Egotism in German philosophy

EGOTISM IN GERMAN
PHILOSOPHY

All rights reserved

EGOTISM

IN

GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

BY

Of S ANT AY AN A

LATE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY

T5-

1 > o. \

u. •

LONDON AND TORONTO
J, M. DENT & SONS LIMITED
NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

PREFACE

THIS book is one of the many that the present war
has brought forth, but it is the fruit of a long
gestation. During more than twenty years, while I
taught philosophy at Harvard College, I had con
tinual occasion to read and discuss German meta
physics. From the beginning it wore in my eyes a
rather questionable shape. Under its obscure and
fluctuating tenets I felt something sinister at work,
something at once hollow and aggressive. It seemed
a forced method of speculation, producing more con
fusion than it found, and calculated chiefly to enable
practical materialists to call themselves idealists and
rationalists to remain theologians. At the same time
the fear that its secret might be eluding me, seeing
that by blood and tradition I was perhaps handi
capped in the matter, spurred me to great and pro
longed efforts to understand what confronted me so
bewilderingly. I wished to be as clear and just about
it as I could — more clear and just, indeed, than it
ever was about itself.

For the rest, German philosophy was never my
chief interest, and I write frankly as an outsider, with
no professorial pretensions ; merely using my common

5

6 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

reason in the presence of claims put forth by others
to a logical authority and a spiritual supremacy
which they are far from possessing.

A reader indoctrinated in the German schools is,
therefore, free not to read further. My object is
neither to repeat his familiar arguments in their
usual form, nor to refute them; my object is to
describe them intelligibly and to judge them from
the point of view of the layman, and in his interests.
For those who wish to study German philosophy, the
original authors are at hand: all I would give here
is the aroma of German philosophy that has reached
my nostrils. If the reader has smelt something of
the kind, so much the better: we shall then under
stand each other. The function of history or of
criticism is not passively to reproduce its subject-
matter. One real world, with one stout corpus of
German philosophy, is enough. Reflection and de
scription are things superadded, things which ought
to be more winged and more selective than what
they play upon. They are echoes of reality in the
sphere of art, sketches which may achieve all the
truth appropriate to them without belying their
creative limitations: for their essence is to be intel
lectual symbols, at once indicative and original.

Egotism — subjectivity in thought and wilfulness
in morals — which is the soul of German philosophy,

PREFACE

is by no means a gratuitous thing. It is a genuine
expression of the pathetic situation in which any
animal finds itself upon earth, and any intelligence
in the universe. It is an inevitable and initial cir
cumstance in life. But like every material accident,
it is a thing to abstract from and to discount as far
as possible. The perversity of the Germans, the
childishness and sophistry of their position, lies only
in glorifying what is an inevitable impediment, and
in marking time on an earthly station from which
the spirit of man — at least in spirit — is called to fly.
This glorified and dpgged egotism, which a thou
sand personal and technical evidences had long
revealed to me in German philosophy, might now,
I should think, be evident to the whole world. Not
that the German philosophers are responsible for the
war, or for that recrudescence of corporate fanaticism
which prepared it from afar. They merely shared
and justified prophetically that spirit of uncom
promising self-assertion and metaphysical conceit
which the German nation is now reducing to action.
It is a terrible thing to have a false religion, all the
more terrible the deeper its sources are in the human
soul. Like many a false religion before it, this which
now inspires the Germans has made a double assault
upon mankind, one with the secular arm, and another
by solemn asseverations and sophistries. This assault,

8 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

though its incidental methods may be dubious, has
been bold and honest enough in principle. It has
been like those which all conquerors and all founders
of militant religions have made at intervals against
liberty or reason. And the issue will doubtless be
the same. Liberty may be maimed, but not killed;
reason may be bent, but not broken. The dark
aggression is to be repelled, if possible, by force of
arms; but failing that, it will be nullified in time
by the indomitable moral resistance which maturer
races, richer in wisdom, can exert successfully against
the rude will of the conqueror.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I. THE GENERAL CHARACTER OF GERMAN PHILOSOPHY . n

II. THE PROTESTANT HERITAGE 21

III. TRANSCENDENTALISM ....... 32

IV. HINTS OF EGOTISM IN GOETHE ..... 43
V. SEEDS OF EGOTISM IN KANT 54

VI. TRANSCENDENTALISM PERFECTED . . . .65

VII. FlCHTE ON THE MISSION OF GERMANY ... 73

VIII. THE EGOTISM OF IDEAS ...... 84

IX. EGOTISM AND SELFISHNESS. . . . . .99

X. THE BREACH WITH CHRISTIANITY . . . .104

XI. NIETZSCHE AND SCHOPENHAUER . . . . .114

XII. THE ETHICS OF NIETZSCHE. . . . . .123

XIII. THE SUPERMAN 136

XIV. HEATHENISM ........ 144

XV. GERMAN GENIUS . . . . . . . 154

XVI. EGOTISM IN PRACTICE . . . . . .162

INDEX ......... 169

EGOTISM IN GERMAN
PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER I

THE GENERAL CHARACTER OF GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

WHAT I propose in these pages to call German philo
sophy is not identical with philosophy in Germany.
The religion of the Germans is foreign to them; and
the philosophy associated with religion before the
Reformation, and in Catholic circles since, is a system
native to the late Roman Empire. Their irreligion
is foreign too; the sceptical and the scientific schools
that have been conspicuous in other countries have
taken root in Germany as well. Thus, if we counted
the Catholics and the old-fashioned Protestants on
the one hand, and the materialists (who call them
selves monists) on the other, we should very likely
discover that the majority of intelligent Germans
held views which German philosophy proper must
entirely despise, and that this philosophy seemed as
strange to them as to other people.

For an original and profound philosophy has arisen
in Germany, as distinct in genius and method from

ii

12 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

Greek and Catholic philosophy as this is from the
Indian systems. The great characteristic of German
philosophy is that it is deliberately subjective and
limits itself to the articulation of self-consciousness.
The whole world appears there, but at a certain
remove; it is viewed and accepted merely as an idea
framed in consciousness, according to principles
fetched from the most personal and subjective parts
of the mind, such as duty, will, or the grammar of
thought. The direction in which German philosophy
is profound is the direction of inwardness. Whatever
we may think of its competence in other matters, it
probes the self — as unaided introspection may — with
extraordinary intentness and sincerity. In inventing
the transcendental method, the study of subjective
projections and perspectives, it has added a new
dimension to human speculation.

The foreign religion and the foreign irreligion of
Germany are both incompatible with German philo
sophy. This philosophy cannot accept any dogmas,
for its fundamental conviction is that there are no
existing things except imagined ones: God as much
as matter is exhausted by the thought of him, and
entirely resident in this thought. The notion that
knowledge can discover anything, or that anything
previously existing can be revealed, is discarded
altogether : for there is nothing to discover, and even

CHARACTER OF GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 13

if there was, the mind could not reach it; it could
only reach the idea it might call up from its own depths.
This idea might be perhaps justified and necessary
by virtue of its subjective roots in the will or in duty,
but never justified by its supposed external object,
an object with which nobody could ever compare it.
German philosophy is no more able to believe in
God than in matter, though it must talk continually
of both.

At the same time this subjectivism is not irreligious.
It is mystical, faithful, enthusiastic: it has all the
qualities that gave early Protestantism its religious
force. It is rebellious to external authority, conscious
of inward light and of absolute duties. It is full of
faith, if by faith we understand not definite beliefs
held on inadequate evidence, but a deep trust in
instinct and destiny.

Rather than religious, however, this philosophy is
romantic. It accepts passionately the aims suggested
to it by sentiment or impulse. It despises prudence
and flouts thejunderstanding. In Faust and in Pier
Gynt we have a poetic echo of its fundamental in
spiration, freed from theological accommodations or
academic cant. It is the adventure of a wild,
sensitive, boyish mind, that now plays the fairy
prince and now the shabby and vicious egoist; a
rebel and an enthusiast, yet often a sensualist to

I4 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

boot by way of experiment; a man eager for ex
perience, but blind to its lessons, vague about nature,
and blundering about duty, but confident that he
can in some way play the magician and bring the
world round to serve his will and spiritual necessities.

Happiness and despair are alike impossible with
such a temperament. Its empiricism is perennial. It
cannot lose faith in the vital impulse it expresses;
all its fancy, ingenuity, and daring philosophy are
embroideries which it makes upon a dark experience.
It cannot take outer facts very seriously; they are
but symbols of its own unfathomable impulses. So
pensive animals might reason. The just and humble
side of German philosophy — if we can lend it virtues
to which it is deeply indifferent — is that it accepts
the total relativity of the human mind and luxuriates
in it, much as we might expect spiders or porpoises
to luxuriate in their special sensibility, making no
vain effort to peep through the bars of their psycho
logical prison.

This sort of agnosticism in a minor key is con
spicuous in the Critique of Pure Reason. In a major
key it reappears in Nietzsche, when he proclaims a
preference for illusion over truth. More mystically
expressed it pervades the intervening thinkers. The
more profound they are the more content and even
delighted they are to consider nothing but their own

CHARACTER OF GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 15

creations. Their theory of knowledge proclaims that
knowledge is impossible. You know only your so-
called knowledge, which itself knows nothing; and
you are limited to the autobiography of your illusions.
The Germans express this limitation of their philo
sophy by calling it idealism. In several senses it fully
deserves this name. It is idealistic psychologically
in that it regards mental life as groundless and all-
inclusive, and denies that a material world exists,
except as an idea necessarily bred in the mind. It
is idealistic, too, in that it puts behind experience a
background of concepts, and not of matter; a ghostly
framework of laws, categories, moral or logical prin
ciples to be the stiffening and skeleton of sensible
experience, and to lend it some substance and mean
ing. It is idealistic in morals also, in that it approves
of pursuing the direct objects of will, without looking
over one's shoulder or reckoning the consequences.
These direct objects are ideals, whereas happiness, or
any satisfaction based on renunciation and com
promise, seems to these spirited philosophers the aim
of a degraded, calculating mind. The word idealism,
used in this sense, should not mislead us ; it indicates
sympathy with life and its passions, particularly the
learned and political ones; it does not indicate any
distaste for material goods or material agencies. The
German moral imagination is in its first or dogmatic

16 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

stage, not in the second or critical one. It is in love
with life rather than with wisdom.

There is accordingly one sense of the term idealism
— the original one — in which this philosophy knows
nothing of it, the Platonic and poetic sense in which
the ideal is something better than the fact. The
Platonic idealist is the man by nature so wedded to
perfection that he sees in everything not the reality
but the faultless ideal which the reality misses and
suggests. Hegel, indeed, drew an outline portrait of
things, according to what he thought their ideal
essence; but it was uglier and more dreary than
the things themselves. Platonic idealism requires a
gift of impassioned contemplation, an incandescent
fancy that leaps from the things of sense to the goals
of beauty and desire. It spurns the earth and believes
in heaven, a form of religion most odious to the
Germans. They think this sort of idealism not only
visionary but somewhat impious; for their own
religion takes the form of piety and affection towards
everything homely, imperfect, unstable, and pro
gressive. They yearn to pursue the unattainable and
encounter the unforeseen. This romantic craving
hangs together with their taste for the picturesque
and emphatic in the plastic arts, and for the up-
welling evanescent emotions of music. Yet their
idealism is a religion of the actual. It rejects nothing

CHARACTER OF GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 17

in the daily experience of life, and looks to nothing
essentially different beyond. It looks only for more
of the same thing, believing in perpetual growth,
which is an ambiguous notion. Under the fashionable
name of progress what these idealists sincerely cherish
is the vital joy of transition; and usually the joy of
this transition lies much more in shedding their
present state than in attaining a better one. For
they suffer and wrestle continually, and by a curious
and deeply animal instinct, they hug and sanctify
this endless struggle all the more when it rends and
bewilders them, bravely declaring it to be absolute,
infinite, and divine.

Such in brief is German philosophy, at least, such
it might be said to be if any clear account of it did
not necessarily falsify it; but one of its chief charac
teristics, without which it would melt away, is
ambiguity. You cannot maintain that the natural
world is the product of the human mind without
changing the meaning of the word mind and of the
word human. You cannot deny that there is a
substance without turning into a substance whatever
you substitute for it. You cannot identify yourself
with God without at once asserting and denying the
existence of God and of yourself. When you speak
of such a thing as the consciousness of society you
must never decide whether you mean the conscious-

B

i8 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

ness individuals have of society or a fabled con
sciousness which society is to have of itself: the first
meaning would spoil your eloquence, and the second
would betray your mythology.

What is involved in all these equivocations is not
merely a change of vocabulary, that shifting use of
language which time brings with it. No, the per
sistence of the old meanings alone gives point to the
assertions that change them and identify them with
their opposites. Everywhere, therefore, in these
speculations, you must remain in suspense as to
what precisely you are talking about. A vague,
muffled, dubious thought must carry you along as
on a current. Your scepticism must not derange
your common sense; your conduct must not express
your radical opinions; a certain afflatus must bear
you nobly onward through a perpetual incoherence.
You must always be thinking not of what you are
thinking of but of yourself or of " something higher."
Otherwise you cannot live this philosophy or under
stand it from within.

The mere existence of this system, as of any other,
proves that a provocation to frame it is sometimes
found in experience or language or the puzzles of
reflection,, Not that there need be any solidity in it
on that account. German philosophy is a sort of
religion, and like other religions it may be capable

CHARACTER OF GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 19

of assimilating a great amount of wisdom, while its
first foundation is folly. This first folly itself will
not lack plausible grounds; there is provocation
enough in a single visit to a madhouse for the assertion
that the mind can know nothing but the ideas it
creates; nevertheless the assertion is false, and such
facile scepticism loses sight of the essence of know
ledge. The most disparate minds, since they do not
regard themselves, may easily regard the same object.
Only the maniac stares at his own ideas; he confuses
himself in his perceptions ; he projects them into the
wrong places, and takes surrounding objects to be
different from what they are. But perceptions
originally have external objects; they express a
bodily reaction, or some inward preparation for such
a reaction. They are reports. The porpoise and the
spider are not shut up in their self-consciousness;
however foreign to us may be the language of their
senses, they know the sea and air that we know, and
have to meet the same changes and accidents there
which we meet — and they even have to meet us,
sometimes, to their sorrow. Their knowledge does
not end in acquaintance with that sensuous language
of theirs, whatever it may be, but flies with the
import of that language and salutes the forces which
confront them in action, and which also confront us.
In focussing these forces through the lenses and veils

20 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

of sense knowledge arises ; and to arrest our attention
on those veils and lenses and say they are all we
know, belies the facts of the case and is hardly
honest. If we could really do that, we should be
retracting the first act of intelligence and becoming
artificial idiots. Yet this sophistication is the first
principle of German philosophy (borrowed, indeed,
from non-Germans), and is the thesis supposed to be
proved in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

CHAPTER II

THE PROTESTANT HERITAGE i

THE German people, according to Fichte and Hegel, ' \
are called by the plan of Providence to occupy the
supreme place in the history of the universe.

A little consideration of this belief will perhaps
lead us more surely to the heart of German philo
sophy than would the usual laborious approach to
it through what is called the theory of knowledge.
This theory of knowledge is a tangle of equivocations ;
but even if it were correct it would be something
technical, and the technical side of a great philo
sophy, interesting as it may be in itself, hardly ever
determines its essential views. These essential views
are derived rather from instincts or traditions which
the technique of the system is designed to defend;
or, at least, they decide how that technique shall be
applied and interpreted.

The moment we hear Fichte and Hegel mentioning
a providential plan of the world, we gather that in
their view the history of things is not infinite and
endlessly various, but has a closed plot like a drama

in which one nation (the very one to which these

21

22 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

philosophers belong) has the central place and the
chief r61e: and we perceive at once that theirs is a
revealed philosophy. It is the heir of Judaism. It
could never have been formed by free observation of
life and nature, like the philosophy of Greece or of
the Renaissance. It is Protestant theology rationalised.
The element of religious faith, in the Protestant sense
of the word faith, is essential to it. About the witness
of tradition, even about the witness of the senses, it
may be as sceptical as it likes. It may reduce nature
and God to figments of the mind; but throughout
its criticism of all matters of fact it will remain
deeply persuaded that the questioning and striving
spirit within is indefeasible and divine. It will never
reduce all things, including the mind, to loose and
intractable appearances, as might a free idealism. It
will employ its scepticism to turn all things into ideas,
in order to chain them the more tightly to the moral
interests of the thinker. These moral interests,
human and pathetic as they may seem to the out
sider, it will exalt immeasurably, pronouncing them
to be groundless and immutable; and it will never
tolerate the suspicion that all things might not
minister to them.

From the same tenet of Fichte and Hegel we may
also learn that in the plan of the world, as this
revealed philosophy conceives it, the principal figures

THE PROTESTANT HERITAGE 23

are not individuals, like the Creator, the Redeemer,
and one's own soul, but nations and institutions. It
is of the essence of Protestantism and of German
philosophy that religion should gradually drop its
supernatural personages and comforting private hopes
and be absorbed in the duty of living manfully and
conscientiously the conventional life of this world.
Not the whole life of the world, however, since gay
religions and many other gay things are excluded,
or admitted only as childish toys. Positive religion,
in fact, disappears, as well as the frivolous sort of
worldliness, and there remains only a consecrated
worldliness that is deliberate and imposed as a duty.
Just as in pantheism God is naturalised into a cosmic
force, so in German philosophy the Biblical piety of
the earlier Protestants is secularised into social and
patriotic zeal.

German philosophy has inherited from Protestant
ism its earnestness and pious intention; also a
tendency to retain, for whatever changed views it
may put forward, the names of former beliefs.
God, freedom, and immortality, for instance, may
eventually be transformed into their opposites, since
the oracle of faith is internal; but their names may
be kept, together with a feeling that what will now
bear those names is much more satisfying than what
they originally stood for. If it should seem that

24 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

God came nearest to us, and dwelt within us, in the
form of vital energy, if freedom should turn out
really to mean personality, if immortality, in the end,
should prove identical with the endlessness of human
progress, and if these new thoughts should satisfy
and encourage us as the evanescent ideas of God,
freedom, and immortality satisfied and encouraged
our fathers, why should we not use these consecrated
names for our new conceptions, and thus indicate
the continuity of religion amid the flux of science?
This expedient is not always hypocritical. It was
quite candid in men like Spinoza and Emerson, whose
attachment to positive religion had insensibly given
way to a half-mystical, half-intellectual satisfaction
with the natural world, as their eloquent imagination,
conceived it. But whether candid or disingenuous,,
this habit has the advantage of oiling the wheels
of progress with a sacred unction. In facilitating
change it blurs the consciousness of change, and
leads people to associate with their new opinions
sentiments which are logically incompatible with
them. The attachment of many tender-minded
people to German philosophy is due to this circum
stance, for German philosophy is not tender.

The beauty and the torment of Protestantism is
that it opens the door so wide to what lies beyond
it. This progressive quality it has fully transmitted

THE PROTESTANT HERITAGE 25

to all the systems of German philosophy. Not that
each of them, like the earlier Protestant sects, does
not think itself true and final; but in spite of itself
it suggests some next thing. We must expect, there
fore, that the more conservative elements in each
system should provoke protests in the next genera
tion; and it is hard to say whether such inconstancy
is a weakness, or is simply loyalty to the principle
of progress. Kant was a puritan; he revered the
rule of right as something immutable and holy,
perhaps never obeyed in the world. Fichte was
somewhat freer in his Calvinism; the rule of right
was the moving power in all life and nature, though
it might have been betrayed by a doomed and self-
seeking generation. Hegel was a very free and
superior Lutheran; he saw that the divine will was
necessarily and continuously realised in this world,
though we might not recognise the fact in our petty
moral judgments. Schopenhauer, speaking again for
this human judgment, revolted against that cruel
optimism, and was an indignant atheist; and finally,
in Nietzsche, this atheism became exultant; he
thought it the part of a man to abet the movement
of things, however calamitous, in order to appro
priate its wild force and be for a moment the very
crest of its wave.

Protestantism was not a reformation by accident,

26 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

because it happened to find the church corrupt; it
is a reformation essentially, in that every individual
must reinterpret the Bible and the practices of the
church in his own spirit. If he accepted them with
out renewing them in the light of his personal religious
experience, he would never have what Protestantism
thinks living religion. German philosophy has in
herited this characteristic; it is not a cumulative
science that can be transmitted ready made. It is
essentially a reform, a revision of traditional know
ledge, which each neophyte must make for himself,
under pain of rendering only lip-service to trans
cendental truth, and remaining at heart unregenerate.
His chief business is to be converted; he must refute
for himself the natural views with which he and all
other men have begun life. And still these views —
like the temptations of Satan — inevitably form them
selves afresh in each generation, and even in the
philosopher, between one spell of introspective
thought and another, so that he always has to re
capitulate his saving arguments from the beginning.
Each new idealist in each of his books, often in every
lecture and every chapter, must run back to refute
again the same homely opponents — materialism,
naturalism, dualism, or whatever he may call them.
Dead as each day he declares these foes to be, he
has to fight them again in his own soul on the morrow.

THE PROTESTANT HERITAGE 27

Hence his continual preoccupation lest he fall away,
or lest the world should forget him. To preserve
his freedom and his idealism he must daily conquer
them anew. This philosophy is secondary, critical,
sophistical; it has a perennial quarrel with inevitable
opinions.

Protestantism, in spite of its personal status,
wished to revert to primitive Christianity. . In this
desire it was guided partly by a conventional faith
in the Scriptures, and partly by a deep sympathy
with experimental religion. German religion and
philosophy are homesick: they wish to be quite
primitive once more. And they actually remain
primitive in spirit, spontaneous and tentative, even
in the midst of the most cumbrous erudition, as a
composition of Diirer's, where flesh, fish, and fowl
crowd every corner, still remains primitive, puzzled,
and oppressed. Such a naive but overloaded mind
is lost in admiration of its own depth and richness;
yet, in fact, it is rather helpless and immature; it
has not learned to select what suffices, or to be
satisfied with what is best.

Faith for the Germans must be a primitive and
groundless assurance, not knowledge credibly trans
mitted by others whose experience may have been
greater than our own. Even philosophy is not con
ceived as a reasonable adjustment to what may have

28 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

been discovered to be the constitution of the world;
it is in the first instance a criticism, to dissolve that
reputed knowledge, and then, when primitive inno
cence is happily restored, it is a wager or demand
made beyond all evidence, and in contempt of all
evidence, in obedience to an innate impulse. Of
course, it is usual, as a concession to the weaker
brethren, to assume that experience, in the end, will
seem to satisfy these demands, and that we shall
win our bets and our wars ; but the point of principle,
borrowed by German philosophy from Protestantism,
is that the authority of faith is intrinsic and absolute,
while any external corroboration of it is problematical
and not essential to the Tightness of the assumptions
that faith makes. In this we have a fundamental
characteristic of the school. Carried (as it seldom is)
to its logical conclusion, it leads to the ultra-romantic
and ultra-idealistic doctrine that the very notion of
truth or fact is a fiction of the will, invented to
satisfy our desire for some fixed point of reference
in thought. In this doctrine we may see the culmina
tion of the Protestant rebellion against mediation in
religion, against external authority, and against
dogma.

The Protestant precept to search the Scriptures,
and the sense that every man must settle the highest
questions for himself, have contributed to the zeal

THE PROTESTANT HERITAGE 29

with which science and scholarship have been pur
sued in Germany. In no other country has so large,
so industrious, and (amid its rude polemics) so co
operative a set of professors devoted itself to all
sorts of learning. But as the original motive was to
save one's soul, an apologetic and scholastic manner
has often survived: the issue is prejudged and
egotism has appeared even in science. For favourable
as Protestantism is to investigation and learning,
it is almost incompatible with clearness of thought
and fundamental freedom of attitude. If the con
trolling purpose is not political or religious, it is at
least " philosophical," that is to say, arbitrary.

We must remember that the greater part of the
" facts " on which theories are based are reported or
inferred facts — all in the historical sciences, since the
documents and sources must first be pronounced
genuine or spurious by the philosophical critic. Here
presumptions and private methods of inference
determine what shall be admitted for a fact, to say
nothing of the interpretation to be given to it. Hence
a piece of Biblical or Homeric criticism, a history of
Rome or of Germany often becomes a little system
of egotistical philosophy, posited and defended with
all the parental zeal and all the increasing conviction
with which a prophet defends his supernatural
inspirations.

30 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

The distinction between Mary and Martha is not
a German distinction : in Germany the rapt idealist
is busy about many things, so that his action is apt to
be heady and his contemplation perturbed. Only the
principle is expected to be spiritual, the illustrations
must all be material and mundane. There is no
paradox in German idealism turning to material
science, commerce, and war for a fresh field of opera
tion. No degeneracy is implied in such an extension
of its vocation, especially when the other ideals of
the state — pure learning, art, social organisation —
are pursued at the same time with an equal ardour.
The test of a genuine German idealist is that he
should forget and sink his private happiness in
whatever service the state may set him to do.

In view of this political fidelity the changing
opinions of men are all indifferent to true religion.
It is not a question of correctness in opinion or
conduct, since for the idealist there can be no ex
ternal standard of truth, existence, or excellence on
which such correctness could depend. Ideas are so
much real experience and have no further subject-
matter. Thought is simply more or less rich, elaborate,
or vehement, like a musical composition, and more
or less consistent with itself. It is all a question of
depth and fulness of experience, obtained by hacking
one's way through this visionary and bewitched

THE PROTESTANT HERITAGE 31

existence, the secret purpose of which is to serve
the self in its development. In this philosophy
imagination that is sustained is called knowledge,
illusion that is coherent is called truth, and will that
is systematic is called virtue.

Evidently the only sanction or vindication that
such a belief will look for is the determination to
reassert it. Religion is here its own heaven, and
faith the only proof of its own truth. What is har
monised in the end is not the experience through
which people have actually passed but only the
echoes of that experience chiming in the mystic ear.
Memory too can play the egotist. Subjectivism can
rule even within the subject and can make him
substitute his idea of himself, in his most self-satisfied
moment, for the poor desultory self that he has
actually been.

The German philosophers have carried on Pro
testantism beyond itself. They have separated the
two ingredients mingled in traditional religions. One
of these ingredients — the vital faith or self-trust of
the animal will — they have retained. The other — the
lessons of experience — they have rejected. To which
element the name of religion should still be given,
if it is given to either, is a matter of indifference.
The important thing is that, call it religion or irre-
ligion, we should know what we are clinging to.

CHAPTER III

TRANSCENDENTALISM

FICHTE called Locke the worst of philosophers, but
it was ungrateful of him, seeing that his own philo
sophy was founded on one of Locke's errors. It was
Locke who first thought of looking into his own
breast to find there the genuine properties of gold
and of an apple; and it is clear that nothing but
lack of consecutiveness and courage kept him from
finding the whole universe in the same generous
receptacle. This method of looking for reality in
one's own breast, when practised with due consecu
tiveness and courage by the Germans, became the
transcendental method; but it must be admitted
that the German breast was no longer that ana
tomical region which Locke had intended to probe,
but a purely metaphysical point of departure, a
migratory ego that could be here, there, and every
where at once, being present at any point from
which thought or volition might be taken to radiate.
It was no longer so easy to entrap as the soul of
Locke, which he asserted travelled with him in his
coach from London to Oxford. But the practice of

32

TRANSCENDENTALISM 33

looking for all things within one's own breast, in the
subtler sense of searching for them in one's memory
and experience, begat in time the whole romantic
and subjective school of philosophy.

Leibniz, the first of German philosophers, although
an enemy of Locke's sensualism and of his slackness
in logic, was even more explicit in assigning a mental
seat to all sensible objects. The soul, he said, had
no windows and, he might have added, no doors;
no light could come to it from without ; and it could
not exert any transitive force or make any difference
beyond its own insulated chamber. It was a camera
obscura, with a universe painted on its impenetrable
walls. The changes which went on in it were like
those in a dream, due to the charge of pent-up
energies and fecundities within it; for the Creator
had wound it up at the creation like a clock, destined
to go for ever, striking infinite hours, with ever richer
chimes.

Here, in miniature, with a clearness and beauty
never afterwards equalled, we have the nature and
movement of the transcendental self set forth before
us: a closed circle of experience, admitting of no
relations with anything beyond, but infinite in its
own potential developments, and guided by an inner
force, according to an innate unconscious plan. All
duties, all principles of interpretation, all data, all

34 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

visioned objects, operated within this single life,
diversifying its field of view, and testifying to its
secret endowment.

Nevertheless, the later idealists, ungrateful to
Locke for their first principle, were ungrateful also
to Leibniz for their ultimate conception, anticipated
by him in all its completeness. There were reasons,
of course, for this ingratitude. Leibniz, like the tran-
scendentalists, had supposed that the objects of sense,
as experience reveals them, were begotten out of the
latent nature of the soul; but he had also conceived
that there were many souls, as many as atoms in
the physical world, and that the images arising in
each were signs of the presence and actual condition
of its companions. Thus perception, while yielding
directly only an idea, as in a dream, was indirectly
symbolic of an outer reality, like a dream significant
and capable of interpretation. And being an un
daunted rationalist, Leibniz assumed that the sooth
sayer capable of reading this dream was reason, and
that whatever reason conceived to be right and
necessary actually must be true in the great outer
world.

It was at this point that Kant deviated into his
radical subjectification of knowledge. His mind had
been more open than that of Leibniz to the influences
of English psychology, it had stewed longer in its

TRANSCENDENTALISM 35

own juice, and he could not help asking how, if the
senses could reveal only ideas of sense, reason was
ever able to reveal anything but ideas of reason.
Those inferences about the vast world outside, which
Leibniz had allowed his spirits to make in their
solitary confinement, were reduced by the more
scrupulous Kant to scribblings upon their prison
walls. These scribblings he officially termed the
ideas of pure — that is, of unsupported — reason; but
in his private capacity he gently continued to agree
with Leibniz and to believe them true.

There was no anomaly, according to Kant, in this
situation. An idea might by chance be the image of
a reality, but we could never know that it was. For
the proof would have to be supplied by a further
idea, and would terminate in that. The hypothesis
and the corroboration would alike be mental, since
experience was of ideas and could envisage nothing
but the vicissitudes of the mind.

If you had asked Leibniz what determined the
order in which perceptions came into any mind, he
would doubtless have answered that the Creator did
so, or (translating that symbol into its analytic
equivalent in his system) that what did so was the
innate destiny or predisposition of that mind to
develop in harmony with the best possible universe.
Here is a very remarkable unconscious principle of

36 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

evolution seated in the spirit and presiding over all
its experience. This is precisely what is meant by
a transcendental principle.

This principle, unconscious as it is, sometimes
betrays its mighty workings to consciousness. Besides
the incidental multitude of ideas which it breeds, it
makes itself felt in subterranean strains and rumblings,
in the sense of movement and of longing. This darker
but deeper manifestation of the transcendental clock
work Leibniz called appetition, and under the name
of Will it has played a great part in later German
systems. To call it Will is, of course, to speak
improperly and mythologically, for actual willing
requires an idea of what is willed. When we say a
man doesn't know what he wants, we mean that he
can will nothing, for lack of a clear idea of his
interests and situation, although he doubtless wants
or lacks many specific things, the absence of which
is rendering him unhappy and restless. These in
stinctive appetitions for objects of which the mind
is ignorant may, by a figure of speech, be called
unconscious Will; a phrase which would be a con
tradiction in terms if this word Will (which I write
with a capital letter) were not used metaphorically.
From this metaphor, when its boldness seems to be
dulled by use, we may pass insensibly to giving the
name of Will to that whole transcendental potency

TRANSCENDENTALISM 37

of the soul which, like the mainspring of a watch,
lay coiled up tightly within it from the beginning of
time. A man's transcendental Will can then be called
the source of everything that ever happens to him —
his birth, his character, his whole life, and his death
—all that he most detests and most emphatically
does not will, like his nightmares, being an expression
of the original pregnancy of his spirit, and its tran
scendental principle of development.

There is but one thing to add touching a point
often left by these philosophers in the most hopeless
obscurity. In Leibniz the number of spirits was
infinite: in the later systems they are reduced to
one. This difference seems greater than it is, for
when such terms as Spirit or Will are used meta
phorically, standing for unconscious laws of con
tinuity or development, and when the Will or Spirit
present in me now may be said to have presided over
the destinies of my soul infinite ages before I was
born, there seems to be no good reason why the
same Spirit or Will should not preside over all the
inhabitants of the universe at all times, be they gods
or humming-birds. Such a Spirit or Will resembles
the notion of Providence, or the law of evolution,
or the pre-established harmony of Leibniz far more
than it resembles a mind. Those philosophers, intent
on proving that the Spirit can be only one, might

38 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

have proceeded, therefore, by urging that a Spirit
was at best a formal and abstract law, covering such
disparate facts, that all flesh and fowl, all demons
and angels, might just as well be animated by a
single Spirit. As it takes all sorts of things to make
a world, it might take all sorts of things to express
a Spirit.

This cool and consciously verbal way of making
all one, however, is not the way of the Germans.
No doubt in practice the unity of the Spirit or Will
in their systems amounts to nothing more, yet their
intention and illusion is rather that whenever two
things can be called manifestations of one Spirit in
the loosest and most metaphorical sense of this word
they are thereby proved to be data in one spirit in
the most intimate and psychological sense of the
same. So that what really happens to transcen-
dentalists is not that they unite all the transcendental
units of Leibniz into one even looser transcendental
unit, but that they limit the universe to what in
Leibniz was one of an infinite number of parallel
careers. Nay, they limit even that one career to the
experience present at one point, that of the most
intense and comprehensive self-consciousness.

The unity they desire and believe in is accordingly
an actual and intense unity. All its elements are to
be viewed at once, bound and merged together by

TRANSCENDENTALISM 39

the simultaneous intuition of all their relations, and
this in a single, unchanging, eternal moment of
thought, or rather of unutterable feeling. The union
is, therefore, real, psychic, mystical, and so close that
everything that was to be united there, by a curious
irony, remains outside.

What can lead serious thinkers, we may ask, into
such pitfalls and shams ? In this case, a powerful
and not unworthy motive. All transcendentalism
takes the point of view of what it calls knowledge;
whenever it mentions anything — matter, God, oneself
— it means not that thing but the idea of it. By
knowledge it understands the image or belief, the
fact of cognition. Whatever is thought of exists, or
can exist, in this philosophy, only for thought; yet
this thought is called not illusion but knowledge,
because knowledge is what the thought feels that it is.
Evidently on this principle none of Leibniz's
spirits could know any other, nor could any phase
of the same spirit know any other phase. The un
bridgeable chasm of want of experience would cut off
knowledge from everything but its " content," the
ideas it has of its objects. Those fabled external
objects would be brought back into my ideas, and
identified with them; my ideas in turn would be
drawn in and identified with the fact that I entertain
them and this fact itself would condense into the

40 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

more intimate and present fact that intensely, vaguely,
deeply I feel that I am, or am tending to be, some
thing or other. My Will or Spirit, the rumble of my
unconscious appetitions, thus absorbs my ideas, my
ideas absorb their objects, and these objects absorb
the world, past, present, and future. Earth and
heaven, God and my fellowmen are mere expressions
of my Will, and if they were anything more, I could
not now be alive to their presence. My Will is absolute.
With that conclusion transcendentalism is complete.

Is such transcendentalism impossibly sceptical ? Is
it absurdly arrogant ? Is it wonderfully true ?

In so complex a world as this, there is room for a
great number of cross-vistas : when all has been
surveyed from one point of view and in one set of
terms, nothing excludes the same reality from being
surveyed from a different centre and expressed in a
different notation. To represent a man, sculpture
is apparently exhaustive; yet it does not exclude
painting, or the utterly disparate description of the
man in words; surveys in which there need be no
contradiction in the deliverance, though there is the
widest diversity and even incommensurability in the
methods. Each sort of net drawn through the same
sea catches a different sort of fish; and the fishermen
may quarrel about what the sea contained, if each
regards his draught as exhaustive. Yet the sea con-

TRANSCENDENTALISM 41

tained all their catches, and also the residue, perhaps
infinite, that escaped them all.

Now one net which every intelligent being casts
over things is that of his own apprehension, experience,
and interests. He may not reflect often on his personal
principle of selection and arrangement; he may be
so interested in the movements he sees through his
glass as never to notice the curious circular frame,
perhaps prismatic, which his glass imposes on the
landscape. Yet among all the properties of things,
the adventitious properties imputed to them in appre
hension are worth noting too; indeed, it chastens
and transforms our whole life if we have once noted
them and taken them to heart. Not that this circum
stance implies for a moment what the dizziness of
idealists has inferred, that things exist only as per
ceived or when we perceive them. What follows is
rather that, besides the things and in the most
interesting contrast to their movement, there is the
movement of our minds in observing them. If, for
instance, I happen not to know the name of my
great-grandfather, and am vexed at my ignorance,
I may search the parish records and discover it,
together with many circumstances of his life. This
does not prove that my interest in genealogy created
my great-grandfather, as a consistent egotist would
assert; but it does show how my interest was a

42 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

nucleus for my discoveries and for the terms, such
as great-grandfather, in which I express them — for
it was no intrinsic property of that worthy man that
he was to become my great-grandfather after his
death, or that I was to discover him.

This vortex which things, as apprehension catches
them, seem to form round each whirling spectator,
is the fascinating theme of lyric poetry, of psycho
logical novels, and of German philosophy. Dominated
as this philosophy is by the transcendental method,
it regards views, and the history and logic of views,
as more primitive and important than the objects
which these views have in common. The genial
Professor Paulsen of Berlin (whose pupil I once had
the advantage of being) had a phrase that continually
recurred in his lectures: Man kann sagen, as much
as to say, Things will yield the following picture, if
one cares to draw it. And he once wrote an article
in honour of Kant very pertinently entitled: Was
uns Kant sein kann ; because no veritable disciple
of Kant accepts what Kant taught as he taught it,
but each rises from the study of the master having
irresistibly formed one or more systems of his own.
To take what views we will of things, if things will
barely suffer us to take them, and then to declare
that the things are mere terms in the views we take
of them — that is transcendentalism.

CHAPTER IV

HINTS OF EGOTISM IN GOETHE

ALL transcendentalists are preoccupied with the self,
but not all are egotists. Some regard as a sad dis
ability this limitation of their knowledge to what
they have created; they are humble, and almost
ashamed to be human, and to possess a mind that
must cut them off hopelessly from all reality. On
the other hand there are many instinctive egotists
who are not transcendentalists, either because their
attention has not been called to this system, or
because they discredit all speculation, or because
they see clearly that the senses and the intellect, far
from cutting us off from the real things that surround
us, have the function of adjusting our action to them
and informing our mind about them. Such an
instinctive egotist does not allege that he creates
the world by willing and thinking it, yet he is more
interested in his own sensations, fancies, and pre
ferences than in the other things in the world. The
attention he bestows on things seems to him to
bathe in light their truly interesting side. What he
chiefly considers is his own experience — what he

43

44 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

cared for first, what second, what he thinks to-day,
what he will probably think to-morrow, what friends
he has had, and how they have lost their charm,
what religions he has believed in, and in general
what contributions the universe has made to him
and he to the universe. His interest in personality
need not be confined to his own; he may have a
dramatic imagination, and may assign their appro
priate personality to all other people ; every situation
he hears of or invents may prompt him to conceive
the thrilling passions and pungent thoughts of some
alter ego, in whom latent sides of his own nature may
be richly expressed. And impersonal things, too,
may fascinate him, when he feels that they stir his
genius fruitfully; and he will be the more ready to
scatter his favours broadcast in that what concerns
him is not any particular truth or person (things
which might prove jealous and exclusive), but rather
the exercise of his own powers of universal sympathy.
Something of this sort seems to appear in Goethe;
and although his contact with philosophical egotism
was but slight, and some of his wise maxims are
incompatible with it, yet his romanticism, his feeling
for development in everything, his private life, the
nebulous character of his religion, and some of his
most important works, like Faust and Wilhelm
Meisterr are all so full of the spirit of German

HINTS OF EGOTISM IN GOETHE 45

philosophy, that it would be a pity not to draw
some illustration for our subject from so pleasant a
source.

There are hints of egotism in Goethe, but in Goethe
there are hints of everything, and it would be easy
to gather an imposing mass of evidence to the effect
that he was not like the transcendentalists, but far
superior to them. For one thing he was many-sided,
not encyclopaedic; he went out to greet the variety
of things, he did not pack it together. He did not
even arrange the phases of his experience (as he did
those of Faust) in an order supposed to be a progress,
although, as the commentators on Faust inform us,
not a progress in mere goodness. Hegel might have
understood all these moral attitudes, and described
them in a way not meant to appear satirical; but
he would have criticised and demolished them, and
declared them obsolete — all but the one at which
he happened to stop. Goethe loved them all; he
hated to outgrow them, and if involuntarily he did
so, at least he still honoured the feelings that he had
lost. He kept his old age genial and green by that
perennial love. In order to hold his head above
water and be at peace in his own heart, he did not
need to be a Christian, a pagan, or an epicurean;
yet he lent himself unreservedly, in imagination, to
Christianity, paganism, and sensuality — three things

46 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

your transcendental egotist can never stomach : each
in its way would impugn his self-sufficiency.

Nevertheless the sympathies of Goethe were only
romantic or aesthetic; they were based on finding in
others an interesting variation from himself, an exotic
possibility, rather than an identity with himself in
thought or in fate. Christianity was an atmosphere
necessary to certain figures, that of Gretchen, for
instance, who would have been frankly vulgar with
out it; paganism was a learned masque, in which one
could be at once distinguished and emancipated; and
sensuality was a sentimental and scientific licence in
which the free mind might indulge in due season. The
sympathy Goethe felt with things was that of a lordly
observer, a traveller, a connoisseur, a philanderer; it
was egotistical sympathy.

Nothing, for instance, was more romantic in Goethe
than his classicism. His Ifhigenie and his Helena
and his whole view of antiquity were full of the
pathos of distance. That pompous sweetness, that
intense moderation, that moral somnambulism were
too intentional; and Goethe felt it himself. In
Faust, after Helen has evaporated, he makes the
hero revisit his native mountains and revert to the
thought of Gretchen. It is a wise home-coming,
because that craze for classicism which Helen sym
bolised alienated the mind from real life and led

HINTS OF EGOTISM IN GOETHE 47

only to hopeless imitations and lackadaisical poses.
Gretchen's garden, even the Walpurgisnacht, was in
truth more classical. This is only another way of
saying that in the attempt to be Greek the truly
classical was missed even by Goethe, since the truly
classical is not foreign to anybody. It is precisely
that part of tradition and art which does not alienate
us from our own life or from nature, but reveals
them in all their depth and nakedness, freed from
the fashions and hypocrisies of time and place. The
effort to reproduce the peculiarities of antiquity is a
proof that we are not its natural heirs, that we do
not continue antiquity instinctively. People can
mimic only what they have not absorbed. They
reconstruct and turn into an archaeological masquerade
only what strikes them as outlandish. The genuine
inheritors of a religion or an art never dream of
reviving it; its antique accidents do not interest
them, and its eternal substance they possess by
nature.

The Germans are not in this position in regard to
the ancients. Whether sympathetic like Goethe, or
disparaging like Burckhardt, or both at once, like
Hegel, they have seen in antiquity its local colour,
its mannerisms, its documents, and above all its
contrasts with the present. It was not so while the
traditions of antiquity were still living and authori-

48 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

tative. But the moderns, and especially the Germans,
have not a humble mind. They do not go to school
with the Greeks unfeignedly, as if Greek wisdom might
possibly be true wisdom, a pure expression of ex
perience and reason, valid essentially for us. They
prefer to take that wisdom for a phase of sentiment,
of course outgrown, but still enabling them to recon
struct learnedly the image of a fascinating past.
This is what they call giving vitality to classical
studies, turning them into Kulturgeschtcbte. This is
a vitality lent by the living to the dead, not one
drawn by the young and immature from a perennial
fountain. In truth classical studies were vital only
so long as they were still authoritative morally and
set the standard for letters and life. They became
otiose and pedantic when they began to serve merely
to recover a dead past in its trivial detail, and to
make us grow sentimental over its remoteness, its
beauty, and its ruins.

How much freer and surer was Goethe's hand
when it touched the cord of romanticism! How
perfectly he knew the heart of the romantic egotist!
The romantic egotist sets no particular limits to the
range of his interests and sympathies ; his programme,
indeed, is to absorb the whole world. He is no
wounded and disappointed creature, like Byron, that
takes to sulking and naughtiness because things

HINTS OF EGOTISM IN GOETHE 49

taste bitter in his mouth. He finds good and evil
equally digestible. The personal egotism of Byron
or of Musset after all was humble; it knew how
weak it was in the universe. But absolute egotism
in Goethe, as in Emerson, summoned all nature to
minister to the self: all nature, if not actually com
pelled to this service by a human creative fiat, could
at least be won over to it by the engaging heroism
of her favourite child. In his warm pantheistic way
Goethe felt the swarming universal life about him;
he had no thought of dragooning it all, as sectarians
and nationalists would, into vindicating some parti
cular creed or nation. Yet that fertile and impartial
universe left each life free and in uncensored com
petition with every other life. Each creature might
feed blamelessly on all the others and become, if it
could, the focus and epitome of the world. The
development of self was the only duty, if only the
self was developed widely and securely enough, with
insight, calmness, and godlike irresponsibility.

Goethe exhibited this principle in practice more
plainly, perhaps, than in theory. His family, his
friends, his feelings were so many stepping-stones
in his moral career; he expanded as he left them
behind. His love-affairs were means to the fuller
realisation of himself. Not that his love-affairs were
sensual or his infidelities callous; far from it. They

So EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

often stirred him deeply and unsealed the springs
of poetry in his heart; that was precisely their
function. Every tender passion opened before him
a primrose path into which his inexorable genius
led him to wander. If in passing he must tread
down some flower, that was a great sorrow to him;
but perhaps that very sorrow and his inevitable
remorse were the most needful and precious elements
in the experience. Every pathetic sweetheart in turn
\ was a sort of Belgium to him; he violated her neu
trality with a sigh; his heart bled for her innocent
sufferings, and he never said afterwards in self-
defence, like the German Chancellor, that she was
** no better than she should be. But he must press on.
His beckoning destiny, the claims of his spiritual
growth, compelled him to sacrifice her and to sacrifice
his own lacerated feelings on the altar of duty to
his infinite self. Indeed, so truly supreme was this
vocation that universal nature too, he thought, was
bound to do herself some violence in his behalf and
to grant him an immortal life, that so noble a process
of self-expansion might go on for ever.

Goethe's perfect insight into the ways of romantic
egotism appears also in Faust, and not least in the
latter parts of it, which are curiously prophetic. If
the hero of that poem has a somewhat incoherent
character, soft, wayward, emotional, yet at the same

HINTS OF EGOTISM IN GOETHE 51

time stubborn and indomitable, that circumstance
only renders him the fitter vehicle for absolute Will,
a metaphysical entity whose business is to be vigor
ous and endlessly energetic while remaining perfectly
plastic. Faust was at first a scholar, fervid and
grubbing, but so confused and impatient that he
gave up science for magic. Notwithstanding the
shams of professional people which offended him,
a private and candid science was possible, which
might have brought him intellectual satisfaction ;
and the fact would not have escaped him if he had
been a simple lover of truth. But absolute Will
cannot be restricted to any single interest, much less
to the pursuit of a frigid truth in which it cannot
believe; for the Will would not be absolute if it
recognised any truth which it had to discover; it
can recognise and love only the truth that it makes.
Its method of procedure, we are told, consists in first
throwing out certain assumptions, such perhaps as
that everything must have a cause or that life and
progress must be everlasting; and the truth is then
whatever conforms to these assumptions. But since
evidently these assumptions might be utterly false,
it is clear that what interests absolute Will is not
truth at all, but only orthodoxy. A delightful illus
tration of this is given by Faust when, emulating
Luther for a moment, he undertakes to translate the

52 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

first verse of Saint John — that being the Gospel that
impresses him most favourably. The point is not
prosaically to discover what the Evangelist meant,
but rather what he must and shall have meant. The
Word will never do; the Sense would be somewhat
better; but In the beginning was Force would have
even more to recommend it. Suddenly, however,
what absolute Will demands flashes upon him, and
he writes down contentedly : In the beginning was
the Deed:

Auf einmal seh' ich Rat

Und schreibe getrost: Im Anfang war die That!

Yet even in this exciting form, the life of thought
cannot hold him long. He aches to escape from it;
not that his knowledge of the sciences, as well as his
magic, will not accompany him through life ; he will
not lose his acquired art nor his habit of reflection,
and in this sense his career is really a progress,
in that his experience accumulates; but the living
interest is always something new. He turns to mis
cellaneous adventures, not excluding love ; from that
he passes to imperial politics, a sad mess, thence to
sentimental classicism, rather an unreality, and finally
to war, to public works, to trade, to piracy, to coloni
sation, and to clearing his acquired estates of tire
some old natives, who insist on ringing church bells
and are impervious to the new Kultur. These public

HINTS OF EGOTISM IN GOETHE 53

enterprises he finds more satisfying, perhaps only
because he dies in the midst of them.

Are these hints of romantic egotism in Goethe
mere echoes of his youth and of the ambient philo
sophy, echoes which he would have rejected if con
fronted with them in an abstract and doctrinal form,
as he rejected the system of Fichte ? Would he not
have judged Schopenhauer more kindly ? Above all,
what would he have thought of Nietzsche, his own
wild disciple ? No doubt he would have wished to
buttress and qualify in a thousand ways that faith in
absolute Will which they emphasised so exclusively,
Schopenhauer in metaphysics and Nietzsche in morals.
But the same faith was a deep element in his own
genius, as in that of his country, and he would hardly
have disowned it.

CHAPTER V

SEEDS OF EGOTISM IN KANT

KANT is remarkable among sincere philosophers fof
the pathetic separation which existed between his
personal beliefs and his official discoveries. His
personal beliefs were mild and half orthodox and
hardly differed from those of Leibniz; but officially
he was entangled in the subjective criticism of
knowledge, and found that the process of knowing
was so complicated and so exquisitely contrived to
make knowledge impossible, that while the facts of
the universe were there, and we might have, like
Leibniz, a shrewd and exact notion of what they
were, officially we had no right to call them facts
or to allege that we knew them. As there was much
in Kant's personal belief which this critical method
of his could not sanction, so there were implications
and consequences latent in his critical method which
he never absorbed, being an old man when he adopted
it. One of these latent implications was egotism.

The fact that each spirit was confined to its own
perceptions condemned it to an initial subjectivity
and agnosticism. What things might exist besides
his ideas he could never know. That such things

54

S^EDS OF EGOTISM IN KANT 55

existed was not doubted; Kant never accepted that
amazing principle of dogmatic egotism that nothing
is able to exist unless I am able to know it. On the
contrary he assumed that human perceptions, with
the moral postulates which he added to them, were
symbols of a real world of forces or spirits existing
beyond. This assumption reduced our initial idiotism
to a constitutional taint of our animal minds, not
unlike original sin, and excluded that romantic pride
and self-sufficiency in which a full-fledged transcen
dentalism always abounds.

To this contrite attitude of Kant's agnosticism
his personal character and ethics corresponded. A
wizened little old bachelor, a sedentary provincial
scribe, scrupulous and punctual, a courteous moralist
who would have us treat humanity in the person of
another as an end and never merely as a means, a
pacifist and humanitarian who so revered the moral
sense according to Shaftesbury and Adam Smith
that, after having abolished earth and heaven, he
was entirely comforted by the sublime truth that
nevertheless it remained wrong to tell a lie — such a
figure has nothing in it of the officious egotist or the
superman. Yet his very love of exactitude and his
scruples about knowledge, misled by the psycho
logical fallacy that nothing can be an object of
knowledge except some idea in the mind, led him

56 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

in the end to subjectivism; while his rigid conscience,
left standing in that unnatural void, led him to
attribute absoluteness to what he called the cate
gorical imperative. But this void outside and this
absolute oracle within are germs of egotism, and
germs of the most virulent species.

The categorical imperative, or unmistakable voice
of conscience, was originally something external
enough — too external, indeed, to impose by itself
a moral obligation. The thunders of Sinai and
the voice from the whirlwind in Job fetched their
authority from the suggestion of power; there spoke
an overwhelming physical force of which we were
the creatures and the playthings, a voice which far
from interpreting our sense of justice, or our deepest
hopes, threatened to crush and to flout them. If
some of its commandments were moral, others were
ritual or even barbarous; the only moral sanction
common to them all came from our natural prudence
and love of life; our wisdom imposed on us the fear
of the Lord. The prophets and the gospel did much
to identify this external divine authority with the
human conscience; an identification which required
a very elaborate theory of sin and punishment and
of existence in other worlds, since the actual pro
cedure of nature and history can never be squared
with any ideal of right.

SEEDS OF EGOTISM IN KANT 57

In Kant, who in this matter followed Calvin, the
independence between the movement of nature, both
within and without the soul, and the ideal of right
was exaggerated into an opposition. The categorical
imperative was always authoritative, but perhaps
never obeyed. The divine law was far from being
like the absolute Will in Fichte, Hegel, and Schopen
hauer, a name for a universal metaphysical force>
or even for the flux of material substance. On the
contrary the sublimity of the categorical imperative
lay precisely in the fact that, while matter and life
moved on in their own unregenerate way, a principle
which they ought to follow, overarched and con
demned them, and constrained them to condemn
themselves. Human nature was totally depraved
and incapable of the least merit, nor had it any power
of itself to become righteous. Its amiable spontaneous
virtues, having but a natural motive, were splendid
vices. Moral worth began only when the will, trans
formed at the touch of unmerited grace, surrendered
every impulse in overwhelming reverence for the
divine law.

This Calvinistic doctrine might seem to rebuke
all actual inclinations, and far from making the will
morally absolute, as egotism would, to raise over
against it an alien authority, what ought to be willed.
Such was, of course, Kant's ostensible intention; but

58 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

sublime as such a situation was declared to be, he
felt rather dissatisfied in its presence. A categorical
imperative crying in the wilderness, a duty which
nobody need listen to, or suffer for disregarding,
seemed rather a forlorn authority. To save the face
of absolute right another world seemed to be required,
as in orthodox Christianity, in which it might be duly
vindicated and obeyed.

Kant's scepticism, by which all knowledge of
reality was denied us, played conveniently into the
hands of this pious requirement. If the whole natural
world, which we can learn something about by ex
perience, is merely an idea in our minds, nothing
prevents any sort of real but unknown world from
lying about us unawares. What could be more
plausible and opportune than that the categorical
imperative which the human mind, the builder of
this visible world, had rejected, should in that other
real world be the head stone of the corner ? *

This happy thought, had it stood alone, might
have seemed a little fantastic; but it was only a
laboured means of re-establishing the theology of
Leibniz, in which Kant privately believed, behind
the transcendental idealism which he had put forward
professorially. The dogmatic system from which he
started seemed to him, as it stood, largely inde
fensible and a little oppressive. To purify it he

SEEDS OF EGOTISM IN KANT 59

adopted a fallacious principle of criticism, namely,
that our ideas are all we can know, a principle which,
if carried out, would undermine that whole system,
and every other. He, therefore, hastened to adopt
a corrective principle of reconstruction, no less fal
lacious, namely, that conscience bids us assume
certain things to be realities which reason and ex
perience know nothing of. This brought him round
to a qualified and ambiguous form of his original
dogmas, to the effect that although there was no
reason to think that God, heaven, and free-will exist,
we ought to act as if they existed, and might call
that wilful action of ours faith in their existence.

Thus in the philosophy of Kant there was a stimu
lating ambiguity in the issue. He taught rather less
than he secretly believed, and his disciples, seizing
the principle of his scepticism, but lacking his con
servative instincts, believed rather less than he taught
them. Doubtless in his private capacity Kant hoped,
if he did not believe, that God, free-will, and another
life subsisted in fact, as every believer had hitherto
supposed; it was only the method of proving their
reality that had been illegitimate. For no matter how
strong the usual arguments might seem (and they
did not seem very strong) they could convey no
transcendent assurance; on the contrary, the more
proofs you draw for anything from reason and

60 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

experience, the better you prove that that thing is
a mere idea in your mind. It was almost prudent,
so to speak, that God, freedom, and immortality, if
they had claims to reality, should remain without
witness in the sphere of " knowledge," as inad
vertently or ironically it was still called; but to
circumvent this compulsory lack of evidence God
had at least implanted in us a veridical conscience,
which if it took itself seriously (as it ought to do,
being a conscience) would constrain us to postulate
what, though we could never " know " it, happened
to be the truth. Such was the way in which the good
Kant thought to play hide-and-seek with reality.
. The momentum of his transcendental method,
however, led to a very different and quite egotistical
conclusion. An adept in transcendentalism can
hardly suppose that God, free-will, and heaven, even
if he postulates them, need exist at all. Existence,
for him, is an altogether inferior category. Even a
specific moral law, thundering unalterable maxims,
must seem to him a childish notion. What the ego
postulates is nothing fixed and already existing, but
only such ideal terms as, for the moment, express
its attitude. If it is striving to remember, it posits
a past; if it is planning, it posits a future; if it is
consciously eloquent, it posits an audience. These
things do not and cannot exist otherwise than in

SEEDS OF EGOTISM IN KANT 61

their capacity of things posited by the ego. All,
therefore, that the categorical imperative can mean
for the complete transcendentalist is that he should
live as if all things were real which are imaginatively
requisite for him, if he is to live hard: this intensity
of life in him being itself the only reality. At that
stage of development at which Kant found himself,
God, freedom, and immortality may have been
necessary postulates of practical reason. But to
suppose that these imagined objects, therefore,
existed apart from the excellent philosopher whose
conscience had not yet transcended them, would be
not to have profited by his teaching. It would be
merely to repeat it. A later and more advanced
transcendentalist, instead of God, freedom, and
immortality, might just as dutifully posit matter,
empire, and the beauty of a warrior's death. His
conscience might no longer be an echo of Chris
tianity, but the trumpet-blast of a new heathenism.
It is for the ego who posits to judge what it should
posit.

The postulates of practical reason, by which Kant
hoped to elude the subjectivity which he attributed
to knowledge, are no less subjective than knowledge,
and far more private and variable. The senses and
the intellect, if they deceive us, seem to deceive us
all in much the same way, and the dream they

62 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

plunge us into in common seems to unite us; but
what obscurity, diversity, hostility in the ideals of
our hearts! The postulates that were intended to
save the Kantian philosophy from egotism are the
most egotistical part of it. In the categorical im
perative we see something native and inward to the
private soul, in some of its moods, quietly claiming
to rule the invisible world, to set God on his throne
and open eternity to the human spirit. The most
subjective of feelings, the feeling of what ought to be,
legislates for the universe. Egotism could hardly go
further.

But this is not all. The categorical imperative, not
satisfied with proclaiming itself secretly omnipotent,
proclaims itself openly ruthless. Kant expressly re
pudiated as unworthy of a virtuous will any con
sideration of happiness, or of consequences, either
to oneself or to others. He was personally as mild
and kindly as the Vicar of Wakefield (whose goodness
he denied to be moral because it was natural), but
his moral doctrine was in principle a perfect frame
for fanaticism. Give back, as time was bound to give
back, a little flesh to this skeleton of duty, make it
the voice not of a remote Mosaic decalogue, but of a
rich temperament and a young life, and you will have
sanctified beforehand every stubborn passion and
every romantic crime. In the guise of an infallible

SEEDS OF EGOTISM IN KANT 63

conscience, before which nothing has a right to stand,
egotism is launched upon its irresponsible career.

The categorical imperative, as Kant personally con
ceived it, was that of the conscience of the eighteenth
century, which had become humanitarian without
ceasing to be Christian, the conscience of the Puritans
passing into that of Rousseau. But the categorical
principle in morals, like the ego in logic, can easily
migrate. If to-day you are right in obeying your
private conscience against all considerations of pru
dence or kindness (though you are prudent and kind
by nature, so that this loyalty to a ruthless Duty is
a sacrifice for you), to-morrow you may be right in
obeying the categorical imperative of your soul in
another phase, and to carry out no matter what irre
sponsible enterprise, though your heart may bleed
at the victims you are making. The principle of
fanaticism is present in either case; and Kant
provides, in his transcendental agnosticism, a means
of cutting off all protests from experience or common
sense, or a more enlightened self-interest. These
protests, he thinks, are not only ignoble, but they
come from a deluded mind, since the world they
regard is a creature of the imagination, whereas the
categorical imperative, revealed to the inner man,
is a principle prior to all worlds and, therefore, not
to be corrected by any suasion which this particular

64 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

world, now imagined by us, might try to exercise on
our free minds.

Thus it is from Kant, directly or indirectly, that
the German egotists draw the conviction which is
their most tragic • error. Their self-assertion and
ambition are ancient follies of the human race; but
they think these vulgar passions the creative spirit
of the universe. Kant, or that soul within Kant
which was still somewhat cramped in its expression,
was the prophet and even the founder of the new
German religion.

CHAPTER VI

TRANSCENDENTALISM PERFECTED

FICHTE purifiedjhe system of Kant of all its i
sistent_and humane elements; he set forth the sub
jective system of knowledge and action in its frankest
and most radical form. The ego, in order to live a
full and free life, posited or feigned a world of circum
stances, in the midst of which it might disport itself;
but this imagined theatre was made to suit the play,
and though it might seem to oppress the Will with
all sorts of hindrances, and even to snuff it but
altogether, it was really only a mirage which that
Will, being wiser than it knew, had raised in order
to enjoy the experience of exerting itself manfully.

It would seem obvious from this that the Will
could never be defeated, and that in spite of its
name it was identical with destiny or the laws of
nature: and those transcendentalists who lean to
naturalism, or pass into it unawares, like% Schelling
or Emerson, actually understand the absolute Will
in this way. But not so Fichte, nor what I take
to be the keener and more heroic romantic school,
whose last prophet was Nietzsche. The Germans, in

65 E

66 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

the midst of their fantastic metaphysics, sometimes
surprise us by their return to immediate experience :
after all, it was in wrestling with the Lord that their
philosophy was begotten. As a matter of fact, the
will is often defeated— especially if we are stubborn
in defining our will; and this tragic fact by no means
refutes the Fichtean philosophy, which knows how
to deal with it heroically. It conceives that what is
inviolable is only what ought to be, the unconscious
plan or idea of perfect living which is hidden in the
depths of all life : a will not animated in some measure
by this idea cannot exist, or at least cannot be noticed
or respected by this philosophy. But when, where,
how often and how far this divine idea shall be carried
put is left unexplained. Actual will may be feeble
or wicked in any degree; and in consequence the
world that ought to be evoked in its maximum con
ceivable richness, may dwindle and fade to nothing.
The Will may accordingly be defeated; not, indeed,
by imagined external things, but by its own apathy
and tergiversation. In this case, according to the
logic of this system (which is as beautifully thought
out as that of Plotinus), the dissolving world will
appear to be overwhelmingly formidable and real.
In expiring because we have no longer the warmth
to keep it alive, it will seem to be killing us; for the
passivity of the ego, says Fichte, is posited as activity

TRANSCENDENTALISM PERFECTED 67

in the non-ego. That way of speaking is scholastic;
but the thought, if we take the egotistical point of
view, is deep and true.

So any actual will may perish by defect and die
out; but actual will may also perish by sublimation.
The true object of absolute Will is not things or
pleasures or length of life, but willing itself; and the
more intense and disinterested this willing is, the
better it manifests absolute Will. The heroic act of
dashing oneself against overwhelming obstacles may,
therefore, be the highest fulfilment of the divine idea.
The will dares to perish in order to have dared every
thing. In its material ruin it remains ideally victorious.
If we consider the matter under the form of eternity,
we shall see that this heroic and suicidal will has
accomplished what it willed; it has not only lived
perilously but perished nobly.

It is hardly necessary to point out how completely
this theory justifies any desperate enterprise to which
one happens to be wedded. It justifies, for instance,
any wilful handling of history and science. The Will
by right lays down the principles on which things
must and shall be arranged. If things slip somehow
from the traces, so much the grander your " scientific
deed " in striving to rein them in. After all, you first
summoned them into being only that you might
drive them. If they seem to run wild and upset you,

68 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

like the steeds of Hippolytus, you will, at least, not
have missed the glory, while you lived and drove,
of assuming the attitude of a master. Gall spirits
from the vasty deep: if they do not come, what of
it ? That will only prove the absolute self-sufficiency
of your duty to call them.

What tightens this speculative bond between
Fichte and the Nietzschean school is that he himself
applied his theory of absolute Will to national life.
This ego, which was identical with mind in general,
he identified also with the German people. If the
Germans suffered their national will to be domes
ticated in the Napoleonic empire, the creative spirit
of the universe would be extinguished, and God
himself, who existed only when incarnate in man
kind, would disappear. It was evidently one's duty
to prevent this if possible; and Fichte poured out
all the vehemence of his nature into the struggle for
freedom. The mere struggle, the mere protest in the
soul, according to his system, would secure the end
desired: self-assertion, not material success, was the
goal. A happy equilibrium once established in human
life would have been only a temptation, a sort of
Napoleonic or Mephistophelian quietus falling on the
will to strive.

I am not sure how far Fichte, in his romantic and
puritan tension of soul, would have relished the

TRANSCENDENTALISM PERFECTED 69

present organisation of Germany. He was a man
of the people, a radical and an agitator as much as
a prophet of nationalism, and the shining armour in
which German freedom is now encased might have
seemed to him too ponderous. He might have dis
cerned in victory the beginning of corruption.

Nevertheless we should remember that a perfected
idealism has a tendency to change into its opposite
and become a materialism for all practical purposes.
Absolute Will is not a natural being, not anybody's
will or thought; it is a disembodied and unrealised
genius which first comes into operation when it begins
to surround itself with objects and points of resistance,
so as to become aware of its own stress and vocation.
What these objects or felt resistances may be is not
prejudged; or rather it is prejudged that they shall
be most opposite to spirit, and that spirit shall ex
perience its own passivity— one mode of its fated and
requisite experience — in the form of an influence
which it imputes to dead and material things.

The whole business of spirit may, therefore, well
be with matter. Science might be mechanical, art
might be cumbrous and material, all the instruments
of life might be brutal, life itself might be hard,
bitter, and obsessed, and yet the whole might remain
a direct manifestation of pure spirit, absolute free
dom, and creative duty. This speculative possibility

TO EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

is worth noting: it helps us to understand modern
Germany. It is no paradox that idealists should be
so much at home among material things. These
material things, according to them, are the offspring
of their spirit. Why should they not sink fondly into
the manipulation of philological details or chemical
elements, or over-ingenious commerce and intrigue?
Why should they not dote on blood and iron ? Why
should these fruits of the spirit be uncongenial to it ?
A theoretical materialist, who looks on the natural
world as on a soil that he has risen from and feeds
on, may perhaps feel a certain piety towards those
obscure abysses of nature that have given him birth;
but his delight will be rather in the clear things of
the imagination, in the humanities, by which the
rude forces of nature are at once expressed and
eluded. Not so the transcendentalist. Regarding his
mind as the source of everything, he is moved to
solemn silence and piety only before himself: on
the other hand, what bewitches him, what he loves
to fondle, is his progeny, the material environment,
the facts, the laws, the blood, and the iron in which
he conceives (quite truly, perhaps) that his spirit
perfectly and freely expresses itself. To despise the
world and withdraw into the realm of mind, as into
a subtler and more congenial sphere, is quite contrary
to his idealism. Such a retreat might bring him

TRANSCENDENTALISM PERFECTED 71

peace, and he wants war. His idealism teaches him
that strife and contradiction, as Heraclitus said, are
the parents of all things; and if he stopped striving,
if he grew sick of ambition and material goods, he
thinks he would be forsaking life, for he hates as he
would death what another kind of idealists have
called salvation.

We are told that God, when he had made the
world, found it very good, and the transcendentalist,
when he assumes the Creator's place, follows his
example. The hatred and fear of matter is perhaps
not a sign of a pure spirit. Even contemplatively, a
divine mind may perfectly well fall in love with
matter, as the Moon-goddess did with Endymion.
Such matter might be imagined only, as if Diana
had merely dreamt of her swain ; and the fond image
might not be less dear on that account. The romantic
poet finds his own spirit greeting him in rocks, clouds,
and waves ; the musician pours out his soul in move
ment and tumult ; why should not the transcendental
general, or engineer, or commercial traveller find his
purest ideal in trade, crafts, and wars? Grim work,
above all, is what absolute Will demands. It needs
the stimulus of resistance to become more intensely
conscious of Self, which is said to be its ultimate
object in imagining a world at all. Acquisition
interests it more than possession, because the sense

72 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

of effort and power is then more acute. The more
material the arts that engage it, and the more com
plicated and worldly its field of action, the more
intense will be its exertion, #nd the greater its joy.
This is no idealism for a recluse or a moping poet ;
it does not feel itself to be something incidental and
fugitive in the world, like a bird's note, that it should
fear to be drowned in the crash of material instru
ments or to be forced to a hideous tension and shrill
ness: shrillness and tension are its native element*
It is convinced that it has composed all the move
ments there are or can be in existence, and it feels
all the more masterful, the more numerous and
thunderous is the orchestra it leads. It is entirely
at home in a mechanical environment, which it can
prove transcendentally to be perfectly ideal. Its
most congenial work is to hack its way through to
the execution of its World-Plan. Its most adequate
and soul-satisfying expression is a universal battle.

CHAPTER VII

FICHTE ON THE MISSION OF GERMANY

WHEN the ancient Jews enlarged their conception
of Jehovah so as to recognise in him the only living
God to whom all nature and history were subject,
they did not cease to regard the universal power as
at the same time their special national deity. Here
was a latent contradiction. It was ingeniously re
moved by saying that Jehovah, while not essentially
a tribal deity, had chosen Israel for his people by a
free act of grace with no previous merit on their part ;
so that the pride of the Jews was not without humility.
No humility, however, is mingled with the claim
which the Germans now make to a similar pre
eminence. " Modern critics," says Max Stirner,
" inveigh against religion because it sets up God>
the divine, or the moral law over against man,,
regarding them as external things, whereas the critics
transform all these objects into ideas in the human
mind. Nevertheless the essential mistake of religion,,
to assign a mission to man at all, is not avoided by
these critics, who continue to insist that man shall
be divine, or ideally human, or what not; morality,,

73

74 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

freedom, humanity, etc., are his essence." Now a
divinity which is subjective or immanent evidently
cannot choose any nation, save by dwelling and
manifesting itself more particularly in them. They
can be highly favoured only in that they are intrin
sically superior, and on that account may be figura
tively called vessels of election. Therefore, if the
spirit which is in a nation is not one spirit among
many in the world (as the primitive Hebrews supposed
and as a naturalistic philosophy would maintain), but
is the one holy and universal spirit, and if at the
same time this spirit dwells in that nation pre
eminently, or even exclusively, humility on the part
of this nation would evidently be out of place.
Accordingly, the Germans cannot help bearing
witness to the divine virtues and prerogatives
which they find in themselves, some of which are
set forth by Fichte as follows :

The present age stands precisely in the middle of
earthly time, between the era in which men were
still self-seeking, earthly, and impulsive, and the
coming era in which they will live for the sake of
pure ideals. The Germans prefigure this better age,
and are leading the rest of the world into it. They
have created the modern world by uniting the
political heritage of classical Europe with the true
religion that lingered in Asia, and they have raised

THE MISSION OF GERMANY 75

the two to a higher unity in their Kultur. From
them is drawn the best blood of most other nations
and the spiritual force that has fashioned them all.

The Germans have never forsaken their native
land nor suffered seriously from immigration. Their
language is primitive, and they have never exchanged
it for a foreign one. Hence German alone is truly a
mother-tongue. Its intellectual terms retain a vital
and vivid connection with sensible experience. True
poetry and philosophy, therefore, exist only in Ger
man. Captious persons who judge by mere crude
feeling may fancy that German is not very melodious ;
but these matters cannot be rightly judged without
reference to first principles, which in this case would
prove that the sweetest language is that which
exhausts all possible sounds and combines them in
all available ways. Whether German or some other
language comes nearest to this a 'priori ideal of
euphony must be left for empirical observation to
decide.

The German nature, being pure, deep, earnest,
and bold, has instinctively seized upon the true
essence of Christianity and discarded with abhorrence
all the lies and corruption that obscured it. This
essence is the imperative need of turning from the
natural to the ideal life. The German knows that
his own soul is safe; but this is not enough for him

76 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

in his unselfishness. His zeal is kindled easily for
warmth and light everywhere; and this zeal of his
is patient and efficacious, taking hold on real life
and transforming it. As he presses on he finds more
than he sought, for he has plunged into the quick
stream of life which forges ahead of itself and carries
him forward with it. The dead heart of other nations
may dream of gods in the clouds, or of some perfect
type of human life already exemplified in the past
and only to be approached or repeated in the future.
The spirit of the German is no coinage of earth; it
is the living source of all the suns, and rushes to
create absolutely new things for ever. The German
mind is the self-consciousness of God.

I do not see that the strain of war or the intoxica
tion of victory could add much to these boasts,
uttered by Fichte when, for the moment, he had
abandoned all hope of military self-assertion on the
part of his country, and relied on education and
philosophy alone to preserve and propagate German
righteoiisness. Even in detail, what he says often
seems strangely like what official Germany is now
saying. Even the hysterical hatred of England is
not absent. In England Fichte did not see the
champion of Protestantism, morality, and political
liberty, nor the constant foe of Napoleon, but only
a universal commercial vampire. His contempt for

THE MISSION OF GERMANY 77

the Latin races, too, was boundless. In the matter
of race, indeed, he entertained a curious idea that
there must have been, from all eternity until the
beginning of history, a primitive Normal People, a
tribe of Adams and Eves; because according to a
principle which he adopted from Calvinistic theology,
if all men had been originally slaves to nature none
could ever have become free. This Normal People
were, of course, the ancestors of the Germans. Earth-
born savage tribes must have existed also for the
Normal People to subdue, since but for some such
conquest the primitive equilibrium would never have
been broken, Eden and the jungle would never have
been merged together, and history, which is a record
of novelties, would never have begun. The theory
of evolution has rendered the reasons for such a
view obsolete; but the idea that the bulk of man
kind are mongrels formed by the union of blonde god
like creatures with some sort of anthropoid blacks,
recurred later in Gobineau and has had a certain
vogue in Germany.

Fichte, following Calvin and Kant, made a very
sharp distinction between the life of nature and that
of duty. The ideal must be pursued without the
least thought of advantage. Trades, he says, must
be practised spontaneously, without any other reward
than longer vigils. The young must never hear it

78 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

mentioned that any one could ever be incited or
guided in life by the thought of his own preservation
or well-being. Knowledge is no report of existing
things or laws which have happened to be discovered.
Knowledge is the very life of God, and self-generated.
It is " an intellectual activity for its own sake, accord
ing to rules for their own sake." In plain English, it
is pure imagination. But the method to be imposed
on this madness is fixed innately, both for thought
and for morals. Only frivolity can interfere with a
unanimous idealism.

We must not suppose that this prescription of
austere and abstract aims implies any aversion on
Fichte's part to material progress, compulsory Kultur,
or military conquest. German idealism, as we have
seen, is not Platonic or ascetic, that it should leave
the world behind. On the contrary, its mission is to
consecrate the world and show that every part of it
is an organ of the spirit. This is a form of piety akin
to the Hebraic. Even the strictest Calvinists, who
taught that the world was totally depraved, were
able, in every sense of the phrase, to make a very
good thing of it. They reclaimed, they appropriated,
they almost enjoyed it. So Fichte gives us prophetic
glimpses of an idealistic Germany conquering the
world. The state does not aim at self-preservation,
still less is it concerned to come to the aid of those

THE MISSION OF GERMANY 79

members of the human family that lag behind the
movement of the day. The dominion of unorganised
physical force must be abolished by a force obedient
to reason and spirit. True life consists in refashioning
human relations after a model innate in the mind.
The glorious destiny of Germany is to bring forth
and establish the world anew. Natural freedom is a
disgraceful thing, a mere medley of sensual and
intellectual impulses without any principle of order.
It is for the Germans to decide whether a providential
progress exists by becoming themselves the provi
dence that shall bring progress about, or whether on
the contrary every higher thought is folly. If they
should fail, history would never blame them, for in
that case there would be no more history.

The sole animating principle of history is the
tendency towards a universal Christian European
monarchy. This tendency is deeper than the plans
of men and stronger than their intentions. " That
a state, even when on the very point of making war,
should solemnly assert its love of peace and its aversion
to conquest, is nothing; for in the first place it must
needs make this asseveration and so hide its real
intention if it would succeed in its design; and the
well-known principle Threaten war that tbou mayst
have 'peace may also be inverted in this way : Promise
'peace that tbou mayst begin war with advantage ; and

86 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

in the second place the state may be wholly in
earnest in its peaceful assurances, so far as its self-
knowledge has gone; but let the favourable oppor
tunity for aggrandisement present itself, and the
previous good resolution is forgotten."

If the people are disinclined to obey the Idea, the
government must constrain them to do so. All the
powers of all the citizens must be absorbed in the
state. Personal liberty could be turned to no good
use when such individuality and variety of training
as are good for the state have been provided for by
its regulations. Nor must any idleness be tolerated.
An ideal education must make men over so that
they shall be incapable of willing anything but what
that education wills them to will. The state may
then rely upon its subjects, " for whoever has a well-
grounded will, wills what he wills for all eternity."

As to foreign relations, the state, in obedience to
its ideal mission, must conquer the surrounding bar
barians and raise them to a state of culture. It is
this process almost exclusively that has introduced
progress into history. " What impels the Macedonian
hero ... to seek foreign lands ? What chains victory
to his footsteps and scatters before him in terror the
countless hordes of his enemies ? Is this mere fortune ?
No; it is an Idea. ... The civilised must rule and
the uncivilised must obey, if Right is to be the law

THE MISSION OF GERMANY 81

of the world. . . . Tell me not of the thousands who
fell round his path; speak not of his own early death.
After the realisation of his Idea, what was there
greater for him to do than to die ? "

This enthusiasm for Alexander (which Hegel
shared) is not merely retrospective. " At last in one
nation of the world the highest, purest morality, such
as was never seen before among men, will arise and
will be made secure for all future time, and thence
will be extended over all other peoples. There will
ensue a transformation of the human race from
earthly and sensual creatures into pure and noble
spirits." " Do you know anything higher than
death? . . . Who has a right to stand in the way
of an enterprise begun in the face of this peril ? "

It may seem curious that an uncompromising
puritan like Fichte, a prophet sprung from the people,
a theoretical republican who quarrelled with his
students for forming clubs and fighting duels, a
fierce idealist full of contempt for worldlings, should
have so perfectly supplied the Junkers and bankers
with their philosophy. But the phenomenon is not
new. Plato, divine and urbane as he was, supplied
the dull Spartans with theirs. Men of idealistic faith
are confident that the foundations of things must
be divine, and when, upon investigating these foun
dations, they come upon sinister principles — blind

82 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

impulse, chance, murderous competition — they fanati
cally erect these very principles into sacred maxims.
All strength, they are antecedently convinced, must
come from God; therefore if deception, wilfulness,
tyranny, and big battalions are the means to power,
they must be the chosen instruments of God on
earth. In some such way the Catholic Church, too,
for fear of impiety, is seen blessing many a form of
deceit and oppression. Thus the most ardent specu
lation may come to sanction the most brutal practice.
The primitive passions so sanctioned, because they
seem to be safe and potent, are probably too narrowly
organised to sustain themselves long; and meantime
they miss and trample down the best . things that
mankind possesses. Nevertheless they are a force like
any other, a force not only vehement but contagious,
and capable of many victories though of no stable
success. Such passions, and the philosophies that
glorify them, are sincere, absorbing, and if frankly
expressed irrefutable.

The transcendental theory of a world merely
imagined by the ego, and the will that deems itself
absolute are certainly desperate delusions ; but not
more desperate or deluded than many another system
that millions have been brought to accept. The thing
bears all the marks of a new religion. The fact that
the established religions of Germany are still forms

THE MISSION OF GERMANY 83

of Christianity may obscure the explicit and heathen
character of the new faith: it passes for a somewhat
faded speculation, or for the cree.d of a few extremists,
when in reality it dominates the judgment and con
duct of the nation. No religious tyranny could be
more complete. It has its prophets in the great
philosophers and historians of the last century; its
high priests and pharisees in the government and
the professors ; its faithful flock in the disciplined
mass of the nation; its heretics in the socialists; its
dupes in the Catholics and the liberals, to both of
whom the national creed, if they understood it, would
be an abomination; it has its martyrs now by the
million, and its victims among unbelievers are even
more numerous, for its victims, in some degree, are
all men.

CHAPTER VIII

THE EGOTISM OF IDEAS

WHEN we are discussing egotism need we speak of
Hegel? The tone of this philosopher, especially in
his later writings, was full of contempt for everything
subjective: the point of view of the individual, his
opinions and wishes, were treated as of no account
unless they had been brought into line with the
providential march of events and ideas in the great
world." This realism, pronounced and even acrid as
it was, was still idealistic in the sense that the sub
stance of the world was conceived not to be material
but conceptual — a law or logic which animated phe
nomena and was the secret of their movement. The
world was like a riddle or confused oracle; and the
solution to the puzzle lay in the romantic instability
or self-contradiction inherent in every finite form of
being, which compelled it to pass into something
different. The direction of this movement we might
understand sympathetically in virtue of a sort of
vital dialectic or dramatic necessity in our own
reflection, Hegel was a solemn sophist: he made
discourse the key to reality.

84

THE EGOTISM OF IDEAS 85

This technical realism in Hegel was reinforced by
his historical imagination, which continually produces
an impression of detachment, objectivity, and im
personal intelligence; he often seems to be lost in
the events of his story and to be plucking the very
heart out of the world. Again, he adored the state,
by which in his view the individual should be entirely
subjugated, not for the benefit of other individuals
(that would be a sort of vicarious selfishness no less
barren than private profit), but in the rapt service of
common impersonal ends.

The family was a first natural group in which the
individual should be happy to lose himself, the trade-
guild was another, and the state was the highest and
most comprehensive of all ; there was nothing worthy
or real in a man except his functions in society.

Nevertheless this denial of egotism is apparent
only. It is a play within the play. On the smaller
stage the individual — save for his lapses and stammer
ings — is nothing but the instrument and vehicle of
divine decrees; in fact he is a puppet, and the only
reality of him is the space he fills in the total spectacle,
But that little stage is framed in by another, often
overlooked, but ever present ; and on this larger and
nearer stage the ego struts alone. It is I that pull
the strings, enjoy the drama, supply its plot and
moral, and possess the freedom and actuality which

86 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

my puppets lack. On the little stage the soul of a
man is only one of God's ideas, and his whole worth
lies in helping out the pantomime; on the big stage,
God is simply my idea of God and the purpose of
the play is to express my mind. The spectacle in
which every individual dances automatically to the
divine tune is only my dream.

•t The philosophy of Hegel is accordingly subjective
and all its realism is but a pose and a tone wilfully
assumed. That this is the truth of the matter might
be inferred, apart from many continual hints and
implications, from the fact that the system is tran
scendental and founded on Kant. Objectivity can,
therefore, be only a show, a matter of make-believe,
something imputed to things and persons by the
mind, whose poetic energies it manifests. Everything
must be set down as a creation of , mind, simply
because it is an object of thought or knowledge.
. This underlying subjectivism also explains the
singular satisfaction of Hegel, whose glance was
comprehensive enough, with so strangely limited a
world as he describes to us. He described what he
knew best or had heard of most, and felt he had
described the universe. This illusion was inevitable,
because his principle was that the universe was
created by description and resided in it. The mission
of Hegel, as he himself conceived it, was not to dis-

THE EGOTISM OF IDEAS

cover the real world or any part of it: in theory he
retracted all belief in a real world and set in its place
his conception or knowledge of it — therefore quite
adequate to its object. If China was the oldest
country he had heard of, the world began with
China, and if Prussia was the youngest and he (as
he had to be) its latest philosopher, the world ended
with Prussia and with himself. This seems a monstrous5
egotism, but it is not arbitrary; in one sense it was1
the least pretentious of attitudes, since it was limited
to the description of a current view, not of a separate
or prior object. The value of a philosophy could lie
only in the fullness and fidelity with which it might
focus the conceptions of the age in which it arose.
Hegel hoped to do this for his own times ; he did not
covet truth to anything further.

The same attitude explains the servility of his
moral philosophy, which is simply an apology for
the established order of things and for the prejudices
of his time and country. His deepest conviction was
that no system of ethics could be more, and if it
tried to be more would be less, because it would be
merely personal. When, for instance, he condemned
harshly the Roman patria potestas it was because it
offended the individualism of the Protestant and
modern conscience; and if in the next breath he
condemned even more harshly the sentimentalists

88 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

who made tender feeling and good intentions the
test of virtue, it was because these individual con
sciences absolved themselves from conformity to the
established church and state. To inquire whether in
itself or in respect to human economy generally, the
morality of Buddha, or Socrates, or Rousseau was
the best would have seemed to him absurd: the
question could only be what approaches or contri
butions each of these made to the morality approved
by the Lutheran community and by the Prussian
ministry of education and public worship. The truth,
then as now, was whatever every good German
believed. This pious wish of HegePs to interpret
the orthodoxy of his generation was successful, and
the modest hopes of his philosophy were fulfilled.
Never perhaps was a system so true to its date and
so false to its subject.

The egotism of Hegel appears also in his treatment
of mathematical and physical questions. The infinite
he called the false infinite, so as to avoid the dilemmas
which it placed him in, such as why the evolution of
the Idea began six thousand years ago, or less ; what
more could happen now that in his self-consciousness
that evolution was complete; why it should have
gone on in this planet only, or if it had gone on else
where also, why the Idea evolving there might not
have been a different Idea. But all such questions

THE EGOTISM OF IDEAS 89

are excluded when one understands that this philo
sophy is only a point of view : the world it describes
is a vista not separable from the egotistical per
spectives that frame it in. The extent of the world
need not be discussed, because that extent is an
appearance only; in reality the world has no extent,
because it is only my present idea.

The infinite thus lost its application; but the word
was too idealistic to be discarded. Accordingly the
title of true infinite was bestowed on the eventual
illusion of completeness, on an alleged system of
relations out of relation to anything beyond. That
nothing existent, unless it was the bad infinite, could
be absolute in this manner did not ruffle Hegel, for
the existent did not really concern him but only
" knowledge," that is, a circle of present and object
less ideas. Knowledge, however limited in fact, always
has the completeness in question for the egotist, whose
objects are not credited with existing beyond him
self. Egotism could hardly receive a more radical
expression than this: to declare the ego infinite
because it can never find anything that is beyond its
range.

The favourite tenet of Hegel that everything
involves its opposite is also a piece of egotism; for
it is equivalent to making things conform to words,
not words to things; and the ego, particularly in

90 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

philosophers, is a nebula of words. In defining things,
if you insist on defining them, you are constrained to
define them by their relation to other things, or even
exclusion of them. If, therefore, things are formed by
your definitions of them, these relations and exclu
sions will be the essence of things. The notion of
such intrinsic relativity in things is a sophism even in
logic, since elementary terms can never be defined
yet may be perfectly well understood and arrested
in intuition; but what here concerns us is rather the
egotistical motive behind that sophism : namely, that
the most verbal and subjective accidents to which
the names of things are subject in human discourse
should be deputed to be the groundwork of the things
and their inmost being.

Egotistical, too, was Hegel's tireless hatred of
what he called the abstract understanding. In his
criticisms of this faculty and the opinions it forms
there is much keenness and some justice. People
often reason in the abstract, floating on words as on
bladders: in their knowingness they miss the com
plexity and volume of real things. But the errors or
abuses into which verbal intelligence may fall would
never produce that implacable zeal with which Hegel
persecutes it. What obsesses him is the fear that, in
spite of its frivolity, the understanding may some
day understand: that it may correct its inadequacies,

THE EGOTISM OF IDEAS 91

trace the real movement of things, and seeing their
mechanism lose that effet (Tcnsemble, that dramatic
illusion, which he calls reason.

Imagine a landscape-painter condemned to have
a naturalist always at his elbow: soon it would not
be merely the errors of the naturalist that would
irritate him, but the naturalist himself. The artist
intent on panoramic effects does not wish to be
forced to look through a microscope; in changing
his focus he loses his subjective object: not reality
but appearance is the reality for him. Hegel, since
it was his mission to substitute so-called knowledge
for being, had to go further; he had to convince
himself, not only that the structure of nature dis
covered by the understanding was irrelevant to his
own conceptual mythology, but that such a structure
did not exist. He was not willing to confess (as the
landscape-painter might) that he was an egotist;
that it was the subjective that interested him, and
that in so great a world the subjective too has its
place. No! he must pretend that his egotism was
not egotism, but identity with the absolute, and that
those who dared to maintain that the world wagged
in its own way, apart from the viewing mind, were
devils, because they suggested that the viewing mind
was not God.

It is this latent but colossal egotism that makes

92 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

plausible the strange use which Hegel sometimes
makes of the word substance. His substance is but
his grammar of discourse; for he was not looking
for substance, in which he could not consistently
believe, but only for the ultimate synthetic impres
sion which he might gather from appearances. For
the theatre-goer, the function of scenery and actors
is that they should please and impress him: but
what, in the end, impresses and pleases him? The
cumulative burden and force of the play; the en
hanced life which it has stimulated in himself. This,
for that ruthless egotist, the aesthete, is the substance
of all things theatrical. Of course, in fact, nothing
could be falser, for the author and actors are real
people, with lives far outrunning their function in
the theatre and truly grounding it. Even the stage
machinery has its natural history, and the artisans
who made it have theirs, both full of mute inglorious
tragedies. These real substances behind his enter
tainment the spectator, in his aesthetic egotism,
laughs at as irrelevant; for him, as for Hamlet, the
play's the thing. What is most his own, his imagina
tive reaction on the spectacle, the terms in which he
finds it easiest and most exciting to describe it, he
calls the substance of it: a term which betrays the
profound impudence of the deliberate egotist; the
deepest reality he will recognise is merely specious,

THE EGOTISM OF IDEAS 93

existing only for the mind that imagines it. What
is supposed to rescue the system of Hegel from sub
jectivism is the most subjective of things — a dialectic
which obeys the impulses of a theoretical parti pris,
and glorifies a fixed idea.

When we have understood all this, those traits of
Hegel's which at first sight seem least egotistical —
his historical insight and his enthusiasm for organised
society — take on a new colour. That historical in
sight is not really sympathetic; it is imperious,
external, contemptuous, feigned. If you are a modern
reading the Greeks, especially if you read them in
the romantic spirit of Goethe's classicism, and know
of them just what Hegel knew, you will think his
description wonderfully penetrating, masterly, and
complete : but would ^Eschylus or Plato have thought
it so? They would have laughed, or rather they
would not have understood that such a description
referred to them at all. It is the legend of the Greeks,
not the life of the Greeks, that is analysed by him.
So his account of mediaeval religion represents the
Protestant legend, not the Catholic experience. What .
we know little or nothing about seems to us in Hegel
admirably characterised: what we know intimately
seems to us painted with the eye of a pedantic,
remote, and insolent foreigner. It is but an idea of
his own that he is foisting upon us, calling it our soul.

94 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

He is creating a world in his head which might be
admirable, if God had made it.

Every one is subject to such illusions of perspective
and to the pathos of distance, now favourable, now un
favourable to what he studies ; but Hegel, thinking
he had the key to the divine design, fancied himself
deeply sympathetic because he saw in everything some
fragment of himself. But no part of the world was
that; every part had its own inalienable superiority,
which to transcend was to lose for ever. To the
omniscient egotist every heart is closed. The past
will never give away its secret except to some self-
forgetful and humble lover who by nature has a
kindred destiny. The egotist who thinks to grasp it,
so as to serve it up at his philosophic banquet, or
exhibit it in his museum of antiquities, grasps only
himself; and in that sense, to his confusion, his
egotism turns out true.

The egotism that appears in this lordly way of
treating the past is egotism of the imagination, the
same that was expressed in the romantic love of
nature, which was really a very subtle, very studious,
very obstinate love of self, intent on finding some
reference and deference to oneself in everything. But
there is also an egotism of passion, which in Hegel
appears in his worship of the state. " The passions "
is the old and fit name for what the Germans call

THE EGOTISM OF IDEAS 95

ideals. The passions are not selfish in the sense in
which the German moralists denounce selfishness ;
they are not contrived by him who harbours them
for his ulterior profit. They are ideal, dangerous,
often fatal. Even carnal passions are not selfish, if
by the self we understand the whole man : they are
an obsession to which he sacrifices himself. But the
transcendental philosophy with its migratory ego can
turn any single passion, or any complex of passions^
into a reputed centre of will, into a moral personage.
As the passion usurps more and more of the man's
nature it becomes a fierce egotist in his place; it
becomes fanaticism or even madness.

This substitution of a passion for a man, when
nobody thought the ego migratory, seemed a disease.
What folly, we said to the human soul, to sacrifice
your natural life to this partial, transitory, visionary
passion! But the German idealist recognises no
natural life, no natural individual. His ego can
migrate into any political body or any synthetic
idea. Therefore, his passions, far from seeming follies
to him, seem divine inspirations, calls to sacrifice,
fidelities to the ideal.

I am far from wishing to say that a German idealist
is commonly just to all the passions and raises them
in turn to be his highest and absolute will. His
passions are generally few and mental. Accidents of

96 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

training or limitations of temperament keep him
respectable; but he is never safe. Dazzle him with
a sophism, such, for instance, as that " the more evil
the more good," or hypnotise him with a super
stition, such as that " organisation is an end in
itself," and nothing more is needed to turn him into
a romantic criminal.

Even the absolute requires an enemy to whet its
edge upon, and the state, which according to Hegel
is morally absolute, requires rival states in order
that its separate individuality may not seem to
vanish, and with it the occasion for blessed and
wholesome wars. Hegel rejects the notion that
nations have any duties to one another because,
as he asserts, there is no moral authority or tribunal
higher than the state, to which its government could
be subject. This assertion is evidently false, since in
the first place there is God or, if the phrase be pre
ferred, there is the highest good of mankind, hedging
in very narrowly the path that states should follow
between opposite vices ; and in the second place there
is the individual, whose natural allegiance to his
family, friends, and religion, to truth and to art, is
deeper and holier than his allegiance to the state,
which for the soul of man is an historical and geo
graphical accident. No doubt at the present stage of
civilisation there is more to be gained than lost by

THE EGOTISM OF IDEAS 97

co-operating loyally with the governments under
which we happen to live, not because any state is
divine, but because as yet no less cumbrous machinery
is available for carrying on the economy of life with
some approach to decency and security. For Hegel,
however, the life of the state was the moral substance,
and the souls of men but the accidents; and as to
the judgment of God he asserted that it was none
other than the course of history. This is a charac
teristic saying, in which he seems to proclaim the
moral government of the world, when in truth he is
sanctifying a brutal law of success and succession.
The best government, of course, succumbs in time
like the worst, and sooner; the dark ages followed
upon the Roman Empire and lasted twice as long.
But Hegel's God was simply the world, or a formula
supposed to describe the world. He despised every
ideal not destined to be realised on earth, he respected
legality more than justice, and extant institutions
more than moral ideals; and he wished to flatter a
government in whose policy war and even crime were
recognised weapons.

This reign of official passion is not, let me repeat,
egotism in the natural man who is subject to
it; it is the sacrifice of the natural man and of
all men to an abstract obsession, called an ideal.
The vice of absoluteness and egotism is transferred

98 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

to that visionary agent. The man may be docile and
gentle enough, but the demon he listens to is ruth
less and deaf. It forbids him to ask, " At what price
do I pursue this ideal ? How much harm must I do
to attain this good ? " No ; this imperative is cate
gorical. The die is cast, the war against human
nature and happiness is declared, and an idol that
feeds on blood, the Absolute State, is set up in the
heart and over the city.

CHAPTER IX

EGOTISM AND SELFISHNESS

IN a review of egotism in German philosophy it
would hardly be excusable to ignore the one notable
writer who has openly adopted egotism in name as
well as in fact. The work of Max Stirner on the
single separate person and what he may call his own
hardly belongs to German philosophy as I have been
using the words: it lacks the transcendental point
of departure, as well as all breadth of view, meta
physical subtlety, 9r generous afflatus; it is a bold,
frank, and rather tiresome protest against the folly
of moral idealism, against the sacrifice of the indi
vidual to any ghostly powers such as God, duty, the
state, humanity, or society; all of which this re
doubtable critic called " spooks " and regarded as
fixed ideas and pathological obsessions. This crudity
was relieved by a strong mother-wit and a dogged
honesty; and it is not impossible that this poor
schoolmaster, in his solitary meditations, may have
embodied prophetically a rebellion against polite and
religious follies which is brewing in the working
classes — classes which to-morrow perhaps will absorb
all mankind and give for the first time a plebeian
tone to philosophy.

99

ioo EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

Max Stirner called the migratory ego back to its
nest. He exorcised that " spook " which had been
ascending and descending the ladder of abstractions,
lodged now in a single passion, now in a political
body, now in a logical term, now in the outspread
universe. The only true ego, he insisted, was the
bodily person, the natural individual who is born
and dies. No other organ or seat existed for the
mind, or for any of its functions. Personal interests
were the only honest interests a man could have, and
if he was brow-beaten or indoctrinated into sacrificing
them, that moral coercion was a scandal and a wrong.
The indomitable individual should shake off those
chains, which were only cobwebs, and come into his
own.

Egotism thus becomes individualism, and threatens
to become selfishness. The logic of these positions
does not seem to have been clear to Max Stirner.
That the individual must possess all his wishes and
aspirations, even the most self-denying and suicidal,
is obvious; he is the seat of those very obsessions
and superstitions which Max Stirner deplored. The
same thing is true of knowledge: a man can know
only what be knows and what his faculties make him
capable of knowing. This fact is the excuse for tran
scendentalism, and the element of truth in it. But
the fact that volition and knowledge must have their

EGOTISM AND SELFISHNESS 101

seat in some person prejudges nothing about the
scope of their objects. The fallacy of egotism begins
with the inference that, therefore, a person can know
only his ideas and can live only for his own benefit.
On the contrary, what makes knowledge knowledge
is that our sensibility may report something which
is not merely our feeling; and our moral being arises
when our interests likewise begin to range over the
world. To deny that a man is capable of generosity
because his generosity must be his own, is insufferable
quibbling. Even our vanities and follies are dis
interested in their way; their egotism is not a
calculated selfishness. When a man orders his tomb
according to his taste, it is not in the hope of enjoying
his residence in it.

Max Stirner, while deprecating all subordination
of the individual to society, expected people, even
after they were emancipated, to form voluntary
unions for specific purposes, such as playing games.
Did he think that such companionship and co-opera
tion would go without gregarious feelings and ideal
interests ? Would not a player wish his side to win ?
Would he not impose a rather painful strain upon
himself at times for the sake of that " spook,"
victory? All the sacrifices that society or religion
imposes on a man, when they are legitimate, are
based on the same principle.

102 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

The protest of Max Stirner against sham ideals
and aims forced upon us by social pressure should
not then have extended to ideals congenial to the
natural man and founded on his instincts. Since the
seat of our enthusiasms must be personal, their appeal
should be so too, if they are to inspire us efficaciously;
but every art and science shows that they may be
utterly impersonal in their object. It was not in
proposing ideal aims that the German philosophers
were wrong: that was the noble and heroic side of
their doctrine, as well as a point in which their psy
chology was correct. Their error lay in defining these
aims arbitrarily and imposing them absolutely, trying
to thrust into us ideals like endless strife and absolute
will, which perhaps our souls abhor. But if our souls
abhor those things, it is because they love something
else; and this other thing they love for its own sake,
so that the very refusal to sacrifice to those idols is
a proof of faith in a true God.

The conclusion of Max Stirner, that because those
idols are false, and the worship of them is cruel and
superstitious, therefore we must worship nothing
and merely enjoy in a piggish way what we may call
our own, is a conclusion that misreads human nature.
It overlooks the fact that man lives by the imagina
tion, that the imagination — when not chaotic and
futile — is exercised in the arts of life, that the objects

EGOTISM AND SELFISHNESS 103

of these arts are impersonal, and that to achieve
these objects brings us a natural happiness.

The Germans are by nature a good stolid people,
and it is curious that their moralists, of every school,
are so fantastic and bad. The trouble lies perhaps in
this, that they are all precipitate. They have not
taken the trouble to decipher human nature, which
is an endowment, something many-sided, unconscious,
with a margin of variation, and have started instead
with the will, which is only an attitude, something
casual, conscious, and narrowly absolute. Nor have
they learned to respect sufficiently the external con
ditions under which human nature operates and to
which it must conform — God, the material world,
the nature and will of other men. Their morality
consequently terminates in ideals, casual, conscious,
and absolute expressions of the passions, or else
expires in a mysticism which renounces all moral
judgment. A reasonable morality terminates instead
in the arts, by which human ideals and passions are
compounded with experience and adapted to the
materials they must work in. The immaturity of the
German moralists appears in their conception that
the good is life, which is what an irrational animal
might say: whereas for a rational being the good is
only the good part of life, that healthy, stable, wise,
kind, and beautiful sort of life which he calls happiness.

CHAPTER X

THE BREACH WITH CHRISTIANITY

GERMAN philosophy has a religious spirit, but its
alliance with Christianity has always been equivocal
and external. Even in the speculations of Leibniz,
concerned as he was about orthodoxy, there was a
spirit of independence and absolutism which was
rationalistic, not to say heathen. The principle of
sufficient reason, for instance, demands that God and
nature shall explain their existence and behaviour to
us, as timid parents explain their behaviour to their
censorious children. By rendering everything neces
sary, even the acts of God, it takes the place of God
and makes him superfluous. Such frigid optimism as
this principle involves, besides being fatalistic, is
deeply discouraging to that hope of deliverance which
is the soul of Christianity: for if this is the best
world possible, how poor must be that realm of
possible worlds where everything is tainted, and
there is no heaven! The theory, too, that each soul
contains the seeds of its whole experience and suffices
for its own infinite development, destroys the mean
ing of creation, revelation, miracles, sin, grace, and

104

THE BREACH WITH CHRISTIANITY 105

charity. Thus without intending it, even the ob
sequious but incredibly intelligent Leibniz under
mined all the doctrines of Christianity in the act of
thinking them afresh, and insinuated into them a
sort of magic heathen individualism.

Kant, Fichte, and Hegel were less punctilious in
their theology, but they still intended to be or to
seem Christians. They felt that what made the
sanctity of traditional religion and its moral force
could be recovered in a purer form in their systems.
This feeling of theirs was not unwarranted; at least,
many religious minds, after the first shock of losing
their realistic faith, have seen in transcendentalism
a means, and perhaps the only safe means, of still
maintaining a sort of Christianity which shall not
claim any longer to be a miraculous or exceptional
revelation, but only a fair enough poetic symbol for
the principles found in all moral life. That he who
loses his life shall save it, for instance, is a maxim
much prized and much glossed by Hegelians. They
lend it a meaning of their own, which might, indeed,
be said to be the opposite of what the Gospel meant ;
for there the believer is urged to discard the very
world with which Hegel asks him to identify himself.
The idea is that if you surrender your private interests
to those of your profession, science, or country, you
become thereby a good and important person, and

106 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

unintentionally a happy one. You will then feel that
the world shares your thoughts and renders them
perpetual, while you, being absorbed in ideal pur
suits, forget your private miseries and mortality.

In this sort of moral psychology there is evidently
some truth; but the " law of experience " which it
points to is but a loose and ambiguous law, which
disguises more facts than it expresses. Honest minds
will rebel against the suggestion tnat when you out
grow a desire you have fulfilled it; and they will
detect the furtive irony in bidding you live hard in
order not to feel the vanity of living. To drown
sorrow in work, and to forget private failures in
public interests, is certainly possible, but it is only
drugging yourself with hurry and routine, which may
not be more advantageous to others than it really is
to yourself. Impersonal or " ideal " aims are not
necessarily less delusive or " higher " than personal
ones; in fact there is far more likelihood that they
are conventional humbug. This pathological hygiene
of idealism, which always stops at some uncriticised
impulse, thinks it secures health when perhaps it has
only increased the dose of illusion.

Nevertheless transcendentalism has this important
element in common with Christianity and with the
other Hebraic religions, that it regards human
interests as the core of the universe and God as the

THE BREACH WITH CHRISTIANITY 107

God of man, who disposes all things for man's benefit.
In its eyes the sphere of providence and moral life is
bounded by the history of a part of Europe and Asia
for a few thousand years. So long as transcen
dentalism is taken to imply some such philosophy of
history it can compound its differences with liberal
Christianity, since they are at one in the cardinal
point of their faith, which is the apotheosis of the
human spirit.

Yet this human egotism, which comforts so many
minds, offends others, in their way no less religious.
Of course, those who believe in the infinity of the
universe, be they mystics or naturalists, smile at
such pettiness and fatuity. But even among tran-
scendentalists, some are repelled; for the dominion
which they attribute to their ego is a dominion over
appearances only; they do not pretend that the
grammar of the human intellect can lay down the
law for the world at large. At the same time, in their
own house they wish to keep their freedom. That
prescribed evolution and that reversible optimism
of the absolute transcendentalists are repulsive to
them; they resent that such a precise and distasteful
career should be imposed on their transcendental
individuality, and should swallow it up. It is these
rebels that have carried romanticism and German
philosophy into its last phase. They have broken at

io8 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

last with Christianity and at the same time with the
theological and cosmic transcendentalism that was
its treacherous ally, and hoped to be its heir.

The transcendentalism of Schopenhauer, sweeping
as it was in its way, retained the modest and agnostic
character it had had in Kant: he proclaimed that
the world was his idea, but meant only (what is un
deniable) that his idea of the world was his idea.
The egotistical doctrine that the whole universe is
but the image of it created by the mind disappeared
altogether in his system. The so-called Will which
he still placed behind everything was no longer his
own will evolving experience out of nothing; it was
a fanciful name for whatever force or substance might
lie behind experience, animating all its objects,
determining their inherent life, and constituting them
facts collateral with himself. If his metaphysics
remained idealistic, it was on account of his romantic
habit of assimilating the life of nature to that of
man, as hasty introspection reveals it; so that the
universe is described in moral and poetical terms
rather than in the terms of science.

The consequences of this change were important.
The Will became infinite in what Hegel called the
evil sense, that is, in the true one. It was no longer
possible to speak of a plan of creation, nor of a
dramatic progress in history, with its beginning in

THE BREACH WITH CHRISTIANITY 109

Eden and its end in Berlin. Life was seen to radiate,
as it really does, from an elementary form into all
sorts of disparate and incomparable growths, capable
of endless diversity. No limit, no forced co-operation,
no stereotyped method was imputed to life. The
pocket universe of Hegel opened out to the stars, so
hateful to that philosopher. Man lost his importance
and at the same time the insufferable burden of his
false pretensions. In Schopenhauer frankness returned,
and with frankness clearness. Yet he could not quite
reconcile man to his actual place in nature. A deep
prejudice still intervened.

Both Christianity and romanticism had accustomed
people to disregard the intrinsic value of things. Things
ought to be useful for salvation, or symbols of other
greater but unknown things : it was not to be expected
that they should be simply good in themselves. This
life was to be justified, if justified at all, only as servile
work or tedious business may be justified, not as
health or artistic expression justify themselves. Unless
some external and ulterior end could be achieved
by living, it was thought that life would be vanity.
Remove now the expectation of a millennium or of a
paradise in the sky, and it may seem that all serious
value has disappeared from our earthly existence.
Yet this feeling is only a temporary after-image of a
particular education.

i io EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

The romantic poets, through pride, restlessness,
and longing for vague impossible things, came to the
same conclusion that the church had reached through
censoriousness and hope. To be always dissatisfied
seemed to that Faust-like age a mark of loftiness.
To be dissatisfied is, indeed, a healthy and promising
thing, when what troubles us can be set right; but
the romantic mind despises such incidental improve
ments which far from freeing the wild egotistical
soul would rather fatten and harness it. It is beneath
the romantic pessimist to remember that people, in
all ages, sometimes achieve what they have set their
hearts on, and that if human will and conduct were
better disciplined, this contentment would be more
frequent and more massive. On the contrary, he
asserts that willing is always and everywhere abortive.

How can he persuade himself of something so
evidently false ? By that mystical misinterpretation of
human nature which is perhaps the core of roman
ticism. He imagines that what is desired is not
this or that — food, children, victory, knowledge, or
some other specific goal of a human instinct — but an
abstract and perpetual happiness behind all these
alternating interests. Of course an abstract and
perpetual happiness is impossible, not merely because
events are sure to disturb any equilibrium we may
think we have established in our lives, but for the

THE BREACH WITH CHRISTIANITY m

far more fundamental reason that we have no abstract
and perpetual instinct to satisfy. The desire for self-
preservation or power or union with God is no more
perpetual or comprehensive than any other: it is
commonly when we are in straits that we become
aware of such objects, and to achieve them, or imagine
we achieve them, will give us only a momentary satis
faction, like any other success. A highest good to be
obtained apart from each and every specific interest
is more than unattainable; it is unthinkable. The
romanticist, chasing wilfully that ignis fatuus,
naturally finds his life arduous and disappointing.
But he might have learned from Plato or any sound
moralist, if his genius could allow him to learn any
thing, that the highest good of man is the sum and
harmony of those specific goods upon which his
nature is directed. But because the romantic will
was unteachable, all will was declared to be foolish.

Schopenhauer was led into his pessimism also by
the spirit of opposition; his righteous wrath was
aroused by the sardonic and inhuman optimism of
Hegel, the arguments for which were so cogent, so
Calvinistic, and so irrelevant that they would have
lost none of their force if they had been proposed in
hell. The best possible world and the worst possible
world are, indeed, identical for that philosophy.
Schopenhauer needed to change nothing in the

ii2 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

description of life, as the other idealists conceived it,
in order to prove that life was a tragedy; for they
were as romantic as himself and as far from feeling
the intrinsic value of happiness, and the possibility
of real progress. Real progress has little to do with
perpetual evolution. It occurs only in certain places
and times, when nature or art comes to the assistance
of some definite interest already embodied, as the
interest in security and mutual confidence, know
ledge, or the fine arts is already embodied in man
kind. Schopenhauer was not insensible to these
achievements; he felt by instinct the infinity and
luxuriance of the moral world. It was in part this
secret sympathy with nature that alienated him
from Christianity and from transcendental meta
physics. But because natural goods cannot be desired
or possessed for ever, he thought their value was
cancelled, even for those who desired and possessed
them. The leaven of romanticism was still at work,
forbidding him to recognise a natural order, with
which a vital harmony might be established. The
ground of life, the Will in all things, was something
lurid and tempestuous, itself a psychological chaos.
The alternative to theism in the mind of Schopenhauer
was not naturalism but anarchy.

This romantic travesty of life and this conception
of metaphysical anarchy were inherited by Nietzsche

THE BREACH WITH CHRISTIANITY 113

and regarded by him as the last word of philosophy.
But he made the breach with Christianity still wider.
The grief of Schopenhauer in the presence of such a
world, his desperate and exotic remedy — the denial
of the will — and his love of contemplation were all
evidences of a mind still half Christian : his pessimism
itself was so much homage to the faith he had lost.
Such backward glances were not for the impetuous
Nietzsche, who felt he was a prophet of the future,
and really was one. Romantic anarchy delighted him;
and he crowned it with a rakish optimism, as with
the red cap of Liberty. He was in hearty sympathy
with absolute Will; he praised it even for being vain
and maleficent, if it was only proud enough to praise
itself.

CHAPTER XI

NIETZSCHE AND SCHOPENHAUER

IT is hardly fair to a writer like Nietzsche, so poetical,
fragmentary, and immature, to judge him as a philo
sopher; yet he wished to be so judged, and planned
a system which was to be an emendation of that of
Schopenhauer. The will to live would become the
will to dominate; pessimism founded on reflection
would become optimism founded on courage; the
suspense of the will in contemplation would yield to
a more biological account of intelligence and taste;
finally in the place of pity and asceticism (Schopen
hauer's two principles of morals) Nietzsche would
set up the duty of asserting the will at all costs and
being cruelly but beautifully strong.

These points of difference from Schopenhauer
cover the whole philosophy of Nietzsche. I will
consider them in order, leaving the last for the next
chapter.

The change from " the will to live " to " the will
to be powerful " is only a change of metaphors : both
are used merely to indicate the general movement of
nature. The choice of a psychological symbol for

this purpose is indifferent scientifically, since the

114

NIETZSCHE AND SCHOPENHAUER 115

facts in any case remain the same and our know
ledge of them is not enlarged; yet it is an interesting
indication of the mind of the poet using it, because
whatever a man knows and loves best, that he takes
his metaphors from. Nietzsche had his reasons for
liking to call the universal principle a lust for power.
He believed he was the herald of two hundred years
of war, he was in love with the vague image of a
military aristocracy, and he was not without a certain
biological acumen.

An acorn in the ground does not strive to per
severe in the state it happens to be in, but expands,
absorbs surrounding elements, and transforms them
into its own substance, which itself changes its form.
Here then is a will to grow, not simply a will to live
or to preserve oneself; in fact, as Nietzsche eloquently
said, here is a will to perish. It is true that when
the oak is full grown it seems to pass to the defensive
and no longer manifests the will either to perish or
to grow. Even while the will to grow is operating,
its scope is not indefinite. It would be grotesque to
imagine that the acorn, like the ego of German philo
sophy, tended to annex the whole earth and the whole
sky and to make a single oak of the universe. If we
take a broad view, perhaps the ancient myth that
nature tends to re-embody certain fixed types, though
inaccurate, gives a better picture of the facts than

ii6 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

the modern myth that she is striving to change in
one predetermined direction. Nevertheless, the fact
that Nietzsche's attention was fascinated by the will
to grow and to dominate shows that he was in sym
pathy with young things, that his heart was big with
the future, and that his age believed in progress.

The change from pessimism to optimism, verbally
so complete, did not imply any divergence between
Nietzsche and Schopenhauer in their description of
the facts; it was all a matter of a little more spirit
in the younger thinker and a little more conscience
in the elder. Romantic poets and their heroes are
well known to oscillate between passionate despair
and passionate enterprise. Schopenhauer affected
passionate despair, Nietzsche recommended passionate
enterprise, each being wedded exclusively to one of
those moods which Faust or Byron could feel alter
nately and reduce to act with all the dashing tumult
of anarchy. The value which the world has in the
eyes of its inhabitants is necessarily mixed, so that
a sweeping optimism or pessimism can be only a
theoretic pose, false to the natural sentiment even
of those who assume it. Both are impressionistic
judgments passed on the world at large, not perhaps
without some impertinence.

Yet it is these poses or attitudes, or, if you like,
these impertinences, that give importance to tran-

NIETZSCHE AND SCHOPENHAUER 117

scendental philosophers ; it is their representative and
contagious side; their views of things would concern
us little, if it was the things themselves that we
wished to understand, but our whole study is a study
in romanticism. The temper of the age ignored that
man is a teachable animal living in a natural world.
All that was a vulgar convention; in% truth a dis
embodied Will was directed on any and every ideal
at random, and when any of these fantastic objects
seemed to be attained nothing was really accom
plished, nothing was accumulated or learned. The
wish for some other will-o'-the-wisp immediately
succeeded, always equally passionate and equally
foolish.

It is amazing that such a picture of human ex
perience should have met with anything but general
derision; but when people read books they compare
them with other books, and when they turn to things
they forget books altogether. Hence the most palpable
falsehoods are held by general consent at certain
moments, because they follow logically from what
the books of the previous generation had maintained.
This absurdity of Schopenhauer's is a plausible varia
tion of idealism; to see how absurd it is you must
remember the facts of life, the existence of any degree
of civilisation or progress. In these the travail of
human nature appears; for human nature is not

ii8 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

merely a name for a certain set of passions known to
literature; in that sense Schopenhauer fully acknow
ledged it, and even thought it immutable; it is rather
the constitution of an animal capable of training and
development. What is more patent than that a man
may learn something by experience and may be
trained? But if he can be trained he is capable of
adaptation and, therefore, of happiness, and the
preposterous assertion that all desires are equally
arbitrary and equally fruitless is blown to the winds.
The belief in a romantic chaos lends itself to
pessimism, but it also lends itself to absolute self-
assertion. Kant had boasted that he had removed
knowledge in order to make room for faith; in other
words, he had returned to chaos in order to find
freedom. The great egotists, who detested the pres
sure of a world they had not posited or created,
followed gladly in that path; but Schopenhauer was
not an egotist. Like Goethe he was probably more
selfish personally than those other philosophers whom
their very egotism had made zealous and single-
minded; but in imagination and feeling he was, like
Goethe, genial and humane: the freedom and ex
uberance of nature impressed him more than his
own. Had he been an egotist, as Fichte, Hegel, and
Nietzsche were, he might have been an optimist like
them. He was rather a happy man, hugely enjoying

NIETZSCHE AND SCHOPENHAUER 119

a great many things, among them food and music;
and he taught that music was a direct transcript of
the tormented will to live. How simple it would
have been for him, if he had been an egotist, to
enjoy the spectacle of that tormented will as much as
the music which was its faithful image! But no;
such aesthetic cruelty, which was Nietzsche's delight,
would have revolted Schopenhauer. He thought
tragedy beautiful because it detached us from a
troubled world and did not think a troubled world
good, as those unspeakable optimists did, because it
made such a fine tragedy. It is pleasant to find
that among all these philosophers one at least was
a gentleman.

If Will is the sole substance or force in the universe,
it must be present in everything that exists, yet
Schopenhauer affirmed that it was absent in aesthetic
contemplation; and he looked to an ultimate denial
of the Will, which if it was to be an act and not
merely a void would evidently be impossible on his
principles. The Will might well say to those who
attempted to deny it : " They reckon ill who leave
me out; when me they fly, I am the wings." In
perceiving and correcting this contradiction, Nietzsche
certainly improved the technique of the system.

Yet that contradiction was not substantial; it was
verbal merely, and due to the fond use of the term

120 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

Will for what might more properly be called matter,
energy, or movement. Will taken in the metaphorical
sense can never be in abeyance, so long as anything
is going on; but will taken in its proper sense is in
abeyance often; and this is what Schopenhauer saw
and meant to say. Actual and conscious will is a
passing phenomenon; it is so little necessary to life
that it always disappears when life is at its height.
All pure pleasures, including those of seeing and
thinking, are without it: they are ingenuous, and
terminate in their present object. A philosopher
should have learned from Aristotle, if not from his
own experience, that at the acme of life we live in the
eternal, and that then, as Schopenhauer said, we no
longer pry but gaze, and are freed from willing.

This is not to say that Nietzsche was not very
happy and witty in his description of the passions
that dominate artists and philosophers, and in urging
that the life of the spirit was an impassioned thing.
To prove it, he might have quoted Schopenhauer
himself, in those moving passages where he describes
the ecstasy of thought and the spell of beauty. It
is not the dead or the bloodless that have such feel
ings. Of course, if the operations of the brain, and
the whole instinctive life of the soul, were interrupted
neither these feelings nor any others would arise.
This was at bottom Schopenhauer's conviction. His

NIETZSCHE AND SCHOPENHAUER 121

great intuition, the corner-stone of his philosophy,
was precisely the priority of automatism and instinct
over the intellect. His only error came from having
given to these underlying processes the name of Will,
when properly the will is one expression of them only,
as the intellect is.

Nietzsche, who adopted the same metaphor, was
led by it into the very confusion which he criticised
in Schopenhauer. Nietzsche had no great technical
competence: he saw the inconsistency only when
he disliked the result; when the result fell in with
his first impressions he repeated the inconsistency.
He often condemned other moralists for being enemies
to life: he reproached the greater part of mankind
for loving inglorious ease and resenting the sufferings
inseparable from the will to be mighty and to perish.
But this churlish attitude of the vulgar would be
quite impossible if the heroic will to be powerful were
the essence of everybody and even of material things.
If I am nothing but the will to grow, how can I ever
will to shrink ?

But this inconsistency in Nietzsche, like that in
Schopenhauer, was an honourable one that came of
forgetting a false generalisation in the presence of a
clear fact. That the will to be powerful is everywhere
was a false generalisation; but it was a clear fact
that some people are pious Christians or Epicurean

122 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

philosophers, who do not care at all about con
quering the world. They want to be let alone,
and perhaps have a shrewd suspicion that no one
lives under such dire compulsions as he who under
takes to tyrannise over others. This slave-morality
of theirs might be called Will, though it is rather
instinct and habit; but it is certainly not a will to
be powerful : it is the opposite of that passion. Thus
Nietzsche, by an honest self-contradiction, pointed
to people who denied the will to be powerful, in
order to abuse them, just as Schopenhauer had
pointed to people who denied or suspended the will
to live, in order to praise them.

CHAPTER XII

THE ETHICS OF NIETZSCHE

NIETZSCHE occasionally spoke disparagingly of
morality, as if the word and the thing had got a
little on his nerves; and some of his best-known
phrases might give the impression that he wished to
drop the distinction between good and evil and
transcend ethics altogether. Such a thought would
not have been absurd in itself or even unphilosophical.
Many serious thinkers, Spinoza for instance, have
believed that everything that happens is equally
necessary and equally expressive of the will of God,
be it favourable or unfavourable to our special
interests and, therefore, called by us good or bad.
A too reverent immersion in nature and history con
vinces them that to think any part of reality better
or worse than the rest is impertinent or even impious.
It is true that in the end these philosophers usually
stultify themselves and declare enthusiastically that
whatever is is right. This rapturous feeling can over
come anybody in certain moods, as it sometimes
overcame Nietzsche; but in yielding to it, besides
contradicting all other moral judgments, these mystics
break their difficult resolution never to judge at all.

123

i24 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

Nietzsche, however, was entirely free from this
divine impediment in morals. The courage to cling
to what his soul loved — and this courage is the essence
of morality — was conspicuous in him. He was a poet,
a critic, a lover of form and of distinctions. Few
persons have ever given such fierce importance to
their personal taste. What he disliked to think of,
say democracy, he condemned with the fulminations
of a god; what he liked to think of, power, he seri
ously commanded man and nature to pursue for their
single object.

What Nietzsche disparaged, then, under the name
of morality was not all morality, for he had an enthu
siastic master-morality of his own to impose. He
was thinking only of the Christian virtues and
especially of a certain Protestant and Kantian
moralism with which perhaps he had been surfeited.
This moralism conceived that duty was something
absolute and not a method of securing whatever
goods of all sorts are attainable by action. The latter
is the common and the sound opinion, maintained,
for instance, by Aristotle; but Nietzsche, who was
not humble enough to learn very much by study,
thought he was propounding a revolutionary doctrine
when he put goods and evils beyond and above right
and wrong: for this is all that his Jenseits von Gut
und Bose amounts to. Whatever seemed to him

THE ETHICS OF NIETZSCHE 125

admirable, beautiful, eligible, whatever was good in
the sense opposed not to bose but to scblecht, Nietzsche
loved with jealous affection. Hence his ire against
Christianity, which he thought renounced too much.
Hence his hatred of moralism, which in raising duty
to the irresponsible throne of the absolute had super-
stitiously sacrificed half the goods of life. Nietzsche,
then, far from transcending ethics, re-established it
on its true foundations, which is not to say that the
sketchy edifice which he planned to raise on these
foundations was in a beautiful style of architecture
or could stand at all.

The first principle of his ethics was that the good
is power. But this word power seems to have had a
great range of meanings in his mind. Sometimes it
suggests animal strength and size, as in the big blonde
beast; sometimes vitality, sometimes fortitude, some
times contempt for the will of others, sometimes (and
this is perhaps the meaning, he chiefly intended)
dominion over natural forces and over the people,
that is to say, wealth and military power. It is
characteristic of this whole school that it confuses
the laws which are supposed to preside over the
movement of things with the good results which they
may involve; so Nietzsche confuses his biological
insight, that all life is the assertion of some sort of
power — the power to breathe, for instance — with the

iz6 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

admiration he felt for a masterful egotism. But even
if we identify life or any kind of existence with the
exertion of strength, the kinds of strength exerted
will be heterogeneous and not always compatible.
The strength of Lucifer does not insure victory in
war; it points rather to failure in a world peopled
by millions of timid, pious, and democratic persons.
Hence we find Nietzsche asking himself plaintively,
" Why are the feeble victorious ? " The fact rankled
in his bosom that in the ancient world martial aris
tocracies had succumbed before Christianity, and in
the modern world before democracy. By strength,
then, he could not mean the power to survive, by
being as flexible as circumstances may require. He
did not refer to the strength of majorities, nor to the
strength of vermin. At the same time he did not
refer to moral strength, for of moral strength he had
no idea.

The arts give power, but only in channels pre
scribed by their own principles, not by the will of
untrained men. To be trained is to be tamed and
harnessed, an accession of power detestable to
Nietzsche. His Zarathustra had the power of dancing,
also of charming serpents and eagles : no wonder that
he missed the power, bestowed by goodness, of charm
ing and guiding men; and a Terpsichorean autocrat
would be hard to imagine. A man intent on algebra

THE ETHICS OF NIETZSCHE 127

or on painting is not striving to rule anybody; his
dominion over painting or algebra is chiefly a matter
of concentration and self-forgetfulness. So dominion
over the passions changes them from attempts to
appropriate anything into sentiments of the mind,
colouring a world which is no longer coveted. To
attain such autumnal wisdom is, if you like, itself
a power of feeling and a kind of strength; but it is
not helpful in conquering the earth.

Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than
his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and
superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless
young scholar and constitutional invalid. He did
not crave in the least either wealth or empire. What
he loved was solitude, nature, music, books. But his
imagination, like his judgment, was captious; it
could not dwell on reality, but reacted furiously
against it. Accordingly, when he speaks of the will
to be powerful, power is merely an eloquent word
on his lips. It symbolises the escape from mediocrity.
What power would be when attained and exercised
remains entirely beyond his horizon. What meets us
everywhere is the sense of impotence and a passionate
rebellion against it.

The phrases in which Nietzsche condensed and
felt his thought were brilliant, but they were seldom
just. We may perhaps see the principle of his ethics

128 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

better if we forget for a moment the will to be power
ful and consider this : that he knew no sort of good
except the beautiful, and no sort of beauty except
romantic stress. He was a belated prophet of roman
ticism. He wrote its epitaph, in which he praised
it more extravagantly than anybody, when it was
alive, had had the courage to do.

Consider, for example, what he said about truth.
Since men were governed solely by the will to be
powerful, the truth for its own sake must be moon
shine to them. They would wish to cultivate such
ideas, whether true or false, as might be useful to
their ambition. Nietzsche (more candid in this than
some other pragmatists) confessed that truth itself
did not interest him; it was ugly; the bracing atmo
sphere of falsehood, passion, and subjective perspec
tives was the better thing. Sometimes, indeed, a
more wistful mood overtook him, and he wondered
whether the human mind would be able to endure
the light of truth. That was the great question of
the future. We may agree that a mind without
poetry, fiction, and subjective colouring would not
be human, nor a mind at all; and that neither truth
nor the knowledge of truth would have any intrinsic
value if nobody cared about it for its own sake. But
some men do care ; and in ignoring this fact Nietzsche
expresses the false and pitiful notion that we can be

THE ETHICS OF NIETZSCHE 129

interested in nothing except in ourselves and our
own future. I am solitary, says the romantic egotist,
and sufficient unto myself. The world is my idea,
new every day : what can I have to do with truth ?

This impulse to turn one's back on truth, whether
in contempt or in despair, has a long history. Lessing
had said that he preferred the pursuit of truth to the
truth itself; but if we take this seriously (as possibly
it was not meant) the pursuit of truth at once changes
its character. It can no longer be the pursuit of
truth, truth not being wanted, but only the pursuit
of some fresh idea. Whether one of these ideas or
another comes nearer to the truth would be unim
portant and undiscoverable. Any idea will do, so
long as it is pregnant with another that may presently
take its place; and as presumably error will pre
cipitate new ideas more readily than truth, we might
almost find it implied in Lessing's maxim that, as
Nietzsche maintained, what is really good is neither
truth nor the pursuit of truth (for you might find
it, and what would you do then?), but rather a
perpetual flux of errors.

This view is also implied in the very prevalent
habit of regarding opinions as justified not by their
object but by their date. The intellectual ignominy
of believing what we believe simply because of the
time and place of our birth, escapes many evolu-

130 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

tionists. Far from trying to overcome this natural
prejudice of position, they raise it into a point of
pride. They declare all opinions ever held in the past
to be superseded, and are apparently content that
their own should be superseded to-morrow, but mean
time they cover you with obloquy if you are so back
ward or so forward as not to agree with them to-day.
They accept as inevitable the total dominion of the
point of view. Each new date, even in the life of an
individual thinker, is expected by them to mark a
new phase of doctrine. Indeed, truth is an object
which transcendental philosophy cannot envisage:
the absolute ego must be satisfied with consistency.
How should the truth, actual, natural, or divine, be
an expression of the living will that attempts, or in
their case despairs, to discover it? Yet that every
thing, even the truth, is an expression of the living
will, is the corner-stone of this philosophy.

Consider further the spirit in which Nietzsche
condemned Christianity and the Christian virtues.
Many people have denounced Christianity on the
ground that it was false or tyrannical, while perhaps
admitting that it was comforting or had a good
moral influence. Nietzsche denounced it — and in
unmeasured terms — on the ground that (while, of
course, as true as any other vital lie) it was mean,
depressing, slavish, and plebeian. How beastly was

THE ETHICS OF NIETZSCHE 131

the precept of love! Actually to love all these gro
tesque bipeds was degrading. A lover of the beauti
ful must wish almost all his neighbours out of the
way. Compassion, too, was a lamentable way of
assimilating oneself to evil. That contagious misery
spoiled one's joy, freedom, and courage. Disease
should not be nursed but cauterised; the world must
be made clean.

Now there is a sort of love of mankind, a jealous
love of what man might be, in this much decried
maxim of unmercifulness. Nietzsche rebelled at the
thought of endless wretchedness, pervasive medio
crity, crying children, domestic drudges, and pom
pous fools for ever. Die Erde war zu lange schon
ein Irrenhaus ! His heart was tender enough, but
his imagination was impatient. When he praised
cruelty, it was on the ground that art was cruel,
that it made beauty out of suffering. Suffering,
therefore, was good, and so was crime, which made
life keener. Only crime, he said, raises a man high
enough for the lightning to strike him. In the hope
of sparing some obscure person a few groans or tears,
would you deprive the romantic hero of so sublime
a death ?

Christians, too, might say they had their heroes,
their saints; but what sort of eminence was that?
It was produced by stifling half the passions. A

132 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

sister of charity could not be an Arminius; devotion
to such remedial offices spoilt the glory of life. Holi
ness was immoral; it was a half-suicide. All ex
perience, the ideal of Faust, was what a spirited
man must desire. All experience would involve, I
suppose, passing through all the sensations of a
murderer, a maniac, and a toad; even through those
of a saint or a sister of charity. But the romantic
mind despises results; it is satisfied with poses.

Consider, too, the romantic demand for a violent
chiaroscuro, a demand which blossoms into a whole
system of ethics. Good and evil, we are told, en
hance one another, like light and shade in a picture;
without evil there can be no good, so to diminish the
one is to undermine the other, and the greatest and
most heroic man is he who not only does most good
but also most harm. In his love of mischief, in his
tenderness for the adventurer who boldly inflicts
injury and suffering on others and on himself, in
order to cut a more thrilling and stupendous figure
in his own eyes, Nietzsche gave this pernicious
doctrine its frankest expression; but unfortunately
it was not wholly his own. In its essence it belongs
to Hegel, and under various sophistical disguises it
has been adopted by all his academic followers in
England and America. The arguments used to defend
it are old sophisms borrowed from the Stoics, who

THE ETHICS OF NIETZSCHE 133

had turned the physical doctrine of Heraclitus, that
everything is a mixture of contraries, into an argu
ment for resignation to inevitable evils and detach
ment from tainted goods. The Stoics, who were
neither romantic nor worldly, used these sophisms
in an attempt to extirpate the passions, not to justify
them. They were sufficiently refuted by the excellent
Plutarch where he observes that according to this
logic it was requisite and necessary that Thersites
should be bald in order that Achilles might have
leonine hair. The absurdity is, indeed, ludicrous, if
we are thinking of real things and of the goods and
evils of experience; but egotists never think of that;
what they always think of is the picture of those
realities in their imagination. For the observer,
effects of contrast do alter the values of the elements
considered; and, indeed, the elements themselves,
if one is very unsympathetic, may not have at all
in contemplation the quality they have in experience :
whence aesthetic cruelty. The respect which Hegel
and Nietzsche have for those sophisms becomes
intelligible when we remember what imperturbable
egotists they were.

This egotism in morals is partly mystical. There
is a luxurious joy in healing the smart of evil in
one's mind, without needing to remove or diminish
the evil in the world. The smart may be healed by

134 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

nursing the conviction that evil after all is good, no
matter how much of it there is or how much of it
we do. In part, however, this egotism is romantic;
it does not ask to be persuaded that evil, in the end,
is good. It feels that evil is good in the present; it
is so intense a thing, to feel and so exciting a thing
to do. Here we have what Nietzsche wished to bring
about, a reversal of all values. To do evil is the true
virtue, and to be good is the most hopeless vice.
Milk is for babes ; your strong man should be soaked
in blood and in alcohol. We should live perilously;
and as material life is the power to digest poisons,
so true excellence is the power to commit all manner
of crimes, and to survive.

That there is no God is proved by Nietzsche prag
matically, on the ground that belief in the existence
of God would have made him uncomfortable. Not
at all for the reason that might first occur to us:
to imagine himself a lost soul has always been a
point of pride with the romantic genius. The reason
was that if there had been any gods he would have
found it intolerable not to be a god himself. Poor
Nietzsche! The laurels of the Almighty would not
let him sleep.

It is hard to know if we should be more deceived
in taking these sallies seriously or in not taking
them so. On the one hand it all seems the swagger

THE ETHICS OF NIETZSCHE 135

of an immature, half-playful mind, like a child that
tells you he will cut your head off. The dreamy
impulse, in its inception, is sincere enough, but there
is no vestige of any understanding of what it pro
poses, of its conditions, or of its results. On the other
hand these explosions are symptomatic; there stirs
behind them unmistakably an elemental force. That
an attitude is foolish, incoherent, disastrous, proves
nothing against the depth of the instinct that inspires
it. Who could be more intensely unintelligent than
Luther or Rousseau ? Yet the world followed them,
not to turn back. The molecular forces of society,
so to speak, had already undermined the systems
which these men denounced. If the systems have
survived it is only because the reformers, in their
intellectual helplessness, could supply nothing to
take their place. So Nietzsche, in his genial im
becility, betrays the shifting of great subterranean
forces. What he said may be nothing, but the fact
that he said it is all-important. Out of such wild
intuitions, because the heart of the child was in them,
the man of the future may have to build his philosophy.
We should forgive Nietzsche his boyish blasphemies.
He hated with clearness, if he did not know what to
love.

CHAPTER XIII

THE SUPERMAN

IN his views on matters of fact Nietzsche, as becomes
the naive egotist, was quite irresponsible. If he said
the course of history repeated itself in cycles, it was
because the idea pleased him; it seemed a symbol
of self-approval on the world's part. If he hailed the
advent of a race of men superior to ourselves and of
stronger fibre, it was because human life as it is, and
especially his own life, repelled him. He was sensitive
and, therefore, censorious. He gazed about him, he
gazed at himself, he remembered the disappointing
frailties and pomposity of the great man, Wagner,
whom he had once idolised. His optimism for the
moment yielded to his sincerity. He would sooner
abolish than condone such a world, and he fled to
some solitary hillside by the sea, saying to himself
that man was a creature to be superseded.

Dissatisfaction with the actual is what usually
leads people to frame ideals at all, or at least to hold
them fast; but such a negative motive leaves the
ideal vague and without consistency. If we could
suddenly have our will, we should very likely find
the result trivial or horrible. So the superman of

136

THE SUPERMAN 137

Nietzsche might prove, if by magic he could be
realised. To frame solid ideals, which would, in fact,
be better than actual things, is not granted to the
merely irritable poet ; it is granted only to the master-
workman, to the modeller of some given substance
to some given use — things which define his aspira
tion, and separate what is relevant and glorious in
his dreams from that large part of them which is
merely ignorant and peevish. It was not for Nietzsche
to be an artist in morals and to institute anything
coherent, even in idea.

The superman of Nietzsche is rendered the more
chimerical by the fact that he must contradict not
only the common man of the present but also the
superior men, the half-superhuman men, of the past.
To transcend humanity is no new ambition; that
has always been the effort of Indian and Christian
religious discipline and of Stoic philosophy. But this
spiritual superiority, like that of artists and poets,
has come of abstraction ; a superiority to life, in that
these minds were engrossed in the picture or lesson
of life rather than in living; and if they powerfully
affected the world, as they sometimes did, it was by
bringing down into it something supermundane, the
arresting touch of an ulterior wisdom. Nietzsche, on
the contrary, even more than most modern philo
sophers, loved mere life with the pathetic intensity of

138 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

the wounded beast; his superman must not rise
above our common condition by his purely spiritual
resources, or by laying up his treasure in any sort of
heaven. He must be not a superior man but a kind
of physiological superman, a griffin in soul, if not in
body, who instead of labouring hands and religious
faith should have eagle's wings and the claws of a
lion. His powers should be superior to ours by
resembling those of fiercer and wilder animals. The
things that make a man tame — Nietzsche was a
retired professor living in a boarding-house — must be
changed into their opposites. But man has been
tamed by agriculture, material arts, children, ex
perience; therefore these things are to be far from
the superman. If he must resemble somebody, it
will be rather the condottieri of the renaissance or the
princes and courtiers of the seventeenth century;
Caesar Borgia is the supreme instance. He must have
a splendid presence and address, gallantry, contempt
for convention, loyalty to no country, no woman,
and no idea, but always a buoyant and lordly asser
tion of instinct and of self. In the helter-skelter
of his irritable genius, Nietzsche jumbled together
the ferocity of solitary beasts, the indifference and
hauteur of patricians, and the antics of revellers, and
out of that mixture he hoped to evoke the rulers of
the coming age.

THE SUPERMAN 139

How could so fantastic an ideal impose on a keen
satirist like Nietzsche and a sincere lover of excel
lence ? Because true human excellence seemed to
him hostile to life, and he felt — this was his strong
and sane side, his lien on the future — that life must
be accepted as it is or may become, and false beliefs,
hollow demands, and hypocritical, forced virtues must
be abandoned. This new wisdom was that which
Goethe, too, had felt and practised ; and of all masters
of life Goethe was the one whom Nietzsche could best
understand. But a master of life, without being in
the least hostile to life, since he fulfils it, nevertheless
uses life for ends which transcend it. Even Goethe,
omnivorous and bland as he was, transcended life in
depicting and judging and blessing it. The saints
and the true philosophers have naturally emphasised
more this renunciation of egotism: they have seen
all things in the light of eternity — that is, as they
are in truth — and have consequently felt a reason
able contempt for mere living and mere dying;
and in that precisely lies moral greatness. Here
Nietzsche could not follow; rationality chilled him;
he craved vehemence.

How life can be fulfilled and made beautiful by
reason was never better shown than by the Greeks,
both by precept and example. Nietzsche in his youth
was a professor of Greek literature: one would have

140 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

expected his superman to be a sort of Greek hero.
Something of the Dorian harshness in beauty, some
thing of the Pindaric high-born and silent victor may
have been fused into Nietzsche's ideal; certainly
Bacchic freedom and ardour were to enter in. But
on the whole it is remarkable how little he learned
from the Greeks, no modesty or reverence, no joy
in order and in loveliness, no sense for friendship,
none for the sanctity of places and institutions.
He repeated the paradoxes of some of their sophists,
without remembering how their wise men had refuted
them. For example, he gave a new name and a
new prominence to the distinction between what he
called the Dionysiac and the Apollonian elements
in Greek genius. He saw how false was that white
washed notion of the Greek mind which young
ladies derived from sketching a plaster cast of the
Apollo Belvidere.1 He saw that a demonic force,
as the generation of Goethe called it, underlay
everything; what he did not see was that this demonic
force was under control, which is the secret of the

1 1 was about to say : How false was the notion of Winkelmann
about the grandeur and repose of the Greek spirit. But Winkelmann,
if his sense for the chained monsters in the Greek soul was inadequate,
was at least in real sympathy with what had inspired Greek sculpture,
love and knowledge of the human body in the life, made gentle by
discipline and kept strong by training. For that reason Winkelmann
seems hardly a German: his learning was deficient and his heart was
humble. He did not patronise the ancients, he believed in them.

THE SUPERMAN 141

whole matter. The point had been thoroughly
elucidated by Plato, in the contrast he drew between
inspiration and art. But Plato was rather ironical
about inspiration, and had a high opinion of art;
and Nietzsche, with his contrary instinct, rushes
away without understanding the mind of the master
or the truth of the situation. He thinks he alone has
discovered the divinity of Dionysus and of the Muses,
which Plato took as a matter of course but would not
venerate superstitiously. Inspiration, like will, is a
force without which reason can do nothing. Inspira
tion must be presupposed; but in itself it can do
nothing good unless it is in harmony with reason, or is
brought into harmony with it. This two-edged wisdom
that makes impulse the stuff of life and reason its
criterion, is, of course, lost on Nietzsche, and with it
the whole marvel of Greek genius. There is nothing
exceptional in being alive and impulsive; any savage
can run wild and be frenzied and enact histrionic
passions : the virtue of the Greeks lay in the exquisite
firmness with which they banked their fires without
extinguishing them, so that their life remained
human (indeed, remained infra-human, like that of
Nietzsche's superman) and yet became beautiful:
they were severe and fond of maxims, on a basis
of universal tolerance; they governed themselves
rationally, with a careful freedom, while well aware

142 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

that nature and their own bosoms were full of gods,
all of whom must be reverenced.

After all, this defect in appreciation is inseparable
from the transcendental pose. The ancients, like
everything else, never seem to the egotist a reality
co-ordinate with himself, from which he might still
have something to learn. They are only so much
" content " for his self-consciousness, so much matter
for his thought to transcend. They can contain
nothing for him but the part of his outgrown self
which he deigns to identify with them. His mind
must always envelop them and be the larger thing.
No wonder that in this school learning is wasted for
the purposes of moral education. Whoever has seen
the learned egotist flies at his approach. History in
his hands is a demonstration of his philosophy.
Science is a quarry of proofs for his hobbies. If we
do not agree with him we are not merely mistaken
(every philosopher tells us that), but we are false to
ourselves and ignorant of our ideal significance. His
ego gives us our place in the world. He informs us
of what we mean, whatever we may say; and he
raises our opinions, as he might his food, to a higher
unity in his own person. He is priest in every temple.
He approaches a picture-gallery or a foreign religion
in a dictatorial spirit, with his a 'priori categories
ready on his lips; pedantry and vanity speak in his

THE SUPERMAN 143

every gesture, and the lesson of nothing can reach
his heart.

No, neither the philosophy inherited by Nietzsche
nor his wayward imagination was fit to suggest to
him a nobler race of men. On the contrary, they
shut him off from comprehension of the best men
that have existed. Like the Utopias or ideals of
many other satirists and minor philosophers, the
superman is not a possibility, it is only a protest.
Our society is outworn, but hard to renew; the
emancipated individual needs to master himself.
In what spirit or to what end he will do so, we do
not know, and Nietzsche cannot tell us. He is the
jester, to whom all incoherences are forgiven, be
cause all indiscretions are allowed. His mind is
undisciplined, and his tongue outrageous, but he is
at bottom the friend of our conscience, and full of
shrewd wit and tender wisps of intuition. Behind his
" gay wisdom " and trivial rhymes lies a great
anguish. His intellect is lost in a chaos. His heart
denies itself the relief of tears and can vent itself
only in forced laughter and mock hopes that gladden
nobody, least of all himself.

CHAPTER XIV

HEATHENISM

SCHOPENHAUER somewhere observes that the word
heathen, no longer in reputable use elsewhere, had
found a last asylum in Oxford, the paradise of dead
philosophies. Even Oxford, I believe, has now
abandoned it; yet it is a good word. It conveys, as
no other word can, the sense of vast multitudes
tossing in darkness, harassed by demons of their own
choice. No doubt it implies also a certain sanctimony
in the superior person who uses it, as if he at least
were not chattering in the general Babel. What
justified Jews, Christians, and Moslems (as Mohammed
in particular insisted) in feeling this superiority was
the possession of a Book, a chart of life, as it were,
in which the most important features of history and
morals were mapped out for the guidance of teachable
men. The heathen, on the contrary, were abandoned
to their own devices, and even prided themselves
on following only their spontaneous will, their habit,
presumption, or caprice.

Most unprejudiced people would now agree that
the value of those sacred histories and rules of life

did not depend on their alleged miraculous origin,

144

HEATHENISM 145

but rather on that solidity and perspicacity in their
authors which enabled them to perceive the laws of
sweet and profitable conduct in this world. It was
not religion merely that was concerned, at least not
that outlying, private, and almost negligible sphere
to which we often apply this name; it was the whole
fund of experience mankind had gathered by living;
it was wisdom. Now, to record these lessons of
experience, the Greeks and Romans also had their
Books; their history, poetry, science, and civil law.
So that while the theologically heathen may be those
who have no Bible, the morally and essentially
heathen are those who possess no authoritative
wisdom, or reject the authority of what wisdom they
have; the untaught or unteachable who disdain not
only revelation but what revelation stood for among
early peoples, namely, funded experience.

In this sense the Greeks were the least heathen
of men. They were singularly docile to political
experiment, to law, to methodical art, to the proved
limitations and resources of mortal life. This life
they found closely hedged about by sky, earth, and
sea, by war, madness, and conscience with their in
dwelling deities, by oracles and local genii with their
accustomed cults, by a pervasive fate, and the
jealousy of invisible gods. Yet they saw that these

divine forces were constant, and that they exercised

K

146 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

their pressure and bounty with so much method
that a prudent art and religion could be built up in
their midst. All this was simply a poetic prologue
to science and the arts; it largely passed into them,
and would have passed into them altogether if the
naturalistic genius of Greece had not been crossed
in Socrates by a premature discouragement, and
diverted into other channels.

Early Hebraism itself had hardly been so wise.
It had regarded its tribal and moral interests as
absolute, and the Creator as the champion and om
nipotent agent of Israel. But this arrogance and
inexperience were heathen. Soon the ascendency
of Israel over nature and history was proclaimed
to be conditional on their fidelity to the Law; and
as the spirit of the nation under chastisement became
more and more penitential, it was absorbed increas
ingly in the praise of wisdom. Salvation was to
come only by repentance, by being born again with
a will wholly transformed and broken; so that the
later Jewish religion went almost as far as Platonism
or Christianity in the direction opposite to heathenism.

This movement in the direction of an orthodox
wisdom was regarded as a progress in those latter
days of antiquity when it occurred, and it continued
to be so regarded in Christendom until the rise of
romanticism. The most radical reformers simply

HEATHENISM 147

urged that the current orthodoxy, religious or
scientific, was itself imperfectly orthodox, being
corrupt, overloaded, too vague, or too narrow. As
every actual orthodoxy is avowedly incomplete and
partly ambiguous, a sympathetic reform of it is
always in order. Yet very often the reformers are
deceived. What really offends them may not be
what is false in the received orthodoxy, but what
though true is uncongenial to them. In that case
heathenism, under the guise of a search for a purer
wisdom, is working in their souls against wisdom of
any sort. Such is the suspicion that Catholics would
throw on Protestantism, naturalists on idealism, and
conservatives generally on all revolutions.

But if ever heathenism needed to pose as con
structive reform, it is now quite willing and able
to throw off the mask. Desire for any orthodox
wisdom at all may be repudiated; it may be set
down to low vitality and failure of nerve. In various
directions at once we see to-day an intense hatred
and disbelief gathering head against the very notion
of a cosmos to be discovered, or a stable human
nature to be respected. Nature, we are told, is an
artificial symbol employed by life; truth is a tempo
rary convention; art is an expression of personality;
war is better than peace, effort than achievement,
and feeling than intelligence; change is deeper than

148 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

form; will is above morality. Expressions of this
kind are sometimes wanton and only half thought
out; but they go very deep in the subjective direction.
Behind them all is a sincere revulsion against the
difficult and confused undertakings of reason ; against
science, institutions, and moral compulsions. They
mark an honest retreat into immediate experience
and animal faith. Man used to be called a rational
animal, but his rationality is something eventual and
ideal, whereas his animality is actual and profound.
Heathenism, if we consider life at large, is the primal
and universal religion.

It has never been my good fortune to see wild
beasts in the jungle, but I have sometimes watched
a wild bull in the ring, and I can imagine no more
striking, simple, and heroic example of animal faith;
especially when the bull is what is technically called
noble, that is, when he follows the lure again and
again with eternal singleness of thought, eternal
courage, and no suspicion of a hidden agency that
is mocking him. What the red rag is to this brave
creature, their passions, inclinations, and chance
notions are to the heathen. What they will they
will; and they would deem it weakness and dis
loyalty to ask whether it is worth willing or whether
it is attainable. The bull, magnificently sniffing the
air, surveys the arena with the cool contempt and

HEATHENISM 149

disbelief of the idealist, as if he said : " You seem,
you are a seeming; I do not quarrel with you, I do
not fear you. I am real, you are nothing." Then
suddenly, when his eye is caught by some bright
cloak displayed before him, his whole soul changes.
His will awakes and he seems to say : " You are my
destiny; I want you, I hate you, you shall be mine,
you shall not stand in my path. I will gore you. I
will disprove you. I will pass beyond you. I shall
be, you shall not have been." Later, when sorely
wounded and near his end, he grows blind to all
these excitements. He smells the moist earth, and
turns to the dungeon where an hour ago he was at
peace. He remembers the herd, the pasture beyond,
and he dreams : " I shall not die, for I love life. I
shall be young again, young always, for I love youth.
All this outcry is nought to me, this strange suffering
is nought. I will go to the fields again, to graze, to
roam, to love."

So exactly, with not one least concession to the
unsuspected reality, the heathen soul stands bravely
before a painted world, covets some bauble, and
defies death. Heathenism is the religion of will, the
faith which life has in itself because it is life, and in
its aims because it is pursuing them.

In their tentative, many-sided, indomitable way,
the Germans have been groping for four hundred

150 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

years towards a restoration of their primitive heathen
ism. Germany under the long tutelage of Rome had
been like a spirited and poetic child brought up by
very old and very worldly foster-parents. For many
years the elfin creature may drink in their gossip
and their maxims with simple wonder; but at last
he will begin to be restive under them, ask himself
ominous questions, protest, suffer, and finally break
into open rebellion. Naturally he will not find at
first theories and precepts of his own to take the
place of his whole education; he will do what he
can with his traditions, revising, interpreting, and
patching them with new ideas; and only if he has
great earnestness and speculative power will he ever
reach an unalloyed expression of his oppressed soul.
Now in Germany speculative power and earnest
ness existed in a high degree, not, of course, in most
people, but in the best and most representative; and
it was this elite that made the Reformation, and
carried it on into historical criticism and transcen
dental philosophy, until in the nineteenth century,
in Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche, the last
remnants of Christian education were discarded and
the spontaneous heathen morality of the race re
asserted itself in its purity. That this assertion was
not consistent, that it was thrown into the language
and images of some alien system, is not to be

HEATHENISM 151

wondered at; but the Christianity of Parsifal, like
the Buddhism of 'the denial of the will, is a pure
piece of romanticism, an exotic setting for those
vacillations and sinkings which absolute Will may
very well be subject to in its absolute chaos.

The rebellion of the heathen soul is unmistakable
in the Reformation, but it is not recognised in this
simple form, because those who feel that it was
justified do not dream that it was heathen, and those
who see that it was heathen will not admit that it
was justified. Externally, of course, it was an effort
to recover the original essence of Christianity; but
why should a free and absolute being care for that
original essence when he has discovered it, unless
his own mind demanded that very thing? And if
his mind demanded it, what need has he to read
that demand into an ancient revelation which, as a
matter of fact, turned on quite other matters ? It
was simply the inertia of established prejudice that
made people use tradition to correct tradition; until
the whole substance of tradition, worn away by that
internal friction, should be dissolved, and impulse
and native genius should assert themselves un
impeded.

Judaism and Christianity, like Greek philosophy,
were singly inspired by the pursuit of happiness, in
whatever form it might be really attainable: now

152 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

on earth if possible, or in the millennium, or in some
abstracted and inward life, like that of the Stoics,
or in the last resort, in a different life altogether
beyond the grave. But heathenism ignores happiness,
despises it, or thinks it impossible. The regimen and
philosophy of Germany are inspired by this contempt
for happiness, for one's own happiness as well as for
other people's. Happiness seems to the German
moralists something unheroic, an abdication before
external things, a victory of the senses over the will.
They think the pursuit of happiness low, materialistic,
and selfish. They wish everybody to sacrifice or
rather to forget happiness, and to do " deeds."

It is in the nature of things that those who are
incapable of happiness should have no idea of it.
Happiness is not for wild animals, who can only
oscillate between apathy and passion. To be happy,
even to conceive happiness, you must be reasonable
or (if Nietzsche prefers the word) you must be tamed.
You must have taken the measure of your powers,
tasted the fruits of your passions and learned your
place in the world and what things in it can really
serve you. To be happy you must be wise. This
happiness is sometimes found instinctively, and then
the rudest fanatic can hardly fail to see how lovely
it is ; but sometimes it comes of having learned some
thing by experience (which empirical people never

HEATHENISM 153

do) and involves some chastening and renunciation;
but it is not less sweet for having this touch of holiness
about it, and the spirit of it is healthy and beneficent.
The nature of happiness, therefore, dawns upon philo
sophers when their wisdom begins to report the lessons
of experience: an a priori philosophy can have no
inkling of it.

Happiness is the union of vitality with art, and
in so far as vitality is a spiritual thing and not mere
restlessness and vehemence, art increases vitality.
It obviates friction, waste, and despair. Without
art, vitality is painful and big with monsters. It is
hurried easily into folly and crime; it ignores the
external forces and interests which it touches. Ger
man philosophy does this theoretically, by dethron
ing the natural world and calling it an idea created
by the ego for its own purposes; and it does this
practically also by obeying the categorical imperative
— no longer the fabled imperatives of Sinai or of
Konigsberg, but the inward and vital imperative
which the bull obeys, when trusting absolutely in
his own strength, rage, and courage, he follows a
little red rag and his destiny this way and that way.

CHAPTER XV

GERMAN GENIUS

IT is customary to judge religions and philosophies
by their truth, which is seldom their strong point;
yet the application of that unsympathetic criterion
is not unjust, since they aspire to be true, maintain
that they are so, and forbid any opposed view, no
matter how obvious and inevitable, to be called true
in their stead. But when religions and philosophies
are dead, or when we are so removed from them by
time or training that the question of their truth is
not a living question for us, they do not on that
account lose all their interest; then, in fact, for the
first time they manifest their virtues to the un
believer. He sees that they are expressions of human
genius; that however false to their subject-matter
they may be, like the conventions of art they are
true to the eye and to the spirit that fashioned them.
And as nothing in the world, not even the truth, is
so interesting as human genius, these incredible or
obsolete religions and philosophies become delightful
to us. The sting is gone out of their errors, which no
longer threaten to delude us, and they have acquired
a beauty invisible to the eye of their authors, because

GERMAN GENIUS 155

of the very refraction which the truth suffered in
that vital medium.

German philosophy is a work of genius. To be
heathen is easy; to have an absolute will and a
belief in chaos — or rather a blind battle with chance
— is probably the lot of most animals; but to be
condemned to be learned, industrious, moral, and
Christian, and yet, through that veil of unavoidable
phenomena and conventions, to pierce to absolute
will and freedom, and to set them forth persuasively
as the true reality, in spite of all the ordered appear
ances which do not cease to confront and to occupy
us — that is a work of genius. It is a wonderful
achievement, to have recovered atavistically the
depths of the primitive soul, in the midst of its later
sophistication. In this philosophy the ancestral ego,
the soul perplexed and incredulous at being born
into this world, returns to haunt us in broad day
light and to persuade us with its ghostly eloquence
that not that ego but this world is the ghost.

The egotism which in German philosophy is justi
fied by a theory in German genius is a form of ex
perience. It turns everything it touches into a part
of its own life, personal, spontaneous, sincere, original.
It is young and self-sufficient ; yet as a continual
change of view is incompatible with art and learn
ing, we see in Germany, even more than elsewhere,

156 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

a division of labour between genius and tradition;
nowhere are the types of the young rebel and the
tireless pedant so common and so extreme.

The notion that something that moves and lives,
as genius does, can at the same time be absolute has
some interesting implications. Such a genius and all
its works must be unstable. As it has no external
sources and no external objects, as its own past can
exercise no control over it (for that would be the
most lifeless of tyrannies), it is a sort of shooting
star, with no guarantees for the future. This, for the
complete egotist, has no terrors. A tragic end and
a multitude of enemies may seem good to the absolute
hero and necessary to his perfect heroism. In the
same way, to be without a subject-matter or an
audience may seem good to the absolute poet, who
sings to himself as he goes, exclusively for the benefit
of that glorious and fleeting moment. Genius could
not be purer than that: although perhaps it might
be hard to prove that it was genius.

A kindred implication, which perhaps might be
less welcome to the egotist himself, is that an absolute
genius is formless, and that the absolute freedom
with which it thinks it takes on now this form and
now that, is not really freedom at all, but subjection
to unknown and perhaps ironical forces. Absolute
Will, of which a perfectly free genius is an expression,

GERMAN GENIUS 157

cannot say specifically what it craves, for essentially
it should crave everything indiscriminately. In
practice, however, it must seem to aim at this or
that precise result. These specific aims are suggested
to it by circumstances, foisted upon it in its replete
innocence; for it is all expectation, all vague hearti
ness and zeal for it knows not what. The logic it
proclaims at any time and calls eternal is but the
fashionable rhetoric of that hour. Absolute Will
is a great dupe on whom fortune forces card after
card. Like Faust it is helpless before the most vulgar
temptations. Why should it not fulfil itself now by
the pursuit of magic, now by the seduction of a
young girl, now by an archaeological pose, now by a
piratical or an engineering enterprise? True, there
are limits to its gullibility; there are suggestions
from which it recoils. The German ego, after swallow
ing Christianity whole, will in Luther stick at In
dulgences. Faust sometimes turns on Mephistopheles,
as the worm will turn: he says that he covets all
experience, but in that he does himself a great
injustice; there are experiences he scorns. After all
this ego is not really absolute; it is specifically and
pathetically human and directed upon a few natural
ends. That is what saves it; for a mind can have no
distinction and a soul no honour if its only maxim
is to live on. It may take up with enthusiasm what-

158 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

ever it takes up, but it will take up anything; and
it may do mightily whatever it does, but it will not
do it long.

Consider, in this respect, the pathetic history of
the German people. It conquered the Roman empire
and it became Roman, or wished to become so. It
had had a mythology and a morality of its own (very
like in principle to those it has since rediscovered),
yet it accepted Christianity with the docility of a
child. It began to feel, after some centuries, how
alien to its genius this religion was, but it could find
relief only in a fresh draught from the same foreign
sources, or others more remote. To cease to be
Roman it tried to become Hebraic and Greek. In
studying these models, however, it came upon a new
scent. What passed for revelation or for classical
perfection was of human national growth, stratified
like the rocks, and not divine or authoritative at all.
If you only made hypotheses enough, you could
prove how it all arose according to necessary laws,
logical, psychological, historical, economical, and
aesthetical. Above all, you could prove how nobody
had understood anything properly before, and how
the key to it all was in your single hand.

Yet the triumphs of theory alone soon seemed
unsatisfying. Wine, science, and song once seemed
to make Germany happy, but if a prince imposed

GERMAN GENIUS 159

military discipline, might not that be an even better
thing ? For a time wist fulness, longing, and the
feeling of Titanic loneliness and of a world to be
evoked and snuffed out like a dream, seemed to fill
the cup of intense living, and the greatest and happiest
of Germans could cry —

Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt
weiss, was ich leide,
allein und abgetrennt
von alter Freude.

But presently true intensity of life appeared to lie
rather in being a victorious general, or an ironmaster,
or a commercial traveller, or a reveller in the Friedrich-
strasse, or a spy and conspirator anywhere in the world.
All these turbid and nondescript ambitions are in
a sense artificial; the Germans accept them now as
a thousand years ago they accepted Christianity,
because such things are suddenly thrust upon them.
By nature they are simple, honest, kindly, easily
pleased. There is no latent irony or disbelief in their
souls. The pleasures of sense, plain and copious,
they enjoy hugely, long labour does not exasperate
thenij science fills them with satisfaction, music
entrances them. There ought to be no happier or
more innocent nation in this world. Unfortunately
their very goodness and simplicity render them help
less ; they are what they are dragooned to be. There
is no social or intellectual disease to which, in spots,

i6o EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

they do not succumb, as to an epidemic : their philo
sophy itself is an example of this. They have the
defects of the newly prosperous; they are far too
proud of their possessions, esteeming them for being
theirs, without knowing whether they are good of
their kind. Culture is a thing seldom mentioned by
those who have it. The real strength of the Germans
lies not in those external achievements of which at this
moment they make so much — for they may outgrow
this new materialism of theirs — it lies rather in what
they have always prized, their Gemiith and their music.
Perhaps these two things have a common root.
Emotion is inarticulate, yet there is a mighty move
ment in it, and a great complexity of transitions and
shades. This intrinsic movement of the feelings is
ordinarily little noticed because people are too wide
awake, or too imaginative. Everything is a fact or a
picture to them, and their emotions seem to them
little but obvious qualities of things. They roundly
call things beautiful, painful, holy, or ridiculous;
they do not speak of their Gemiitb, although, of
course, it is by virtue of their emotions that, they
pass such judgments. But when the occasions of our
emotions, the objects that call them forth, are not so
instantly focussed, when we know better what we
feel than why we feel it, then we seem to have a
richer and more massive sensibility. Our feelings

GERMAN GENIUS 161

absorb our attention because they remain a thing
apart : they seem to us wonderfully deep because we
do not ground them in things external.

Now music is a means of giving form to our inner
feelings without attaching them to events or objects
in the world. Music is articulate, but articulate in
a language which avoids, or at least veils the articu
lation of the world we live in; it is, therefore, the
chosen art of a mind to whom the world is still
foreign. If this seems in one way an incapacity, it is
also a privilege. Not to be at home in the world,
to prize it chiefly for echoes which it may have in
the soul, to have a soul that can give forth echoes,
or that can generate internal dramas of sound out
of its own resources — may this not be a more enviable
endowment than that of a mind all surface, a sensitive
plate only able to photograph this not too beautiful
earth? In any case, for better or for worse, inward
sensibility, unabsorbed in worldly affairs, exists in
some people; a life, as it were, still in the womb and
not yet in contact with the air. But let these inspired
musicians, masters in their own infinite realms,
beware of the touch of matter. Let them not com
pose a system of the universe out of their Gemiith,
as they might a symphony. Let them not raise their
baton in the face of the stars or of the nations, and
think to lead them like an orchestra.

L

CHAPTER XVI

EGOTISM IN PRACTICE

THEORIES in their own ethereal essence can have no
influence on events. But the men who conceive and
adopt a theory form, in doing so, certain habits of
discrimination and of reaction to things. In fact,,
they have conceived and adopted their theory
because their habits of apprehension and action
suggested it to them, or could be brought to suggest
it : the explicit theory is a symbol and omen of their
practical attitude, of their way, as the phrase has it,
of grasping the situation.

All philosophies have the common property of
being speculative, and, therefore, their immediate
influence on those who hold them is in many ways
alike, however opposed the theories may be to one
another: they all make people theoretical. In this
sense any philosophy, if warmly embraced, has a
moralising force, because, even if it belittles morality,
it absorbs the mind in intellectual contemplation,,
accustoms it to wide and reasoned comparisons, and
makes the sorry escapades of human nature from
convention seem even more ignominious than its
ruling prejudices.

The particular theory of egotism arises from an

162

EGOTISM IN PRACTICE 163

exorbitant interest in ourselves, in the medium of
thought and action rather than in its objects. It is
not necessarily incorrect, because the self is actual
and indispensable; but the insistence on it is a little
abnormal, because the self, like consciousness, ought
to be diaphanous. Egotism in philosophy is, there
fore, a pretty sure symptom of excessive pedantry
and inordinate self-assertion.

In the lofty theory of egotism life is represented
as a sort of game of patience, in which the rules, the
cards, the table, and the empty time on our hands,
all are mere images created by the fancy, as in a
dream. The sense of being occupied, though one
really has nothing to do, will then be the secret of
the whole affair, and the sole good to be attained
by living. Of course this fantastic theory is put
forward only on great occasions, when an extreme
profundity is in place; but like other esoteric doc
trines it expresses very well the spirit in which those
people live habitually who would appeal to it in the
last resort. Obviously such an egotist should in
consistency be a man of principle. He would feel it
to be derogatory to his dignity, and contrary to his
settled purpose, to cheat at the game he has instituted.
That luck should sometimes go against him is pre
ordained by himself; otherwise the game would
have no zest, and to be interested, to be pressed,

164 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

even to be annoyed seems the highest good to him
in his great tedium. He will, therefore, be assiduous,
patient, and law-abMing; and the idea of ever
abandoning his chosen game for anything less forced
and less arbitrary will seem to him disloyalty to
himself, and a great wickedness.

Indeed, nothing beside his own purpose will have
any value in his eyes, or even any existence. He will
therefore inevitably act without consideration for
others, without courtesy, without understanding.
When he chooses to observe anything external — and
he is studious — his very attentions will be an insult;
for he will assume that his idea of that external thing
is the reality of it, and that other people can have
only such rights and only such a character as he is
willing to assign to them. It follows from his egotistical
principles that in judging others he should be officious
and rude, learned and mistaken.

What the egotist calls his will and his ideals are,
taken together, simply his passions ; but the passions
of the egotist are turned into a system and go un-
rebuked. A man who lowers his precepts to the level
of his will may the more easily raise his practice to
the level of his precepts. He endows his life with a
certain coherence, momentum, and integrity, just
because he has suppressed all vain aspiration and all
useless shame. He does not call himself a sinner;

EGOTISM IN PRACTICE 165

he would be at a loss for a reason to think himself
one; for really his standard of virtue expresses
nothing but his prevalent will. Is it not intelligible
that such a morality should be more efficacious,
more unifying, heavier, and more convinced than
one which begins by condemning our natural passions
and the habitual course of human life ?

In fact, egotism in practice is a solemn and arduous
business; there is nothing malicious about it and
nothing gay. There is rather a stolid surprise that
such honest sentiments and so much enterprise
should not meet everywhere with applause. If other
people are put thereby at a disadvantage, why should
they not learn their lesson and adopt in their turn
the methods of the superman ? If they are touched
by the vanity and the charm of existence and neglect
the intense pursuit of their absolute will, why do
they complain if they are jostled and beaten ? Only
he deserves life and freedom, said Goethe, who is
forced daily to win them afresh.

If the egotist suffers passion to speak in his philo
sophy, it is perhaps because he has so little passion.
Men of frank passions quickly see the folly of them;
but the passions of the egotist are muffled, dull, like
the miserly passions of old men; they are diffused
into sensuality and sentiment, or hardened into
maxims. Egotistical lovers can hold hands for hours

166 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

and chastely kiss each other for years; such tokens
of affection help to keep them in love and at the
same time are a sop to more troublesome impulses.
Sentimentality and gush mark the absence of passion :
the blood has been diluted to lymph. Hence the
egotist can the more easily mistake his passions for
duties, and his cupidities for ideals. His devotion to
these ideals is pure and enthusiastic; but in serving
them he fattens steadily, as punctual at his work as
at his meals, as dutifully moved by the approved
music as by the official patriotism, vicious when it
seems manly to be vicious, brutal when it seems
politic to be brutal; he feels he is impeccable, and
he must die in his sins. Nothing can ruffle the autono
mous conscience of this kind of idealist, whose nature
may be gross, but whose life is busy and conventional,
and who loudly congratulates himself daily on all he
knows and does.

Turn the circumstances about as you like, the
egotist finds only one ultimate reason for everything.
It is not a reason; it is absolute will. Suppose we
asked the ego, in the Fichtean system, why it posited
a material world to be its implacable enemy and
rebellious toy, and why without necessity it raised
this infinity of trouble for itself and for the unhappy
world which it created by its fiat. It could only
reply: " Because such is the categorical imperative

EGOTISM IN PRACTICE 167

within me; because so I will, so I must, and so my
absolute duty and its logic require. If the conse
quences are tragic — and in the end I know they must
be tragic — that only proves the sublime unselfishness
of my egotism, the purity of my sacred folly, the
ideality of my groundless will. All reasons, all justi
fications which might appeal to me must be posterior
to my will; my will itself can have no justification
and no reason."

Let us admire the sincerity of this searching con
fession. Virtue itself, if it relied on self-consciousness
for its philosophy, could not justify itself on other
grounds. If the difference between virtue and vice is
hereby obliterated, that only proves that the differ
ence is not founded on self-consciousness but on the
circumstances and powers under which we live. What
self-consciousness can disclose is not the basis of
anything. All will -is the expression of some animal
body, frail and mortal, but teachable and rich in
resource. The environment in which this will finds
itself controls and rewards its various movements,
and establishes within it the difference between virtue
and vice, wisdom and folly.

The whole transcendental philosophy, if made
ultimate, is false, and nothing but a private per
spective. The will is absolute neither in the indi*
vidual nor in humanity. Nature is not a product of

168 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

the mind, but on the contrary there is an external
world, ages prior to any idea of it, which the mind
recognises and feeds upon. There is a steady human
nature within us, which our moods and passions may
wrong but cannot annul. There is no categorical
imperative but only the operation of instincts and
interests more or less subject to discipline and mutual
adjustment. Our whole life is a compromise, an
incipient loose harmony between the passions of the
soul and the forces of nature, forces which likewise
generate and protect the souls of other creatures,
endowing them with powers of expression and self-
assertion comparable with our own, and with aims
no less sweet and worthy in their own eyes; so that
the quick and honest mind cannot but practise
courtesy in the universe, exercising its will without
vehemence or forced assurance, judging with serenity,
and in everything discarding the word absolute as
the most false and the most odious of words. As
Montaigne observes, "He who sets before him, as
in a picture, this vast image of our mother Nature
in her entire majesty; who reads in her aspect
such universal and continual variety; who discerns
himself therein, and not himself only but a whole
kingdom, to be but a most delicate dot — he alone
esteems things according to the just measure of their
greatness."

INDEX

ALEXANDER THE GREAT, a model

for German idealists, 80, 81
Aristotle, 120, 124

Belief in God, disproved prag
matically, 134
Bull-psychology, 148, 153
Burckhardt, 47
Byron, 48, 49

Caesar Borgia, a superman, 138

Calvinism, in Kant, 57; in Fichte,
25, 77; in Hegel, in

Categorical imperative, its origin,
56; its prerogatives, 62;
its dangers, 63

Chancellor, the German, his
chivalrous after - thought
about Belgium, 50

Christianity, foreign to Germany,
1 1 ; undermined by German
philosophy, 104, 105; patron
ised by Goethe, 46; aban
doned by romantic indi
vidualists, 107; denounced
by Nietzsche, 130-132; has
one element in common with
egotism, 106

Classicism, romantic in Goethe,
46; missed by Nietzsche,
139-142; when truly vital,
48

Conquest, a sublime duty, 80, 81

Contraries, alleged to be in
separable, 89, 90

Criticism, historical, has a tran
scendental basis, 29

Critique of Pure Reason, its
agnosticism, 14; its so
phistical foundation, 20

Durer, 27

Egotism, defined, 6; distin
guished from selfishness, 95-
97, 100-102, 118; based on
error, 167; implicit in the
Kantian imperative and pos
tulates, 62-64; implies integ
rity, force, self-complacency,
163-166; is odious in pedants,
142

Emerson, 24, 49; quoted, 119
England, judged by Fichte, 76
Evil, justified, 123, 132-134

Faith, German conception of it,
13, 27; corroborated only
by itself, 31, 68

Faust, typical egotist, 13, 14;
prefigures the evolution of
Germany, 50, 51, 157; im
proves on Saint John, 52

Fichte, 65-83

Gemuth, why self-conscious, 160
German ethics, its faults, 103
German language, its merits, 75
German nation, its purity, 75 ;
its mission, 78, 79; in what
sense the chosen people, 73,
74; necessary to the con
tinued existence of God, 68;
and of history, 79; its for
tunes, 158-160

German philosophy, not all philo
sophy in Germany, u;
primitive, 27; subjective,
12; in what senses idealistic,
1 5 ; in what sense not so, 1 6 ;
ambiguous, 17, 18; a revela-

170 EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

tion, 22; must continually

be proved afresh, 26; is a

work of genius, 155
Gobineau, 77

Goethe, 43-53; quoted, 159, 165
Good and evil above right and

wrong, 124
Gospel, amended by Faust, 52;

glossed by Hegelians, 105

Happiness, not for the egotist,

14, 15; he despises it, 152;
not abstract nor absolute,
no, in; attainable, 1 1 8 ;
its nature, 152, 153

Heathenism, use of the word,
1 44 ; contrast with paganism ,
145, 146; its modern form,

147. 148
Hegel, 84-98
Human nature, 117, 118

Idealism, meanings of the word,

15, 16; fosters practical
materialism, 5, 69-72, 78, 81,
82; should be imposed on
the young, 80; its mystical
issue, 38-40

Ideals, when captious, when solid,

137

Infinity, evaded by Hegel, 88, 89;
recognised again by Scho
penhauer, 1 08, 109

Kant, 54-64; 25, 34, 35, 42
Knowledge, assumed to be im
possible, 15; abuse of the
term, 39, 60

Leibniz, anticipates transcen
dentalism, 33; his insidious
theology, 104

Lessing, on truth, 129

Locke, sets the ball rolling, 32

Luther, 135, 157

Max Stirner, 99-103; quoted, 73
Montaigne, quoted, 168
Music, 1 6, 161
Musset, 49

Mysticism, in knowledge, 38-40;
in morals, 123

Nietzsche, 114-143

Optimism, egotistical, 25, in,
114, 116, 118, 119

Passion, not naturally egotistical,

10 1 ; may become so, 95, 98;

dull in egotists, 165, 166
Paulsen, 42
Perception, terminates in things

not in ideas, 19
Pessimism, inherits disregard of

intrinsic values, 109; reacts

against optimism, 25, in;

is arbitrary, 116

Pier Gynt, typical egotist, 13, 14
Plato, his idealism contrasted

with the German, 16; his

oppressive politics, 8 1 ; on

inspiration, 141
Postulates of practical reason,

equivocal, 58-64
Power, divers meanings of the

word, 125-127
Preservation, no law of nature,

US
Progress, when illusory, 1 7 ; when

real, 112
Protestantism, 21-31, 151

Religion in German philosophy,

7, 13. 75. 76, 82,83
Rome and German genius, 150

Schopenhauer, 108-122
Selfishness, distinguished from
egotism, 95, 97, 100-102, 118

INDEX

171

Society, its alleged consciousness,
17, 18; a " spook," 99

Socrates, 146

Spinoza, religious feeling trans
ferred to nature, 24; his
mysticism in ethics, 123

Spirit, its meanings, 37; its
mystic unity, 38

State, the absolute, an idol, 96-
98

Substance, egotistical use of the
term, 17, 92

Superman, 136-143

Tender minds, how attracted to

German philosophy, 24
Transcendentalism, 32-42
Truth, a figment of the will, 28;
made in Germany, 88; less

valuable than illusion, 14,
128-130; not the strong
point of philosophies, 154

Understanding, hostility of Hegel
to the, 90, 91

Wagner, 136, 150

War, a boon, 96; how it should
be started, 79; is to rage for
two hundred years, 115

Wilhelm Meister, 44

Will, used metaphorically, 36,
114; should be disinterested,
67; may be fulfilled in de
feat, 66, 67; is unstable
and indeterminate, 156-158;
may be denied, 119, 120

Winkelmann, 140, note

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