Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/69

Rh to be rejected? By no means. The intellect has worked in the interests of life. It is easier for men to live, when they project their experience outside themselves; they feel that they have thereby something to steady themselves by and to lean upon. Indeed, a tendency to deception exists more or less in life in general. We have all heard of the various protective devices of the lower forms of life; sometimes they are the finest forms of defense, and quite take the place of weapons like horns or poisonous fangs. But the most perfect kind of deception would be that practised by a being on itself,—the real nature of the process being either unrealized, or if realized, soon obscured to the mind. This is the deception which man practises on himself in relation to the sensible and conceptual world. It is all in the interests of life—most men could hardly live without it; and it has as much right to be as truth—indeed more right to be, in the particular circumstances envisaged. Illusion, deception, as part of the life-process and legitimate—such is Nietzsche's point of view at the present time: argument to this effect makes the substance of the pregnant fragment, "On Truth and Falsehood in the Extra-moral [i.e., theoretic] Sense." undefined

Indeed he has now such a sense of the function of illusion in the world, that he defends it in connections where many of us would feel the sole imperative of truth. For example, in discussing the use and harm of history for life, he questions the benefit for men in general of pushing historical study to its last extremes. If reality is made to stand out in all its nakedness, if illusions are totally banished, reverence and the power of joyful activity suffer. He has in mind particularly the study of religious origins. He speaks of the dissolving influence of the new historical theology—here is perhaps a subsidiary reason for the attack on Strauss. A religion that is turned into a piece of historical knowledge simply is, he thinks, at the end of its way. A loving constructive spirit should go along with all destruction. He is even critical toward modern science in the same spirit. The doctrines of change as a sovereign law, of the fluidity of all types and species, of the absence of all cardinal distinction between man and animal, he calls "true, but deadly"; and he thinks that life ruled by