ophy to justify it. Christianity would not justify it, but Darwinism could. Given a little audacity, and the thing could be done.

Nietzsche had the audacity, and became the voice.

II. YOUTH

Nevertheless, his father was a minister; a long line of clergymen lay behind each of his parents; and he himself remained a preacher to the end. He attacked Christianity because there was so much of its moral spirit in him; his philosophy was an attempt to balance and correct, by violent contradiction, an irresistible tendency to gentleness and kindness and peace; was it not the final insult that the good people of Genoa should call him Il Santo "the Saint"? His mother was a pious and Puritan lady, of the same sort that had fostered Immanuel Kant; and, with perhaps one disastrous exception, Nietzsche remained pious and Puritan, chaste as a statue, to the last: therefore his assault on Puritanism and piety. How he longed to be a sinner, this incorrigible saint!

He was born at Röcken, Prussia, on October 15, 1844,which happened to be the birthday of the reigning Prussian king, Frederick William IV. His father, who had tutored several members of the royal family, rejoiced at this patriotic coincidence, and named the boy after the King. "There was at all events one advantage in the choice of this day for my birth; my birthday throughout the whole of my childhood was a day of public rejoicing." 1

The early death of his father left him a victim to the holy women of the household, who petted him into an almost feminine delicacy and sensibility. He disliked the bad boys of the neighborhood, who robbed birds' nests, raided orchards, played soldier, and told lies. His school-mates called him "the 1 Ecce Homo, English translation, ed. Levy, p. 15.

little minister," and one of them described him as "a Jesus in the Temple." It was his delight to seclude himself and read the Bible, or to read it to others so feelingly as to bring tears to their eyes. But there was a hidden nervous stoicism and pride in him: when his school-fellows doubted the story of Mutius Scaevola he ignited a batch of matches in the palm of his hand and let them lie there till they were burnt out.1 It was a typical incident: all his life long he was to seek physical and intellectual means of hardening himself into an idealized masculinity. "What I am not, that for me is God and virtue.” 2

At eighteen he lost his faith in the God of his fathers, and spent the remainder of his life looking for a new deity; he thought he found one in the Superman. He said later that he had taken the change easily; but he had a habit of easily deceiving himself, and is an unreliable autobiographer. He became cynical, like one who had staked all on a single throw of the dice, and had lost; religion had been the very marrow of his life, and now life seemed empty and meaningless. He passed suddenly into a period of sensual riot with his college mates at Bonn and Leipzig, and even overcame the fastidiousness that had made so difficult for him the male arts of smoking and drinking. But soon wine, woman and tobacco disgusted him; he reacted into a great scorn of the whole biergemüthlichkeit of his country and his time; people who drank

1 Mencken, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, Boston, 1913; p. 10. 2 Thus Spake Zarathustra, p. 129. This work will be referred to hereafter as "Z"; and the following (in the English translation) will be referred to by their initials: The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Thoughts Out of Season (1873–76), Human All Too Human (1876–80), The Dawn of Day (1881), The Joyful Wisdom (1882), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), The Genealogy of Morals (1887); The Case of Wagner (1888), The Twilight of the Idols (1888), Antichrist (1889), Ecce Homo (1889), The Will to Power (1889). Perhaps the best of these as an introduction to Nietzsche himself is Beyond Good and Evil. Zarathustra is obscure, and its latter half tends towards elaboration. The Will to Power contains more meat than any of the other books. The most complete biography is by Frau Förster-Nietzsche; Halévy's, much shorter, is also good. Salter's Nietzsche the Thinker (New York, 1917) is a scholarly exposition.

beer and smoked pipes were incapable of clear perception or subtle thought.

It was about this time, in 1865, that he discovered Schopenhauer's World as Will and Idea, and found in it "a mirror in which I espied the world, life, and my own nature depicted with frightful grandeur."1 He took the book to his lodgings, and read every word of it hungrily. "It seemed as if Schopenhauer were addressing me personally. I felt his enthusiasm, and seemed to see him before me. Every line cried aloud for renunciation, denial, resignation." 2 The dark color of Schopenhauer's philosophy impressed itself permanently upon his thought: and not only when he was a devoted follower of "Schopenhauer as Educator" (the title of one of his essays), but even when he came to denounce pessimism as a form of decadence, he remained at bottom an unhappy man, whose nervous system seemed to have been carefully designed for suffering, and whose exaltation of tragedy as the joy of life was but another self-deception. Only Spinoza or Goethe could have saved him from Schopenhauer; but though he preached æquanimitas and amor fati, he never practised them; the serenity of the sage and the calm of the balanced mind were never his.

At the age of twenty-three he was conscripted into military service. He would have been glad to get exemption as nearsighted and the only son of a widow, but the army claimed him nevertheless; even philosophers were welcomed as cannonfodder in the great days of Sadowa and Sedan. However, a fall from a horse so wrenched his breast-muscles that the recruiting-sergeant was forced to yield up his prey. Nietzsche never quite recovered from that hurt. His military experience was so brief that he left the army with almost as many delusions about soldiers as he had had on entering it; the hard Spartan life of commanding and obeying, of endurance and discipline, appealed to his imagination, now that he was free 1 B. T., introd., p. xvii.

2 Quoted by Mencken, p. 18.