Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A PHILOSOPHY OF ORIGINALITY ONE might expect that Nietzsche, who glories in the triumph of the strong over the weak in the struggle for life, red in tooth and claw, would look up to Darwin as his master. But Nietzsche recognizes no master, and he emphasizes this by speaking in his poetry of Darwin as "this English joker," whose "mediocre reason" is accepted for philosophy.1 To Nietzsche that which exists is the mere incidental product of blind forces. Instead of working for a development of the better from the best of the present, which is the method of nature, he shows his contempt for the human and all-too-human; he prophesies a deluge and hopes that from its floods the overman will emerge whose seal of superiority will be the strength of the conqueror that enables him to survive in the struggle for existence. Nietzsche has looked deeply into the apparent chaos of life that according to Darwin is a ruthless strugglefor survival. He avoids the mistake of those sentimentalists who believe that goody-goodyness can rule the world, who underrate the worth of courage and over-rate humility, and who would venture to establish peace on earth by grounding arms. He sees the differences that exist between all things, the antagonism that obtains everywhere, and preferring to play the part of the hammer, he showers expressions of contempt upon the anvil. 1 See Nietzsche's poems in the appendix to A Genealogy of Morals, Eng. ed., Macmillan, p. 248. And Nietzsche's self-assertion is immediate and direct. He does not pause to consider what his self is, neither how it originated nor what will become of it. He takes it as it is and opposes it to the authority of other powers, the state, the church, and the traditions of the past. An investigation of the nature of the self might h...