And surely not Nietzsche alone acted thus. The whole history of ethics, the whole history of philosophy is to no small degree the incessant search for prerogative and privilege, patents and charters. The Christians--Tolstoi and Dostoevsky--do not in the least differ from the enemy of Christianity, Nietzsche. The humble Jew, Spinoza, and the meek pagan, Socrates, the idealist Plato, and the idealist Aristotle, the founders of the newest, noblest and loftiest systems, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, even Schopenhauer, the pessimist, all as one man seek a charter, a charter, a charter. Evidently life on earth without a charter becomes for the 'best' men a horrible nightmare and an intolerable torment. Even the founder of Christianity, who so easily renounced all privileges, considered it possible to preserve _this_ privilege for his disciples, and perhaps--who knows?--for himself too. Whereas if Nietzsche and those other philosophers had been able resolutely to renounce titles, ranks, and honours, which are distributed not only by morality, but by all the other Sanhedrim, real and imaginary, which are set over man; if they could have drunk this cup to the dregs, then they might have known, seen, and heard much that was suspected by none of them before. Long since men have known that the road to knowledge lies by way of a great renunciation. Neither righteousness nor genius gives a man privilege above others. He is deprived, for ever deprived, of the protection of earthly laws. There are no laws. To-day he is a king, to-morrow a slave; to-day God, to-morrow a worm; to-day first, to-morrow last. And the worm crushed by him to-day will be God, his god to-morrow. All the measures and balances by which men are distinguished one from another are defaced for ever, and there is no certainty that the place a man once occupied will still be his. And all philosophers have known this; Nietzsche, too, knew it, and by experience. He was the friend, the ally, and the collaborator of the great Wagner, the herald of a new era upon earth; and later, he grovelled in the dust, broken and crushed. And a second time this thing happened to him. When he had finished _Zarathustra,_ he became insane, more exactly, he became half-idiot. It is true he carried the secret of the second fall with him to the grave. Yet something has reached us, for all his sister's efforts to conceal from carnal eyes the change that had befallen him. And now we ask: Is the essence of life really in the rank, the charter, the patent of nobility? And can the words of Christ be understood in their literal sense? Are not all the Sanhedrim set over man, and as it were giving meaning to his life, mere fictions, useful and even necessary in certain moments of life, but pernicious and dangerous, to say no more, when the circumstances are changed? Does not life, the real and desirable life, which men have sought for thousands of years, begin there where there is neither first nor last, righteous or sinner,