Also, there is your proletariat. And there is your culture on summits far out of his reach. The more inaccessible it is, shining there with a radiance that never falls upon him, the less does he reflect that all is not gold that glitters. Then there is your philanthropist, foremost in culture of mind and heart, surveying the masses far beneath him, in the slime and grime of life, and doubting at last whether any labor of love can lift men up to where he thinks men ought to be; whether, after all, it can bring joy to men who are sick and sore with the load of life. Not to be partial, one may magnanimously cite your philistine also--the man of "the golden mean," the "man of sanity," as mediocrity has ever brand-marked itself, who "hates _ultra_." For the life of him your philistine cannot understand how a "reasonable" man can have any doubt about our culture. Does he not read in his favorite newspaper how gloriously we have progressed? Does he not encore the prodigious achievements of our technique? Has he not heard his crack spellbinder orate on the cultural felicity that follows our flag? Down with the disloyalty of highbrow doubters! Now it was from an entirely different side, indeed it was from an entirely different standpoint, that Friedrich Nietzsche contemplated modern culture, particularly the national culture of the German Fatherland. What horrified him was not simply the _content_, but the _criterion_, of our culture. He sharply scrutinized the _ideals_ which we set ourselves in our culture. He found not simply our achievements but our ideals, _ourselves_ even, so inferior, so vulgar, so contemptible, that he began to doubt whether even the Germans could be recognized as a culture people or not. Hence Nietzsche became the most ruthless iconoclast of our culture. Unlike the majority, unlike the scholars, the philanthropists, the philistines, Nietzsche was not moved by the misery of the masses, by the great social need of our time. He did not regret that the boon of our culture was shared by so few, inasmuch as, in his opinion, this boon was of very doubtful value. He found our life so barbarous, so culture-hostile, that he still missed the first elements of a true culture among us. Hence Nietzsche lunged against _status quo_. He did what he himself called "_unzeitmässig_," untimely. He flung a question, more burning than any other, into our time--more burning than even the social question, constituting indeed the main part of that question. It was the question as to how _man_ fared in this culture--the question as to what _man_ got out of it and as to what it got out of man.