"No," said the evolutionists, "we do not believe in a moral order of things, although our doctrine does indeed seem to be a reflection of such an order; neither do we believe in God: but we certainly pin our faith to our little idol Evolution, and feel quite convinced that it is going to make us muddle through to perfection somehow--look at our proofs!" And what are these proofs? On all sides they are falling to bits, and we are quickly coming to the conclusion that an assembly of facts can prove nothing--save the inability of a scientist to play the rôle of a creative poet. Nietzsche was one of the first to see, that if Becoming were a reliable hypothesis, it must be supported by different principles from those of the Darwinian school, and he spared no pains in sketching out these different principles.[49] "These English psychologists--what do they really mean?" Nietzsche demands. "We always find them voluntarily or involuntarily at the same task of pushing to the front the _partie honteuse_ of our inner world, and looking for the efficient, governing and decisive principle in that precise quarter where the intellectual self-respect of the race would be the most reluctant to find it--that is to say, in slothfulness of habit, or in forgetfulness, or in blind and fortuitous mechanism and association of ideas, or in some factor that is purely passive, reflex, molecular, or fundamentally stupid,--what is the real motive power which always impels these psychologists in precisely this direction?"[50] Not one of these advocates of mechanism, however, realized how profoundly he was degrading man, and how seriously he had therefore sullied all human achievement. In their scientific _réchauffé_ of the Christian concept of man's depravity, they all had the most hearty faith, and, as there was little in their over-populated and industrial country to contradict their conclusions, they did not refrain from passing these conclusions into law. We can detect nothing in this greatest scientific achievement of the last century which seriously resists or opposes our heritage in the realm of the religious spirit. In their fundamentals, the two are one; And when we take them both to task, and try to discover their influence upon the world, we wonder not so much why Art is so bad, but why Art has survived at all. For, though for the moment we may exclude the influence of earlier English thought upon general artistic achievement, at least the degraded condition of Art at the present day cannot be divorced in this manner from more recent English speculation, for even Mr. Bosanquet counts Darwin and Lyell among those who have ushered in the new renaissance of art in England![51] "At present," says Nietzsche, "nobody has any longer the courage for separate rights, for rights of domination, for a feeling of reverence for himself and his equals,--for pathos of distance,... and even our politics are morbid from this want of courage!"[52]