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24 Women, he says, like him—all but the unwomanly kind; people who never heard his name or the word philosophy are fond of him—the old fruit-vendors in Turin, for example, who pick out their sweetest grapes for him. He is pleased with the idea of his being of Polish descent (Poles are to him "the French among the Slavs"). He is flattered at the thought of devoted readers; "people have said that it was impossible to lay down a book of mine—I even disturbed the night's rest." His anticipations of the future border on the grotesque. His Transvaluation [of all Values] will be like a "crashing thunderbolt." "In two years," he wrote Brandes in 1888, "we shall have the whole earth in convulsions."

Such is what Professor Pringle-Pattison calls Nietzsche's "colossal egotism"—I know no worse instances; he thinks it attained proportions not to be distinguished from mania. It may be so, but one or two things should be borne in mind. The first is Nietzsche's addiction to strong language in general—particularly toward the close of his life. For instance, "Where has God gone? I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I; we are all murderers, etc." —it is his strong picturesque way of stating what he conceived to be the essential fact as to the course of modern philosophical thought, beginning with Kant. He amplifies the picture of coming "convulsions" by speaking of "earthquakes," "displacement of mountains and valleys." He feels so foreign to everything German, that "the nearness of a German hinders his digestion." He has a "horrible fear" that he may some day be taken for a saint, but he would rather be a Hanswurst—"perhaps I am a Hanswurst." Again, "I am no man, I am dynamite." He even says to his friend and helper, Peter Gast, "I consider you