l Sometimes he makes distinctions on the subject. "'On n'est bon que par la pitié: il faut done qu'il y ait quelque pitié dans tous nos sentiments'—so sounds morality at present! And how has this come about?—That the man of sympathetic, disinterested, publicly useful, gregarious actions is now felt to be the moral man, is perhaps the most general effect and change of mind which Christianity has produced in Europe; although it was neither its intention nor its doctrine" (Dawn of Day, 132—the italics are mine) .
m So a writer whom Dolson quotes (op. cit., p. 100). The Encyclopedia Britannica, art. "Ethics," calls Nietzsche "the most orthodox exponent of Darwinian ideas in their application to ethics." It seems to be the general view, even Frank Thilly saying, "Nietzsche made this theory the basis of his new ethics" (Philosophical Review, March, 1916, p. 190).
n Cf., e.g., Will to Power, §§ 70, 647-52, 684, 685; Twilight etc., ix, § 14. One who wishes a discriminating treatment of the subject cannot do better than read pp. 219-38 of Richter's Friedrich Nietzsche. Simmel, in "Fr. Nietzsche, eine moralphilosophische Silhouette" (Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 1906), and Oskar Ewald in Nietzsches Lehre in ihren Grundbegriffen, deny specifically Darwinian elements in the theory of the superman, though Simmel's view appears to be somewhat modified in his Schopenhauer und Nietzsche (1907—see p. 5).
o The loftier elevation, where pity is transcended, is portrayed in these lines:
"
"Destined, O star, for radiant path.
No claim on thee the darkness hath!
Roll on in bliss through this, our age!
Its trouble ne'er shall thee engage!
In furthest worlds thy beams shall glow:
Pity, as sin, thou must not know!
Be pure: that duty's all you owe."
The transation is Thomas Common's—the original, with the title, "Sternen-Moral," being § 63 of "Scherz, List und Rache," prefixed to Joyful Science. Similar sentiment is expressed in Beyond Good and Evil, §§ 271, 284; Will to Power, § 985.
CHAPTER XXIII
a Vernon Lee says in Vital Lies, "Make no use of 'vital lies,' they are vital and useful only when they are accepted as vital truths"—as if being "accepted as vital truths" was inconsistent with their being "lies"!
b Paul Carus does not interpret Nietzsche's attitude to truth and science very finely when he says that "he expressed the most sovereign contempt for science," was "too proud to submit to anything, even to truth," or "to recognize the duty of inquiring," and rejected "with disdain" the "methods of the intellect" (Nietzsche and Other Exponents of Individualism, pp. 5-8).
c Even Dolson (op. cit., p. 96), but not William Wallace (op. cit., pp. 533-4), who, however, hardly does justice to the full import of Nietzsche's skepticism.
d Cf. Richter's lucid statement: "In the realms of values there are no true and no false ideas, in the time-honored sense of agreement or disagreement of an idea with its object. For there are here no objects, known as existing, but only something not existing in advance, namely, goals or ends (Ziele) which are arbitrarily created by an act of will.
