PHILOSOPHY OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. 707 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF FFJEDRICH NIETZSCHE. 



By Professor FRANK THILLY, 



PRINCETON UNIVERSITY. 



TT^VERY once in a while in the history of human thought a man 

 -*—' ■ arises who protests against the mass of tradition in custom, law, 

 morality, science, philosophy and religion, and asserts his own indi- 

 viduality. In the presence of the accumulated acquisitions of human 

 minds and human hands, he experiences a feeling of restraint and 

 dependence, he finds his thought and action tied down on every side 

 by the traditional theories and rules of past generations ; the weight of 

 ages rests as an incubus upon his soul and he longs for the free and 

 untrammeled use of his head and heart and hands. Unable any longer 

 to bear the burden of the past upon his shoulders, he casts it off, he 

 declares his independence, he asserts his individuality. He wipes the 

 slate clean, and begins to write upon it new thoughts, new values, new 

 ideals, or at least what seem to him to be new thoughts, values and 

 ideals. 



Our present age is the historical age par excellence. It studies the 

 past and shows us how the present has grown out of this past. It 

 regards everything as the product of evolution, it tells us that we are 

 what we are because our ancestors were what they were, that we do 

 what we do because they did what they did; it traces the development 

 of the thinker, the poet, the statesman, of law, morality, religion, art, 

 literature and science; it justifies our conceptions and institutions on 

 the ground that they have grown from simple beginnings and will 

 develop in their own good time into more and more complex and per- 

 fect forms. The individual is the child of the past, in him our grand- 

 fathers are speaking to the present, in him their ideals and values are 

 asserting themselves; they are the laws of the present, he is their 

 mouthpiece. Against these conceptions and values a man of our time, 

 Friedrich Nietzsche, has uttered his everlasting No. " Man alone," 

 he says, " finds himself so hard to bear. That is because he carries so 

 many strange things upon his shoulders. Like the camel he kneels 

 down and allows a heavy load to be placed on his back. Particularly, 

 the strong, burden-bearing man, in whom reverence dwells: too many 

 heavy strange words and values he loads upon his back — and now life 

 seems to him a desert." He breaks the old tables of values and de- 

 mands that new ones be set up in their stead. He is not content with 

 studying the conditions that gave rise to the ideals which we now 



