Before the rev. professors had come to Schopenhauer, or
even to Spencer, he was hauling ashore the devil-fish, Nietzsche. No
stranger poisons have ever passed through the customs than those he has
brought in his baggage. No man among us has ever urged more ardently, or
with sounder knowledge or greater persuasiveness, that catholicity of
taste and sympathy which stands in such direct opposition to the booming
certainty and snarling narrowness of Little Bethel.
If he bears a simple label, indeed, it is that of anti-Philistine. And
the Philistine he attacks is not so much the vacant and harmless fellow
who belongs to the Odd Fellows and recreates himself with _Life_ and
_Leslie's Weekly_ in the barber shop, as that more belligerent and
pretentious donkey who presumes to do battle for "honest" thought and a
"sound" ethic--the "forward looking" man, the university ignoramus, the
conservator of orthodoxy, the rattler of ancient phrases--what Nietzsche
called "the Philistine of culture." It is against this fat milch cow of
wisdom that Huneker has brandished a spear since first there was a
Huneker.
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