Philosophy in the hands of philosophers tends always to hide the tremors of its exciting conception in the dried abstract statements of dialectic. A philosopher’s pride is in the impersonal nature of his thought. It must stand by itself, and work like a piece of machinery, on which the maker’s name is the only sign that it was once a daring, personal adventure of the intellect, the instincts and the senses of the body of a man. Its maker, when it is finished, would wish to wipe the filings and the oil from his hands with a piece of cotton waste, and, folding his arms, to watch it in independent activity. The reason of this ambition is to be found neither in modesty, nor yet in vanity, but in a ruling intellectual concept, the concept of absolute truth. If the true is universally true, if a thing either _is_, or _is not_, then the personality of the thinker either is grit in the wheels, or, by the necessity of its presence and assistance, betrays the weakness of the thought whose truth or untruth can in no way be affected by the existence or non-existence of its discoverer. This Nietzsche resolutely denied, and denied in two ways. First, he denied the absolute nature of truth, asserting that the word “true” was merely a title given by men to opinions, and that the justice of its application was, in a broad sense, to be judged pragmatically. A pragmatist before William James, he said: “The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing; and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong) are the most indispensable to us; that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely imagined world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live--that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life.”[5]