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Royle reads everything she can lay her hands on, but her husband's special subject is philosophy, and last night he lent me a volume of Nietzsche. I don't think I understood a single word, but between it and the moorghy-khana I had a bad night. I thought I had to make in five minutes a new scheme of the Universe.

When the whole of Germany was delirious with joy over her victory, at a time when the unquestioned triumph of her arms tended rather to reflect unearned glory upon every department of her social organisation, it required both courage and discernment to raise the warning voice and to apply the wet blanket. But Nietzsche did both, and with spirit, because his worst fears were aroused.

Up to that fatal moment "his history is that of a man sane and interesting apart from his special gifts as orator, healer and prophet"; but from that point onward he set to work to live up to "his destiny as a god," part of which was to be killed and to rise again. Many other prophets have gone mad for instance, Ruskin and Nietzsche.

Like Nietzsche, the modern German believes that the world must be ruled by a super-man, and that he is the super-man. Like Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the German is convinced that he belongs to a super-race, and that the Teuton has been the master-builder of European civilization.” See an amusing article, “Ornamente,” in the Zukunft.

That is precisely what every sinner would like to believe. "I have done that, says my memory. I cannot have done that, says my pride, and remains obdurate. In the end, my memory gives in." So wrote Nietzsche, keenly and cynically observant of his kind.

The following extract from Nietzsche may be worth quoting as presenting one aspect of his many-sided thought:

For the chapter on Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche, I shall give but a few references, though the literature on these writers is enormous. The translation of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, by S. W. Dyde , I have found good, where I have compared it with the original. The word "Right" in the title is unavoidably ambiguous, for the German word means both "right" and "law."

Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, Leibnitz, Nietzsche, Hume, Bradley, William James had all been rejected and were piled on the floor, but he had hesitated longer over Bergson's Creative Evolution. He really seemed to be giving that some attention, though he read it if he were reading it so fast that the hand which turned the pages hardly rested between each movement.

And he was always making a parade of Father Duvillard's millions, while pretending to disdain them, and act the revolutionist, for ever saying that he'd use his cigarette to fire the cartridge which was to blow up the world! He was Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, and Tolstoi, and Ibsen, rolled into one! And you can see what he has become with it all: a humbug with a diseased mind!"

He'll talk Nietzsche, or Schopenhauer, or Kant, or anything, but the only thing in this world, not excepting Mary, that he really cares for, is his monism. Haeckel is his little tin god. The only way to insult him is to take a slap at Haeckel." "Here's the hang-out." Brissenden rested his demijohn at the upstairs entrance, preliminary to the climb.