Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

David Strauss, the corifessor and the writerand it now torments itself to draw metaphors from the railway, thetelegraph, the steam-engine, the stock exchange, and feels proud ofthe fact that these similes must be new because they are modern. InStrauss's confessional book we find ample tribute paid to the modemmetaphor: he dismisses us with a page-and-a-halflong simile drawnfrom road improvement works, a few pages earlier he compares theworld to a machine with its wheels, pistons, hammers and 'soothingoil'. - A meal which starts with champagne (p. 362) . Kant as a hydropathicestablishment (p. 325). 'The Swiss constitution compares withthe English as a watermill compares with a steam-engine, a waltz or asong with a fugue or a symphony' (p. 265). 'In the case of everyappeal, the correct succession of tribunals must be adhered to. Theintermediate tribunal between the individual and mankind, however,is the nation' (p. 258). 'If we wish to discover whether life in fact existsin an organism that seems to us dead, we usually test it by administeringa strong, often painful stimulus, a jab for instance' (p. 141).'The religious domain in the human soul is like the domain of theRedskin in America' (p. 138). 'To set down the sum total of all thepreceding in round numbers at the bottom of the bill' (p. 90). 'TheDarwinian theory is like a railway track that has just been marked out... where the banners flutter gaily in the wind' (p. 176). It is in thisway, namely the most modern way, that Strauss has complied withthe philistine demand that from time to time a new metaphor mustmake an appearance.Also very widespread is a fu rther demand that didactic statementsmust be composed in long sentences employing abstractions, whilethose intended to persuade should preferably be in short little sentenceswith contrasting forms of expression hopping one after theother. Strauss provides on page 132 a model sentence of the didacticand scholarly kind: inflated to truly Schleiermacherish proportions,it creeps along at the pace of a tortoise: 'That at the earlier stages ofreligion, instead of a single such Whence there appear many, insteadof one God there appears a multiplicity of gods, is, according to thisderivation of religion, due to the fact that the various natural fo rcesor conditions of life which arouse in man the feeling of absolutedependence still act upon him in the beginning in all their multifariousness,he has not yet become aware how in regard to hisabsolute dependence upon them there is no distinction betweenthem, consequently the Whence of this dependence or the Being towhich in the last instance they are to be traced back can be only one.'An example of the opposite kind of thing, of the short little sentences51