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Individualism and anarchism continue to denounce the state, when they ought to reform it and improve its institutions. In the meantime the world wags on. The state exists, society exists, and innumerable social institutions exist. The individual grows under the influence of other individuals, his ideas—mere spooks of his brain—yet the factors of his life, right or wrong, guide him and determine his fate. There are as rare exceptions a few lawless societies in the wild West where a few outlaws meet by chance, revolver in hand, but even among them the state of anarchy does not last long, for by habit and precedent certain rules are established, and wherever man meets man, wherever[Pg 102] they offer and accept one another's help, they co-operate or compete, they join hands or fight, they make contracts, form alliances, and establish rules, the result of which is society, the state, with all the institutions of the state, the administration, the legislature, the judiciary, with all the intricate machinery that regulates the interrelations of man to man.
The truth is that man develops into a rational, human and humane being through society by his intercourse with other men. Man is not really an individual in the sense of Stirner and Nietzsche, a being by himself and for himself, having no obligations to his fellows. Man is a part of the society through which he originated and to which he belongs and to overlook, to neglect and to ignore his relations to society, not to recognize definite obligations or rules of conduct which we formulate as duties is the grossest mistake philosophers can make, and this becomes obvious if we consider the nature of man as a social being as Aristotle has defined it.
The assertion of selfhood and the hankering after originality make Nietzsche the exponent of the absolute uniqueness of everything particular, and he goes to the extreme of denying all kinds of universality—even that of formal laws (the so-called uniformities of nature), reason, and especially its application in the field of practical life, morality. His ideal is "Be thyself! Be unique! Be original!" Properly speaking, we should not use the term ideal when speaking of Nietzsche's maxims of life, for the conception of an ideal is based upon a recognition of some kind of universality, and Nietzsche actually sneers at any one having ideals. The adherents of Nietzsche speak of their master as "der Einzige," i. e., "the unique one," and yet (in spite of the truth that every thing particular is in its way unique) the uniformities of nature are so real and unfailing that Nietzsche is simply the representative of a type which according to the laws of history and mental evolution naturally and inevitably appears whenever the philosophy of nominalism[Pg 104] reaches its climax. He would therefore not be unique even if he were the only one that aspires after a unique selfhood; but the fact is that there are a number of Nietzsches, he happening to be the best known of his type. Other advocates of selfhood, of course, will be different from Nietzsche in many unimportant details, but they will be alike in all points that are essential and characteristic. One of these Nietzsches is George Moore, a Britain who is scarcely familiar with the writings of his German double, but a few quotations from his book, Confessions of a Young Man, will show that he can utter thoughts which might have been written by Friedrich Nietzsche himself. George Moore says:
"I was not dissipated, but I loved the abnormal" (p. 18).
"I was a model young man indeed" (p. 20).
"I boasted of dissipations" (p. 19).
"I say again, let general principles be waived; it will suffice for the interest of these pages if it be understood that brain-instincts have always been, and still are, the initial and the determining powers of my being" (p. 47).
George Moore, like Nietzsche, is one of Schopenhauer's disciples who has become sick of pessimism. He says:
"That odious pessimism! How sick I am of it" (p. 310).
When George Moore speaks of God he thinks of him in the old-fashioned way as a big self, an individual and particular being. Hence he denies him. God is as dead as any pagan deity. George Moore says:
"To talk to us, the legitimate children of the nineteenth century, of logical proofs of the existence of God, strikes us in just the same light as the logical proof of the existence of Jupiter Ammon" (p. 137).
George Moore is coarse in comparison with Nietzsche. Nietzsche is no cynic; he is pure-hearted and noble by nature. Moore is voluptuous and vulgar. Both are avowed immoralists, and if the principle of an unrestrained egotism be right, George Moore is as good as Nietzsche, and any criminal given to the most abominable vices would not be worse than either.
Nietzsche feels the decadence of the age and longs for health; but he attributes the cause of his own decadence to the Christian ideals of virtue, love, and sympathy with others. George Moore cherishes the same views; he says:
"We are now in a period of decadence, growing steadily more and more acute" (p. 239).
"Respectability ... continues to exercise a meretricious and enervating influence on literature" (p. 240).
"Pity, that most vile of all vile virtues, has never been known to me. The great pagan world I love knew it not" (p. 200).
"The philanthropist is the Nero of modern times" (p. 185).
Both Nietzsche and Moore long for limitless freedom; but Moore seems more consistent, for he lacks the ideal of the overman and extends freedom to the sex relation, saying:
"Marriage—what an abomination! Love—yes, but not marriage...freedom limitless" (p. 168-169).
Moore loves art, but his view of art is cynical, and here too he is unlike Nietzsche; he says:
"Art is not nature. Art is nature digested. Art is a sublime excrement" (p. 178).
Both believe in the coming of a great social deluge. George Moore says:
"The French revolution will compare with the revolution that is to come, that must come, that is inevitable, as a puddle on the road-side compares with the sea. Men will hang like pears on every lamp-post, in every great quarter of London, there will be an electric guillotine that will decapitate the rich like hogs in Chicago" (p. 343).
Ideals are regarded as superstitions, and belief in ideas is deemed hypocritical. George Moore says:
"In my heart of hearts I think myself a cut above you, because I do not believe in leaving the world better than I found it; and you, exquisitely hypocritical reader, think that you are a cut above me because you say you would leave the world better than you found it" (p. 354).
The deeds of a man, his thoughts and aspirations, which constitute his spiritual self, count for nothing; the body alone is supposed to be real, and thus after death a pig is deemed more useful than a Socrates. Continues Moore:
"The pig that is being slaughtered as I write this line will leave the world better than it found it, but you will leave only a putrid carcass fit for nothing but the grave" (p. 353).
