who “examines.” “Examining needs at least a secret antagonism, that of an opposite point of view,” it is said on page 46 of the above-named work itself, with an insidious, melancholy application that was perhaps understood by few.) The composure that gave me the _power_ to speak after many intervening years of solitude and abstinence, first came with the book, _Human, All-too Human_, to which this second preface and apologia(1) is dedicated. As a book for “free spirits” it shows some trace of that almost cheerful and inquisitive coldness of the psychologist, who has _behind_ him many painful things that he keeps _under_ him, and moreover establishes them for himself and fixes them firmly as with a needle-point. Is it to be wondered at that at such sharp, ticklish work blood flows now and again, that indeed the psychologist has blood on his fingers and not _only_ on his fingers? 2. The _Miscellaneous Maxims and Opinions_ were in the first place, like _The Wanderer and His Shadow_, published separately as continuations and appendices to the above-mentioned human, all-too human _Book for Free Spirits_: and at the same time, as a continuation and confirmation of an intellectual cure, consisting in a course of anti-romantic self-treatment, such as my instinct, which had always remained healthy, had itself discovered and prescribed against a temporary attack of the most dangerous form of romantics. After a convalescence of six years I may well be permitted to collect these same writings and publish them as a second volume of _Human, All-too Human_. Perhaps, if surveyed together, they will more clearly and effectively teach their lesson—a lesson of health that may be recommended as a _disciplina voluntatis_ to the more intellectual natures of the rising generation. Here speaks a pessimist who has often leaped out of his skin but has always returned into it, thus, a pessimist with goodwill towards pessimism—at all events a romanticist no longer. And has not a pessimist, who possesses this serpentine knack of changing his skin, the right to read a lecture to our pessimists of to-day, who are one and all still in the toils of romanticism? Or at least to show them how it is—done? 3.