Friedrich Nietzsche Human All-Too-Human A Book For Free Spirits Part II Translated By Paul V. Cohn, B.A. New York The MacMillan Company 1913 CONTENTS Translator’s Introduction. Preface. Part I. Miscellaneous Maxims And Opinions. Part II. The Wanderer And His Shadow. Footnotes TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION. The publication of _Human, all-too-Human_ extends over the period 1878-1880. Of the two divisions which constitute the Second Part, “Miscellaneous Maxims and Opinions” appeared in 1879, and “The Wanderer and his Shadow” in 1880, Nietzsche being then in his thirty-sixth year. The Preface was added in 1886. The whole book forms Nietzsche’s first lengthy contribution to literature. His previous works comprise only the philological treatises, _The Birth of Tragedy_, and the essays on Strauss, Schopenhauer, and Wagner in _Thoughts out of Season_. With the volumes of _Human, all-too-Human_ Nietzsche appears for the first time in his true colours as philosopher. His purely scholarly publications, his essays in literary and musical criticism—especially the essay on Richard Wagner at Bayreuth—had, of course, foreshadowed his work as a thinker. These efforts, however, had been mere fragments, from which hardly any one could observe that a new philosophical star had arisen on the horizon. But by 1878 the period of transition had definitely set in. Outwardly, the new departure is marked by Nietzsche’s resignation in that year of his professorship at Bâle—a resignation due partly to ill-health, and partly to his conviction that his was a voice that should speak not merely to students of philology, but to all mankind. Nietzsche himself characterises _Human, all-too-Human_ as “the monument of a crisis.” He might as fitly have called it the first-fruits of a new harvest. Now, for the first time, he practises the form which he was to make so peculiarly his own. We are told—and we may well believe—that the book came as a surprise even to his most intimate friends. Wagner had already seen how matters stood at the publication of the first part, and the gulf between the two probably widened on the appearance of the Second Part. Several aphorisms are here, varying in length as in subject, and ranging over the whole human province—the emotions and aspirations, the religions and cultures and philosophies, the arts and literatures and politics of mankind. Equally varied is the range of style, the incisive epigram and the passage of pure poetry jostling each other on the same page. In this curious power of alternating between cynicism and lyricism, Nietzsche appears as the prose counterpart of Heine.