th the laboured
and ineffectual constructions of the theoretic man, even of Socrates the
founder of philosophy, the radiant vision of the artist, the lucid
clarity of Apollo. 'His book gave the lie to a thousand years of orderly
development', wrote the great Hellenist Wilamowitz, Nietzsche's old
schoolfellow, indignant at his rejection of the labours of scholastic
reason. But it affirmed energetically the passion of his own time for
immediate and first-hand experience.

And it did more. Beside and above Apollo, Nietzsche put Dionysus; beside
vision and above it, _rage_. Of the union of these two Tragedy was born.
And Nietzsche's glorification of this elemental creative force also
responded to a wider movement in philosophy, here chiefly German. His
Dionysiac rage is directly derived from that will in which Schopenhauer
saw the master faculty of man and the hidden secret of the universe; and
the beginning of Schopenhauer's fame, about 1850, coincides with a
general rehabilitation of will as the dominant faculty in the soul and
in the world, at the cost of the methodic orderly processes of
understanding; a movement exhibited in the psychological innovations of
Wundt and Muensterberg, in the growth of the doctrine that what a thing
is is determined by what it _can_; that value is in fact the measure,
and even the meaning, of existence; that will can arm impotence, create
faith, and master disease; and in the call of the colossal will-power
which created the German empire and launched her on the career of
industrial greatness. Nietzsche's Superman is, above all, a being of
colossal and masterful will, and Zarathustra, the prophet of
superhumanity, is only an incarnation of the will that for Schopenhauer
moved the world. The moment at which the prestige of will began
definitely to overcome that of reasoning is marked, as Aliotta has
pointed out, by the appearance of James's _Will to Believe_, just when
agnosticism seemed triumphant.

Nietzsche and Bergson thus, with all their obvious and immense
divergences, concurred in this respect, important from our present point
of view, that their influence tended to transfer authority from the
philosophic reason to those 'irrational' elements of mind which reach
their highest intensity in the vision and 'rage' of the poet. James's
vindication of drunken exaltation as a source of religious insight was
not the least symptomatic passage of his great book. And both concurred,
however re