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Friedrich Nietzsche is about as good a case as there is on record of a genius blasted by migraine. The originality and force of his mind, as well as the articulate music of an imaginative poet, places Nietzsche among the philosophic elect of the race. Showing that he was an unstable pituitary-centered of a certain type will throw light upon his malady, as well as upon his life and work.
I do so often; and only yesterday I had a specially vivid experience of the kind." "What was that?" "Well, I was reading Nietzsche." "Who is he?" "A German writer. It does not much matter, but I had him in my mind when I was speaking." "Well, but what does he say?" "It's not so much what he says, as what he denies." "What does he deny, then?" "Everything that you, I suppose, would assert.
Again, when the friendship ripened, we cannot well imagine Nietzsche, the younger man, being anything less than intoxicated by his senior's attention and love, and we are therefore not surprised to find him pressing Wagner forward as the great Reformer and Saviour of mankind. When the blow came it was therefore all the more severe.
John, a young magazine writer, was an anarchic disciple of Nietzsche. Masson, a painter, held to a doctrine of eternal recurrence that was petrifying. And Hall, usually so merry, could outfoot them all when he once got started on the cosmic pathos of religion and the gibbering anthropomorphisms of those who loved not to die. At such times Saxon was oppressed by these sad children of art.
He has not thought it profitable to hide his doubts and has not feared to declare openly that none of the existing philosophies suit him, and that he is trying to follow his own path. All of his work is but the absolute image of his own uncertainties, of his passionate researches, and of his constant "restlessness." At times people have believed that he was a disciple of Nietzsche.
He, too, under the Lord, is an accomplice of the Life-stream. He helps it forward, even while he opposes himself to it, just as a bulwark of submerged rocks make the tide leap landward with more foaming fury! Goethe's idea of the "Eternal Feminine" leading us "upward and on" is not at all the sentimental nonsense which Nietzsche fancied it. In a profound sense it is absolutely true.
Nietzsche, as a matter of fact, had neither the spite nor the meanness requisite for the purely personal attack. In his Ecce Homo, he tells us most emphatically: "I have no desire to attack particular persons I do but use a personality as a magnifying glass; I place it over the subject to which I wish to call attention, merely that the appeal may be stronger."
As the war progressed I became more and more impressed with the conviction that the German propaganda rested upon a materialistic foundation. I secured the writings of Nietzsche and found in them a defense, made in advance, of all the cruelties and atrocities practiced by the militarists of Germany. Nietzsche tried to substitute the worship of the "Superman" for the worship of God.
"Zarathustra's ape" he is called in the discourse. He is one of those at whose hands Nietzsche had to suffer most during his life-time, and at whose hands his philosophy has suffered most since his death. In this respect it may seem a little trivial to speak of extremes meeting; but it is wonderfully apt.
And his message and his personality are one. He is a convincing illustration of Fichte’s dictum, that any great system of philosophy is the outcome, not of the intellect, but of a man’s character. Nietzsche is not a metaphysician like Hegel, whom he abhorred. He is not a “logic-grinder,” like Mill, whom he despised. He is a moralist, like the French, whom he loved.
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