Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/110

94 volumes being Dawn of Day (1881), Joyful Science (1882). The first of these books follows a certain order, treating successively of "First and Last Things," "The History of the Moral Sentiments," "The Religious Life," "Art and Artists," "Signs of Higher and Lower Culture," "Man in Intercourse with Others," "Wife and Child," "The State," "Man Alone with Himself"; and the two succeeding volumes follow, though less certainly, the same order. In Dawn of Day and Joyful Science, order of any kind is but slightly perceptible.

Before taking up the new views in detail, let me note a few general marks of the period. In the first place, the spirit of change is on Nietzsche. He has known slight changes before; now it is a great change. Even his perspective of moral values is somewhat altered. He does not think, for instance, so highly of loyalty as he had. "I have not the talent for being loyal, and, what is worse, not even the vanity to wish to appear so." He raises the general question whether we are irrevocably bound by vows of allegiance to a God, a prince, a party, a woman, a religious order, an artist, a thinker,—whether they were not hypothetical vows, with the unexpressed presupposition that the object to which we consecrated ourselves was really what we supposed it to be. Are we obligated, he asks, to be loyal to our errors, even when we see that by this loyalty we inflict injury on our higher self? "No, there is no law, no obligation of this sort; we must become traitors, practise disloyalty, surrender our ideals." And if it be asked why those remaining faithful to a conviction are admired, while others who change are despised, he fears the answer must be that only motives of vulgar advantage or personal fear are supposed to inspire change—a poor tribute, he thinks, to the intellectual significance of convictions. Indeed, he suspects that passion and inertia have much to do with unchangeable convictions, and that the intellect, aspiring to be cool and just, is bound to be to this extent their enemy. He puts his ideal in words like these: "From the fire [of passion] set free, we move on impelled by the intellect from opinion to opinion, through