NEO-DARWINIAN SOCIOLOGISTS 83 
Nietzsche’s peculiar reaction against the naturalistic 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 idée fixe, 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 morality ”’ 
imposed by the ruling classes for their own advantage. The ré- 
sumé 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. 
