Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/74



Nietzsche's first metaphysics, his first ethical views reveal the influence of Schopenhauer. In general, the order of the world, including that of human life, cannot be changed. It is not founded on reason, and is but slightly accessible to rational influence. The old rationalism effectually came to an end with Kant and Schopenhauer, who demonstrated the unsurpassable limits of theoretic curiosity, and begot anew the sense of the fundamental mysteriousness of things. A certain deep resignation is the practical consequence, a certain frank facing and acceptance of reality in all its forms, including those which are terrible. Instead of science, thinking that it can find the cause of all ills and so can remedy them, wisdom becomes the goal—wisdom, which refusing to be seduced by the specious promises of the sciences, looks unmoved on the world as a whole, and by sympathy and love seeks to make the eternal suffering it finds there its own. This is the atmosphere favorable to the rise of a new and tragic type of culture, similar to that which existed among the Greeks before Socrates and Euripides exercised their rationalizing influence.

But because the broad features of the human lot cannot be changed, it does not follow that things may not be better than they are, that there is not something which man may strive for. At bottom Nietzsche was of idealistic temperament, and though this did not distort his vision of reality, it kept him from relapsing into quietism. He felt indeed that the weightiest question of philosophy was just how far the realm of the unchangeable extended, so that knowing this we might set out to improve the changeable side of things with all the courage at our command. We may not be able to do much, and may easily be depressed, but neither becoming rich nor honored nor