[227] Shaw's philosophy has many points of contact with the Pragmatism of Schiller and James. Shaw sees in truth and justice, not abstract principles external to man, but human passions, which have, in their time, conflicted with higher passions as well as with lower ones. With James he is at one in the belief that “Truth has its palæontology, and its 'prescription' and may grow stiff with years of veteran service and petrified in men's regard by sheer antiquity”; and with Schiller's “humanistic” doctrine that “to an unascertainable extent our truths are man-made products too.” To Shaw, as to James, “'the right' is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.”

[228] Giving the Devil His Due: a review, by Bernard Shaw, of Vols. I. and II. of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Supplement to the Saturday Review, May 13th, 1899.

[229] “'Is here,' someone will ask, 'an ideal being erected, or an ideal being broken down?' But have ye ever really asked yourselves sufficiently as to how dearly the erection of all ideals on earth were paid for? How much reality had to be slandered and misconceived for this purpose; how much falsehood sanctioned; how much conscience confused; how much 'God' sacrificed each time? In order that a sanctuary may be erected, a sanctuary must be broken down: this is the law—name me an instance in which it is violated!” Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, translated by William A. Hausemann, p. 122 (Macmillan).

[230] To take a single example, consult My Dream, from The Bab Ballads and Songs of a Savoyard, the first two stanzas of which read:

[231] A Dramatic Realist to His Critics, in the New Review (London), July, 1894.

[232] This morality is no new thing under the sun; Maurice Maeterlinck has declared that our morality of to-day has nothing to add to this injunction, found in the Arabian Nights: “Learn to know thyself! And do thou not act till then. And do thou then only act in accordance with all thy desires, but having great care always that thou do not injure thy neighbour.”

[233] Compare also the notable passage, embodying a similar view, in Max Stirner's The Ego and His Own (Benjamin R. Tucker, N. Y., 1907), p. 212, beginning: “'What am I?' each of you asks himself. An abyss of lawless and unregulated impulses, desires, wishes, passions, a chaos without light or guiding star!...”

[234] A Degenerate's View of Nordau, in Liberty, July 27th, 1895.

[235] Mr. Shaw has recently pointed out that Professor A. K. Rogers, in his Mr. Bernard Shaw's Philosophy (Hibbert Journal, July, 1910), has failed to note the “trumpery (!) distinction between instinct and conscience” which Shaw had drawn in Man and Superman.

[236] It is worthy of note that Nietzsche has defined freedom as the will to be responsible for oneself. Compare also The Ego and His Own, pp. 237-238 (Benjamin R. Tucker, N. Y.), the passage beginning: “To be a man is not to realize the ideal of Man, but to realize oneself, the individual....”

[237] Who I Am, and What I Think, Part II., in The Candid Friend, May 18th, 1901.

[238] Compare Does Modern Education Ennoble? by G. Bernard Shaw; in Great Thoughts, October 7th, 1905.

[239] The substance of Shaw's philosophy—as, indeed, he once told me—is embodied in Act III. of Man and Superman.

[240] For the sake of making himself easily understood, Shaw frequently expresses his neo-theological conceptions in the familiar phraseology of orthodox religion. Shaw's practice of personifying God, when in reality he mentally identifies “God” with a mystical and impersonal “Force,” is a practice which many people quite justly condemn.

[241] Cf. Shaw's open letter to G. W. Foote, in The Freethinker, November 1st, 1908.

[242] In this connection it is interesting to read Shaw's review of Samuel Butler's Luck or Cunning? published under the heading “Darwin Denounced,” in the Pall Mall Gazette, May 31st, 1887. At this time, Shaw committed himself neither to Lamarck nor to Butler, but was content to define the issues of the controversy. Certainly his interest was aroused, and years later his support was won, by Butler's protest against natural selection as—to use Butler's own words—“a purely automatic conception of the universe as of something that will work if a penny be dropped into the box.”

[243] Compare The Philosophy of Bernard Shaw, by Archibald Henderson, in the Atlantic Monthly, February, 1909.

[244] Compare A Genealogy of Morals, translated by William A. Hausemann; Alexander Tille's introduction, pp. xvi. and xviii. For Shaw's general confession of indebtedness to others, compare the preface to Major Barbara—First Aid to Critics.