IBSEN, EMERSON AND NIETZSCHE 147 



IBSEN, EMEKSON AND NIETZSCHE; THE INDIVIDUALISTS 



By Peofessoe LEWIS WORTHINGTON SMITH 



DEAKE UNIVEESITY, DES MOINES, IA. 



THE development of various phases of individualism is one of the 

 striking phenomena of the nineteenth century. We are not yet 

 far enough away from it to be sure how it will look to our eyes when it 

 has become somewhat definitely measurable as the actual past, but it is 

 not a wild conjecture to think that it will then appear as the individ- 

 ualistic century. In the world of letters Ibsen, Emerson and Nietzsche 

 were three of the more significant, not to say the three most signifi- 

 cant, apostles of individualism. They are interesting in comparison, 

 because they represent quite different phases of the individualistic 

 spirit and find their inspiration in somewhat different sources at the 

 same time that they were contemporaneous and were each the product 

 of a general tendency of their time. They illustrate that responsiveness 

 to the common tone of an age that often surprises us in great men who 

 have seemingly been not at all subject to the same specific influences. 

 There were three major subjects of human thought within which 

 originated the presuppositions that were the foundation for individual- 

 ism. These were religion, political economy and biology with its re- 

 lated sciences. When at the house of the centurion Cornelius in 

 Coesarea, Peter said that he perceived that God was not a respecter of 

 persons, but that in every nation he that feared him and respected 

 him was acceptable to him, the Christian religion was set forward on 

 that course that was to bring man finally to a larger hope and trust 

 for himself and all his fellows. For several centuries, for the first 

 twelve hundred years following the founding of the Eoman Catholic 

 ecclesiastical system, indeed, the church meant little for either morality 

 or the individual man. It was the church itself, its organization and 

 its further establishment, tbat was of first moment, but with the 

 Protestant reformation the fundamental Christian sense of human 

 values at once became more active in society. When it became " the 

 dissidence of dissent" in the new world and particularly when it be- 

 came New England Congregationalism, that sense of value had made 

 the individual human being of first importance in the world. That 

 consequence of the development of protestantism was carried still 

 further by the weakening of Calvinism in the New England churches 

 and by the warmer recognition of the interest taken by the Son of God 

 in every man, Jew or Gentile. It was not solely because New England 



