Mr. Burton flashes his lamp fitfully over a large area, and shows us loitering spots as well as boggy ground it were well to avoid. Opening his book at random, we find here a hint on reading and here a warning gleam over some political or social morass.
When the morass is a deep one, however, we must not expect to sound its depths with a lantern gleam, and so sometimes Mr. Burton disappoints us. Thus in discussing the individual and society he merely tells us what we all know: that we pay for the advantage of sociality, of mutual comfort, and support by the loss of individuality, by the growth of a fear to do the thing that commends itself to our best judgment. But what must we do? Must we fill in this particular morass by throwing in all the individuals? Or will the individuals be able to jump it? Mr. Burton is discreet on such points.
More satisfactory than that essay and others like it are those on literature. Under “Books and Men” the author deplores the tendency which characterized Chaucer (“Farewell my books and my devotion”) of drawing an antithesis between men and books, between literature and life. Literature has its origin in life and its apparent separation from it is an accidental result of the printed book method of spreading what used to be spread by the human voice alone or in chorus.
Illiam Dhone.
About Nietzsche
Nietzsche and Other Exponents of Individualism, by Paul Carus. [The Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago.]
Expositions of Nietzsche are usually written by uncritical disciples with little knowledge of formal philosophy. In so far as Nietzsche was a poet, some of these productions may be of value in spots, but in so far as Nietzsche was an intellectual critic of life they are worthless.
Dr. Carus writes from the standpoint of a philosopher in the most formal sense of that word. To him Nietzsche the thundering voice of protest named Zarathustra is of less importance than Nietzsche the extreme nominalist. The chief value of his work therefore is purely informative. He will certainly not send the philosophic debutante further into the matter.
Even from the purely informative side, however, Dr. Carus’s work is delimited by his own attitude, which is that of the old time believer in the validity of universals. Recurrence, uniformity, eternal norms of things behind the changing phenomena are the foundations of Dr. Carus’s stated or implied world view.
He therefore treats Nietzsche as simply a forerunner of such, to him, mischievous people as William James and Henri Bergson. He takes great pains, indeed, to show that there are many Nietzsches, and among them he classes George Moore, on the strength of extracts from his Confessions of a Young Man. Of more value than that is his consideration of the philosophy of Stirner—mainly because Stirner is not so well known as Nietzsche, nor so well as he deserves to be on his merits.