have, so far, proved more nearly right than those of liberals or Socialists. If he is a mere symptom
of disease, the disease must be very wide-spread in the modern world.
Nevertheless there is a great deal in him that must be dismissed as merely megalomaniac.
Speaking of Spinoza he says: "How much of personal timidity and vulnerability does this
masquerade of a sickly recluse betray!" Exactly the same may be said of him, with the less
reluctance since he has not hesitated to say it of Spinoza. It is obvious that in his day-dreams he is
a warrior, not a professor; all the men he admires were military. His opinion of women, like every
man's, is an objectification of his own emotion towards them, which is obviously one of fear.
"Forget not thy whip"--but nine women out of ten would get the whip away from him, and he
knew it, so he kept away from women, and soothed his wounded vanity with unkind remarks.
He condemns Christian love because he thinks it is an outcome of fear: I am afraid my neighbour
may injure me, and so I assure him that I love him. If I were stronger and bolder, I should openly
display the contempt for him which of course I feel. It does not occur to Nietzsche as possible that
a man should genuinely feel universal love, obviously because he himself feels almost universal
hatred and fear, which he would fain disguise as lordly indifference. His "noble" man --who is
himself in day-dreams--is a being wholly devoid of sympathy, ruthless, cunning, cruel, concerned
only with his own power. King Lear, on the verge of madness, says:
I will do such things-What they are yet I know not--but they shall be The terror of the earth.
This is Nietzsche's philosophy in a nutshell.
It never occurred to Nietzsche that the lust for power, with which he endows his superman, is
itself an outcome of fear. Those who do not fear their neighbours see no necessity to tyrannize
over them. Men who have conquered fear have not the frantic quality of Nietzsche's "artist-tyrant"
Neros, who try to enjoy music and massacre while their hearts are filled with dread of the
inevitable palace revolution. I will not deny that, partly as a result of his teaching, the