“But these are always themselves in process of change.”

“Yes, gradual change.”

“Not necessarily gradual; and even if it were, still change.  And to sanction a change, however slight, may always mean, in the end, the sanctioning of a whole revolution.”

“Besides,” cried Leslie, “even if there were anything finally established, what right have we to judge that the established is the Good?”

“I don’t know that we have any right; but I am sure it is what we do.”

“Perhaps we do, many of us,” I said, “but always, so far as we reflect, with a lurking sense that we may be all wrong.  Or how else do you account for the curious, almost physical, sinking and disquiet we are apt to experience in the presence of a bold denier?”

“I don’t know that I do experience it.”

“Do you not?  I do so often; and only yesterday I had a specially vivid experience of the kind.”

“What was that?”

“Well, I was reading Nietzsche.”

“Who is he?”

“A German writer.  It does not much matter, but I had him in my mind when I was speaking.”

“Well, but what does he say?”

“It’s not so much what he says, as what he denies.”

“What does he deny, then?”

“Everything that you, I suppose, would assert.  I should conjecture, at least, that you believe in progress, democracy, and all the rest of it.”

“Well?”

“Well, he repudiates all that.  Everything that you would reckon as progress, he reckons as decadence.  Democracy he regards, with all that it involves, as a revolt of the weak against the strong, of the bad against the good, of the herd against the master.  Every great society, in his view, is aristocratic, and aristocratic in the sense that the many are deliberately and consciously sacrificed to the few; and that, not as a painful necessity, but with a good conscience, in free obedience to the universal law of the world.  ‘Be strong, be hard’ are his ultimate ethical principles.  The modern virtues, or what we affect to consider such, sympathy, pity, justice, thrift, unselfishness and the like, are merely symptoms of moral degeneration.  The true and great and noble man is above all things selfish; and the highest type of humanity is to be sought in Napoleon or Caesar Borgia.”

“But that’s mere raving!”

“So you are pleased to say; and so, indeed, it really may be.  But not simply because it contradicts those current notions which we are embodying, as fast as we can, in our institutions.  It is precisely those notions that it challenges; and it is idle to meet it with a bare denial.”

“I can conceive no better way of meeting it!”

“Perhaps, for purposes of battle.  Yet, even so, you would surely be stronger if you had reason for your faith.”

“But I think my reason sufficient—­those are not the ideas of the age.”

“But for all you know they may be those of the next.”