Spencer doubled up into a
single individual is 'a thing imagination boggles at.' Perhaps it is
the translator's idea of the _Uebermensch_.]

Perhaps it is impossible to understand Nietzsche unless one admits
that his writings show traces of the disease which very soon prevented
his writing at all. But at the same time, while that is true, there is
much more in his work than the ravings of a distempered mind. There
may have been little method, but there was a great deal of genius, in
his madness. While he always overstates his case,--his colossal egoism
leads him to exaggerate any doctrine,--and while I do not think that
the actual doctrines of Nietzsche in the way he puts them will ever
gain any general acceptance, while his system of morality may not have
any chance of being the moral code of the next generation or even of
being regarded as the serious alternative to Christian morality, yet
it is not too much to say that he is symptomatic of a new tendency in
ethical thought, a tendency of which he is the greatest, if also the
most extravagant exponent, but which has its roots in certain new
influences which have come to this generation with the ideas and the
triumphs, scientific and material, of the preceding generation.

There are two quite different kinds of influence to which the
formation of an ethical doctrine may be due. In the first place, there
are the moral sentiments and opinions of the community and of the
moralist himself; and, in the second place, there are the scientific
and philosophical doctrines accepted by the writer or inspiring what
is loosely called the spirit of the time. In most ethical movements
the two kinds of influence will be found co-operating, though the
latter is almost entirely absent in some cases. The incoherence of
popular opinions about morality is a potent stimulus to reflexion, and
may of itself give rise to systematic ethical enquiry. This is more
particularly the case when a change of social conditions, or contact
with alien modes of life, force into light the inadequacy of the
conventional morality. In such a case the new ethical reflexion may
have a disintegrating effect upon the traditional code, and give
to the movement the character and importance of a revolution. The
reflective activity of the Sophists in ancient Greece--a movement of
the deepest ethical significance--was in the main of this nature.
It consisted in a radical sifting and criticism of current moral
standa