This world is not merely the object of science. There are innumerable tendencies which exist and have a right to exist, but they ought not to banish science, scientific enquiry and scientific ideals from the place they hold; for science is the mariners' compass which guides us over the ocean of life, and though the majority of the passengers do not and need not worry about it, science is after all the only means which makes for progress and lifts mankind to higher and higher levels.
If we criticize men like James and Bergson and other philosophers of subjectivism we do it as a defence of the indispensable character of the objectivity of science as well as of philosophy as a science.
James and Bergson were by no means the originators of their method of philosophizing. There have been many sages before them who deemed the spectacles through which they viewed the world to be the most important or even the only significant issue of life's problems. The Ionian physicists were outdone by the sophists, and in modern times Friedrich Nietzsche expressed the most sovereign contempt for science.
Among all the philosophies of modern times there is perhaps none which in its inmost principle is more thoroughly opposed to our own than Nietzsche's, and yet there are some points of mutual contact which are well worth pointing out. The problem which is at the basis of Nietzsche's thought is the same as in our philosophy, but our solution is radically different from his.
Friedrich Nietzsche is a philosopher who astonishes his readers by the boldness with which he rebels against every tradition, tearing down the holiest and dearest things, preaching destruction of all rule, and looking with disdain upon the heap of ruins in which his revolutionary thoughts would leave the world.
For more than a century Germany has been the storm-center of philosophical thought. The commotions that started in the Fatherland reached other countries, France, England, and the United States, after they had lost their force at home. Kant's transcendentalism and Hegel's phenomenalism began to flourish among the English-speaking races after having become almost extinct in the home of their founders. Prof. R. M. Wenley of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich., expresses this truth with his native Scotch wit in the statement which I do not hesitate to endorse, that "German professors when they die go to Oxford," and we may add that from Oxford they travel west to settle for a while in Concord, Boston, Washington, or other American cities.
Hegelianism had scarcely died out in the United States when Schopenhauer and Nietzsche began to become fashionable. The influence of the former has been felt in a quiet way for some time while the Nietzsche movement is of more recent date and also of a more violent character.
Nietzsche represents a type of most modern date. His was a genius after the heart of Lombroso. He was eccentric and atypical.
Lombroso's psychology is an outgrowth of nominalism which does not recognize an objective norm for truth, health, reason, or normality of any kind, and regards the average as the sole method of finding a norm. If, however, the average type is the standard of measurement, the unusually excellent specimens, being rare in number, must be classed together with all other deviations from the average, and thus a genius is regarded as abnormal as much as a criminal—a theory which has found many admirers in this age that is sicklied over with agnosticism, the modern offshoot of nominalism. The truth is that true genius (not the pseudo-genius of erratic minds, not the would-be genius of those who make a failure of life) is uncommonly normal—I had almost said "abnormally normal."
A perfect crystal is rare; so the perfectly normal man is an exception; yet for all that he is a better representative of the ideal of his type than the average.