The history of philosophy should be so expounded that this tendency should be clearly manifest. This would spare us from many prejudices, and would clear the way for new and important inquiries. Kant, who shared the opinion that truth is the same for all, was convinced that metaphysics must be a science _a priori,_ and since it cannot be a science _a priori,_ must therefore cease to exist. If the history of philosophy had been expounded and understood differently in his day, it would never have entered his mind thus to impugn the rights of metaphysics. And probably he would not have been vexed by the contradictoriness or the lack of proof in the teachings of various schools of metaphysics. It cannot be otherwise, neither should it be. The interest of mankind is not to put an end to the variety of philosophic doctrines but to allow the perfectly natural phenomenon wide and deep development. Philosophers have always had an instinctive longing for this: that is why they are so troublesome to the historian of philosophy. _The First and the Last_ In the first volume of _Human, All too Human,_ which Nietzsche wrote at the very beginning of his disease, when he was still far from final victory and chiefly told of his defeats, there is the following remarkable, though half-involuntary confession: 'The complete irresponsibility of Man for his actions and his being is the bitterest drop for the man of knowledge to drink, since he has been accustomed to see in responsibility and duty the very patent of his title to manhood.' Much bitterness has the inquiring spirit to swallow, but the bitterest of all is in the knowledge that his moral qualities, his readiness to fulfil his duty ungrudgingly, gives him no preference over other men. He thought he was a man of noble rank, even a prince of the blood, crowned with a crown, and the other men boorish peasantry--but he is just the same, a peasant, the same as all the rest. His patent of nobility was that for which he fulfilled his most arduous duty and made sacrifices; in it he saw the meaning of life. And when it is suddenly revealed that there is no provision made for titles or patents, it is a horrible catastrophe, a cataclysm--and life loses all meaning. Evidently the conviction expressed with such moving frankness in these words, was with Nietzsche a second nature, which he could not master all his life long. What is the Superman but a title, a patent, giving the right to be called a noble among the _canaille?_ What is the pathos of distance and all Nietzsche's teaching of ranks? The formula, beyond good and evil, was by no means so all-destructive as at first sight it seemed. On the contrary, by erasing certain laws graven on the tables of mankind of old, that formula as it were revealed other commandments, obliterated by time, and therefore invisible to many.