GERMAN PHILOSOPHY IN BRINGING ABOUT THE GREAT WAR. 123 



indulgence of passion is more noble than the restraint of it, the 

 German behaves Like a savage ; if a Prussian finds a Bavarian 

 train five minutes late, he, without considering the feelings of 

 his fellow-travellers, talks of "this Bavarian pig-sty." This result 

 would then seem to be like the dividing of Beelzebub's house 

 against itself, which would cause his kingdom to fall. But that 

 is a very different result from the organization of an empire 

 into a vast military machine bent on crushing other empires 

 and dominating the world. That attempt will, we hope and 

 believe, fail, but the failure will not be a shameful one : its 

 initial success and its ultimate failure will be both due to the 

 fact that Nietzsche's absurdities have had no effect ; that 

 discipline and self-restraint, the virtues which he condemns, 

 have on the one side and on the other enabled not only whole 

 nations, but whole groups of nations to organize themselves, to 

 subordinate not only personal but even national ambitions and 

 aspirations to a common end. When Treitschke quotes the 

 gospel in favour of his glorification of war, greater love hath no 

 man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend, urging 

 that such love is displayed by the soldier, we can follow him 

 thus far, that the virtues which render success in war possible 

 are encouraged by the Christian system, discouraged and 

 ridiculed by the aphorisms of Nietzsche. The historian of 

 materialism says with truth of the egoistic philosophy: while 

 the enormous development of material interests appears to const// ute 

 the predominating characteristic of our time ; while the theory of 

 that development has distinctly hrought the principle of egoism into 

 the foreground of the general consciousness : still there has 

 simultaneously been an enhancement of the need, for national 

 unity, for social co-operation and for the fraternization of 

 previously isolated elements; we can at present only guess which of 

 these factors — the egoism or the co-operation — is destined to impress 

 its character on the future. For the present we must maintain 

 that if the egoism should at some time get the upper hand, this 

 'would not furnish a new constructive principle, but only a source 

 of continuous disintegration. 



There is another noticeable difference between the views of 

 Mr. Smith and Professor Muirhead. The latter distinguishes 

 between the influence of the earlier philosophers and that of 

 Nietzsche ; " it is not in Hegelianism, but in the violent 

 reaction against the whole Idealist philosophy that set in 

 shortly after his death, that we have to look for philosophical 

 foundations of present-day materialism." This writer's 

 analysis then assumes an idealistic period beginning with Kant 



