Thoughts out of Season, Part II - Public Domain

About Thoughts out of Season, Part II - Public Domain

Nietzsche, who served in an ambulance corps in '71, had seen something of the Franco-German War, and to him it was the “honest German bravery” that had won the day. But to the rest of his countrymen it was a victory for German culture as well; though there were still a few elegancies, a few refinements of manners, that might veneer the new culture, and in this regard the conquered might be allowed the traditional privilege of conquering the conquerors. Nietzsche answered roundly, “the German does not yet know the meaning of the word culture,” and in the essay on history set himself to show that the so-called culture was a morass into which the German had been led by a sixth sense he had developed during the nineteenth century—the “historical sense”: he had been brought by his spiritual teachers to [Pg x]believe that he was the “crown of the world-process” and that his highest duty lay in surrendering himself to it.

With Nietzsche, the historical sense became a “malady from which men suffer,” the world-process an illusion, evolutionary theories a subtle excuse for inactivity. History is for the few not the many, for the man not the youth, for the great not the small—who are broken and bewildered by it. It is the lesson of remembrance, and few are strong enough to bear that lesson. History has no meaning except as the servant of life and action: and most of us can only act if we forget. This is the burden of the first essay; and turning from history to the historian he condemns the “noisy little fellows” who measure the motives of the great men of the past by their own, and use the past to justify their present.