"I have sometimes half believed, although the suspicion is mortifying, that there is only one step between his state who deeply indulges in imaginative meditation, and insanity; for I well remember that at this period of my life, when I indulged in meditation to a degree that would now be impossible, and I hope unnecessary, my senses sometimes appeared to be wandering."
And artists are the proper judges of artists,—not Oxford Dons, like Dr. Schiller, who, in his imprudent attempt at dealing with something for which his pragmatic hands are not sufficiently delicate, eagerly av-ails himself of popular help in his article on Nietzsche in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and implies the hackneyed and wholly exploded belief that Nietzsche's philosophy is madness in the making. As German philosophies, however, are said to go to Oxford only when they die, we may, perhaps, conclude from this want of appreciation in that quarter, how very much alive Nietzsche's doctrine still is.
Not that Nietzsche went mad so soon, but that he went mad so late is the wonder of wonders. Considering the extraordinary amount of work he did, the great task of the transvaluation of all values, which he actually accomplished, and the fact that he endured such long years of solitude, which to him, the sensitive artist to whom friends were everything, must have been a terrible hardship, we can only wonder at his great health, and can well believe his sister's account of the phenomenal longevity and bodily vigour of his ancestors.
No one, however, who is initiated, no one who reads this work with understanding, will be in need of this introductory note of mine; for, to