George Moore, like Nietzsche, is one of Schopenhauer's disciples who has become sick of pessimism. He says:
"That odious pessimism! How sick I am of it" (p. 310).
When George Moore speaks of God he thinks of him in the old-fashioned way as a big self, an individual and particular being. Hence he denies him. God is as dead as any pagan deity. George Moore says:
"To talk to us, the legitimate children of the nineteenth century, of logical proofs of the existence of God, strikes us in just the same light as the logical proof of the existence of Jupiter Ammon" (p. 137).
George Moore is coarse in comparison with Nietzsche. Nietzsche is no cynic; he is pure-hearted and noble by nature. Moore is voluptuous and vulgar. Both are avowed immoralists, and if the principle of an unrestrained egotism be right, George Moore is as good as Nietzsche, and any criminal given to the most abominable vices would not be worse than either.
Nietzsche feels the decadence of the age and longs for health; but he attributes the cause of his own decadence to the Christian ideals of virtue, love, and sympathy with others. George Moore cherishes the same views; he says:
"We are now in a period of decadence, growing steadily more and more acute" (p. 239).
"Respectability ... continues to exercise a meretricious and enervating influence on literature" (p. 240).
"Pity, that most vile of all vile virtues, has never been known to me. The great pagan world I love knew it not" (p. 200).
"The philanthropist is the Nero of modern times" (p. 185).
Both Nietzsche and Moore long for limitless freedom; but Moore seems more consistent, for he lacks the ideal of the overman and extends freedom to the sex relation, saying:
"Marriage—what an abomination! Love—yes, but not marriage...freedom limitless" (p. 168-169).