aggressive action is performed: aggressive words alone are used, and
these he selects from among the most insulting he can find. He
moreover exhausts all his accumulated strength and energy in coarse
and noisy expression, and when once his utterances have died away he
is more of a coward even than he who has always held his tongue. The
very shadow of his deeds--his morality--shows us that he is a
word-hero, and that he avoids everything which might induce him to
transfer his energies from mere verbosity to really serious things.
With admirable frankness, he announces that he is no longer a
Christian, but disclaims all idea of wishing to disturb the
contentment of any one: he seems to recognise a contradiction in the
notion of abolishing one society by instituting another--whereas there
is nothing contradictory in it at all. With a certain rude
self-satisfaction, he swathes himself in the hirsute garment of our
Simian genealogists, and extols Darwin as one of mankind's greatest
benefactors; but our perplexity is great when we find him constructing
his ethics quite independently of the question, "What is our
conception of the universe?" In this department he had an opportunity
of exhibiting native pluck; for he ought to have turned his back on
his "We," and have established a moral code for life out of bellum
omnium contra omnes and the privileges of the strong. But it is to be
feared that such a code could only have emanated from a bold spirit
like that of Hobbes', and must have taken its root in a love of truth
quite different from that which was only able to vent itself in
explosive outbursts against parsons, miracles, and the "world-wide
humbug" of the Resurrection. For, whereas the Philistine remained on
Strauss's side in regard to these explosive outbursts, he would have
been against him had he been confronted with a genuine and seriously
constructed ethical system, based upon Darwin's teaching.