Nietzsche's hero has, of course, very little in common with the semi-historical fighting prophet of Iran. Under the disguise of a story with no particular scene or date, he gives you a treatise on the moral life as it might be if men would regard the extirpation of the unfit and the propagation of a race of physically and mentally superior beings as the first and last of human duties. Of course, in any such picture there must always be many subjective features, and much that is characteristic of Zarathustra, his extreme individualism, his love of loneliness and solitary places, his hatred of a complex and expensive life, is simply a reflection of the peculiar personal taste of his Creator. Had Nietzsche himself not been free from ordinary social and domestic ties, it is likely that the individualistic and anti-social strain in his teachings would have been far less prominent than it is. But when all allowance has been made for such personal idiosyncrasies, it remains the fact that Nietzsche has more boldly than any other writer of our time raised the most important of social questions; the question whether the ethical and political ideals of Christianity, of democracy, of universal benevolence, are those of a healthy or those of a radically diseased humanity. No future vindication of our current idea can be regarded as of any value unless it sets itself to grapple, more seriously than professional moral philosophy has as yet done, with the attack of Zarathustra. In the minor writings which fill the other two volumes of the translation already published, Nietzsche is less constructive and more purely iconoclastic. The "Antichrist" subjects the established religion of Europe and the moral code based upon it to a criticism which is always suggestive, often profound, sometimes merely angry and wrong-headed. The attack upon Wagner, in whom Nietzsche had once looked for a master, is closely connected with the furious onslaught upon Christian ideals. Of Wagner the musician Nietzsche has many things both hard and shrewd to say, but the Wagner against whom the main brunt of his polemic is directed is Wagner the psychologist, the pessimist, the preacher of chastity and resignation--in a word, as Nietzsche understands him, the decadent. Christianity, according to Nietzsche, has made decadence into a religion, Schopenhauer has turned it into a philosophy, Wagner into an æsthetic theory. Hence the constant polemic against all three which recurs in all Nietzsche's writings. The "Genealogy of Morals" is devoted to the exposition of a favourite theory of Nietzsche's, that there have always been two antithetical codes of moral values, that of "masters" and that of "slaves." "Masters" prize above everything else qualities which bespeak a superabundance of personal force, strength, beauty, wealth, long life; "slaves" set the highest store by qualities which make servitude more endurable, and in the end render revenge upon the "master" possible.