It should be clearly understood that the significance of Nietzsche for our age is not to be explained by any weighty discovery in the realm of knowledge. Nietzsche's merit consists not in any unriddling of the universe by a metaphysical key to its secrets, but rather in the diffusion of a new intellectual light elucidating human consciousness in regard to the purpose and the end of existence. Nietzsche has no objective truths to teach, indeed he acknowledges no truth other than subjective. Nor does he put any faith in bare logic, but on the contrary pronounces it one of mankind's greatest misfortunes. His argumentation is not sustained and progressive, but desultory, impressionistic, and freely repetitional; slashing aphorism is its most effective tool. And so, in the sense of the schools, he is not a philosopher at all; quite the contrary, an implacable enemy of the métier. And yet the formative and directive influence of his vaticinations, enunciated with tremendous spiritual heat and lofty gesture, has been very great. His conception of life has acted upon the generation as a moral intoxicant of truly incalculable strength.
Withal his published work, amounting to eighteen volumes, though flagrantly irrational, yet does contain a perfectly coherent doctrine. Only, it is a doctrine to whose core mere peripheric groping will never negotiate the approach. Its essence must be caught by flashlike seizure and cannot be conveyed except to minds of more than the average imaginative sensibility. For its central ideas relate to the remotest ultimates, and its dominant prepossession, the Overman, is, in the final reckoning, the creature of a Utopian fancy. To be more precise, Nietzsche extorts from the Darwinian theory of selection a set of amazing connotations by means of the simultaneous shift from the biological to the poetic sphere of thought and from the averagely socialized to an uncompromisingly self-centred attitude of mind. This doubly eccentric position is rendered feasible for him by a whole-souled indifference to exact science and an intense contempt for the practical adjustments of life. He is, first and last, an imaginative schemer, whose visions are engendered by inner exuberance; the propelling power of his philosophy being an intense temperamental enthusiasm at one and the same time lyrically sensitive and dramatically impassioned. It is these qualities of soul that made his utterance ring with the force of a high moral challenge. All the same, he was not any more original in his ethics than in his theory of knowledge. In this field also his receptive mind threw itself wide open to the flow of older influences which it encountered. The religion of personal advantage had had many a prophet before Nietzsche. Among the older writers, Machiavelli was its weightiest champion. In Germany, Nietzsche's immediate predecessor was “Max Stirner,”[(16)] and as regards foreign thinkers, Nietzsche declared as late as 1888 that to no other writer of his own century did he feel himself so closely allied by the ties of congeniality as to Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The most superficial acquaintance with these writers shows that Nietzsche is held responsible for certain revolutionary notions of which he by no means was the originator. Of the connection of his doctrine with the maxims of “The Prince” and of “The Ego and His Own” (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum)[(17)] nothing further need be said than that to them Nietzsche owes, directly or indirectly, the principle of “non-morality.” However, he does not employ the same strictly intellectual methods. They were logicians rather than moralists, and their ruler-man is in the main a construction of cold reasoning, while the ruler-man of Nietzsche is the vision of a genius whose eye looks down a much longer perspective than is accorded to ordinary mortals. That a far greater affinity of temper should have existed between Nietzsche and Emerson than between him and the two classic non-moralists, must bring surprise to the many who have never recognized the Concord Sage as an exponent of unfettered individualism. Yet in fact Emerson goes to such an extreme of individualism that the only thing that has saved his memory from anathema is that he has not many readers in his after-times, and these few do not always venture to understand him. And Emerson, though in a different way from Nietzsche's, was also a rhapsodist. In his poetry, where he articulates his meaning with far greater unrestraint than in his prose, we find without any difficulty full corroboration of his spiritual kinship with Nietzsche. For instance, where may we turn in the works of the latter for a stronger statement of the case of Power versus Pity than is contained in “The World Soul”?
“He serveth the servant,
The brave he loves amain,
He kills the cripple and the sick,
And straight begins again;
For gods delight in gods,
And thrust the weak aside,—