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What is then the destiny of these singular souls? Is their force, which is at times immense, lost? Will the philosopher always be a paradoxical being, and useless to men? Friedrich Nietzsche was troubled; it was the utility of his own life that he questioned. He would never be a musician, that he knew at last; never a poet, he had ceased to hope for it. He had not the faculty of conceiving the uniformities, of animating a drama, of creating a soul. One evening he confessed this to Overbeck with such sadness that his friend was moved. He was therefore a philosopher, moreover, a very ignorant one, an amateur of philosophy, an imperfect lyrical artist; and he questioned himself: Since I have for weapons only my thoughts, the thoughts of a philosopher, what can I do? He answered: I can help. Socrates did not create the truths that error kept prisoners in the souls of his interlocutors, he only aspired to the title of accoucheur. Such is the task of a philosopher. He is an inefficient creator, but a very efficient critic. He is obliged to[Pg 139] analyse the forces which are operative around him, in science, in religion, and in art; he is obliged to give the directions, to fix the values and the limits. Such shall be my task. I will study the souls of my contemporaries, and I shall have every authority to say to them: Neither science nor religion can save you; seek refuge in art, the power of modern times, and in the artist who is Richard Wagner. "The philosopher of the future," he wrote, "he must be the supreme judge of an sthetic culture, a censor of every digression."

Nietzsche went to Naumburg for the Christmas holidays. Wagner sent him word to ask him to stop at Bayreuth on his way home to Basle, but he was hard pressed by work and perhaps a little ill, and no doubt a secret instinct warned him that solitude would be best for the meditation of the problems which he had to determine for himself. He made his apologies. Besides, he had had for some weeks many opportunities of proving his attachment. He had written an article (the only one in all his work) in answer to an alienist who had undertaken to prove that Wagner was mad. He had offered a sum of money to help in the propaganda. This anonymous and distant manner was the only one that suited him at the time. Even at Basle he tried to found a Wagnerian Verein. He was therefore astounded when he discovered that the master was displeased at his absence. Already in the past year an invitation, also declined, had helped to provoke a mild lecture.

"It is Burckhardt who is keeping you at Basle," wrote Cosima Wagner. Nietzsche wrote and remedied things, but the painful impression remained.

"Everything is quieted," he told the friend who had informed him; "but I cannot quite forget. Wagner knows that I am ill, absorbed in work, and in need of a little liberty. I shall be, henceforth, whether I wish[Pg 140] it or no, more anxious than in the past. God knows how many times I have wounded him. Each time I am astonished, and I never succeed in precisely locating the point in which we have clashed."

This annoyance did not affect his thought; we can follow it to its smallest shades of meaning, thanks to the notes published in the tenth volume of his complete works. It is quite active and fecund. "I am the adventurer of the spirit," he was to write. "I wander in my thought. I go to the idea that calls me...."

He was never to wander so audaciously as in the first weeks of 1876.

He completed a finer and sober essay, Ueber Wahrheit und Lge im ausser moralischen Sinne (On Truth and Falsehood in an Extra-Moral Sense.) (It is a pity that it is necessary to translate these high-sounding expressions, and we render them word for word.) Nietzsche always liked high-sounding words; he does not recoil here from using the word "untruth," and essays for the first time a "reversal of values." To the true he opposes the false and prefers it. He exalts the imaginary worlds which poets add to the real world. "Dare to deceive thyself and dream," Schiller had said; Friedrich Nietzsche repeats this advice. It was the happy audacity of the Greeks; they intoxicated themselves with their divine histories, their heroic myths, and this intoxication set their souls on high adventures. The loyal Athenian, persuaded that Pallas dwelt in his city, lived in a dream. More clear-sighted, would he have been stronger; more passionate, braver? Truth is good in proportion to the services which it assures, and illusion is preferable if it performs its duty better. Why deify the truth? It is the tendency of the moderns; Pereat vita, fiat veritas! they say readily. Why this[Pg 141] fanaticism? It is an inversion of the sane law for men: Pereat Veritas, fiat vita!

Nietzsche wrote down these dogmatic formulas, but did not stop at them. He went on writing. It was thus that he worked and advanced in his researches. Let us not forget that these thoughts, firm though they were in manner, were only indications, steps on the road. He would give birth to other and perhaps contrary thoughts. Friedrich Nietzsche had in him two instincts, opposed to each other; the one, that of the philosopher, and the other, that of the artist; the one was bent on truth, the other was ready to fabricate. He hesitated at the moment when he had to sacrifice one or the other. The instinct for the true protested within him. He did not abandon his formulas; he took them up again, he essayed new definitions, he indicated the difficulties, the hiatus. His thoughts had no disguise, and we can follow his researches. Let us translate this significant disorder:

"The philosopher of the tragic knowledge. He binds the disordered instinct of knowledge, but not by a new metaphysic. He does not establish new beliefs. He sees with a tragic emotion that the ground of metaphysics opens under him, and he knows that the many-coloured whirlwind of science can never satisfy him. He builds for himself a new life; to art he restores its rights.

"The philosopher of the desperate knowledge abandons himself to blind science: knowledge at any price.

"Even if metaphysics be only an anthropomorphic appearance, for the tragic philosopher that achieves the image of being. He is not sceptical. Here there is an idea to create; for scepticism is not the end. The instinct of knowledge forced to its extreme limits turns against itself to transform itself into a criticism of the faculty of knowledge. Knowledge in the service of the best[Pg 142] kind of life. One should even will illusion, therein lies the tragic."

What is then this philosopher of the desperate knowledge whose attitude Nietzsche defines in two lines. Must he not love him, having found for him already such a beautiful name? There is an idea to create, writes Nietzsche; what then is this idea? It seems that in many passages Nietzsche is pleased to contemplate, without its veils, that terrible reality, whose aspect alone, says the Hindu legend, means death.

"How," he writes, "do they dare talk of a destiny for the earth? In infinite time and space there are no ends: what is there, is eternally there, whatever the forms. What can result from it for a metaphysical world one does not see.

"Without support of this order humanity should stand firm; a terrible task for the artist!

"The terrible consequences of Darwinism, in which, moreover, I believe. We respect certain qualities which we hold as eternal, moral, artistic, religious, &c., &c., &c. The spirit, a production of the brain, to consider it as supernatural! To deify it, what folly!

"To speak of an unconscious end of humanity, to me, that is false. Humanity is not a whole like an ant-hill. Perhaps one may speak of the unconscious ends of an ant-hill—but of all the ant-hills of the world!