profound sense of the politeness that an aristocrat owes to himself. He clung to the legend that he was the descendant of Polish noblemen, and was proud of being mistaken by Poles for a Pole, that Frenchman among the Slavs. His favourite books were the courteous unruffled French moralists of the seventeenth century, and the works of Stendhal, who resembled them in wearing a sword and in his love of fine manners. His precarious health gave him extreme sensitiveness to his physical condition. He believed that clear thinking was only possible in dry air and on hills. His highest praise for his work was that it was mountain thought. He composed in the open air and in motion, and advised other people to follow his example. “Remain seated as little as possible, put no trust in any thought that is not born in the open, to the accompaniment of free bodily motion--nor in one in which even the muscles do not celebrate a feast. All prejudices take their origin in the intestines.” He seized on Flaubert’s “On ne peut penser et écrire qu’assis,” with a cry: “Here have I got you, you nihilist? A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.” He defended himself against the charge of decadence, claiming that “apart from the fact that I am a decadent, I am also the reverse of such a creature.” A decadent, he said, was one attracted by what was detrimental to him, “as the cabbage attracts the vegetarian.” A healthy man, on the other hand, enjoys what is good for him, possesses “the will to health,” and “is strong enough to make everything turn to his own advantage.” He found in convalescence “a pale delicate light and a sunshine happiness,” “a feeling of bird-like freedom, prospect, and haughtiness.” From the combination of his ill-health and his healthiness (he was in youth at least physically robust), Nietzsche learnt, he says, “to look upon healthier concepts and values from the standpoint of the sick, and conversely to look down upon the secret work of the instincts of decadence from the standpoint of him who is laden and rich with the richness of life.” He mentions “the sweetness and spirituality which is almost inseparable from extreme poverty of blood and muscle,” and remembers the unusual dialectical clearness he enjoyed while suffering from headache and nausea. He was more conscious than most men that his body shared in the adventures of his brain. When the idea of Eternal Recurrence came into his mind by the lake of Silvaplana, high in the mountains, it was perhaps with some recognition of this that, after scribbling it down on a sheet of paper, he added the exultant postscript: “6000 feet beyond man and time!” Such, sketched as briefly as possible, is the physiological background on which we must set his work.