real world has become very like his nightmare, but that does not make it any the less horrible.
It must be admitted that there is a certain type of Christian ethic to which Nietzsche's strictures
can be justly applied. Pascal and Dostoevsky--his own illustrations--have both something abject in
their virtue. Pascal sacrificed his magnificent mathematical intellect to his God, thereby attributing
to Him a barbarity which was a cosmic enlargement of Pascal's morbid mental tortures.
Dostoevsky would have nothing to do with "proper pride"; he would sin in order to repent and to
enjoy the luxury of confession. I will not argue the question how far such aberrations can justly be
charged against Christianity, but I will admit that I agree with Nietzsche in thinking Dostoevsky's
prostration contemptible. A certain uprightness and pride and even self-assertion of a sort, I
should agree, are elements in the best character; no virtue which has its roots in fear is much to be
admired.
There are two sorts of saints: the saint by nature, and the saint from fear. The saint by nature has a
spontaneous love of mankind; he does good because to do so gives him happiness. The saint from
fear, on the other hand, like the man who only abstains from theft because of the police, would be
wicked if he were not restrained by the thought of hell-fire or of his neighbours' vengeance.
Nietzsche can only imagine the second sort of saint; he is so full of fear and hatred that
spontaneous love of mankind seems to him impossible. He has never conceived of the man who,
with all the fearlessness and stubborn pride of the superman, nevertheless does not inflict pain
because he has no wish to do so. Does any one suppose that Lincoln acted as he did from fear of
hell? Yet to Nietzsche Lincoln is abject, Napoleon magnificent.
It remains to consider the main ethical problem raised by Nietzsche, namely: should our ethic be
aristocratic, or should it, in some sense, treat all men alike? This is a question which, as I have just
stated it, has no very clear meaning, and obviously, the first step is to try to make the issue more
definite.
We must in the first place try to distinguish an aristocratic ethic from an aristocratic political
theory. A believer in Bentham's principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number has a
democratic ethic, but he may think that the general happiness is best promoted by an aristocratic
form of government. This is not Nietzsche's posi-