98 Foundations of Democratic Dogma
in Germany, I first read through the Genealogy of Morals.
It was, I think, the greatest single spiritual adventure of my
life. In the grey light of the morning I found myself sur-
veying the wreckage of my beliefs in a curious mood, one in
which a profound sense of loss was not unmixed with a
sense of profound exhilaration—of a great task to be under-
taken. Enough that I knew from that moment that not only
was the problem of values my problem, but also that it was
destined to be the key problem of the epoch in which I was
to live. My anticipations were not wrong. The reconstruc-
tion of our values which followed upon Nietzsche’s chal-
lenge was not only my problem but that of a large part of
recent philosophy.
I should like to tell the story of the long fight within phi-
losophy itself which this issue so vividly set by Nietzsche
precipitated—the struggle to solve the problem of value and
to fix the hierarchy of values. It is the story of a new field
in modern philosophy called Axiology. It has been a great
fight and I rejoice to have had a part in it. Step by step the
merely subjectivistic and biological theory of values—of
which Nietzsche was but the extreme protagonist—is being
met and, as I believe, at all important points, being over-
come. The Ninth International Congress of Philosophy,
held in Paris in 1937, devoted an entire section to this prob-
lem, which shows how fundamental it is in modern philoso-
phy. Of the fifty or more papers devoted to the subject, the
overwhelming majority represented the standpoint of objec-
tive and absolute values.
This is, however, not the immediate subject of this pres-
ent lecture although the democratic dogma of natural rights
is closely connected with it. Nietzsche was one of the most
virulent of all antagonists of this doctrine because, as he
clearly saw, it presupposes the doctrine of objective and ab-
solute values. The relations of these two conceptions will