new time, may be the greatest thing. Nietzsche had once put the idea in poetic form:
"Destined, O star, for radiant path
No claim on thee the darkness hath!
Roll on in bliss through this our age!
Its trouble ne'er shall thee engage!
In furthest world thy beams shall glow:
Pity, as sin, thou must not know!
Be pure: that duty's all you owe."[1]
At moments he could almost exult—at least he could quote the beautiful words of Isaiah, "exultabit solitudo et florebit quasi lilium";[2] and he even said (though, I fear, with something of bravado), "One has no right to have nerves … to suffer from solitude. For my part, I have never suffered save from the multitude."[3]
And yet this "solitary" was bound by the most intimate ties to his kind, and one might almost say that love for his kind was final motive of all his thinking. What was the path of greatness for mankind?—that was his supreme question. How he worked out an answer, and what the answer was, it will be the effort of this book to explain. But with an answer he could not keep silent about it. He had to speak f—the burden was on him. Yes, it was his burden,—no one else felt it, no one else gave the answer credence. Hence an acutely personal note in speaking of it. Sometimes a message sums up the aspirations of an age: then the individual communicating it is unimportant. Sometimes, however, a message goes counter to an age, or at least speaks to deaf ears; then the individual becomes of capital importance. Nietzsche never separates himself from his word; but in the circumstances the word lent gravity to him. It was well, then, that men should know authoritatively of him, should understand how his wonderful fortune had befallen him, should be let into his inner thought and impulses. As if aware of this, he speaks freely to one or two friends, and he writes the extraordinary autobiographical notes, Ecce Homo. This last was immediately only for his sister's eyes, who was at the time in South Amer-
