NEO-DARWINIAN SOCIOLOGISTS 83 



Nietzsche's peculiar reaction against the naturaKstic ethics of 

 Darwin and the English utilitarians is doubtless to be explained 

 also in the light of his temperament, early training and violent 

 reaction which carried him to the extreme of conventional 

 iconoclasm. Naturalistic ethics made large place for sympathy, 

 sociability and self-sacrifice. Nietzsche, an eccentric egoist, with 

 will to power and natural selection forming an idee fixe j re-enforced 

 by the experience which came by defying, with more or less 

 success, the forces both physical and moral which seemed allied 

 against him, had to find some other explanation for the origin of 

 moral sentiments than that given by the Darwinians. 



His approach was through his specialty, philology, and he tried 

 to prove by the derivation of words used to express ethical con- 

 cepts that the moral code of Christendom was a " slave moraHty " 

 imposed by the ruling classes for their own advantage. The re- 

 sume of the process by which he obtained " enlightenment " as 

 set forth in A Genealogy of Morals indicates the pressure of his in- 

 dividualistic bias. His violence against traditional Christianity is 

 likewise explained. The Christianity with which he was most 

 familiar was that typified on the one hand by the life of Saint 

 Francis of Assisi and on the other that set forth dogmatically by 

 Albrecht Ritschl who was Professor of Systematic Theology at 

 Bonn during his student days there. The negation of the will 

 to live which found its greatest Christian example in Saint 

 Francis must necessarily call forth violent opposition from one of 

 Nietzsche's temperament and life philosophy.^ 



His study of the genesis of moral ideas is unsatisfactory from 

 biological and anthropological viewpoints, and seems strained 

 even from that of philology. To try to explain the herding in- 

 stinct among men which is so pronounced among certain species 

 of mammals as a social institution produced by the combining of 

 the many weak against the few strong, is too absurd to merit 

 serious consideration. ^ 



With Nietzsche the good is that which advances the will to live, 

 the bad, that which hinders it. But he never gets beyond the 



1 A Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, cf. Mencken, p. 143. 



2 A Genealogy of Morals, p. 17. 



