NIETZSCHE AND OTHER EXPONENTS OF INDIVIDUALISM BY PAUL CARUS CHICAGO LONDON THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY 1914 [Illustration: Friedrich Nietzsche. Statue by Klein.] TABLE OF CONTENTS ANTI-SCIENTIFIC TENDENCIES DEUSSEN'S RECOLLECTIONS EXTREME NOMINALISM A PHILOSOPHY OF ORIGINALITY THE OVERMAN ZARATHUSTRA A PROTEST AGAINST HIMSELF NIETZSCHE'S PREDECESSOR EGO-SOVEREIGNTY ANOTHER NIETZSCHE NIETZSCHE'S DISCIPLES THE PRINCIPLE OF VALUATION INDIVIDUALISM CONCLUSION INDEX ANTI-SCIENTIFIC TENDENCIES. Philosophies are world-conceptions presenting three main features: (1) A systematic comprehension of the knowledge of their age; (2) An emotional attitude toward the cosmos; and (3) A principle that will serve as a basis for rules of conduct. The first feature determines the worth of the several philosophical systems in the history of mankind, being the gist of that which will last, and giving them strength and backbone. The second one, however, appeals powerfully to the sentiments of those who are imbued with the same spirit and thus constitutes its immediate acceptability; while the ethics of a philosophy becomes the test by which its use and practicability can be measured. The author's ideal has been to harmonize these three features by making the first the regulator of the second and a safe basis of the third. What we need is truth; our fundamental emotion must be truthfulness, and our ethics must be a living of the truth. Truth is not something that we can fashion according to our pleasure; it is not subjective; its very nature is objectivity. But we must render it subjective by a love of truth; we must make it our own, and by doing so our conduct in life will unfailingly adjust itself. Former philosophies made the subjective element predominant, and thus every philosopher worked out a philosophy of his own, endeavoring to be individual and original. The aim of our own philosophy has been to reduce the subjective to its proper sphere, and to establish, in agreement with the scientific spirit of the age, a philosophy of objective validity. It is a well known experience that the march of progress does not advance in a straight line but proceeds in epicycles. Man seems to tire of the rigor of truth. From time to time he wants fiction. A strict adherence to exact methods becomes monotonous to clever minds lacking the power of concentration, and they gladly hail vagaries. Truth, they claim, is relative, knowledge mere opinion, and poetry had better replace science. Then they say: Error, be thou our guide; Error, thou art a liberator from the tyranny of truth. Glory be to Error! Similar retrograde movements take place from time to time in art. Classical taste changes with romantic tendencies. Goethe, Schiller and Lessing are followed by Schlegel and Tieck, Mozart and Beethoven by Wagner.