learned will lift us out of our depression, and the only sense in striving in these directions is to win power, whereby we may come to the help of nature and correct a little her foolish and clumsy ways.[1] a
What then can we do? What shall be our aim? Nietzsche's idealistic temper is plentifully in evidence in the way he gives his answer. We do not get our aim, he says, by studying history, science, or circumstances now existing. In this way we acquaint ourselves with facts: but ethics is a question of our attitude to facts, of the way in which we shall confront them. He does not like his historical generation, which wishes only to be "objective," which does not know how to love or hate, and perhaps, as in Hegel's case, turns the historical process itself into a semi-divine affair. He thinks that Hegel's influence was so far harmful on German youth. One who bends and bows to the "power of history" gives in the end an obsequious "yes," Chinese fashion, to every "power," whether it be a government or a public opinion or a majority of heads, and moves to the time which the "power" sets. Not so morality: it is not merely conceiver or interpreter, but judge—if history says what is or was, it says what should be or should have been. Raphael had to die at the age of thirty-six: was there anything right or rational in such a necessity? Some one was arguing in Germany at the time, that Goethe at eighty-two was worn out, but Nietzsche says that for a couple of years of the "worn-out" Goethe and of such conversations as he had with Eckermann, he would give whole wagon-loads of men still running their careers and highly modern at that. That the many go on living, while a few, such as these, come to an end, is nothing but brutal fact, stupidity that cannot be altered—a "so it is," over against the moral demand, "so it should not be." Yes, over against morality! he reiterates; for whatever the virtue we have in mind, whether it be justice, generosity, courage, wisdom, or pity, it is virtuous in so far as it rises against this blind might of facts, this tyranny of the actual, and subjects itself to laws which are not the laws of these historical fluctuations.[2] He reflects in a similar spirit on statistics. "How,
