an old colonel of the War of Secession said to a French traveller, but we are a proud race; a shopkeeper of Pottsville spoke of the Pennsylvania miners as "the senseless populace."[1] J. Bourdeau has drawn attention to the strange likeness which exists between the ideas of A. Carnegie and Roosevelt, and those of Nietzsche, the first deploring the waste of money involved in maintaining incapables, the second urging the Americans to becoming conquerors, a race of prey.[2]
I am not among those who consider Homer's Achaean type, the indomitable hero confident in his strength and putting himself above rules, as necessarily disappearing in the future. If it has often been believed that the the was bound to disappear, that was because the Homeric values were imagined to be irreconcilable with the other values which spring from an entirely different principle; Nietzsche committed this error, which all those who believe in the necessity of unity in thought are bound to make. It is quite evident that liberty would be seriously compromised if men came to regard the Homeric values (which are approximate the same as the Cornelian values) as suitable only to barbaric peoples. Many moral evils would for ever remain unremedied if some hero of revolt did not force the people to become aware of their own state of mind on the subject. And art, which is after all of some value, would lose the finest jewel in its crown.
The philosophers are little disposed to admit the right of art to support the cult of the "will to power"; it seems to them that they ought to give lessons to artists, instead
- ↑ De Rousiers, La Vie américaine: ranches, fermes, et usines, pp. 303–305.
- ↑ J. Bourdeau, Les Maîtres de la pensée contemporaine, p. 145. The author informs us on the other hand that "Jaurès greatly astonished the people of Geneva by revealing to them that the hero of Nietzsche, the superman, was nothing else but the proletariat" (p. 139). I have not been able to get any information about this lecture of Jaurès; let us hope that he will some day publish it, for our amusement.
