just, and yet it is a commonplace observation that multitudes of men, in the midst of our most civilized societies, have little more sense of justice than so many jackals. Therefore, we may safely set aside the argument that a "natural" instinct for sentimental self-sacrifice stands as an impassable barrier to Nietzsche's dionysian philosophy. There is no such barrier. There is no such instinct. It is an idea merely—an idea powerful and persistent, but still mutable and mortal. Certainly, it is absurd to plead it in proof against the one man who did most to establish its mutability.
We come now to the final argument against Nietzsche—the argument, to wit, that, even admitting his criticism of Christian morality to be well-founded, he offers nothing in place of it that would serve the world as well. The principal spokesman of this objection, perhaps, is Paul Elmer More, who sets it forth at some length in his hostile but very ingenious little study of Nietzsche.[6] Mr. More goes back to Locke to show the growth of the two ideas which stand opposed as Socialism and individualism, Christianity and Nietzscheism today. So long, he says, as man believed in revelation, there was no genuine effort to get at the springs of human action, for every impulse that was ratified by the Scriptures was believed to be natural and moral, and every impulse that went counter to the Scriptures was believed to be sinful, even by those who yielded to it habitually. But when that idea was cleared away, there arose a need for something to take its place, and Locke came forward with his theory that the notion of good was founded upon sensations of pleasure and that of bad upon sensations of pain. There followed Hume, with his elaborate effort to prove that sympathy was a source of pleasure, by reason of its grateful tickling of the sense of virtue, and so the new conception of good finally stood erect, with one foot on frank self-interest and the other on sympathy. Mr. More shows how, during the century following, the importance of the second of these factors began to be accentuated, under the influence of Rousseau and his followers, and how, in the end, the first was forgotten almost entirely and there arose a non-Christian sentimentality which was worse, if anything, than the sentimentality of the Beatitudes. In England, France and Germany it colored almost the whole of philosophy, literature and politics. Stray men, true enough, raised their voices against it, but its sweep was irresistible. Its fruits were diverse and memorable—the romantic movement in Germany, humanitarianism in England, the Kantian note in ethics, and, most important of all, Socialism.
That this exaltation of sympathy was imprudent, and that its effects, in our own time, are far from satisfactory, Mr. More is disposed to grant freely. It is perfectly true, as Nietzsche argues, that humanitarianism has been guilty of gross excesses, that there is a "danger that threatens true progress in any system of education and government which makes the advantage of the average rather than the distinguished man its chief object." But Mr. More holds that the danger thus inherent in sympathy is matched by a danger inherent in selfishness, that we are no worse off on one horn of Hume's dual ethic than we should be on the other. Sympathy unbalanced by self-seeking leads us into maudlin futilities and crimes against efficiency; self-seeking unchecked by sympathy would lead us into sheer savagery. If there is any choice between the two, that choice is probably in favor of sympathy, for the reason that it is happily impossible of realization. The most lachrymose of the romantics, in the midst of their sentimentalizing, were yet careful of their own welfare. Many of them, indeed, displayed a quite extraordinary egoism, and there was some justice in Byron's sneer that Sterne, for one, preferred weeping over a dead ass to relieving the want (at cost to himself) of a living mother.
But in urging all this against Nietzsche, Mr. More and the other destructive critics of the superman make a serious error, and that is the error of assuming that Nietzsche hoped to abolish Christian morality completely, that he proposed a unanimous desertion of the idea of sympathy for the idea of intelligent self-seeking. As a matter of fact, he had no such hope and made no such proposal. Nothing was more firmly fixed in his mind, indeed, than the notion that the vast majority of men would cling indefinitely, and perhaps for all time, to some system of morality more or less resembling the Christian morality of today. Not only did he have no expectation of winning that majority from its idols, but he bitterly resented any suggestion that such a result might follow from his work. The whole of his preaching was addressed, not to men in the mass, but to the small minority of exceptional men—not to those who live by obeying, but to those who live by commanding—not to the race as a race, but only to its masters. It would seem to be impossible that any reader of Nietzsche should overlook this important fact, and yet it is constantly overlooked by most of his critics. They proceed to prove, elaborately and, it must be said, quite convincingly, that if his transvaluation of values were made by all men, the world would be no better off than it is today, and perhaps a good deal worse, but all they accomplish thereby is to demolish a hobgoblin of straw. Nietzsche himself sensed the essential value of Hume's dualism. What he sought to do was not to destroy it, but to restore it, and, restoring it, to raise it to a state of active conflict—to dignify self-interest as sympathy has been dignified, and so to put the two in perpetual opposition. He believed that the former was by long odds the safer impulse for the higher castes of men to follow, if only because of its obviously closer kinship to the natural laws which make for progress upward, but by the same token he saw that these higher castes could gain nothing by disturbing the narcotic contentment of the castes lower down. Therefore, he was, to that extent, an actual apologist for the thing he elsewhere so bitterly attacked. Sympathy, self-sacrifice, charity—these ideas lulled and satisfied the chandala, and so he was content to have the chandala hold to them. "Whom do I hate most among the rabble of today? The Socialist who undermines the workingman's instincts, who destroys his satisfaction with his insignificant existence, who makes him envious and teaches him revenge."[7] In brief, Nietzsche dreamed no dream of all mankind converted into a race of supermen: the only vision he saw was one of supermen at the top.
To make an end, his philosophy was wholly aristocratic, in aim as well as in terms. He believed that superior men, by which he meant alert and restless men, were held in chains by the illusions and inertia of the mass—that their impulse to move forward and upward, at whatever cost to those below, was restrained by false notions of duty and responsibility. It was his effort to break down those false notions, to show that the progress of the race was more important than the comfort of the herd, to combat and destroy the lingering spectre of sin—in his own phrase, to make man innocent. But when he said man he always meant the higher man, the man of tomorrow, and not mere men. For the latter he had only contempt: he sneered at their heroes, at their ideals, at their definitions of good and evil. "There are only three ways," he said, "in which the masses appear to me to deserve a glance: first, as blurred copies of their betters, printed on bad paper and from worn-out plates; secondly, as a necessary opposition; and thirdly, as tools. Further than that I hand them over to statistics—and the devil.[8] ... I am writing for a race of men which does not yet exist. I am writing for the lords of the earth."[9]
[1] Author of "Nietzsche et l'Immoralisme" and other books. The argument discussed appears in an article in the International Monthly for March, 1901, pp. 134-165.
[2] In the North American Review for Dec., 1904.
[3] A more extended treatment of this point will be found in "Men vs. the Man," by Robert Rives La Monte and the present author: New York, 1910.
[4] In "The Kingdom of Man," London, 1907.