ABSTRACT
Nietzsche’s impact on English writers in the years 1896-1914 appears to justify Wyndham Lewis’s statement that he became, for a time ‘the greatest popular success of any philosopher of modern times’. What sets him apart is the kind of impact he had. Philosophers are normally influential because in one way or another they reveal some essential truth about human nature. This is not the case with Nietzsche, although he does reveal certain truths, notably concerning the will to power, the genealogy of morals, and man’s extraordinary power of self-deception. It was not this, however, that made him so influential. So far as British writers are concerned, his appeal lay in what is also, paradoxically, his greatest weakness: his capacity for generalization. This capacity ensured both that little of his work was true, and that most of it was highly stimulating.
