Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/296

280 a hitherto unused instrument, the conscious reasoning mind, was now for the first time acting.

Positive proofs of the hypothesis are, of course, impossible—Nietzsche does not offer any. I suspect that the idea of it came to him from something he observed—or thought he observed—in quarters nearer home. We find him describing, for instance, the probable spiritual fortunes of a German noble, when brought under the influence of the Church in the early Middle Ages and shut up in a monastery. It is in the course of a discussion of two historic methods of "bettering" man, one of taming the animal man, the other of rearing a certain type. These are zoölogical terms, and the former process is like what goes on in menageries with wild beasts—they are weakened, their power to harm is diminished, they are made sickly through fear, pain, wounds, and hunger. It seemed to him that something of this sort was what a German "blond beast" underwent, when he was tamed by the Church, above all when lured into a monastery. The Church was a kind of menagerie, and the most beautiful examples of the "blond beast" were everywhere hunted down in its interest. And how did one of these "bettered" nobles look within the monastery walls? Nietzsche answers, "like a caricature of man, like an abortion; he had become a 'sinner,' he was fast in a cage, he had been shut in between horrible conceptions.… There he lay, sick, wretched, malevolent against himself: full of hatred against the impulses of life, full of suspicion against everything that was still strong and happy." Plainly it is a phenomenon much like that to which we have just been attending—only that now it is a superior type of man instead of a wandering savage who is subjugated, and that the subjugating force is spiritual rather than physical. What seems to me likely is that Nietzsche generalized from instances of this kind. The passage is in a later book than Genealogy of Morals, but the reflection may have been earlier. A similar psychology of bad conscience is presupposed in another passage. Answering the question, "What is it in Christianity we fight against?" he says, "That it seeks to crush the strong, to take away their spirit, to exploit their bad hours and wearinesses, to convert their proud assurance