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100 at the age of ten, tending thereafter in a more scientific direction and keeping their religion in a weaker, pantheistic form, they at last leave the ideas of God, immortality, and the like quite behind, but yield to the charms of a metaphysical philosophy. In course of time, however, this too becomes incredible. On the other hand, art appears to last, and for a while the metaphysics lingers as a form of art or as a transfiguring artistic mood. But the scientific sense grows ever more imperative and conducts the full-grown man to natural science and history and especially into strictest methods of thinking, while to art falls an ever milder and more modest significance. Nietzsche thinks that this is a kind of epitome of the intellectual history of humanity—it is at least, we may say, a summary of his own personal history down to and into his second period.

Nietzsche had a friend at this time—really since 1874—by the name of Paul Rée. He was a positivist of the French and English type. He had written a book, Psychological Observations, which impressed Nietzsche, and during the winter of 1876-77 they were together in Sorrento, where Rée wrote another book, The Origin of the Moral Sentiments, a copy of which he presented to Nietzsche with the inscription, "To the father of this book from its most grateful mother." undefined Undoubtedly Nietzsche influenced him, and yet he as certainly influenced Nietzsche. He seems to have particularly directed Nietzsche's attention to Pascal and Voltaire and Prosper Mérimée; he was already in that world of historical study and of fine psychological analysis which Nietzsche was to make his own, and Nietzsche once humorously dubbed his new standpoint "Réealismus." Yet a radically determining influence may be doubted. undefined Nietzsche's general positivistic tendency really began as far back as when his first doubts arose as to Schopenhauer's metaphysical interpretation of the will. He speaks, indeed, of his "new philosophy," but he is aware that "nature makes no leaps," and says that it is the task of the biographer to remember this principle. This second period is only relatively, not absolutely distinguished from the first. undefined