Page:Thus Spake Zarathustra - Alexander Tille - 1896.djvu/26

 Prince Puckler-Muskau, however, was scarcely taken seriously, and even when Wilhelm Jordan took up the idea in his Demiurgos of 1854 and Radenhausen in his book Isis, Man and World, scarcely anybody thought of its far-reaching importance. It was only after Darwin had in his Origin of Species of 1859 placed the whole idea of evolution on a scientific basis, that the same poet Wilhelm Jordan could celebrate in his epos Die Nibdunge the higher bodily and intellectual development of the human race as the great goal of humanity, and the centre of ethical obligations. He connected it with patriarchal matrimonial institutions, and made it the point of view from which his heroes select wives for their sons. Although clearly pronounced in at least twenty passages of that epic, it failed to attract public sympathy for a considerable time, and only after Nietzsche (who follows Jordan closely in all details) had taken up the idea and made it almost the leading motive of his Zarathustra, did it impress itself upon large circles of the educated youth. And it is Nietzsche's undeniable merit to have led this new moral ideal to a complete victory, so that from his writings it rapidly spread over German lyrics and epic poetry. Nietzsche himself tells us that the fundamental idea of his Zarathustra originated in August 1881 in the Engadine. The composition of the work extended over about two years. The First Part was written in January and February 1883 near Genoa; the Second Part in Sils Maria in June and July of the same year; the Third Part in the following winter at Nice, and the Fourth Part from November 1884 till February 1885 at Mentone. The Fourth Part, which was then not intended to be the last, but rather an Interlude of the whole poem, was never published by Nietzsche, but merely printed for private circulation among a few friends. It was not publicly issued till