Secondly, he denied that the personality of the thinker was a disturbing factor in his thought. It was, on the contrary, the guarantee that once at least that thought had been true. “Now philosophical systems are absolutely true only to their founders; to all later philosophers they are usually a single big mistake, and to feebler minds a sum of mistakes and truths.... Therefore many disapprove of every philosopher, because his aim is not theirs.... Whoever, on the contrary, finds any pleasure at all in great men finds pleasure also in all such systems, be they ever so erroneous, for they all have in them one point which is irrefutable, a personal touch and colour; one can use them in order to form a picture of the philosopher, just as from a plant growing in a certain place one can form conclusions as to the soil. _That_ mode of life, of viewing human affairs at any rate, has existed once, and is therefore possible.” He wrote that quite early in his career in his little book on early Greek philosophy, a history like the dawn setting on fire the tips of the distant mountains, then the nearer, and at last throwing on the ground behind him the shadow of the observer. For Nietzsche, the mountain peaks are those fragments of the crumbled systems which are personal to their authors, and, even if refutable as philosophy are irrefutable as particular and individual revelations. It is a delightful little gathering of philosophers and, perhaps, more important than has yet been admitted, in its promise of Nietzsche’s habit of thought, his impatience of dialectic, his dislike of the Parmenidean mind, his trust in the poetic, the particular. “What verse is to the poet,” he says, “dialectic thinking is to the philosopher; he snatches at it in order to hold fast his enchantment, in order to petrify it.” From this view he never departed. In _Beyond Good and Evil_ he repeats his belief in the personal character of thought: “In each cardinal problem there speaks an unchangeable ‘I am this’; a thinker cannot learn anew about man and woman, for instance, but can only learn fully--he can only follow to the end what is ‘fixed’ about them in himself.” And again in _Zarathustra_: “‘This is now my way--where is yours?’ Thus did I answer those who asked me ‘the way.’ For _the_ way--it doth not exist.”