Page:Thus Spake Zarathustra - Alexander Tille - 1896.djvu/22

 bold and unreasonable speculations like the idea of eternal recurrence, according to which all that is has been infinite times before in exactly the same way, and will recur infinitely in future, and Zarathustra boasts to be the first to teach this grand illusion. Indeed at another place he carries his individualism so far as to counsel people to kill themselves at the right time, in order not to become superfluous on earth.

Among the numerous intellectual currents which gather in the channel of Thus Spake Zarathustra in order to be con veyed to the ocean of general cultured, and subsequently popular, opinion, three take a prominent place, the individ ualistic, the free religious, and the evolutional utilitarian move ments, the springs of all of which go back to last century. These currents are neither the only ones that flow through Nietzsche's book, nor do they appear clearly separated from other minor tendencies. The first and the third are in more than one respect in opposite directions to each other. Yet they may be said to express the leading motives of the book.

The greatest German historian of to-day distinguishes three stages in the evolution of mental life, symbolical, conventional, and individual mental life. In Western Europe the period of individual mental life begins with the time of the Reformation, the doctrine of private judgment in matters of belief being its clearest expression. It is only since then that the theory was developed that opinions are free. This field was in the course of time somewhat enlarged, so as to cover other things besides opinion. In political thought the school of Anarchism is an outcome of this idea, and Humboldt, Dunoyer, Stirner, Bakounine, and Auberon Spencer are probably the best-known representatives of these tendencies. Even Herbert Spencer shows traces so marked of this doctrine, that Huxley could name his theory Administrative Nihilism.