Doctrine of Natural Rights 97
In this really great book we are told that we must change
all our moral conceptions—there must be a complete trans-
valuation of all our values. Hitherto we have taken them
for granted—as the measure of culture. In Nietzsche’s own
words—of the Preface—“we have never seriously consid-
ered the value of our values themselves.” This is the ques-
tion of our century, as he views it, and it is the question set
us by Darwinian evolution and its view of man. On this
view he holds all our inherited moral and political values
are false.
Nietzsche, it is important to realize, starts with the pri-
macy of science in the modern world, and with the view of
nature and of man which he thinks is made necessary by
science. He accepts the view of man which follows from
Darwinian naturalism and seeks to place both morals and
politics on a scientific or naturalistic basis. The human val-
ues which we have taken for granted—the distinctions be-
tween good and evil inherited from another philosophy of
man—cannot be grafted upon modern evolutionary natu-
ralism. We must get beyond the distinctions of good and
evil, as they have been handed down to us by the Greek and
Christian civilizations, and work out ideas of good and bad
which are deducible from the biological conception of man.
“All the sciences,” we are told, “have now to pave the way
for the future task of the philosopher; this task being un-
derstood to mean that he must solve the problem of value;
that he has to fix the hierarchy of values.” Nietzsche be-
lieved, moreover, that, as he said in Thus Spake Zarathus-
tra, God is dead, and with His death went all the ideals of
rights and justice which are bound up with belief in Him.
The theological and philosophical structure with which our
values are bound up is gone and with that structure go the
values also.
I shall never forget the long night in which, as a student