Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/714

708 uphold; indeed, he regards the historic sense as the cause of the weakness of our times. We must cease feeling that we are epigoni. It is the function of the philosopher, in his opinion, to create new values, new ideals, a new civilization. "The real philosophers," he declares, "are commanders and legislators; they say: Thus shall it be; they alone determine the whither and wherefore of man; with creative hands they touch the future—their knowing is creation, their creation is legislation, their will for truth is—will for power." "Blessed it must seem to you to press your hands upon thousands of years as upon wax," says Zarathustra (in Nietzsche's book: 'Thus spake Zarathustra').

What our estimate of the world, of life and of our civilization will be must depend, of course, upon our values, upon our standards, upon our ideal, upon what we really prize. Hence, in order to understand our philosopher and his iconoclasm, we must understand his fundamental proposition, his basal thought, his ideal, the standard with which he approaches things. We shall then be prepared to understand why he objected so strenuously to our times, why he waged such a relentless war against his contemporaries, and earned for himself the title of a Kämpfer gegen seine Zeit. I shall not here attempt to trace the development of his ideas and to show how he gradually grew into them. Nor shall I attempt to point out the contradictions in his thoughts or even offer a criticism of them. It will be sufficient for my purpose to find the motif of his philosophy, to discover the fundamental principle upon which his thinking rests, and to show how his thoroughgoing opposition to the things around him more or less logically followed from it.

Schopenhauer teaches that the will is the fundamental principle of life. This will to be, this will to live, is a blind striving, a constant struggle for existence, a battle against death which we are bound to lose at last. "The life of most men is a weary yearning and torture, a dreamy tottering through the four ages toward death, with a series of trivial thoughts as an accompaniment. They are like a clock-work which is wound up and goes without knowing why; and every time a man is conceived and born, the clock of human life is wound up anew in order to grind out the same old hackneyed tune which it has played so many countless times before, measure for measure, beat for beat, with insignificant variations." It follows from the very nature of the human will that life should be full of pain and misery. And because it is full of pain, says Schopenhauer, it is bad, it is an evil, and not to be is better than to be. It also follows from the nature of the will that it is selfish and base. Men are knaves or fools or both. The end and aim of the average man's existence is to keep himself alive, and he will do anything he can to eke out his petty life. He is a cruel, unjust and cowardly egoist, whom fear makes honest and vanity sociable. And the only way to succeed in this world is to be