Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

David Strauss, the confessor and the writercisely a creature of nature and nothing else, and has evolved to theheight of being man by quite other laws: precisely, in fact, by alwaysforgetting that other creatures similar to him possessed equivalentrights, precisely by feeling himself the stronger and graduallyeliminating the other, weaker examples of his species? While Straussis obliged to assume that no two creatures have been exactly similar,and that the entire evolution of man from the level of the animals upto the heights of the cultural philistine depends upon the law of differencesbetween individuals, he finds no difficulty in enunciatingthe opposite: 'behave as though there were no differences betweenindividuals!' Where has the moral teaching of Strauss-Darwin nowgone, where has any courage whatever gone!We are at once given a fresh demonstration of the point at whichcourage is transposed into its opposite. For Strauss continues: 'Donot ever forget that you and all that you are aware of within andaround you is no disconnected fragment, no wild chaos of atomsand accidents, but that 'everything proceeds according to eternallaws out of the one primeval source of all life, all reason and all goodnessthat is the epitome of religion.' Out of this 'one primevalsource' however, there at the same time flows all destruction, allunreason, all evil, and Strauss calls this source the universe. But how,given it possesses so contradictory and self-annulling a character,should this be worthy of religious veneration and be addressed bythe name 'God', as Strauss himself addresses it (p. 365): 'our Goddoes not take us into his arms from outside' - here one expects as anantithesis a certainly very strange 'taking us into his arms fromwithin'! - 'he opens to us sources of consolation within us. He showsus that, while chance would be an irrational master of the world,necessity, i.e. the chain of causes in the world, is reason itself' (apiece of surreptitiousness which only the 'we' can fail to recognize assuch because they were raised in this Hegelian worship of the real asthe rational, that is to say in thedeiflCationofsuccess). 'He teaches us to seethat to desire an exception to the fulfilment of a single law of naturewould be to desire the destruction of the cosmos.' On the contrary,Master: an honest natural scientist believes that the world conformsunconditionally to laws, without however asserting anything as tothe ethical or intellectual value of these laws: he would regard anysuch assertions as the extreme anthropomorphism of a reason thathas overstepped the bounds of the permitted. But it is at precisely thepoint at which the honest natural scientist resigns that Strauss 'reacts'- in order to plume us with his feathers - 'religiously', and goes on to31