THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

CHAPTER IX
Friedrich .Nietzsche
I. THE LINEAGE OF NIETZSCHE
NIETZSCHE was the child of Darwin and the brother of Bismarck.
It does not matter that he ridiculed the English evolutionists and the
3-erman nationalists: he was accustomed to denounce those who had
xiost influenced him; it was his unconscious way of covering up his debts.
The ethical philosophy of Spencer was not the most natural corollary
Df the theory of evolution. If life is a struggle for existence in which the
Ittest survive, then strength is the ultimate virtue, and weakness the only
Fault. Good is that which survives, which wins; bad is that which gives
>vay and fails. Only the mid-Victorian cowardice of the English Darwinians,
and the bourgeois respectability of French positivists and German
socialists, could conceal the inevitableness of this conclusion. These
men were brave enough to reject Christian theology, but they did not
iare to be logical, to reject the moral ideas, the worship of meekness and
gentleness and altruism, which had grown out of that theology. They
ceased to be Anglicans, or Catholics, or Lutherans; but they did not dare
cease to be Christians. So argued Friedrich Nietzsche.
"The secret stimulus of the French free-thinkers from Voltaire to August
Comte was not to remain behind the Christian ideal, . . . but to outbid it if
possible. Comte, with his 'Live for others,* out-Christianizes Christianity. la
Germany it was Schopenhauer, and in England John Stuart Mill, who gave
the greatest fame to the theory of sympathetic affections, of pity, and of use-
fulness to others as the principle of action. . . . All the systems of socialism
placed themselves unwittingly . . . upon the common ground
trines." 1
of these doc-
Darwin unconsciously completed the work of the Encyclopedists: they
had removed the theological basis of modern morals, but they had left
that morality itself untouched and inviolate, hanging miraculously in
the air; a little breath of biology was all that was needed to clear away
this remnant of imposture. Men who could think clearly soon perceived
what the profoundest minds of every age had known: that in this battle
''Quoted in Faguet, On Reading Nietzsche, New York, 1918; p. 71*
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