Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/151

Friedrich Nietzsche. Why should the ruler-man bow down to outworn statutes or stultify his self-dependent moral sense before the artificial and stupidly uni- form moral relics of the dead past? Good is whatever conduces to the increase of my power, — evil is whatever tends to diminish it ! Only the weakling and the hypocrite will disagree.

Unmistakably this is a straightout application of the "pragmatic" criterion of truth. Nietzsche's unconfessed and cautious imitators, who call themselves pragmatists, are not bold enough to follow their own logic from the cognitive sphere to the moral. They stop short of the natural conclusion to which their own premises lead. Morality is necessarily predicated upon specific notions of truth. So if Truth is an alterable and shifting concept, must not morality likewise be variable ? The pragmatist might just as well come out at once into the broad light and frankly say: u Laws do not interest me in the abstract, or for the sake of their general beneficence; they interest me only in so far as they affect me. Therefore I will make, interpret, and abolish them to suit my- self." To Nietzsche the "quest of truth" is a palpable evasion. Truth is merely a means for the