Page:Thus Spake Zarathustra - Alexander Tille - 1896.djvu/24

 Then in the nineteenth century a whole literature bearing on the subject arose. Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Gutzkow, Hein rich Heine, David Strauss, F. Th. Vischer, Eduard von Hartmann, and Felix Dahn are its principal representatives. And Ludwig Feuerbach has given this free religious movement a motto by the saying : " God was my first, Reason my second, and Man my third and last thought. Man alone is and must be our God. No salvation outside of Man." The same idea which made James Cotter Morrison writing on the decrease of religious influence and the increase of morality title his book : Service of Man, in opposition to the Service of God preached by the churches all over the world, is at the root of that Ger- man movement, the most prominent representative of which in modern Germany is Friedrich Nietzsche. His Zarathustra deals with the latest phases of the belief in God. In many respects he adopts the same attitude as Heinrich Heine, but his criticism of Christianity is most akin to that of perhaps the freest spirit of modern Germany, Karl Gutzkow, whose foot- steps he follows.

The connection between natural science and literature has always, in Germany as elsewhere, been very loose. True, Albrecht von Haller made some attempts to bring them into contact, and Goethe tried to attain the same end in his Wahlvenvandtschaften and in other writings : up to the present time the world has no literature which has taken into itself even the most important knowledge which natural science regards as definitively fixed ; and the literary historian who would take up as his subject a history of the conversations on Darwinism occurring in modern novels would produce a most astounding book that could not fail to make any scientist laugh in his most melancholy hours. Yet there are certain parallel developments in literature and science which by no means lack