truly as for others; a spark from this fire falling into the scholar's soul purifies and ennobles him—lifts him out of the lukewarm or frigid mood in which he is apt to do his daily task.[1] Nietzsche interprets justice (momentarily at least) after Schopenhauer, as a metaphysical impulse[2]—that is, one that breaks down the wall of individuality belonging to our phenomenal being and makes each say "I am thou." Egoism, in the ordinary sense of the term, receives little countenance from him; whether unintelligent or intelligent, whether on the part of the people or of the possessing classes, it wins no admiration.[3]
Sympathy and pity rank with justice. I may cite here an incident in his personal history. His attack on Strauss has been already mentioned. It sounds malicious at times, certainly it was often ironical, but it was really an attack on the specious German culture which Strauss represented (particularly in the widely read Old and New Faith[4]), not on Strauss himself; and when the learned man died, Nietzsche was half-rueful (for his book had made considerable impression), and wrote a friend, "I hope that I did not make his last years harder to bear, and that he died without knowing anything of me. It disturbs me a bit."[5] His sister tells us that so long as a type he combated was impersonal, he could fight joyfully; but when he was suddenly made to realize that a man of sensitive heart, surrounded by revering friends, stood behind it, pity arose instead, and he suffered more from the blows of his sword than the enemy did—and that then he would sigh, "I am not really made for hating and enmity."[6] b He had also sympathy for the "people," the unfortunate. In discussing the reform of the theater, he appears to have above all the popular aspects of the case in mind, speaking of the hollowness and thoughtlessness of a society, which only concerns itself for the mass so
- ↑ "Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 6.
- ↑ Ibid., sect. 6.
- ↑ "Use and Harm of History etc.," sects. 5, 9; cf. the tone in which truth as an egoistic possession of the individual" is spoken of, sect. 6.
- ↑ Welcker judged Strauss with similar sharpness (according to R. M. Meyer, Jahrbuch für das classische Alterthum, V (1900), 716.
- ↑ See Werke (pocket ed.), II, xxxviii. There is a later reference in somewhat different tone, Werke (8vo ed.), XIV, 373-4, § 250.
- ↑ Werke (pocket ed.), II, xl.
