The greater part of that work (which fills seventeen volumes in the English translation) is made up of short numbered paragraphs, arranged under general headings. The lectures and poems are, indeed, the only exceptions, for though _The Birth of Tragedy_, and the essays called _Thoughts out of Season_, are less disintegrated than later books, we can perceive, in their numbered sections, the promise of sections shorter and continually shortening to the brief “Maxims and Missiles” at the beginning of _The Twilight of the Idols_. Even _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ was built in a similar manner, though disguised by the rush of prophecy and a more definite general scheme. Nietzsche allowed such constructive power as he had to atrophy. He was never a systematic thinker, but, because his paragraphs are not such separate and individual observations like those of Chamfort or Vauvenargues; because they were often written in swift succession, one after another, there is a dangerous possibility that in reading them we may feel we are reading notes for a book which the author has not troubled to piece together into the superficial form to which we are accustomed. We may resent this, but we are more likely to grow weary of the constant change of subject, of the staccato iteration of ideas without prologues or epilogues to awaken slowly and lull again to repose our sluggish brains. It is well to remember that we have learnt to read too fast, and that Nietzsche foresaw our discomfort. “He that writeth in blood doth not want to be read but learnt by heart.... It is no easy task to understand unfamiliar blood. I hate the reading idlers.” We cease to feel the superficial confusion and inconsistency of those ten thousand paragraphs when we become better aware of the half-dozen ideas that were the parents of that numerous family. We are then able to trace a paragraph’s pedigree, and to place it in a larger scheme than that of the volume in which it happens to be printed. No reader of Nietzsche can have failed to notice that his books, different in detail, different in application, yet often seem coincident with each other. Nor is this due to chance repetitions that would betray an uncritical improvisation. It is an accurate indication of Nietzsche’s habit of mind. His books were gleanings, and, after his mature work began, they were gleanings from fields almost uniformly sown. The seasons varied and the sower’s arm was irregular in its swing, but the harvest was always from a field that had been fertilised by a fairly uniform mixture of ideas. The ideas of the pragmatic nature of truth, of Eternal Recurrence, of the Will to Power, of the Superman, and of master and servant morality, yield in book after book a new crop of lesser ideas, applied, amplified, restricted or illustrated in psychological observation. For this reason I do not intend, in what can but be a short essay, any detailed criticism of Nietzsche’s books, but rather to note the results of such criticism.