commonly conceived, being pre-eminently shown in pitying, caring for, and tending them.[1]
In other words, by following mistaken ideas we have cut athwart the law of selection, which is an inevitable part of the law of development.[2] We have ourselves acquired a sickly and unnatural sensibility (we can't stand the sight of suffering, we weak creatures of today);[3] we have stimulated the egoism of the sickly and degenerate, and, by holding fast in life great numbers of misshapen beings, have given to existence itself a gloomy and questionable aspect.[4] And for the result, Nietzsche holds, as I have said, Christianity chiefly responsible. l By giving, as it does, an absolute value to the individual, it makes it impossible to sacrifice him. Genuine human love is hard, full of self-conquest, because it needs sacrifice; while this pseudo-humanity which is called Christianity strives just that no one be sacrificed.[5]
Nietzsche is sometimes said to have been carried away by Darwin—his ideas have been called "Darwinism gone mad." m This is superficial (Nietzsche's attitude to Darwin was in reality a very mixed one), n indeed a bit childish, when one considers the rôle which the idea of selection has played in the world. Emerson, in "The World-Soul," says:
"He serveth the servant,
The brave he loves amain;
He kills the cripple and the sick,
And straight begins again;
For gods delight in gods,
And thrust the weak aside;
To him who scorns their charities
Their arms fly open wide."
And this was before Darwin. Indeed, the idea of selection, of acceptance and unpitying rejection, of an immanent struggle for existence in the world, is as old as the Bible—as the prophet
- ↑ Ecce Homo, IV, § 8; of. Werke, XIV, 66-7, § 132; 119, § 252.
- ↑ The Antichristian, § 7.
- ↑ Will to Power, § 52; Beyond Good and Evil, § 202.
- ↑ The Antichristian, § 7. Cf. Emerson (Representative Men, chap, i), "Enormous populations, if they be beggars, are disgusting, like hills of ants, or of fleas—the more, the worse."
- ↑ Will to Power, § 246. Emerson says, on the other hand, "The more of these drones perish, the better for the hive" (The Conduct of Life, "Fate").
