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[To the Editor of the "Spectator."] by Anthony M. Ludovici The Spectator 104, 1910, p. 52 - p. 52 - Now on what grounds does the writer of the review seem to imply a necessary relationship between nonsense and a poet's incursions into the realm of science? Has not history shown us again and again how far ahead of the scientist the great poet — the "maker," in the Greek sense of the word — has shown himself to be in the discovery of natural laws? Have the achievements of Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Goethe been forgotten? And is it not just possible that Nietzsche's scientific conclusions may be worthy of our profoundest respect, not in spite of, but precisely owing to, the fact that he was a consummate poetic genius? Let us examine the conclusions of which your reviewer seems to disapprove. Nietzsche believed in an aristocratic arrangement of society. He refused to grant that men are equal, and advocated the practice of that deliberate and purposive selection which would establish what he regarded as a necessary scale of gradations of rank and a sharp division of classes, with the best ever at the head. Is there anything preposterous in that? Regarded from the purely scientific standpoint, the notion of an aristocratic arrangement of society is entirely invulnerable. One has only to read Darwin on the degeneration of the cultivated types through promiscuous breeding, and the latest works of two such eminent men as Schallmeyer and Bateson, to realise how truly scientific and profound Nietzsche's views on sociology actually are. Turning now to his biology pure and simple, we find him opposed to Darwin and the convinced natural selectionists every point where the evolutionary hypothesis is now admitted to be weak and assailable. Granting for the sake of argument that Nietzsche spoke only from his inner consciousness, as poets are wont to speak, without a fact or figure to guide him, what he says remains as unanswerable to-day as when he first put it on paper, and not until some one comes forward with a fresh description of the process by which varieties occur in the animal and vegetable kingdoms will the difference between Nietzsche and Darwin be satisfactorily overcome. If he objected to Darwin's mechanistic explanation of evolution, it was because he felt what many men of science are now beginning to feel, — viz., that it is too unflinchingly materialistic. We have no reason to suppose that Samuel Butler and Nietzsche ever communicated with each other on the point, and yet both agreed that Darwin had "pitchforked mind out of the universe." Again, in Professor Vries's views concerning the nature of "sports" we are confronted with the opinion of an independent scientific investigator who comes wonderfully near to Nietzsche in doctrine, and we have only to recall the latter's words in "The Genealogy of Morals" — viz., that the utmost importance should be ascribed to the "highest functionaries in the organism in "which the life-will appears as an active and formative principle " — in order to see the connexion. Further, when Nietzsche sets up his "will to power" as the more fundamental life motor, supplanting Darwin's "struggle for existence"; when he protects against the "will to pleasure" and the "will to avoid pain" being postulated as primary motive forces, he is merely pointing to a distinction which is daily becoming more and more obvious. Clearly pleasure and pain, as motives, imply a step backwards, a reference to experience, a pause during which results make themselves known. But primitive life and noble men take no such steps backwards, make no such references to experience, and do not pause to await results. The search for pleasure, and the avoidance of pain, together with the "struggle for existence," are phenomena occurring only in certain quarters of organic life, and certainly not where the air is purest. Is it not possible — and I ask this question in all humility — that Darwin's explanation of evolution was tinged and tainted throughout by his experience of the chaotic democratic age in which he lived, — an age in which millions of minor existences were striving to maintain themselves at all costs, an age in which the struggle for existence seemed indeed to have supplanted all the nobler and freer passions of mankind? — I am, Sir, & c., |
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