[140]. R. Schmidt, Deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen (1921), vol. II.
[141]. E. Förster-Nietzsche, Das Leben Nietzsches, vol. II, p. 99.
[142]. W. M. Salter in his Nietzsche the Thinker—probably the best and most exact study of Nietzsche’s thought we possess—summarises Nietzsche’s “æsthetic metaphysics,” as he terms it (pp. 46-48), in words which apply almost exactly to Gaultier.
[143]. See especially his book Über den Nervösen Charakter (1912). It has been translated into English.
[144]. Jules de Gaultier, Le Bovarysme, and various other of his works. Georges Palante has lucidly and concisely expounded the idea of Bovarism in a small volume, La Philosophie du Bovarysme (Mercure de France).
[145]. Gaultier has luminously discussed the relations of War, Civilisation, and Art in the Monde Nouveau, August, 1920, and February, 1921.
[146]. These are problems concerning which innocent people might imagine that the wise refrained from speculating, but, as a matter of fact, the various groups of philosophic devotees may be divided into those termed “Idealists” and those termed “Realists,” each assured of the superiority of his own way of viewing thought. Roughly speaking, for the idealist thought means the creation of the world, for the realist its discovery. But here (as in many differences between Tweedledum and Tweedledee for which men have slain one another these thousands of years) there seem to be superiorities on both sides. Each looks at thought in a different aspect. But the idealist could hardly create the world with nothing there to make it from, nor the realist discover it save through creating it afresh. We cannot, so to put it, express in a single formula of three dimensions what only exists as a unity in four dimensions.
[147]. Bertrand Russell, Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916), p. 235.
[148]. I may here be allowed to refer to another discussion of this point, Havelock Ellis, The Philosophy of Conflict, and Other Essays, pp. 57-68.
[149]. I may remark that Plato had long before attributed the same observation to the Pythagorean Timæus in the sublime and amusing dialogue that goes under that name: “Sight in my opinion is the source of the greatest benefit to us, for had we never seen the stars, and the sun, and the heavens, none of the words which we have spoken about the universe would ever have been uttered. But now the sight of day and night, and the months and the revolution of the years, have created Number, and have given us a conception of Time, and the powers of inquiring about the Nature of the Universe, and from this source we have derived philosophy, than which no greater good ever was or will be given by the gods to mortal man.”