IBSEN, EMERSON AND NIETZSCHE 153 



theory of the world order of things that offered the required basis for 

 his views. 



Nietzsche frequently displays an antipathy for English thought, 

 irritated apparently by its practical and utilitarian leanings. Never- 

 theless it was to an Englishman, Darwin, that he was indebted for the 

 substantial support that his thinking needed. It is not evolution, how- 

 ever, that is the support of the Nietzschean individualism, but the 

 Darwinian process of evolution. The thing that is inseparably bound 

 up with Darwinism is the doctrine of the struggle for existence. If we 

 accept the struggle for existence as the most important, or even as a 

 vital factor in the process of evolution, then we may accept Nietzsche's 

 will to power. The one is the reflection in philosophy of what the other 

 is in biology. It is the application to human life of a biological sense 

 of values. The man actuated by the will to power is the one that, suc- 

 ceeding in the struggle for existence, will carry the evolutionary process 

 forward. It does not matter that this idea did not originate in this way 

 in Nietzsche's mind. However personal and illogical it may have been 

 in its inception, we shall yet have to give it a hearing, if wr can be 

 assured that it is but the expression in new terms of an established 

 scientific truth so generally accepted in one department of knowledge 

 as to be of universal application in all departments. That is a vital 

 question, vital, not for Nietzsche alone, but also for all of us in all our 

 thinking while we are yet a part of that struggle between individualism 

 and collectivism of which the world will not for a long time see the end. 



It is to be borne in mind that there is no general question now of the 

 actuality of evolution, but within the last twenty years there has devel- 

 oped among biologists a wide-spread distrust of Darwinism as an 

 explanation of evolution. It would not do to say that selection and the 

 struggle for existence have been disproved as sufficiently revealing the 

 method of evolution, but they have been very largely discredited. 

 Instead of the Darwinian explanation of the method of evolution there 

 have been proposed a great many other explanations, and those accept- 

 ing these various theories have naturally been active in showing the 

 weaknesses in Darwinism. In other words, the presuppositions upon 

 which individualism founded itself in Nietzsche's philosophy and in the 

 thought of the world have been very seriously undermined. No one 

 will be so bold as to deny that now as we finish the first decade of the 

 twentieth century, along with the weakening of our faith in the 

 survival of the fittest, we are witnesses of a pronounced lessening of the 

 power of individualism over the human mind. Nietzsche, individualist 

 of the most extreme type though he was, is probably read more than 

 ever, but interest in him is rather interest in what men have thought 

 than interest in what they are still thinking. A recent sign of the 

 reversal of our feeling in this matter is observable in the wide-spread 



vol. iiXxvni. — 11. 



