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108 into abstract philosophemes, but it is unnecessary; nor need one comment on their mournful undertone. Sometimes, indeed, our mortality is spoken of in a different tone. Nietzsche was a man to accept things as they are and make the best of them—and once, after saying that "we have lost one interest, the 'after death' question no longer concerns us," he speaks of this as "an unspeakable benefit, too recent to be fully appreciated." He even asks if it is not shameless to wish an eternal continuance of ourselves. "Have you then no thought of all the rest of things that would have to endure you for all eternity, as they have endured you hitherto with a more than Christian patience?" But I suspect that he makes a virtue of necessity in speaking in this way; his deeper feeling did not really change, and we shall come on traces of it in his last period.

Nietzsche views man largely in what I may call a physiological light. Our consciousness is not the core of our being—it is intermittent, waxes and wanes; as a late development of the organic, it is something imperfect and weak—it may lead astray as well as give help. undefined Among the signs of progress in the nineteenth century is to be reckoned the placing of the health of the body before that of the soul, and conceiving the latter as resulting from, or at least conditioned by, the former. A drop of blood too much or too little in the brain may make one's life unspeakably miserable and hard, so that we suffer more from this drop than Prometheus did from his vulture. Varying foods may have varying spiritual effects. It is a question whether pessimism (of the ordinary type) may not be the after-effect of a wrong diet, the spread of Buddhism being an instance: Nietzsche discourses especially on the danger of vegetarianism. Possibly the European unrest of recent times