708 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



uphold; indeed, he regards the historic sense as the cause of the weak- 

 ness of our times. We must cease feeling that we are epigoni. It is 

 the function of the philosopher, in his opinion, to create new values, 

 new ideals, a new civilization. " The real philosophers/' he declares, 

 " are commanders and legislators ; they say : Thus shall it be ; they 

 alone determine the whither and wherefore of man ; with creative hands 

 they touch the future — their knowing is creation, their creation is legis- 

 lation, their will for truth is — will for power." " Blessed it must seem 

 to you to press your hands upon thousands of years as upon wax," says 

 Zarathustra (in Nietzsche's book: 'Thus spake Zarathustra'). 



What our estimate of the world, of life and of our civilization will be 

 must depend, of course, upon our values, upon our standards, upon our 

 ideal, upon what we really prize. Hence, in order to understand our 

 philosopher and his iconoclasm, we must understand his fundamental 

 proposition, his basal thought, his ideal, the standard with which he 

 approaches things. We shall then be prepared to understand why he 

 objected so strenuously to our times, why he waged such a relentless 

 war against his contemporaries, and earned for himself the title of a 

 Kampfer gegen seine Zeit. I shall not here attempt to trace the devel- 

 opment of his ideas and to show how he gradually grew into them. 

 Nor shall I attempt to point out the contradictions in his thoughts or 

 even offer a criticism of them. It will be sufficient for my purpose to 

 find the motif of his philosophy, to discover the fundamental prin- 

 ciple upon which his thinking rests, and to show how his thorough- 

 going opposition to the things around him more or less logically fol- 

 lowed from it. 



Schopenhauer teaches that the will is the fundamental principle 

 of life. This will to be, this will to live, is a blind striving, a constant 

 struggle for existence, a battle against death which we are bound to 

 lose at last. " The life of most men is a weary yearning and torture, 

 a dreamy tottering through the four ages toward death, with a series 

 of trivial thoughts as an accompaniment. They are like a clock-work 

 which is wound up and goes without knowing why; and every time a 

 man is conceived and born, the clock of human life is wound up anew in 

 order to grind out the same old hackneyed tune which it has played 

 so many countless times before, measure for measure, beat for beat, 

 with insignificant variations." It follows from the very nature of 

 the human will that life should be full of pain and misery. And be- 

 cause it is full of pain, says Schopenhauer, it is bad, it is an evil, 

 and not to be is better than to be. It also follows from the nature of 

 the will that it is selfish and base. Men are knaves or fools or both. 

 The end and aim of the average man's existence is to keep himself 

 alive, and he will do anything he can to eke out his petty life. He is 

 a cruel, unjust and cowardly egoist, whom fear makes honest and 

 vanity sociable. And the only way to succeed in this world is to be 



