150 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



It was in the same spirit that he spoke slightingly of travel. Man 

 could find nothing in foreign countries beyond what he took there, 

 because, if he would be fully himself, if he would bring himself to 

 completion, he would find the whole world in himself. That was the 

 sufficient warrant for feeling that society was not important, but man 

 the individual, man, too, not as in society and a part of it, but man as 

 a separate entity realizing his kinship with the divine in his own way 

 for himself. 



There is this same word again in the conclusion of " The American 

 Scholar." 



Is it not the chief disgrace of the world, not to be a unit — not to be 

 reckoned one character — not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was 

 created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thou- 

 sand, of the party, the section, to which we belong? . . . We will walk on our 

 own feet; we will speak our own minds. ... A nation of men will for the first 

 time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which 

 also inspires all men. 



The background for the individualism of the German philosopher 

 Nietzsche was in most respects very different from that of Emerson. 

 There was this much in common between them that they both came of 

 clerical stock and that in a way they both reacted from the religious 

 bias that seemed so to have been given to their lives. Beyond that 

 superficial resemblance in the influences playing upon them, they 

 differed radically in the way in which they responded to the teach- 

 ings of Christianity. Emerson may be said to have been a natural 

 development of the puritan spirit, unique, iconoclastic, reconstruct- 

 ive, to be sure, and yet a puritan clergyman, who, as Woodberry 

 says, never wholly escaped the black coat. In every fiber of his being 

 he was first and last a moralist, one who passed out of the negations 

 of puritanism to its affirmations, and yet essentially a puritan moralist. 

 The one thing that most marks Nietzsche's individualism, that dis- 

 tinguishes it vitally and unalterably from Emerson's, is its intense 

 opposition to Christian morality. This hatred of the whole Christian 

 system has its ground in his conception of Jewish morality as a slave 

 morality. Christian ethics are, to his view, the product of a religious 

 system and teaching, the end and purpose of which is that of giving 

 weakness an advantage over strength, of making the slave the ultimate 

 lord of his master, of raising a subject race to a sense of triumph over 

 its enemies and conquerors. This to his mind is a monstrous perver- 

 sion of things, for, as he says in " A Genealogy of Morals " : 



To demand of strength that it should not manifest itself as strength, that 

 it should not be a will to overpower, to subdue, to become master of, that it 

 should not be a thirst for enemies, resistance, and triumphs, is as absurd as to 

 demand of weakness that it should manifest itself as strength. 



