Nietzsche in spite of believing that the latter helped on the war, can readily be seen by grouping a few of Dr. Figgis's appreciations: "The passion of his flaming soul, his sincerity, his sense of beauty, his eloquence, the courage of his struggle with ill health, the pathos of that lonely soul craving for sympathy, his deep psychological insight and sense of prophetic mission - all these gave him a spell which is hard to resist' (p. 8). "Nietzsche's life showed not only great heroism in its struggle with ill health, but was, in its noble simplicity and poverty and unwearied interest in high things, an example to an age sunk in vulgar money-making" (p. 49). "There is always something of the eternal undergraduate about Nietzsche. The undergraduate is not insincere. But he honestly believes himself more shocking than he is. He is astounded alike at his cleverness, his melancholy, and his profundity. A little later he learns that all clever young men go through this phase" (p. 248). "In a new age, very childlike, he calls to all with the spirit of youth, to try all experiments, to shrink back neither for fear nor for love, neither for God nor for man, neither for good nor for evil" [not 'bad'] "This call, together with his strange, mystical sense of the eternal in the transient and, therefore, the value of the moment; this paradox of the ungodly who yet worships, of the immoralist" [supermoralist] "who preaches self-control, of the Antichrist who could mount the Cross, the iconoclast who could yet set up a religion, this it is which gives to Friederich Nietzsche a charm that will outlast all the febrile puerilities of his attacks on Christianity" [conventional pietistic Christianism] "and all the superficial snobbery" [hatred of false assertions of equality] "of his contempt" [æsthetic disgust] "for the common man" (p. 263 f.). "Few Christians attain so high a standard as did Nietzsche' (p. 307).

Unfortunately Dr. Figgis is not always happy in seeing through Nietzsche's thrusts against conventional pietism. He quotes the text against Nietzsche-"He that is greatest among you let him be your minister," and has evidently failed to see that Nietzsche finds the text thus often interpreted among the clergy that he knew: "He that is a minister among you let him be the greatest." What Jesus evidently meant was this: "If I,

your Lord and master, wash your feet, ye should wash one another's feet." Nietzsche would have understood that. And it must be remembered that he had a splendid reverence for men and women that practised Christianity in a sincere way with distinction of spirit and joy in life. Such distinction and the concealed joy of anticipated freedom is the undertone of the Lord's Prayer. Nietzsche was more Christlike than he knew when he said: "I am the voice of the day after to-morrow." [Give us this day the bread of to-morrow, when the Kingdom of the Superman comes; free us from the sense of strained responsibility; bring us into the large spaces where we shall no more suffer testing, but be as the children of the household in the many ethereal mansions.]

We can close our notice of Dr. Figgis's book in no better way than by quoting his summary of the deep significance of Nietzsche: "The more his writings are read, the more difficult will it be for Christians to go on trying to serve both God and Mammon. They cannot go on forever halting between two opinions, directing their lives by one standard and professing lip service to another. They will have to come out and no longer be of those Limbo-spirits, 'neither for God nor for His enemies'" (p. 308).

One is inclined to introduce Mr. Salter's investigation of Nietzsche's thought by setting down Nietzsche's special hatreds in some such way as this: These things he abhorred and despised and fought against:-pacifistic ethics, Bolshevik politics, what Mr. Roosevelt would call "pussy-foot" religion, and bourgeois art.

These hatreds sincere Prussian junkerism and Nietzsche may share in common, but oh the difference! This the junkers are of course unable to see, for spiritual things are spiritually discerned. Nietzsche loves the peasants, tolerates the pacifists and the bourgeois, discriminates among the pietists. And we shall find Mr. Salter marshalling before us patent proof that Nietzsche would not have been found among the subservient servants and theologians and other apostles of Kultur, who complacently found reasons for Germany's actions after the German Emperor and his advisers had committed Germany to a war, and who

continued to plead "self-defence" and "necessity," whereas Nietzsche would have seen the barbarism and treachery of the war lords whose ambitions he anticipated immediately after 1870.

It is a pleasure to pay tribute to Mr. Salter's scholarly, discriminating, and sympathetic book. He is not an apologist for Nietzsche, but lets the poet-philosopher speak for himself. We venture to predict that Mr. Salter's book will long rank as the most careful study in English of Nietzsche the Thinker.

Although Mr. Salter wrote the substance of his book before the war, he gives us enough material wherewith to judge whether Nietzsche would have approved the war and the German methods. Nor has anyone the right to hold a paradoxical philosopher responsible for perversions of his doctrines, especially since he warns his readers that only the highest spiritual lovers of a large Humanity can be edified by his work, and begs that he be not judged by foolish "first disciples." Seeing the strong points in Prussianism, Nietzsche, like many of us, admires them for their strength and efficiency; but his disgust would have become actually physical had he known that a pseudo-Darwinian Bernhardi would have quoted one of his sayings out of its context, literary and biographical, and called it a saying of "the Master.

Dr. Salter is right in claiming that Nietzsche's philosophy cannot be studied apart from his life, for Nietzsche himself held it as an article of his philosophical creed that the true view of life is personalistic, and that a man's visions must be studied in the light of the man's life. Nietzsche's friends regarded him as pure and chaste, independent but law-abiding, tolerant toward men of other nationalities, a lover of France, and a critical admirer of England; he was eager to aid the weak when they needed help and had not the power to help themselves; and when his brain was giving way and the shadows of death were approaching, he used to sign his poor demented letters "Dionysus," or "The Crucified One," thus evidencing in articulo mortis his life-long effort to synthesize Greek joyousness and Christian self-sacrifice.

Turning now to our special theme, let us note some samples of Nietzsche's attitude toward Germany as represented to-day

by her ruling classes. We shall list his views under convenient headings, although the topics of course overlap in all sorts of ways. With only occasional reference we include the biography by his sister, Frau Foerster, in all that we have to say concerning Nietzsche.

"KULTUR."-"The German is magnificent in war; he is admirable as an astute investigator and scholar, removed from the world; but otherwise he is hardly a pleasing person" (Foerster, I, p. 207).

"Of the German of to-day he remarks: 'It costs dear to come to power: power makes stupid. . . . Can one interest oneself in the German Empire? Where is the new thought? To rule and to help the highest thought to victory-that is the only thing that could interest me in Germany.' Of Bismarck, presumably, he said: 'Strong. Strong. Strong and mad! Not great!' 'Power is tiresome-witness the empire''

(Salter, p. 257).

Mr. Salter shows that there is but one primary reference to the 'blond beast' in all of Nietzsche's writings, and that referred to the early blond inhabitants of Europe, whether Celtic, Teutonic, or Slavic, whether Hellenic or Roman. He was referring to what he supposed to be the ethnic preparation for culture.

"It is a trouble with the Germans that they know how to obey, though not to command. . . . ." (p. 376).

"He really has a twofold classification of great men, the highest, rarest type simply giving directions to mankind, but not actually ruling it-ruling being a function of the others" (p. 393).

"German philosophers in particular he finds not clean and straight in their thinking. . . . ." (p. 23).

"Better allow yourself to be robbed than have scarecrows about you to prevent it'" (p. 118).

"Everything good is instinct,' which is not the same as saying, Every instinct is good" (p. 353).

DEGENERATION.-"It seemed to him that the Germans had grown a degree more dishonest, more greedy of favor, more grasping and more thoughtless since the war [1870], and it de

pressed him to see that the venerable, free-thinking theologian [David Strauss] should glorify this state of affairs and be the herald of public self-sufficiency" (Foerster, I, p. 295). He wrote a stinging attack on Strauss's nationalistic views; but when Strauss died Nietzsche expressed the hope that the old man had not seen the criticism and been hurt by it.

"Nietzsche does not think highly of 'agitators.'

This is why he might have had reserves as to some who call themselves Nietzscheans to-day-for, he observes, with a touch of humor, the first disciples of a doctrine prove nothing against it" (Salter, p. 403).

"When the war was over [1870], the luxury, the contempt of the French, the nationalism . . . . displeased me'” (p. 74).

NATIONALISM.—"How absurd it is to extol and glorify a whole nation. We must single out individuals. . . . The only thing that interests me in a nation is its attitude toward the training of individuals. There has never yet been a

superman.

Verily even the greatest men I found-all

too human'" (Foerster, II. p. 202 f.).

[The great] "are gentlemen, but in an intellectual and spiritual sense" [not national] (Salter, p. 396).

"Nietzsche expresses the hope that joy in foreign originality, without desire to ape it, will some day be the mark of a new culture" (p. 397).

men of power, took great and fearful responsibilities, but were spoiled by some defect" (p. 400).

666

Inspired by a narrow patriotism and a false racial pride. . . . . "German" becomes an argument, Deutschland, Deutschland über alles a principle, the Germans are proclaimed as the "moral world order" in history. . . . . Deutschland . . I fear that was the end of German philosophy'" (p. 465).

"A poor Venetian gondolier is ever a better figure than a Berlin Geheimrath, and, in the end, indeed, a better man' (p. 469).

"He even ventured to say that [the English] are ahead of all other people in philosophy, natural science, history, in the field of discovery, and in the spreading of culture. ." (p. 98).