GERMAN PHILOSOPHY IN BRINGING ABOUT THE GREAT WAR. 12!) 



country, where, indeed, he himself resided for many years. He is 

 the ostensible provocative agent most in evidence, and as the 

 Professor regards him as practically the mouthpiece of the Govern- 

 ment, this is only what could be expected. But the question I 

 wished to ask was about Nietzsche. While we must agree that his 

 writings are not especially addressed to Germany, and that he himself 

 was not a German professor at all, nor an admirer of Treitschke, 

 may not his remarkable works be a powerful, though indirect, cause 

 of this war 1 He was an anti-socialist and did not trouble about the 

 masses at all. His plan was to create a dominant race of absolutely 

 anti-Christian and non-moral supermen, who by brute force should 

 possess at any rate Europe, and it would appear that in Germany 

 alone was this concept swallowed with avidity. These world-rulers 

 of Nietzsche, being anti-Christian, can be called nothing but " world- 

 rulers of darkness," and, as we know, this expression is found in 

 St. Paul's Ephesian letter ; there are those in this room who, like 

 myself, believe that for the real cause and power behind this war we 

 must look to the spirit world, and I would ask the Professor 

 whether, looking at it even behind the visible, the very spirit 

 that energized Nietzsche may not be the spirit that is prosecuting 

 this war, using the Kaiser and others as its tools 1 



The Eev. Graham Barton urged that the philosophers had no 

 very great effect upon the nations at large. Thus when philosophers 

 like Seneca were teaching, the nations amongst whom they taught 

 were sunk in barbarism. Nietzsche was an iconoclast, desirous of 

 destroying Christianity and civilization, and of bringing in a new 

 condition of things. But the doctrine of force was inherent in the 

 German people : it had been a potential energy for more than forty 

 years, and had now become dynamic. 



The Eev. J. J. B. Coles said that we had no adequate explana- 

 tion of the time in which we were now living. We believed that 

 God overruled events, even when He did not directly interfere with 

 the actions of men. In the last hundred years they had seen a great 

 break-up of European society, a break-up which had extended to 

 America. It seemed to him that this had been prefigured in the 

 prophecy of the fourth beast, which was contained in the seventh 

 chapter of the book of Daniel. 



Archdeacon Potter said that they were much indebted to the 

 Lecturer for throwing light on this important subject. 



K 



