The other line of attack, however, is more serious, and penetrates to the very core of the modern moral system with its savage onslaught on Christianity. What is Christianity, says Nietzsche, but the revolt of the slaves in the sphere of morals? Our philosopher's suggestion, of course, that Christianity was a deliberate stratagem on the part of a revengeful Israel to square accounts with the conqueror, has, on the face of it, no claim to serious consideration as anything but a poetic thought. The fact, however, that Christianity from its beginning catered avowedly for the poor, the weak, the oppressed, the inefficient, is admittedly true, whatever disputes may range as to the inferences to be drawn from this fact. And that the accusation of being a slave-morality is something more than empty abuse, is substantiated by the numerous slaves who did, in fact, subscribe to the infant creed. It is, moreover, not without its interest to watch nowadays a recurrence of the same phenomenon. Just, indeed, as at present the proletariate are ipso facto ready to believe, quite apart from any question of any economic justification of the doctrine, in the genuine iniquity of the rich capitalist, so in the early Christian era the proletariate were not reluctant to put their faith in the saying, that, "it was as easy for a camel to go through the eye of a needle as for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven." The difference, however, between modern and ancient Christianity stands out clearly from the fact that though this identical creed is invoked with something approaching equal facility on the sides both of the angels and the devils, it is, on the whole, now identified with the richer and more prosperous classes.
It must, however, be frankly admitted that Nietzsche somewhat overshoots the mark, both in dubbing the history of the world a conflict between the two ideals, of Rome and Judæa, the egoistic and altruistic ideals, and in asseverating that the primitive "beast of prey prowling avidly after booty and victory" was the only type of the human species worthy of admiration, and that the tamed modern species is but a diseased distortion. We will deal later with the lacuna caused in Nietzsche's philosophy by his refusal to recognise the true significance of the Aristotelian doctrine that man is a ζῶον πολιτικον when we show that even from his own standpoint the modern state of man is preferable to the primal. Suffice it for the present to say that, however large a part of the truth Nietzsche captured with this potent theory, there remains a not inconsiderable part which still eluded him.
III
Having endeavoured thus to dispose of the "ethically good" and "ethically bad" by the theory that such ideas are merely distortions of the ideas of "practically good and practically bad," Nietzsche in the second essay of the Genealogy makes a similar effort to take the sting out of the ideas of "Schuld" (guilt, debt), and "schlechtes Gewissen" (bad conscience). But here, again, difficulties beset our revolutionary. He approves of responsibility and the sacredness of the promise, but disapproves of the bad conscience by which the individual would enforce these things on himself. He blesses justice, but damns the social system. We shall find it hard to follow him in his attempted reconciliation of these divergent standpoints. When, for instance, he alludes with almost paternal approbation to the savage mnemonics by which the "conscience" (per se) was produced, and then proceeds to an envenomed, if none the less brilliant polemic against the "bad conscience," we see that in reality it is not so much the existence of a conscience quâ conscience, to which he objects, but the existence of a conscience functioning on what he conceives to be a vicious basis. Indeed, even the most faithful of our prophet's disciples would admit that the Nietzschean teaching lays down as thorny and toilsome a path for the "bold, bad man," or übermensch, as Christianity ever decreed for the good man or weakling. The only difference, in fact, between Nietzschean and Christian ethics is that between excessive self-affirmation and excessive self-negation. But one has only to read Zarathustra to realise immediately that this self-affirmation is no heedless hedonism, but a tense and chronic struggle of the ego against the world, subject to as rigid rules and braving as intense martyrdoms as does the Christian struggle of the spirit against the flesh. We may say, in fact, that on an officially Nietzschean basis the "bad" man who fails in being thoroughly and perfectly bad is, and apparently properly so, subject to as poignant pangs as is the "good" man who fails in being thoroughly and perfectly good.
Granted, however, that it is the content of the bad conscience rather than the existence of a bad conscience per se, which provokes his righteous indignation, let us make some attempt to see how far Nietzsche is logical in condemning, as he does, existing ethics as the bastard child of contract and revenge, thriving amid a civilisation which has no real right to exist. Nietzsche starts off in fine feather to prove that the word "Schuld" (guilt) is the same as the word "Schuld" (debt), as though that momentous piece of philological research crushed all ethics once and for all. We do not for a moment dispute the philology. Moreover, as far as the general principle is concerned, it had been previously pointed out by Maine that all crimes were in their origin torts—that is to say, private wrongs against the individual (though doubts as to how far this theory is to be carried are raised by the universal execration which even in the most primitive societies was visited on murderers like Cain or Orestes).
It may, moreover, be true that in many cases the local god is simply a deceased ancestor promoted to a heavenly status, who requires payment for protecting his descendants. But such arguments can at the best merely have effect on the theological conception of morality as a divine ordinance descending immediately from heaven. From the sociological standpoint, indeed, to derive "ethics" from "contract" is simply to consolidate one phase of the social instinct by deriving it from another. As, however, has been hinted before, it was the theological conception that was Nietzsche's main objective. So long as he could kill that, he was indifferent to the price, if, indeed, his morbidly classic and aristocratic standpoint did not hold that the taint of the bourgeois and the βάναυσος attached automatically to everything commercial.
The shifts, however, to which Nietzsche is driven are well illustrated when we come to that further stage in his evolution of the moral idea, which consists in deriving modern ethics or the "bad conscience" from the principle of "resentment" or "revenge," which is alleged to be a totally distinct thing from the "active feeling" by which Justice enforces its sanctions. But with all due respect to Nietzsche and his official expounders, we find it hard to appreciate any real difference in principle between the various drastic measures by which the social organism enforces its decree. The punishment for murder, we suggest, would be equally death both in a Nietzschean and in a non-Nietzschean state, and how anything more than the merest verbal distinction is achieved by labelling one sanction the "active emotion of justice" and the other "the principle of resentment" we are frankly at a loss to conceive. We can only say that the basing of the "bad conscience" on the spirit of revenge is true in the sense that from one aspect the function of the social organism is to protect the many against the few by the enforcements of drastic punishments against its transgressors. That, moreover, the strong are unduly restricted to pamper the weak is an arguable proposition, how arguable, can be seen from the present volubility of the financially strong when menaced nowadays with taxation for the benefit of the financially weak. But to go to the length of saying that the whole social fabric is a morbid distortion, a thing intrinsically bad, a kind of quasi-theological fall from an ideal state of primitive anarchy, is, at the most charitable estimate, a mere piece of poetic extravagance. Yet to this length Nietzsche goes when he pictures his blonde primæval beast swung into "new situations and conditions of existence"; in other words, into the "pale of society with a spring and rush." The apparent suddenness of the transition strikes us, indeed, as naïf as the philosophy of Rousseau or of Hobbes, who actually conceived the social contract as a specific bargain entered into at a specific time.
One of the most interesting parts, however, of the whole essay is Nietzsche's explanation of the "bad conscience" as the result of the primitive energy of the savage venting itself in psychological self-torture when debarred from its natural outlet of physical violence. "All instincts which do not vent themselves without vent themselves within," so runs the dictum of the prophet, a dictum no doubt of great psychological truth, and capable of concrete illustration when applied to nuns, monks, and other ascetics, or to definite cases of neurotic introspection, but clearly not deserving to be treated as the key to the whole social fabric.
We have already remarked that the real weakness of the Nietzschean philosophy lay in the neglect of the Aristotelian theory that man was a ζῶον πολιτικον or a social animal. Let us resume this line of inquiry. Nietzsche does, it is true, refer to the "herd instinct" of the weak, but only to exhibit his very palpable contempt against the weak who herd together so as to be able effectually to combat the strong. A yet further proof of Nietzsche's bitter hatred of the social organism is supplied by the celebrated phrases in Zarathustra, "as little state as possible," and "the slow suicide which we call the state." In our view, however, the real test of Nietzsche's position is touched when we come to the position of the aristocratic strong man. "Are they," one wonders, "tainted or untainted with the herd instinct?" Nietzsche's answer to this question seems to be that, so far as concerns the vast bulk of the herd, they are inimical to the social instinct, but that none the less they find social organisation (apparently that identical state which we have seen spoken of as "slow suicide") necessary, not only for keeping the herd in proper order, but for the purpose of "their own fight with other complexes of power." Viewed impartially, however, it does not seem to us that Nietzsche pays sufficient importance to the universality and value of the social instinct. Perhaps the root of the whole matter lies in the fact that Nietzsche fixes apparently the human unit as the individual, whereas, in point of fact, it is that state in miniature, the family. The origin of the family may no doubt be found in the primæval instincts of sex and parentship. None the less, it is an indisputed sociological fact that the family, or its larger manifestation the tribe, is, as is evident from the slightest perusal of the works of Darwin, Maine, or Westermarck, the primitive form of human life. It would obviously be outside the scope of this preface to go in detail into the whole question of the origin of society, but it would also appear an indisputable platitude that man, quâ man, thrives by co-operation and association. In economical terminology this truth is known as the division of labour, in sociology by our frequently quoted Aristotelian dictum that man is a social animal. Nietzsche, it is true, tries to evade, or at any rate minimise, the force of this fact by treating law as the concrete exemplification of might is right. This, of course, is true as far as it goes, but it is only one side of the medal. All law is based on sovereignty, and all sovereignty is in the last resort based on force. It is possible, no doubt, for this force, this ultimate sanction to be exercised on approved Nietzschean principles by the few against the many. To quote the words of Ihering, the great Austrian jurist: "And so force, when it allies itself with insight and self-control, produces law. It is the origin of law out of the power of the stronger who stands in opposition to another, of which we now begin to get a glimpse." Yet, even though for the moment we confine ourselves to this aspect, it is obvious that while such a law subjugates the weak to the strong, it also regulates and curtails the rights of the strong among themselves, creating, as it were, a state within a state, or, to use once again the language of Ihering, "the self-limitation of force in its own interest." Equally important, however, is the obverse side of the medal, on which appears the exercise of the ultimate sanction by the many against the few. To quote Ihering for the last time: "The crucial point in the whole organisation of law is the preponderance of the common interests of all over the particular interests of the individuals." The vice, then, of Nietzsche's theory is that he bisects law into its two constituent phases, ignores one phase and confines himself to the other, apparently in blissful oblivion of the fact that even in the most aristocratic of aristocracies there exists, even though in miniature, the "slow suicide of the state."
There is a further criticism which seems to arise properly out of Nietzsche's vehement denunciation of civilisation. The state and civilisation are bad according to Nietzsche, because they take the sting out of this struggle for existence, and cut the fangs of the superman. But, according to Nietzschean principles, are they not equally good in so far as they enable the superman to refine and elaborate his scale of combat? It is, indeed, obvious that the intellectualisation of the blonde beast of primitive times into the newspaper proprietor, American financier, or revolutionary philosopher of modernity would have been impossible but for the intervention of a very highly developed social organism. Yet even the most confirmed Nietzschean would admit that Mr. Rockefeller is, in spite of his evangelistic proclivities, a more highly developed specimen of the superman than Tamerlane, and Lord Northcliffe than, say, Cæsar Borgia.