GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 57 



Nietzsche who flung to the winds all such futile 

 attempts at compromise and who first proclaimed 

 aloud to the world the inner meaning of popular 

 Darwinism, the true ethic of the great pagan revival 

 of the modern West. 



The permanent significance of Nietzsche in Western 

 literature springs from a tremendous fact. It is in 

 Nietzsche's writings that the Western mind first 

 beholds laid bare with unspeakable fidelity that 

 overmastering animal soul of the West which repre- 

 sents the individual efficient in the struggle for 

 his own interests, of which Darwin gave us the 

 science. The West was born of force. Its con- 

 ditions through millenniums of time have been the 

 product of force. All the characteristic science 

 of the West is the organized knowledge of force. 

 Yet the world-shaping tragedy of our times is that 

 the modern West does not stand for the supremacy 

 of force. It represents, on the contrary, that 

 spiritual integration of mind which is making 

 Right superior to force. The modern West repre- 

 sents the doom of the doctrine of force in history. 

 But it is Nietzsche of all the world who has voiced 

 for us the animal soul of the past as it recognizes 

 this terrible issue and as it rages against the meaning 

 of the new world which it feels to be destined to 

 overwhelm it. There is no event in humanity to 



