Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/192

176 by the remoter difficulty of a predetermination ages on ages ago—and probably Calvinists and determinists in general are quite like the rest of us in acting as if they were free from day to day now. undefined

That the doctrine of recurrence can withstand criticism, I by no means assert. Writers on the whole friendly to Nietzsche have criticised it. undefined I am simply endeavoring to set it forth as he held it. But it is tolerably evident that it is not an entirely fantastic or mystical doctrine. Nietzsche himself was not dogmatic about it. One of his critics notes that he simply called it "the most scientific of all possible hypotheses" —hypothesis then still. He speaks of recurrence as "more probable" than non-recurrence. He is even willing to say, "Perhaps it is not true; let others wrestle with it." undefined Still he was aware that practically speaking, as Bishop Butler has told us, probability is the guide of life. Remarking on the effect which repetitions in general have (e.g., the seasons, periodic illnesses, waking and sleeping), he says, "If the circular repetition of things is only a probability or possibility, even the thought of a possibility can agitate and refashion us, not merely actual sensations or definite expectations. How has the possibility of eternal damnation worked on men!" And yet Nietzsche wanted as much proof for his ideas as he could get. Not for nothing was he the child of a scientific and experimental age. He even said once that he no longer wished to hear of things and questions about which experiment was impossible, and we have his sister's testimony that he mistrusted all those enraptured and extreme states in which people fancy that they "grasp truth with their hands." We know that in the winter before the thought of eternal recurrence crystalized, he had been reading with lively agreement Helmholtz, Wundt (his earlier writings), and the mathematician Riemann. Professor Richter even says that he worked out his doctrine with the help of three