Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/68

Rh held out by the official religions—their sugar plums and dog whips, as Maeterlinck puts it—one can only wonder how his writings escaped as long as they did the attention of the authorities that swing the power of imprimatur and anathema.

Maeterlinck may not be classed unreservedly as a radical individualist. For whereas a philosophy like that of Nietzsche takes no account of the "much-too-many," who according to that great fantasist do not interest anybody except the statistician and the devil, Maeterlinck realizes the supreme importance of the great mass as the ordained transmitters of civilization. The gulf between aristocratic subjectivism, devoted single-mindedly to the ruthless enforcement of self-interest, and, on the other hand, a self-forgetful social enthusiasm, is bridged in Maeterlinck by an extremely strong instinct for justice and, moreover, by his firm belief — at least for the time being — that the same strong instinct exists universally as a specific trait of human nature. By such a philosophy Justice, then, is discerned not as a supra-natural function, but as a function of human nature as distinguished from nature at large. The restriction is made necessary by our knowledge of the observable operations of nature. In particular