Nietzsche calls himself an atheist; he denies the existence of God in any form, and thus carries atheism to an extreme where it breaks down in self-contradiction. We understand by God (whether personal, impersonal, or superpersonal) that something which determines the course of life; the factors that shape the world, including ourselves; the law to which we must adjust our conduct. Nietzsche enthrones the self in the place of God, but for all practical purposes his God is blunt success and survival of the fittest in the crude sense of the term; for according to his philosophy the self must heed survival in the struggle for existence alone, and that, therefore, is his God. Nietzsche's God is power, i. e., overwhelming force, which allows the wolf to eat the lamb. He ignores the power of the still small voice, the effectiveness of law in the world which makes it possible that man, the over-brute, is not the most ferocious, the most muscular, or the strongest animal. Nietzsche regards the cosmic order, in accommodation to which ethical codes have been invented, as a mere superstition. Thus it will come to pass that Nietzsche's type of the overman, should it really make its appearance on earth, would be wiped out as surely as the lion, the king of the beasts, the proud pseudo-overbrute of the animals, will be exterminated in course of time. The lion has a chance for survival only behind the bars of the zoölogical gardens or when he allows himself to be tamed by man, that weakling among the brutes whose power has been built up by a comprehension of the sway of the invisible laws of life, physical, mental and moral. What is the secret of Nietzsche's success? While other men of greater consistency, among them his predecessor Stirner, failed, he attained an unparalleled fame, and his philosophy exercised an extraordinary influence upon large classes of people not only in Germany but also abroad, in Russia, in France, in the United States and even in conservative England. We must concede that Nietzsche possesses a poetic power of oratory; he appeals to sentiment; he is not much of a thinker, not a philosopher, but a leader and a prophet, and as such he stands for the most extreme egoism. Nietzsche attempts to establish the absolute sovereignty of the individual and grants a most irresponsible freedom to the man who dares; and this principle of doing away with moral maxims has made him popular. The truth is that our moral sanctions are no longer accepted. People still believe in God, in the authority of church and state, but their belief is no longer a living faith. Whatever they may think of God, the old God, the God of traditional dogmatism, is gone. He is no longer a living power in the hearts of the people; and so, large masses rejoice to have the proclamation frankly stated that God is dead, that they need no longer fear hell, and that the chains of their slavery are broken.