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This, then, is the midnight song—

"Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht!
Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?
'Ich schlief, ich schlief—
Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht:—
Die Welt ist tief,
Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht.
Tief ist ihr Weh—
Lust—tiefer noch als Herzeleid:
Weh spricht: Vergeh!
Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit—
—will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit!'"

6.

Such is he, then, this warlike mystic, poet and thinker, this immoralist who is never tired of preaching. Coming to him fresh from the English philosophers, one feels transported to another world. The Englishmen are all patient spirits, whose natural bent is towards the accumulation and investigation of a mass of small facts in order thereby to discover a law. The best of them are Aristotelian minds. Few of them fascinate us personally or seem to be of very complex personality. Their influence lies more in what they do than in what they are. Nietzsche, on the other hand, like Schopenhauer, is a guesser, a seer, an artist, less interesting in what he does than in what he is.

Little as he feels himself a German, he nevertheless continues the metaphysical and intuitive tradition of German philosophy and has the German thinker's profound dislike of any utilitarian point of view. In his passionate aphoristical form he is unquestionably original; in the substance of his thought he reminds one here and there of many another writer, both of contemporary Germany and of France; but he evidently regards, it as perfectly absurd that he should have to thank a contemporary for anything, and storms like a German at all those who resemble him in any point.

I have already mentioned how strongly he reminds one of Ernest Renan in his conception of culture and in his hope of an aristocracy of intellect that could seize the dominion of the world. Nevertheless he has not one appreciative word to say for Renan.

I have also alluded to the fact that Eduard von Hartmann was his predecessor in his fight against Schopenhauer's morality of pity. In this author, whose talent is indisputable, even though his importance may not correspond with his extraordinary reputation, Nietzsche, with the uncritical injustice of a German university professor, would only see a charlatan. Hartmann's nature is of heavier stuff than Nietzsche's. He is ponderous, self-complacent, fundamentally Teutonic, and, in contrast to Nietzsche, entirely unaffected by French spirit and southern sunshine. But there are points of resemblance between them, which are due to historical conditions in the Germany that reared them both.

In the first place, there was something analogous in their positions in life, since both as artillerymen had gone through a similar schooling; and in the second place, in their culture, inasmuch as the starting-point of both is Schopenhauer and both nevertheless retain a great respect for Hegel, thus uniting these two hostile brothers in their veneration. They are further in agreement in their equally estranged attitude to Christian piety and Christian morality, as well as in their contempt, so characteristic of modern Germany, for every kind of democracy.

Nietzsche resembles Hartmann in his attacks on socialists and anarchists, with the difference that Hartmann's attitude is here more that of the savant, while Nietzsche has the bad taste to delight in talking about "anarchist dogs," expressing in the same breath his own loathing of the State. Nietzsche further resembles Hartmann in his repeated demonstration of the impossibility of the ideals of equality and of peace, since life is nothing but inequality and war: "What is good? To be brave is good. I do not say, the good cause sanctifies war, but the good war sanctifies every cause." Like his predecessor, he dwells on the necessity of the struggle for power and on the supposed value of war to culture.

In both these authors, comparatively independent as they are, the one a mystical natural philosopher, the other a mystical immoralist, is reflected the all-dominating militarism of the new German Empire. Hartmann approaches on many points the German snobbish national feeling. Nietzsche is opposed to it on principle, as he is to the statesman "who has piled up for the Germans a new tower of Babel, a monster in extent of territory and power and for that reason called great," but something of Bismarck's spirit broods nevertheless over the works of both. As regards the question of war, the only difference between them is that Nietzsche does not desire war for the sake of a fantastic redemption of the world, but in order that manliness may not become extinct.

In his contempt for woman and his abuse of her efforts for emancipation Nietzsche again agrees with Hartmann, though only in so far as both here recall Schopenhauer, whose echo Hartmann is in this connection. But whereas Hartmann is here only a moralising doctrinaire with a somewhat offensive dash of pedantry, one can trace beneath Nietzsche's attacks on the female sex that subtle sense of woman's dangerousness which points to painful experience. He does not seem to have known many women, but those he did know, he evidently loved and hated, but above all despised. Again and again he returns to the unfitness of the free and great spirit for marriage. In many of these utterances there is a strongly personal note, especially in those which persistently assert the necessity of a solitary life for a thinker. But as regards the less personal arguments about woman, old-world Germany here speaks through the mouth of Nietzsche, as through that of Hartmann; the Germany whose women, in contrast to those of France and England, have for centuries been relegated to the domestic and strictly private life. We may recognise in these German writers generally that they have an eye for the profound antagonism and perpetual war between the sexes, which Stuart Mill neither saw nor understood. But the injustice to man and the rather tame fairness to woman, in which Mill's admirable emancipatory attempt occasionally results, is nevertheless greatly to be preferred to Nietzsche's brutal unfairness, which asserts that in our treatment of women we ought to return to "the vast common sense of old Asia."

Finally, in his conflict with pessimism Nietzsche had Eugen Dhring (especially in his Werth des Lebens) as a forerunner, and this circumstance seems to have inspired him with so much ill-will, so much exasperation indeed, that in a polemic now open, now disguised, he calls Dhring his ape. Dhring is a horror to him as a plebeian, as an Antisemite, as the apostle of revenge, and as the disciple of the Englishmen and of Comte; but Nietzsche has not a word to say about Dhring's very remarkable qualities, to which such epithets as these do not apply. But we can easily understand, taking Nietzsche's own destiny into consideration, that Dhring, the blind man, the neglected thinker who despises official scholars, the philosopher who teaches outside the universities, who, in spite of being so little pampered by life, loudly proclaims his love of life—should appear to Nietzsche as a caricature of himself. This was, however, no reason for his now and then adopting Dhring's abusive tone. And it must be confessed that, much as Nietzsche wished to be what, for that matter, he was—a Polish szlachcic, a European man of the world and a cosmopolitan thinker—in one respect he always remained the German professor: in the rude abuse in which his uncontrolled hatred of rivals found vent; and, after all, his only rivals as a modern German philosopher were Hartmann and Dhring.