My attitude to myself at that time (1876), and the unearthly certitude with which I grasped my life-task and all its world-historic consequences, is well revealed throughout the book, but more particularly in one very significant passage, despite the fact that, with my instinctive cunning, I once more circumvented the use of the little word "I,"--not however, this time, in order to shed world-historic glory on the names of Schopenhauer and Wagner, but on that of another of my friends, the excellent Dr. Paul Rée--fortunately much too acute a creature to be deceived--others were less subtle. Among my readers I have a number of hopeless people, the typical German professor for instance, who can always be recognised from the fact that, judging from the passage in question, he feels compelled to regard the whole book as a sort of superior Realism. As a matter of fact it contradicts five or six of my friend's utterances: only read the introduction to _The Genealogy of Morals_ on this question.--The passage above referred to reads: "What, after all, is the principal axiom to which the boldest and coldest thinker, the author of the book "_On the Origin of Moral Sensations_" (read Nietzsche, the first Immoralist), "has attained by means of his incisive and decisive analysis of human actions? 'The moral man,' he says is no nearer to the intelligible (metaphysical) world than is the physical man, for there is no intelligible world.' This theory, hardened and sharpened under the hammer-blow of historical knowledge" (read _The Transvaluation of all Values_), "may some time or other, perhaps in some future period,--1890!--serve as the axe which is applied to the root of the 'metaphysical need' of man,--whether more as a blessing than a curse to the general welfare it is not easy to say; but in any case as a theory with the most important consequences, at once fruitful and terrible, and looking into the world with that Janus-face which all great knowledge possesses."[4] [Footnote 1: Nohl and Pohl were both writers on music; Kohl, however, which literally means cabbage, is a slang expression, denoting superior nonsense.--TR.] [Footnote 2: Needless to say, Nietzsche distinguishes between Bismarckian Germany and that other Germany--Austria, Switzerland, and the Baltic Provinces--where the German language is also spoken.--TR.] [Footnote 3: _Human, all-too-Human,_ Part II. in this edition.--TR.] [Footnote 4: _Human, all-too-Human,_ vol. i. Aph. 37.] "THE DAWN OF DAY: THOUGHTS ABOUT MORALITY AS A PREJUDICE" 1