But he who rejects truth cuts himself loose from the fountain-head of the waters of life. He may deify selfhood, but his own self will die of its self-apotheosis. His divinity is not a true God-incarnation, it is a mere assumption and the self-exaltation of a pretender. Nietzsche's philosophy is more consistent than it appears on its face. Being the negation of the right of consistency, its lack of consistency is its most characteristic feature. If the intellect is truly, as Schopenhauer suggests, the servant of the will, then there is no authority in reason, and arguments have no strength. All quarrels are simply questions of power. Then, there is might, but not right; right is simply the _bon plaisir_ of might. Then there is no good nor evil; good is that which I will, bad is that which threatens to thwart my will. Good and evil are distinctions invented for the enslavement of the masses, but the free man, the genius, the aristocrat, who craftily tramples the masses under foot, knows no difference. He is beyond good and evil. This, indeed, is the consequence which Nietzsche boldly draws. It is a consistent anarchism; it is unmoralism, a courageous denial of ethical rule; and a proud aristocratism, the ruthless shout of triumph of the victor who hails the doctrine of the survival of the strongest and craftiest as a "joyful science." Nietzsche would not refute the arguments of those who differ from him; for refutation of other views does not befit a positive mind that posits its own truth. "What have I to do with refutations!" exclaims Nietzsche in the Preface to his Genealogy of Morals. The self is lord. There is no law for the lord, and so he denounces the ethics of Christianity as slave-morality, and preaches the lord-morality of the strong which is self-assertion. Morality itself is denounced by Nietzsche as immoral. Morality is the result of evolution, and man's moral ideas are products of conditions climatic, social, economical, national, religious, and what not. Why should we submit to the tyranny of a rule which after all proves to be a relic of barbarism? Nietzsche rejects morality as incompatible with the sovereignty of selfhood, and, pronouncing our former judgment a superstition, he proposes "a transvaluation of all values." The self must be established as supreme ruler, and therefore all rules, maxims, principles, must go, for the very convictions of a man are mere chains that fetter the freedom of his soul. [1] _La Gaya Scienza_, German edition, p. 154; and _passim_ in _Menschliches_, etc. [2] For further details of a refutation of this wrong conception of geometry, see the author's _Foundation of Mathematics_. A PHILOSOPHY OF ORIGINALITY