"What does he deny, then?" "Everything that you, I suppose, would assert. I should conjecture, at least, that you believe in progress, democracy, and all the rest of it." "Well?" "Well, he repudiates all that. Everything that you would reckon as progress, he reckons as decadence. Democracy he regards, with all that it involves, as a revolt of the weak against the strong, of the bad against the good, of the herd against the master. Every great society, in his view, is aristocratic, and aristocratic in the sense that the many are deliberately and consciously sacrificed to the few; and that, not as a painful necessity, but with a good conscience, in free obedience to the universal law of the world. 'Be strong, be hard' are his ultimate ethical principles. The modern virtues, or what we affect to consider such, sympathy, pity, justice, thrift, unselfishness and the like, are merely symptoms of moral degeneration. The true and great and noble man is above all things selfish; and the highest type of humanity is to be sought in Napoleon or Cæsar Borgia." "But that's mere raving!" "So you are pleased to say; and so, indeed, it really may be. But not simply because it contradicts those current notions which we are embodying, as fast as we can, in our institutions. It is precisely those notions that it challenges; and it is idle to meet it with a bare denial." "I can conceive no better way of meeting it!" "Perhaps, for purposes of battle. Yet, even so, you would surely be stronger if you had reason for your faith." "But I think my reason sufficient--those are not the ideas of the age." "But for all you know they may be those of the next." "Well, that will be its concern." "But surely, on your own theory, it must also be yours; for you said that the later was also the better. And the better, I suppose, is what you want to attain." "Well!" "Well then, in supporting the ideas and institutions generally current, you may be hindering instead of helping the realization of the Good you want to achieve." "But I don't believe Nietzsche's ideas ever could represent the Good!" "Why not?" "Because I don't." "But, at any rate, do you abandon the position that we can take the ideas of our time as a final criterion?" "I suppose so--I don't know--I'm sure there's something in it! Do you believe yourself that they have no import for us?" "I didn't say that; but I think we have to find what the import is. We cannot substitute for our own judgment the mere fact of a current convention, any more than we can substitute the mere fact of the tendency of Nature. For, after all, it is the part of a moral reformer to modify the convention. Or do you not think so?" "Perhaps," he admitted, "it may be!"