unholy prayer which I addressed to it in my youth? I was about fifteen years old when, weary of useless conflicts against the young hot blood that longed to satisfy its passions, exhausted by the religious doubts which devastated my soul, which was eager to solve the riddle of existence, surrounded by pietists who worried me under the plea of winning my soul to love the God-like, I roundly asserted to an old lady friend who had lectured me to death, "I pitch morality overboard, provided I can be a great genius and universally admired!" I was, moreover, strengthened in my views by Thomas Henry Buckle, who taught us that morality was "a nothing," incapable of development, and that intelligence was everything. Later on, when I was twenty, I learnt from Taine that evil and good were indifferent matters, possessed of unconscious and irresponsible qualities, like the acidity of acids, and the alkalinity of alkalis. And this phrase, which was quickly caught up and developed by George Brandes, has stamped an impress of immorality on Scandinavian literature. A sophism, that is a weak syllogism which has missed the mark, has seduced a whole generation of freethinkers. Weak indeed it is! For if we analyse Buckle's epigram, "Morality is incapable of development, and therefore does not matter," it is easy to discover that the inference should rather be, "Morality, which remains invariably the same, thereby proves her divine and everlasting origin." When my wish was finally attained, I became an acknowledged and admired genius, and the most despised of all men born in my country in this century. Banished from the better circles, neglected by the smallest of the small, disavowed by my friends, I received the visits of my admirers by night, or in secret. Yes, all do homage to morality, and a minority reverence talent, a fact which gives rise to various reflections concerning the essence of morality. Still worse is the reverse of the medal! Truth! As though I had never given myself over to the power of falsehood, in spite of my pretence to be more truthful and sincere than others. I do not dwell on the petty falsehoods of childhood, which signify so little, occasioned as they mostly were by fear or the incapacity of distinguishing between fact and imagination, and because they were counterbalanced by punishments unjustly inflicted and based upon false accusations of my schoolfellows. But there are other falsehoods, and more serious ones because of the injurious consequences which evil example and excuse for grievous wrongdoing involve. For example, the untrue description in my autobiography, "The Son of a Servant," with regard to the crisis of puberty. When I wrote that youthful confession, the liberal tendency of that period seems to have induced me to use too bright colours with the pardonable object of freeing from fear young men who have fallen into precocious sin.