The other narrative tells how, imprisoned, tortured inwardly by a compulsory recantation, Galileo gathered himself together and declared: “E pu se muove” (“it moves though”). Galileo never uttered these words; but the history of the world has uttered them for him! Yes, it moves itself, this earth, and in its motion it knocks everything down that is in its way. Not the earth alone moves—all that is in the world is eternal motion!
Man moves—in space, and time, extensively and intensively. Truth moves, and, moving, demolishes thrones and altars. Morality moves, making ancient good uncouth. Faith moves, the human heart putting into it the pulse beat of its life, and there is no way to stop this self moving Faith.
Those old stories are not true to fact, but they are true to truth. Galileo did say: “It is my opinion that the earth is very noble and admirable by reason of so many and so different generations and alterations which are incessantly made therein.” And Descartes joined him: “The nature of things physical is much more easily conceived when they are beheld coming gradually into existence, than when they are only considered as produced at once in a finished and perfect state.” Thus these men—and many others—voiced the changed temper that was coming over the world,—the transfer of interest from the permanent to the changing.
Slowly the new attitude was adopted in many departments of knowledge, but the facts of biology were apparently all against its becoming a general philosophical movement. The species of plants and animals had every appearance of being fixed and final, unchangeably stamped once for all upon the sentient world by the Creator. Not only so, but the wonderful adaptation of organism to environment, of organ to organism, a marvelous and delicate complexity of teleological adjustment, seemed to testify unanswerably to the reality of fixed and final types, to a static underpinning for all this changing order.
Origin of Species! That was the bomb with which Charles Darwin destroyed the last stronghold of a static world-view. “Species” is the scholastics’ translation of the Greek Eidos, the fixed and final type or idea which is first and final cause of the changing life of each creature. Species is a synonym and epitome of fixity and finality; it is the key-word of a static other-world reality. When Darwin said, “Origin of Species,” he was cramming the conflict of the ancient wisdom and the modern knowledge into a bursting phrase. When he said of species what Galileo said of the earth, e pu se muove, he emancipated once for all genetic and experimental ideas as an organon of asking questions and looking for explanations. He lifted the biological gates which had kept back the flood of change from inundating the old fields of fixity.
In sum: The world of thought is slowly, painfully making a change in its fundamental attitude toward reality such as is not made oftener than once in several millennia: One general conception of reality was all-controlling for 2,000 years. Then from Copernicus to Darwin many factors in a world-subversive change were struggling for recognition. Conceptions that had reigned in the philosophy of nature and of knowledge for 2,000 years rested in the superiority of the fixed and final: they rested on treating change and origin as signs of defect and unreality. In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency; in treating forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the “origin of species” introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of all our values and verities and virtues.
But heaven and earth and species are not all. Shall there be no Copernicus of the moral heavens, no Galileo of the moral earth, no Darwin of the moral life?
Hove now Friedrich Nietzsche into sight!
Loyalty has ever been the basic virtue, foundation of life and of law. Naturally, in the moral world, the objects to which loyalty shall be related will be objects that are real. But, as we have seen, in the old world, the real was the unchangeable, the immobile, the finished, the final, the absolute. To these, therefore, the old loyalty was directed and dedicated.
Comes now Friedrich Nietzsche, a man in whose name the entire moral revolution of our time has found its most pregnant expression, and declares war upon that old loyalty, and does so in the name of a new culture, a new humanity. To him this loyalty is not only an empty folly; it is more than that—a crime against life, a weakening of human power. To him, not stationariness, but self-changing, is the life task of man. He feels himself akin only to him who changes. Every moment of life has an existence, a right, a content of its own. No present point of time has a right to lay claim, on its own account, to the next point. From what we now will, think, feel, no man may presume to require us to will, think, feel the same way tomorrow. And this preaching of Nietzsche’s on the duty of change as against the old duty to change never has found more ears to listen and more hearts to believe than any other preaching of our time. This new preaching is at once most influential and most dangerous. But its very dangerousness is a most wholesome and necessary part of the modern moral view of life.