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156 happiness. Frau Andreas-Salomé thinks that the land of his future expectations was not really a new one, but the old one from which he originally set out—and in a deep sense this is true; but she admits that the products of the new period were more or less shaped by the experiences of the intervening years. "Certain great perspectives of the spiritual and moral horizon are my strongest springs of life," he wrote her, after referring to the fearful existence of renunciation he had been obliged to lead. "I also have morning-dawns … what I no longer believed …appears now possible—as the golden morning dawn on the horizon of all my future life."

Though the general outlines of the world are much the same to Nietzsche as in the preceding period, conceptions of possibility and change and man's power play, as just intimated, an ever larger part. One might almost say that he becomes optimist. He had earlier said, "Away with the wearisomely hackneyed terms, optimism and pessimism!" He maintained that they stood for theological contentions, and that no one cared any longer for the theologians—except the theologians themselves. Good and bad have only human references—the world itself is neither good nor bad (not to say best and worst), and we should stop both glorifying it and reviling it in this way. But favorable or unfavorable judgments of the world may be based on other grounds, and he inclines more and more to a favorable judgment. The world comes to seem good to him just as it is, without any intrinsic order, or inherent purpose, or moral governance—good, that is, as a place one is willing and glad to live in. Indeed, he approximates to religious feeling about it—at least he uses religious language. His mouthpiece, Zarathustra, says, "To blaspheme against the earth is now the most dreadful thing." Even change and accident are regarded with a semireligious veneration. All becoming is to Zarathustra a "dance of Gods," a "wantonness of Gods." The earth is likened to