CHAPTER II
PLATO: PHILOSOPHY AS POLITICS

I
The Man and the Artist

WHY do we love Plato? Perhaps because Plato himself was a lover: lover of comrades, lover of the sweet intoxication of dialectical revelry, full of passion for the elusive reality behind thoughts and things. We love him for his unstinted energy, for the wildly nomadic play of his fancy, for the joy which he found in life in all its unredeemed and adventurous complexity. We love him because he was alive every minute of his life, and never ceased to grow; such a man can be loved even for the errors he has made. But above all we love him because of his high passion for social reconstruction through intelligent control; because he retained throughout his eighty years that zeal for human improvement which is for most of us the passing luxury of youth; because he conceived philosophy as an instrument not merely for the interpretation, but for the remoulding, of the world. He speaks of himself, through Socrates, as “almost the only Athenian living who sets his hand to the true art of politics; I am the only politician of my time.”[17] Philosophy was for him a study of human possibilities in the light of human realities and limitations; his daily food consisted of the problems of human relations and endeavors: problems of liberty versus order; of sex relations and the family; of ideals of character and citizenship, and the educational approaches to those ideals; problems of the control of population, of heredity and environment, of art and morals. With all his liking for the poetry of mysticism, philosophy none the less was to him preËminently an adventure in this world; and unlike ourselves, who follow one or another of his many leads, he sailed virginal seas. Every reader in every age has called him modern; but what age can there be to which Plato will not still be modern?

Plato was twenty-eight when Socrates died;[18] and though he was not present at the drinking of the hemlock, yet the passing of the master must have been a tragic blow to him. It brought him face to face with death, the mother of metaphysics. Proudest of all philosophers, he did not hide his sense of debt to Socrates: “I thank the gods,” he said, “that I was born freeman, not slave; Greek, not barbarian; man, not woman; but above all that I was born in the time of Socrates.” The old philosopher gone, Athens became for a time intolerable to Plato (some say, Plato to Athens); and the young philosopher sailed off to see foreign shores and take nourishment of other cultures. He liked the peaceful orderliness and aged dignity with which a long dominant priesthood had invested Egypt; beside this mellow civilization, he was willing to be told, the culture of his native Athens was but a precarious ethnological sport. He liked the Pythagoreans of southern Italy, with their aristocratic approach to the problem of social construction and their communal devotion to plain living and high thinking; above all he liked their emphasis on harmony as the fundamental pervasive relation of all things and as the ideal in which our human discords might be made to resolve themselves had men artistry enough. Other lands he saw and learnt from: stories tell how he risked his handsome head to build an ideal state in Syracuse; how he was sold into slavery and redeemed by a friend; and how he passed down through Palestine even to India, absorbing the culture of their peoples with a kind of osmotic genius. And at last, after twelve years of wandering, he heard again the call of Athens, and went home, stored with experience and ripe with thought.

Arrived now at the mid-point of his life, he turned to the task of self-expression. Should he join one of the political parties and try to make the government of Athens a picture of his thought? Perhaps he felt that his thought was not yet definite enough for that; politics requires answers in Yes or No, and philosophy deals only in Yes-and-No. He hesitated to join a party or pledge himself to a dogma; and was prepared to be hated by all parties alike for this hesitation.[19] Aristocracy was in his blood, and he would not stoop to conquer by a plebiscite. He thought of turning to the stage, as Euripides had done, and teaching through the mask; in his youth he had written plays, and smiled now to think how he had hoped to rival Aristophanes. But there were too many limitations here, of religious subject and dramatic form; Plato’s philosophy was a thing of ever broadening borders, and could not be cramped into a ceremony. But neither was his philosophy an arid academic affair, to be written down as one places in order the bones of a skeleton; it was vibrantly alive, it was itself a drama and a religion. Why should there not be a drama of idea as well as of action?—Had not the play of thought its tragedies and comedies?—Was not philosophy, after all, a matter of life and death?

In such a juncture of desires came that fusion of drama and philosophy which we know as Plato’s dialogues,—assuredly the finest production in all the history of philosophy. Here was just the instrument for a man whose thought had not congealed into dogmas and a system. All genius is heterogeneous; a great man is a sum of many men;—let the soul give its selves a voice, and it will speak in dialogue.[20] Just instrument, too, for a man who wished to play with the varied possibilities of speculation, who cared to clarify his own mind rather than to give forth finalities where life itself was so blind and inconclusive. A conclusion is too often but the point at which thought has lost its wind; being not so much a solution of the problem as a dissolution of thought. Hence the riotous play of the imagination in Plato; lively game of trial and error, merry-go-round of thought; here is imagery squandered with lordly abandon; here is humor such as one misses in our ponderous modern philosophers; here is no system but all systems;[21] here is one abounding fountain-head of European thought; here is prose strong and beautiful as the great temples where Greek joy disported itself in marble; here literary prose is born,—and born adult.

II
How to Solve the Social Problem

TO understand Plato one must remember the Pythagorean motif: harmony is the heart of Plato’s metaphysics, of his psychological and educational theory, of his ethics and his politics. To feel such harmony as there is, and to make such harmony as may be,—that to Plato is the meaning of philosophy.

We observe this at the outset in the more-mystified-than mystifying theory of ideas. Obviously, the theory of ideas belongs to Socrates; the Platonic element is a theory not of ideas so much as of ideals. Socrates wants truth, but Plato wants beauty, harmony. Socrates is bent on argument, and points you to a concept; Plato is a poet with a vision, and points you to the picture that he sees. Understanding, says Plato, is of the earth earthly; but poetic vision is divine.[22] Hence the maze of quibbling in the dialogues; it is Plato and not Socrates who is culprit here. Reasoning was an alien art to Plato; try as he might to become a mathematician he remained always a poet,—and perhaps most so when he dealt with numbers. Dialectic was in Plato’s day a recent invention; he plays with it like a youth in the breakers, letting it now raise him to heights of ecstatic vision and now bury him in the deadliest logic-chopping. But—let us not doubt it—he knows when he is logic-chopping; he goes on, partly that he may paint his picture, partly for the mere joy of parrying pros and cons; this new game, he feels, is a sport for the gods.

Let us smile at the heavy seriousness of those who suppose that this man meant everything he said. No one does, but least of all men Plato, who hardly taught except in parables. What is the “heaven” of the ideas but a poet’s way of saying that the constancies observable in the relations among things are not identical with the things themselves, but have a reality and permanence of their own? So we phrase it in our own distinguished verbiage; but Plato prefers, as ever, to draw a picture. And notice, in this picture, the ever present reference to social needs. What is a concept, after all, but a scheme for the conservation of mental resources, an instrument of prediction, a method of control? Without the power to form concepts we could never turn experience to use, it would slip between our fingers; we should be like the maidens condemned to carry water in a sieve. The idea of anything is the sum of its observed constancies of behavior; hence the medium of our adaptation and control. To have ideas of things is to know the map or plan of things; it is to see tendencies, directions, and results; it is to know how to use things. That is why knowledge is power; every idea is a tool with which to bend the world to serve our will. And that too is why the Ideas are real: they have power, and “anything which possesses any sort of power is real.”[23]

All this, as was said, is but an embellishment of the Socratic doctrine that salvation lies in brains. But Plato rushes on. Not only may everything be brought under a concept, an Idea, but it may be brought under a perfect Form, an Ideal. Things are not what they might be. Men are not such as men might be, states are often sorry states, beds might be more ideal beds, even dirt could be more perfectly dirt. To all things that are, there correspond perfect Ideals of what they might be, in a thoroughly harmonious world. To say that these Ideals are real, that they exist, is only to claim for them that they are operative, and get results. Whether his supernaturalism was only part of his political theory, others may dispute; let it suffice us at present that Plato believed that the Ideals could and did operate through human agency. The distinctive thing about man is that perceiving the thing that is, he can conceive the thing that might be. He is the forward-looking, ideal-making animal; through him, if he but will it, proceeds creation. The brute may be a thinker, but man may be also an artist. Out of the abundance of the sexual instinct (as Plato implies in the Symposium) emerges this ideal-seeking and -making quality; from which come art and ethics and religion. William Morris looks at a slum and conceives Utopia; and forthwith begins to make for Utopia even though the road lead him through a jail. Is it that William Morris loves “humanity”? Not at all; he loves beauty and his dream; he is uncomfortable with all this dirt and despair before him; it is his fortune or misfortune that he cannot see these slums without falling thrall to a vision of better things. So with most of us “reformers”: we wish to change things, not because we love our fellows much more than “conservatives” do, nor because we believe that happiness varies with income; but because we hear the call of the beautiful, and see in the mind’s eye another form wherein the world might come more pleasingly to sight.

What we have to do, says Plato, is to make people conceive a better world, so that they may see this world as ugly, and may strive to reshape it. We must conceive the perfect Forms of things, and batter this poor world till it reform itself and take these perfect shapes. To learn to see—and seeing learn to make—these perfect Forms: that is the task of philosophers. To make philosophers: that is the social problem.

III
On Making Philosopher-Kings

IT is simple, isn’t it? Give us enough philosophers, and the beautiful city will walk out of the picture into the fact. But how make philosophers? And perhaps there is a perfect Form for philosophers, too? How shall we “see—and seeing learn to make”—the perfect philosopher?

Let us not worry about this little matter of dialectics, says Plato; we know quite well some of the things we must do in order that we may have more and greater philosophers. It is quite clear that one thing we must do is to give our best brains to education.

Is that trite? Not at all. Do we give our best brains to education? Do we offer more to our ministers or commissioners of education than to our presidents, or governors, or mayors, or bank presidents, or pugilists? Or do we honor them more? When Plato says that the office of minister of education is “of all the great offices of state the greatest,” and that the citizens should elect their very best man to this office,[24] he is not pronouncing a platitude, he is making a radical, a revolutionary proposition. It has never been done, and it will not soon be done; for men, naturally enough, are more interested in making money than in making philosophers. And yet, says Plato, gently but resolutely, we may as well understand that until we give our best brains to the problem of making philosophers our much-ado about social ills will amount to noise and wind, and nothing more. “How charming people are!” he writes, drawing an analogy between the individual and the body politic; “they are always doctoring—and thereby increasing and complicating—their disorders, fancying they will be cured by some nostrum which somebody advises them to try,—never getting better but always growing worse.... Are they not as good as a play, trying their hand at legislation, and imagining that by reforms they will make an end to the dishonesties and rascalities of mankind, not knowing that they are in reality cutting away at the heads of a hydra?”[25]

Notice that the aim of the educational process is, for Plato, not so much the general spread of intelligence as the discovery and development of the superior man. (This conception of the task of the educator appears again and again in later thought: we hear it in the nineteenth century, for example, in Carlyle’s “hero,” Schopenhauer’s “genius,” and Nietzsche’s “superman.”) It is very naÏve, thinks Plato, to look to the masses as the source and hope of social improvement; the proper function of the masses is to toil as cheerfully as may be for the development and support of the genius who will make them happy—so far as they are capable of happiness. To aim directly at the elevation of all is to open the door to mediocrity and futility; to find and nurse the potential genius,—that is an end worthy the educator’s subtle art.

Now if you are going to discover genius in the bud you must above all things handle your material, at the outset at least, with tender care. You must not overflow with prohibitions, or indulge yourself too much in the luxury of punishments. “Mother and father and nurse and tutor set to quarrelling about the improvement of the child as soon as ever he is able to understand them: he cannot say or do anything without their setting forth to him that this is just and that unjust, this honorable and that dishonorable, this holy and that unholy, do this and don’t do that. And if he obeys, well and good; if not he is straightened by threats and blows, like a piece of warped wood.”[26] Suppress here, and you get expression there;—often enough, abnormal expression. Better have no hard mould of uniformity and conformity wherein to crush and deform each differently aspiring soul. Think twice before forcing your ’isms and ’ologies upon the child; his own desires will be your best curriculum. “The elements of instruction,” writes Plato, in a too-little-noticed passage, “should be presented to the mind in childhood, but without any notion of forcing them. For a freeman ought to be a freeman in the acquisition of knowledge. Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be a sort of amusement; that will better enable you to find out the natural bent.”[27] There is a stroke of Plato’s genius here: it is a point which we laggards are coming to after some two thousand three hundred years. “To find out the natural bent,” to catch the spark of divine fire before conformity can put it out; that is the beginning and yet the summit of the educator’s task,—the initium dimidium facti.

In this search for genius all souls shall be tried. Education must be universal and compulsory; children belong not to parents but to the state and to the future.[28] And education cannot begin too early. Cleinias, asking whether education should begin at birth, is astonished to be answered, “No, before”; and if Plato could have his way, no doubt there would be a realization of Dr. Holmes’ suggestion that a man’s education should begin two thousand years before he is born. The chief concern at the outset will be to develop the body, and not to fill the soul with letters; let the child be taught his letters at ten, but not before.[29] Music will share with gymnastics the task of rounded development. The boy who tells his teacher that the athletic field is as important and necessary a part of education as the lecture-room is right. “How shall we find a gentle nature which has also great courage?”[30] Music mixed with athletics will do it. “I am quite aware that your mere athlete becomes too much of a savage, and that the musician is melted and softened beyond what is good for him.”[31] There is a determination here that even the genius shall be healthy; Plato will not tolerate the notion that to be a genius one needs to be sick: let the genius have his say, but let him, too, be reminded that he is no disembodied spirit. And let art take care lest its vaunted purgation be a purgation of our strength and manhood; poetry and soft music may make men slaves. No man shall bother with music after the age of sixteen.[32]

At twenty a general test will weed out those who give indication that further educative labor will be wasted on them; the others will go on for another decade, and a second test will eliminate those who will in the meantime have reached the limit of their capacities for development. The final survivors will then—and not before—be introduced to philosophy. “They must not be allowed to taste the dear delight too early; that is a thing especially to be avoided; for young men, as you may have observed, when they first get the taste in their mouths, argue for amusement, and are always contradicting and refuting, like puppy-dogs that delight to tear and pull at all who come near them.... And when they have made many conquests and received defeats at the hands of many, they violently and speedily get into a way of not believing anything that they believed before, and hence not only they, but philosophy generally, have a bad name with the rest of the world.”[33]

Five happy years are given to the study of philosophy. Gradually, the student learns to see the universal behind the particular, to judge the part by relating it to the whole; the fragments of his experience fall into a harmonious philosophy of life. The sciences which he has learned are now united as a consistent application of intelligence to life; indeed, the faculty of uniting the sciences and focussing them on the central problems of life, is precisely the criterion of the true philosopher.[34] But involved in this is a certain practical quality, a sense for realities and limitations. One must study books—and men; one should read much, but live more. So Plato legislates that his new philosophers shall spend the years from thirty-five to fifty in the busy din of practical life; they must, in his immortal image, go back into the cave. The purpose of higher education is to detach us for a time from the life of action, but only so that we may later return to it with a better perspective. To be put for a goodly time upon one’s own resources, to butter one’s own bread for a while,—that is an almost indispensable prerequisite to greatness. Out of such a test men come with the scars of many wounds; but to those who are not fools every scar is the mark of a lesson learned.

And now here are our philosophers, ripe and fifty, hardened by the tests of learning and of life. What shall we do with them? Put them away in a lecture-room and pay no further attention to them? Give them, as their life-work, the problem of finding how Spinoza deduces, or fails to deduce, the Many from the One? Have them fill learned esoteric journals with unintelligible jargon about the finite and the infinite, or space and time, or the immateriality of roast beef? No, says Plato; let them govern the state.

Did Plato mean it? Was he so enraged at the state-murder of the most beloved of philosophers that he forearmed himself against such a contretemps in his Utopia by making the philosophers supreme?—Was it only his magnificent journalistic revenge? Was it merely his reaction to the observed cramping and mediocritization of superior intellects in a democracy? Was it but Plato’s dramatic way of emphasizing the Socratic plea for intelligence as the basis of morals and social life? Perhaps all this; but much more. It was his sober judgment; it was the influence of the Egyptian priesthood and the Pythagorean brotherhood coming to the surface in him; it was the long-accumulated deposit of the stream of his personal experience.

We have to remember here that by philosopher Plato does not mean Immanuel Kant. He means a living being, a man like Seneca or Francis Bacon, a man in whom knowledge is fused with action, and keen perception joins with steady hand; a man who has had not only the teaching of books but the discipline of hard experience; a man who has learned with equal readiness to obey and to command; a man whose thought is coÖrdinated by application to the vital problems of human society. “Inasmuch as philosophers alone are able to grasp the eternal and unchangeable, and those who wander in the region of the many and variable are not philosophers, I must ask you which of the two kinds should be rulers of our state?”[35] Well, then, “Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, ... cities will never cease from ill, nor the human race.”[36]

That, of course, is the heart and soul of Plato.

IV
Dishonest Democracy

LET us get back to the circumference and approach this same point by another route.

I grant you, says Plato, that to have rulers at all is very disagreeable. And indeed we should not need to have them were it not for a regrettable but real porcine element in us. My own Utopia is not an aristocracy nor a democracy, nor any kind of an ’ocracy; it is what some of you would call an anarchist communism. I have described it very clearly in the second book of my Republic, but nobody cares to notice it, except to repeat my brother’s gibe about it.[37] But instead of this Utopia of mine being a “City of Pigs,” it is just because we are pigs that I had to give up painting this picture and turn to describing “not only a state, but a luxurious state.” I am still “of opinion that the true state, which may be said to be a healthy constitution, is the one which I have described,” and not the “inflamed constitution” to which I devoted the rest of my book, and which in my opinion is much more a “City of Pigs” than the other. It is because people want “to lie on sofas, and dine off tables, and have dainties and dessert in the modern fashion, ... and perfumes, and incense, and courtesans, and cakes, and gold, and ivory, ... hunters and actors, ... musicians, players, dancers, ... tutors, ... servants ... nurses wet and dry, ... barbers, confectioners and cooks, ... and hosts of animals (if people are to eat animals), ... and physicians; ... then a slice of neighbor’s land ... and then war,”[38]—in short, it is because people are pigs that you must have soldiers and rulers and laws.

But if you must have them, why not train your best men for the work, just as you train some to be doctors, and others to be lawyers, and others to be engineers? Think of taking a man’s pills just because he can show a count of noses in his favor! Think of letting a man build the world’s greatest bridge because he is popular! You accuse me of plagiarizing from Pythagoras, but in truth, you who believe in democracy are the Pythagoreans of politics,—you believe in number as your god. Your equality is the equality of the unequal, and is all a matter of words and never of reality; your liberty is anarchy, it is the congenital sickness wherein your democracy was conceived and delivered, and whereof it inevitably dies; your freedom of speech is a license to lie; your elections are a contest in flattery and prevarication. Your democracy is a theatrocracy; and woe to the genius who falls into your hands. Perhaps you like democracy because you are like democracy: all your desires are on a level; that you should respect some of them and discipline others is an idea that never enters your heads. It has never occurred to you that it takes more time and training to make a statesman than it does to make a bootblack. But statesmanship is something that can never be conferred by plebiscite; it must be pursued through the years, and must find the privilege of office without submitting to a vote. Wisdom is too subtle a thing to be felt by the coarsened senses of the mob. Your industry is wonderful because it is shot through with specialization and training; but because you reject specialization and training in filling the offices of your government the word politics has become dishonored in your mouths. And just because you will let any one be your leader no real man ever submits himself to your choice.

V
Culture and Slavery

THERE is much exaggeration here, of course, as might be expected of one whose material and social concerns were bound up with the oligarchical party at Athens, whose friends and relatives had died in battle against the armies of the democracy; whose early years had seen the democratic mismanagement of the Peloponnesian war and the growth of a disorderly individualism in Athens. But there are also lessons here for those who are strong enough to learn even from their enemies.[39] To press home these lessons at this point would take us too far afield; our plan for the moment is to follow Plato’s guidance until he has led us out into a clear view of his position.

We shall suppose such a scheme of education as Plato desires; we shall suppose that a moderate number of those who entered the lists at birth have survived test after test, have “tasted the dear delight” of philosophy for five years, and have passed safely through the ordeal of practical affairs; these men (and women, as we shall see) now automatically become the rulers of the Platonic state: let us observe them in their work and in their lives.

To the guardians it is a matter of first principles that the function of the state—and therefore their function—is a positive function; they are to lead the people, and not merely to serve as an umpire of disputes. They are the protagonists of a social evolution that has at last become conscious; they are resolved that henceforth social organization shall be a far-seeing plan and not a haphazard flux of expediencies of control. They know that they are asked to be experts in foresight and coÖrdination; they will legislate accordingly, and will no more think of asking the people what laws should be passed than a physician would ask the people what measures should be taken to preserve the public health.

And first of all they will control population; they will consider this to be the indispensable prerequisite to a planned development. The state must not be larger than is consistent with unity and with the efficacy of central control. People may mate as they will,—that is their own concern; but they must understand quite clearly that procreation is an affair of the state. Children must be born not of love but of science; marriage will be a temporary relation, allowing frequent remating for the sake of beautiful offspring. Men shall not have children before thirty, nor after forty. Deformed or incurably diseased children will be exposed to die. Children must leave their mothers at birth, and be brought up by the state. Women must be freed from bondage to their children, if women are to be real citizens, interested in the public weal, and loving not a narrow family but the great community.

For women are to be citizens; it would be foolish to let half the people be withdrawn from interest in and service to the state. Women will receive all the educational advantages offered to men; they will even wrestle with them, naked, in the games. If any of them—and surely some of them will—pass all the tests, they shall be guardians, too. People are to be divided, for political purposes, not by difference of sex, but by difference of capacity. Some women may be fit not for housekeeping but for ruling,—let them rule; some men may be fit not for ruling but for housekeeping,—let them keep house.

Without family, and without clearly ascertainable relationship between any man and any child, there can be no individual inheritance of property; the guardians will have all things in common, and without Tertullian’s exception.[40] Shut off from the possibility of personal bequests or of “founding a family,” the guardians will have no stimulus to laying up a hoard of material goods; nay, they will not be moved to such hoarding by fear of the morrow, for a modest but sufficient maintenance will be supplied them by the working classes. There will be no money in use among them; they will live a hard simple life, devoted to the problems of communal defence and development. Freed from family ties, from private property and luxury, from violence and litigation, and all distinctions of Mine and Thine, they will have no reason to oppress the workers in order to lay up stores for themselves; they will be happy in the exercise of their high responsibilities and powers. They will not be tempted to legislate for the good of their own class rather than for the good of the community; their joy will lie in the creation of a prosperous and harmonious state.

Under their direction will be the soldiers, also specially selected and trained, and supported by the workers. But these workers?

They will be those who have been eliminated in the tests. The demands of specialization will have condemned them to labor for those who have the gift of guidance. They shall have no voice in the direction of the state; that, as said, is a reward for demonstrated capacity, and not a “natural right.”[41] Frankly, there are some people who are not fit to be other than slaves; and to varnish that fact with oratory about “the dignity of labor” is merely to give an instance of the indignities to which a democratic politician will descend. These workers are incapable of a subtler happiness than that of knowing that they are doing what they are fit to do, and are contributing to the maintenance of communal prosperity. Such as they are, these workers, like the other members of the state, will find their highest possibilities of development in such an organized society. And to make sure that they will not rebel, they will have been taught by “royal lies” that their position and function in the state have been ordained by the gods. There is no sense in shivering at this quite judicious juggling with the facts; there are times when truth is a barrier to content, and must be set aside. Physicians have been known to cure ailments with a timely lie. Labor stimulated by such deception may be slavery, if you wish to call it so; but it is the inevitable condition of order, and order is the inevitable condition of culture and communal success.

VI
Plasticity and Order

BUT is it just?—some one asks. Perhaps there are other things than order to be considered. Perhaps this hunger for order is a disease, like the monistic hunger for unity; perhaps it is a corollary to the À priori type of mind; perhaps it is part of the philosopher’s general inability to face a possibly irrational reality. Here for order’s sake the greater part of the people must work in silence: they shall not utter their desires. Here for order’s sake are sacrificed that communal plasticity, that freedom of variety, that happy looseness and changeability of structure, in which lie all the suggestion and potency of social reconstruction. If there is any lesson which shines out through all the kaleidoscope of history, it is that a political system is doomed to early death if its charter offer no provision and facility for its own reform. Plasticity is king. Human ideals change, and leave nations, institutions, even gods, in their wake. “Law and order in a state are” not “the cause of every good”;[42] they are the security of goods attained, but they may be also the hindrance of goods conceived. A state without freedom of criticism and variation is like a sail-boat in a calm; it stands but it cannot move. Such a state is a geometrical diagram, a perfect syllogism evolved out of impossible premises; and its own perfection is its refutation. In such a state there could be no Plato, with a penchant for conceiving Utopias; much less a Socrates, holding that a life uncriticised is unworthy of a man. It would be a state not for philosophers but for priests: very truly its basis would not be dialectical clarity but royal lies. Here is the supreme pessimism, the ultimate atheism, of the aristocrat, that he does not believe in the final wholesomeness of truth. And surely something can be said for democracy. Granted that democracy is not a problem solved but a problem added; it is at least a problem that time may help to clarify. Granted that men used to slavery cannot turn and wisely rule themselves; what is better than that they should, by inevitable trial and error, learn? Errando discimus. Granted that physicians do not consult us in their prescriptions; but neither do they come to us before they are chosen and called. “That the guardian should require another guardian to guard him is ridiculous indeed.”[43] But he would! Power corrupts unless it is shared by all. “Cities cannot exist, if a few only share in the virtues, as in the arts.”[44] To build your culture on the backs of slaves is to found your city on Vesuvius. Men will not be lied to forever,—at least with the same lies! And to end with such a Utopia,—what is it but to yield to Thrasymachus, to arrange all things at last in the interest of the stronger? Is it just?

VII
The Meaning of Justice

BUT what is justice?—asks Plato. Don’t you see that our notion of justice is the very crux of the whole business? Is justice merely a matter of telling the truth? Nonsense; it may be well to have our children believe that; but those who are not children know that if a lie is a better instrument of achievement than the truth in some given juncture of events, then a lie is justified. Truth is a social value, and has its justification only in that; if untruth prove here and there of social value, then untruth is just.[45] The confusion of justice with some absolute eternal law comes of a separation of ethics from politics, and an attempt to arrive at a definition of justice from the study of individuals. But morals grow out of politics; justice is essentially a political relation. And taking the state as a whole, it is clear that nothing is “good” unless it works; that it would be absurd to say that justice demands of a state that it should be ordered in such a way as to make for its own decay. Social organization must be effective, and lies and class-divisions are justified if they make for the effectiveness of a political order. Surely social effectiveness forbids that men fit to legislate should live out their lives as cobblers, or that men should rule whose natural aptitude is for digging ditches. Justice means, for politics at least, that each member of society is minding his natural business, is doing that for which he is fitted by his own natural capacity. Injustice is the encroachment of one part on another; justice is the efficient functioning of each part. Justice, then, is social coÖrdination and harmony. It is not “the interest of the stronger,” it is the harmony of the whole. So in the individual, justice is the harmonious operation of a unified personality; each element in one’s nature doing that which it is fitted to do; again it is not mere strength or forcefulness, but harmonious, organized strength; it is effective order. And effective order demands a class division. You may mouth as you please the delusive delicacies of democracy; but classes you will have, for men will always be some of gold and some of silver and some of brass. And the brass must not pass itself off as silver, nor the silver as gold. Give the brass all the time and opportunity in the world, and it will still be brass. Of course brass will not believe that it is brass, but we had better make it understand once for all that it is so, even if we have to tell a thousand lies to get the truth believed.

And as for variation and plasticity, remember that these too are valueless except as they make for a better society. They assuredly make for change; but change is not betterment. History is a chaos of variations; without some organ for their control they cancel one another and terminate inevitably in futility. Our problem is not how to change, but how to set our best brains to controlling change for the sake of a finer life.

VIII
The Future of Plato

THERE are aperÇus here, and a bewildering wealth of suggestions, which one is tempted to pursue to their ultimate present significance. But to do that would be to encroach too much on the subjects of later chapters. The vital thing here is not to accept or refute any special element in Plato’s political philosophy; it is rather to see how inextricably politics and philosophy were bound together in his mind as two sides of fundamentally one endeavor. Here is the passion to remould things; here is the seeing of perfection and the will to make perfection; here speaks out for the first time in European history the courage of the intellect that not only will perceive but will remake. Here is a man; no dead academic cobweb-weaver, but a masterful, kingly soul, mixed up in warm intimacy with the complex flow of the life about him. He paints Utopia; but at the same time he takes his own counsel anent the importance of an educational approach to the social problem, and founds the most famous and influential university the world has ever seen. Picture him in the gardens and lecture-halls of his Academy, arranging and supervising and coÖrdinating, and turning out men to whom nations looked—and not in vain—for statesmen. Not merely to lift men up to the beatific vision of unities and perfections, but to teach them the art of creation, to fire them with the ardor of a new artistry; this he aimed to do, and did. “The greatest works grow in importance, as trees do after the death of the mortal men who planted them.”[46] So grew the Republic, and the Academy.

To catch in a chapter the deep yet subtle spirit and meaning of this “finest product of antiquity,”[47]—it is not easy. In Plato’s Utopia there would no doubt have been a law against writing so briefly on so vast a phenomenon,—with, in this case, the inevitably consequent derangement of the Platonic perspective, and the impossibility, within such compass, of focussing Plato in the political and philosophical meaning of his time. One’s feeling here is of having desecrated with small talk the Parthenon of philosophy. Perhaps as we go on we shall be able to see more clearly the still-living value of Plato’s thought: in almost everything that we shall hereinafter discuss his voice will be heard, even though unnamed. To-day, at last, he comes again into his own—as in Renaissance days—after centuries dominated by the influence of his first misinterpreter; and generations bred on the throned lukewarmness of the Nicomachean Ethics yield to a generation that is learning to feel the hot constructive passion of the Republic. Dead these two thousand and some hundred years, Plato belongs to the future.

CHAPTER III
FRANCIS BACON AND THE SOCIAL POSSIBILITIES OF SCIENCE

I
From Plato to Bacon

“As I read Plato,” writes Professor Dewey, “philosophy began with some sense of its essentially political basis and mission—a recognition that its problems were those of the organization of a just social order. But it soon got lost in dreams of another world.”[48] Plato and Aristotle are the crura cerebri of Europe. But in Aristotle, along with a wealth of acute observation of men and institutions, we find a diminishing interest in reconstruction; the Stagirite spent too much of his time in card-cataloguing Plato, and allowed his imagination to become suffocated with logic. With the Stoics and Epicureans begin that alienation of ethics from politics, and that subordination of philosophy to religious needs, which it is part of the task of present thinking to undo. Alexander had conquered the Orient, only to have Orientalism conquer Greece. Under Scholasticism it was the fate of great minds to retrace worn paths in the cage of a system of conclusions determined by external authority; and the obligation to uphold the established precluded any practical recognition of the reconstructive function of thought. With the Renaissance—that Indian summer of Greek culture—the dream of a remoulded world found voice again. Campanella, through the darkness of his prison cell, achieved the vision of a communist utopia; and other students of the rediscovered Plato painted similar pictures. Indeed this reawakening of Plato’s influence gave to the men of the Renaissance an inspiriting sense of the wonders that lay potential in organized intelligence. Again men faced the task of replacing with a natural ethic the falling authoritarian sanctions of supernatural religion; and for a time one might have hoped that the thought of Socrates was to find at last its due fruition. But again men lost themselves in the notion of a cultured class moving leisurely over the backs of slaves; and perhaps it was well that the whole movement was halted by the more Puritan but also more democratic outburst of the Reformation. What the world needed was a method which offered hope for the redemption not of a class, but of all. Galileo and Roger Bacon opened the way to meeting this need by their emphasis on the value of hypothesis and experiment, and the necessity of combining induction with deduction; it remained for Francis Bacon to lay out the road for the organized employment of these new methods, and to inspire all Europe with his warm vision of their social possibilities.

II
Character

IF you would understand Bacon, you must see him as not so much a philosopher as an administrator. You find him a man of great practical ability: he remoulds philosophy with one hand and rules part of England with the other; not to speak of writing Shakespeare’s plays between times! He rises brilliantly from youthful penury to the political pinnacle; and meanwhile he runs over the whole realm of human knowledge, scattering praise and censure with lordly hand. Did we not know the fact as part of the history of England we should never suspect that the detailed and varied learning of this man was the incidental accomplishment of a life busied with political intrigue. Bene vixit qui bene latuit: surely here is a man who has lived widely, and in no merely physical sense has made the world his home. Life is no “brief candle” to him, nor men “such stuff as dreams are made of”; life is a glorious gift, big with blessing for him who will but assist at the delivery. There is nothing of the timid ascetic about him; like Socrates, he knows that there is a sort of cowardice in shunning pleasure;[49] best of all, there is so much work to be done, so many opportunities for the man of unnarrowed soul. He feels the exhilaration of one who has burst free from the shackles of intellectual authority: he sees before him an uncharted future, raw material for hands that dare to mould it; and he dares. All his life long he is mixed up with the heart of things; every day is an adventure. Exiled from politics he plunges gladly into the field of scientific reconstruction; he does not forget that he is an administrator, any more than Plato could forget that he was a dramatist; he finds the world of thought a chaos, and bequeaths it a planful process for the coÖrdination of human life; all Europe responds to his call for the “enlarging of the bounds of human empire.” He works joyfully and buoyantly to the very last, and dies as he has wished, “in an earnest pursuit, which is like one that is wounded in hot blood, who, for the time, scarce feels the hurt.”

III
The Expurgation of the Intellect

CONSIDER the reaction of an experienced statesman who leaves the service of a king to enter the service of truth. He has left a field wherein all workers moved in subordination to one head and one focal purpose; he enters a field in which each worker is working by himself, with no division of labor, no organization of endeavor, no correlation of ends. There he has found administration, here he finds a naÏve laissez-faire; there order, here anarchy; there some sense of common end and effort, here none. He understands at once the low repute of philosophy among men of affairs. “For the people are very apt to contemn truth, upon account of the controversies raised about it; and so think those all in a wrong way, who never meet.”[50] He understands at once why it is that the world has been so little changed by speculation and research. He is a man whose consciousness of pervasive human misery is too sharp for comfort;[51] and he sees no hope of remedy for this in isolated guerilla attacks waged upon the merest outposts of truth, each attack with its jealously peculiar strategy, its own dislocated, almost irrelevant end. And yet if there is no remedy for men’s ills in this nascent science and renascent philosophy, in what other quarter, then, shall men look for hope and cure?

There is no other, Bacon feels; unless victory is first won in the laboratory and the study it will never be won in political assemblies; no plebiscite or royal edict, but only truth, can make men free. Man’s hope lies in the reorganization of the processes of discovery and interpretation. Unless philosophy and science be born again of social aims and social needs they cannot have life in them. A new spirit must enter.

But first old spirits must be exorcised. Speculation and research must bring out a declaration of independence against theology. “The corruption of philosophy by superstition and an admixture of theology is ... widely spread, and does the greatest harm.”[52] The search for final causes, for design in nature, must be left to theologians; the function of science is not to interpret the purposes of nature, but to discover the connections of cause and effect in nature. Dogma must be set aside: “if a man will begin with certainties he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties.”[53] Dogma must be set aside, too, because it necessitates deduction as a basic method; and deduction as a basic method is disastrous.

But that is not all; there is much more in the way of preliminaries: there must be a general “expurgation of the intellect.” The mind is full (some would say made up) of prejudices, wild fancies, “idols,” or imaginings of things that are not so: if you are to think correctly, usefully, all these must go. Try, then, to get as little of yourself as possible in the way of the thing you wish to see. Beware of the very general tendency to put order and regularity in the world and then to suppose that they are native to the structure of things; or to force all facts into the unyielding mould of a preconceived opinion, carefully neglecting all contrary instances; or to give too credulous an ear to that which flatters the wish. Look into yourself and see the forest of prejudices that has grown up within you: through your temperamental attitudes; through your education; through your friends (friendship is so often an agreement in prejudices); through your favorite authors and authorities. If you find yourself seizing and dwelling on anything with particular satisfaction, hold it in suspicion. Beware of words, for they are imposed according to the apprehension of the crowd; make sure that you do not take abstractions for things. And remind yourself occasionally that you are not the measure of all things, but their distorting mirror.

So much by way of clearing the forest. Comes then induction as the fount and origin of all truth: patient induction, obedient to the call of fact, and with watchful eye for, above all things, the little unwelcome instance that contradicts. Not that induction is everything; it includes experiment, of course, and is punctuated by hypothesis.[54] (More, it is clearly but the servant of deduction, since the aim of all science is to predict by deduction from generalizations formed by induction; but just as clear is it that the efficacy of the whole business lies grounded in the faithfulness of the induction: induction is servant, but it has all men at its mercy.) And to formulate methods of induction, to surround the process by mechanical guards, to protect it from the premature flights of young generalizations,—that is a matter of life and death to science.

IV
Knowledge is Power

AND now, armed with these methods of procedure, we stand face to face with nature. What shall we ask her? Prudens questio dimidium scientiÆ: to know what to ask is half of every science.

You must ask for laws,—or, to use a Platonic term, forms. In every process there is matter and there is form: the matter being the seat of the process or operation, and the form its method or law. “Though in nature nothing really exists besides individual bodies, performing pure individual acts, according to a fixed law, yet in philosophy the very law, and the investigation, discovery, and explanation of it, is the foundation as well of knowledge as of operation. And it is this law, with its clauses, that I mean when I speak of Forms.”[55] Not so much what a “thing” is, but how it behaves;—that is the question. And what is more, if you will examine your conception of a “thing,” you will see that it is really a conception of how the “thing” behaves; every What is at last a How. Every “thing” is a machine, whose essence or meaning is to be found not by a mere description of its parts, but by an account of how it operates. “How does it work?” asks the boy before a machine; see to it that you ask the same question of nature.

For observe, if you know how a thing works, you are on the way to managing and controlling it. Indeed, a Form can be defined as those elements in a process which must be known before the process can be controlled. Here we see the meaning of science; it is an effort to discover the laws which must be known in order “that the mind may exercise her power over the nature of things.”[56] Science is the formulation of control; knowledge is power. The object of science is not merely to know, but to rebuild; every science longs to be an art. The quest for knowledge, then, is not a matter of curiosity, it is a fight for power. We “put nature on the rack and compel her to bear witness” against herself. Where this conception reigns, logic-chopping is out of court. “The end of our new logic is to find not arguments but arts; ... not probable reasons but plans and designs of works; ... to overcome not an adversary in argument but nature in action.”[57]

But there is logic-chopping in other things than logic. All strife of men with men, of group with group, if it leaves no result beyond the victory and passing supremacy of the individual or group, is logic-chopping. Such victories pass from side to side, and cancel themselves into final nullity. Real achievement is victory, not over other men but with them. “It will not be amiss to distinguish the three kinds, and as it were grades, of ambition in mankind. The first is of those who desire to extend their own power in their native country; which kind is vulgar and degenerate. The second is of those who labor to extend the power of their country and its dominion among men. This certainly has more dignity, though not less covetousness. But if a man endeavor to establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race over the universe, his ambition is without doubt both a more wholesome thing and a more noble than the other two. The empire of man over things depends wholly on the arts and sciences. For we cannot command nature except by obeying her.”[58]

V
The Socialization of Science

Natura non vincitur nisi parendo. “I accept the universe,” says Margaret Fuller. “Gad! you’d better!” says Carlyle. I accept it, says Bacon, but only as raw material. We will listen to nature, but only that we may learn what language she understands. We stoop to conquer.

There is nothing impossible but thinking makes it so. “By far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science and the undertaking of new tasks ... is found in this, that men despair and think things impossible.... If therefore any one believes or promises more, they think this comes of an ungoverned and unripened mind.”[59] There is nothing that we may not do, if we will, but we must will; and must will the means as well as the end. Would we have an empire of man over nature? Very well: organize the arts and sciences.

“Consider what may be expected from men abounding in leisure, and from association of labors, and from successions of ages; the rather because it is not a way over which only one man can pass at a time (as is the case with that of reasoning), but within which the labors and industries of men (especially as regards the collecting of experience) may with the best effort be distributed and then combined. For then only will men begin to know their strength when instead of great numbers doing all the same things, one shall take charge of one thing and another of another.”[60] There should be more coÖperation, less chaotic rivalry, in research. And the coÖperation should be international; the various universities of the world, so far as they engage in research, should be like the different buildings of a great manufacturing plant, each with its own particular specialty and quest. Is it not remarkable how “little sympathy and correspondence exists between colleges and universities, as well throughout Europe as in the same state and kingdom?”[61] Why cannot all the research in the world be coÖrdinated into one unified advance? Perhaps the truth-seekers would be unwilling; but has that been shown? And is the number of willing coÖperators too small to warrant further effort? How can we know without the trial? Grant that the genius would balk at some external central direction; but research after all is seldom a matter of genius. “The course I propose ... is such as leaves but little to the acuteness and strength of wits, but places all wits and understandings nearly on the level.”[62] Let scope and freedom be amply provided for the genius; it is the work of following up the aperÇus of genius that most sorely needs coÖrdination. Organization of research means really the liberation of genius: liberation from the halting necessities of mechanical repetition in experiment. Nor is coÖrdination regimentation; let each man follow his hobby to whatever university has been assigned to the investigation of that particular item. Liberty is futility unless it is organized.

It is a plan, you see, for the socialization of science. It is a large and royal vision; to make it real involves “indeed opera basilica,” it is the business of a king, “towards which the endeavors of one man can be but as the sign on a cross-road, which points out the way but cannot tread it.”[63] It will need such legislative appropriations as are now granted only to the business of competitive destruction on land and sea. “As the secretaries and spies of princes and states bring in bills for intelligence, so you must allow the spies and intelligencers of nature to bring in their bills if you would not be ignorant of many things worthy to be known. And if Alexander placed so large a treasure at Aristotle’s command for the support of hunters, fowlers, fishers and the like, in much more need do they stand of this beneficence who unfold the labyrinths of nature.”[64]

VI
Science and Utopia

SUCH an organization of science is Bacon’s notion of Utopia. He gives us in The New Atlantis, in plain strong prose, a picture of a state in which this organization has reached the national stage. It is a state nominally ruled by a king (Bacon never forgets that he is a loyal subject and counsellor of James I); but “preËminent amongst the excellent acts of the king ... was the erection and institution of an Order or Society which we call Solomon’s House; the noblest foundation, as we think, that ever was upon the earth, and the lantern of this kingdom. It is dedicated to the study of the nature of all things.”[65] Every twelve years this Order sends out to all parts of the world “merchants of light”; men who remain abroad for twelve years, gather information and suggestions in every field of art and science, and then (the next expedition having brought men to replace them) return home laden with books, instruments, inventions, and ideas. “Thus, you see, we maintain a trade not for gold, silver or jewels; nor for silk; nor for spices; nor for any other commodity or matter; but only for God’s first creation, which was Light.”[66] Meanwhile at home there is a busy army filling many laboratories, experimenting in zoÖlogy, medicine, dietetics, chemistry, botany, physics, and other fields; there are, in addition to these men, “three that collect the experiments in all the books; ... three that try new experiments”; three that tabulate the results of the experimenters; “three that look into the experiments of their fellows, and cast about how to draw out of them things of use ... for man’s life; ... three that direct new experiments”; three that from the results draw up “observations, axioms, and aphorisms.”[67] “We imitate also the flights of birds; we have some degree of flying in the air; we have ships and boats for going under water.”[68] And the purpose of it all, he says, with fine Baconian ring, is “the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”[69]

VII
Scholasticism in Science

THIS is the voice of the Renaissance, speaking with some method to its music. It is the voice of Erasmus rather than that of Luther; but it is the voice of a larger and less class-bound vision than that which moved the polite encomiast of folly. Such minds as were not lost in the religious turmoil of the time responded to Bacon’s call for a new beginning; a “sense of liberation, ... of new destinies, pulsates in that generation at Bacon’s touch.”[70] Bacon says, and with justice, that he “rang the bell which called the wits together.”[71] When, in 1660, a group of London savants formed the Royal Society, it was from Bacon that they took their inspiration, and from the “House of Solomon” part of their plan of organization. Diderot and D’Alembert acknowledged the impetus given by their reading of Bacon to the adventurous enterprise which completed and distributed the EncyclopÉdie despite the prohibition of the king. To-day, after two hundred years of Cartesian futility about mind and body and the problem of knowledge, the Baconian emphasis on the socially-reconstructive function of thought renews its power and appeal. The world returns to Socrates, to Plato, and to Bacon.

But with some measure of wholesome disillusionment. These last two centuries have told us that science, unaided, cannot solve our social problem. We have invented, invented, invented, invented; and with what result? The gap between class and class has so widened during these inventive years that there are now not classes but castes. Social harmony is a matter of brief interludes in a drama more violent than any ever mimicked on the stage. Men trained and accomplished in science, like Prince Kropotkin, abandon it on the score that it has turned its back on the purpose that gave it vitality and worth.[72]

What is the purpose of science? What do scientists consider to be the purpose of science? The laboratories are crowded with men who have no inkling of any other than a purely material reconstruction as the function of their growing knowledge. Specialization has so divided science that hardly any sense of the whole survives. The ghosts of scholasticism—of a pursuit of knowledge divorced from its social end—hover about the microscopes and test-tubes of the scientific world; and the upshot of it all is that to them who have, more is given. Let Bacon speak here: “There is another great and powerful cause why the sciences have made but little progress, which is this. It is not possible to run a course aright, when the goal itself has not been rightly placed.”[73] Sciences with obvious social functions have languished through lapse of all sense of direction, all feeling of focus; psychology, for example, is but now reviving under the stimulus of men who dared to “stir the earth a little about the roots of this science,”[74] because they had perceived its purpose and meaning in the drama of reconstruction. The blunt truth is that unless a scientist is also a philosopher, with some capacity to see things sub specie totius,—unless he can come out of his hole into the open,—he is not fit to direct his own research. “As no perfect discovery can be made upon a flat or level, neither is it possible to discover the more remote and deeper parts of any science, if you stand but upon the level of the same science, and ascend not to a higher science.”[75] Before it can be of real service to life, science must be enlightened by some discrimination of values, some consideration and fitting together of human ends: without philosophy as its eye piece, science is but the traditional child who has taken apart the traditional watch, with none but the traditional results.

There is more to this indictment. Science has been organized, though very imperfectly, for research; it has been organized hardly at all for social application and control. The notion that science can be used in conserving the vital elements of order and at the same time facilitating experimental and progressive change, is but beginning to walk about. Indeed, the employment and direction of scientific ability in the business of government is still looked upon as a doubtful procedure; to say that the administration of municipal affairs, for example, is to be given over to men trained in the social sciences rather than to men artful in trapping votes with oratorical molasses, is still a venture into the loneliness of heresy. Again let Bacon speak, who was administrator and philosopher in one. “It is wrong to trust the natural body to empirics who commonly have a few receipts whereon they rely, but who know neither the causes of the disease, nor the constitution of patients, nor the danger of accidents, nor the true methods of cure. And so it must needs be dangerous to have the civil body of states managed by empirical statesmen, unless well mixed with others who are grounded in learning. On the contrary it is almost without instance that any government was unprosperous under learned governors.”[76]

Plato over again, you say. Yes; just as “Greek philosophy is the dough with which modern philosophers have baked their bread, kneading it over and over again,”[77] so this vital doctrine of the application of the best available intelligence to the problem of social order and development must be restated in every generation until at last the world may see its truth and merit exemption from its repetition.

VIII
The Asiatics of Europe

BUT the place of Bacon in the continuum of history is hardly stated by connecting him with Plato. Conceive of him rather as a new protagonist in the long epic of intelligence; another blow struck in the seemingly endless war between magic and science, between supernaturalism and naturalism, between the spirit of worship and the spirit of control. Primitive man—and he lives everywhere under the name of legion—looks out upon nature as something to be feared and obeyed, something to be cajoled by ritual and sacrifice and prayer. In ages of great social disorder, such as the millennium inaugurated in Western Europe by the barbarian invasions, the primitive elements in the mental make-up of men emerge through the falling cultural surface; and cults rich in ritual and steeped in emotional luxury grow in rank abundance. It is in the character of man to worship power: if he feels the power without him more intensely than the power within, he worships nature with a humble fear, and leans on magic and supernatural rewards; if he feels the power within him more intensely than the power without, he sees divinity in himself and other centres of remoulding activity, and thinks not of worshipping and obeying nature, but of controlling and commanding her. The second attitude comes, of course, with knowledge, and action that expresses knowledge; it is quite human that nature should not be worshipped once she has been known. A man is primitive, then, when he worships nature and makes no effort to control her; he is mature when he stops worshipping and begins to control,—when he understands that “Nature is not a temple but a workshop,”[78] not a barrier to divinity, but the raw material of Utopia.

Now the essence of Bacon is not the replacement of deduction by induction, but the change of emphasis from worship to control. This emphasis, once vivid in Plato but soon obscured by Oriental influence, is one of the two dominant elements in modern thought (the other being the puzzling over an artificial problem of knowledge); and unless the Baconian element finally subordinates the Cartesian, the word modern must no longer arrogate to itself a eulogistic connotation. Hence Bacon, and not Descartes, is the initiator of modern philosophy; part initiator, at least, of that current of thought which finds rebellious expression in the enlightenment of the eighteenth-century, and comes to supremacy in the scientific victories of the nineteenth. The vital sequence in modern philosophy is not Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, and Bergson (for these are the Asiatics of Europe), but Bacon, Hobbes, Condorcet, Comte, Darwin, and James.[79]

The hope of the world is in this resolute spirit of control,—control of the material without us, and of the passions within. Bit by bit, one is not afraid to say, we shall make for ourselves a better world. Shall we not find a way to eliminate disease, to control the increase of population, to find in plastic organization a substitute for revolution? Shall we perhaps even succeed in transmuting the lust for power over man into ambition to conquer the forces that impede man? Shall we make men understand that there is more potency of joy in the sense of having contributed to the power of men over nature than in any personal triumph of one over another man?—more glory in a conquest of bacteria than in all the martial victories that have ever spilled human blood? Here is the beginning of real civilization, and the mark of man. “The environment transforms the animal; man transforms the environment.”[80] “Looking at the history of the world as a whole, the tendency has been in Europe to subordinate nature to man; out of Europe, to subordinate man to nature. Formerly the richest countries were those in which nature was most bountiful; now the richest countries are those in which man is most active.”[81] Control is the sign of maturity, the achievement of Europe, the future of America. It is, one argues again, the drama of history, this war between Asia and Europe, between nature and man, between worship and control. Fundamentally it is the upward struggle of intelligence: Plato is its voice, Zeno its passing exhaustion, Bacon its resurrection. It was not an unopposed rebirth: there is still no telling whether East or West will win. Surrounded by the backwash of Oriental currents everywhere, the lover of the Baconian spirit needs constantly to refresh himself at the fount of Bacon’s inexhaustible inspiration and confidence. “I stake all,” he says, “on the victory of art over nature in the race.” And one needs to hold ever before oneself Bacon’s favorite device: A ship passing through the Pillars of Hercules out into the unknown sea, and over it the words, Plus ultra.

More beyond!

CHAPTER IV
SPINOZA ON THE SOCIAL PROBLEM[82]

I
Hobbes

PASSING from Bacon to Spinoza we meet with Thomas Hobbes, a man from whom Spinoza drew many of his ideas, though very little of his inspiration. The social incidence of the greater part of Hobbes’s thinking has long been recognized; he is not a figure over whom the biographer of social thought finds much cause to quarrel. He is at once the materialist par excellence of modern philosophy, and the most uncompromising protagonist of the absolutist theory of the state. The individual, all compact of pugnacity, was to Hobbes the bogey which the state, voracious of all liberties, became two centuries later to Herbert Spencer. He had in acute degree the philosopher’s natural appetite for order; and trembled at the thought of initiatives not foreseen by his political geometry. He lived in the midst of alarms: war stepped on the heels of war in what was very nearly a real bellum omnium contra omnes. He lived in the midst of political reaction: men were weary of Renaissance exuberance and Reformation strife, and sank gladly into the open arms of the past. There could be no end, thought Hobbes, to this turmoil of conflicting egos, individual and national, until all groups and individuals knelt in absolute obedience to one sovereign power.

But all this has been said before; we need but remind ourselves of it here so that we may the better appreciate the vibrant sympathy for the individual man, the generous defence of popular liberties, that fill with the glow of subdued passion the pages of the gentle Spinoza.

II
The Spirit of Spinoza

YET Spinoza was not wanting in that timidity and that fear of unbridled instinct which stood dictator over the social philosophy of Hobbes. He knew as well as Hobbes the dangers of a democracy that could not discipline itself. “Those who have had experience of how changeful the temper of the people is, are almost in despair. For the populace is governed not by reason but by emotion; it is headlong in everything, and easily corrupted by avarice and luxury.”[83] And even more than Hobbes he withdrew from the affairs of men and sought in the protection of a suburban attic the peace and solitude which were the vital medium of his thought. He found that sometimes at least, “truth hath a quiet breast.” “Se tu sarai solo,” wrote Leonardo, “tu sarai tutto tuo.” And surely Goethe thought of Spinoza when he said: “No one can produce anything important unless he isolate himself.”

But this dread of the crowd was only a part of Spinoza’s nature, and not the dominant part. His fear of men was lost in his boundless capacity for affection; he tried so hard to understand men that he could not help but love them. “I have labored carefully not to mock, lament, or execrate, but to understand, human actions; and to this end I have looked upon passions ... not as vices of human nature, but as properties just as pertinent to it as are heat, cold, storm, thunder, and the like to the nature of the atmosphere.”[84] Even the accidents of time and space were sinless to his view, and all the world found room in the abundance of his heart. “Spinoza deified the All in order to find peace in the face of it,” says Nietzsche:[85] but perhaps, too, because all love is deification.

All in all, history shows no man more honest and independent; and the history of philosophy shows no man so sincere, so far above quibbling and dispute and the picking of petty flaws, so eager to receive the truth even when brought by the enemy, so ready to forgive even persecution in the depth and breadth of his tolerance. No man who suffered so much injustice made so few complaints. He became great because he could merge his own suffering in the suffering of all,—a mark of all deep men. “They who have not suffered,” says Ibsen,—and, one might add, suffered with those they saw suffer,—“never create; they only write books.”

Spinoza did not write much; the long-suffering are seldom long-winded. A fragment On the Improvement of the Understanding; a brief volume on religion and the state; the Ethics; and as he began to write the chapter on democracy in the Political Treatise consumption conquered him. Bacteria take no bribes.

III
Political Ethics

HAD he lived longer it would have dawned perhaps even on the German historians that Spinoza’s basic interest was not in metaphysics so much as in political ethics. The Ethics, because it is the most sustained flight of reasoning in philosophy, has gathered round it all the associations that throng about the name of Spinoza, so that one is apt to think of him in terms of a mystical “pantheism” rather than of coÖrdinative intelligence, democracy, and free thought.[86] HÖffding considers it a defect in Spinoza’s philosophy that it takes so little notice of epistemology: but should we not be grateful for that? Here are men suffering, said Spinoza, here are men enslaved by passions and prelates and kings; surely till these things are dealt with we have no time for epistemological delicacies. Instead of increasing the world’s store of learned ignorance by writing tomes on the possibility of a subject knowing an object, Spinoza thought it better to give himself to the task of helping to keep alive in an age of tyrannical reaction the Renaissance doctrine of popular sovereignty. Instead of puzzling himself and others about epistemology he pondered the problem of stimulating the growth of intelligence and evolving a rational ethic. He thought that philosophy was something more than a chess-game for professors.

There is no need to spend time and space here on what for Spinoza, as for Socrates and Plato, was the problem of problems,—how human reason could be developed to a point where it might replace supernatural sanctions for social conduct and provide the medium of social reconstruction. One point, however, may be profitably emphasized.

A careless reading of the Ethics may lead to the belief that Spinoza bases his philosophy on a naÏve opposition of reason to passion. It is not so. “A desire cannot be restrained or removed,” says Spinoza, “except by an opposite and stronger desire.”[87] Reason is not dictator to desire, it is a relation among desires,—that relation which arises when experience has hammered impulses into coÖrdination. An impulse, passion or emotion is by itself “a confused idea,” a blurred picture of the thing that is indeed desired. Thought and impulse are not two kinds of mental process: thought is impulse clarified by experience, impulse is thought in chaos.

IV
Is Man a Political Animal?

WHY is there a social problem? Is it because men are “bad”? Nonsense, answers Spinoza: the terms “good” and “bad,” as conveying moral approval and disapproval, are philosophically out of court; they mean nothing except that “each of us wishes all men to live according to his desire,” and consoles himself for their non-complaisance by making moral phrases. There is a social problem, says Spinoza, because men are not naturally social. This does not mean that there are no social tendencies in the native human constitution; it does mean that these tendencies are but a sorry fraction of man’s original nature, and do not avail to chain the “ape and tiger” hiding under his extremely civilized shirt. Man is a “political animal”; but he is also an animal. We must approach the social problem through a very respectful consideration of the ape and tiger; we must follow Hobbes and inquire into “the natural condition of man.”

“In the state of nature every man lives as he wishes,”[88]—he is not pestered with police regulations and aldermanic ordinances. He “may do whatever he can: his rights extend to the utmost limits of his powers.”[89] He may fight, hate, deceive, exploit, to his heart’s desire; and he does. We moderns smile at the “natural man” as a myth, and think our forbears were social ab initio. But be it remembered that by “social” Spinoza implies no mere preference of society to solitude, but a subordination of individual caprice to more or less tacit communal regulation. And Spinoza considers it useful, if we are going to talk about “human nature in politics,” to ask whether man naturally submits to regulation or naturally rebels against it. When he wrote of a primitive non-social human condition he wrote as a psychologist inferring the past rather than as an historian revealing it. He observed man, kindly yet keenly; he saw that “everyone desires to keep down his fellow-men by all possible means, and when he prevails, boasts more of the injuries he has done to others than of the advantage he has won for himself”;[90] and he concluded that if we could trace human history to its sources we should find a creature—call him human or pre-human—willing, perhaps glad, to have the company of his like, but still unattracted and unhampered by social organization.

We like to laugh at the simple anthropology of Spinoza and Rousseau; but the laugh should be turned upon us when we suppose that the historical motif played any but a very minor part in the discussion of the natural state of man. History was not the point at all: these men were not interested in the past so much as in the possibilities of the future. That is why the eighteenth century was so largely their creation. When a man is interested in the past he writes history; when he is interested in the future he makes it.

The point to be borne in mind, Spinoza urges, is that we are still essentially unsocialized; the instinct to acquire possession and power, if necessary by oppression and exploitation, is still stronger than the disposition to share, to be tolerant of disagreement, and to work in mutual aid. The “natural man” is not a myth, he is the solid reality that struts about dressed in a little brief civilization. “Religion teaches that each man should love his neighbor as himself, and defend the rights of others as earnestly as he would his own. Yet this conviction has very little influence over man’s emotions. It is no doubt of some account in the hour of death, for then disease has weakened the emotions, and the man lies helpless. And the principle is assented to in church, for there men have no dealings with one another. But in the mart or the court it has little or no effect, though that is just where the need for it is greatest.”[91] He still “does everything for the sake of his own profit”;[92] nor will even the unlimited future change him in that, for it is his very essence. His happiness is in the pursuit of his profit, his supreme joy is in the increase of his power. And a social order built upon any other basis than this exuberant egoism of man will be as lasting, in the eye of history, as a name that is writ in water.

V
What the Social Problem Is

BUT what if it is a good basis? What if “the foundation of virtue is the endeavor to preserve one’s own being” to the uttermost?[93] What if there is a way in which, without any hypocritical mystification, this self-seeking, while still remaining self-seeking, may become coÖperation?

Spinoza’s answer is not startling: it is the Socratic answer, issuing from a profound psychological analysis. Given the liberation and development of intelligence, and the discordant strife of egos will yield undreamed-of harmonies. Men are so made, they are so compact of passion and obscurity, that they will not let one another be free; how can that be changed? Deception has been tried, and has succeeded only temporarily if at all. Compulsion has been tried; but compulsion is a negative force, it makes for inhibition rather than inspiration. It is a necessary evil; but hardly the last word of constructive social thinking. There is something more in a man than his capacity for fear, there is some other way of appealing to him than the way of threats; there is his hunger and thirst to know and understand and develop. Think of the untouched resources of this human desire for mental enlargement; think of the millions who almost starve that they may learn. Is that the force that is to build the future and fashion the city of our dreams? Here are men torn with impulses, shaken by mutual interference; is it conceivable that they would be so deeply torn and shaken if that hunger of theirs for knowledge—knowledge of themselves, too,—were met with generous opportunity? Men long to be reasonable; they know, even the least of them, that under the tyranny of impulse there is no ultimately fruitful life; what is there that they would not give for the power to see things clearly and be captains of their souls? Here if anywhere is an opportunity for such statesmanship as does not often grace the courts of emperors and kings!

How we can come to know ourselves, our inmost nature, how we can through this knowledge achieve coÖrdination and our real desires,—that is for Spinoza the heart of the social problem. The source of man’s strength is that he can know his weakness. If he can but find himself out, then he can change himself. “A passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it.”[94] When a passion is tracked to its lair and confronted with its futile partiality, its sting is drawn, it can hurt us no more; it may coÖperate but it may no longer rule. It is seen to be “inadequate,” to express but a fragment of us, and so seen it sinks into its place in the hierarchy of desires. “And in proportion as we know our emotions better, the more are they susceptible to control.”[95] Passion is passivity; control is power. Knowledge brings control, and control brings freedom; freedom is not a gift, it is a victory. Knowledge, control, freedom, power, virtue: these are all one thing. Before the “empire of man over nature” must come the empire of man over himself, must come coÖrdination. Achievement is born of clear vision and unified intent, not of actions that are but bubbles on the muddy rapids of desire.

VI
Free Speech

“Before all things, a means must be devised for improving and clarifying the understanding.”[96] “Since there is no single thing we know which is more excellent than a man who is guided by reason, it follows that there is nothing by which a person can better show how much skill and talent he possesses than by so educating men that at last they will live under the direct authority of reason.”[97] But how?

First of all, says Spinoza, thought must be absolutely free: we must have the possible profit of even the most dangerous heresies. If that proposition appear a trifle trite, let it be remembered that Spinoza wrote at a time when Galileo’s broken-hearted retraction was still fresh in men’s memories, and when Descartes was modifying his philosophy to soothe the Jesuits. The chapter on freedom of thought is really the pivotal point and raison d’Être of the Tractatus Theologico-politicus; and it is still rich in encouragement and inspiration. Perhaps there is nothing else in Spinoza’s writings that is so typical at once of his gentleness and of his strength.

Free speech should be granted, Spinoza argues, because it must be granted. Men may conceal real beliefs, but these same beliefs will inevitably influence their behavior; a belief is not that which is spoken, it is that which is done. A law against free speech is subversive of law itself, for it invites derision from the conscientious. “All laws which can be broken without any injury to another are counted but a laughing-stock.”[98] It is useless for the state to command “such things as are abhorrent to human nature.” “Men in general are so constituted that there is nothing they will endure with so little patience as that views which they believe to be true should be counted crimes against the law.... Under such circumstances men do not think it disgraceful, but most honorable, to hold the laws in abhorrence, and to refrain from no action against the government.”[99] Where men are not permitted to criticise their rulers in public, they will plot against them in private. There is no religious enthusiasm stronger than that with which laws are broken by those whose liberty has been suppressed.

Spinoza goes further. Thought must be liberated not only from legal restrictions but from indirect and even unintentional compulsion as well. Spinoza feels very strongly the danger to freedom, that is involved in the organization of education by the state. “Academies that are founded at the public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men’s natural abilities as to restrain them. But in a free commonwealth arts and sciences will be best cultivated to the full if everyone that asks leave is allowed to teach in public, at his own cost and risk.”[100] He would have preferred such “free lances” as the Sophists to the state universities of the American Middle West. He did not suggest means of avoiding the apparent alternative of universities subsidized by the rich. It is a problem that has still to be solved.

In demanding absolute freedom of speech Spinoza touches the bases of state organization. Nothing is so dangerous and yet so necessary; for ignorance is the mother of authority. The defenders of free speech have never yet met the contention of such men as Hobbes, that freedom of thought is subversive of established government. The reason is only this, that the contention is probably true, so far as most established governments go. Absolute liberty of speech is assuredly destructive of despotism, no matter how constitutional the despotism may be; and those who have at heart the interests of any such government may be forgiven for hesitating to applaud Spinoza. Freedom of speech makes for social vitality, certainly; without it, indeed, the avenues of mental and social development would be blocked, and life hardly worth living. But freedom of speech cannot be said to make for social stability and permanence, unless the social organization in question invites criticism and includes some mechanism for profiting by it. Where democracy is real, or is on the way to becoming real, free speech will help, not harm, the state; for there is no man so loyal as the man who knows that he may criticise his government freely and to some account. But where there is the autocracy of a person or a class, freedom of speech makes for dissolution,—dissolution, however, not of the society so much as of the government. The Bourbons are gone, but France remains. Nay, if the Bourbons had remained, France might be gone.

But to argue to-day for freedom of speech is to invite the charge of emphasizing the obvious. It may be wholesome to remind ourselves, by a few examples, that however universal the theory of free speech may be, the practice is still rather sporadic. An American professor is dismissed because he thinks there is a plethora of unearned income in his country; an English publicist is reported to have been refused “permission” to fill lecture engagements in America because he had not been sufficiently patriotic; and one of the most prominent of living philosophers loses his chair because he supposes that conscience has rights against cabinets. But indeed our governing bodies are harmless offenders here in comparison with the people themselves. The last lesson which men and women will learn is the lesson of free thought and free speech. The most famous of living dramatists finds himself unsafe in London streets, because he has dared to criticise his government; the most able of living novelists finds it convenient to leave Paris because there are still some Germans whom he does not hate; and an American community full of constitutional lawyers shows its love of “law and order” by stoning a group of boys bent on expounding the desirability of syndicalism.

Perhaps the world has need of many Spinozas still.

VII
Virtue as Power

FREEDOM of expression is the corner-stone of Spinoza’s politics; the postulate without which he refuses to proceed. But Spinoza does not have to be told that this question of free speech precipitates him into the larger problems of “the individual vs. the state”; he knows that that problem is the very raison d’Être of political philosophy; he knows that indeed the problem goes to the core of philosophy, and finds its source and crux in the complex socio-egoistical make-up of the individual man.

The “God-intoxicated” Spinoza is quite sober and disillusioned about the social possibilities of altruism. “It is a universal law of human nature that no one ever neglects anything which he judges to be good, except with the hope of gaining a greater good.”[101] “This is as necessarily true as that the whole is greater than its part.”[102] This confident reduction of human conduct to self-reference does not for Spinoza involve any condemnation: “reason, since it asks for nothing that is opposed to nature, demands that every person should ... seek his own profit.”[103] Observe, reason demands this; this same self-seeking is the most valuable and necessary item in the composition of man. Spinoza, as said, goes so far as to identify this self-seeking with virtue: “to act absolutely in conformity with virtue is, in us, nothing but to act, live, and preserve our being (these three have the same meaning) as reason directs, from the ground of seeking our own profit.”[104] This is a brave rejection of self-renunciation and asceticism by one whose nature, so far as we can judge it now, inclined him very strongly in the direction of these “virtues.” What we have to do, says Spinoza, is not to deny the self, but to broaden it; here again, of course, intelligence is the mother of morals. Progress lies not in self-reduction but in self-expansion. Progress is increase in virtue, but “by virtue and power I understand the same thing”;[105] progress is an increase in the ability of men to achieve their ends. It is part of our mental confectionery to define progress in terms of our own ends; a nation is “backward” or “forward” according as it moves towards or away from our own ideals. But that, says Spinoza, is naÏve nonsense; a nation is progressive or backward according as its citizens are or are not developing greater power to realize their own purposes. That is a doctrine that may have “dangerous” implications, but intelligence will face the implications and the facts, ready not to suppress them but to turn them to account.

It was the passion for power that led to the first social groupings and developed the social instincts. Our varied sympathies, our parental and filial impulses, our heroisms and generosities, all go back to social habits born of individual needs. “Since fear of solitude exists in all men, because no one in solitude is strong enough to defend himself and procure the necessaries of life, it follows that men by nature tend towards social organization.”[106] “Let satirists scoff at human affairs as much as they please, let theologians denounce them, and let the melancholy, despising men and admiring brutes, praise as much as they can a life rude and without refinement,—men will nevertheless find out that by mutual help they can much more easily procure the things they need, and that it is only by their united strength that they can avoid the dangers which everywhere threaten them.”[107] Nihil homine homini utilius. Men discover that they are useful to one another, and that mutual profit from social organization increases as intelligence grows. In a “state of nature”—that is, before social organization—each man has a “natural right” to do all that he is strong enough to do; in society he yields part of this sovereignty to the communal organization, because he finds that this concession, universalized, increases his strength. The fear of solitude, and not any positive love of fellowship, is the prime force in the origin of society. Man does not join in social organization because he has social instincts; he develops such instincts as the result of joining in such organization.

VIII
Freedom and Order

EVEN to-day the social instincts are not strong enough to prevent unsocial behavior. “Men are not born fit for citizenship, but must be made so.”[108] Hence custom and law. Each man, in his sober moments, desires such social arrangements as will protect him from aggression and interference. “There is no one who does not wish to live, so far as possible, in security and without fear; and this cannot possibly happen so long as each man is allowed to do as he pleases.”[109] “That men who are necessarily subject to passions, and are inconstant and changeable, may be able to live together in security, and to trust one another’s fidelity,”—that is the purpose of law.[110] Ideally, the state is to the individual what reason is to passion.[111] Law protects a man not only from the passions of others, but from his own; it is a help to delayed response. How to frame laws so that the greatest possible number of men may find their own security and fulfilment in allegiance to the law,—that is the problem of the statesman. Law implies force, but so does life, so does nature; indeed, the punishments decreed by “man-made” states are usually milder than those which in a “state of nature” would be the natural consequents of most interferences; not seldom the law—as when it prevents lynching—protects an aggressor from the natural results of his act. Force is the essence of law; hence international law will not really be law until nations are coÖrdinated into a larger group possessed of the instrumentalities of compulsion.[112]

It is clear that Spinoza has the philosophic love of order. “Whatever conduces to human harmony and fellowship is good; whatever brings discord into the state is evil.”[113] But discord, one must repeat, is often the prelude to a greater harmony; development implies variation, and all variation is a discord except to ears that hear the future. The social sanction of liberty lies of course in the potential value of variations; without that vision of new social possibilities which is suggested by variations from the norm a people perishes. Spinoza does not see this; but there is a fine passage in the Tractatus Politicus[114] which shows him responsive to the ideal of liberty as well as to that of order: “The last end of the state is not to dominate men, nor to restrain them by fear; rather it is so to free each man from fear that he may live and act with full security and without injury to himself or his neighbor. The end of the state is, I repeat, not to make rational beings into brute beasts or machines. It is to enable their bodies and their minds to function safely. It is to lead men to live by, and to exercise, a free reason, that they may not waste their strength in hatred, anger, and guile, not act unfairly toward one another. Thus the end of the state is really liberty.”

So it is that Spinoza takes sharp issue with Hobbes and exalts freedom, decentralization, and democracy, where Hobbes, starting with almost identical premises, concludes to a centralized despotism of body and soul. This does not mean that Spinoza had no eye for the defects of democracy. “Experience is supposed to teach that it makes for peace and concord when all authority is conferred upon one man. For no political order has stood so long without notable change as that of the Turks, while none have been so short-lived, nay, so vexed by seditions, as popular or democratic states. But if slavery, barbarism, and desolation are to be called peace, then peace is the worst misfortune that can befall a state. It is true that quarrels are wont to be sharper and more frequent between parents and children than between masters and slaves; yet it advances not the art of home life to change a father’s right into a right of property, and count his children as only his slaves. Slavery, then, and not peace, comes from the giving of all power to one man. For peace consists not in the absence of war, but in a union and harmony of men’s souls.”[115]

No; better the insecurity of freedom than the security of bondage. Better the dangers that come of the ignorance of majorities than those that flow from the concentration of power in the hands of an inevitably self-seeking minority. Even secret diplomacy is worse than the risks of publicity. “It has been the one song of those who thirst after absolute power that the interest of the state requires that its affairs be conducted in secret.... But the more such arguments disguise themselves under the mask of public welfare the more oppressive is the slavery to which they will lead.... Better that right counsels be known to enemies, than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.... It is folly to choose to avoid a small loss by means of the greatest of evils.”[116]

This is but one of many passages in Spinoza that startle the reader with their present applicability and value. There is in the same treatise a plan for an unpaid citizen soldiery, much like the scheme adopted in Switzerland; there is a plea against centralization and for the development of municipal pride by home rule and responsibility; there is a warning against the danger to democracy involved in the territorial expansion of states; and there is a plan for the state ownership of all land, the rental from this to supply all revenue in time of peace. But let us pass to a more characteristic feature of Spinoza’s political theory, and consider with him the function of intelligence in the state.

IX
Democracy and Intelligence

“There is no single thing in nature which is more profitable to man than a man who lives according to the guidance of reason.”[117] Such a man, to begin with, has made his peace with the inevitable, and accepts with good cheer the necessary limitations of social life. He has a genial sense of human imperfections, and does not cushion himself upon Utopia. He pursues his own ends but with some perspective of their social bearings; and he is confident that “when each man seeks that which is [really] profitable to himself, then are men most profitable to one another.”[118] He knows that the ends of other men will often conflict with his; but he will not for that cause make moral phrases at them. He feels the tragedy of isolated purposes, and knows the worth of coÖperation. As he comes to understand the intricate bonds between himself and his fellows he finds ever more satisfaction in purposes that overflow the narrow margins of his own material advantage; until at last he learns to desire nothing for himself without desiring an equivalent for others.[119]

Given such men, democracy follows; such democracy, too, as will be a fulfilment and not a snare. Given such men, penal codes will interest only the antiquarian. Given such men, a society will know the full measure of civic allegiance and communal stability and development. How make such men? By revivals? By the gentle anÆsthesia of heaven and the cheap penology of hell? By memorizing catechisms and commandments? By appealing like Comte, to the heart, and trusting to the eternal feminine to lead us ever onward? (Onward whither?) Or by spreading the means of intelligence?

It is at this point that the social philosophy of Spinoza, like that of Socrates, betrays its weaker side. How is intelligence to be spread? Perhaps it is too much to ask the philosopher this question; he may feel that he has done enough if he has made clear what it is which will most help us to achieve our ends. Spinoza, after all, was not the kind of man who could be expected to enter into practical problems; his soul was filled with the vision of the eternal laws and had no room for the passing expediencies of action. His devotional geometry was a typical Jewish performance; there is something in the emotional make-up of the Jew which makes him slide very easily into the attitude of worship, as contrasted with the GrÆco-Roman emphasis on intellect and control. All pantheism tends to quietism; to see things sub specie eternitatis may very well pass from the attitude of the scientist to the attitude of the mystic who has no interest in temporal affairs. It is the task of philosophy to study the eternal and universal not for its own sake but for its worth in directing us through the maze of temporal particulars; the philosopher must be like the mariner who guides himself through space and time by gazing at the everlasting stars. It is wholesome that the history of philosophy should begin with Thales; so that all who come to the history of philosophy may learn, at the door of their subject, that though stars are beautiful, wells are deep.

X
The Legacy of Spinoza

BUT to leave the matter thus would be to lose a part of the truth in the glare of one’s brilliance. We have to recognize that though Spinoza stopped short (or rather was cut short) at merely a statement of the prime need of all democracies,—intelligence,—he was nevertheless the inspiration of men who carried his beginning more nearly to a practical issue. To Spinoza, through Voltaire and the English deists, one may trace not a few of the thought-currents which carried away the foundations of ecclesiastical power, civil and intellectual, in eighteenth-century France, and left the middle class conscience-free to engineer a revolution. It was from Spinoza chiefly that Rousseau derived his ideas of popular sovereignty, of the general will, of the right of revolution, of the legitimacy of the force that makes men free, and of the ideal state as that in which all the citizens form an assembly with final power.[120] The French Declaration of Rights and the American Declaration of Independence go back in part to the forgotten treatises of the quiet philosopher of Amsterdam. To have initiated or accelerated such currents of thought—theoretical in their origin but extremely practical in their issue—is thereby once for all to have put one’s self above the reach of mere fault-finding. One wonders again, as so many have wondered, what would have been the extent of this man’s achievement had he not died at the age of forty-four. When Spinoza’s pious landlady returned from church on the morning of February 21, 1677, and found her gentle philosopher dead, she stood in the presence of one of the great silent tragedies of human history.

CHAPTER V
NIETZSCHE

I
From Spinoza to Nietzsche

LET us dare to compress within a page or two the social aspect of philosophical thought from Spinoza to Nietzsche. Without forgetting that our purpose is to show the social problem as the dominant interest of only many, not all, of the greater philosophers, we may yet risk the assertion that the majority of the men who formed the epistemological tradition from Descartes to Kant were at heart concerned less with the problem of knowledge than with that of social relations. Descartes slips through this generalization; he is a man of leisure lost in the maze of a puzzle which he has not discovered so much as he has unconsciously constructed it. In Locke’s hands the puzzle is distorted into the question of “innate ideas,” in order that under cover of an innocent epistemological excursion a blow may be struck at hereditary prejudices and authoritarian teaching, and the way made straight for the advance of popular sovereignty (as against the absolutism of Hobbes), free speech, reasonable religion, and social amelioration. The dominance of the social interest is not so easily shown in the case of Leibniz; but let it be remembered none the less that epistemology was but an aside in the varied drama of Leibniz’ life, and that his head was dizzy with schemes for the betterment of this “best of all possible worlds.” Bishop Berkeley begins with esse est percipi and ends with tar-water as the solution of all problems. David Hume, in the midst of a life busied with politics and the discussion of social, political, and economic problems, spares a year or two for epistemology, only to use it as a handle whereby to deal a blow to dogma; he “was more damaging to religion than Voltaire, but was ingenious enough not to get the credit for it.”[121] The social incidence of philosophy in eighteenth-century France was so decided that one might describe that philosophy as part of the explosive with which the middle class undermined the status quo. This social emphasis continues in Comte, who cannot forget that he was once the secretary of St. Simon, and will not let us forget that the function of the philosopher is to coÖrdinate experience with a view to the remoulding of human life. John Stuart Mill is radical first and logician afterward; and the more lasting as well as the more interesting element in Spencer is the sociological, educational, and political theory. In Kant the basic social interest is buried under epistemological cobwebs; yet not so choked but that it finds very resolute voice at last. The essence of the matter here is the return of the prodigal, the relapse of a once adventurous soul into the comfort of religious and political absolutes, categorical—and Potsdam—imperatives. Here is “dogmatic slumber” overcome only to yield to the torpor and abÊtisement of “practical reason”; here is no “Copernican revolution” but a stealthy attempt to recover an anthropocentricism lost in the glare of the Enlightenment. It dawns on us that the importance of German philosophy is not metaphysical, nor epistemological, but political; the vital remnant of Kant to-day is to be found not in our overflowing Mississippi of Kantiana, but in the German notion of obedience.[122] Fichte reËnforces this notion of unquestioning obedience with the doctrine of state socialism: he begins by tending geese, and ends by writing philosophy for them. So with Hegel: he starts out buoyantly with the proposition that revolution is the heart of history, and ends by discovering that the King of Prussia is God in disguise. In Schopenhauer the bubble bursts; a millennium of self-deception ends at last in exhaustion and despair. Every Hildebrand has his Voltaire, and every Voltaire his Schopenhauer.

II
Biographical

“In future,” Nietzsche once wrote, “let no one concern himself about me, but only about the things for which I lived.” We must make this biographical note brief.

Nietzsche was born in RÖcken, Germany, 1844, the son of a “noble young parson.” He was brought up in strict piety, and prepared himself to enter the ministry; even at boarding-school he was called “the little minister,” and made people cry by his recitations from the Bible. We have pictures of him which show him in all his boyish seriousness; it is evident that he is of a deeply religious nature, and therefore doomed to heresy. At eighteen he discovers that he has begun to doubt the traditional creed. “When I examine my own thoughts,” he writes, “and hearken into my own soul, I often feel as if I heard the buzzing and roaring of wild-contending parties.”[123] At twenty-one, while studying in the University of Leipzig, he discovers the philosophy of Schopenhauer; he reads all hungrily, feeling here a kindred youth; “the need of knowing myself, even of gnawing at myself, forcibly seized upon me.”[124] He is ripe for pessimism, having both religion and a bad stomach. Because of his defective eyesight he is barred from military service; in 1870 he burns with patriotic fever, and at last is allowed to join the army as a nurse; but he is almost overcome at sight of the sick and wounded, and himself falls ill with dysentery and dyspepsia. In this same year he sees a troop of cavalry pass through a town in stately gallop and array; his weakened frame thrills with the sight of this strength: “I felt for the first time that the strongest and highest Will to Life does not find expression in a miserable struggle for existence, but in a Will to War, a Will to Power, a Will to Overpower!”[125] Nevertheless, he settles down to a quietly ascetic life as professor of philology at the University of Basle. But there is adventure in him; and in his first book[126] he slips from the prose of philology into an almost lyrical philosophy. Illness finds voice here in the eulogy of health; weakness in the deification of strength; melancholy in the praise of “Dionysian joy”; loneliness in the exaltation of friendship. He has a friend—Wagner—the once romantic rebel of revolution’s barricades; but this friend too is taken from him, with slowly painful breaking of bond after bond. For Wagner, the strong, the overbearing, the ruthless, is coming to a philosophy of Christian sympathy and gentleness; qualities that cannot seem divine to Nietzsche, because they are long-familiar elements in his own character. “What I am not,” he says, most truthfully, “that for me is God and virtue.”[127] And so he stands at last alone, borne up solely by the exhilaration of creative thought. He has acquaintances, but he puts up with them “simply, like a patient animal”; “not one has the faintest inkling of my task.” And he suffers terribly “through this absence of sympathy and understanding.”[128]

He leaves even these acquaintances, and abandons his work at Basle; broken in health he finds his way hopefully to the kindlier climate of Italy. Doctor after doctor prescribes for him, one prescription reading, “a nice Italian sweetheart.” He longs for the comradeship, but dreads the friction, of marriage. “It seems to me absurd,” he writes, “that one who has chosen for his sphere ... the assessment of existence as a whole, should burden himself with the cares of a family, with winning bread, security, and social position for wife and children.” He does not hesitate to conclude that “where the highest philosophical thinking is concerned all married men are suspect.”[129] Nevertheless he wanders humanly into something very like a love-affair; he is almost shattered with rapid disillusionment, and takes refuge in philosophy. “Every misunderstanding,” he tells himself, “has made me freer. I want less and less from humanity, and can give it more and more. The severance of every individual tie is hard to bear; but in each case a wing grows in its place.”[130] And yet the need of comradeship is still there, like a gnawing hunger: many years later he catches a passing smile from a beautiful young woman, whom he has never seen before; and “suddenly my lonely philosopher’s heart grew warm within me.”[131] But she walks off without seeing him, and they never meet again.

The simple Italians who rent him his attic room in Genoa understand him better perhaps than he can be understood by more pretentious folk. They know his greatness, though they cannot classify it. The children of his landlady call him “Il Santo”; and the market-women keep their choicest grapes for the bent philosopher who, it is whispered, writes bitterly about women and “the superfluous.” But what they know for certain is that he is a man of exceeding gentleness and purity, that he is the very soul of chivalry; “stories are still told of his politeness towards women to whom no one else showed any kindness.”[132] Let him write what he pleases, so long as he is what he is.

He lives simply, almost in poverty. “His little room,” writes a visitor, “is bare and cheerless. It has evidently been selected for cheapness rather than for comfort. No carpet, not even a stove. I found it fearfully cold.”[133] His publisher has made no profit on his books; they are too sharply opposed to the “spirit of the age”; hence the title he gives to two of his volumes: UnzeitgemÄsse Betrachtungen,—Thoughts Out of Season. There is no money, he is now informed, in such untimely volumes; hereafter he must publish his books at his own cost. He does, stinting himself severely to meet the new expense; his greatest books see the light in this way.[134]

He works hard, knowing that his shaken frame has but short lease of life; and he comes to love his painful solitude as a gift. “I can’t help seeing an enemy in any one who breaks in upon my working summer.... The idea that any person should intrude upon the web of thought which I am spinning around me, is simply appalling. I have no more time to lose—unless I am stingy with my precious half-hours I shall have a bad conscience.”[135] Half-hours; his eyes will not work for more than thirty minutes at a time. He feels that only to him to whom time is holy does time bring reward. “He is fully convinced,” an acquaintance writes of him, “about his mission and his permanent importance. In this belief he is strong and great; it elevates him above all misfortune.”[136] He speaks of his Thus Spake Zarathustra in terms of almost conscious exaggeration: “It is a book,” he says, “that stands alone. Do not let us mention the poets in the same breath; nothing perhaps has ever been produced out of such a superabundance of strength.”[137] He does not know that it is his illness and his hunger for appreciation that have demanded this self-laudation as restorative and nourishment. He predicts, rightly enough, that he will not begin to get his due meed of appreciation till 1901.[138] His “unmasking of Christian morality,” he says, “is an event unequalled in history.”[139]

All this man’s energy is in his brain; he oozes ideas at every pore. He crowds into a sentence the material of a chapter; and every aphorism is a mountain-peak. He dares to say that which others dare only to think: and we call him witty because truth tabooed is the soul of wit. Every page bears the imprint of the passion and the pain that gave it birth. “I am not a man,” he says, “I am dynamite”; he writes like a man who feels error after error exploding at his touch; and he defines a philosopher as “a terrible explosive in the presence of which everything is in danger.”[140] “There are more idols than realities in the world; and I have an ‘evil eye’ for idols.”[141]

What is this philosophy which seemed to its creator more important than even the mightiest events of the past? How shall we compress it without distorting it, as it has been distorted by so many of its lovers and its haters? Let us ask the man himself to speak to us; let us see if we cannot put the matter in his own words, ourselves but supplying, so to speak, connective tissue. That done, we shall understand the man better, and ourselves, and perhaps our social problem.

III
Exposition

1
Morality as Impotence

From a biological standpoint the phenomenon morality is of a highly suspicious nature.[142] Cui bono?—Whom shall we suspect of profiting by this institution? Is it a mode of enhancing life?—Does it make men stronger and more perfect?—or does it make for deterioration and decay? It is obvious that up to the present, morality has not been a problem at all; it has rather been the very ground on which people have met after all distrust, dissension, and contradiction, the hallowed place of peace, where thinkers could obtain rest even from themselves.[143] But what if morality be the greatest of all the stumbling-blocks in the way of human self-betterment? Is it possible that morality itself is the social problem, and that the solution of that problem lies in the judicious abolition of morality? It is a view for which something can be said.

You have heard that morality is a means used by the strong to control the weak. And it is true: just consider the conversion of Constantine. But to stop here is to let half the truth be passed off on you as the whole; and half a truth is half a lie. Much more true is it that morality is a means used by the weak to control the strong, the chain which weakness softly lays upon the feet of strength. The whole of the morality of Europe is based upon the values which are useful to the herd.[144] Every one’s desire is that there should be no other teaching and valuation of things than those by means of which he himself succeeds. Thus the fundamental tendency of the weak and mediocre of all times has been to enfeeble the strong and to reduce them to the level of the weak; their chief weapon in this process was the moral principle.[145] Good is every one who does not oppress, who hurts no one, attacks no one, does not take vengeance but hands over vengeance to God; who goes out of the way of evil, and demands little from life; like ourselves, patient, meek, just. Good is to do nothing for which we are not strong enough.[146] Zarathustra laughed many times over the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had lame paws![147] Obedience, subordination, submission, devotion, love, the pride of duty; fatalism, resignation, objectivity, stoicism, asceticism, self-denial; in short, anemia: these are the virtues which the herd would have all men cultivate,—particularly the strong men.[148] And the deification of Jesus,—that is to say of meekness,—what was it but another attempt to lull the strong to sleep?

2
Democracy

See, now, how nearly that attempt has succeeded. For is not democracy, if not victorious, at least on the road to victory to-day? And what is the democratic movement but the inheritor of Christianity?[149] Not the Christianity of the great popes; they knew better, and were building a splendid aristocracy when Luther spoiled it all by letting loose the levelling instincts of the herd.[150] The instinct of the herd is in favor of the leveller (Christ).[151] I very much fear that the first Christian is in his deepest instincts a rebel against everything privileged; he lives and struggles unremittingly for “equal rights.”[152] It is by Christianity, more than by anything else, that the poison of this doctrine of “equal rights” has been spread abroad. And do not let us underestimate the fatal influence! Nowadays no one has the courage of special rights, of rights of dominion. The aristocratic attitude of mind has been most thoroughly undermined by the lie of the equality of souls.[153]

But is not this the greatest of all lies—the “equality of men”? That is to say, the dominion of the inferior. Is it not the most threadbare and discredited of ideas? Democracy represents the disbelief in all great men and select classes; everybody equals everybody else; “at bottom we are all herd.” There is no welcome for the genius here; the more promising for the future the modern individual happens to be, the more suffering falls to his lot.[154] If the rise of great and rare men had been made dependent upon the voices of the multitude, there never would have been any such thing as a great man. The herd regards the exception, whether it be above or beneath its general level, as something antagonistic and dangerous. Their trick in dealing with the exceptions above them—the strong, the mighty, the wise, the fruitful—is to persuade them to become their head-servants.[155]

But the torture of the exceptional soul is only part of the villainy of democracies. The other part is chaos. Voltaire was right: “Quand la populace se mÊle de raisonner, tout est perdu.” Democracy is an aristocracy of orators, a competition in headlines, a maelstrom of ever new majorities, a torrent of petty factions sweeping on to ruin. Under democracy the state will decay, for the instability of legislation will leave little respect for law, until finally even the policeman will have to be replaced by private enterprise.[156] Democracy has always been the death-agony of the power of organization:[157] remember Athens, and look at England. Within fifty years these Babel governments will clash in a gigantic war for the control of the markets of the world; and when that war comes, England will pay the penalty for the democratic inefficiency of its dominant muddle-class.[158]

This wave of democracy will recede, and recede quickly, if men of ability will only oppose it openly. It is necessary for higher men to declare war on the masses. In all directions mediocre people are joining hands in order to make themselves master. The middle classes must be dissolved, and their influence decreased;[159] there must be no more intermarrying of aristocracy with plutocracy; this democratic folly would never have come at all had not the master-classes allowed their blood to be mingled with that of slaves.[160] Let us fight parliamentary government and the power of the press; they are the means whereby cattle become rulers.[161] Finally, it is senseless and dangerous to let the counting-mania (the custom of universal suffrage)—which is still but a short time under cultivation, and could easily be uprooted—take deeper root; its introduction was merely an expedient to steer clear of temporary difficulties; the time is ripe for a demonstration of democratic incompetence and a restoration of power to men who are born to rule.[162]

3
Feminism

Democracy, after all, is a disease; an attempt on the part of the botched to lay down for all the laws of social health. You may observe the disease in its growth-process by studying the woman movement. Woman’s first and last function is that of bearing robust children.[163] The emancipated ones are the abortions among women, those who lack the wherewithal to have children (I go no farther, lest I should become medicynical).[164] All intellect in women is a pretension; when a woman has scholarly inclinations there is generally something wrong with her sex. These women think to make themselves charming to free spirits by wearing advanced views; as though a woman without piety would not be something perfectly obnoxious and ludicrous to a profound and godless man![165] If there is anything worthy of laughter it is the man who takes part in this feminist agitation. Let it be understood clearly that the relations between men and women make equality impossible. It is in the nature of woman to take color and commandment from a man,—unless she happens to be a man. Man’s happiness is “I will,” woman’s happiness is “He will.”[166] Woman gives herself, man takes her: I do not think one will get over this natural contrast by any social contract.[167] Indeed, women will lose power with every step towards emancipation. Since the French Revolution the influence of woman has declined in proportion as she has increased her rights and claims. Let her first do her proper work properly (consider how much man has suffered from stupidity in the kitchen), and then it may be time to consider an extension of her activities. To be mistaken in this fundamental problem of “man and woman,” to deny here the profoundest antagonism, and the necessity for an eternally hostile tension, to dream here of equal rights, equal training, equal claims and obligations: that is a typical sign of shallow-mindedness. On the other hand, a man who has depth of spirit as well as of desires, and has also the depth of benevolence which is capable of severity and harshness, and easily confounded with them, can only think of woman as Orientals do: he must conceive of her as a possession, as confinable property, as a being predestined for service and accomplishing her mission therein—he must take his stand in this matter upon the immense rationality of Asia, upon the superiority of the instincts of Asia.[168]

4
Socialism and Anarchism

All this uprising of housekeepers is, of course, part of the general sickness with which Christianity has inoculated and weakened the strong races of Europe. Consider now the more virulent forms of the disease: socialism and anarchism. The coming of the “kingdom of God” has here been placed in the future, and been given an earthly, a human, meaning; but on the whole the faith in the old ideal is still maintained. There is still the comforting delusion about equal rights, with all the envy that lurks in that delusion. One speaks of “equal rights”: that is to say, so long as one is not a dominant personality, one wishes to prevent one’s competitors from growing in power.[169] It is a pleasure for all poor devils to grumble—it gives them a little intoxicating sensation of power. There is a small dose of revenge in every lamentation.[170] When you hear one of those reformers talk of humanity, you must not take him seriously; it is only his way of getting fools to believe that he is an altruist; beneath the cover of this buncombe a man strong in the gregarious instincts makes his bid for fame and followers and power. This pretense to altruism is only a roundabout way of asking for altruism, it is the result of a consciousness of the fact that one is botched and bungled.[171] In short, socialism is not justice but covetousness.[172] No doubt we should look upon its exponents and followers with ironic compassion: they want something which we have.[173]

From the standpoint of natural science the highest conception of society according to socialists is the lowest in the order of rank among societies. A socialist community would be another China, a vast and stifling mediocracy; it would be the tyranny of the lowest and most brainless brought to its zenith.[174] A nation in which there would be no exploitation would be dead. Life itself is essentially appropriation, conquest of the strange and weak; to put it at its mildest, exploitation.[175] The absence of exploitation would mean the end of organic functioning. Surely it is as legitimate and valuable for superior men to command and use inferior men as it is for superior species to command and use inferior species, as man commands and uses animals.[176] It is not surprising that the lamb should bear a grudge against the great birds of prey, but that is no reason for blaming the great birds of prey.[177] What should be done with muscle except to supply it with directive brains? How, otherwise, can anything worthy ever be built by men? In fact, man has value and significance only in so far as he is a stone in a great building; for which purpose he has first of all to be solid; he has to be a “stone.”[178]

Now the common people understand this quite well, and are as happy as any of the well-to-do, so long as a silly propaganda does not disturb them with dreams that can never be fulfilled.[179] Poverty, cheerfulness, and independence—it is possible to find these three qualities combined in one individual; poverty, cheerfulness, and slavery—this is likewise a possible combination: and I can say nothing better to the workmen who serve as factory-slaves.[180]

As for the upper classes, they need be at no loss for weapons with which to fight this pestilence. An occasional opening of the trap-door between the Haves and the Have-nots, increasing the number of property-owners, will serve best of all. If this policy is pursued, there will always be too many people of property for socialism ever to signify anything more than an attack of illness.[181] A little patience with inheritance and income taxes, and the noise of the cattle will subside.[182]

Notice, meanwhile, that socialism and despotism are bedfellows. Give the socialist his way, and he will put everything into the hands of the state,—that is to say, into the hands of demagogue politicians.[183] And then, all in the twinkling of an eye, socialism begets its opposite in good Hegelian fashion, and the dogs of anarchism are let loose to fill the world with their howling. And not without excuse or benefit; for politicians must be kept in their place, and the state rigidly restricted to its necessary functions, even if anarchist agitation helps one to do it.[184] And the anarchists are right: the state is the coldest of all monsters, and this lie creeps out of its mouth, “I, the State, am the people.”[185] So the wise man will turn anarchism, as well as socialism, to account; and he will not fret even when a king or two is hurried into heaven with nitroglycerine. Only since they have been shot at have princes once more sat securely on their thrones.[186]

Anarchism justifies itself in the aristocrat, who feels law as his instrument, not as his master; but the rebellion against law as such is but one more outburst of physiological misfits bent on levelling and revenge.[187] It is childish to desire a society in which every individual would have as much freedom as another.[188] Decadence speaks in the democratic idiosyncrasy against everything which rules and wishes to rule, the modern misarchism (to coin a bad word for a bad thing).[189] When all men are strong enough to command, then law will be superfluous; weakness needs the vertebrÆ of law. He is commanded who cannot obey his own self. Let the anarchist be thankful that he has laws to obey. To command is more difficult; whenever living things command they risk themselves; they take the hard responsibilities for the result.[190] Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves;[191] when the mob is capable of that, it will be time to think of dispensing with law. The truth is, of course, that the anarchist is lulled into nonsense by Rousseau’s notion of the naturally good man. He does not understand that revolution merely unlashes the dogs in man, till they once more cry for the whip.[192] Cast out the Bourbons, and in ten years you will welcome Napoleon.

That is the end of anarchism; and it is the end of democracy, too.

The truth is that men are willing and anxious to be ruled by rulers worthy of the name. But the corrupted ruling classes have brought ruling into evil odor. The degeneration of the ruler and of the ruling classes has been the cause of all the disorders in history. Democracy is not ruling, but drifting; it is a political relaxation, as if an organism were to allow each of its parts to do just as it pleased. Precisely these disorganizing principles give our age its specific character. Our society has lost the power to function properly; it no longer rids itself naturally of its rotten elements; it no longer has the strength even to excrete.[193]

5
Degeneration

What kind of men is to be found in such a society? Mediocre men; men stupid to the point of sanctity; fragile, useless souls-de-luxe; men suffering from a sort of hemiplegia of virtue,—that is to say, paralyzed in the self-assertive instincts; men tamed, almost emasculated by a morality whose essence is the abdication of the will.[194] Now, as a rule, the taming of a beast is achieved only by deteriorating it; so too the moral man is not a better man, he is rather a weaker member of his species. He is altruistic, of course; that is, he feels that he needs help. There is no place for really great men in this march towards nonentity; if a great man appears he is called a criminal.[195] A Periclean Greek, a Renaissance Florentine, would breathe like one asphyxiated in this moralic acid atmosphere; the first condition of life for such a man is that he free himself from this Chinadom of the spirit.[196] But the number of those who are capable of rising into the pure air of unmoralism is very small; and those who have made timid sallies into theological heresy are the most addicted to the comfort and security of ethical orthodoxy. In short, men are coming to look upon lowered vitality as the heart of virtue; and morality will be saddled with the guilt if the maximum potentiality of the power and splendor of the human species should never be attained.[197]

Men of this stamp require a good deal of religious pepsin to overcome the indigestibility of life; if they leave one faith in the passing bravery of their youth they soon sink back into another.[198] God, previously diluted from tribal deity into substantia and ding-an-sich,[199] now recovers a respectable degree of reality; the imaginary pillar on which men lean is made stronger and more concrete as their weakness increases. How much faith a person requires in order to flourish, how much fixed opinion he needs which he does not wish to have shaken, because he holds himself thereby,—is a measure of his power (or more plainly speaking, of his weakness).[200]

The same criterion classifies our friends the metaphysicians,—those albinos of thought,—who are, of course, priests in disguise.[201] The degree of a man’s will-power may be measured by the extent to which he can dispense with the meaning in things; by the extent to which he is able to endure a world without meaning; because he himself arranges a small portion of it.[202] The world has no meaning: all the better; put some meaning into it, says the man with a man’s heart. The world has no meaning: but it is only a world of appearance, says the weak-kneed philosopher; behind this phenomenal world is the real world, which has meaning, and means good. Of the real world “there is no knowledge; consequently there is a God”—what novel elegance of syllogism![203] This belief that the world which ought to be is real is a belief proper to the unfruitful who do not wish to create a world. The “will to truth” is the impotence of the “will to create.”[204] Even monism is being turned into medicine for sick souls; clearly these lovers of wisdom seek not truth, but remedies for their illnesses.[205] There is too much beer and midnight oil in modern philosophy, and not enough fresh air.[206] Philosophers condemn this world because they have avoided it; those who are contemplative naturally belittle activity.[207] In truth, the history of philosophy is the story of a secret and mad hatred of the prerequisites of life, of the feelings which make for the real values of life.[208] No wonder that philosophy is fallen to such low estate. Science flourishes nowadays, and has the good conscience clearly visible on its countenance; while the remnant to which modern philosophy has gradually sunk excites distrust and displeasure, if not scorn and pity. Philosophy reduced to a “theory of knowledge,” a philosophy that never gets beyond the threshold, and rigorously denies itself the right to enter—that is philosophy in its last throes, an end, an agony; something that awakens pity. How could such a philosophy rule![209]

6
Nihilism

All these things, democracy, feminism, socialism, anarchism, and modern philosophy, are heads of the Christian hydra, each a sore in the total disease. Given such illness, affecting all parts of the social body, and what result shall we expect and find? Pessimism, despair, nihilism,—that is, disbelief in all values of life.[210] Confidence in life is gone; life itself has become a problem. Love of life is still possible,—only it is the love of a woman of whom one is doubtful.[211] The “good man” sees himself surrounded by evil, discovers traces of evil in every one of his acts. And thus he ultimately arrives at the conclusion, which to him is quite logical, that nature is evil, that man is corrupted, and that being good is an act of grace (that is to say, it is impossible to man when he stands alone). In short, he denies life.[212] The man who frees himself from the theology of the Church but adheres to Christian ethics necessarily falls into pessimism. He perceives that man is no longer an assistant in, let alone the culmination of, the evolutionary process; he perceives that Becoming has been aiming at Nothing, and has achieved it; and that is something which he cannot bear.[213] Suffering, which was, before, a trial with promised reward, is now an intolerable mystery; if he is materially comfortable himself, he finds source for sentiment and tears in the pain and misery of others; he concocts a “social problem,” and never dreams that the social problem is itself a result of decadence.[214] He does not feel at home in this world in which the Christian God is dead, and to which, nevertheless, he brings nothing more appreciative than the old Christian moral attitude. He despairs because he is a chaos, and knows it; “I do not know where I am, or what I am to do; I am everything that knows not where it is or what to do,” he sighs.[215] Life, he says at last, is not worth living.

Let us not try to answer such a man; he needs not logic but a sanitarium. But see, through him, and in him, the destructiveness of Christian morals. This despicable civilization, says Rousseau, is to blame for our bad morality. What if our good morality is to blame for this despicable civilization?[216] See how the old ethic depreciates the joy of living, and the gratitude felt towards life; how it checks the knowledge and unfolding of life; how it chokes the impulse to beautify and ennoble life.[217] And at what a time! Think what a race with masculine will could accomplish now! Precisely now, when will in its fullest strength were necessary, it is in the weakest and most pusillanimous condition. Absolute mistrust concerning the organizing power of the will: to that we have come.[218] The world is dark with despair at the moment of greatest light.

What if man could be made to love the light and use it?

7
The Will to Power

Is it possible that this despair is not the final state in the exhaustion of a race, but only a transition from belief in a perfect and ethical world to an attitude of transvaluation and control?[219] Perhaps we are at the bottom of our spiritual toboggan, and an ascending movement is around the corner of the years. Now that our Christian bubble has burst into Schopenhauer, we are left free to recover some part of the joyous strength of the ancients. Let us become again as little children, unspoiled by religion and morality; let us forget what it is to feel sinful; let the thousandfold laughter of children clear the air of the odor of decay. Let us begin anew; and the soul will rise and overflow all its margins with the joy of rediscovered life.[220] Life has not deceived us! On the contrary, from year to year it appears richer, more desirable, and more mysterious; the old fetters are broken by the thought that life may be an experiment and not a duty, not a fatality, not a deceit![221] Life—that means for us to transform constantly into light and flame all that we are, and also all that we meet with; we cannot possibly do otherwise.[222] To be natural again, to dare to be as immoral as nature is; to be such pagans as were the Greeks of the Homeric age, to say Yea to life, even to its suffering; to win back some of that mountain-air Dionysian spirit which took pleasure in the tragic, nay, which invented tragedy as the expression of its super-abundant vitality, as the expression of its welcome of even the cruelest and most terrible elements of life![223] To be healthy once more!

For there is no other virtue than health, vigor, energy. All virtues should be looked upon as physiological conditions, and moral judgments are symptoms of physiological prosperity or the reverse. Indeed, it might be worth while to try to see whether a scientific order of values might not be constructed according to a scale of numbers and measures representing energy. All other values are matters of prejudice, simplicity, and misunderstanding.[224] Instead of moral values let us use naturalistic values, physiological values; let us say frankly with Spinoza that virtue and power are one and the same. What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power, the will to power, and power itself, in man. What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is increasing, that resistance is being overcome.[225] This is not orthodox ethics; and perhaps it will not do for long ears,—though an unspoiled youth would understand it. A healthy and vigorous boy will look up sarcastically if you ask him, “Do you wish to become virtuous?”—but ask him, “Do you wish to become stronger than your comrades?” and he is all eagerness at once.[226] Youth knows that ability is virtue; watch the athletic field. Youth is not at home in the class room, because there knowledge is estranged from action; and youth measures the height of what a man knows by the depth of his power to do.[227] There is a better gospel in the boy on the field than in the man in the pulpit.

Which of the boys whom we know do we love best in our secret hearts—the prayerful Aloysius, or the masterful leader of the urchins in the street? We moralize and sermonize in mean efforts to bring the young tyrant down to our virtuous anÆmia; but we know that we are wrong, and respect him most when he stands his ground most firmly. To require of strength that it should express itself as weakness is just as absurd as to require of weakness that it should express itself as strength.[228] Let us go to school to our children, and we shall understand that all native propensities are beneficent, that the evil impulses are to a far view as necessary and preservative as the good.[229] In truth we worship youth because at its finest it is a free discharge of instinctive strength; and we know that happiness is nothing else than that. To abandon instinct, to deliberate, to clog action with conscious thought,—that is to achieve old age. After all, nothing can be done perfectly so long as it is done consciously; consciousness is a defect to be overcome.[230] Instinct is the most intelligent of all kinds of intelligence which have hitherto been discovered.[231] Genius lies in the instincts; goodness too; all consciousness is theatricality.[232] When a people begins to worship reason, it begins to die.[233] Youth knows better: it follows instinct trustfully, and worships power.

And we worship power too, and should say so were we as honest as our children. Our gentlest virtues are but forms of power: out of the abundance of the power of sex come kindness and pity; out of revenge, justice; out of the love of resistance, bravery. Love is a secret path to the heart of the powerful, in order to become his master; gratitude is revenge of a lofty kind; self-sacrifice is an attempt to share in the power of him to whom the sacrifice is made. Honor is the acknowledgment of an equal power; praise is the pride of the judge; all conferring of benefits is an exercise of power.[234] Behold a man in distress: straightway the compassionate ones come to him, depict his misfortune to him, at last go away, satisfied and elevated; they have gloated over the unhappy man’s misfortune and their own; they have spent a pleasant Sunday afternoon.[235] So with the scientist and the philosopher: in their thirst for knowledge lurks the lust of gain and conquest. And the cry of the oppressed for freedom is again a cry for power.[236]

You cannot understand man, you cannot understand society, until you learn to see in all things this will to power. Physiologists should bethink themselves before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength: self-preservation is only one of the results of this. And psychologists should think twice before saying that happiness or pleasure is the motive of all action. Pleasure is but an incident of the restless search for power; happiness is an accompanying, not an actuating, factor. The feeling of happiness lies precisely in the discontentedness of the will, in the fact that without opponents and obstacles it is never satisfied. Man is now master of the forces of nature, and master too of his own wild and unbridled feelings; in comparison with primitive man the man of to-day represents an enormous quantum of power, but not an increase of happiness. How can one maintain, then, that man has striven after happiness? No; not happiness, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but capacity; that is the secret of man’s longing and man’s seeking.[237]

Let biologists, too, reËxamine the stock-in-trade of their theory. Life is not the continuous adjustment of internal to external relations, but will to power, which, proceeding from within, subjugates and incorporates an ever-increasing quantity of “external phenomena.” All motive force, all “causation” whatever, is this will to power; there is no other force, physical, dynamical, or psychical.[238] As to the famous “struggle for existence,” it seems at present to be more of an assumption than a fact. It does occur, but as an exception; and it is due not to a desire for food but À tergo to a surcharge of energy demanding discharge. The general condition of life is not one of want or famine, but rather of riches, of lavish luxuriance, and even of absurd prodigality; where there is a struggle it is a struggle for power. We must not confound Malthus with Nature.[239] One does indeed find the “cruelty of Nature” which is so often referred to, but in a different place: Nature is cruel, but against her lucky and well-constituted children; she protects and shelters and loves the lowly. Darwin sees selection in favor of the stronger, the better-constituted. Precisely the reverse stares one in the face: the suppression of the lucky cases, the reversion to average, the uselessness of the more highly constituted types, the inevitable mastery of the mediocre. If we drew our morals from reality, they would read thus: the mediocre are more valuable than the exceptional creatures; the will to nonentity prevails over the will to life. We have to beware of this formulation of reality into a moral.[240]

No; morality is not mediocrity, it is superiority; it does not mean being like most people, but being better, stronger, more capable than most people. It does not mean timidity: if anything is virtue it is to stand unafraid in the presence of any prohibition.[241] It does not mean the pursuit of ends sanctified by society; it means the will to your own ends, and to the means to them. It means behaving as states behave,—with frank abandonment of all altruistic pretence. Corporate bodies are intended to do that which individuals have not the courage to do: for this reason all communities are vastly more upright and instructive as regards the nature of man than individuals, who are too cowardly to have the courage of their desires. All altruism is the prudence of the private man; societies are not mutually altruistic. Altruism and life are incompatible: all the forces and instincts which are the source of life lie stagnant beneath the ban of the old morality. But real morality is certainty of instinct, effectiveness of action; it is any action which increases the power of a man or of men; it is an expression of ascendent and expanding life; it is achievement; it is power.[242]

8
The Superman

With such a morality you breed men who are men; and to breed men who are men is all that your “social problem” comes to. This does not mean that the whole race is to be improved: the very last thing a sensible man would promise to accomplish would be to improve mankind. Mankind does not improve, it does not even exist. The aspect of the whole is much more like that of a huge experimenting workshop where some things in all ages succeed, while an incalculable number of things fail. To say that the social problem consists in a general raising of the average standard of comfort and ability amounts to abandoning the problem; there is as little prospect of mankind’s attaining to a higher order as there is for the ant and the ear-wig to enter into kinship with God and eternity. The most fundamental of all errors here lies in regarding the many, the herd, as an aim instead of the individual: the herd is only a means. The road to perfection lies in the bringing forth of the most powerful individuals, for whose use the great masses would be converted into mere tools, into the most intelligent and flexible tools possible. Every human being, with his total activity, has dignity and significance only so far as he is, consciously or unconsciously, a tool in the service of a superior individual. All that can be done is to produce here and there, now and then, such a superior individual, l’uomo singulare, the higher man, the superman. The problem does not concern what humanity as a whole or as a species is to accomplish, but what kind of man is to be desired as highest in value, what kind of man is to be worked for and bred. To produce the superman: that is the social problem. If this is not understood, nothing is understood.[243]

Now what would such a man be like? Shall we try to picture him?

We see him as above all a lover of life: strong enough, too, to love life without deceiving himself about it. There is no memento mori here; rather a memento vivere; rich instincts call for much living. A hard man, loving danger and difficulty: what does not kill him, he feels, leaves him stronger. Pleasure—pleasure as it is understood by the rich—is repugnant to him: he seeks not pleasure but work, not happiness but responsibility and achievement. He does not make philosophy an excuse for living prudently and apart, an artifice for withdrawing successfully from the game of life; he does not stand aside and merely look on; he puts his shoulder to the wheel; for him it is the essence of philosophy to feel the obligation and burden of a hundred attempts and temptations, the joy of a hundred adventures; he risks himself constantly; he plays out to the end this bad game.[244]

To risk and to create, this is the meaning of life to the superman. He could not bear to be a man, if man could not be a poet, a maker. To change every “It was” into a “Thus I would have it!”—in this he finds that life may redeem itself. He is moved not by ambition but by a mighty overflowing spendthrift spirit that drives him on; he must remake; for this he compels all things to come to him and into him, in order that they may flow back from him as gifts of his love and his abundance; in this refashioning of things by thought he sees the holiness of life; the greatest events, he knows, are these still creative hours.[245]

He is a man of contrasts, or contradictions; he does not desire to be always the same man; he is a multitude of elements and of men; his value lies precisely in his comprehensiveness and multifariousness, in the variety of burdens which he can bear, in the extent to which he can stretch his responsibility; in him the antagonistic character of existence is represented and justified. He loves instinct, knows that it is the fountain of all his energies; but he knows, too, the natural delight of Æsthetic natures in measure, the pleasure of self-restraint, the exhilaration of the rider on a fiery steed. He is a selective principle, he rejects much; he reacts slowly to all kinds of stimuli, with that tardiness which long caution and deliberate pride have bred in him; he tests the approaching stimulus. He decides slowly; but he holds firmly to a decision made.[246]

He loves and has the qualities which the folk call virtues, but he loves too and shows the qualities which the folk call vices; it is again in this union of opposites that he rises above mediocrity; he is a broad arch that spans two banks lying far apart. The folk on either side fear him; for they cannot calculate on him, or classify him. He is a free spirit, an enemy of all fetters and labels; he belongs to no party, knowing that the man who belongs to a party perforce becomes a liar. He is a sceptic (not that he must appear to be one); freedom from any kind of conviction is a necessary factor in his strength of will. He does not make propaganda or proselytes; he keeps his ideals to himself as distinctions; his opinion is his opinion: another person has not easily a right to it; he has renounced the bad taste of wishing to agree with many people. He knows that he cannot reveal himself to anybody; like everything profound, he loves the mask; he does not descend to familiarity; and is not familiar when people think he is. If he cannot lead, he walks alone.[247]

He has not only intellect; if that were all it would not be enough; he has blood. Behind him is a lineage of culture and ability; lives of danger and distinction; his ancestors have paid the price for what he is, just as most men pay the price for what their ancestors have been. Naturally, then, he has a strong feeling of distance; he sees inequality and gradation, order and rank, everywhere among men. He has the most aristocratic of virtues: intellectual honesty. He does not readily become a friend or an enemy; he honors only his equals, and therefore cannot be the enemy of many; where one despises one cannot wage war. He lacks the power of easy reconciliation; but “retaliation” is as incomprehensible to him as “equal rights.” He remains just even as regards his injurer; despite the strong provocation of personal insult the clear and lofty objectivity of the just and judging eye (whose glance is as profound as it is gentle) is untroubled. He recognizes duties only to his equals; to others he does what he thinks best; he knows that justice is found only among equals. He has that distinctively aristocratic trait, the ability to command and with equal readiness to obey; that is indispensable to his pride. He will not permit himself to be praised; he does what serves his purpose. The essence of him is that he has a purpose, for which he will not hesitate to run all risks, even to sacrifice men, to bend their backs to the worst. That something may exist which is a hundred times more important than the question whether he feels well or unwell, and therefore too whether the others feel well or unwell: this is a fundamental instinct of his nature. To have a purpose, and to cleave to it through all dangers till it be achieved,—that is his great passion, that is himself.[248]

9
How to Make Supermen

It is our task, then, to procreate this synthetic man, who embodies everything and justifies it, and for whom the rest of mankind is but soil; to bring the philosopher, the artist, and the saint, within and without us, to the light, and to strive thereby for the completion of nature. In this cultivation lies the meaning of culture: the direction of all life to the end of producing the finest possible individuals. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; his very essence is to create a being higher than himself; that is the instinct of procreation, the instinct of action and of work. Even the higher man himself feels this need of begetting; and for lesser men all virtue and morals lie in preparing the way that the superman may come. There is no greater horror than the degenerating soul which says, “All for myself.” In this great purpose, too, is the essence of a better religion, and a surpassing of the bounds of narrow individualism; with this purpose there come moments, sparks from the clear fire of love, in whose light we understand the word “I” no longer; we feel that we are creating, and therefore in a sense becoming, something greater than ourselves.[249]

How to make straight the way for the superman?

First by reforming marriage. Let it be understood at once that love is a hindrance rather than a help to such marriages as are calculated to breed higher men. To regard a thing as beautiful is necessarily to regard it falsely; that is why love-marriages are from the social point of view the most unreasonable form of matrimony. Were there a benevolent God, the marriages of men would cause him more displeasure than anything else; he would observe that all buyers are careful, but that even the most cunning one buys his wife in a sack; and surely he would cause the earth to tremble in convulsions when a saint and a goose couple. When a man is in love, he should not be allowed to come to a decision about his life, and to determine once for all the character of his lifelong society on account of a whim. If we treated marriage seriously, we would publicly declare invalid the vows of lovers, and refuse them permission to marry. We would remake public opinion, so that it would encourage trial marriage; we would exact certificates of health and good ancestry; we would punish bachelorhood by longer military service, and would reward with all sorts of privileges those fathers who should lavish sons upon the world. And above all we would make people understand that the purpose of marriage is not that they should duplicate, but that they should surpass, themselves. Perhaps we would read to them from Zarathustra, with fitting ceremonies and solemnities: “Thou art young, and wishest for child and marriage. But I ask thee, art thou a man who dareth to wish for a child? Art thou the victorious one, the self-subduer, the commander of thy senses, the master of thy virtues?—or in thy wish doth there speak the animal, or necessity? Or solitude? Or discord with thyself? I would that thy victory and freedom were longing for a child. Thou shalt build living monuments unto thy victory and thy liberation. Thou shalt build beyond thyself. But first thou must build thyself square in body and soul. Thou shalt not only propagate thyself, but propagate thyself upward! Marriage: thus I call the will of two to create that one which is more than they who created it. I call marriage reverence unto each other as unto those who will such a will.”[250]

In a word, eugenic marriage; and after eugenic marriage, rigorous education. But interest in education will become powerful only when belief in a God and his care have been abandoned, just as medicine began to flourish only when the belief in miraculous cures had lapsed. When men begin at last to believe in education, they will endure much rather than have their sons miss going to a good and hard school at the proper time. What is it that one learns in a hard school? To obey and to command. For this is what distinguishes hard schooling, as good schooling, from every other schooling, namely that a good deal is demanded, severely exacted; that excellence is required as if it were normal; that praise is scanty, that leniency is non-existent; that blame is sharp, practical, and without reprieve, and has no regard to talent and antecedents. To prefer danger to comfort; not to weigh in a tradesman’s balance what is permitted and what is forbidden; to be more hostile to pettiness, slyness, and parasitism than to wickedness;—we are in every need of a school where these things would be taught. Such a school would allow its pupils to learn productively, by living and doing; it would not subject them to the tyranny of books and the weight of the past; it would teach them less about the past and more about the future; it would teach them the future of humanity as depending on human will, on their will; it would prepare the way for and be a part of a vast enterprise in breeding and education.[251] But even such a school would not provide all that is necessary in education. Not all should receive the same training and the same care; select groups must be chosen, and special instruction lavished on them; the greatest success, however, will remain for the man who does not seek to educate either everybody or certain limited circles, but only one single individual. The last century was superior to ours precisely because it possessed so many individually educated men.

10
On the Necessity of Exploitation

And next slavery.

This is one of those ugly words which are the verba non grata of modern discussion, because they jar us so ruthlessly out of the grooves of our thinking. Nevertheless it is clear to all but those to whom self-deception is the staff of life, that as the honest Greeks had it, some are born to be slaves. Try to educate all men equally, and you become the laughing-stock of your own maturity. The masses seem to be worth notice in three aspects only: first as the copies of great men, printed on bad paper from worn-out plates; next as a contrast to the great men; and lastly as their tools. Living consists in living at the cost of others: the man who has not grasped this fact has not taken the first step towards truth to himself. And to consider distress of all kinds as an objection, as something which must be done away with, is the greatest nonsense on earth; almost as mad as the will to abolish bad weather, out of pity to the poor, so to speak. The masses must be used, whether that means or does not mean that they must suffer;—it requires great strength to live and forget how far life and injustice are one. What is the suffering of whole peoples compared to the creative agonies of great individuals?[252]

There are many who threw away everything they were worth when they threw away their slavery. In all respects slaves live more securely and more happily than modern laborers; the laborer chooses his harder lot to satisfy the vanity of telling himself that he is not a slave. These men are dangerous; not because they are strong, but because they are sick; it is the sick who are the greatest danger to the healthy; it is the weak ones, they who mouth so much about their sickness, who vomit bile and call it newspaper,—it is they who instil the most dangerous venom and scepticism into our trust in life, in man, and in ourselves; it is they who most undermine the life beneath our feet. It is for such as these that Christianity may serve a good purpose (so serving our purpose too). Those qualities which are within the grasp only of the strongest and most terrible natures, and which make their existence possible—leisure, adventure, disbelief, and even dissipation—would necessarily ruin mediocre natures—and does do so when they possess them. In the case of the latter, industry, regularity, moderation, and strong “conviction” are in their proper place—in short, all “gregarious virtues”; under their influence these mediocre men become perfect. We good Europeans, then, though atheists and immoralists, will take care to support the religions and the morality which are associated with the gregarious instinct; for by means of them an order of men is, so to speak, prepared, which must at some time or other fall into our hands, which must actually crave for our hands.[253]

Slavery, let us understand it well, is the necessary price of culture; the free work, or art, of some involves the compulsory labor of others. As in the organism so in society: the higher function is possible only through the subjection of the lower functions. A high civilization is a pyramid; it can stand only on a broad base, its first prerequisite is a strongly and soundly consolidated mediocrity. In order that there may be a broad, deep, and fruitful soil for the development of art, the enormous majority must, in the service of a minority, be slavishly subjected. At their cost, through the surplus of their labor, that privileged class is to be relieved from the struggle for existence, in order to create and to satisfy a new world of want. The misery of the toilers must still increase in order to make the production of a world of art possible to a small number of Olympian men.[254]

11
Aristocracy

The greatest folly of the strong is to let the weak make them ashamed to exploit, to let the weak suggest to them, “It is a shame to be happy—there is too much misery!” Let us therefore reaffirm the right of the happy to existence, the right of bells with a full tone over bells that are cracked and discordant. Not that exploitation as such is desirable; it is good only where it supports and develops an aristocracy of higher men who are themselves developing still higher men. This philosophy aims not at an individualistic morality but at a new order of rank. In this age of universal suffrage, in this age in which everybody is allowed to sit in judgment upon everything and everybody, one feels compelled to reËstablish the order of rank. The higher men must be protected from contamination and suffocation by the lower. The richest and most complex forms perish so easily! Only the lowest succeed in maintaining their apparent imperishableness.[255]

The first question as to the order of rank: how far is a man disposed to be solitary or gregarious? If he is disposed to be gregarious, his value consists in those qualities which secure the survival of his tribe or type; if he is disposed to be solitary, his qualities are those which distinguish him from others; hence the important consequence: the solitary type should not be valued from the standpoint of the gregarious type, or vice versa. Viewed from above, both types are necessary; and so is their antagonism. Degeneration lies in the approximation of the qualities of the herd to those of the solitary creature, and vice versa; in short, in their beginning to resemble each other. Hence the difference in their virtues, their rights and their obligations; in the light of this difference one comes to abhor the vulgarity of Stuart Mill when he says, “What is right for one man is right for another.” It is not; what is right for the herd is precisely what is wrong for their leaders; and what is right for the leaders is wrong for the herd. The leaders use, the herd is used; the virtues of either lie in the efficiency here of leadership, there of service. Slave-morality is one thing, and master-morality another.[256]

And leadership of course requires an aristocracy. Let us repeat it: democracy has always been the death-agony of the power of organization and direction; these require great aristocratic families, with long traditions of administration and leadership; old ancestral lines that guarantee for many generations the duration of the necessary will and the necessary instincts. Not only aristocracy, then, but caste; for if a man have plebeian ancestors, his soul will be a plebeian soul; education, discipline, culture will be wasted on him, merely enabling him to become a great liar. Therefore intermarriage, even social intercourse of leaders with herd, is to be avoided with all precaution and intolerance; too much intercourse with barbarians ruined the Romans, and will ruin any noble race.[257]

In what direction may one turn with any hope of finding even the aspiration for such an aristocracy? Only there where a noble attitude of mind prevails, an attitude of mind which believes in slavery and in manifold orders of rank, as the prerequisites of any higher degree of culture. Men with this attitude of mind will insistently call for, and will at last produce, philosophical men of power, artist-tyrants,—a higher kind of men which, thanks to their preponderance of will, knowledge, riches, and influence, will avail themselves of democratic Europe as the most suitable and subtle instrument for taking the fate of Europe into their hands, and working as artists upon man himself. The fundamental belief of these great desirers will be that society must not be allowed to exist for its own sake, but only as the foundation and scaffolding by means of which a select class of beings may be able to elevate themselves to their highest duties, and in general to a higher existence: like those sun-climbing plants in Java which encircle an oak so long and so often with their arms that at last, high above it, but supported by it, they can unfold their tops in the open light, and exhibit their happiness.[258]

12
Signs of Ascent

Are we moving toward such a consummation? Can we detect about us any signs of this ascending movement of life? Not signs of “progress”; that is another narcotic, like Christianity,—good for slaves, but to be avoided by those who rule. Man as a species is not progressing; the general level of the species is not raised. But humanity as mass sacrificed to the prosperity of the one stronger type of Man,—that would be a progress.[259]

Progress of this kind, to some degree, there has always been. The ruling class in Greece, as seen in Homer and even in Thucydides (though with Socrates degeneration begins), is an example of this kind of progress or attainment. Imagine this culture, which has its poet in Sophocles, its statesman in Pericles, its physician in Hippocrates, its natural philosopher in Democritus; here is a yea-saying, a gratitude, to life in all its manifestations; here life is understood, and covered with art that it may be borne; here men are frivolous so that they may forget for a moment the arduousness and perilousness of their task; they are superficial, but from profundity; they exalt philosophers who preach moderation, because they themselves are so immoderate, so instinctive, so hilariously wild; they are great, they are elevated above any ruling class before or after them because here the morals of the governing caste have grown up among the governing caste, and not among the herd.[260]

We catch some of the glory of these Greeks in the men of the Renaissance: men perfect in their immorality, terrible in their demands; we should not dare to stand amid the conditions which produced these men and which these men produced; we should not even dare to imagine ourselves in those conditions: our nerves would not endure that reality,—not to speak of our muscles. One man of their type, continuator and development of their type, brother (as Taine most rightly says) of Dante and Michelangelo,—one such man we have known with less of the protection of distance; and he was too hard to bear. That Ens Realissimum, synthesis of monster and superman, surnamed Napoleon! The first man, and the man of greatest initiative and developed views, of modern times; a man of tolerance, not out of weakness, but out of strength, able to risk the full enjoyment of naturalness and be strong enough for this freedom. In such a man we see something in the nature of “disinterestedness” in his work on his marble, whatever be the number of men that are sacrificed in the process. Men were glad to serve him; as most normal men are glad to serve the great man; the crowd was tired of “equal rights,” tired of being masterless; it longed to worship genius again. What was the excuse for that terrible farce, the French Revolution? It made men ready for Napoleon.[261]

When shall we produce another superman? Let us go back to our question: Can we detect about us any signs of strength?

Yes. We are learning to get along without God. We are recovering from the noble sentiments of Rousseau. We are giving the body its due; physiology is overcoming theology. We are less hungry for lies,—we are facing squarely some of the ugliness of life,—prostitution, for example. We speak less of “duty” and “principles”; we are not so enamored of bourgeois conventions. We are less ashamed of our instincts; we no longer believe in a right which proceeds from a power that is unable to uphold it. There is an advance towards “naturalness”: in all political questions, even in the relations between parties, even in merchants’, workmen’s circles only questions of power come into play; what one can do is the first question, what one ought to do is a secondary consideration. There is a certain degree of liberal-mindedness regarding morality; where this is most distinctly wanting we regard its absence as a sign of a morbid condition (Carlyle, Ibsen, Schopenhauer); if there is anything which can reconcile us to our age it is precisely the amount of immorality which it allows itself without falling in its own estimation.[262]

Modern science, despite its narrowing specialization, is a sign of ascent. Here is strictness in service, inexorability in small matters as well as great, rapidity in weighing, judging, and condemning; the hardest is demanded here, the best is done without reward of praise or distinction; it is rather as among soldiers,—almost nothing but blame and sharp reprimand is heard; for doing well prevails here as the rule, and the rule has, as everywhere, a silent tongue. It is the same with this “severity of science” as with the manners and politeness of the best society: it frightens the uninitiated. He, however, who is accustomed to it, does not like to live anywhere but in this clear, transparent, powerful, and highly electrified atmosphere, this manly atmosphere.[263]

In this achievement of science lies such an opportunity as philosophy has never had before. Science traces the course of things but points to no goal: what it does give consists of the fundamental facts upon which the new goal must be based. All the sciences have now to pave the way for the future task of the philosopher; this task being understood to mean that he must solve the problem of value, that he has to fix the hierarchy of values. He must become lawgiver, commander; he must determine the “whither” and “why” for mankind. All knowledge must be at his disposal, and must serve him as a tool for creation.[264]

Most certain of the signs of a reascending movement of life is the development of militarism. The military development of Europe is a delightful surprise. This fine discipline is teaching us to do our duty without expecting praise. Universal military service is the curious antidote which we possess for the effeminacy of democratic ideas. Men are learning again the joy of living in danger. Some of them are even learning the old truth that war is good in itself, aside from any gain in land or other wealth; instead of saying “A good cause will hallow every war,” they learn to say “A good war hallows every cause.” When the instincts of a society ultimately make it give up war and conquest, it is decadent: it is ripe for democracy and the rule of shopkeepers. A state which should prevent war would not only be committing suicide (for war is just as necessary to the state as the slave is to society); it would be hostile to life, it would be an outrage on the future of man. The maintenance of the military state is the last means of adhering to the great traditions of the past; or where it has been lost, of reviving it. Only in this can the superior or strong type of man be preserved.[265]

A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at six or seven great men, and then to get around them. The state is the organization of immorality for the attainment of this purpose. But as existing to-day the state is a very imperfect instrument, subject at any moment to democratic foundering. What concerns the thinker here is the slow and hesitant formation of a united Europe. This was the thought, and the sole real work and impulse, of the only broad-minded and deep-thinking men of this century,—the tentative effort to anticipate the future of “the European.” Only in their weaker moments, or when they grew old, did they fall back again into the national narrowness of the “Fatherlanders”—then they were once more “patriots.” One thinks here of men like Napoleon, Heine, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Schopenhauer. And after all, is there a single idea behind this bovine nationalism? What possible value can there be in encouraging this arrogant self-conceit when everything to-day points to greater and more common interests?—at a moment when the spiritual dependence and denationalization which are obvious to all are paving the way for the rapprochements and fertilizations which make up the real value and sense of present-day culture?[266]

What an instrument such a united Europe would be for the development and protection and expression of superior individuals! What a buoyant ascent of life after this long descent into democracy! See now, in review, the two movements which we have studied and on which we have strung our philosophy: on the one hand Christian mythology and morality, the cult of weakness, the fear of life, the deterioration of the species, ever increasing suppression of the privileged and the strong, the lapse into democracy, feminism, socialism, and at last into anarchy,—all terminating in pessimism, despair, total loss of the love of life; on the other hand the reaffirmation of the worth of life, the resolute distinction between slave-morality and master-morality, the recognition of the aristocratic valuation of health, vigor, energy, as moral in all their forms, and of the will to power as the source and significance of all action and all living; the conception of the higher man, of the exceptional individual, as the goal of human endeavor; the redirection of marriage, of education, of social structure, to the fostering and cherishing of these higher types;—culminating in the supernational organization of Europe as the instrumentality and artistic expression of the superior man.[267]

Is this philosophy too hard to bear? Very well. But those races that cannot bear it are doomed; and those which regard it as the greatest blessing are destined to be masters of the world.[268]

IV
Criticism

WHAT shall one say to this? What would a democrat say,—such a democrat as would be a friend to socialism and feminism, and even to anarchism,—and a lover of Jesus? One pictures such a man listening with irritated patience to the foregoing, and responding very readily to an invitation to take the floor.

There are lessons here, he begins, as if brushing away an initial encumbrance. There is something of Nietzsche in all of us, just as there is something of Jesus (almost as there is something of man and of woman in all of us, as Weininger argued); and part of that crowd called myself is flattered by this doctrine of ruthless power. Nietzsche stood outside our social and moral structure, he was a sort of hermit in the world of thought; and so he could see things in that structure which are too near to our noses for easy vision. And as you listen to him you see history anew as a long succession of masterings and enslavings and deceivings, and you become almost reconciled to the future being nothing but a further succession of the same. And then you begin to see that if the future is to be different, one of the things we must do is to pinch ourselves out of this Nietzschean dream.

And a good way to begin is with Nietzsche’s own principle, that every philosophy is a physiology.[269] He asks us to believe that there is no such thing as a morbid trait in him,[270] but we must not take him at his word. The most important point about this philosophy is that it was written by a sick man, a man sick to the very roots—if you will let me say it, abnormal in sexual constitution; a man not sufficiently attracted to the other sex, because he has so much of the other sex in him. “She is a woman,” he writes in Zarathustra, “and never loves anyone but a warrior”; that is, if Nietzsche but knew it, the diagnosis of his own disease. This hatred of women, this longing for power, this admiration for strength, for successful lying,[271] this inability to see a tertium quid between tyranny and slavery,[272]—all these are feminine traits. A stronger man would not have been so shrewishly shrill about woman and Christianity; a stronger man would have needed less repetition, less emphasis and underlining, less of italics and exclamation points; a stronger man would have been more gentle, and would have smiled where Nietzsche scolds. It is the philosophy, you see, of a man abnormally weak in the social instincts, and at the same time lacking in proper outlet for such social instincts as nature has left him.

Consequently, he never gets beyond the individual. He thinks society is made up of individuals, when it is really made up of groups. He supposes that the only virtues a man can have are those which help him as an isolated unit; the idea that a man may find self-expression in social expression, in coÖperation, that there are virtues which are virtues because they enable one to work with others against a common evil,—this notion never occurs to him. He does not see that sympathy and mutual aid, for example, though they preserve some inferior individuals, yet secure that group-solidarity, and therefore group-survival, without which even the strong ones would perish.[273] He does not imagine that perhaps the barbarians who invaded Rome needed the gospel of a “gentle Jesus meek and mild” if anything at all was to remain of that same classical culture which he paints so lovingly.[274] He laughs at self-denial; and then invites you to devote yourself forever to some self-elected superman.

This philosophy of aristocracy, of the necessity of slavery, of the absurdity of democracy,—of course it is exciting to all weak people who would like to have power,—and who have not read it all before in Plato. In this particular case the humor of the situation lies in the very powerful attack which Nietzsche makes on the irreligious religious humbug which has proved one of the chief instruments of mastery in the hands of the class whose power he is trying to strengthen. “I hope to be forgiven,” says Nietzsche, “for discovering that all moral philosophy hitherto has belonged to the soporific appliances.”[275] “Discovering”—as if the aristocracy had not known that all along! “Here is a naÏve bookworm,” these “strong men” will say among themselves, “who has discovered what every one of us knows. He presumes to tell us how to increase our power, and he can find no better way of helping us than to expose in print the best secrets of our trade.”

Just in this lies the value of Nietzsche, as Rousseau said of Machiavelli: he lets us in behind the scenes of the drama of exploitation. We know better now the men with whom democracy must deal. We see the greed for power that hides behind the contention that culture cannot exist without slavery. Grant that contention: so much the worse for culture! If culture means the increasing concentration of the satisfactions of life in the hands of a few “superior” pigs, their culture may be dispensed with; if it is to stay, it will have to mean the direction of knowledge and ability to the spread of the satisfactions of life. Which is finer,—the relationship of master and slave, or that of friend and friend? Surely a world of people liking and helping one another is a finer world to live in than one in which the instincts of aggression are supreme. And such a coÖperative civilization need not fear the tests of survival; selection puts an ever higher premium on solidarity, an ever lower value on pugnacity. Intelligence, not ready anger, will win the great contests of the future. Friendship will pay.

The history of the world is a record of the patient and planful attempt to replace hatred by understanding, narrowness by large vision, opposition by coÖperation, slavery by friendship. Friendship: a word to be avoided by those who would appear blasÉ. But let us repeat it; words have been known to nourish deeds which without them might never have grown into reality. Some find heaven in making as many men as possible their slaves; others find heaven in making as many men as possible their friends. Which type of man will we have? Which type of man, if abundant, would make this world a splendor and a delight?

The hope for which Jesus lived was that man might some day come to mean friend. It is the only hope worth living for.

V
Nietzsche Replies

“It is certainly not the least charm of a theory,” says Nietzsche, “that it is refutable.”[276] But “what have I to do with mere refutations?”[277] “A prelude I am of better players.”[278] “Verily, I counsel you,” said Zarathustra, “depart from me and defend yourselves against Zarathustra! And better still, be ashamed of him. Perhaps he hath deceived you. The man of perception must not only be able to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends. One ill requiteth one’s teacher by always remaining only his scholar. Why will ye not pluck at my wreath? Ye revere me; but how if your reverence one day falleth down? Beware of being crushed to death with a statue! Ye say ye believe in Zarathustra? But what is Zarathustra worth? Ye are my faithful ones; but what are all faithful ones worth? When ye had not yet sought yourselves ye found me. Thus do all faithful ones; hence all belief is worth so little. Now I ask you to lose me and find yourselves; not until all of you have disowned me shall I return unto you.”[279]

VI
Conclusion

“Look,” says Rudin, in Turgenev’s story, “you see that apple tree? It has broken down with the weight and multitude of its own fruit. It is the emblem of genius.” “To perish beneath a load one can neither bear nor throw off,” wrote Nietzsche,—“that is a philosopher.”[280] I shall announce the song of the lightning, said Zarathustra, and perish in the announcing.[281]

Insanity with such a man is but a matter of time; he feels it coming upon him; he values his hours like a man condemned to execution. In twenty days he writes the Genealogy of Morals; in one year (1888) he produces The Twilight of the Idols, Antichrist, The Case of Wagner, Ecce Homo, and his longest and greatest book, The Will to Power. He not only writes these books; he reads the proof-sheets, straining his eyes beyond repair. He is almost blind now; he is deceived, taken advantage of, because he can hardly see farther than his touch. “If I were blind,” he writes pitifully, “I should be healthy.”[282] Yet his body is racked with pain: “on 118 days this year I have had severe attacks.”[283] “I have given a name to my pain, and call it ‘a dog’—it is just as pitiful, just as importunate and shameless; and I can domineer over it, vent my bad humor on it, as others do with their dogs, servants, and wives.”[284]

Meanwhile the world lives on unnoticing, or noticing only to misunderstand. “My foes have become mighty, and have so distorted my teaching, that my best beloved must be ashamed of the gifts that I gave them.”[285] He learns that the libertines of Europe are using his philosophy as a cloak for their sins: “I can read in their faces that they totally misunderstand me, and that it is only the animal in them which rejoices at being able to cast off its fetters.”[286] He finds one whom he thinks to make his disciple; he is buoyed up for a few days by the hope; the hope is shattered, and loneliness closes in once more upon him. “A kingdom for a kind word!” he cries out in the depth of his longing; and again he writes, “For years no milk of human kindness, no breath of love.”[287]

In December, 1888, one whom he has thought friendly writes that his brother-in-law is sending to a magazine an attack on him. It is the last blow; it means that his sister has joined the others in deserting him. “I take one sleeping-draught after another to deaden the pain, but for all that I cannot sleep. To-day I will take such a dose that I will lose my wits.”[288] He has been taking chloral, and worse drugs, to pay for the boon of sleep; the poison tips the scale already made heavy by his blindness and eye-strain, by his loneliness, by the treachery of his friends, by his general bodily ailments; he wakes up from this final draught in a stupor from which he never recovers; he writes to Brandes and signs himself “The Crucified”; he wanders into the street, is tormented by children, falls in a fit; his good landlord helps him back to his room, sends for the simple, ignorant doctor of the neighborhood; but it is too late; the man is insane. Age, forty-four; another—the only name greater than his among modern philosophers—had died at that pitifully early age.

The body lingered eleven years behind the mind. Death came in 1900. He was buried as he had wished: “Promise me,” he had asked his sister, many years before, “that when I die only my friends shall stand about my coffin, and no inquisitive crowd. See that no priest or anyone else utters falsehoods at my graveside, when I can no longer defend myself; and let me descend into my tomb as an honest pagan.”[289]

After his death the world began to read him. As in so many cases the life had to be given that the doctrine might be heard. “Only where there are graves,” he had written in Zarathustra, “are there resurrections.”[290]