Where Nietzsche Comes In.

It seems more likely when one passes in review the extant data that at least one and a crucial cause for the present situation is the “overwhelming power and unbending will to victory in the German people” when confronted with an opportunity for the “further expansion of their greatness.”  That such phrases should be in the mouths of our apologists for the war is significant.  And that the invasion of Belgium “so necessary for the Germans” is treated by the spokesmen of morality solely and confessedly from the standpoint of military expediency seems to indicate the permeation of the Nietzsche superman into the very stronghold of idealistic philosophy.

It would, of course, be as absurd to suppose Nietzsche a direct cause of this war as it would be to regard the Serajevo murderers as the sole cause.  Nietzsche was and is an exponent of his time, as well as one reciprocally fostering such movements as Bernhardi militarism and the Crown Prince’s war book.  Perhaps it will not be inappropriate here to cite from “War and the People of War,” in “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” (Pages 67-68,) the magnum opus of Nietzsche: 

You should love peace as a means to new war and brief peace more than a long one.  Do you say, “It is a good cause by which a war is hallowed”?  I say unto you, It is a good war which hallows every cause.  War and courage have done greater things than the love of one’s neighbor.  “What, then, is good?” you ask.  To be brave is good.  Let young maidens say, “Good is to be pretty and touching.”  But you are hateful?  Well, so be it, my brethren!  Cast about you a mantle of the sublimely hateful.  And when your soul has become great it will become wanton; in your greatness there will be malice, I know, and in malice the proud heart will meet the weakling.

This, we are told, is not to be taken literally—­all is symbolism and has a meaning other than the more direct one.  But the fact remains, as can be testified by the present writer from three years’ residence as a university student in Germany, that the rank and file as well as the aristocracy—­from laborers and small shopkeepers, petty officials, and students to Judges of the Supreme Court and university professors who have become “secret councilors” (Geheimrat)—­not only in Berlin and Bonn but in Munich and Heidelberg, all have become ominously full of the doctrine of the survival of the fittest and the consequent expediency of power, not only in intellectual rivalry but in Krupps and high explosives.

The Nietzsche fire may, perhaps, serve a purpose on the hearthstone of our inmost life if it be to rescue us from complacency and secure inanity, but in the form of electrically connected lyddite stores and gasoline bombs it drives those who believe in a supernation to a literal interpretation of the above widely popular philosophy.  And, as demonstrated at Louvain and Rheims, it goes far to obliterate the memorials of a past which Nietzsche thought so contemptible a check upon the prowess of the “blonde Bestie” as he progressed toward—­toward the superman.