returned from church on the morning of February 21, 1677, and found her gentle philosopher dead, she stood in the presence of one of the great silent tragedies of human history. CHAPTER V NIETZSCHE I From Spinoza to Nietzsche Let us dare to compress within a page or two the social aspect of philosophical thought from Spinoza to Nietzsche. Without forgetting that our purpose is to show the social problem as the dominant interest of only _many_, not all, of the greater philosophers, we may yet risk the assertion that the majority of the men who formed the epistemological tradition from Descartes to Kant were at heart concerned less with the problem of knowledge than with that of social relations. Descartes slips through this generalization; he is a man of leisure lost in the maze of a puzzle which he has not discovered so much as he has unconsciously constructed it. In Locke’s hands the puzzle is distorted into the question of “innate ideas,” in order that under cover of an innocent epistemological excursion a blow may be struck at hereditary prejudices and authoritarian teaching, and the way made straight for the advance of popular sovereignty (as against the absolutism of Hobbes), free speech, reasonable religion, and social amelioration. The dominance of the social interest is not so easily shown in the case of Leibniz; but let it be remembered none the less that epistemology was but an aside in the varied drama of Leibniz’ life, and that his head was dizzy with schemes for the betterment of this “best of all possible worlds.” Bishop Berkeley begins with _esse est percipi_ and ends with tar-water as the _solution_ of all problems. David Hume, in the midst of a life busied with politics and the discussion of social, political, and economic problems, spares a year or two for epistemology, only to use it as a handle whereby to deal a blow to dogma; he “was more damaging to religion than Voltaire, but was ingenious enough not to get the credit for it.”[121] The social incidence of philosophy in eighteenth-century France was so decided that one might describe that philosophy as part of the explosive with which the middle class undermined the _status quo_. This social emphasis continues in Comte, who cannot forget that he was once the secretary of St. Simon, and will not let us forget that the function of the philosopher is to coördinate experience with a view to the remoulding of human life. John Stuart Mill is radical first and logician afterward; and the more lasting as well as the more interesting element in Spencer is the sociological, educational, and political theory. In Kant the basic social interest is buried under epistemological cobwebs; yet not so choked but that it finds very resolute voice at last. The essence of the matter here is the return of the prodigal, the relapse of a once adventurous soul into the comfort of religious and political absolutes, categorical--and Potsdam--imperatives.