Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 78.djvu/155

Rh This demand is the demand of the Christian system, and, to quote Nietzsche again from the same volume:

This is what Nietzsche calls the slave revolt in morality, and with the present triumph of the Christian system that here had its source he sees a transformation of the values of the terms good and bad that has been more or less destructive of the fine ideals of the human race. Evil has gained the upper hand. He says again:

It was as an intellectual aristocrat, a believer in aristocratic values, that Nietzsche set forward in his development as an individualist. He began his life work as a philologist, and Greek was his especial philological interest. His studies in this field brought him under the influence of Greek ideals of power and beauty, dionysiac ideals of abandon, of unrestraint, of free joy, as opposed to the moral conceptions involved in the worship of Apollo. This point of view appears in his first philosophical book, "The Birth of Tragedy." In its first form this title had the additional phrase, "out of the Spirit of Greek Music," and this is significant as revealing his sense of the greatest of the arts as having its origin in the vague and wandering impulses of free feeling rather than in moralizing and reflective thought. Here was the origin of that sense of final values upon which his philosophy is built. The thing of most worth in the world is not the average man and his happiness, but the select man, the man who answers Yea to all of life, the man who takes tribute of