I think I can trace in your works certain points of agreement with my own taste: your predilection for Beyle, for instance, and for Taine; but the latter I have not seen for seventeen years. I am not so enthusiastic about his work on the Revolution as you seem to be. He deplores and harangues an earthquake. I used the expression "aristocratic radicalism" because it so exactly defines my own political convictions. I am a little hurt, however, at the offhand and impetuous pronouncements against such--phenomena as socialism and anarchism in your works. The anarchism of Prince Kropotkin, for instance, is no stupidity. The name, of course, is nothing. Your intellect, which is usually so dazzling, seems to me to fall a trifle short where truth is to be found in a nuance. Your views on the origin of the moral ideas interest me in the highest degree. You share--to my delighted astonishment--a certain repugnance which I feel for Herbert Spencer. With us he passes for the god of philosophy. However, it is as a rule a distinct merit with these Englishmen that their not very high-soaring intellect shuns hypotheses, whereas hypothesis has destroyed the supremacy of German philosophy. Is not there a great deal that is hypothetical in your ideas of caste distinctions as the source of various moral concepts? I know Rée whom you attack, have met him in Berlin; he was a quiet man, rather distinguished in his bearing, but a somewhat dry and limited intellect. He was living--according to his own account, as brother and sister--with a quite young and intelligent Russian lady, who published a year or two ago a book called _Der Kampf um Gott_, but this gives no idea of her genuine gifts. I am looking forward to receiving the books you promise me. I hope in future you will not lose sight of me. Yours, GEORGE BRANDES. 4. NIETZSCHE to BRANDES. _Nice_, Jan. 8, 1888. You should not object to the expression "missionary of culture." What better way is there of being one in our day than that of "missionising" one's disbelief in culture? To have understood that our European culture is a vast problem and by no means a solution--is not such a degree of introspection and self-conquest nowadays culture itself? I am surprised my books have not yet reached you. I shall not omit to send a reminder to Leipzig. At Christmas time Messieurs the publishers are apt to lose their heads. Meanwhile may I be allowed to bring to your notice a daring curiosity over which no publisher has authority, an _ineditum_ of mine that is among the most personal things I can show. It is the fourth part of my _Zarathustra_; its proper title, with regard to what precedes and follows it, should be-- _Zarathustra's Temptation_ An Interlude.