id="id00049">The ideas which Nietzsche expresses go to the root of the matter. In the first place, he drew a distinction between what he regarded as two different types of morality. One of these he called the morality of masters or nobles, and he called the other the morality of slaves. Self-reliance and courage may be cited as the qualities typical of the noble morality, for they are the qualities which tend to make the man who possesses them a master over others, to give him a prominent and powerful place in the world, and to help him to subjugate to his will both nature and his fellow-men. On the other hand, there are the qualities which form the characteristic features of Christian morality—such as benevolence or love of one's neighbour, the fundamental precept of the Gospels, and the humility and obedience which have been perhaps unduly emphasised in ecclesiastical ethics. These are the qualities which he means when he speaks of the morality of the slave.

In the second place, therefore, what is distinctive of Nietzsche is this: that he explicitly rejects the Christian morality, in particular the virtues of benevolence, of obedience, of humility: these are regarded by him as belonging to a type of morality which is to be overcome and which he calls the servile morality. He deliberately sets in antithesis to one another what he calls Christian and what he calls noble virtues: meaning by the latter the qualities allied to courage, force of will, and strength of arm, such as were manifested in certain Pagan races, but above all in the heroes of the Roman Republic. He would, therefore, deliberately prefer the older Pagan valuation of conduct to the Christian valuation.

In the third place, he attempts what he calls a transvaluation of all values. Every moral idea needs revision, every moral idea, every suggestion of value or worth in conduct, must be tried and tested afresh, and a new morality substituted for the old. And with this claim for revision is connected his idea that the egoistic principle which underlies the Pagan virtues preferred to the Christian, and the higher development of the self-capacities to which it will lead, will evolve a superior kind of men—"Over-men" or "Uebermenschen"—to whom, therefore, we may look as setting the tone and giving the rule for subsequent conduct.

Nietzsche is an unsystematic writer, though none the less powerful on that account. He is apt to be perplexing to the reader who looks for system or a definite and reasoned statement of doctrine; but his aphorisms are all the more fitted to impress readers who are not inclined to criticism, and might shirk an elaborate argument. It is difficult, accordingly, to select from him a series of propositions that would give a general idea of the complete transmutation of morality which he demands. So far as I can make out, there is only one point in which he still agrees with the old traditional morality, and that point seems to cause him no little difficulty. No thinker can afford to question the binding nature of the law of Truth, least of all a thinker so obviously in earnest about his own prophetic message as Nietzsche was. All his investigations presuppose the validity of this law for his own thought; all his utterances imply an appeal to it; and his influence depends on the confidence which others have in his veracity. And on this one point only Nietzsche has to confess himself a child of the older morality. "This book," he says in the preface to one of the least paradoxical of his works, 'Dawn of Day,' "This book … implies a contradiction and is not afraid of it: in it we break with the faith in morals—why? In obedience to morality! Or what name shall we give to that which passes therein? We should prefer more modest names. But it is past all doubt that even to us a 'thou shalt' is still speaking, even we still obey a stern law above us—and this is the last moral precept which impresses itself even upon us, which even we obey: in this respect, if in any, we are still conscientious people—viz., we do not wish to return to that which we consider outlived and decayed, to something 'not worthy of belief,' be it called God, virtue, truth, justice, charity; we do not approve of any deceptive bridges to old ideals, we are radically hostile to all that wants to mediate and to amalgamate with us; hostile to any actual religion and Christianity; hostile to all the vague, romantic, and patriotic feelings; hostile also to the love of pleasure and want of principle of the artists who would fain persuade us to worship when we no longer believe—for we are artists; hostile, in short, to the whole European Femininism (or Idealism, if you prefer this name), which is ever 'elevating' and consequently 'degrading.' Yet, as such conscientious people, we immoralists and atheists of this day still feel subject to the German honesty and piety of thousands of years' standing, though as their most doubtful and last descendants; nay, in a certain sense, as their heirs, as executors of their inmost will, a pessimist will, as aforesaid, which is not afraid of denying itself, because it delights in taking a negative position. We ourselves are—suppose you want a formula—the consummate self-dissolution of morals." [1]

[Footnote 1: Nietzsche, 'Werke,' iv. pp. 8, 9 (1899). The translation is taken (with corrections) from the English version by Johanna Volz (1903). Nietzsche has so shocked and confused the English printer that when the author writes himself an 'immoralist' the compositor has made him call himself an 'immortalist.' And errors of the sort do not affect the printer only. Nietzsche's sneer at 'Femininism' is deftly turned aside by Miss Volz, by the simple device of substituting for it the word Pessimism. And Dr Tille, the translator of his best-known work, 'Thus spake Zarathustra' (1896, p. xix), has been bemused in an even more wonderful manner. He enumerates "the best known representatives" of Anarchic tendencies in political thought as "Humboldt, Dunoyer, Stirner, Bakounine, and Auberon Spencer"! The vision of Mr Auberon Herbert and Mr Herbert Spencer doubled up into a single individual is 'a thing imagination boggles at.' Perhaps it is the translator's idea of the Uebermensch.]

Perhaps it is impossible to understand Nietzsche unless one admits that his writings show traces of the disease which very soon prevented his writing at all. But at the same time, while that is true, there is much more in his work than the ravings of a distempered mind. There may have been little method, but there was a great deal of genius, in his madness. While he always overstates his case,—his colossal egoism leads him to exaggerate any doctrine,—and while I do not think that the actual doctrines of Nietzsche in the way he puts them will ever gain any general acceptance, while his system of morality may not have any chance of being the moral code of the next generation or even of being regarded as the serious alternative to Christian morality, yet it is not too much to say that he is symptomatic of a new tendency in ethical thought, a tendency of which he is the greatest, if also the most extravagant exponent, but which has its roots in certain new influences which have come to this generation with the ideas and the triumphs, scientific and material, of the preceding generation.

There are two quite different kinds of influence to which the formation of an ethical doctrine may be due. In the first place, there are the moral sentiments and opinions of the community and of the moralist himself; and, in the second place, there are the scientific and philosophical doctrines accepted by the writer or inspiring what is loosely called the spirit of the time. In most ethical movements the two kinds of influence will be found co-operating, though the latter is almost entirely absent in some cases. The incoherence of popular opinions about morality is a potent stimulus to reflexion, and may of itself give rise to systematic ethical enquiry. This is