Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/31

Rh views crystallized when he was still young and varied thereafter in no material point. Only one who changes, he tells us, is kindred to him. "One must be willing to pass away, in order to be able to rise again." It is easy to misunderstand the spirit of the changes. Professor Saintsbury can see little in them but the desire to be different. Nietzsche himself admits that he likes short-lived habits, hence not an official position, or continual intercourse with the same person, or a fixed abode, or one kind of health. And yet the movements of his thought impress me as on the whole more necessitated than chosen. His break with the religious faith of his youth was scarcely from a whim. If one doubts, let one read the mournful paragraph beginning, "Thou wilt never more pray," and judge for himself —or note the tone of "All that we have loved when we were young has deceived us," or of "What suffering for a child always to judge good and evil differently from his mother, and to be scorned and despised where he reveres!" So no one who reads with any care the records of his intercourse with Wagner, can think that he welcomed the final break. Rather was he made ill by it, in body and soul—it was the great tragedy of his mature life. Giving up the ideas of free-will and responsibility was not from choice; even the idea of "eternal recurrence" was first forced upon him. Almost the only region in which he felt free to follow his will was in projecting a moral ideal, and in the moral field itself he recognized strict limits. In general, he not so much chose his path as chose to follow it. He felt a "task," and the "burden" of his "truths." "Has ever a man searched on the path of truth in the way I have—namely, striving and arguing against all that was grateful to my immediate feeling?" He opposed the artist love of pleasure, the artist lack of conscience, which would persuade us