Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 78.djvu/154

150 It was in the same spirit that he spoke slightingly of travel. Man could find nothing in foreign countries beyond what he took there, because, if he would be fully himself, if he would bring himself to completion, he would find the whole world in himself. That was the sufficient warrant for feeling that society was not important, but man the individual, man, too, not as in society and a part of it, but man as a separate entity realizing his kinship with the divine in his own way for himself.

There is this same word again in the conclusion of "The American Scholar."

The background for the individualism of the German philosopher Nietzsche was in most respects very different from that of Emerson. There was this much in common between them that they both came of clerical stock and that in a way they both reacted from the religious bias that seemed so to have been given to their lives. Beyond that superficial resemblance in the influences playing upon them, they differed radically in the way in which they responded to the teachings of Christianity. Emerson may be said to have been a natural development of the puritan spirit, unique, iconoclastic, reconstructive, to be sure, and yet a puritan clergyman, who, as Woodberry says, never wholly escaped the black coat. In every fiber of his being he was first and last a moralist, one who passed out of the negations of puritanism to its affirmations, and yet essentially a puritan moralist. The one thing that most marks Nietzsche's individualism, that distinguishes it vitally and unalterably from Emerson's, is its intense opposition to Christian morality. This hatred of the whole Christian system has its ground in his conception of Jewish morality as a slave morality. Christian ethics are, to his view, the product of a religious system and teaching, the end and purpose of which is that of giving weakness an advantage over strength, of making the slave the ultimate lord of his master, of raising a subject race to a sense of triumph over its enemies and conquerors. This to his mind is a monstrous perversion of things, for, as he says in "A Genealogy of Morals":