The influence of his disease upon his character and writings is everywhere painfully manifest. Nietzsche was seized with an enthusiasm for Schopenhauer and his works at the age of twenty-one. With greater intensity his devotion to Wagner and his music, I gather, was turned to morbid dislike by the influence of diseased cerebral activity. Deussen, I feel, is in error when he writes that “A deeper cause lay at the root of Nietzsche’s resignation of his professorship in 1879 than his ‘combined diseases of the nerves of his eyes, brain, and stomach.’ The philologic profession of teachers, like a coat, became too small for him, etc. His internal unrest, etc.” But if so, it is an error which only extends the pathologic to the deeper activities of his mind. How far his cerebral irritation was responsible for his “aristocratic anarchy,” his occasional lapses into egoistic disdain, etc., would be impossible to gauge. It surely was not wholly inoperative. Stringency, hardness, radicalism, it certainly helped to produce. Möbius thinks the Zarathustra would not have been written without the morbid cerebral irritation. It appears almost certain that the aphoristic form of much of his later writing is explained as the result of the manner in which he was forced to do his literary work, _i.e._ by thinking and note-making while walking. The serious reflexes to eyes, head, and digestive system, which were induced by writing, compelled him to collate these notes with the least overworking possible. Hence also result the growing contradictions and illogicalities, the discreteness and want of transitional, connecting, and modifying sentences. In one of the last days of December, 1888, or in the first days of January (dates not definite), Nietzsche fell, near his lodgings in Turin, and could not rise again. A servant found him and led him home with much difficulty. For two days he lay silent and still on his sofa, when abnormal cerebral activity and confusion were evident. He spoke much in monologue, sang and played the piano loud and long, lost the sense of money value, and wrote fantastically to and about his friends, etc. Overbeck hurried to him and brought him to Basle, to the sanatorium of Professor Binswanger, the alienist, where the diagnosis, according to Deussen, of progressive, later corrected to that of atypical, paralysis, was made. His mother had him brought to Naumburg, cared for him until her death in 1897, after which his sister moved with him to Weimar. He died August 25, 1900. According to Dr. Reicholdt the immediate cause of his death was pneumonia, with edema of the lungs. There was no autopsy; an examination of the brain would have revealed many secrets.