If Nietzsche reacts so violently against the teaching of Schopenhauer, it is not because he is by nature precluded from appreciating its seduction. It is rather because he had at one time in his life too deeply understood and too completely yielded to its soothing counsel of surrender that he later bends all his energies to its destruction. This complete revulsion of feeling was not a unique episode in Nietzsche’s experience. On the contrary his intellectual life is largely a history of such accepting and rejecting. Born into a clergyman’s family, passing his childhood in quiet Naumburg, Nietzsche in his last years claims the name of Antichrist. Eagerly connecting himself in his student days at Bonn with one of those corps that treasured the republican ideals of ’48, he advocates in his later years a social organization modeled on the caste-system of the East. An ardent patriot in ’70, he becomes the contemner of the organized state in general, a contemptuous critic of Germanism in particular. A trained student of history, a distinguished professor of philology at Basel, some of his most cunning and cutting analyses expose the weakness of the learned temperament. In his first important work, “The Birth of Tragedy,” we find him an apostle of Wagner; his later “Case of Wagner” is perhaps the cruelest polemic against a man and his art of which modern letters give example. The bare enumeration of these changes is bound to leave an impression of waywardness. Yet this impression would be in so far false that it is clear each accepting was a matter of deep feeling with Nietzsche, each rejecting cost its price. At times, to be sure, he would put on a brave front before the spectacle of his thought’s inconstancy. Only those that can change can grow: “I love those that change,” he writes. But at other times there is more of melancholy in his recalling of abandoned ideals. “If thinking be thy destiny, then honor that destiny with divine honors; sacrifice to it thy best and thy dearest.” It is not without reason that he calls the progress of his thoughts a “Selbstüberwindung” and one may best understand the fierce bitterness of his attack upon those he has put behind him if one remember that nothing less than hatred could replace an old love in this too tenacious heart. It is then of a piece with the rest, if a philosophy which in the end represented the dearest foe of his thought should have been the friend and guide of Nietzsche’s youth. How deep a meaning Schopenhauer had once possessed for him may be judged from the following extracts. The first is from a letter written in 1867 to his friend the Baron von Gersdorff on the occasion of the death of von Gersdorff’s brother: