62 Transactions Texas Academy of Science. — 1908-1909. 
tion of life and soul activities obtained. Monism prevailed in phi- 
losophy as in science. Lotze and Hartmann tried to stem the tide 
and turn philosophy back to idealism again, but failed. 
On the whole, German philosophy was in a deplorable condition 
during the last decade of the nineteenth century, and was incapable 
of new combinations. The special direction which any new move- 
ment should take was conditioned by the moods and the needs of the 
time in which the Germans were experiencing powerful metamor- 
phoses in their political condition, which affected their intellectual 
life. There was a felt need of a philosopher who should construct 
and reconcile clashing theories and establish a new modus vivendi. 
Friedrich Nietzsche attempted to solve the philosophic problem. Born 
in the first half of the nineteenth century and dying on the boun- 
dary between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (1844-1900) he 
became the dazzling light of the German literature at that epoch. He 
declared in his philosophy the principles which had been assumed 
by science and philosophy as fundamental, and carried them to their 
logical conclusions. All the contrasts of contemporary consciousness 
appear in the spirit of Nietzsche. It would certainly lead us too far 
to follow out in all its details the development of this remarkable 
man. For it would be a history of the various factors of modern 
civilization which he advocated. We can summarize his principal ac- 
tivities under the following seven heads: 1, anti-morality; 2, anti- 
socialism ; 3, anti-democracy ; 4, anti-feminism ; 5, anti-intellectualism ; 
6, anti-pessimism; 7, anti-religion. 
Nietzsche tore down the barriers to all authority and preached a 
new, hard doctrine, the evangel of force, power, strength, the “Sur- 
vival of the Fittest;” hence his success. The moral and legal bar- 
riers come for him, not from nature, but from statutes ; laws are only 
made by the weak, the vicious, the many for their own protection 
against the strong. Nature, however, desires the rule of the strong, 
who, from natural right, oppress the weak. This anti-moral princi- 
ple declares all legal and moral laws unnatural chains which the 
strong man tears off. In all probability Fichte, in his c^o-doctrine, 
is mostly responsible for these ultra ideas and yet the real source of 
Nietzche’s theories of life, of his revaluation of old values, is to be 
found in Schopenhaur and Darwin. In the first period of Nietzsche’s 
development Schopenhauer was his favorite philosopher. The great 
musician, Wagner (see Geburt cler Trogoedie, 1871,) also exerted a 
powerful influence upon the rising young philosopher, though the 
primary influence came from Schopenhauer’s W illenmetaphysik 
(Metaphyisics of the Will) and his (Schopenhauer’s) pessimism. 
