He further impressed his contemporaries by his psychological profundity and abstruseness. His spiritual life has its abysses and labyrinths. Self-contemplation provides him with immense material for investigation. And he is not content with self-contemplation. His craving for knowledge is a passion; covetousness he calls it: "In this soul there dwells no unselfishness; on the contrary, an all-desiring self that would see by the help of many as with its own eyes and grasp as with its _own_ hands; this soul of mine would even choose to bring back all the past and not lose anything that might belong to it. What a flame is this covetousness of mine!" The equally strong development of his lyrical and critical qualities made a fascinating combination. But it was the cause of those reversals of his personal relations which deprive his career (in much the same way as Sören Kierkegaard's) of some of the dignity it might have possessed. When a great personality crossed his path he called all his lyricism to arms and with clash of sword on shield hailed the person in question as a demigod or a god (Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner). When later on he discovered the limitations of his hero, his enthusiasm was apt to turn to hatred, and this hatred found vent without the smallest regard to his former worship. This characteristic is offensively conspicuous in Nietzsche's behaviour to Wagner. But who knows whether this very lack of dignity has not contributed to increase the number of Nietzsche's admirers in an age that is somewhat undignified on this point! In the last period of his life Nietzsche appeared rather as a prophet than as a thinker. He predicts the Superman. And he makes no attempt at logical proof, but proceeds from a reliance on the correctness and sureness of his instinct, convinced that he himself represents a life-promoting principle and his opponents one hostile to life. To him the object of existence is, everywhere the production of genius. The higher man in our day is like a vessel in which the future of the race is fermenting in an impenetrable way, and more than one of these vessels is burst or broken in the process. But the human race is not ruined by the failure of a single creature. Man, as we know him, is only a bridge, a transition from the animal to the superman. What the ape is in relation to man, a laughingstock or a thing of shame, that will man be to the superman. Hitherto every species has produced something superior to itself. Nietzsche teaches that man too will and must do the same. He has drawn a conclusion from Darwinism which Darwin himself did not see. In the last decade of the nineteenth century Nietzsche and Tolstoy appeared as the two opposite poles. Nietzsche's morality is aristocratic as Tolstoy's is popular, individualistic as Tolstoy's is evangelical; it asserts the self-majesty of the individual, where Tolstoy's proclaims the necessity of self-sacrifice.