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12 at in his writings. He admires Schopenhauer for having written for himself; for no one, he says, wishes to be deceived, least of all a philosopher who takes as his law, Deceive no one, not even thyself. He comes to say at last, "I take readers into account no longer: how could I write for readers? … But I note myself down, for myself." "Mihi ipsi scripsi—so it is; and in this way shall each one do his best for himself according to his kind." At least this became an ideal, for he owns that sometimes he has hardly the courage for his own thoughts ("I have only rarely the courage for what I really know").

If I may give in a sentence what seems to me the inmost psychology and driving force of his thinking, it was like this:—Being by nature and by force of early training reverent, finding, however, his religious faith undermined by science and critical reflection, his problem came to be how, consistently with science and the stern facts of life and the world, the old instincts of reverence might still have measurable satisfaction, and life again be lit up with a sense of transcendent things. He was at bottom a religious philosopher—this, though the outcome of his thinking is not what would ordinarily be called religious. There is much irony in him, much contempt, but it is because he has an ideal; and his final problem is how some kind of a practical approximation to the ideal may be made. He himself says that one who despises is ever one who has not forgotten how to revere.

The question is sometimes raised whether Nietzsche was a philosopher at all. Some deny it, urging that he left no systematic treatises behind him; they admit that he may have been a poet, or a master of style ("stylist," to use a barbarous word imported from the German), or a prophet—but he was not a thinker. undefined But because a man does not write systematically, or