In the following year, 1863, Nietzsche met a schoolfellow’s sister, an ethereal little Berlin girl, who for a while appealed to “the large, broad-shouldered, shy, rather solemn and stiff youth.” To this early experience, which never went beyond poetic _Schwärmerei_, his sister is inclined to trace the origin of Nietzsche’s view of women as very fragile, tender little buds. The experience is also interesting because it appears to stand alone in his life. We strike here on an organic abnormality in this congenital philosopher. Nietzsche’s attitude was not the crude misogyny of Schopenhauer, who knew women chiefly as women of the streets. Nietzsche knew many of the finest women of his time, and he sometimes speaks with insight and sympathy of the world as it appears to women; but there was clearly nothing in him to answer to any appeal to passion, and his attitude is well summed up in an aphorism of his own _Zarathustra_: “It is better to fall into the hands of a murderer than into the dreams of an ardent woman.” “All his life long,” his sister writes, “my brother remained completely apart from either great passion or vulgar pleasure. His whole passion lay in the world of knowledge; only very temperate emotions remained over for anything else. In later life he was grieved that he had never attained to _amour passion_, and that every inclination to a feminine personality quickly changed to a tender friendship, however fascinatingly pretty the fair one might be.” He would expend much sympathy on unhappy lovers, yet he would shake his head, saying to himself or others: “And all that over a little girl!”