looking every inch an emperor yet unable to cast even a moral maxim at
his ignoble foes.

After the plague of the Antonines we come to the great plague of
Justinian and here at last we have the evidence of an exact historian
who did not run and could state what he saw in language that we can
understand. Gibbon says hesitantly that Procopius was a doctor, though
probably in truth he was a lawyer. Possibly he was too much afraid of the
naughty little Empress Theodora, whom he was afterwards to slander, to
forsake the path of duty and run away when the world seemed dying; but
at any rate he has left us a remarkable account of the plague of 542,
one of the most terrible recorded visitations of epidemic disease; and
after reading Gibbon’s somewhat excitable account of it I think that few
doctors will deny that it was real old bubonic plague that has so often
made history. Justinian suffered from it and recovered; we do not know
enough about the exact circumstances to estimate its exact effects upon
the world; but we can be pretty certain that the bacillus pestis did not
lay waste the Byzantine Empire for nothing. Gibbon estimates the total
loss of life at a hundred millions; but one doubts if the population
of the Roman Empire, even in its palmiest days, was ever much larger,
and surely the plague could not have swept off everybody in the known
world, though we do know that, if it really breaks loose in flea-bitten
surroundings, plague can do an infinity of mischief, probably more than
any other known disease.

We leave the dead old world that shook at Cæsar’s nod, and leap in one
moment to the very beginnings of the modern world, to the Black Death of
1348; for, though the Middle Ages were still to drag their slow length
along for at least a century, there can be little doubt that after the
Black Death had terrified mankind all our modern problems were beginning,
if only in embryo. The original source of it seems to have been China,
and the epidemic proceeded with most leisurely footsteps until it took
ship for Europe. Dr. Hecker[20] in 1833 wrote an exhaustive account of
it from mediæval records; but since 1833 the cell-theory of Schleiden
and Schwann has revolutionised medicine, and even Dr. Hecker has to be
translated into modern terminology; so rapidly has medicine changed that
a book written ten years ago is already obsolete. Indeed, it is not
too much to say that more has been discovered in medicine within the
last thirty years than in the whole previous half-million years during
which man has been upon the earth; one sometimes becomes terrified at
the amazing growth of knowledge. Whither is it all leading us? Are we
becoming as gods? Vespasian joked about himself when he was dying; let
us not really grow “pumpkinified,” to use Seneca’s words about Claudius,
when we think ourselves becoming deified.

The Black Death seems to have come to Europe from Africa by ship in 1348.
The harbingers of the epidemic began in 1347 with earthquakes and floods
in China and Egypt; in far-away China the earth opened and swallowed
men. Frightful portents appeared in the sky (of course I am simply
quoting this nonsense from Hecker and his mediævalists) and the seasons
changed, summer becoming winter. At that time, according to Hecker, the
sheet of ice was formed which has since prevented men from looking upon
the coast of Greenland; there were unequalled rains and the floodgates
of heaven were opened in a more than Noachian deluge. Vast swarms of
locusts appeared and died; and the want of the crops which they had
devoured thrust man, whose hold upon the earth is always so feeble, to
the edge of that slight precipice which generally protects him from the
Valley of Starvation. The earth opened, and into the crevasses men fell,
never to be seen again; from the crevasses arose a horrid stench. Into
this world, even more starved and terrified by the adventure of living
than was common in the Middle Ages, the rat and the bacillus pestis made
their death-dealing plunge. The epidemic which they brought seems to have
been carried from the sultry delta of the Nile by ship to Greece and
Italy; four fugitives—and unknown numbers of rats and fleas—fled to find
safety in Marseilles, carrying their own destruction with them. Thence
the plague went to Avignon, at that time the residence of the pope; and
ultimately to England where it landed in the southwest counties, taking
half a year to crawl to London. As acutely noted by Procopius, plague
always spreads inland from the shores of the sea, and we now know that
it spreads just so fast as the rat can run and no faster. In 1348 they
knew nothing about rats and bacteria, but attributed everything to bad
air or evil spirits; and they noted that there was a continuance of
southerly winds, which of course in Greece and Italy are hot winds and
may possibly have spread the plague by bringing the ships and their
contained rats. In Germany they had some story about a dense pestiferous
fog which smelt abominably and so was obviously the cause of the Black
Death. It is difficult to say how much truth there was in these stories
of fog, though they are too numerous and too well attested to be utterly
ignored; they have naturally been seized upon by historical novelists in
search of the dramatic and anxious to show that in 1348 everything was
different from things as they are to-day. Possibly they accounted for the
preponderance of pneumonic plague.

John Cantacuzenos, Byzantine emperor, whose own son died of it, left a
description that entirely fits in with our modern knowledge of plague,
buboes, black spots and all, though there is a certain resemblance to
Thucydides which makes one rather believe that he was adding to his
narrative for dramatic effect. Strangely modern is his description of the
dull stupor that affects so many plague patients to-day. We all noticed
it in the slight epidemic that affected Sydney some years ago. Then again
John specially stated that some patients were attacked by a violent pain
in the chest, with difficulty of breathing and a putrid expectoration.
This looks uncommonly like the pneumonic type of plague which proved so
destructive in Manchuria in 1910.

But the most interesting feature of the Black Death was its attack upon
Avignon, where Guy de Chauliac was physician to the pope. It lasted eight
months, with the usual concomitants of numbers of dead so huge that the
living could not bury them. As trench after trench became filled, no
matter how hard the living worked, the pope blessed the Rhone and had
the bodies hurled into that rushing stream, doubtless to the joy of
the rats. Guy himself showed the courage that one expects in a modern
doctor, and has left us a perfectly recognisable description, which is
commented upon by both Dr. Hecker and Dr. Crawfurd. It is in Guy himself
that our interest dwells; for at last Medicine had found its soul. His
colleagues, being trained in Arabian medicine, all told him that the
plague was inevitably fatal, that medicine could do nothing, and that he
was only courting destruction by staying to comfort those whom he knew
that he could not save. Guy himself had a theory that strong purgation
would cure the disease, though he knew that the only real safety was in
flight. He stayed; though whether he was prevented from running by the
medicines that he prescribed or by sheer courage no one can say. His
own words were “As for me I did not dare absent myself, though I was in
constant fear.” To be feared of a thing and yet to do it—that is what
makes the prettiest kind of a man; and to be afraid only of his own
conscience makes a man a hero. Guy was afraid of his own conscience,
not of the plague, and therefore he has become one of the heroes of
medicine. No doubt he donned his quaint mediæval anti-infection costume
with its beaky vizor, and went from door to door trying to bring a little
hope to the gloomy death-beds of the frightened people; no doubt he had
himself to clean up the mess caused by his treatment, which must have
been calamitous. But he lives in the memory of his colleagues, for we are
all proud to belong to the profession of that simple-minded doctor of
Provence, and try to act like him though with less messy treatment. He
was a brave man.

The epidemic endured at Avignon for eight months, and Guy tells us that
for the first three it took the form, in our terminology, of pneumonic
plague and was intensely infectious, but for the other five it seems to
have been the ordinary bubonic that was so fatal in London in 1665. Guy
remained in Avignon for the Black Death, and faced its return twelve
years later. In the first visitation the poor suffered, but in the
second the rich; but, rich or poor, Guy remained at his post with his
ample store of aloes to win the love of the dying whom he could not save.
We know now some results of crude aloes which are not very pleasant, and
I wonder whether Master Guy de Chauliac ever noticed them, or whether
his patients ever came running to him to cure them of the effects of his
aloes.

To sum up, it is probable that the series of epidemics that we call
the Black Death were all different varieties of the plague; bubonic,
pneumonic, septicæmic, hæmorrhagic, etc. The sentimental and journalistic
Nordic nations, such as the English and Germans, muttered the horrified
name “Black Death,” afraid to give the thing a name, just as to-day
they talk about the “Red Plague” or “a certain loathsome disease” when
they mean to say syphilis; but the more clear-sighted and logical
Mediterranean peoples knew that the thing certainly killed them, though
they did not know what it was, so they simply called it La Grande
Mortelaga—the Great Mortality, which it assuredly was. We prosaic
moderns simply call it the plague, whose dread name even to-day makes us
shudder. We do not fear it, because we know exactly how it is spread,
and that, to use Osler’s epigrammatic words, all that one needs to
defeat an epidemic of plague is a stout heart and a long purse. During
the fourteenth century men’s hearts, being very ignorant, were not very
stout, and their purses were atrociously short. It would hardly be too
much to say that during the Middle Ages, and up till about 1700, the
greatest cause of death in cities was the plague. After 1700 people
slowly began to become rich, and to build better houses which would keep
the rat at a distance, so that man conquered the plague without knowing
how he had done it. But the conditions in the Middle Ages must have
been frightful. Listen to the words of Dr. Abram in _English Life and
Manners in the Later Middle Ages_ about the overcrowding, which would put
even Glasgow to shame. He is referring to the Miller of Trumpington in
Chaucer’s _Reve’s Tale_; and the miller cannot have been a very poor man;
he was prosperous and on edge for his dignity. But in his house there
was only one bedroom, where slept he himself, his wife, his baby, his
grown-up daughter, and two undergraduates from Cambridge all at once.

No wonder the rats and fleas were rampant and the plague swept over the
land. And as for the personal cleanliness of these crowded peoples,
there was none.[21] If I wished to use another jargon than medical I
would say it was a minus quantity, but personally I prefer the medical,
because that means something and is exact.

The Black Death revived that strange and mournful sect of the
flagellants, the Brotherhood of the Cross. The spirit of man, which
is capable of such wonders, must needs bow before that shadow of
itself which it has projected into the infinite, and ask pardon of
its anthropomorphic fourteenth-century God for the fancied sins which
had brought these horrors upon the world. The quaint figures of the
flagellants wandered, cross on breast, in doleful procession all over
Europe, chanting dolorous hymns of misery that bore the seeds of
rebellion against that very God whom they affected to supplicate. They
would reach a church, lie down in circles, strip off their clothing and
flog each other with scourges of nails. People crowded to watch the
blood flow, while doubtless the rats and fleas rejoiced if rejoicing be
possible to beings so lowly. In these flagellants probably lay the real
seeds of the Reformation which was to come. They sometimes seized upon
a church and rebelliously conducted Mass without an authorised priest,
although the pope, Clement VI, who was a brave man and faced the plague
like a hero, had given absolution in advance to every patient who should
be taken sick. Man wanted his own priest, and sometimes when he sent in
his last extremity his priest would not come, or was dead of the plague,
so that when the epidemic had abated, and the world was struggling to
recover itself and reap the neglected harvests, men were only too ready
to believe the stories about the priests and their women which were even
then paving the way for the Reformation. The Statute of Labourers, in
England, was the herald of many of our modern political ideas. Those
unhappy men who died, stupefied by plague, were really dying for humanity.

We cannot make an accurate guess even at the actual number of people lost
during the Great Mortality. Hecker, after taking the utmost trouble,
thought that at least a fourth of the people of Europe perished, but in
some places far more; thus in Avignon, of which we have the most exact
information, about nine-tenths. This vast mortality in Avignon was
not caused by de Chauliac and his aloes, any more than it was due to
Pope Clement and his blessing. Probably de Chauliac’s treatment had no
influence one way or the other; neither did the question of pope and
anti-pope nor the great schism. But we know more about what happened at
Avignon than anywhere else, because de Chauliac was a brave doctor who
told the truth.

We do not forget the plague, because it takes very good care of that, and
is still, though we have long purses, the nightmare of health officials
who keep their silent watch over the health of mankind.

But, in dealing with epidemic diseases that have affected civilisation
we must not forget malaria. Like syphilis itself, its social effects
have been prodigious. Malaria was undoubtedly, with typhus and possibly
smallpox, one of the real causes of the fall of the Roman Empire. The
work of Sir Ronald Ross in discovering that it is spread by the anopheles
mosquito, is one of the great epoch-making discoveries of history. There
are few countries in the world which are free from malaria to-day.
Unquestionably it is the cause of the anæmia and poor physique of the
inhabitants of most tropical countries; and Australia is fortunate
in having so few anopheles mosquitoes, though we have so many other
varieties of the abominable little pests. That the numerous returned
soldiers who were infected with malaria in Palestine have comparatively
rarely spread their disease is due to the rarity of the anopheles in
Australia; but doctors are always on the lookout for this particular pest
and let us hope will keep it to its natural habitat in moister countries.
Probably the real reason of the good physique of Australians is that
the British race, for the first time in history, has had the chance of
developing in a warm climate with no malaria. We are making a mistake in
concentrating on the search for the discovery of the will-o’-the-wisp
cause of cancer, which, though a very terrible and horrible disease,
possibly associated into the very mystery of life itself, has probably
less important social effects than either syphilis or malaria. I do not
merely refer to the actual death-rate from these diseases, though it
is probable that syphilis indirectly causes more deaths than cancer,
tuberculosis or overeating. The trouble is that syphilis works in so
mysterious a way; it is sly and subtle in its effects; it lies long
latent and springs up again to the slaughter after the man who is its
victim has long forgotten that he ever had it; and it conceals itself
under innumerable guises. The great problem before the civilised world
to-day is not the cure of cancer; it is the prevention of syphilis.

We know exactly how to prevent syphilis in the male. Metchnikoff and
Calmette have shown us by experimental proof that is irrefragable. That
their method is impossible to apply satisfactorily in the female owing
to anatomical reasons is no reason whatever for so solemnly concealing
its existence from young men, because, if it were generally known to the
male, the females would not be affected and the contagiousness of the
disease would die out in one generation. It is painful to think of the
vast mortality and misery that is caused by this one disease when every
decent doctor knows exactly how to prevent it. With moral education in
self-restraint together with application of Metchnikoff’s discoveries,
which are known to every doctor, there is no reason whatever why syphilis
should not be entirely abolished from the educated world. The other
venereal diseases though serious are of comparatively minor importance;
even gonorrhœa, which sterilises so many women and blinds so many babies,
is less important because it does not affect the brain.

My own opinion is, that while moral education should certainly be
attended to, every boy should have a quiet talk with his doctor before he
goes to boarding-school and still better perhaps before he goes to the
university. It is common experience that more lads become infected while
they are young and ignorant, during the time of their university life,
than at any other time.

We have apparently got over our post-war epidemic of influenza, which
sensationally minded people called the Black Death without knowing what
they said. But has fate altogether done with us? Has the war really left
no other sequel than the influenza? Only this morning I was reading an
article by Mr. Stephen Graham in the _Nineteenth Century and After_, in
which he refers to the frightful post-war corruption of women in London,
as shown by the mad competition among prostitutes for the favours of men.
I can corroborate that article fully, for last year I went travelling
over many parts of Europe, and I was impressed and horrified by exactly
the same thing. A man cannot leave his hotel unaccompanied without being
set upon by these women, who are evidently starving and desperate.
London, Paris, and Rome are all the same; there is nothing to choose
between them.

Nothing seems to be done about this frightful menace. Let us take care
lest a rival to the Black Death may ruin the people of Europe. Immorality
must be paid for somehow; and it does no good for politicians to wrangle
over trifles such as the German restitutions when there is a very much
more dreadful menace knocking at the world’s doors.

During Tudor times, when the world seems to have been almost at its
lowest stage of filth, there were great epidemics of typhus fever in
Europe, especially in Italy; thus reviving memories of Athens and the
Roman Empire, which to the eyes of modern men seem to have been an age
of beauty. Typhus is beyond all other diseases the disease of filth,
war, and misery; and that it spread so vigorously in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries seems to show that things at that time were less
romantic than people try to depict. Probably, if we could get at the real
truth, throughout recorded history, typhus has slain more people than any
other epidemic disease, possibly even more than the plague itself.

There can be little doubt as to the identity of the “Sweating Sickness”
of Tudor times. It seems to have begun with the bloodshed of the Wars of
the Roses, as the army of Henry VII marched in misery, slush, and triumph
after the battle of Bosworth. Very soon after the king’s entry into
London the sweating sickness began to spread among the overcrowded houses
of the capital. It ravaged high and low; at first it spread largely
among young and vigorous men; in one week it took two lord mayors and
six aldermen. The coronation of Henry VII was postponed by reason of the
general distress, and the disease spread without interruption over the
whole country. Nobody seemed to be immune; and when it attacked Oxford
the professors and students fled alike in a common terror, so that the
ancient university was as deserted as it was, for a more worthy reason,
during our late war.

After its first appearance, sudden and savage, the English Sweat for
a time abandoned its victims, and the mediæval world resigned itself
to its normal accompaniments of epidemic typhus, smallpox, and plague.
Soon after the return of Columbus we begin to hear of a new and terrible
disease, syphilis,[22] though there has been great argument as to whether
it may not have been yaws, which is a comparatively mild tropical
long-continued ailment. To my mind the fact is convincing that we find
no real traces of syphilis in the bones from ancient burial-places. If
it had existed in the ancient world we should certainly have found such
evidences.

But the English Sweat was only biding its opportunity; for it returned
mildly in 1506; and again severely in 1517; and again, in its worst
epidemic, in 1528. By this time the world was beginning to think that
we were eternally damned; and when in 1529, it spread to Hamburg, the
good North Germans tried to signify their belief in the usual manner by
confining their patients in the best replica of hell that they could
imagine. Every patient, whatever his sickness, was hidden under a heap
of featherbeds; the stove was driven to its full force; the windows shut
and sealed with rags; and the patient’s relatives heaped themselves upon
him until it sometimes happened that he was actually smothered by their
well-meant efforts.

Besides the sweat, influenza recurred again and again; and slew its
thousands and tens of thousands. It probably so weakened Mary Tudor’s
heart that she died suddenly while hearing Mass.

Now what was this dreadful Sweating Sickness which so paralysed over and
over again the strong arm of the Tudors? Osler describes it confidently
as what we call miliary fever; a disease which now and then breaks out in
little valleys of Italy and Eastern Europe; kills a few harmless people;
and suddenly departs as quickly as it came.

Of course there must always be doubt as to all these mediæval epidemics.
One symptom may impress one doctor as due to one special disease, another
symptom may impress another as the most important. Thus, thinking of the
plague of Athens, what impressed me most was the fact that Thucydides
expressly mentioned the fact that the patient’s fingers and genitals used
sometimes to drop off when he seemed on the high road to recovery. We see
just the same symptom in epidemic typhus to-day.

It is difficult exactly to understand ancient pathological terms; when
an ancient observer says “peticula” or “bubo” or “macula” or uses other
learned terms, we cannot be quite sure that he means to convey exactly
the same idea as the words imply to ourselves. There is always room for
honest difference of opinion. But after carefully reviewing the diseases
of old I fancy most people will agree with Sydney Smith when he wrote:

    “The good of olden times let others state.
    I think it lucky I was born so late.”

With all the glamour that enthusiasts and romanticists have cast upon the
Middle Ages we are probably very much happier to-day.

F. W. Nietzsche

I had long shared the general belief that this remarkable man died of
general paralysis; but a brief study of the facts as they are set forth
in Frau Foster-Nietzsche’s book, _The Lonely Nietzsche_, will convince
any fair-minded person, as they did me, that such an hypothesis is
untenable. As Nietzsche was undoubtedly one of the makers of the modern
mind it will be worth while to study his health a little, for the more we
study it the more remarkable he becomes.

From youth onwards he was subject to dreadful headaches, often
accompanied by vomiting and intense pain in the eyes. He had temporary
strokes of paralysis, and sometimes lost the power of speech. Probably
the disease from which he suffered was what we now call migraine or “sick
headache.” This is a trouble that is almost confined to persons of active
and intelligent mind, and the cause of it is quite unknown. Nietzsche,
imagining that his headaches had something to do with his digestion, used
to starve himself and lead the most ascetic life; but all to no purpose.
Starvation rather tends to make the patient worse. As a rule this
sickness tends to improve as the patient grows older; but in Nietzsche’s
case advancing age brought no relief. Work was impossible, and he had
to get leave of absence from his position as Professor of Classical
Philology in the University of Basel in 1876. Later on he tried to resume
work, but spent many years in wandering from one health resort to another
in almost constant pain; indeed, he said that for him two hundred days
out of every year were days of pain.

This migraine is a very terrible complaint which affects mostly the elect
of the earth: those whose brains are far above the average. Women are
more often affected by it than men; and in them it appears to become
worse periodically and at the climacteric. Afterwards it generally leaves
them. Clods do not suffer from migraine; the trouble appears to be one of
the prices that very clever men have to pay for their brains. Sufferers
from it are generally very prone to seasickness and to trainsickness, and
once an attack is in full blast no treatment whatever but natural sleep
seems to relieve it. The pain appears to be so terrible that the stomach
is paralysed by the sheer violence of it, and such drugs as aspirin,
phenacetin, and even opium pills are useless because they are at once
vomited. Sometimes symptoms indistinguishable from those of migraine
persist for many years in cases of chronic Bright’s disease; and there is
reason to suspect that it may be accompanied by some sudden constriction
of an artery in the brain. In the worst cases the pain also affects the
eye; and occasionally there is confusion of speech or even positive
aphasia. Possibly even a stroke of paralysis may occur, and there is the
usual fear of insanity that seems to accompany all nervous troubles in
highly neurotic men.

Late in the year 1888 the blow fell; and Nietzsche became definitely
insane. Nietzsche’s sister has left us quite a good account of it which
enables us to guess with a certain amount of probability the actual
nature of his insanity; though we must always remember that he had been
suffering from this terrible agony for years and had already had strokes
that were probably due to a temporary constriction of a cerebral artery.

During the latter end of 1888 Nietzsche was even more than usually
worried; sensitive old women, Wagnerians and all the little people were
writing him abusive letters. Something had to go. Either angry people
must leave him alone or the delicate filament of Nietzsche’s mind must
snap. It had already been strained past endurance by his headaches and
pains in the eye and incessant self-denial. The first symptom seems to
have been that his Italian landlady noticed that Professor Nietzsche had
suddenly taken to imbibing gigantic draughts of water. Suddenly, while he
was walking near his home, he fell down in the street and could not get
up again; that is to say, probably one of his cerebral arteries had gone
into a state of spasm. His landlord found him and helped him home, where
he lay for two days on a sofa in a lethargic, probably semi-conscious,
state; he would not say a word nor answer questions. When he awoke to the
world again he was deranged. He talked loudly to himself and would not
allow people into his room, for he said he was composing an oratorio. He
had always been interested in music. He began to write wild letters to
his friends and relatives, accusing them of all sorts of silly things,
but, be it observed, of nothing indecent. Then he began to accuse himself
of fancied extravagance. When he met Professor Oberbeck he ran towards
him and embraced him, saying, “My dear fellow, I hope you’ve brought me
money; I’ve been living so extravagantly!” Nietzsche extravagant; a man
who was a byword for asceticism and who did not even then realise the
fame and fortune that was beginning to come to him! When they examined
his papers they found 900 francs among them. They took him to Jena, where
he was admitted to an asylum. Unhappily his friends had no specimen of
his handwriting to assist the asylum doctors, and as it was before the
days of the cerebro-spinal Wassermann test, it is not surprising that
the poor doctors, driven to give the thing a name, hinted at general
paralysis, though they seem to have eaten their words later.

The ordinary typical case of general paralysis is much as follows: An
apparently perfectly sane and normal man suddenly goes out and orders
a dozen motor-cars, or twenty-three cameras, or fifty arm-chairs, or
a dozen sets of gymnastic apparatus or something equally silly; then
he goes home to his wife very well pleased with himself and boasts how
he has suddenly become the best cyclist in Europe or the most famous
cricketer. No doubts for him, gladsome fellow! Probably he will also tell
her that he is God. Or perhaps he will indecently assault some little
girl before the very eye of some hitherto friendly policeman. Sometimes
the disease will begin with purely neurasthenic and gloomy symptoms,
so that even a clever doctor may be put off the scent for months or
years. But when he is examined carefully it will generally be found that
his hand is tremulous so that he cannot write intelligibly; his tongue
trembles and perhaps wobbles in and out like a trombone; his speech is
indistinct; the pupils of his eyes may be unequal or not circular. Later
come the fits and increasing dementia that haunt him till his death.

The fact that Nietzsche suffered from doubts about money and showed no
sign of obscenity seems to point to a totally different form of insanity.
Faithful to the principle that no doctor ought to offer a diagnosis
without having seen the patient, I hesitate to say definitely what was
the matter with Nietzsche, especially as Dr. Oscar Levy of Hamburg is
still alive and knows the Nietzsche case intimately; but I should not
wonder if the poor overwrought man was suddenly seized by something akin
to melancholia,[23] that last infirmity of sensitive minds. As clods
do not suffer from migraine they comparatively rarely attain to the
heights—or depths—of melancholia. Under the influence of nursing, rest
and protection from the attacks of the world, he partly recovered, but,
as generally happens with melancholia in middle age, he seems to have
become more emotional and partly demented before the chronic trouble
that may have caused his headaches ultimately killed him. Throughout
his insanity the difficulty in speaking pursued him. “I don’t speak
prettily,” he would pathetically say; and after a tremor that may have
been uræmic he passed away.

No philosopher has been more shockingly misrepresented to the British
public; and now that the bitterness of the war is over it is quite time
that we should make some effort to understand what he intended. The
famous “superman” was not a big bullying German _picklehaube_; it seems
to have represented what a man might become if freed from conventional
repression: if his instincts were perfect in every way. The “will to
power” was not the arrogance that caused the war; as a matter of fact,
no man ever attacked German militarism so fiercely as did Nietzsche.
It really represented what the modern evolutionist means by survival
value in all organisms. Possibly Nietzsche made a mistake in attributing
prudery to the effects of Pauline Christianity; the very essence of
prudery is now thought to lie in unconscious regrets of the old for their
lost sexual power. It seems to be a frustrated wish-fulfilment and is
found among people who worship mumbo-jumbo, as well as among those who
pretend to follow Jesus.

Nietzsche did well to point out, as Huxley pointed out years ago, that
“all men are _not_ born free and equal,” as optimists have averred. A
little healthy pessimism would be very good for the world; it would teach
it to be more careful about paying its debts and would prevent it from
blundering into an ignorant war such as the last one.

But nobody who has ever seen the disgusting spectacle of a man dying of
general paralysis, demented, helpless, lying bestial, an obscene body
that has long survived its soul, deserted by every one but his mother and
his old aunts, could ever look at the portrait of the dying Nietzsche,
gazing so wistfully into the setting sun, and say that Nietzsche died of
general paralysis. The Italians called him Il Santo, the Saint; so far
did he seem to them above all moral frailty.

It was probably owing to his incessant pain that he could never settle
down to systematise his philosophy, but had to write in epigrams.

Arthur Schopenhauer

It is difficult not to smile at this peculiar philosopher, even though
he has obtained nearly as many admirers as Nietzsche himself, and it is
a dangerous thing to offend a Nietzschian. But let us treat him with the
seriousness that he would have insisted upon as his right.

He was born in Dantzig in 1788; he died in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1860, a
philosopher to whom both Germany and England have laid claim, because
his father wished him to be born in England, and took his mother there
just before the expected birthday, but the good lady suddenly took fright
at the English—is it possible that there can have been anybody on earth
who has not liked the English?—and insisted on going back to Germany for
the confinement. I have actually heard that to this very natural whim of
a pregnant woman is to be attributed Arthur’s detestation of women! In
that idea perhaps we may see the natural thought of all Englishmen that
England is the only fit country for a man to be born in. But his father
had his revenge; for he called the little son “Arthur” and the lady,
being a dutiful German wife, had to submit, consoling herself by the
thought that it was a German as well as an English name. But Arthur’s
detestation of women is probably to be attributed to a more physical
cause, as we shall see.

In 1793 Dantzig was annexed by Prussia, so the Schopenhauers moved to
Hamburg. Later on, when the question of Arthur’s education came to be
settled, they decided to send him to both France and England; and in
London the future pessimist was placed at a boarding-school kept by
a clergyman at Wimbledon—poor little boy. For some reason he found
the life, and more particularly the religious training of the good
schoolmaster, intensely irksome; and long afterwards he referred with
disgust to the atmosphere of cant and hypocrisy which permeated England
at that time. _Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis._

In 1807 his father was found dead in the canal at Hamburg, being
suspected to have thrown himself from an upper story; and Arthur, out
of respect for his father’s wishes, definitely took up his duties in an
office, though personally he longed to be an author. His mother, being
now free from the encumbrance of a husband—at least presumably she found
him an encumbrance—took to literature as a minor novelist at Weimar. When
Arthur went to join her, he found that she seemed to have forgotten the
memory of his father; and before very long they quarrelled. At the age
of twenty-one Arthur determined to enter the university of Göttingen as
a medical student; and later on took to philosophy, and gained his Ph.D.
It was probably while he was at the university that he caught syphilis;
and for long underwent the heroic doses of mercury at intervals that
the nineteenth century thought essential for the cure of that disease.
It was not till the time of Fournier and Sir Jonathan Hutchinson that
it was recognised that, while mercury was essential, it was not so
much the amount of mercury as the faithful years of its intermittent
duration that were really necessary; and Schopenhauer duly went through
the proper course of huge doses accompanied by all the wretchedness
of salivation, depression, and internal pain, that used to be thought
necessary for every syphilitic if he would escape the legendary tortures
of that wonderful disease. He frequently complained to his friends of his
treatment; but, in spite of the sufferings that it caused him, he had in
reality little to complain about, for he lived to seventy years of age
and escaped the graver nervous troubles that often accompany untreated
syphilis. Nowadays, of course, we should put him on injections of one of
the arseno-benzol compounds, accompanied probably with rubbings, pills
or injections of mercury, and insist on his taking moderate exercise
in the fresh air and living a sober, righteous and godly life without
excitement or dissipation. While we should be chary of giving a definite
prognosis we should tell him that probably he would see no more of his
disease either in himself or his children if he took care of himself and
faithfully continued his treatment. But Schopenhauer, while escaping the
more serious nervous, bone and skin manifestation of syphilis, evidently
did not escape the psychasthenic troubles, the obsessions and imperative
ideas—the phobias; and syphilophobia had him in its grip till the end of
his life. In this strange condition the patient becomes possessed by an
undue terror of syphilis and its results; and often the fear of syphilis
becomes transferred to the fear of every other infectious disease until
his life becomes a burden to him as he walks perpetually in the presence
of evil spirits which ache to devour him. Probably it was to these
phobias that he owed his unnatural hatred of women, and his hatred
of the lower side of man’s nature. He knew that these “under-sized,
short-legged, long-haired creatures who were not really beautiful,” went
about the world simply for the purpose of spreading syphilis—made a trade
of it, in short; and that he, being a man of strongly sexual impulses,
could not resist their embrace, though he knew it to be death. He had
no wax wherewith he might shut his ears to their siren songs, while his
sturdy rowers propelled his boat beside their lair; he could not leave
his house without knowing that some of them would lure him with their
dreadful charms; how different the miserable creatures were from the
proper form of a human being, which should be, like Arthur Schopenhauer
himself, a rather short, square, blue-eyed, sturdy North German. And so
his miserable life went on, carrying its own torture with it, and daily
his thoughts turned more and more to the utter wretchedness of life, and
the stupidity of those followers of Fichte and Hegel who simply _would_
not see the truth. Probably his pessimism was a direct result of his
syphilophobia.

He kept a diary in accordance with his plan of absolute self-confession;
and there are many thoughts on love and marriage, written during the
years 1819-22 and 1825-31, which his modest English biographer describes
as being quite too frank for publication. These thoughts were written
down in English; probably Schopenhauer doubted whether the Deity
understood that language, just as we nowadays are quite certain that He
does not understand French or Latin. But we can leave them unread, in the
certain surety that they were completely coarse.

He now fell into a quarrel with Hegel, for, as he thought, purposely
setting the world against the mighty Arthur Schopenhauer, of whom
probably Hegel at that time had never heard in his life. He now began
to indulge in that most expensive and unsatisfactory of all amusements,
lawsuits.

In 1821 he found three women gossiping on the landing outside his door;
so naturally he complained to his landlady, who assured him that such
a thing would not happen again. Alas! a few days later there they were
again, still cackling. Schopenhauer warned them to be off, and not to
disturb his lordly self. Two of them, being meek and as he thought
women really should be, departed, but the third was of sterner stuff
and refused. She was a maiden sempstress of fifty who lived in the room
higher up. Schopenhauer incontinently took her by the waist and threw
her downstairs[24] with a coarse description of her character to boot;
and after her flung her sewing and the tools of her trade. Heard a body
ever the like? She took him to court, as no proper woman should do, and
the philosopher defended his own case. An ungallant judge decided in his
favour, and naturally the aggrieved lady appealed. This short-legged,
long-haired female actually appealed against the decision given in favour
of the Right, in favour of the great pessimist philosopher, of the
Neo-Buddhist who just then wanted to get away to Italy for a holiday!
And will it be believed that an unjust, nay, an inhuman, judge would
not postpone the hearing of the appeal, so that once more Schopenhauer
should be able to air his eloquence. In Schopenhauer’s absence in the
sunny south the case was decided against him, and he was sentenced to pay
the long-haired, etc., creature damages. Three years later the spinster
renewed her assaults upon him, having discovered that he had injured her
so severely that she was unable to earn her living; and this time the
court ordered Schopenhauer to pay her a pension of £9 a year for the rest
of her life. This was really getting beyond a joke, and Schopenhauer
appealed; but unsuccessfully. Therefore he was faced with the prospect of
paying the damsel this pension until the Greek calends; for it is well
known that women are very hard to kill, and when they are in receipt of
a pension they will live for ever out of sheer spite. But unfortunately
for her she died of cholera some time afterwards; and Schopenhauer,
receiving notice that he was relieved of pensioning her, showed his joy
by scrawling upon the paper the appropriate—and obscene—words: “Obit
anus—abit onus.” Thus it was proved that from woman came all man’s woes;
but few men have the chance to revenge themselves on the sex by an
epigram. As a rule, woman gets her epigram in first, owing to her agile
tongue.

The last few years of his life were spent at Frankfurt-am-Main, where his
was the most perfect instance of a quiet and philosophic life of which I
have any knowledge, except Spinoza’s. The fires of his youth and middle
age had died down, and the ashes took a long while to become stone-cold.
At half-past seven every morning he rose and took a bath, taking
particular care to wash his eyes very thoroughly.[25] Then, having
ordered his housekeeper strictly to keep to her kitchen, he made himself
coffee, and settled down to work for three or four hours; this being
in his opinion the utmost that the human brain could stand at severe
intellectual labour, in which he was probably right. At noon she came and
timidly knocked at his door, whereupon he left his books and began to
play upon his flute. At 1 p.m. he went to the Englischer Hof for dinner;
and there he ate in silence with a gold coin displayed ostentatiously
beside his plate. After this had gone on for some years he explained to
a friend that he had kept the coin as a wager to himself that he should
present it to the poor-box if anybody should start a discussion about
any single subject under the sun but women, wine, and horses. After
dinner, with the faithful coin still unused in his pocket, he went home,
read light literature for a couple of hours, and at four o’clock went
for a brisk walk into the suburbs. His only companion was a poodle-dog,
and “Schopenhauer with his dog” has become a legend; the local children
used to call it “young Schopenhauer.” After two hours of walking at his
utmost speed, summer or winter, he went to the reading-room, and read
_The Times_. This literature predisposing him for sleep, he went home,
ate a very light supper, got out his long pipe, smoked for an hour, “and
so to bed.”

And this went on for about ten years, until, one day he noticed that
he could not walk quite so fast as usual, and that he was beginning to
get breathless when he was going uphill. By this time he had become
more egotistical than ever; his chief pleasure was in reading laudatory
comments in the newspapers upon Herr Doktor Arthur Schopenhauer
_hochwohlgeboren_ and his wonderful philosophy. Gradually praise and
public fame began to come to him. A steady stream of people came to
see him, among them many women attracted by the thought of the great
woman-hater.[26] As his heart began slowly to fail his doctor visited him
every day; until one day the philosopher was laid up with a slight attack
of pneumonia. Recovering from this, he tried to resume his invariable
routine; but on September 20th he had another bad attack. On the morning
of the 21st he rose as usual. A few minutes after his housekeeper had
left him, his doctor called and found him lying dead on his sofa. The
Goddess Luetina, assuming her least terrible appearance, had carried him
to the Nirvana where no women could trouble him.

It is one thing to write a witty essay against women, just to annoy the
feminists, who, poor ladies, have such quaint ideas about men and are,
in physiological language so excessively ready to react to stimuli.
But Schopenhauer’s case was far otherwise; with him it was a matter of
coarseness in his mind and sheer lust in his body. No wonder he despised
the animal in man. In hating woman he was really hating himself because
he could not resist them.

And it was probably well for him that he had to complain of his gigantic
doses of mercury, for, with his family history of a father who committed
suicide and his own worrying and neurotic mind, he was just the sort
of man to get cerebral syphilis or general paralysis. I have read many
attempts to explain Schopenhauer’s misogyny, but I rather fancy we can
detect the real reason for it in his own syphilophobia. Some critics
have tried to explain it by slandering his mother and sister, on the
assumption that every man can only judge woman by the women he knows; and
that Joanna Schopenhauer and Adele Schopenhauer must therefore have been
of bad character. Possibly! But he was full of phobias and obsessions.
And the best thing we read about him was his genuine love for Beethoven.
Often he would sit and listen to a symphony, dreaming with his eyes shut;
and, the last divine chords sounded, he would leave his seat rudely, lest
some lesser music should blur the impression.

I have often thought of writing a history of the effect of syphilis upon
the history of the world; but the difficulties appal me. We now know that
syphilis is less a disease of skin and bone, than a very grim disease
of the nervous system; and so secretive is it, so it loves to conceal
itself under other names, that even to-day, though every doctor is
acutely on the lookout for it, it would be impossible from the mortality
returns to pick out which man or woman died of syphilis and which of some
apparently quite distinct affection. All that is safe to say is that the
very flower of the human race, the greatest artists, poets, musicians and
philosophers, have all rested under a strong suspicion of having fought
against the spirochæte before it killed them. Too likely such a history
as passes through my mind would degenerate into a mere _chronique
scandaleuse_, and nobody would believe it.

So long as there is this horrible and disgusting prudery about syphilis,
so long will it continue to lay waste the fairest part of the human
race; and few doctors will disagree with Schopenhauer, the poor hopeless
syphilophobe, when he said that war and syphilis are the two greatest
foes to humanity.

The great effect of the philosophy of Schopenhauer has probably been
indirect. When the young undergraduate of Oxford enunciated the belief
that there is nothing new and nothing true, and no matter, he probably
thought that he was quoting the beliefs of the great woman-hater; but it
was reserved for a mind far nobler and more truly poetical to see the
real inner meaning of Schopenhauer’s thoughts. The great discovery of
Schopenhauer was that the evil in man has quite as much to do with his
character as the good. Thomas Hardy, in writing the _Woodlanders_ and
_Tess of the D’Urbervilles_, was really transfiguring Schopenhauer’s
somewhat arid philosophy until it became a beautiful truth. Hardy, in a
sense, was simply a reaction from the foolish optimism of the Victorians;
from the cheerful caricaturing of human nature by Charles Dickens;
from the mock cynicism of Thackeray. That some people still say that
his novels are grey and unduly pessimistic simply means that they have
not yet grasped the full truth about human nature. And surely Hardy’s
“Immanent Will” was truly Schopenhaueresque.

Healthy minds have converted Schopenhauer’s pessimism into the gentle
pessimism of the present day, which may be rather beautiful and poetical
than hideous. That Schopenhauer could be so vulgarly insulting to women
was simply the index of his own diseased mind.

His opinions about women were merely an instance of the utterly degrading
effect of syphilis upon the human brain and soul.

Baruch Spinoza

This, the most wonderful of all philosophers, the most daring, the most
scientific, was born, a little Jew of Portuguese descent, in Amsterdam on
November 28th, 1632, at a time when the European world was riven by the
fiercest sectarian contention; when the hounds of the Spanish Inquisition
were baying hell-fire and destruction to any man who should dare to
differ from the dogmas of the pope as to objective truth. He grew up to
be a typical Oriental—like Jesus Himself—with all the Oriental powers of
mysticism.

Desirous of completing his knowledge of Latin, he took lessons from a
certain doctor of medicine, one Van den Ende, who eked out his income by
taking pupils. Whether the worthy Van den Ende employed his spare time
by inoculating Spinoza with what Hume afterwards called his “hideous
atheistical doctrines” is not apparently known; but it seems certain
that Spinoza thus early came under the influence of that series of ideas
which so many people have complained of as “medical materialism,”
whatever that may mean. Ignorant people have, from the very earliest
times, complained that doctors have no religion; that we only look upon
the materialist side of man; that we are blind to ethical truth and to
the eternal verities of Plato. This, of course, is sheer nonsense. It
is quite true that few, if any, doctors have been burned at the stake
for a point of belief; but that is simply because the medical profession
has always preferred, if burning were in the question, to be burned
for something that could be proved objectively, such as the difference
between scarlet fever and cancer, for instance, and not because of
an opinion that apparently depends upon a state of mind or upon the
education that any given man has received, or upon the surroundings in
which he grew up.

It is said that Van den Ende had a daughter with whom Spinoza fell in
love; but the critics have cast so many doubts upon the pretty romance
that has been woven between them that nowadays it is not generally
believed. Some rash words of Spinoza’s having come to the ears of
the authorities of the synagogue, they summoned him before them to
explain; but, seeing that he had already parted in very truth from the
conventional Hebrew worship, and not wishing to have any public scandal
among the community, the Chief Rabbi offered him a pension of 1,000
florins if he would outwardly conform and appear occasionally in the
synagogue; that is to say, if Spinoza would turn hypocrite. But this
was not at all in accordance with Spinoza’s character, so, since he
refused to be coerced, it became necessary to excommunicate him from the
synagogue after an unavailing attempt had been made by some footpad to
assassinate him. Spinoza drew up a protest against his excommunication,
but did not publish it. He dropped the name of Baruch and took the name
of Benedict; in this possibly there may have been a shimmer of irony at
his excommunication, for both names mean “blessed.” Such irony would
be in accordance with what one might expect from a pupil of Van den
Ende, who in truth seems to have been an ironical man. Later, he fell
into trouble with the French authorities in Paris, and was hanged for a
conspirator. Van den Ende seems to have been a very undoctor-like sort of
doctor, for it is seldom indeed that any of our profession conspire with
anybody; least of all for a religious or political purpose. Marat, of
course, was a brilliant exception, but he came to an untimely end.

Expelled from the Hebrew Church, and with the Inquisition waiting
open-mouthed to burn him if it had the chance, Spinoza spent the rest
of his short life in little towns of Holland, keeping himself alive by
grinding spectacles. The tubercle bacillus was already beginning to eat
away his lungs, and men howled at him as an atheist whenever he went into
the street. But already he had many admirers. A man named De Fries left
him a small fortune which Spinoza refused, saying that the man’s brother
and rightful heir had more need of it than he. The brother accepted it
on the sole condition that Spinoza should take sufficient money to keep
him alive. Even of this, which was offered on the assumption that Spinoza
would need 500 florins, he would only accept 300 florins annually, and
gave the rest to the poor.

During the five years following his excommunication Spinoza worked hard
at his philosophical speculations, and at his lens-grinding, attaining
a great reputation for thoroughness in his work. A little society
of doctors and medical students was formed to study the Cartesian
philosophy, and by sheer learning, daring of speculation, and elevation
of moral character, the little Hebrew became the leader; and thus began
the extraordinary admiration for the philosophy of Spinoza which has
always distinguished biological scientists.

Spinoza attained eminence in many ways before the end came. His landlady,
a Madame van den Spyek, came to him in a religious difficulty. She knew
that Spinoza was good and learned, though people _did_ call him an
atheist, and went saying what a sorry time he would have of it when the
Inquisition got hold of him. Yet she heard so much about the different
sects, which were struggling so fiercely all over Europe. What was she,
a decent and pious woman who worshipped God after the manner of her
fathers, to believe? She would ask the gentle and learned atheist; so she
went diffidently to him and opened her heart to him. Thus spake Spinoza:
“Your religion is a good religion, madame; you have no need to seek after
another, and neither need you doubt of your eternal welfare so long as,
with due pious observances, you continue to live a life of peace and
charity with all.”

Just so might have spoken T. H. Huxley two hundred years later; just so
might have spoken Plato two thousand years earlier; so assuredly would
not have spoken Bishop Tertullian, who said, two hundred years after the
crucifixion of a loving and forgiving Jesus, “Credo quia impossibile,”
and rejoiced to think that those who differed from him in opinions were
safely frizzling in hell.

Spinoza, in his strenuous devotion to scientific truth, knowing nothing
about the tiny rod-shaped bacillus that was growing in his lungs, led a
most unhealthy life. Sometimes for three months together his footsteps
would not cross the lintel; he lived a life of asceticism worthy of
Nietzsche himself, or of a monk of the Thebaid, though for a very
different reason. Eating just enough to keep him alive and no more,
cheerful and merry with his friends, averse from all political and
religious contention, he was proud of only one thing—his self-control.
People said that he used to be vastly amused by setting two spiders to
fight one another. Of course this story really represents Spinoza’s
interest in the weird marriage rights of the Arachnidæ. These are really
extraordinarily interesting, and many a thoughtful man has followed them,
with the aid of an electric torch, in the dusk of the evening when the
sexes conjoin. The female is considerably larger and more powerful than
the male; and she sits quietly waiting with a naughty gleam in her bright
eyes, at the centre of the web. He, insignificant despicable wretch,
dances timidly towards her, two of his paws held out with the caution
of a professional pugilist. They meet, he continuing his excessive
caution. Then a moment of love, an almost imperceptible caress, and he
flees literally for his life with hell at his heels. Should the dutiful
wife catch him, woe worth the day for the husband. The wicked creature,
having sated her sinful lust, devours him, claw, spinnerets and all.
Marriage from the point of view of a spider must be an exciting business.
I do not know what are the odds on the escape of the male; but doubtless
Spinoza worked them out from his own observations. Personally I should
fancy that the male has about an even chance. I have often watched
among the mosquitoes only to find after an hour that the male could not
approach at all, dare he never so wisely. But I have seen horrid orgies
of cannibalism should the husband be a shade too slow. It is feminism _in
excelsis_; she, great, big, hulking brute that she is, cannibalistically
eats her dear little mate with his slender and spiderly grace. And likes
to do it, too. Fabre thought that it was a sort of religious rite among
the Arachnidæ; but let us think better of the race of spiders than that.
I have no doubt whatever that it was while Spinoza was watching the
spiders at their cannibalistic love-making that the amazing spectacle of
the presence of so much cruelty in Nature thrust itself before his mind,
and led him to speculate why he, too, a man so good and virtuous, who
had never harmed a single living creature in his life, should yet be so
ill and coughing and sweating and spitting and falling away to a shadow.
It was then probably that he evolved his stately system of pantheism
that has so impressed the scientific world. Why should the performance
of a purely natural function, one which God has implanted in the spiders
that they might propagate their species, be attended with such savagery?
This story about Spinoza is told by Dr. Colerus, the Lutheran divine
who afterwards became his biographer. Naturally Colerus misunderstood
Spinoza’s scientific enthusiasm, and equally naturally Spinoza, being
accused of atheism, was also accused of cruelty as monstrous as that of
Domitian in his most palmy days. An atheist in the seventeenth century
was known to be capable of all.

There is really little more to tell about the short life of Spinoza.
He was offered a post at the University of Heidelberg as professor of
philosophy, but politely declined on the score of his health. Probably
he did so really because he did not care to set himself in a position
where a turn of the wheel of war might put him at the mercy of the
hounds of the Inquisition, with their burnings and tortures and _auto da
fe’s_ and religious wars. The real call to join his spirit with that of
the Immanent God came when he was forty-two years old in 1674. However
deeply a man may speculate upon “God, Man, and his well-being”—to name
only one of his works—the tubercle bacillus takes no heed of motives,
and will ever be ready to attack him if he denies himself food and fresh
air. Thus it was that his friends of The Hague went quietly to church one
afternoon, doubtless thinking nothing of the troublesome cough from which
he had suffered for so long; and that when they returned they did not
hear his cheerful voice, for he was lying dead at his spectacle grinding.

He had a short life; we can sum it up in a few words: Spinoza was a good
man and he died poor. When they came to look into his effects they found
nothing but a very little money, just enough to satisfy his creditors;
the tools of his trade and a few lenses, which were afterwards sold as
being of great intrinsic value because he had ground them so well.

It was many years before the real worth of the little Hebrew began to
dawn upon the world; and then it was not the doctors nor the scientific
men to whom it appealed but the poets, for like all true poets he was a
mystic. During the eighteenth century, until the French Revolution began
to free men’s minds, he was looked upon as an atheist, and even the
good-natured Hume, possibly ironically, spoke of his hideous atheistical
doctrine. But the poets, in the ecstasy of joy that accompanied the
liberation of mankind, saw far otherwise. Goethe begun to understand
him, and Novalis, the German hymn-writer, spoke famously of him as a
“God-intoxicated man”; a man drunk with the intellectual love of God.
Indeed, the very word “love” is too carnal a term to apply to Spinoza’s
philosophy. It was probably some such feeling that led people to hesitate
deeply before changing the ancient terms “Faith, Hope, and Charity” into
“Faith, Hope, and Love,” although Spinoza in his mysticism, and our
modern mystic, Professor Freud,[27] would have approved it.

After Novalis came Coleridge and Wordsworth; and thenceforward Spinoza’s
fame began rapidly to extend, until it has influenced the whole of
modern thought. Benjamin Jowett, in one of his biological sermons
delivered in Edinburgh, the home of Calvinism, spoke of him as one of the
best men who ever lived, and compared his life to that of John Bunyan,
sorrowfully admitting that the tinker would probably have burnt the
spectacle-grinder if they could have met.

Like Jowett, Dean Inge also has been touched by the wonder of Baruch the
Jew. “Beatitudo non est premium virtutis, sed ipsa virtus,” said Spinoza.
“Heaven,” repeats Dean Inge, “is not the _reward_ of virtue; it is virtue
itself.” And again speaking of Spinoza, he says, “No thoroughgoing
rationalist philosophy can explain the working of a mind in love.”

Accepting as proved that Spinoza’s philosophy has enormously influenced
the modern world, let us consider what it really is. Spinoza’s pantheism
does not consist, as so many amiable spiritualists seem to think, of
a kindly God of mystic light, surrounded by a fluttering crowd of
disembodied spirits with a general atmosphere of worship throughout the
universe. It is a highly mystical and rather stern philosophy which leads
to surprising results and best explains the known facts of life. God is
infinite, with attributes of extension and thought; therefore He must
embrace all good and all evil. As He is infinite He must be coterminous
with the universe in which there can be nothing else but God. In fact,
God is reality. God is the universe. Christ, in Spinoza’s view, is a
mystical conception Who includes all the gentleness, all the wisdom,
all the loving-kindness, of the world. He is the method by which God
communicated His will to man. Putting it briefly, Spinoza was a complete
monist, who made no distinction whatever between spirit and matter.

The further we extend scientific inquiry the more we confirm Spinoza’s
views of the universe. Nebulæ have been discovered whose light takes a
million years to reach the earth; so also did Spinoza account for the
existence of evil in the world, that it could only exist because God
allowed it, and as we cannot understand why God should allow it, the
natural corollary must be that it is a part of Himself. As his fellow-Jew
Heine said: “All our modern philosophers, perhaps unconsciously to
themselves, see through the glasses that Baruch Spinoza ground.”

Spinoza began the revolt against the orthodox conception of a fall
from virtue on the part of man; and he was strongly supported by the
doctrine of evolution which was the greatest contribution of the
nineteenth century to thought. One would have thought that there could
be no single educated man in the world to-day who does not firmly
believe that man has ascended from an ape-like animal, for one has only
to stroll around any decent museum to see the irrefragable proofs in
the skulls and prehistoric remains of man who lived far beyond recorded
time, long before man had learned to speak or to act with his fellow-man
in societies. Yet to this day some obscurantists try to prohibit the
teaching of natural selection; as if it mattered! In spite of them
natural selection will go on triumphant, however the wilfully blind may
rage. But we have passed beyond the stage of natural selection so far as
man is concerned. We now live in the age of intellect, the psychozoic
age. The little naked, helpless creature that had so stern a fight for
existence against the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros has developed a
brain such as never was in the world before, and that brain is beginning
to take a hand in nature’s game. Evolution is proceeding, not by tooth
and claw, not by ravening and bloodshed, but by the discoveries of such
men as Luther Burbank, who has revolutionised horticulture; of Henry
Ford, who has revolutionised transport; and of our own Australian
Farrar, who, by revolutionising wheat-growing, has made it possible for
two blades of wheat to grow where one grew before. In the world of ideas
evolution is proceeding by the thoughts of such men as Darwin, Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer and thousands of young biologists. The brain of man will
work towards perfection possibly by birth control, sterilisation of the
unfit, and beyond all by the elimination of syphilis.

The process of evolution towards righteousness was interrupted for five
sad years by the World War, which was due to a stupid misunderstanding of
that very doctrine of evolution to which Spinoza’s philosophy had pointed
the way. But pantheism must be looked upon, not as a religion, but as a
scientific philosophy. As a religion it does not satisfy the heart of man.

Eternity, according to Spinoza, is not merely a long time: it is really
a mode of thought, and cannot be reduced to measurements of time. That
is strangely like what one hears from countless pulpits to-day, if the
occupants thereof have opened their ears to modern thought. We are
living in eternity to-day, and should act as if our actions were to be
eternal. Still speaking mystically, heaven is to be a good man; hell is
to be a bad man. There can be nothing worse even if we do know what is
happening to us after death. And no better man ever lived upon the earth
than the despised little Jew, Spinoza. Except for fear of being accused
of perpetrating an epigram upon a most solemn subject, I might say that
it is better to be God-intoxicated with Spinoza than priest-intoxicated
with the various unphysiological Christian creeds. T. H. Huxley, who was
accused of all sorts of nonsense, recognised that it was necessary to
create an ideal Jesus for man, because, as the critics have shown, owing
to the intervention of very imperfect men, we do not really know what
were His real teachings; still, we must make an ideal for ourselves;
and for every man his own religion must lie between himself and his
God, or it is no religion. But so long as it leads to tolerance, mercy,
loving-kindness, and duty, he cannot go far wrong. All these things were
taught by Spinoza, and, so far as we know, by Jesus Christ.

But possibly the recent discovery of the unconscious mind may have cast a
doubt even upon the stately pantheism of Spinoza. Possibly what he took
to be the attributes of God are in reality purely human conceptions.
Possibly animals, being so much more under the influence of the
unconscious mind than men are, do not feel as we do, and there may not
be so much cruelty in the world as we suppose. We know that in men the
unconscious mind was the first to be evolved, and certainly it is the
last to die.[28] To that extent at least may we give thanks to God, and
as George Santayana says in his essay on Spinoza to all the little men
who have sneered at Spinoza: “I do not believe you; God is great.”

But if Spinoza was the greatest of philosophers we must also remember
that he was one of the first, if not the very first, of the critics
of the Bible who endeavoured to see that wonderful book through clear
glasses, through spectacles that were properly ground, because he had
ground them himself. He had not the advantage of modern physiology and
psychology, whereby we know that a book, written by men in a state of
semi-savagery, such as Moses and the other supposed authors of the
Pentateuch, must reflect their semi-savage minds and the thickened
cerebral arteries which must have been theirs if they were so old as
tradition states. None the less he came to very much the same conclusions
as have been reached by the most learned and scientific of modern
commentators. As the doctrine of evolution has cast a doubt amounting
to certainty upon the story of creation, so Spinoza, by reason of his
intellectual love of God, has cast a doubt upon the theory of a personal
God, of an all-wise and all-loving Father. The existence of evil in the
world, so ever-present, so clamant, so insistent, by itself disproves the
existence of such a personality. Where was the fatherly God of the deists
when the late war broke out? Perchance he slept or was gone on a journey.
Such an absentee God is no God for modern man. By recognising that evil,
if, and so far as it exists, must be part of God himself, Spinoza fell
in absolutely with modern thought, only he lived three hundred years too
soon. But the discovery, or hypothesis, of the unconscious mind, has had
still more startling effects upon philosophy; for who can now say that
he is not unconsciously listening to the voice of his grandmother when
he is formulating his most earnest conclusions? Those sanguine persons,
mostly politicians who state proudly that they are satisfied to remain
undisturbed with the beliefs that they have learned at their mother’s
knee, are probably unconsciously retailing the beliefs that she in her
turn learned from her mother, and she from hers. Beliefs acquired in
very early youth remain till the end of life as if they were divine;
Gibbon has shown the debt that the early Church owed to women, who were
doubtless the contemporary mothers and grandmothers and had the maternal
mind; dear, amiable, credulous, superstitious creatures they were, though
perhaps a trifle narrow-minded. Undoubtedly these women were not persons
of critical and scientific mind, though to every one of their sons and
grandsons they must have seemed to speak with awful “respectability,”
just as old ladies do to this very day. It has been very well said that
whenever one feels a conviction of absolute certainty approximating to
the divine, one is probably listening to the still small voice of the
“herd” speaking through one’s unconscious memory; and common experience
is that the herd generally speaks most emphatically through the dulcet
tones of that dear old lady, that real transmitter of the herd ideas of
past generations, the grandmother. _She_, not Spinoza, nor Nietzsche,
nor Darwin, nor Schopenhauer, has been the real maker of thought to the
present day.

Let Spinoza and Nietzsche go hang as abominations unto the Lord, atheists
and capable of the utmost wickedness—but _not_ of sectarian wars and
wholesale tortures and burnings. And as for Voltaire—one simply shudders
at his ribaldry and irrepressible mockery of so-called religion which
caused savage persecution in the name of the best and most merciful of
men—Jesus Christ. To that extent at least _l’infame_ has passed away,
largely owing to Voltaire, though personally he could not have been a
very nice man if all tales are true. But certain sects are still willing
to apply another form of torture than thumbscrew, rack and stake to those
who dare to differ in opinion from their grandmothers.

I see that I have omitted the most mystical of Spinoza’s conceptions.
God, besides having the attributes mentioned, has infinite substance.
That was really why they turned him out of the synagogue, and would
have liked to burn him if they could. The idea of giving a body to
God whom St. John defined as an emotion! God is _Love_! Nowadays the
identification of matter with electricity and the modern conception of
the ether is the nearest that science can reach to Spinoza’s dreamings,
but that in no way detracts from his extraordinary insight into the
universe. Even taking Spinozism in its most material aspect, we find
that the more we extend the bounds of the known universe the greater
it becomes, until infinity seems to become rather more than a mere
mathematical conception denoted by a mathematical symbol.

What we gain from Spinoza then—and the best of men, the best of the
clergy, agree—is that eternity is a state of mind; that is to say, it is
a purely human conception. Perhaps if we go further and say that good and
evil, instead of being attributes of the infinite God, are also purely
human conceptions, we shall come still nearer to absolute truth.

But quite clearly the notion of God as an all-wise and all-loving Father
is inconsistent with medical experience. The only decent thing nature has
done for man is to give us our unconscious minds, without which we should
be stunned and maddened by the intolerable thunder of our hearts, the
rushing through our arteries, the incessant dripping of our kidneys and
even more uncomely internal parts. And the way nature has treated woman
is still more shocking. Any earthly father who treated his children as
nature has treated woman would be considered rather as a stepfather.

Nowadays Spinoza’s pantheism suggests to scientific men the mighty
forces that lie locked up within the atom.[29] So far as we know, the
universe, however vast it may be, is, in the last resource, composed of
atoms. But once again, and fifty times over, I would most strenuously say
that pantheism is a philosophy: it is _not_ a religion. It is too stern,
too scientific, too consistent with known facts, ever to attract the
countless bruised hearts, relics of the late war, longing for comfort in
their grief.

Even otherwise intelligent men often ask me whether the _Religio Medici_
of Sir Thomas Browne really represents the religion of modern doctors.
The nearest approach to a talk about religion I have ever heard from
a doctor was once when I heard one doctor say of another that he was
believed to pray for his patients; but in that I seem to scent a savour
of professional jealousy. Otherwise I might almost feel justified in
saying that _Religio Medici_ is generally considered by doctors to be
a farrago of quackery, mysticism, credulity, and astrology, put into
gorgeous and quite unnecessarily obscure language; full of sound and
fury; signifying nothing. Probably Browne was unconsciously remembering
the teachings of some old lady who had impressed the truth upon him in
his early infancy—probably with her slipper.

But I cannot close this essay upon the greatest of all philosophers
better than by repeating the words of Ernest Renan upon him when they
dedicated the great statue at The Hague in 1882: “Woe unto him who in
passing should hurl an insult at this gentle and pensive head. He would
be punished, as all vulgar souls are punished, by his own vulgarity, and
by his incapacity to conceive what is divine. This man from his granite
pedestal will point out to all men the way of blessedness which he had
found; and ages hence the cultivated traveller, passing by this spot,
will say in his heart, ‘The truest vision man ever had of God, came
perhaps, here.’”

Nor can one do better than follow Spinoza so far as earthly intelligence
can lead us. Those people whose hearts the war has left bruised and
broken are fortunate if they can still believe what they learned at
their mother’s knee. She, dear, simple, lovable soul, knew nothing about
the unconscious mind, nor physiology, nor historical criticism, nor
Spinoza and his majestic pantheism. All she knew was that her sons were
unhappy, and she must comfort them as best she could. Men have always
been unhappy, and women have always tried to comfort them according to
their sons’ needs. All good men have the same religion, and they have all
learned it at their mother’s knee.[30]

Of all the philosophers who have tried to solve the awful mystery of the
Infinite God, Baruch Spinoza probably came as near to it as He will ever
allow.

But man must work out his own salvation, and it is not right to blame
the infinite God if anything fails to happen as we desire. “Let us still
cultivate our garden.”

THE END

FOOTNOTES

[1] There are innumerable English synonyms for psychasthenic, mostly
slang. A few are unbalanced, half-crazy, half-cracked, half-dotty,
peculiar, queer, etc. But none of these expresses the exact meaning of
the Greek; indeed, it is impossible absolutely to escape from medical
jargon, except by a phrase.

[2] Probably it was the clinical type with stupor, in which grief and the
sense of sin become so overwhelming that the patient can hardly move.

[3] According to Professor J. J. Welsh many ointments in use at the time
contained mercury.

[4] In cases resembling nymphomania that occur after childbirth we call
it puerperal insanity.

[5] The title was only recent. Formerly he had been called “His Grace.”

[6] See how neurotic he was at the time!

[7] Please note that “sex” does _not_ mean “sensuality.”

[8] These postulates are:

    (_a_) Her supposed deformity must have been such as would allow
    her terrible father and her anxious mother to accept her as a
    daughter, although they both desperately longed for a son and
    heir.

    (_b_) It must have been such as would have been known to
    herself.

    (_c_) It could not have interfered with the ordinary
    physiological processes of her life.

    (_d_) It must have been such as would not interfere with her
    living in at least tolerable health to the age of sixty-nine.

[9] If it is a science.

[10] Please do not look upon this as a diagnosis; all we say positively
is that the spirochæte must have affected his mind.

[11] _British Medical Journal_, 1910.

[12] Some say sixteen.

[13] Much the same libels on Catherine’s physical condition were spread
about her as had already been said about Elizabeth.

[14] Macaulay makes such fun of the poor doctors, with many sensational
adjectives, but I shall not reprint it here.

[15] A Freudian would say that Frederick’s dirtiness simply represented
an unconscious revolt against the tyranny of his father.

[16] Probably he was some crazy fellow of the minor clergy. The whole
world seems to have gone mad at this time; it only shows us what the
Crusades really meant to Europe.

[17] _Plague and Pestilence in Art and Literature_, by Raymond Crawfurd.

[18] Friedlander, taking his account of it entirely from Galen,
considered it to have been “petechial typhus,” or smallpox. The sanitary
condition of Rome must have been perfectly frightful, and to read
Friedlander makes one shudder.

[19] Probably Mus Rattus, the black rat, at that time. Mus decumanus, the
brown rat, does not seem to have begun to conquer the black rat till the
eighteenth century.

[20] _Epidemics of the Middle Ages._

[21] Of course this mainly refers to the poor. It is said that the serfs
deforested Europe in order that their betters might have a weekly hot
bath.

[22] The question of the first appearance of syphilis in Europe appears
to have been settled by an article in the _St. Louis Urological and
Cutaneous Review_ for 1924.

[23] Probably, like so many leaders of thought, Nietzsche was of the
manic-depressive temperament, with all the apparently insane egotism of
that temperament.

[24] It reminds one of Beethoven and the rice pudding, and of Henry VIII
and his loving subjects. But, whereas Henry, being a law-abiding, even
though impetuous, sovereign, was able to satisfy his obsessions by due
process of law, Schopenhauer and Beethoven had to take the matter into
their own forthright hands. And yet they say that the world did not
improve in those 300 years.

[25] Probably he was thinking of gonorrhœal ophthalmia, and dreading
lest he catch it by the unconventional way of a bath. No doubt somebody
had warned him against the dangers of the towel. He was full of quaint
ideas about infection. He must have walked in a maze of ghosts due to his
syphilophobia.

[26] I hate to remind the world of the ancient slander—

    A woman, a dog, and a crab-apple tree,
    The more you thrash ’em the better they be.

[27] Similarly Freud’s use of the term “sex” has been much misunderstood.
It does not mean sensuality. In man it has been so sublimated as to come
nearer to pity and love than to mere brute instinct.

[28] So far as we know we invariably become unconscious before we die; it
seems to be exactly like falling asleep.

[29] Or rather perhaps the infinite forces of the universe _as grasped by
the mind of man_.

[30] Of course because religion and science have nothing whatever to do
with each other. Religion is an emotion comparable to pity and love—that
is, to sex. Science is the observation of phenomena, which religion
sometimes unwisely tries to solve by transcendental explanations.