who mistake the present wretchedness of Humanity for sinfulness, and
wish to make their patient less sinful and still more wretched. Both
Nietzsche and Disraeli have clearly recognised that this patient of
theirs is suffering from weakness and not from sinfulness, for which
latter some kind of strength may still be required; both are therefore
entirely opposed to a further dieting him down to complete moral
emaciation, but are, on the contrary, prescribing a tonic, a
roborating, a natural regime for him --advice for which both doctors
have been reproached with Immorality by their contemporaries as well
as by posterity. But the younger doctor has turned the tables upon
their accusers, and has openly reproached his Nazarene colleagues with
the Immorality of endangering life itself, he has clearly demonstrated
to the world that their trustful and believing patient was shrinking
beneath their very fingers, he has candidly foretold these Christian
quacks that one day they would be in the position of the quack
skin-specialist at the fair, who, as a proof of his medical skill,
used to show to the peasants around him the skin of a completly cured
patient of his. Both Nietzsche and Disraeli know the way to health,
for they have had the disease of the age themselves, but they
have--the one partly, the other entirely-- cured themselves of it,
they have resisted the spirit of their time, they have escaped the
fate of their contemporaries; they therefore, and they alone, know
their danger. This is the reason why they both speak so violently, why
they both attack with such bitter fervour the utilitarian and
materialistic attitude of English Science, why they both so ironically
brush aside the airy and fantastic ideals of German Philosophy--this
is why they both loudly declare (to use Disraeli's words) "that we are
the slaves of false knowledge; that our memories are filled with ideas
that have no origin in truth; that we believe what our fathers
credited, who were convinced without a cause; that we study human