reflecting student, harassed in various ways, might have, and is essentially Schopenhauerian in the manner in which it is described. But though he felt the glory of nature's life, he did not set up nature as a model, then or at any time. In a striking passage in one of his later books, Beyond Good and Evil, he speaks of the impossibility of living "according to nature." Nature, he says, is wasteful, indifferent, without purpose or consideration, pity or justice, at once fearful, desert-like, and uncertain, indifference itself being power—one recalls Matthew Arnold's sonnet "In Harmony with Nature." The Stoics really put their moral ideal into nature—and then proceeded to find it natural![1] c Indeed, Nietzsche dissents from the whole conception, so common in our day, of morality and life as consisting in adjustment to external conditions. To be determined by our environment, rather than to shape it more or less ourselves, is to him a sign of decadence.[2] Much that looks like a simple effect of environment is, he urges, really the result of an active adaptation from within—exactly the same circumstances being treated in different ways (according to the nature of the inner impulse).[3] He criticises Spencer and Darwin for overvaluing outer conditions[4] and would probably have agreed with William James against John Fiske and Grant Allen in their famous controversy about "Great Men" some years ago. d A genius, he says, is not explained by the conditions of his rise,[5] and he counts it one of the weaknesses of modern life that we no longer know how to act, and can only react on incitement from without—examples being historians, critics, analyzers, interpreters, observers, collectors, readers, and scientific men in general, i.e., all who merely note what is and do not create.[6] It is from nowhere save from within and from the innermost impulses of our nature that Nietzsche takes his moral ideal.
Yes, so strong is the idealizing tendency with him that he refuses even to take the dominating morality of our time as the ideal of morality. At present the average man, the social man, is in the foreground and everything is estimated from the
