All-too-Human to the memory of a Frenchman, the hundredth anniversary of whose death was about to occur, Voltaire, calling him "one of the greatest liberators of the mind."
IV
It is a period which Professor Ziegler calls his "leanest." Professor Riehl, on the other hand, finds it in many respects the most attractive and valuable; and Jacob Burckhardt pronounced Human, All-too-Human his "sovereign book." Much depends on the point of view. If one has above all the critical temper, if one is bent on analysis and skeptical of enthusiasm, if one distrusts metaphysics and high-soaring aims, in other words if one is a typical scholar or scientific man, the writings of this period are likely to appeal to him more than any others. Nietzsche is now anti-metaphysical, anti-mystical, anti-romantic à l'outrance. His passion for actuality makes him explore all the corners of life where the ideal throws a glamor over the real and rout it out. Or, to use a sardonic metaphor which he himself employs in a later retrospect, he lays one error after another "on ice"—with the result that it is "not refuted, but freezes." It is so, he says, with "the genius," with "the saint," with "the hero"; it is so finally with "belief," with so-called "convictions"; even "pity" cools off considerably, and "the thing in itself" freezes almost everywhere.[1] Yet a deep-seeing poet has said,
"We all are changed by slow degrees,
All but the basis of the soul,"
and it is true of Nietzsche. Actuality is not the whole of possible existence, and the passion for actuality was never the whole nor the deepest thing in Nietzsche. Later on he came to realize this distinctly. His present phase is really one of transition—Riehl calls it an interlude.[2] f All the same, we may as well attend to it for the time, as if no other were to follow—in fact be like Nietzsche himself, who at first does not know whether anything more is to come. He ventures a summary description of how men develop intellectually during their first thirty years:—Beginning with religious impulses as children and perhaps reaching the height of their impressionability
