faith is gone or shaken, and the mere blind mechanical impulse of knowing lags (for it may be as blind and unreasoning as any other), what, in the absence of some other faith, will keep it going, what purpose shall inspire it?[1] Nietzsche thinks that there is more or less restlessness and inner discontent among scientific men today: "science as a means of benumbing oneself (Selbst-Betäubung)—do you know that?"[2] The, supreme value which he himself postulates is life, ever stronger and more victorious life, life rising to the superhuman and divine. With such an ideal he has something with which to measure the worth of other things: now science may receive a direction, a meaning, a limit, a method, a right to be.[3] Truth is valuable so far as it helps in attaining the great end, is necessary to its attainment; but that which gives it its value, fixes also the limits of its value, and to the extent that truth would militate against life, not to say undo it, its sacredness and authority cease. Life is beyond true and false, as it is beyond good and evil.
Instances of the utility of truth and science it is needless to give—they are on every hand. But instances of the utility of error and illusion may be in order. I have just referred to the utility of the error which most men make about the physical world. Nietzsche also recognizes—as we have seen—the beneficial rôle which illusions of free-will and responsibility have played in the past."[4] a In social life and intercourse now there may be useful illusions. There is no duty to see things too clearly, too exactly. It was one of Zarathustra's prudences to be to some extent blind in face of men, to allow himself to be deceived by them.[5] Nietzsche outgrew, but did not regret his illusions about Wagner—in certain years, he remarks, we have the right to see things and men falsely, to have magnifying glasses to give us hope.[6] There is a value in illusions like those of eternal love, eternal revenge, eternal mourning—the feelings become ennobled in this way, even if the event proves that the
- ↑ Genealogy etc., III, § 25.
- ↑ Ibid., III, § 23. Pascal had thrown out a similar suggestion (see the reference in "David Strauss etc.," sect. 8).
- ↑ Ibid., § 24.
- ↑ Human, etc., § 40 (cf. § 33); Werke, XIII, 204, § 458; The Wanderer etc., § 350.
- ↑ Zarathustra, II, xxi.
- ↑ Werke, XIV, 375, § 254; cf. 380, § 264.
