Another critic, this time a Frenchman, Alfred Fouillée by name,[1] chooses as his point of attack the Nietzschean doctrine that a struggle is welcome and beneficial to the strong, that intelligent self-seeking, accompanied by a certain willingness to take risks, is the road of progress. A struggle, argues M. Fouillée, always means an expenditure of strength, and strength, when so expended, is further weakened by the opposing strength it arouses and stimulates. Darwin is summoned from his tomb to substantiate this argument, but its exponent seems to forget (while actually stating it!) the familiar physiological axiom, so often turned to by Darwin, that strength is one of the effects of use, and the Darwinian corollary that disuse, whether produced by organized protection or in some other way, leads inevitably to weakness and atrophy. In other words, the ideal strong man of M. Fouillée's dream is one who seeks, with great enthusiasm, the readiest possible way of ridding himself of his strength. Nordau, Violet Paget and various other critics attack Nietzsche from much the same side. That is to say, they endeavor to controvert his criticism of humility and self-sacrifice and to show that the law of natural selection, with its insistence that only the fittest shall survive, is insufficient to insure human progress. Miss Paget, for example,[2] argues that if there were no belief in every man's duty to yield something to his weaker brother the race would soon become a herd of mere wild beasts. She sees humility as a sort of brake or governor, placed upon humanity to keep it from running amuck. A human being is so constituted, she says, that he necessarily looms in his own view as large as all the rest of the world put together. This distortion of values is met with in the consciousness of every individual, and if there were nothing to oppose it, it would lead to a hopeless conflict between exaggerated egos. Humility, says Miss Paget, tempers the conflict, without wholly ending it. A man's inherent tendency to magnify his own importance and to invite death by trying to force that view upon others is held in check by the idea that it is his duty to consider the welfare of those others. The objection to all this is that the picture of humility Miss Paget draws is not at all a picture of self-sacrifice, of something founded upon an unselfish idea of duty, but a picture of highly intelligent egoism. Whatever his pharisaical account of his motives, it must be obvious that her Christian gentleman is merely a man who throws bones to the dogs about him. Between such wise prudence and the immolation of the Beatitudes a wide gulf is fixed. As a matter of fact, that prudence is certainly not opposed by Nietzsche. The higher man of his visions is far from a mere brawler. He is not afraid of an open fight, and he is never held back by fear of hurting his antagonist, but he also understands that there are times for truce and guile.