Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/39

Rh arose. They were like what prophets and revealers of divine mysteries may be imagined to have experienced in the past; most persons with such experiences would probably be turned into "believers" forthwith. Nietzsche, however, is cool, objective, analytical in describing what he has undergone; it appears simply as a happy, supreme moment in his psychological history—the account may well become a kind of classic for the scientific student of religious phenomena. Indeed, Nietzsche now makes special claims for himself as a psychologist—he is one "who has not his like." In speaking of the seductive, poisonous influence of Christian morality on thinkers, inasmuch as they were kept by it from penetrating into the sources whence it sprung, he says, "Who in general among philosophers before me was psychologist and not rather the antithesis of one, a 'higher kind of swindler,' an 'idealist'?" He indicates similar feeling about himself as a thinker in general—ranging himself with Voltaire, whom he calls, in contrast with his successors, a "grand-seigneur of the mind." German philosophers in particular he finds not clean and straight in their thinking—they never went through a seventeenth century of hard self-criticism as the French had; they are all Schleiermachers—and "the first straight mind in the history of mind, one in whom truth comes to judgment on the counterfeits of four millenniums," should not be reckoned among them (I need not say that he means himself). He is convinced of his future influence. He is "the most formidable man that ever was," though this does not exclude his becoming "the most beneficent." He speaks of his sufferings, and adds with a touch of humor, "one pays dear for being immortal; one dies several times while one lives." He looks forward to institutions where there will be living and teaching as he understands living and teaching—"perhaps there will even be chairs for the interpretation of Zarathustra." His thankfulness to Sils-Maria (where Zarathustra was first conceived) would fain give it "an immortal name." Little signs of vanity escape him.