In order to be able to provoke so much diversity of opinion, a man must be not only versatile but forcible. Nietzsche was both. There is scarcely a subject in the whole range of philosophical thought which he does not attack and blow up; and he hurls forth his hard, polished missiles in a manner so destructive, and at the same time with such accuracy of aim, that it is no wonder a chorus of ill-used strongholds of traditional thought now cry out against him as a disturber and annihilator of their peace. Yet, through all the dust, smoke, and noise of his implacable warfare, there are both a method and a mission to be discerned--a method and a mission in the pursuit of which Nietzsche is really as unswerving as he seems capricious. Throughout his life and all his many recantations and revulsions of feeling, he remained faithful to one purpose and to one aim--the elevation of the type man. However bewildered we may become beneath the hail of his epigrams, treating of every momentous question that has ever agitated the human mind, we still can trace this broad principle running through all his works: his desire to elevate man and to make him more worthy of humanity's great past. Even in his attack on English psychologists, naturalists, and philosophers, in _The Genealogy of Morals_, what are his charges against them? He says they debase man, voluntarily or involuntarily, by seeking the really operative, really imperative and decisive factor in history precisely where the intellectual pride of man would least wish to find it, i.e. in _vis inertiæ_, in some blind and accidental mechanism of ideas, in automatic and purely passive adaptation and modification, in the compulsory action of adjustment to environment. Again, in his attack on the evolutionists' so-called "struggle for existence," of which I shall speak more exhaustively later, it is the suggestion that life--mere existence in itself--is worthy of being an aim at all, that he deprecates so profoundly. And, once more, it is with the view of elevating man and his aspirations that he levels the attack. Whatever we may think of his methods, therefore, at least his aim was sufficiently lofty and honourable, and we must bear in mind that he never shirked the duties which, rightly or wrongly, he imagined would help him to achieve it. What was Nietzsche? If we accept his own definition of the philosopher's task on earth, we must place him in the front rank of philosophers. For, according to him, the creation of new values, new principles, new standards, is the philosopher's sole _raison d'être_; and this he certainly accomplished. If, on the other hand, with all the "school" philosophers, we ask him to show us his system, we shall most surely be disappointed. In this respect, therefore, we may perhaps need to modify our opinion of him.