Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/340

324 "on which we philosophers have been wont to build for now two thousand years as upon the surest foundation"; it is something which gives to every man an infinite worth, a metaphysical worth, and ranges him in a different order from this earthly one; it is "die Moral im alten Sinne," covering all practices and mores on which the power of Gods, priests, and saviours rests, including ideas of free-will, sin, guilt, of an offended deity, of calamity as punishment, of a way of salvation, of conscience as supernatural—the whole of what he calls "the moral interpretation of existence," and none at bottom made it more assuredly than Schopenhauer. The historical (as opposed to Nietzsche's imaginary) Zarathustra shared in it essentially, turning morality as he did into something metaphysical, making it a force, a cause, an end in itself, and viewing the contest between good and evil as the driving wheel in the general machinery of things. Such is the morality which Nietzsche thought his criticism undermined—at least it is oftenest what he has in mind.

To put the results somewhat in order (and stating them always as he conceives them), the criticism undermines, first, the faith that morality brings one in any special sense into contact with ultimate reality. Rée had said that the moral man stands no nearer the intelligible (metaphysical) world than the physical man does, and Nietzsche follows him. To put morality into the nature of things, as philosophers in common with peoples have done, to give the world a moral significance has as much validity and no more than ascribing a male or female gender to the sun. Kindness, sympathy exist and have a meaning in social formations—they serve and help maintain a whole in conflict with other wholes, but in the total economy of the world, where there can be no passing away or loss, they are a superfluous principle. The whole circle of ethical conceptions can be explained without going out of the realm of human relations. The idea of a moral order, the construing of