conviction that he declares that if a man's attitude to Christianity is not critical, we may as well turn our back on him.[1]
In the absence of theistic or metaphysical faith, the world becomes aimless, essentially meaningless to him. It is a kind of welter—history is so, as well as nature.[2] He thinks that an unprejudiced investigator who searches out the development of the eye, and observes the forms it has in the lowest creatures and its gradual growth, comes to the conclusion that seeing was not an end aimed at, but simply happened, when chance brought the requisite apparatus together.[3] Even in man's inventions, accident, i.e., an accidental inspiration or thought, plays a part—only the accident does not happen to most men.[4] Reason itself may have come by accident into the world, i.e., in an irrational way.[5] For with chances of various kinds, it may sooner or later happen that some throws of the dice are so lucky that they have all the appearance of design;[6] the best kind of results may thus arise on occasion—happy hits, we may say, on nature's part. j Accordingly Nietzsche speaks of the chaos (rather than cosmos) of existence.[7] He does not mean that things happen without a cause, but apart from any plan or ordering thought: chance is the opposite of design, out of which correlation it means nothing.[8] Chance happenings have causes behind them like everything else, and hence are necessitated like everything else.[9] Law in nature, however, he regards as a questionable conception. If people are fond of it, they must either be thinking that all natural things follow their law in free obedience—in which case they really admire the morality of nature—or else the idea of a
- ↑ The Wanderer etc., § 182.
- ↑ Human, etc., § 238.
- ↑ Dawn of Day, § 122.
- ↑ Ibid., § 363.
- ↑ Ibid., § 123.
- ↑ Ibid., § 130.
- ↑ Joyful Science, §§ 109, 277.
- ↑ He goes so far as to argue on this basis that in nature at large there is, strictly speaking, no chance: "If you know that there are no aims, you know also that there is no chance: for only in connection with a world of aims has the word 'chance' a meaning" (Joyful Science, § 109).
- ↑ Once, it must be admitted, Nietzsche contrasts chance with necessity (Ecce Homo, II, § 8), relapsing, we must suppose, for the moment into popular modes of expression.
