Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/53

Rh the world, of justice as its law, and of love as its driving force. But Nietzsche is unable to make out either a rational or a moral government of things. Change and undoing overtake all things, even the best and rarest: what is excellent is no more permanent than anything else. The world seems to him chiefly a blind striving of will, or rather of wills—wills, too, which strive with one another (save within certain limits) and more or less live off one another. He finds little that is worshipful or adorable in such a world (whether as it appears or as it inwardly is). Aside from awe before its vastness, it rather awakens pity. In reaching this result Kant's negative arguments against theology had affected him, but it was the concrete make-up of the world that was the decisive thing—especially what Darwin has brought home to us English-speaking people, and what Schopenhauer had noted decades before. The "horrible struggle for existence" is often referred to. undefined The world was undivine. Nietzsche even speaks of this later as if it had been a first-hand independent conviction with him—of atheism as conducting him to Schopenhauer. If so, Schopenhauer simply did him the service of formulating and grounding his conviction—i.e., of tracing back to their ultimate metaphysical origin the pain and wrong of the world, the general contradictoriness and impermanence of things.

How did Nietzsche react to such a view practically? Careful attention to his various early writings seems to reveal two attitudes—taken either at successive times, or, according to his mood, more or less at the same time. The reaction that came first (if there was a first) was like Schopenhauer's own. He wished to renounce life, felt pity to be the supreme law, even inclined to practical asceticism —and with it all had the dim sense of another order of things than this we know, one to which the negation of life somehow conducts. There are several passages of this tenor. undefined The other reaction was strongly contrasted—it was a disposition to accept life and the world, even if they were undivinely constituted. Why this one came to predominate, it might be hard to say. One consideration and