Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/113

 instead of pampering them. Mankind can only be reinvigorated if the strong and healthy are helped to come into their own. The dreams of the pacifists are fatal to the pragmatic virtues and to the virility of the race. The greatest need is an aggressive campaign for the moral and intellectual sanitation of the world. So let the brain rule over the heart,— and so forth in the same strain.

Very soon, however, Strindberg passed out of the sphere of Nietzsche's influence. The alienation was due as much to his general instability as to the disparity between his pessimistic temper and the joyous exaltation of Zarathustra-ism. His striking reversion to orthodoxy was by no means illogical. Between pessimism and faith there exists a relation that is not very far to seek. When a person has forfeited his peace of soul and cannot find grace before his own conscience, he might dutch as a last hope the promise of vicarious redemption. Extending the significance of his own personal experience to everything within his horizon, and erecting a dogmatic system upon this tenuous generalization, Strindberg reached the conviction that the purpose of living is to suffer, a conviction that threw his philosophy well into line with the religious and ethical ideas of the