Christianity is played out, so long as men are willing to call God' whatever they have conceived to guarantee that everything is all right somehow, and to affiliate to Christianity' whatever beliefs embody their highest aspirations. The world is realising more and more that religion is not rooted in merely rational formulas but in the necessities of life, and cannot be eradicated by dialectics.

The immoralism of Nietzsche has been greatly exaggerated. It is relative to the traditional morality of which he denies the value. He does not mean that he believes that everyone should do as he pleases and put no restraint upon his impulses, though he does recognise that conduct is not an affair merely of ethical principles,' but mainly of impulses, and that it behoves us to have them sound. In spite of his denunciations of 'asceticism,' therefore, he sees that a severe training' (which is all that asceticism originally meant) is needed to make the higher man after his own heart, whose life would certainly not be that of the pleasure-seeker. But he believes that to establish the new values of a 'master' morality he must negate the old ones of the 'slave' morality which Christianity has imposed on us. Thus his 'immoralism' becomes an aspect of the 'transvaluation of values.'

Now this is an important and valuable idea, and Nietzsche deserves credit for having familiarised us with it. The discovery of the problem of values is probably the greatest achievement of philosophic thought during the 19th century; and it is curious to see how gradually and obscurely the discovery was made, and how little the thinkers who are oriented towards the past understand its importance even now. Perhaps the question was rendered ripe for discussion by the rise of pessimism. For, if we reflect on the clash of the optimist and pessimist valuations of life, we cannot but see that the facts are the same on either view, and so come upon the general question: what difference is made to the 'facts' by our attitude towards them? This leads first of all to the recognition of an antithesis between 'facts' and values,' which crops up in Germany in the second half of the 19th century and is typically expressed in the theology of Ritschl. It is said that a fact' is one thing

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and its valuation something different and independent. The nature of a fact does not necessarily determine a man's attitude towards it; the same facts may consequently be valued variously, and may change their human significance with such a change of valuation. Thus valuing is creating,' as Nietzsche clearly saw (Thus spake Zarathustra,' p. 67). In the realms of art, morals and religion, moreover, the really important facts are such facts of human valuation. But it is not at first perceived that this antithesis of fact and value will not ultimately stand, because the facts' our sciences recognise are permeated through and through by the value-judgments which were thought to be a peculiar human addition to them. Yet it is clear that every judgment of fact' must have been preferred above alternative claimants to the dignity of fact, because it was judged to be more valuable than its rivals by the experts who enunciated it. Thus a human valuation is latent in every judgment, and the argument ends in a thorough-going humanism.'

·

Nietzsche's analysis did not go quite so far. But he had intimately lived through a striking change of valuation in the realm of art. He had seen Wagner's 'music of the future' fight its way in a few years from general reprobation as discordant, to general admiration as the music best worth hearing, and had himself taken part in the fray, though only to abandon and abuse his friend, in the hour of victory, because he considered 'Parsifal' an ignominious capitulation to Christianity. And, if he had not happened to come across the ancient tale how Euripides two thousand years before had saved what was then the music of the future from suppression and its author, Timotheus, from suicide, or to notice that in the world of fashion annual changes of valuation are the rule, so that at the beginning of each fresh season it is obligatory to condemn whatever taste ruled the year before, this might well seem to him a wonderful event, and suggest the possibility of transvaluing the moral values.

But Nietzsche surely overrated his powers and underrated the frequency of such transvaluations. They are going on everywhere and at all times all round us; and no one man can control the valuations of all the world. For the same objects are valued differently by different persons;

and there is therefore always a question whose valuations are going to prevail. In this social struggle of conflicting values more or less momentous changes are always occurring more or less rapidly. This is true even within the same general scheme of values. Even the Christian table of values has in practice sloughed off asceticism and the monastic life as ingredients in its moral ideal; nor do Christians now act as if they thought that gluttony and acedia still ranked among the Seven Deadly Sins. The situation is further complicated by the fact that many values are acted on without being put in words, while others are recognised in name only and not acted on, whence it may often be inferred that they are not really believed. For the severest test of sincerity of belief is that it should be acted on. Thus, however zealous we may be to call 'eternal' the values we believe in, we do not thereby exempt them from the flux of all reality.

Nietzsche's doctrine, then, is even truer than he thought. It is both easier to change values, and much harder, for there are so many of them. The moral values have to compete with the aesthetic and the prudential; and many acts may be classified in alternative ways. Chinese ethics' appear to be merely codes of etiquette, while Greek 'ethics' relied on feeling for the 'beautiful and not on the 'sense of duty.' The morality of the Superman, therefore, has not to battle with a single foe, but with an indefinite multitude, each appealing to different types of men. The Christian morality which Nietzsche wishes to supersede has never been the only one. If it had been, the course of history would have been vastly different. But it has always had to contend with a number of alternatives, and to share with them its influence over the human mind. And it has grown strong and supple and subtle in the process. Had Nietzsche realised what the existence of various codes of honour and propriety or etiquette means in a variety of social and military castes, and the vogue of a multitude of rules of business and professional morality, of trade customs and of moral attitudes which are little more than idiosyncrasies, he would hardly have been so sanguine about the success of his particular transvaluation.

Nor is the transvaluation he proposes as new as he imagines. The gospel of violence and strength has always

been acted on, though its exponents have mostly been too busy to theorise about their principles. But it is a delusion of academic intellectualism that nothing is real but what has been put in print. One thing, however, may fairly be demanded of the theorist : he should find clear and clean-cut conceptions to cover the facts. We have a right, therefore, to ask Nietzsche, as the spokesman of the 'strong,' what precisely he means by 'strength,' what constitutes the mastery of his rulers, and what are the qualities so precious that the life and happiness of millions may be sacrificed to gain them. Is 'strength literally physical, or are intellectual and moral qualities ingredients in its composition? Are we to say that the strong are clearly those who actually exercise power, or those who ought to rule and might do so but for social restrictions? In other words, is the theory's ultimate appeal to the way of the world, or to some ideal beyond it?

Here, to our surprise, we get on to ground that has often been fought over. For, as Plato's Socrates in the 'Republic' points out to his Thrasymachus, when he is anticipating Nietzsche by a contention that morality is imposed on the weak by the strong in the interest of the rulers, the actual rulers often make mistakes, and the ideal rulers might turn out to be the moral. Darwinism also seems to involve a notion of 'fitness' that may be heckled much as the Nietzschean notion of 'strength.' Are the 'fit' those who in fact survive, or those who would be fittest in some ideal scheme? If we say the former, is not the survival of the fittest a mere tautology? If the latter, are we not surreptitiously trying to obtain from nature the endorsement of some human ideal of fitness, which need not at all involve fitness to survive in the rough-andtumble of the actual world? Darwinism extricates itself from the toils of this plausible but essentially verbal dialectic by insisting on a concrete study of the scientific facts. Taking it for granted that whatever lives must somehow act so as to survive, it enquires how in fact living creatures act. In virtue of what qualities and modes of behaviour do those survive that do? How do they guard against the dangers that beset their life? and are they surviving better than before, or worse? Only after the actual process of survival has been exhaustively explored

does the true Darwinian allow inferences to be drawn as to how we ought to act to improve the prospects of survival for ourselves or others. In other words, biological analysis is kept distinct from ethical precept.

This distinction is not to be found in Nietzsche, who was probably born too early to have assimilated the full meaning of Darwinism,* which was rather slow in spreading into literary circles in Germany. He never unambiguously explains what he means by 'strength,' and seems to have no consistent notion of it. Sometimes he seems to mean physical strength alone, and to exult in 'blond wild beasts,' who overpower and disdain alike craft, discipline and numbers. But it is plain that such strength is no match for cunning; and, even on Nietzsche's showing, the slave-morality organised by the priestcraft of decadents has triumphed over the valuations of the masters. We find, therefore, cleverness or force of intellect included in the notion of strength in passages such as that explaining why the weak triumph' ('Will to Power,' aph. 864).

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The sick and the weak have more intellect . . . and are more malicious and interesting. . . . Woman has always conspired with decadent types--the priests, for instance-against the 'mighty,' against the 'strong,' against men. . . . Strong races decimate each other mutually, by means of war, lust for power, and venturousness; . . . their existence is a costly affair, and all great ages have to be paid for. The strong are, after all, weaker, less wilful, and more absurd than the average weak ones. They are squandering races.'

The candour of the admission that the 'strong' are in reality the weaker does not seem to leave much substance in Nietzsche's advocacy of the strong-man doctrine; but he did not himself publish the Will to Power.' At any rate we should here correct Nietzsche by a wider, more scientific and Darwinian notion of 'strength. Every quality has to be reckoned as 'strength' which contributes in fact to survival-even the docility

* He opposes his 'Will to Power' to the struggle for existence, misunderstands natural selection, which he confuses with evolution, and has not grasped the cardinal fact that morphological degeneration' may be biologically better adaptation, as e.g. in the parasitism of Sacculina (cf. • Will to Power,' aph. 647, 684-5).