t the cat had beaten him at all.
He might think he had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first. Or
he might feel that he had actually inflicted frightful punishment on the
cat by keeping him alive. Just as a microbe might feel proud of
spreading a pestilence, so the pessimistic mouse might exult to think
that he was renewing in the cat the torture of conscious existence. It
all depends on the philosophy of the mouse. You cannot even say that
there is victory or superiority in nature unless you have some doctrine
about what things are superior. You cannot even say that the cat scores
unless there is a system of scoring. You cannot even say that the cat
gets the best of it unless there is some best to be got.

We cannot, then, get the ideal itself from nature, and as we follow here
the first and natural speculation, we will leave out (for the present)
the idea of getting it from God. We must have our own vision. But the
attempts of most moderns to express it are highly vague.

Some fall back simply on the clock: they talk as if mere passage through
time brought some superiority; so that even a man of the first mental
calibre carelessly uses the phrase that human morality is never up to
date. How can anything be up to date? a date has no character. How can
one say that Christmas celebrations are not suitable to the twenty-fifth
of a month? What the writer meant, of course, was that the majority is
behind his favourite minority--or in front of it. Other vague modern
people take refuge in material metaphors; in fact, this is the chief
mark of vague modern people. Not daring to define their doctrine of what
is good, they use physical figures of speech without stint or shame,
and, what is worst of all, seem to think these cheap analogies are
exquisitely spiritual and superior to the old morality. Thus they think
it intellectual to talk about things being "high." It is at least the
reverse of intellectual; it is a mere phrase from a steeple or a
weathercock. "Tommy was a good boy" is a pure philosophical statement,
worthy of Plato or Aquinas. "Tommy lived the higher life" is a gross
metaphor from a ten-foot rule.

This, incidentally, is almost the whole weakness of Nietzsche, whom some
are representing as a bold and strong thinker. No one will deny that he
was a poetical and suggestive thinker; but he was quite the reverse of
strong. He was not at all bold. He never put his own meaning before
himself in bald abstract wor