The most cunning snares laid for us by the Evil One are, in Dostoevsky’s reckoning, intellectual temptations and problems. I do not think it will be going far astray from my subject if I consider first of all the problems expressing mankind’s torturing obsessions.... What is Man? Whence comes he and whither does he return? What was he before birth, what becomes of him after death? To what Truth can mankind attain?--or even more pertinently--What _is_ Truth? With Nietzsche a new problem arose, completely different from the rest, and far from being absorbed amongst these others, it pressed straight to the forefront. As a problem it, too, has its torturing uncertainty--an uncertainty that drove Nietzsche to madness. “What can mankind accomplish? What can one single man accomplish?” The question implies the terrible apprehension that man could have been other than he is, could have accomplished--could yet accomplish--greater things, whereas he is content to take his graceless ease at the first halting-place without thought of crowning his progress. Was Nietzsche actually the first to formulate this question? I dare not affirm that he was, for I am confident he had already come across the problem amongst the Greeks and amongst the Italians of the Renaissance. But with the latter the question was answered immediately, and man turned eagerly to the domain of practical activity. The solution was sought and found unerringly in action and in the practice of the arts. I have in mind Alexander and Cæsar Borgia, Frederick II, King of the Two Sicilies, Leonardo da Vinci, and Goethe--creators, men of a superior race. For artists and for men of action the problem of the _superman_ does not exist, or is at least readily solved. Their very lives and activity provide an answer in themselves. The torturing dread begins when the problem is left unsolved, or when the interval between question and answer is protracted. The being who thinks and invents and does not act brews his own poison draught. Hearken again to William Blake: “_He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence_”--the pestilence that proved mortal to Nietzsche. “What can a man accomplish?” is the atheist’s characteristic query, and Dostoevsky exquisitely realized the fact that to deny God is inevitably to exalt man. God a myth?... Then everything is lawful! We find this idea in _The Possessed_ and it is repeated in _The Karamazovs_: “If God exists, all is His will, and from His will I cannot escape. If not; it’s all my will and I am bound to show self-will.”[101] How can a man assert his independence? Again begins that torturing dread. Everything is possible. Is it? Everything? What can one man accomplish?