Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/135

Friedrich Nietzsche of the case of Power versus Pity than is contained in "The World Soul"? "He serveth the servant, The brave he loves amain, He kills the cripple and the sick, And straight begins again; For gods delight in gods, And thrust the weak aside, — To him who scorns their charities Their arms fly open wide." From such a world-view what moral could proceed more logically than that of Zarathustra : "And him whom ye do not teach to fly, teach — how to fall quicker"?

But after all, the intellectual origin of Nietzsche's ideas matters but little. Wheresoever they were derived from, he made them strikingly his own by raising them to the splendid elevation of his thought. And if nevertheless he has failed to take high rank and standing among the sages of the schools, this shortage in his professional prestige is more than counterbalanced by the wide reach of his influence among the laity. What might the re-classification, or perchance even the re-interpretation, of known facts about life have