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The construction of philosophical family trees for Nietzsche has ever been one of the favorite pastimes of his critics and interpreters. Thus Dr. Oscar Levy, editor of the English translation of his works, makes him the heir of Goethe and Stendhal, and the culminating figure of the "Second Renaissance" launched by the latter, who was "the first man to cry halt to the Kantian philosophy which had flooded all Europe."1 Dr. M. A. Mügge agrees with this genealogy so far as it goes, but points out that Nietzsche was also the intellectual descendant of certain pre-Socratic Greeks, particularly Heracleitus, and of Spinoza and Stirner.2 Alfred Fouillée, the Frenchman, is another who gives him Greek blood, but in seeking his later forebears Fouillée passes over the four named by Levy and Mügge and puts Hobbes, Schopenhauer, Darwin, Rousseau and Diderot in place of them.3 Again, Thomas Common says that "perhaps Nietzsche is most indebted to Chamfort and Schopenhauer," but also allows a considerable influence to Hobbes, and endeavors to show how Nietzsche carried on, consciously and unconsciously, certain ideas originating with Darwin and developed by Huxley, Spencer and the other evolutionists.4 Dr. Alexander Tille has written a whole volume upon this latter relationship.5 Finally, Paul Elmer More, the American, taking the cue from Fouillée, finds the germs of many of Nietzsche's doctrines in Hobbes, and then proceeds to a somewhat elaborate discussion of the mutations of ethical theory during the past two centuries, showing how Hume superimposed the idea of sympathy as a motive upon Hobbes' idea of self-interest, and how this sympathy theory prevailed over that of self-interest, and degenerated into sentimentalism, and so opened the way for Socialism and other such delusions, and how Nietzsche instituted a sort of Hobbesian revival.6 Many more speculations of that sort, some of them very ingenious and some merely ingenuous, might be rehearsed. By one critic or another Nietzsche has been accused of more or less frank borrowings from Xenophanes, Democritus, Pythagoras, Callicles, Parmenides, Arcelaus, Empedocles, Pyrrho, Hegesippus, the Eleatic Zeno, Machiavelli, Comte, Montaigne, Mandeville, La Bruyère, Fontenelle, Voltaire, Kant, La Rochefoucauld, Helvétius, Adam Smith, Malthus, Butler, Blake, Proudhon, Paul Rée, Flaubert, Taine, Gobineau, Renan, and even from Karl Marx!—a long catalogue of meaningless names, an exhaustive roster of pathfinders and protestants. A Frenchman, Jules de Gaultier, has devoted a whole book to the fascinating subject.7

But if we turn from this laborious and often irrelevant search for common ideas and parallel passages to the actual facts of Nietzsche's intellectual development, we shall find, perhaps, that his ancestry ran in two streams, the one coming down from the Greeks whom he studied as school-boy and undergraduate, and the other having its source in Schopenhauer, the great discovery of his early manhood and the most powerful single influence of his life. No need to argue the essentially Greek color of Nietzsche's apprentice thinking. It was, indeed, his interest in Greek literature and life that made him a philologist by profession, and the same interest that converted him from a philologist into a philosopher. The foundation of his system was laid when he arrived at his conception of the conflict between the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus, and all that followed belonged naturally to the working out of that idea. But what he got from the Greeks of his early adoration was more than a single idea and more than the body of miscellaneous ideas listed by the commentators: it was the Greek outlook, the Greek spirit, the Greek attitude toward God and man. In brief, he ceased to be a German pastor's son, brought up in the fear of the Lord, and became a citizen of those gorgeous and enchanted isles, much as Shelley had before him. The sentimentality of Christianity dropped from him like an old garment; he stood forth, as it were, bare and unashamed, a pagan in the springtime of the world, a ja-sager. More than the reading of books, of course, was needed to work that transformation—the blood that leaped had to be blood capable of leaping—but it was out of books that the stimulus came, and the feeling of surety, and the beginnings of a workable philosophy of life. It is not a German that speaks in "The Antichrist," nor even the Polish noble that Nietzsche liked to think himself, but a Greek of the brave days before Socrates, a spokesman of Hellenic innocence and youth.

No doubt it was the unmistakably Greek note in Schopenhauer—the delivery of instinct, so long condemned to the ethical dungeons—that engendered Nietzsche's first wild enthusiasm for the Frankfort sage. The atmosphere of Leipsic in 1865 was heavy with moral vapors, and the daring dissent of Schopenhauer must have seemed to blow through it like a sharp wind from the sea. And Nietzsche, being young and passionate, was carried away by the ecstasy of discovery, and so accepted the whole Schopenhauerean philosophy without examining it too critically—the bitter with the sweet, its pessimism no less than its rebellion. He, too, had to go through the green-sickness of youth, particularly of German youth. The Greek was yet but half way from Naumburg to Attica, and he now stopped a moment to look backward. "Every line," he tells us somewhere, "cried out renunciation, denial, resignation.... Evidences of this sudden change are still to be found in the restless melancholy of the leaves of my diary at that period, with all their useless self-reproach and their desperate gazing upward for recovery and for the transformation of the whole spirit of mankind. By drawing all my qualities and my aspirations before the forum of gloomy self-contempt I became bitter, unjust and unbridled in my hatred of myself. I even practised bodily penance. For instance, I forced myself for a fortnight at a stretch to go to bed at two o'clock in the morning and to rise punctually at six." But not for long. The fortnight of self-accusing and hair-shirts was soon over. The green-sickness vanished.8 The Greek emerged anew, more Hellenic than ever. And so, almost from the start, Nietzsche rejected quite as much of Schopenhauer as he accepted. The Schopenhauerean premise entered into his system—the will to live was destined to become the father, in a few years, of the will to power—but the Schopenhauerean conclusion held him no longer than it took him to inspect it calmly. Thus he gained doubly—first, by the acquisition of a definite theory of human conduct, one giving clarity to his own vague feelings, and secondly, by the reaction against an abject theory of human destiny, the very antithesis of that which rose within him.

And yet, for all his dissent, for all his instinctive revolt against the resignationism which overwhelmed him for an hour, Nietzsche nevertheless carried away with him, and kept throughout his life, some touch of Schopenhauer's distrust of the search for happiness. Nine years after his great discovery we find him quoting and approving his teacher's words: "A happy life is impossible; the highest thing that man can aspire to is a heroic life." And still later we find him thundering against "the green-grazing happiness of the herd." What is more, he gave his assent later on, though always more by fascination than by conviction, to the doctrine of eternal recurrence, the most hopeless idea, perhaps, ever formulated by man. But in all this a certain distinction is to be noted: Schopenhauer, despairing of the happy life, renounced even the heroic life, but Nietzsche never did anything of the sort. On the contrary, his whole philosophy is a protest against that very despair. The heroic life may not bring happiness, and it may even fail to bring good, but at all events it will shine gloriously in the light of its own heroism. In brief, high endeavor is an end in itself—nay, the noblest of all ends. The higher man does not work for a wage, not even for the wage of bliss: his reward is in the struggle, the danger, the aspiration. As for the happiness born of peace and love, of prosperity and tranquillity, that is for "shopkeepers, women, Englishmen and cows." The man who seeks it thereby confesses his incapacity for the loftier joys and hazards of the free spirit, and the man who wails because he cannot find it thereby confesses his unfitness to live in the world. "My formula for greatness," said Nietzsche toward the end of his life, "is amor fati ... not only to bear up under necessity, but to love it." Thus, borrowing Schopenhauer's pessimism, he turned it, in the end, into a defiant and irreconcilable optimism—not the slave optimism of hope, with its vain courting of gods, but the master optimism of courage.

So much for the larger of the direct influences upon Nietzsche's thinking. Scarcely less was the influence of that great revolution in man's view of man, that genuine "transvaluation of all values," set in motion by the publication of Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species," in 1859. In the chapter on Christianity I have sketched briefly the part that Nietzsche played in the matter, and have shown how it rested squarely upon the parts played by those who went before him. He himself was fond of attacking Darwin, whom he disliked as he disliked all Englishmen, and of denying that he had gotten anything of value out of Darwin's work, but it is not well to take such denunciations and denials too seriously. Like Ibsen, Nietzsche was often an unreliable witness as to his own intellectual obligations. So long as he dealt with ideas his thinking was frank and clear, but when he turned to the human beings behind them, and particularly when he discussed those who had presumed to approach the problems he undertook to solve himself, his incredible intolerance, jealousy, spitefulness and egomania, and his savage lust for bitter, useless and unmerciful strife, combined to make his statements dubious, and sometimes even absurd. Thus with his sneers at Darwin and the other evolutionists, especially Spencer. If he did not actually follow them, then he at least walked side by side with them, and every time they cleared another bit of the path he profited by it too. One thing, at all events, they gave to the world that entered into Nietzsche's final philosophy, and without which it would have stopped short of its ultimate development, and that was the conception of man as a mammal. Their great service to human knowledge was precisely this. They found man a loiterer at the gates of heaven, a courtier in the ante-chambers of gods. They brought him back to earth and bade him help himself.

Meanwhile, the reader who cares to go into the matter further will find Nietzsche elbowing other sages in a multitude of places. He himself has testified to his debt to Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle), that great apologist for Napoleon Bonaparte and exponent of the Napoleonic philosophy. "Stendhal," he says, "was one of the happiest accidents of my life.... He is quite priceless, with his penetrating psychologist's eye and his grip upon facts, recalling that of the greatest of all masters of facts (ex ungue Napoleon—); and last, but not least, as an honest atheist—one of a species rare and hard to find in France.... Maybe I myself am jealous of Stendhal? He took from me the best of atheistic jokes, that I might best have made: 'the only excuse for God is that He doesn't exist.'"9 Of his debt to Max Stirner the evidence is less clear, but it has been frequently alleged, and, as Dr. Mügge says, "quite a literature has grown up around the question." Stirner's chief work, "Der Einzige und sein Eigentum,"10 was first published in 1844, the year of Nietzsche's birth, and in its strong plea for the emancipation of the individual there are many ideas and even phrases that were later voiced by Nietzsche. Dr. Mügge quotes a few of them: "What is good and what is evil? I myself am my own rule, and I am neither good nor evil. Neither word means anything to me.... Between the two vicissitudes of victory and defeat swings the fate of the struggle—master or slave!... Egoism, not love, must decide." Others will greet the reader of Stirner's book: "As long as you believe in the truth, you do not believe in yourself; you are a servant, a religious man. You alone are the truth.... Whether what I think and do is Christian, what do I care? Whether it is human, liberal, humane, whether unhuman, illiberal, unhumane, what do I ask about that? If only it accomplishes what I want, if only I satisfy myself in it, then overlay it with predicates if you will: it is all one to me...." But, as Dr. J. L. Walker well says, in his introduction to Mr. Byington's English translation, there is a considerable gulf between Stirner and Nietzsche, even here. The former's plea is for absolute liberty for all men, great and small. The latter is for liberty only in the higher castes: the chandala he would keep in chains. Therefore, if Nietzsche actually got anything from Stirner, it certainly did not enter unchanged into the ultimate structure of his system.

The other attempts to convict him of appropriating ideas come to little more. Dr. Mügge, for example, quotes these pre-Nietzschean passages from Heracleitus: "War is universal and right, and by strife all things arise and are made use of ... Good and evil are the same.... To me, one is worth ten thousand, if he be the best." And Mr. More quotes this from Hobbes: "In the first place, I put forth, for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only with death"—to which the reader may add, "Whatsoever is the object of any man's appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth good ... for these words of good, evil and contemptible are ever used with relation to the person that useth them; there being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common rule of good and evil, to be taken for the nature of objects themselves."11 But all these passages prove no more than that men of past ages saw the mutability of criteria, and their origin in human aspiration and striving. Not only Heracleitus, but many other Greeks, voiced that ethical scepticism. It was for many years, indeed, one of the dominant influences in Greek philosophy, and so, if Nietzsche is accused of borrowing it, that is no more than saying what I have already said: that he ate Greek grapes in his youth and became, to all intellectual intents and purposes, a Greek himself. A man must needs have a point of view, a manner of approach to life, and that point of view is no less authentic when he reaches it through his reading and by the exercise of a certain degree of free choice than when he accepts it unthinkingly from the folk about him. The service of Heracleitus and the other Greeks to Nietzsche was not that they gave him his philosophy, but that they made him a philosopher. It was the questions they asked rather than the answers they made that interested and stimulated him, and if, at times, he answered much as they had done, that was only proof of his genuine kinship with them.

On the artistic, as opposed to the analytical side, Nietzsche's most influential teacher, perhaps, was Goethe, the noblest intellectual figure of modern Germany, the common stammvater of all the warring schools of today—in Nietzsche's own phrase, "not only a good and great man, but a culture itself." His writings are full of praises of his hero, whom he began to read as a boy of eight or ten years. His grandmother, Frau Erdmuthe Nietzsche, was a sister to Dr. Krause, professor of divinity at Weimar in Goethe's day, and she lived in the town while the poet held his court there, and undoubtedly came into contact with him. Her mother, Frau Pastor Krause, was probably the Muthgen of Goethe's diary. But despite all this, she thought that "Faust" and "Elective Affinities" were "not fit for little boys" and so it remained for Judge Pindar, the father of one of young Nietzsche's Naumburg playmates, to conduct the initiation.12 Thirty years afterward, Nietzsche gratefully acknowledged his debt to Herr Pindar, and his vastly greater debt to Goethe—"a thorough-going realist in the midst of an unreal age.... He did not sever himself from life, but entered into it. Undaunted, he took as much as possible to himself.... What he sought was totality."13

Nietzsche was also an extravagant admirer of Heinrich Heine, and tried to imitate that poet's "sweet and passionate music." "People will say some day," he declared, "that Heine and I were the greatest artists, by far, that ever wrote in German, and that we left the best any mere German14 could do an incalculable distance behind us."15 Another poet he greatly revered was Friedrich Hölderlin, a South German rhapsodist of the Goethe-Schiller period, who wrote odes in free rhythms and philosophical novels in gorgeous prose, and died the year before Nietzsche was born, after forty years of insanity. Karl Joel,16 Dr. Mügge and other critics have sought to connect Nietzsche, through Hölderlin, with the romantic movement in Germany, but the truth is that both Nietzsche and Hölderlin, if they were romantics at all, were of the Greek school rather than the German. Certainly, nothing could be further from genuine German romanticism, with its sentimentality, its begging of questions and its booming patriotism, than the gospel of the superman. What Nietzsche undoubtedly got from the romantics was a feeling of ease in the German language, a disregard for the artificial bonds of the schools, a sense of hospitality to the gipsy phrase. In brief, they taught him how to write. But they certainly did not teach him what to write.

Even so, it is probable that he was as much influenced by certain Frenchmen as he ever was by Germans—particularly by Montaigne, La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld, Fontenelle, Vauvenargues and Chamfort, his constant companions on his wanderings. He borrowed from them, not only the somewhat obvious device of putting his argument into the form of apothegms and epigrams, but also their conception of the dialectic as one of the fine arts—in other words, their striving after style. "It is to a small number of French authors," he once said, "that I return again and again. I believe only in French culture, and regard all that is called culture elsewhere in Europe, especially in Germany, as mere misunderstanding.... The few persons of higher culture that I have met in Germany have had French training—above all, Frau Cosima Wagner, by long odds the best authority on questions of taste I ever heard of."17 This preference carried him so far, indeed, that he usually wrote more like a Frenchman than like a German, toying with words, experimenting with their combinations, matching them as carefully as pearls for a necklace. "Nietzsche," says one critic,18 "whether for good or evil, introduced Romance (not romantic!) qualities of terseness and clearness into German prose; it was his endeavor to free it from those elements which he described as deutsch und schwer." (German and heavy.)

For the rest, he denounced Klopstock, Herder, Wieland, Lessing and Schiller, the remaining gods in Germany's literary valhalla, even more bitterly than he denounced Kant and Hegel, the giants of orthodox German philosophy.

1. "The Revival of Aristocracy," London, 1906, pp. 14-59.

2. "Friedrich Nietzsche: His Life and Work," New York, 1909, pp. 315-320.

3. "Nietzsche et l'Immoralisme," Paris, 1902, p. 294.

4. "Nietzsche as Critic, Philosopher, Poet and Prophet," London, 1901, pp. xi-xxiii.

5. "Von Darwin bis Nietzsche," Leipsic, 1895.

6. "Nietzsche," Boston, 1912, pp. 18-45.

7. "De Kant à Nietzsche," Paris, 1900.

8. Nietzsche himself, in after years, viewed this attack humorously, and was wont to say that it was caused, not by Schopenhauer alone, but also (and chiefly) by the bad cooking of Leipsic. See "Ecce Homo," II, i.

9. "Ecce Homo," II, 3.

10. Eng. tr. by Steven T. Byington, "The Ego and His Own," New York, 1907.

11. The Leviathan, I, vi; London, 1651.

12. Frau Förster-Nietzsche: "The Life of Nietzsche" (Eng. tr.), Vol. I, p. 31.

13. "Götzendämmerung," IX, 49.

14. Heine was a Jew—and Nietzsche, as we know, liked to think himself a Pole.

15. "Ecce Homo," II, 4.

16. "Nietzsche und die Romantik," Jena, 1905.

17. "Ecce Homo," II, 3.

18. J. G. Robertson: "A History of German Literature," Edinburgh, 1902, pp. 611-615.