he remained a not unworthy follower of those German heroes who were not “classics,” but honest seekers after the highest they knew. In this hypertrophied repulsion for the everyday work of the intellectual world we touch on a defect in Nietzsche’s temperament which we must regard as fundamental, and which wrought in him at last to wildest issues. In another of these essays, _Schopenhauer als Erzieher_, Nietzsche sets forth his opinions concerning his early master in philosophy. It is a significant indication of the qualities that attracted him to Schopenhauer that he compares him to Montaigne, thus at once revealing his own essential optimism, and the admiration which he then and always felt for the great French masters of wisdom. He regards Schopenhauer as the leader from Kant’s caves of critical scepticism to the open sky with its consoling stars. Schopenhauer saw the world as a whole, and was not befooled by the analysis of the colours and canvas wherewith the picture is painted. Kant, in spite of the impulse of his genius, never became a philosopher. “If any one thinks I am thus doing Kant an injustice, he cannot know what a philosopher is, _i.e._, not merely a great thinker but also a real man;” and he goes on to explain that the mere scholar who is accustomed to let opinions, ideas, and things in books always intervene between him and facts, will never see facts, and will never be a fact to himself; whereas the philosopher must regard himself as the symbol and abbreviation of all the facts of the world. It remained an axiom with Nietzsche that the philosopher must first of all be a “real man.” In this essay, which Nietzsche always preferred to his other early works, he thus for the first time clearly sets forth his conception of the philosopher as a teacher, a liberator, a guide to fine living; Schopenhauer’s metaphysical doctrine he casts aside with indifference. Unconsciously, as in late years he seems to have admitted, he was speaking of himself and setting forth his own aims. Thus it is characteristic that he here also first expressed his conception of the value of individuality. Shakespeare had asked: “Which can say more Than this rich praise, that you alone are you?” But Shakespeare was only addressing a single beloved friend. Nietzsche addresses the same thought to the common “you.” “At bottom every man well knows that he can only live one single life in the world, and that never again will so strange a chance shake together into unity such singularly varied elements as he holds: he knows that, but he hides it like a bad conscience.” This was a sane and democratic individualism; in later years, as we shall see, it assumed stranger shapes.