make his meaning clearer. Suppose that reality had ultimately a tragic character, as Nietzsche early, and in a sense always, believed, that most men could not look on it and live, would it still and none the less be their duty to face it? Would facing it and perishing be better than deception about it and life? It is of course an extreme case, but it may none the less serve as a test, and now as at the beginning Nietzsche puts life first. "We must be conscienceless as regards truth and error, so long as life hangs in the balance."[1] Again, the mass of men believe in things, bodies, atoms, substances. They are illusory beliefs in his estimation, but none the less convenient and useful for the practical purposes of life. "If we take the strictest standpoint of morality, e.g., of honesty (Ehrlichkeit), intercourse with things and all the articles of faith of our ordinary action (as, for instance, that there are bodies) are unmoral."[2] But Nietzsche does not consider us obliged to throw away these articles of faith on this account.[3]
What he has in mind appears in still another connection. There is a tendency among scientific men today to eschew theory and hypothesis—to lay the emphasis on getting facts, ever more facts, even the petits faits. We see it not only in the natural sciences, but in history—the important thing is thought to be not to prove anything, not to judge, to approve or disapprove, but to fix the facts, describe them, be a mirror of them.[4] Nietzsche regards it as a kind of asceticism. In a way indeed he honors it; he calls the painstaking, scrupulous, scientific men who deny the vagrant speculative instincts in which it is so easy to wander or wallow, the real heroes in the intellectual world of our day.[5] And yet he asks himself, Why, in the last analysis, this worship of the actual, this rigid separation of everything subjective from it, this feeling that truth only is sacred and that thinking which is not devoted to getting it is labor thrown away? In other days, when God was supposed to be behind all and in all, reality as a whole might be something
