Influence of Science Upon German Literature. 
65 
ters and established periodicals for the promulgation of their views. 
His theories captured the lower and middle classes and penetrated 
into the castle as well, and seemed destined to hold the citadel against 
the combined attacks of the conventional school. But they had for- 
gotten reverence and culture, conventionalism and even self-respect; 
hence their day is now fast passing away ; more rational views obtain. 
Turning to the literature we find that the reaction against the 
good, old orthodox conventional literature set in about the middle of 
the eighteenth century, somewhat before science began its fruitful in- 
vestigations, which led to such excellent results. But it is only when 
we turn to the modern period that we find the greatest influence of 
science and Nietzscheanism. The theory of a physical and mechanical 
world, the theory of the descent of man, the theory of the so-called 
scientific monism had brought thought, feeling and will under the 
sway of matter. The whole man was subject to mechanical develop- 
ment, the intellectual as well as the physical man. Heredity, environ- 
ment, milieu, modified and limited, but did not free him from the 
natural or inherited impulses and views of life, hence his irrespon- 
sibility, from the moral point of view; the only thing that had kept 
the standard of morality at its best, religion, had been swept away. 
Morality was stranded. Nietzscheanism sits enthroned in its place, 
and the individual becomes lord by right of might. He develops 
only self, lives for self alone in the world, and there is no other 
world. In the struggle for life pity has no place. Selfishness, the 
value of man alone, obtain. The revolution is complete. Ibsen pro- 
claims this revolutionizing of the human intellect to be the chief task 
of modern literature, and it certainly has served in this capacity. For 
two principle thoughts have swayed it : Emphasis of the Darwinian 
theory of man’s descent, and the idea that might makes right, or, 
to put it more mildly, the struggle of life. 
Naturalism is probably the first outgrowth of this revolutionary 
movement. It is a significant fact that the appearance of Flaubert’s 
“Madame Bovary,” the first French novel of Naturalism, and Ibsen’s 
“Comedy of Love,” in which the Norwegian individualist proclaims 
his doctrine of individual rights, are only five years apart, and that 
in these five years Darwin’s chief work saw the light of day. Natural- 
ism took deep root in French soil, and Flaubert was succeeded by the 
man whose name is the symbol of pure naturalism, Emile Zola. In 
his great novels the characters are the mere types of the different 
kinds of Naturalism, subject to the same ruling passion of love, selfish- 
ness, revenge, hate and greed, the lowest passions of man. Herein 
the author demonstrates his belief in the animal nature of the race. 
