The probable Nietzschean challenge to mercy
a wild page from any Prussian sophist makes men doubt it
Nietzsche is the strongest contextual candidate: Chesterton has just named him and attacked his language of the overman. But ‘any Prussian sophist’ identifies a type, not an explicit author or quotation. A relevant comparison is Nietzsche's The Antichrist (written 1888; first published 1895): §2 measures good by increased power, while §7 attacks Christian pity as harmful to life. These give concrete substance to Chesterton's fear that readers will reconsider mercy itself. The Antichrist, §§2, 7.
The comparison also qualifies the polemic. In §4 Nietzsche rejects the assumption that humanity necessarily improves through evolution. He is therefore no straightforward spokesman for automatic progress. Chesterton's immediate accusation concerns what fashionable readers do with successive philosophies: change their standards rather than realize them. This does not establish either that Nietzsche lacked a positive standard or that Chesterton was quoting this book. The inspected English witness is H. L. Mencken's 1918 translation, reproduced from a Knopf pocket edition first issued in 1923, second printing 1924; it postdates Orthodoxy and cannot be Chesterton's source.
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