IV
Nietzsche felt that he belonged to a spiritual line. He was grateful to those of his own time or century who had influenced him, and to the great spirits of the past whose blood was kindred to his own—indeed he was so conscious of being well-born in this respect, that he did not feel the need of fame.[1] His ancestry he designates differently at different times. Once he speaks of four pairs of names: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer.[2] At another time he mentions Zarathustra, Moses, Mohammed, Jesus, Plato, Brutus, Spinoza, Mirabeau.[3] At still another, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Spinoza, Goethe.[4] It is interesting to note that the most constant names are Spinoza and Goethe, the next most constant Plato. Kant is not mentioned. This cannot mean that Kant had not influenced him, though more negatively than otherwise, and perhaps principally through Schopenhauer and Friedrich Albert Lange; with Kant's theoretic standpoint he was far more in harmony than with Plato's, but Plato's aristocratic practical philosophy appealed to him as Kant's democratic, Rousseau-born ethics did not. Nietzsche confessed that he almost loved Pascal, who had instructed him unendingly; but he thought that Christianity had corrupted his noble intellect, though if he had lived thirty years longer, he might have turned on Christianity as he had earlier on the Jesuits. l
